NeenahPolitics.com will be, I hope, a place the interested Neenah citizen can turn to for in-depth information and commentary about the political activities in our city. It won't be a place to turn for a list of community events, say; those activities -- like Streetball, Community Fest, the Bergstrom-Mahler Art Fair, etc. -- are covered elsewhere (for example, the "Leisure Connections" brochure, Jan - May 2009 [12 MB PDF], and the "Neenah Notes" newsletter, winter 2009 edition [300 KB PDF]).
The things I will focus on are:
- Meetings of city committees, commissions, boards, and authorities, including agendae and (decidedly) unofficial minutes of those meetings. I attend a fair number of them, including the Common Council, Public Services & Safety Committee, the BID Board, and the Sustainable Neenah Committee, and, when I can, other bodies that meet in the late afternoon or evening.
- Construction projects, TIF-funded and others. My goal is to construct a timeline that shows where projects are in their life cycles.
- Timeline for city legislation and referenda. From initial memo to first committee discussion to public hearing to Council vote, there's a timeline for every piece of legislation that winds up on the books. Another goal of mine is to flesh those out to give you a snapshot of the progress on each item of legislation .
- The budget. This is a big item. I will attempt to match up significant city purchases with the line items of the budget that cover them. I'll also report on how we're doing budget-wise as the year progresses.
- Follow-ups on the "burning issues of the day". A couple of years ago it was the Neenah Police Department and the Dringoli affair. Now it's the Plexus development downtown and Jake the rooster. I'd like to keep more regular tabs on these things more thoroughly than the media outlets do.
- Maps for various things. I love maps and I'm a bit disappointed that the city web site doesn't even have a link to Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps for the city of Neenah. There's a lot that can be done with maps.
All of these are things I'm interested in, and I figure that any neighbor of mine here in Neenah with even a little curiosity often finds it difficult to figure out just what's going on.
I get the same packets of information that the Council members get now that I'm a candidate for alderman in the 3rd District. I will always relay the gist of that information to you here, with what I think are the most significant items as well as recounting the routine stuff.
I'll make personal, unofficial reports of the meetings I attend. They're all open to the public and I record most of them to get the details right.
This site will grow as I devote more time to it. Of course, a lot of my time between now and April 7th will be spent knocking on doors and meeting the voters in the 3rd District. I hope that when I tell them about this site that they'll turn to it regularly to keep up with what's going on in Neenah.
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