Property Tax Bills: Reading the Tea Leaves?

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Perhaps my mind fails me, but in years past, I recall receiving a pleasant marketing letter from the Mayor extolling the hard work that went into limiting the annual increases in our property tax bills. This year, I found only the bill. I’ve emailed the Mayor’s office asking for comments on this.
Perhaps, given the size of this year’s increases, they did not want to be that closely identified with the tax bills? (OTOH, eliminating the letter does save a few dollars).

Badger Women’s Volleyball advances to NCAA Regionals

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Great fun watching the University of Wisconsin Women’s Volleyball stage an impressive first period rally to beat Notre Dame 36-34, 30-16 and 30-16 Saturday night at the Field House.
The Badgers advance to the NCAA Regional semifinals played at the Resch Center in Green Bay, Wis., Friday evening. Wisconsin will take on third-seeded Hawaii Women’s Volleyball (30-0) with the winner moving on to play either Texas Women’s Volleyball (26-4) or Stanford Women’s Volleyball (26-6) in the regional final. For ticket information, call 1-800-895-0071.
I smile at the thought of Hawaii, Texas and Stanford joining the UW in Green Bay (Resch Center) next weekend 🙂
You can follow the NCAA finals here.

Schools, Quality of Life, Jobs, Economic Growth and Globalization

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Yesterday’s property tax bill (including not small increases in local and school taxes) along with recent articles on the China Price and Milwaukee’s loss of unskilled labor jobs serve to remind Wisconsin residents of the real issues facing our state:

  • Encouraging the formation of more new businesses. I don’t believe the formation of yet another quasi-government organization is the answer. Rather, let’s simplify (and reduce) the paperwork that any organization must support to operate in Wisconsin.
  • Broadband: Wisconsin is stuck with SBC, a telco that has done nothing to offer true, 2 way broadband (100X the speed of today’s rather slow DSL/cable services) to Wisconsin residents. I have not seen any indication that our state’s political leadership has boarded the cluetrain on this one.
  • Biotech certainly has great promise for Wisconsin, however, historically the benefits have generally gone to out of state firms. Perhaps this will change somewhat over time.

Without a strong, growing tax base, we’ll continue to see substantial increases in local property taxes. I don’t believe this is a sustainable strategy.

Baseball’s Steriod Problem: Comments around the Internet

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Unsurprisingly, there’s no shortage of comments on this week’s steriod use disclosures by Jason Giambi and a sort of disclosure by Barry Bonds (from grand jury testimony). I’ve compiled quite a few links: Alltheweb | Clusty | Google News | Teoma | Yahoo Search
Michael Hunt pens a refreshing column taking baseball, Bud Selig and the MLB player’s union to task for not addressing the problem. Nice to see a more realistic approach from the journal-sentinel after their strange Miller Park cheerleading.

Barry Bonds Grand Jury Testimony

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Lance Williams, Mark Fainaru-Wada for the 2nd day reveal grand jury testimony in the BALCO case. This time, it’s Barry Bonds:

Barry Bonds told a federal grand jury that he used a clear substance and a cream supplied by the Burlingame laboratory now enmeshed in a sports doping scandal, but he said he never thought they were steroids, The Chronicle has learned.
Federal prosecutors charge that the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, known as BALCO, distributed undetectable steroids to elite athletes in the form of a clear substance that was taken orally and a cream that was rubbed onto the body.

It will be interesting to see how Milwaukee based commissioner Bud Selig deals with this…..