Lisa jo VonAllmen Campaign Announcement

Here is a missive I received from Lisa jo VonAllmen, a candidate for the Monona City Council.

My name is Lisa jo VonAllmen, I am 43 years old and live at 4906 Rothman Place in Monona I’ve long considered running for Monona City Council and have decided that now is the right time to make the commitment to run and serve as a member of Monona’s City Council.

My family moved to Monona when I was in seventh grade and I graduated from Monona Grove High School in 1982. My husband, Ron, was born and raised here and graduated in 1979. After the birth of our daughter, Amelia we chose to move back to Monona driven by our desire to recreate the wonderful childhood Ron and I experienced growing up in this unique community.

After resettling into Monona, I started paying more attention to Monona’s parks and recreation, a feature that helps to makes this a wonderful community. In 2005, after attending a Park and Recreation meeting I applied for and was appointed to a seat on the Park and Recreation Board.

Serving on the Park Board has educated me about how the different city departments work together. Listening to all opinions, sharing my own, and working to implement the Park and Recreation committee’s goals are skills that will serve the community well as an elected member of Monona’s City Council.

I have a strong desire to serve the community. After reaching out to Mayor Robb Kahl with the suggestion of developing a group to study ways to attract and retain families in Monona, I was one of the first members appointed to the Family Attraction and Retention Ad-Hoc Committee. The committee has only just begun to discuss exciting ideas and we are looking forward to the coming year to develop some of the ideas.

My professional background as a Systems Project Manager challenges me to learn new processes and procedures. I relate well with all types of people, facilitate meetings with varied skill levels, viewpoints and agendas, and have the ability to hear people and identify with their viewpoint. I can quickly evaluate and decipher complex subject matter, make decisions, develop a plan and communicate my viewpoint.

My best asset is that I’m an optimist and I see the glass is half full; yes, there are many pressing infrastructure issues and I’m confident that my input as a City Council member will help to develop and implement policies to address issues like infrastructure. It is important for elected officials to effectively communicate to our citizens the implications of city policies. With so many great things happening in Monona, it’s vital for city government to also shed light on these issues.

Let’s strive to have Monona’s City Hall become more customer service oriented while maintaining efficiencies that keep taxes from rising.

Important Issues Facing Monona
· Accountability
· Oversight
· Roads and Physical Infrastructure
· Monona Drive Reconstruction
· Garden Circle Redevelopment
· The Vitality of Monona

Monona has a new City Administrator and we will find out in the coming weeks and months how well he manages the City Departments. As a city council member, I want to be one of the people who is familiar with him and ensure that he has the proper support staff to do his job well.

I want the opportunity to participate in the coming months and years on decisions regarding Monona Drive and the Garden Circle projects. And there are the basics; roads, parks, maintaining our services, taxes, our schools, community pride and being more service oriented.

PRO MONONA. My platform is “Pro Monona”, meaning that we need to protect and sustain Monona as a community. I know things change but I also remember the days when I was a kid and want the same great upbringing for my daughter. There are many challenges and opportunities in the future for Monona and I want to participate in the decisions that are being made. If I am elected to our city council I will listen to your concerns and use that input to help make decisions that affect this community. I am capable and up to the task.

Please feel free to contact me to discuss your thoughts and opinions about Monona, at lisajov AT att.net or call me at 608-445-3935. MD Note: To keep down spam I substituted the word AT for the sign @. To send Lisa jo and email you will need to change that.

Thanks again for your interest and Happy Holidays.

Jill List in Her Own Words

After I blogged that Jill List was running for MG School Board several comments were posted and not all supportive. I sent her an email asking if she wanted to post anything. She sent two emails. The second one is a small addendum Here they are.

As to the question "who's Jill List?".

I am a transplant to Cottage Grove from Milwaukee. I am the eldest girl of a family of 9. My husband, Tom is from Green Bay originally. When we learned that we would be moving to the Madison area we chose Cottage Grove, in large part because of the school district and because there was a house big enough to accommodate us all. We have six kids, four which currently attend school here. Our kids range in ages from 25-6 and one grandbaby, Emma. We were told really great things about this district and for the most part this has all been true. The realtors that we worked with happily showed us the land where the new school was to be built. All seemed peachy keen here. We were completely unaware of the controversy brewing about the new school and the growing animosity between our two communities. Live and learn.

It was by chance that we landed here but we have grown to love it. In no small part this is the result of our school district. MG has provided us a way to truly become a part of this community. It feels to me that this school district is at the heart of who we are, maybe the best part of who we, are as a community. My husband is a football coach; our 15y.o. plays football, basketball, and track. He is also a show choir convert. All of our kids do sports and are involved in scouting and in 4-H. Our kids have about 10 more years in this district. Much of our life revolves around this school district. Because of this I am very committed to maintaining what has been successful. A unified district.

