A new coffee shop for downtown Middleton
If all goes according to plan, downtown Middleton will soon have a new coffee shop: Madison-based Grace Coffee has signed a lease for part of the space recently vacated in the Middleton Center by Helbachs, a coffee shop that became infamous because of its anti-face-mask politics and the protests it caused (pictured).
According to Terrence Wall of T. Wall Enterprises, the landlord, Grace Coffee will remodel the space, and hope to open the first week of November. They will be offering home-baked croissants, breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner, deliveries, coffee and a full beer and and cocktail menu, including custom mimosas for brunch.
Grace Coffee was founded in 2019 by two Seattle transplants, Carlos Falcon and Mallory Orr. The Middleton Center shop will be their fourth location after Madison (State Street and East Washington Avenue) and Sun Prairie.
They will not be taking over the whole former Helbachs area, but, as Terrence Wall explained, a small suite will be split off along Parmenter Street to be leased to a different retailer in the future.
How to vote and when and where
Last week, the City of Middleton mailed about 8,000 election ballots to residents who had applied for absentee ballots. According to City Administrator Mike Davis, City staff anticipate receiving close to 10,000 absentee ballot requests (out of about 15,000 registered voters) before the election on November 3. They further expect that another 3,000 Middleton voters will split between voting early in person at City Hall and voting in person on election day itself at one of the four polling places.
Voter registration deadlines:
October 14, 2020 - The deadline to register to vote online (by 11:59 pm) or by mail (postmarked).
October 30, 2020 at 5:00 pm - The deadline to register to vote at the clerk's office.
Voters can register at their polling place on Election Day (November 3, 2020).
By-mail absentee voting deadlines:
October 29, 2020 at 5:00 pm - The deadline to request an absentee ballot by mail for regular and overseas voters.
October 30, 2020 at 5:00 pm - The deadline to request an absentee ballot by mail for indefinitely confined voters and military voters (not on active duty).
Absentee ballots should be requested as soon as possible by visiting myvote.wi.gov.
Early-voting will take place in Council Chambers at City Hall (7426 Hubbard Avenue, Middleton) from Tuesday, October 20, to Friday, October 23, from 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm, from Monday, October 26, to Thursday, October 29, from 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm, and on Friday, October 30, from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm. In order to provide for physical distancing in accordance with the pandemic-related public health requirements, lines will be formed outdoors, and voters are advised to dress accordingly. Depending on the state of the pandemic, the hours might also change between now and then.
Polls will be open from 7:00 am to 8:00 pm on November 3, 2020.
Residents of aldermanic districts 1 and 2 will vote at St. Luke's Lutheran Church (7337 Hubbard Avenue); residents of aldermanic districts 3 and 4 will vote at St. Bernard's Parish Center (7436 University Avenue); residents of aldermanic districts 5 and 6 will vote at the Middleton Court House/Police Station (7341 Donna Drive); residents of aldermanic districts 7 and 8 will vote at the School District Service Center (7106 South Avenue).
According to City Clerk Lorie Burns, Middleton is fully staffed with election workers and volunteers for the November election.
For more information on the City of Middleton election, please see these links:
https://cityofmiddleton.us/159/Elections and https://www.cityofmiddleton.us/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=952
To track your returned absentee ballot, please visit: https://myvote.wi.gov/en-us/
Organized groups may have influenced survey
On Monday, September 21, the Middleton Park, Recreation and Forestry Commission (PRFC) decided to not proceed with an envisaged conversion of the Lakeview Park Splashpad from the current flow-through system to a closed system. On closer inspection it turned out that regulatory and engineering requirements would make the project more than twice as expensive as originally thought ($225,500 instead of $100,000), while the amount of water saved would be much smaller than anticipated. On a brighter note, the Lakeview Park shelter should be completed by the end of the month: The tiles that had been held up in Montreal because of a prolonged strike by longshoremen have arrived in Middleton and are currently being installed.
Commission members also received an update on the new Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan (CORP) that the consulting firm MSA has been working on for some time. The update included results from a public survey conducted via Survey Monkey between May 1 and June 1, 2020. A total of 489 people participated in the survey, just under two thirds of which (65%) were city of Middleton residents. They answered questions about their use of Middleton's recreational facilities and programs, including sports infrastructure, parks and trails. A surprisingly high number of respondents requested more spending on off-road bike trails and swimming facilities, leading to the conclusion that small, albeit well organized special-interest groups can exploit the open-survey format to lend disproportionate weight to their cause. PRFC members therefore asked MSA to refine the survey results by filtering out non-city-of-Middleton residents, in the hope of reaching some insight into what the people who actually pay for the parks and other public lands, i.e. the city of Middleton taxpayers, want.
Oh, and apparently it is important to City staff and other public-lands professionals to change the department's name to Middleton Parks and Recreation Department (from the current Public Lands, Recreation and Forestry Department). That would be more in line with similar departments across the nation (not to mention a famous TV comedy show), and could also help eliminate some confusion: According to Public Lands Director Matt Amundson, about half the people who call the Public Lands etc. Department really want to talk to the Public Works Department instead, but they get the two mixed up. It appears that many people are easily confuzzled.
A bright decision
The Community Development Authority (CDA) decided yesterday (Tuesday, September 22) to have string-lighting installed at the downtown plaza. The lights will be strung over six poles set up in a rectangle about 100 feet by 50 feet in the center of the space. PKK Lighting will do the work, and the Village Green will provide the electricity (for free). The CDA will foot the bill for the construction (not to exceed $4,000).
Officials and the Open Meetings Law
It might be a good idea for the City Attorney and the City Administrator to remind elected and appointed officials, as well as senior City staff members, of the Open Meetings Law.
There has recently been in an increase in the creation of informal sub-committees by standing committees like the CDA to deal with specific issues. These sub-committees or working groups meet in private to hash out details, like the public-plaza lighting proposal, which they then bring back to the full committee for a discussion and a vote. While not illegal per se, these informal groups run the risk of violating the Open Meetings Law not only if they form a positive quorum of any committee, but also if they form a negative quorum, i.e. a number of members of any committee that could block a decision. They could also fall into the trap of a so-called walking quorum. According to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, 'a walking quorum is a series of gatherings among separate groups of members of a governmental body, each less than quorum size, who agree, tacitly or explicitly, to act uniformly in sufficient number to reach a quorum'.
While there has not been evidence that Middleton officials have violated the Open Meetings Law in any such way, slipshod committee management and/or ignorance the law could easily lead to, presumably unintended, violations. This is not limuted to Middleton; only a few days ago, the Madison City Attorney had to remind Madison City Council members of the requirements of the Open Meetings Law.
Virtual meetings make it (too) easy for committee members to chat and discuss agenda items before a meeting has been called to order. That can also be a violation of the Open Meetings Law. The same goes after a meeting has been adjourned.
A more blatant potential violation was committed at yesterday’s CDA meeting by mayor Gurdip Brar in his role as chairman of that committee: At the end of the meeting, after the last agenda item had been dealt with, he asked the members for any other business they wanted to talk about. Fortunately, nobody really took the bait.