The few Janesville city council meetings I attended over the years regarding annexation of existing farmland for development had extremely low public attendance, to my disappointment. Developers and landowners requesting annexation would talk up the bogus benefits of the expanding tax base – and the Janesville administration would come to the podium and follow suit that the developers plan for the parcel fits the administration and council pre-approved “Comprehensive Growth” plan. Any short rebuttal would revolve around a comment that without annexation, the owners of the parcel would develop anyways, but that it would be much better for the city to have some control because of it’s close proximity to the city, yatta, yatta, yatta - Cha-ching. It was rubber stamped every time.
Under those circumstances, farmers could get twice the value for their land if they sell to developers, but would they still attract those kind of buyers if they knew Janesville wouldn’t rubber stamp the annexation with sewer and water? That I believe is the real question and the problem. In recent years, I don’t know if any annexation requests have ever been denied by the Janesville City Council.
There are several ways to discourage this gravy train to sprawl. One way is to exclude all Ag land from the comprehensive plan. But that would require political cojones. Another way the city can check it and encourage the preservation of farmland here would require just as much vision and bravura from city leaders. Janesville would have to consider and approve a moratorium on annexations. Only then might owners and developers think twice about building a development on septic and private well, and without other city services. Right now, they take one look at Janesville’s existing “Comprehensive Growth Plan” and factor in the Janesville’s reputation as an annexation rubber stamp to immediately begin pounding in “For Sale” signs. Without Janesville’s annexation, the decision to blacktop farmland would remain where it belongs, in the hands of the pre-annexation township or county.
It still might not stop the loss of farmland nor will it infringe on the owners rights, but at least Janesville would no longer be complicit in the destruction of some of the finest farmland and topsoil on Earth. In my view, the problems with respect to the farmland, developers or property rights won't involve Janesville’s influence or growth plan in this matter – if they refused to annex. Without excluding Ag land, the solution to guarantee Janesville’s sustainability in the future must include annexation restraint with or without the comprehensive growth plan.
This posting is the independent perspective of this blogs’ author and is not written in cooperation with the Rock Environmental Network (REN). However, I enthusiastically support their cause and concerns.
The Rock Environmental Network is urging Janesville residents to attend Janesville's Sustainability Committee meeting next Tuesday night to discuss the City's Comprehensive Plan. For more information, click here.
30 comments:
I was at a loss to find any real vision in this plan. It was conceived prior to the closing of our GM facility. Without an economic engine there will be minimal growth. It's obsolete before it gets the rubber stamp. In a way thats good because the public still needs more education regarding the preservation of this areas greatest natural resource, Farmland. Most are still captivated by such things as snow removal and lawn mowing.
About he bulletin board -- did you know if you do not have outlook mail when you click HERE nothing happens except a sign saying "cant do it". I have Vista Mail so I never could send anything in. Put a form on the page or get gmail or write it out rockcountyatgmaildotorg but its a good idea and to be popular, everyone should have a way to post.
Horrible stuff going on at the Humane Society -- I would like to see their meetings posted. And Save Our Swans has announcements. Please fix it with a form.
Thanks for letting me know about the email problem. I'll look into it.
We have a friend who lives in Eugene, Oregon and have visited there several times. The community was concerned about land use and passed an ordinance drawing a line around the current development. No development is allowed beyond that line. What has happened? There were those who left the city and built homes outside the reach of city governement. The greater harm was that those with typical sized lots sold them for a profit to others who yearned for modern urban living. Typically one lot was divided and as many as three houses were built on the lot. They are often 3 stories and of course yards are almost non existent. As property values soared, working class families could no longer afford to buy their own home. Lower priced properties were bought up for development and the residents displaced. The result is a degraded inner city and increased homelessness. Of course the folks who sold out made out very well. The wealthy "greens" are very pleased to see their social engineering enacted. There is wasteland surrounding the no development land. It was a nice place to visit but I can't even say that anymore. It is no longer a place where working people want to raise their families.
Yeah there is a LOT wrong with the density concept and it is no more green than rats in a maze are green. The people who plan said communities don't live there and do not care about the people who have to live piled on top of each other without gardens or yards.