Life before CG and MG.

As I said I am from Milwaukee. I attended Alverno College where I studied Art Education and Art Therapy. I worked for a number of years teaching art to middle and high schoolers who were in residential treatment centers and in alternative schools. I then moved into the human services area serving adults with chronic mental illnesses. I worked for a day treatment program where I did program development, taught art, life skills and adult education classes. I also developed and implemented a number of vocational training programs. About 10 years ago, after several years working for non-profits, I made the move to corporate administration working for a construction company. I also started my own company doing construction management. Ultimately, Tom's career would land us here. I've worked a little outside of the home since our fifth child; John was born working part-time for the Part-time Teachers Union at MATC.

Working part-time has provided me the opportunity to do a bit of volunteer work. I have sat on the Cottage Grove PTO as Vice-president and the Winnequah MS PTO as the Treasurer for two terms. I am currently a member of the CG PTO Holiday Fest and Craft Fair committee. This was my third year as a member. I currently sit on the MG Policy and Personnel Committee. I am currently serving my second term as a community member on this committee. I also work at the elementary school as parent volunteer in the classrooms and for the support staff.

Outside of school work I have been a member of the Cottage Grove Community Library Committee since January of 2005. I was a member of the Capitol Campaign Committee and Chaired the Community Events Committee. I very recently resigned these library positions. So now I have all kinds of time on my hands :)

I am also a hopeless liberal that believes in fairness and equity for all, is shocked by the inequity in this country, the war and the Bush administration and the apathy of the people in this community and country.

As for the misrepresented information.

For the record.

I never voted to sell Nichols. As powerful as I like to think I am (and try to convince my family that I am) I am not so much. I did however second a motion made by Frank Salvi of Cottage Grove to allow the Board to consider and take action on the matter. I also voted in favor of the motion. The motion failed at that time. This occurred, I believe, over two years ago at an annual meeting at Cottage Grove Elementary (though I would have to double check that). As I recall the issue at hand was funding the expense of the facility and declining enrollment in the district. The Board has since considered and voted to in fact close Nichols for the very same reasons that a number of people argued several years ago.

I never voted to increase class sizes in Monona or anywhere else within our district. Again, I'm not the powerful. I did however vote to maintain the current policy regarding class sizes in this district. As I understand it the committee only has the power to make a recommendation to the full board. This is not to diminish the importance of committee recommendations, but the final authority lies with the Full School Board. The class size debate, as I understood it being presented by the Monona families at the special session, was that there was a specific class/grade that demonstrated special circumstance that would warrant reducing class sizes in Monona. The information presented by Bill Breisch and Ed O'Connor depicted a different scenario than that being presented by the community members in attendance. Given the information provided by Bill and Ed (and there was a LOT of it) and the fact that the policy is a "guideline" with a "goal" and does allow latitude for the administrators to make recommendations and if necessary drop below the "guideline" or "goal" when warranted seemed sufficient reason not to change the policy and drop the bottom out of the "guideline".

Addendum:

Just follow to clarify something. I was present during the special meeting at Nichols on June 26, 2007 when the issue of class size was addressed. I forgot to mention that John Faust was also present at this meeting and presented to the group. I was however, not present for the actual committee vote on July 19, 2007. The committee forwarded the matter to the full board without recommendation. So I never had the opportunity to vote on the issue. For the record I would have voted with the majority for the reasons that I stated before.

Also, I serve on the Policy and Personnel Committee not Curriculum.


Jill List

No More Anonymous Posts

Over the past weeks and months, I have grown less and less comfortable with and tolerant of the hyper-opinionated anonymous posts. My suggestions that posters sign their name has not been widely adopted (perhaps in part because when people have provided their names, anonymous posters have then blasted them). Nonetheless, allowing anonymous comments has no doubt increased the number of posts and I have been reluctant to cut them off.

We have now entered what the pundits call 'the silly season' that the rest of us know as campaign time. A number of anonymous comments have been posted naming the candidates and offering the poster's anonymous opinion of the candidates and asserting facts about them. Not surprisingly, people will write things anonymously that they would never say if their name was attached to it.

I have concluded that these anonymous posts are not healthy for our local political scene. Local campaigns can get heated enough without the added goad of anonymous venom. It is not hard to envision the nastiness increasing as the election draws nearer.

At least for the time being, anonymous comments will no longer be posted. You will need to register with Google in order to post comments. Registration is free and easy and a plus is that you won't need type in those goofy letters. Registering does not require that you use your real name, so I am also asking that people identify themselves at least the first time they post.

