Milwaukee – Page 23 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

BIDS as a Superior Innovation Tool

Post author:Carolyn Garski
Post published:November 1, 2015
Post category:Milwaukee Political Processes & Rhetoric Public Tax Law

Cities, which were previously facing population decreases due to urban sprawl, are now facing an urban resurgence or revitalization. Millennials and retirees have found a home in many of the urban centers of America. In 2010, 83.7% of people in the United States and Puerto Rico lived in metropolitan area and a 10.8% growth in metropolitan areas from 2000-2010.[1] However, with a large number of people living in the suburbs in previous decades, cities have not updated their neighborhoods to fit the needs and desires of its new residents. One of the tools to meet this need is a Business Improvement District (BID)

Business Improvement Districts are areas inside a municipality created for the purpose of developing, redeveloping, or maintaining a business area.[2] New Orleans was the first city in the United States to implement a BID, and it saw great success. [3] There are now more than 1,200 BIDs nationally. In 1984, Wisconsin created its BID statute. [4] There currently 34 active BIDs within the city of Milwaukee. [5]

One of the unique aspects of a BID is that it requires that one business owner in this area to come forward with a petition for the BID.[6] The planning commission designs its special assessment method and the implementation of the collected funds. If the owners of at least 40% of land value inside the BID raise an objection, it is vetoed. If the landowners do not veto the plan, then it then goes through the city legislative process and the mayor can approve it. The BID members have to renew the BID on an annual basis, unless there is an outstanding debt.

America’s Public Libraries Are Important, Changing Pillars, Conference Speakers Say

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:October 30, 2015
Post category:Milwaukee Public Speakers at Marquette

Wayne Wiegand is a prominent expert on public libraries who titled his book, published this fall, Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library.

How big a part of our lives are libraries? Wiegand summed up key themes of his book by telling a conference at Marquette Law School on Thursday that libraries “are much more important than we previously thought they were.” They are vital parts of boosting the lives of millions of people and of America as a whole.

Those were key themes also of the packed-house, half-day conference, titled The Future of the American Public Library, in the Appellate Courtroom of Eckstein Hall. Leading figures on the past and future of public libraries in America and in Milwaukee specifically described the past, present, and future of these often low-profile but central pillars of American life.

The conference had an underlying tone similar to a pep rally for libraries. Many in the audience were themselves librarians who applauded the depiction of libraries as places that adopt to and serve important community needs — inspiring young people, providing valuable information to everyone from job seekers to the curious, bringing together neighborhoods, and sometimes providing warm, reassuring places to those who need them.

New Cristo Rey High School Has High Career Aims for Students

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:October 7, 2015
Post category:Education & Law Milwaukee Public Speakers at Marquette

For Maritza Contreras, the Cristo Rey experience began with seeing high school kids in her neighborhood on the way to school all dressed up. She was about nine at the time and the idea of going to school in your best clothes was “the weirdest thing I ever heard of.” But she was attracted to it. She made it her goal to go to Cristo Rey High School, a private school in her Chicago neighborhood where teens were required to work part time in real jobs in real work places and to aim to go to and succeed in college so that they could become adults working in places like the ones where they did their student placements.

For Contreras, Cristo Rey meant being asked for the first time about her college plans. It meant learning a set of skills and expectations that opened avenues for her, including small but important things such as how to shake hands firmly while making eye contact with someone.

And it meant enrolling in Marquette University with major scholarship support, graduating cum laude with a degree in nursing, and setting aside her nursing ambitions “for now” to get involved in helping the community as director of administrative management services for the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Wisconsin.

Cristo Rey has grown also. Starting in 1996 with the school Contreras attended, there are now 30 Christo Rey schools across the country. A local school, Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, opened this fall with 129 ninth graders, almost all of them low-income and benefitting from the state’s private school voucher program. The school is based in a church in West Milwaukee, just south of Miller Park.