Better to subsidize small organic farms with animal respectful practices and heavily penalize factory farms. Tax them out of business and deport the illegal workers who are forced to work on them for slave wages.
Rich, I don't believe your "result" of a degraded inner city. Janesville been doing the exact opposite and THAT has resulted in a vacant and decaying inner city with property values in the $50 grand area. Is THAT what you'd rather have? Good paying and plentiful jobs cause property values to rise. If you have 500 $300,000 homes and no jobs to sustain them - you'll wind up with 500 $160,000 homes and most will still be vacant. Janesville is at a crossroads - it's time to return to the inner city and take care of what we have instead of paving over more farmland that we can't afford to snow plow in the winter.
Where is this terrible inner city and by whose standards? I see good places for poor people to live instead of Chicago like neighborhoods -- do you want to push the poor into the river? Put them in high rises? Good that we have affordable property in the 50s with backyards. You are adopting the values of the elites who destroyed us. They hide behide words like green and save our farms and density. Look what happens to PEOPLE not property.
Standards that you detest. Who do think are pitching in to buy and/or rent some of these sub-standard and dilapidated homes? They are illegals, drug users and other transients.
We need to set up conditions that entice more young couples, poor or middle-class, to consider buying their first home and raising their family in the heart of the Fourth Ward. It's already happening, but there has to be more.
On the plus side, Janesville has a good stock of affordable housing, but you don't have to think like an elite to want better things for you and yours. It's all about pushing people into jobs and good wages - not into the river - to lift people out of poverty, if that is society's goal. Without jobs, we have nothing.
Jobs, residential developments and people are flighting to the outer edges of Janesville, leaving the the most valuable part - the center to rust, and dividing the area into economic and social classes. This has happened hundreds of times through recent history in nearly all large towns and cities. Janesville is no different.
I don't think "green" when I think about preserving farms - I think about life-giving sustainability, there is a difference.
I'm confused. The farmers want, and the people buying the land want it... so why is this an issue?
Basically you are saying that you don't like what other people are doing with their land, and you'd like to stop them from doing with their land what they see fit?
Are you going to farm it for them?
No "families" are not the answer-- FAMILIES mean breeders for the teacher unions and the schools so that property taxes can continue to skyrocket. You are speaking about 70 year old rhetoric. We have too many people. Taxes should discourage reproduction and "growth". That is a green policy. Homes in the 4th ward should remain low priced so single people can buy a house and fix it up.
LAW enforcement should act to remove illegals and gangs. YOU were the one, Louis, who urged me to accept that nothing can be done about gang graffiti and 2nd generation gang initiations. That $3,500.00 I pay on a house not even worth $150,000. on a SS pension SHOULD be going to law enforcement but instead is being sucked up into schools and coaches and sports extravaganzas for those FAMILIES who rent and breed and do not pay a dime for the schools they use and abuse.
Nick, you shouldn't be confused. Let's say the farmers have an SUV everybody likes but only farmers will buy because it's equipped with manual transmission and steering, there's no A/C and no power windows. It's a farm, a giant piece of vacant fertile land. Janesville steps in and nothing else but through the spectre of annexation - they add all the bells and whistles - now more than farmers want that SUV. So the price goes up through nothing done by the farmer. If the farmers want to do with their land as they see fit - fine, but the buyer should not automatically think they'll get all the bells and whistles when they buy a stripped down version.
I don't think the city should be doing what they've been doing regarding annexation. Plus, some of their decisions have resulted in additional millions of dollars for some speculators and nobody is looking into these deals.
REN has a slightly different direction but with the same goal - to plan for a sustainable future.
GC, families aren't the total answer, but they are a piece to the progessive puzzle. Outside of law enforcement, there is little an individual citizen can do to battle gangs, grafitti, drug users and transients EXCEPT to support initiatives that will foster and encourage better elements to move in. Whether they're families, singles, gays or atheists shouldn't matter, as long as jobs are available, good working people will come. This is just one of many reasons why I support what REN is doing. It will help foster sustainable inner neighborhoods as well by focusing attention back to the inner core. While everybody is looking out to see how they can pave over the farmland - no one is looking in to do anything about the gang members spraying grafitti on your house.