I am not particularly happy about this change, especially because I am fairly certain most of the nastier comments are coming from a small number of people (in fact, possibly a very small number). But these new requirements seem like the responsible thing to do.

Google Blogger also gives me the option reviews comments before they get posted instead of or in addition to requiring registration. This option could be a substitute for the ban on anonymous comments, but for now a ban it is..

I will evaluate this policy as we go along and reserve the right to change my mind.

Books New and Old

The MJS has an interesting take on books in the Sunday paper. They asked a "writers and other bibliophiles in Wisconsin" to recommend and old book and a new book. The title quest BY Geeta Sharma Jensen.


If they'd asked, here are my picks. Post yours.







Old: The Towers of Trebizond (New York Review Books Classics) by Rose Macaulay


This book has one of the most memorable opening lines in the history of the written word: "'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass." The Towers of Trebizond is a mostly hilarious sendup of conventional society (primarily British, but others do not escape unscathed) in the form of a travelogue and memoir of a youngish upper middle-class English woman who travels to Turkey with her Aunt Dot and their High Anglican minister Hugh Chantry-Pigg. A camel, Billy Graham sightings, and a disappearance into Soviet Russia are involved in this wonderfully witty tale. Macaulay also sprinkles some philosophy along the way and a sudden and sobering twist at the end.


I first came across this book while on the New York Review Books - NYRB web site and more specifically while looking at NYRB Classics. The NYRB republishes wonderful classics with an "innovative list of outstanding fiction and nonfiction from all ages and around the world. Beginning in 1999 with the publication of Richard Hughes's High Wind in Jamaica, more than 200 NYRB Classics have been published. They include new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Dante, Balzac, and Chekhov; fiction by modern and contemporary masters such as Vasily Grossman, Mavis Gallant, and Upamanyu Chatterjee; tales of crime and punishment by George Simenon and Kenneth Fearing; masterpieces of narrative history and literary criticism, poetry, travel writing, biography, cookbooks, memoirs, and unclassifiable classics on the order of J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip and Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy....Taken as a whole, NYRB Classics may be considered a series of books of unrivaled variety and quality for discerning and adventurous readers."


If you love books, you must check out NYRB Classics.






New: My first pick A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is a huge bestseller. It relates the tragic story of Afghanistan over the past three decades as told through the life stories of two women. The plight of Afghan women epitomizes what Aldous Huxley (Aldous Huxley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) called "the descending road of modern history". Hosseini sculpts a poignant and heart-breaking tale, if somewhat predictable at times.


BTW, I got my copy of A Thousand Splendid Suns from the EXPRESS Collection at the Monona Public Library. You can find these books on the shelves next to the self-checkout machine. I was on the 'hold' list at about number 438 when I scarfed it.





My second pick is the far less known Sword Song (The Saxon Chronicles, Book 4) a work of historical fiction by Bernard Cornwell. It's the 9th century in "England" (a country that does not yet exist) and Alfred's Anglo-Saxons are in the midst of the long struggle with the Danes. Plenty of battle action, but with the back story struggle between the "Christian nailed god" and the Norse gods, Odin in particular.


This title has not been released in the US yet ( but it will be on Jan. 22, 2008). I got an advance reader copy through Harper Collins First Look program.


Amazon link: Sword Song (The Saxon Chronicles, Book 4)

My final new pick is Rumpole Misbehaves: A Novel (Rumpole Novels) by John Mortimer. British barrister Horace Rumpole is one of my very favorite fictional characters. His views on society, law, justice, and marriage are nearly always hilariously funny, but insightful. He actually still believes in a fair trial for the criminally accused - even for the ones society despises. Given that Mortimer passed his 84th birthday this year I thought we had seen the last of new Rumpole adventures, but no, he's back for another 'hopeless case'. BTW, Mortimer is himself a Queen's Counsel or QC, an elevated status in the British courts that Rumpole hasn't reached and the members of which he refers to as 'queer customers' (meaning 'odd ducks').

In Case You Missed It

The Capital Times had a couple of articles prominently featuring Monona this week.

The good folks over at The Natural Step Monona made the Business section in a story on Greening the holidays.

BTW, the MJS also has a Green Guide on its web site. Note the saving money part. YOUR GREEN GUIDE: Ideas to save money, help the planet

***

The Monona city budget also made the news in an excellent article by Karyn Saemann on the strains the levy cap is putting on city governments, like Monona that have to stay under the levy limit mandated by the state. Cities taxed by fiscal caps

Monona is really up going to be against in the 2009 operating budget. It is entirely possible we will decide to ask the voters if they want to exceed the 2% levy cap. If we do decide to put that question on the ballot, then we will need to do so sooner rather than later. In order to place such a question on the April ballot, the city council would need to act soon.