I read with interest the proposed Madison city budget, which received first reading at the Madison City Commission meeting last night. I noticed that the Lake Area Improvement Corporation is slated to receive $140,000 in public tax dollars, which, if past performance is any indicator, the LAIC will then proceed to squander in secret, subterfuge, and spin.
But wait a minute: $140,000? When LAIC exec (and Spearfish native, a fact whose irony I am deeply contemplating) Dwaine Chapel begged the city for his annual taxpayer handout this summer, he asked for $240,000, including a sixth $100,000 payment to continue the five-year Forward Madison initiative, which saw Madison go backward in jobs and population.
Forward Madison wasn't mentioned on the record last night. The $100,000 request is not in the budget. My friend Ashley Allen, who attended the meeting to question the city's funding of the LAIC, says that afterward, in conversation with commissioners and the local press, he learned that Forward Madison will not receive a handout from the city in 2012. There are, however, rumblings of a new plan to be rolled out in 2013.
If the city is indeed telling the LAIC no, then taxpayers may consider that a victory. Forward Madison was all talk and no net benefits. If the LAIC is working on a new plan, the city and all taxpayers should demand it do so in the open, with active public engagement, a full accounting of why the five-year program failed, and an uninhibited discussion of what we can do differently in our next economic development push (suggestion one: new leadership at the LAIC, executive director and board).
Still, taxpayers should press for more accountability and even more redirection of funds toward more beneficial public projects. Instead of pouring $140,000 into the LAIC, over $100,000 of which goes straight to Dwaine Chapel's pocket, the city might do just as much good for community economic development by zero-funding the LAIC and transferring all of that money to the school district to help build an event center (which come heck or high water will be the centerpiece of the next building bond issue the school pushes on us).
The LAIC has failed. The city appears ready to partially acknowledge that failure by denying at least some of the money the LAIC is begging for. The city should now go further and demand full public accountability from the LAIC, as it would from me or any other entity requesting public money, before any more money is wasted.