Janesville Planners - Visionaries Or Pirates?

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The article titled Heavy Lifting Starts in Tuesday's Janesville Gazette about Monday's Janesville City Council meeting left out quite a bit of the passion that was displayed by several citizen speakers.

I was enlightened by some of the rhetoric coming from at least one of those citizens who approached the podium to address the city council about a privately owned building in downtown Janesville, explaining his ideas and vision for property that belongs to someone else.

”We condemned buildings before, the building is condemnable. We can take the building back with eminent domain, and release it to private development.” – Steve (Janesville resident)

Wow. But Steve wasn’t finished just yet.

”I encourage you not to accept the fact that just because one man, an obstructionist, owns a building that we don’t have the right to speak out against that, that we don’t have the right to take that building back” – Steve

Pretty powerful stuff, to publicly announce how you covet somebody else’s property and then encourage authorities to literally take it from one private party, in this case the owner, and hand it over to another private party. Again, the City Council sat motionless after his speech, and without rebuttal or denial I’m afraid, gave viewers the solid impression that Steve was speaking their language. Afterwards, John Beckord from Forward Janesville referred to Steve’s rant as passionate, and then discarded a popular opinion by some residents about the spending relationship and the debt incurred between the operational budget and the borrowing required for capital investment as a “failure to understand.” In a backward sort of way, Beckord’s comments actually supports the reasoning behind the request made by another citizen to televise the upcoming city budget “learning sessions” on public access cable. That request (for televising) was made again at this meeting – and for the third time the city council denied permission.

Another issue was the annexation of property at County A and Austin Road. Here, two citizens made an impassioned plea to the council in opposition while none (private citizens) spoke for it. Those two people were as good as 200 against zero, but the council doesn't see things that way. People should understand by now that once a city administration has bought into annexation as a favorable way to sprawl and expand their tax base - it's extremely hard to beat them. This pre-determination weighs like a heavy anvil over the heads of those who oppose. I can't think of anything short of radioactive land that would stop an annexation request made to the city of Janesville - and I'm not too sure about that (radioactivity) stopping them either.