Louis
Don't you see what your words cover? Good people? The people there ARE good people - poor good people and they are not going to disappear when they are priced out of their homes.
One way or the other they (those people) are real and we have to deal with them now where they are not push them out. Truant officers - special education, jobs and court sanctions -- NOT more dense living spaces to drive them crazy by forcing them to live too close to one another.
There is nothing progressive about what you are proposing -- it is the same answer we have heard for years given by privileged people from privileged places. Instead of all our money going to middle class solutions and fostering "growth" for the business class, we should decrease the school budget, tax reproduction and increase child abuse protections, economic development cooperatives and law enforcement projects. Stop tearing down housing. Instead weatherize and rehab housing if landlords will keep the rent low for the 5 years subsequent. That is the answer for the 4th ward, make it a place where the poor can dwell and prosper. Your solutions will push them onto the street or drive them crazy by decreasing the quality of their lives. Increase the police presence and eliminate gang activity, eliminate teen pregnancy and eliminate child abuse.
Density is torture -- worry less about Gitmo and more about child abuse in Janesville.
Subsidize family organic farms so that US citizens can be employed. Make small organic family farms support 6 to 10 workers besides the owner by subsidizing their ability to hire those who live in the 4th ward when school is out for the summer. The answer to farm progress is not agribusiness with 100 cows stuffed into a cage. The answer to this economic crises is not propping up a predatory credit economy.
Why does the left keep pushing only what works for the bosses? You sound more corporate than Wall St.
I'm talking your language about "people." Who do you think you're covering when you're talking about illegals or families or people "breeding? If you don't like the density humanity brings - get out of the city. I don't mean that to sound snarky but that's what suburban and rural areas are for.
Everything I write about is about inner city renewal and rehabbing. Focus there first!! If they build the comprehensive growth plan around sprawl, it will cause more inner city decay. They won't be tearing individual houses in the Fourth Ward over the next decade, they will be tearing down whole blocks of them if farms are gobbled up for development. This is exactly what their plan will accomplish and the truth is....that is exactly what they want to do.
Apparently, your solution is the status quo consisting of people left to shift for themselves and to segregate a large town like Janesville into sections of economic and cultural class. It doesn't work and it is unsustainable.
Not everyone can just get out of the city - especially the poor cannot. Illegals are a deportable problem except that you need them for cheap labor. Everyone else has a right to space and light. You do not have a right to pile them on top of one another like rats just because you have money and time to organize. Did you ever bother to ask those people what they want? In a way they can understand? Or would that interfere with the ability to make profits?
Breeding should be discouraged because that is what is good for people although not for corporations. The population is unsustainable and will double in the next 20 years. Resources are limited.
I do not think the FIRST thing to do is urban renewal which always destroys communities and hurts the poor. You are talking about focusing on farms by imposing your values instead of taxing and subsidizing sustainable agriculture.
I won't bother you again because you deliberately don't understand what I am saying and never will. People like you want the world to be Chicago and New York. There is nothing progressive about gentrification and it is a joke that you think that is not segregation at its worst. But yet you see yourself as progressive. OK I am gone.
Read your own words about breeding and what YOU think is good for people. None of us have any right to force people to do anything against their will.
Thanks to the internet, concerned citizens can make their case and explain their views in real time.
We disagree GC, but I still appreciate your openness and exchange here.
We agree about forcing but it is a way of life in the US and the world. Taxes force.
Instead of using taxes to encourage breeding which is unsustainable, they can be used to discourage breeding. Because belief that there will not be a disaster from unchecked population increases ignores reality. Go down to the Humane Society and take a look at the cages.
Why are homeowners charged taxes to support schools? How do those two factors (home owning and children) relate? They do not relate and that form of taxation does not teach people to limit their families or conserve resources. School should be funded by those who have school age children. Divorcing her from the cost does not teach the 16 year old that she can't take care of three children. It does not teach the guy working at Target or GM not to have another child if in renting he is never directly affected and responsible for rising school costs in relation to the number of children he produces.
