Letter: Reader disagrees with editorial opinion
To the Editor:
As a re-subscriber to the Point/Plover Metro Wire (to follow your politics coverage) I read with interest Ms. Makuski’s op-ed “The future of city council, and the city, depends on citizens.” I would add that the future of County Board, and the County, depends on citizens.
To nitpick and “deconstruct” some of what’s in that op-ed. The overall “tone” of your piece seems to be that Council has become too visionary, not rooted in daily praxis in dealing with real problems on the ground. Whether elected officials follow the work of Smart Towns, or the New Urbanists of Kunstler, or Heinberg’s Post-Carbon Institute, or the “Vision Zero” movement you mention, this simply shows that they are looking to new systems/methods of governance, not impractical people.
Merely citing The Way We’ve Always Done Things In These Parts isn’t sufficient. I do agree with your point about respecting what local government Staff are doing, and in County meetings I often say, hire qualified people and let them do their jobs. For example, letting Jen McNelley handle the groundwater quality issue out in the town of New Hope and Nelsonville, rather than letting County Board supes run that show.
This sentence struck me as odd, beginning, “Attention to university student issues would increase, while property owners became the new focus of increased code enforcement.” As someone who has been a nine-year community member of a UWSP student environmental club (I’m not a UWSP employee) I always urge students to be more engaged in the community around them and publicly raise the issues that impact them. Such as housing quality.
I also found interesting the comment to your op-ed by the Gold Key Motors owner about “Save Stevens Point.” He lists candidates to vote for, says “Vital to the survival of Stevens Point.” I was not aware that Point was in the throes of an existential crisis.
Here’s what I non-partisanly stand for in the run for County Board again:
Four System Conditions of the Natural Step -for sustainability
To become a sustainable society we must eliminate our contributions to…
1. The systematic increase of concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust (for example, heavy metals and fossil fuels)
2. The systematic increase of concentrations of substances produced by society (for example, plastics, dioxins, PFAS, PCBs and DDT)
3. The systematic physical degradation of nature and natural processes (for example, over harvesting forests, destroying green space/habitat and overfishing); and…
4. Conditions that systematically undermine people’s capacity to meet their basic human needs (for example, unsafe working conditions, chronic workforce cuts, and not enough pay for young workforce to live on).
System conditions in Lahti and James, “The Natural Step for Communities” book.
County Board Supervisor District 10 Bob Gifford
Park Ridge
