Nobody knows Madison better than Paul Soglin. As a student at UW-Madison he helped lead the infamous Vietnam protests. He has served as a city council member, worked in the private sector and as a UW faculty member. Oh yeah, and he's already been the mayor. Twice.
During his first term he led projects to turn State Street into a pedestrian mall and build the Madison Civic Center (now the Overture Center). He secured funding to help expand the Madison Metro bus system and oversaw the first phase of construction on Madison's bike trails. During his second stint as mayor he succeeded in building Monona Terrace, a project that saw many false starts during the decades before.
I should also mention that under his leadership Madison saw record low unemployment rates and was ranked the country's most livable city twice, in addition to being the best place to raise children, best place for women and best place to start a business. Some will argue that this is more a reflection of the booming economic climate during his second term, but the fact remains Madison fared remarkably well under his leadership.
So what has Mayor Dave done for us? He's got some great accomplishments under his belt as well. He added more police, fire and paramedic stations around the city, which his campaign site claims have dropped the city to its lowest crime rates in decades. He's been a constant advocate for the city's strong cycling community. He transformed State Street's Halloween celebration, which had typically ended in countless arrests and riots into the Freakfest we've come to know today. Regardless of how much you grumble about having to spend $10 just to visit State Street in your gorilla
costume, it did a world of good for the city's reputation.
But for all the great things Cieslewicz has done for Madison, he's also drawn a lot of criticism from the business community for making the city a nearly impossible place to do business in.
For years Madison has suffered under the crushing weight of endless public debate. We argue about everything, and as a result progress comes very slowly to our supposedly ""progressive"" city. For building proposals like the Edgewater Hotel's expansion, the Central Library and now the Mifflin Street apartment complex and Johnson Street hotel, it's not uncommon for the blueprints to be constantly redrawn and debated about for years before the public begrudgingly agrees to let someone invest in our local economy.
If those examples don't sway you, perhaps Mayor Dave's own words will. He wrote in the Isthmus last August that he once set up a committee to select an official city song. The result was the epitome of Madison's political economy. The group debated for months and went into their final meeting with four options. They left that meeting with five.
He told that story as a kind of tongue-in-cheek commentary on the city's ""uniqueness,"" but knowing that Madisonians like to argue until they're blue in the face about even the smallest issues do, we really want to keep a mayor who can't even authoritatively pick a jingle?
I see a real possibility that Soglin, if elected again, can help change the status quo in Madison and make this a place that investors are begging to get a piece of. As his record shows, Soglin knows how to work with the city to get things done.
But will he? One paragraph on his website shows that he, too, might have fallen into the trap of local bureaucracy.
His campaign site states, ""One of the first things Paul will do as Mayor will be to meet with every member of the city council to get their recommendations for their own and citizen appointments to city committees so we create a committee system that is diverse with people and ideas.""
There it is. Committee system. Our innate desire to make sure everyone has a voice in even the most minute city planning decision threatens to bog us down once again.
Soglin, you've got my vote come April 5, but please do us all a favor. Give the citizens our say and then let your decades of experience take the wheel. Madison needs some tough love to save us from ourselves.
Lydia Statz is a junior majoring in journalism and international studies. Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
