{"id":1772,"date":"2011-05-19T09:14:09","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T14:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/?p=1772"},"modified":"2011-05-19T09:14:36","modified_gmt":"2011-05-19T14:14:36","slug":"surprise-surprise-budgetary-surprise-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/surprise-surprise-budgetary-surprise-not\/","title":{"rendered":"Surprise! Surprise! Budgetary Surprise! (Not!)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wow, what a budget surprise!<\/a><\/p>\n

Not<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I love these told-ya-so moments. Actually, I don’t. I just wish our elected leaders weren’t so easily intimidated by engineers who demand giant highways. I wish instead that they would listen to their constituents who have researched this stuff so that we can move forward to a better, less paved, place.<\/p>\n

It’ll be interesting to see if our new crop of alders are alert to the wastefulness of creating places that suck through highway expansion. Brenda has an interesting take on it<\/a> (make sure to read down through the comments as well).<\/p>\n

The big question is, will the tough-guy engineers be able to stare down & intimidate the elected officials into compliance as they traditionally have. Judging from our last neighborhood council meeting, that ugly history will likely repeat itself. I asked my alder, Marsha Rummel point blank what questions she asked when the capital paving budget was presented to the city council a couple of weeks ago. Her reply: “We weren’t allowed to ask questions. It was an informational presentation.” We know who is boss, when city councillors are intimidated from asking questions — at a city council meeting<\/strong><\/em> — about the biggest item in the city budget.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I predicted three years ago, Madison highway expansion binge is overwhelming city finances.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[760,8,13,452],"tags":[372,351,584,985,984,726],"class_list":["post-1772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-places-that-suck","category-politics","category-urban-designplanninggeography","tag-brenda-konkel","tag-dean-mosiman","tag-madison-city-budget","tag-madison-city-engineering","tag-madisons-budget-gap","tag-marsha-rummel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1772"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1776,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1772\/revisions\/1776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}