Sustainability places people in close contact to the resource and makes them responsible for their maintenance.
Taxes force. So why is agribusiness getting subsidies to bring in illegals to work in horrible conditions with animal practices that amount to animal torture?
Is our policy production at the expense of the masses for the profit of the few? Tax subsidies could be used to pay citizens to work and live on small humane organic farms.
POLICY should focus on PEOPLE not Property.
I am saying that planning in limiting expansion by preventing escape from the city ignores the roots of the problem and instead benefits the privileged at the expense of those with no privilege. Property investors, real estate and business owners profit. It is not just or fair planning. Fair planing would seek to limit population and make areas which are affordable, livable and safe in the city. Not raise the price of homes and displace the poor.
Business profiteers control planning from its inception in the university to its indecipherable process which seems open but always has a predictable end recommendation. The people of the fourth ward have mobilized, have started their own projects successfully; quality of life projects but the city just continues its' plan to displace them and replace them. The rhetoric is progressive but the reality is regressive because the priority should be the people living in blighted or poor areas, not the property. But that would take resources, tax money and no one could profit from that kind of revitalization.
But this policy is unsustainable. Growth can be cancerous and the organism is dying. There is no more money; the resources are depleted and dissent is becoming organized. Education and experience have joined hands. Still the bosses are softly worming their way into the planing and environmental groups, using the buzz words that the youth are taught in college equal progressive. But no one asks is our policy production at the expense of the masses for the profit of the few? Does our food policy sacrifice the quality of life for animals and workers for the profit of the few?
I am like a person watching a car on the train tracks. That is why my diplomacy is gone. This is insane. You cannot keep "replacing" people unless you kill them. They don't magically disappear. You have to deal with their problems and that takes resources. More babies does not create more resources. This belief is the message of the exploitative religions and corporations. Give us more youth to make money for US and who gives a damn about the quality of their lives as long as we can exploit them.
Well here is a clue. "They" do -- the poor care about the quality of their lives and they are very angry.
I too am puzzled at our (you and I) inability to connect when I know we should be on the same side.
But there is a divergence occurring a realignment of feminists and it seems that as usual the men won't get it until we are years into the wave. Sad to me. Familiar the loss. But our eyes are wide open to the connections. I no longer support pro business environmentalism which ignores the reality of people's needs and seeks to eliminate them by bulldozing their homes. There ARE other ways and LBJ's war on poverty used them. The weatherization program going back 30 years to its original programs would be a good start.
If the people of the Fourth Ward have mobilized, that's a very good sign, but they need to organize a political coalition without city administration moles. That is the only way they can impact their community. When the administration presents a powerpoint presentation at a neighborhood meeting - the coalition needs to present their own as the mainstream and adminstration's as the "alternative." However, making a community a haven for the poor should not be among the goals of a political community group, but it should be all inclusive.
Without politics, the group is powerless.
So far it is just self help - clean up, neighborhood meetings -- only the beginning of political consciousness. But you are correct and I hope it goes further.
I get how restraining annexation could preserve farmland, but how you blame sprawl for inner city blight is something that doesn't make sense.
My comment about the degraded inner city in Oregon is of course a subjective opinion. It was formed by my observations over a 20year period and conversations with residents. The increased homelessness is real and is evidenced by the existence of many portable toilets to service those sleeping in city parks. Some low cost housing may not be pretty but it does put a roof over the head of those hurting largely because of substance abuse and mental illness. The City of Janesville just eliminated some of that housing in the building being demolished on Court St near the Courthouse. I honestly don't know if that is progress or not.
It is NOT progress -- it is profit before people and Janesville will pay for it -- that is the irony -- it makes me believe in karma -- when the powerful do these things for the profiteers at the expense of the helpless and hopeless among us -- it always backfires and degrades our environment and worse hardens the soul of the community. Subsequently and consequently things just get worse and worse. In the end, we lose democracy and corruption rules.
So I assume here that if new private money comes to Janesville and they want to build new development - commercial or residential - you either would point them to the farmland like the administration has been doing for the past 40 years OR you would tell them they're not wanted in Janesville.
