The debate was hosted by the non-partisan policy research organization the Wisconsin Policy Forum, and held at downtown’s Central Library. Incumbent Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway and challenger Gloria Reyes outlined their priorities for public safety, transit, climate change, and equity initiatives for city staff.
What to do about Madison’s housing crisis was one topic front and center. Under current projections, the city is expected to see 70,000 new residents by 2040, and both candidates agreed that the city needs to build more housing fast. But the candidates differ on how to do that.
Rhodes-Conway says that, since she first took office in 2019, she’s put an emphasis on building more affordable housing, saying that last year alone the city approved over 4,000 new housing units.
But she says that the city can’t just build apartments, but create pathways to affordable home ownership as well.
“What’s missing is that first-time home buyer opportunity,” Rhodes-Conway says. “You can’t, anymore, buy a home in my neighborhood as a first-time home buyer, and we have to make sure that that opportunity is available to everyone in our community that wants to take advantage of it. I don’t want the middle class to be priced out of Madison, so I’m going to be working hard on the housing crisis so that everyone can live here.”
Gloria Reyes, former school board president and deputy mayor under Paul Soglin, says that Mayor Rhodes-Conway has not been talking enough with the community about how they want to see housing growth in Madison.
Reyes points to the city’s most recent attempt to increase housing density in Madison – changing the definition of family in zoning codes to allow for more unrelated renters to live in a single-family home. That proposal is going before the Common Council this evening. Reyes says that the city is not doing a good enough job talking with people about controversial changes to their neighborhoods.
“We need more engagement at the city level, we need more transparency, and that’s currently not what’s happening,” Reyes says. “That’s why we are seeing the friction at city council meetings, and we’re calling each other NIMBYs.”
Also a part of housing? Housing people who don’t have it.
Reyes pointed to the housing first-initiatives that helped to move people off of the streets and into housing, and criticized the city’s response to homelessness during the pandemic, specifically pointing to the temporary encampment at Reindahl Park.
“I feel that we have, as a city, not done our due diligence in supporting our homeless population,” Reyes says. “I think during COVID, when we put people in Reindahl Park, (it) was devastating. It broke my heart, because we don’t treat people like that.”
But Mayor Rhodes-Conway fired back, saying that the reason people moved into the Reindahl Park encampment was because previous administrations did not do enough to support unhoused people.
“For decades, the way the city of Madison treated homeless people was to warehouse them in church basements, and to kick them off the capital square and watch them on camera,” Rhodes-Conway says. “When the pandemic hit, we knew that that was not a sustainable or acceptable option. First, we transformed a community center into a shelter, and then we transformed the old fleet facility into a shelter, and then we bought a building and transformed it into an even better temporary shelter. Now we are on track to build Wisconsin’s first purpose built men’s homeless shelter.”
Another hotly debated issue last night came in the form of the city’s budget, and the amount of debt the city has taken on in recent years. As federal COVID funding is expected to run dry next year, the city could be facing a $20 million budget shortfall starting in 2025.
Reyes says that the city got into this situation by using one-time federal funds for projects that will need ongoing funding, specifically pointing to projects like Bus Rapid Transit.
“I will not jeopardize basic city services and impact city staff,” Reyes says. “I think we really need to figure out and make decisions now so that we aren’t at this place in the future. We all wanted a Bus Rapid Transit system, it works (and) we really need one. But if we don’t have the money, we can’t spend it on a Bus Rapid Transit system and continue to operate it.”
But for Rhodes-Conway, the problem lies less with city spending, and more with the Republican-led legislature. According to a June 2022 report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum, state aid for local municipalities has dropped 63% over the last 30 years when adjusted for inflation.
With the continued lack of state aid, Rhodes-Conway says that the city is running out of options.
“For about a decade, the city of Madison managed to make it through, in part because we continue to have strong growth in our community, and in part because we added a series of fees to close the gaps,” Rhodes-Conway says. “You may not have noticed this, but we added a forestry fee, we added the ambulance fee. We added a number of fees over those ten years to close the gap. We are running out of fees, and the gaps are getting bigger because the costs to continue keep going up.”
With these rising gaps comes a rise in the city’s debt levels. Currently, the city spends around 17% of the general spending on paying off debts. According to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, that’s projected to rise to 20% of the city’s general spending by 2030.
Reyes says that this is the worst place the city can be.
“We keep talking about state aid, state aid, but we cannot rely on state aid,” Reyes says. “ It’s going to be great, but it’s going to affect our bond rating, it’s going to affect everything, so we are going to have to make some tough decisions over the next couple of years.”
Mayor Rhodes-Conway says that she’s balancing infrastructure that the city needs with the amount of debt the city is willing to take on.
Rhodes-Conway says she’s picky about which projects get capital funding, but that the city needs to look elsewhere to fund those projects.
“…one is for us to continue to pursue other sources of funding, specifically federal funding, for infrastructure,” Rhodes-Conway says. “Now is a great time to do that, because we have an administration in the White House that is providing funds, and appreciates and understands cities in a way that just hasn’t been true in the past.”
The full debate is available on WisconsinEye, but requires a subscription to view.
The spring election is exactly five weeks from today, on Tuesday, April 4th.
Photo courtesy: Chali Pittman / WORT News Team
