The Madison Affect and The Monona Difference (Updated)

I have added a couple paragraphs to the end of this post that may clarify what I was trying to say.

You may have noticed that certain types of public policy proposals tend to generate strong reactions in Monona, often quite emotional responses seemingly out of all proportion to the subject at hand. I have been pondering why this might be so. I mean, to take the issue du jour, do people really care that much about whether their neighbors raise a few chickens?

These upsetting proposals generally come from the liberal or progressive wing, are viewed as unconventional, relate to a topic that is easy to grasp, and has already been tried out in Madison (as well as lots of other places, but that’s beside the point). My working title for this phenomenon is The Madison Affect.

Three examples will represent the kinds of topics I am thinking of: domestic partner health insurance coverage for city workers, the smokefree Monona ordinance, and now the urban chicken proposal. You can probably think of others. A certain segment of the Monona populace gets quite agitated about these types of proposals. That agitation provokes a burst of energy from the other side and away we go with a full-fledged kerfuffle.

First off, the reactions to these kinds of policy proposals contain a sizable and straight-forward political element. Simply put, these proposals come from the progressive side and provoke a negative response from conservatives. But surely something more than that is going on here.

The argument is sometimes advanced directly that a proposal is a bad idea because ‘it comes from Madison’, which is not really an argument, but simply expresses a prejudice (a prejudice that also reflects the political element). Whether Madison has adopted a particular policy is not a substantive argument for or against the adoption of that policy in Monona.

On the other hand, Monona is located next door to Madison and they do have a lot bright folks over there. It would be silly to put on blinders so that we in Monona do not consider any proposal that has already been tried across the lake. We can take ideas from Appleton or Marshfield, but not Madison? Ideas have no geographic location and are not owned by anyone or any group. Ideas deserve evaluation on their merits not their geographic provenance.

But something else is afoot.

Monona is a funny place. People move here and stay a lifetime. We like what we have here and we don’t want it messed up – even if we do reserve the right to complain. The interesting thing is that Monona is actually a very young community as communities go. My hometown of Mt. Vernon, Illinois was founded in 1817. Anyone involved in its founding has been dead for 150 years or so. Monona, by contrast, was founded as a village in 1938 and as a city on April 3, 1969, a mere 40 years ago. Perhaps this relative newness makes our politics a bit more personal.

A few of the people involved in building the city are still around town and many more are well-remembered by those who have been involved with city government in the past 4 decades. For instance, when Dean Bowles was first elected to the city council, the city of Monona was just four years old. The guy who founded my hometown, on the other hand, has the junior high named after him. Nobody alive knows much about Zadok Casey, but they do associate a lot of bad memories with his name.

Monona’s face, if you will, was literally and figuratively shaped within the lifetimes of most of its residents. The dredging of the Winnequah Park lagoon, for instance, took place in 1962-63. Monona Cable has recently been showing a film of this dredging and filling work narrated by then-village engineer Paul Rapp. When I first became involved in Monona politics back in 1989, I was fortunate enough to serve with Mr. Rapp on the Public Works Committee. At that same time, Glen Thousand, the city’s original assessor still held the post. Get the idea? Perhaps the very newness of the city makes some people resist changes to the city they helped build (or at the very least watched others build).

To some folks, these kinds of policy ideas represent unwelcome and unconventional change. Some folks fear that Monona will become ‘just like Madison’ and lose its own identity; that we will lose the special something that makes Monona the place we love to live. That is simply not going to happen.

While it is worth noting that Monona voters are now slightly more liberal than Dane County voters as a whole, the ‘Monona difference’ is not really about the politics. Those of us who have moved here in the past 5, 15 or 25 years moved here because we saw something we wanted. Whether we decide to allow people to raise a few chickens or not, Monona will preserve its special identity.

We have some things that Madison can only envy, but never have. First of all, our population is small enough that we know each other – sometimes maybe a little too well! We have life on a human scale. We also have many exceptionally able and interesting people in our town and we can get to know them because our social scale is compressed. We mix the hoi polloi with the high-and-mighty in a way that makes it awfully hard to be hoity toity.

People come to Monona and stay - or in some cases they come back and stay. Unlike many small towns, where many of the 'best and brightest' look for the first chance to leave town and never look back, a remarkable number of young Mononans look for a chance to get back here. This stability contributes to an unusual depth of community commitment and a vibrant political life. Hang around town for awhile and you can be on a first-name basis with all of your local elected officials and other civic leaders. Or step up, volunteer, and become one of our leaders yourself. Try that in Madison.

This stability may also make some of us want to jealously guard what we have against ‘newcomers’ who want to change some things. It can also make people feel like newcomers or outsiders even after they have lived here for many years. On the lighter side, even after you’ve lived in your home for 15 years, it is not uncommon for the house to still be known by the name of your predecessors, as in, ‘oh, you live in the Krajco home’ – even though you have lived in the house since 1991. But it really can be tough to attain a sense of belonging and acceptance here. We could work on that one, folks.

We would also be well-advised to embrace the newcomers in our midst and invite them to fully participate in our civic life. I’m thinking they have some good ideas and a lot of energy to contribute. We’re good, but we’re far from perfect, and we can do better. Stability is good, staleness is not. New people with new ideas can help reshape what we have into something even better.

We have made it a public policy priority to attract and keep families. Do we really want to tell people, “If you want to raise backyard chickens, go to a smokefree bar, or get health insurance for your life partner, then head on down the road because we don’t want you or your unconventional ideas around here”? We are strong enough and secure enough to try some new things without losing our sense of civic identity or lessening our commitment to this place we call home.

We care deeply about our schools, our library, our parks, our parade, our festival, our farmers’ market, our lake, our neighbors – you name it. Sometimes this depth of commitment makes us reduce those on the other side of a political argument to unfair caricatures. We would be well-advised to assume the good faith of the folks on the other side a bit more than we do. I include myself in that admonishment.

Trying a few new public policies is not going to change the basic ‘it’ that makes Monona the place we love to live.

Addendum:

Upon further reflection, I would add that part of my goal in this post was to understand *why* certain types of proposals get some Monona residents quite agitated - aside from and in addition to the obvious political aspect.

What I failed to make clear enough was that part of the explanation is that because Monona has not been around very long so that there are people who have lived here throughout all or most of the history of the city. These people, or some of them, may see certain policy proposals as a threat to what they see as the identity of Monona. In this context, the vehemence of their reaction is more understandable. They built the city and don't want it changed.

I happen to disagree with them in thinking that these policy differences are the defining characteristics of Monona, but I think I understand a bit better why they react the way they do. And that was why I asked that we all, on both sides, assume the good faith of the other side and that we all have the best interests of Monona in mind.