Homelessness is not a result of having not enough affordable homes in Janesville - it's a result of many different circumstances and personal situations that oftentimes but not always, a job would help. There are NO jobs in Janesville. When GM folds, there will be no new money flowing in - expect well-worn dollar bills exchanged between you and the merchants, providing Wal-Mart doesn't send the excess to Arkansas.
Many of those affordable (40,000 - 70,000) homes are vacant or left unsold for years in the market. My guess is Janesville could lose a third of the affordable housing and no one would notice.
I'm not against low-income housing at all, it's just we shouldn't have an area designated for it. Affordable housing should be available in all neighborhoods of the city.
How do you know there is vacant affordable low income houses available in Janesville and how much are the rents? Houses where you can have an animal? Or just point me to a place I can get the info. Rent for about 400-450 a month. Seriously, I know people who will rent if the landlord will take a chance on them or will convert to sec 8 housing.
There are hundreds of homes for sale or rent all over Janesville, many in the Fourth Ward or central city, some along the edges of the Court House Hill district. I don't have specific numbers but I think you'll find many owners motivated to "listen."
OK I know this is 100 years old but I have been thinking about it because I am somewhat conflicted. Maybe your goal is to preserve farmland but mine is also to preserve land for migrating animals and birds; as well as give people living space.
One thing I am adamant about is limiting population through changes in tax, school and benefits policy. But in terms of conserving land there is a whole option we never considered in this discussion. What about putting farm land into land trusts and allowing farmers and others to live on the land if they farm organically; sell their produce in the community and agree to accept community workers from the jails and CAP programs?
If the land was in a trust and the people lived off the sales; the welfare and disability benefits and what they grow, that would prevent sprawl and help with social needs.
Farmland should have many advocates of different stripes and reasons to protect and preserve the open land. Giving wildlife sanctuary should be among those reasons.
But limiting population by means of someone else's idea of control could be just as dangerous as to what we have now in America - a vast media/religious/government plan bordering on a conspiracy to encourage pro-creation. Since 9/11, it seems even the entertainment magazine "People" would probably do themselves justice if they changed the name to "Preggo.'
That's a little off topic, but I'm sure you get my point.
That's why I think we would be better off placing restrictions on land by limiting it's developmental potential through zoning and annexations. That's all developers look for.....the potential for a return on the investment. Limit that potential and we might limit the development.
You know I am under major attack by every one on the net for these views but I am in support of severe restrictions on parental rights. I know it's dangerous but I dont care anymore. One too many abused child stories pushed me over the edge. I know you understand so i wont go overboard here.
This is one of my statements they would not let out of moderation:
Changing tax policy; and social benefit eligibility will do more than trying to admonish or force anyone to do anything.
What I am trying to get people to see is that there is a reason for overpopulation. That is that the patriarchy encourages it through its’ economic policies and regulations. Tax credits, no benefits without babies; employer benefits available only to biological children and spouses instead of equally on a pro rata basis to every employee.
So many centuries of this has brainwashed people to their own self-interest. Survival is a basic hard wired primitive instinct. If economically, a woman needs marriage to survive then marriage will be attractive with benefits everyone wants and they will call that love.
If children mean economic benefits, child support and status then women whose self sufficiency is difficult, will have an overpowering need to breed and call it “natural”.
But it is only the invisible corporate, religious, patriarchal hand behind the curtain pulling the strings.
That is what the book, Baby Boon by Elinor Burkett is about. Suggesting ways our economic policy could be used for rational purpose rather than to spew out cogs for the machine.
and i didn't even talk about penalties on the child free ala property taxes for school tennis courts.
God if only parents would just have to pay for schools - home owners and renters, excepting those with no children under 21. I would be satisfied with that and they could keep all the other incentives to reproduce.
Last night on WI Eye a televised workshop on Farm Zoning even farm enterprise zones. They said Janesville did it in 2005. Farmland Enterprise Zones were interesting. They were into density if a farmer built any residences but glossed over the mandatory nature of it if the 5 farmers applied for zoning.
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