Virtue signalers may derail the jail!
Legislators like to say: the minority talks, the majority votes.
Proponents of improving the Dane County jail are the majority but lack the super-majority (28 votes on a 37-member county board) needed to tack on another $24 million to the $148 million already authorized for the project, due to cost overruns. They don’t have the votes, so they voted 22 to 15 Thursday night 02-17-22 to buy time — to keep talking — for another two weeks until the next meeting.
Barack Obama himself couldn’t get the additional 6 votes, it sayeth here. What that means for the project ain’t exactly clear. Either scale back new construction required to close down two floors of cells built in the 1950s or, conceivably, start from Square One if most of the already approved $148 million isn’t committed this fiscal/calendar year. A lot will depend on the April 5 election and that’s not looking good.
Outdated Alcatraz-like cells on the top two floors of the City-County Bldg would be replaced but BLM crowd doesn’t want more humane facilities; they want no jail at all
A member of the “Shovels in the Ground Caucus,” Supv. Andrew Schauer (Sun Prairie) moved for more time, promising that compromises were in the works that would bring doubters on board.
Supv. Richelle Andrae (Madison Hill Farms), a jail opponent, wasn’t buying. “For a year and a half now we’ve known this resolution is not going to pass. I don’t think anything is going to change anyone’s minds.”
Shovel-ready Supv. Jeff Weigand (Marshall) voted for the delay but could read the virtual room: “What are two more weeks going to get us? … This has been studied to death.” Indeed, 28 studies costing $15.3 million in the last 16 years.
“After talking to people for several weeks,” Supv. Melissa Ratcliff (Cottage Grove) agreed, “nobody can tell me what they want to do. We’re not the ones suffering; people in jail are the ones who are suffering.”
For good measure, Supv. Yogesh Chawla (Progressive Dane) accused members of “strong-arming to make supervisors vote a certain way. (Now they want) another two weeks to pressure.” (The horror! “Strong-arming”! AKA arm-twisting, is an essential ingredient of the legislative stew.)
Woke racists flood the zone
Because its meetings remain on line, the county avoided the disruptive tantrums BLM affiliates employed to shut down local democracy, pre-pandemic. Didn’t stop the usual suspects from using their screen time to preen their Woke virtues. “White supremacist,” “the carceral state,” buzz buzz buzz.
Derail the Jail/ Defund the Police regulars like Erika Bach, Allison Bell Bern, and Tyson Vitale — all white — accusing, when you come down to it, Sheriff Kalvin Barrett, Police Chief Shon Barnes, District Attorney Ismael Ozanne, and the judiciary (including Circuit Judge Everett Mitchell) of racism for racial disparity most foul. (For our foreign audience, those officials are people of color.) Because 59% of the jail population are P.O.C. For Progressives, correlation is causation.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: As we predicted in the last thrilling episode, the Shovels in the Ground caucus may become an endangered species. BLM noise maker Bell Bern taunted: “We tried to warn you we would have some new voices coming to the County Board. That’s the reason some of you are on your way out.”
Do you even know YOUR county supervisor?
Education
Blaska Policy Werkes 
You gotta love it when “the intersection” of Dane County bureaucracy, the love of taxpayer dollars, Ultra-Woke ideology, and typical Madison analysis paralysis meet.
Call it The Crossroads of Chaos. They have been sitting there motionless for years, while the costs continue to skyrocket.
Gotta love it — unless you’re a Madison taxpayer with even a tiny bit of “open your eyes” awareness. Then it’s the realization that we are getting robbed at every turn and these people don’t really give a hoot.
Put another ballot in the dropbox and keep electing these mediocre wannabe’s, Madison.
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Maybe if they sought more competitive bids including non union labor they could get the job done with the original budget. But we know there are too many hands that need to be greased in order to secure the election/re-election of the decision makers.
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Oh come on now. If you took that $150M and hired more social workers, woke judges, court commissioners and ADA’s the jail would be almost empty and all these people would be out not committing crimes maybe even working. You might have enough money left over to remodel the CCB jail into something like a treatment center. We have to look forward to 21st century solutions and not backwards.
Sorry, the small progressive, woke part of my brain twitched a little bit.
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Are there any old industrial sites for sale in Madison or in Dane County? There has to be some industrial site that is in existence that could be turned into a jail. Biggest problem I see is that even if you build a new jail and have the housing capacity to hold all the people that commit crimes in Madison, you still have another issue.
The problem is that judges and court commissioners, prosecutors don’t want to put the bad guys in jail.
Issuing a $200.00 – $1,000.00 signature bond to someone who was just busted for stealing a car is hardly a deterrent to commit more crimes. In fact, the thug who did so is laughing his ass off at the idiots who did so and the cops who went through the time and trouble to arrest him.
What do you say to a woman who was brutally raped and beaten who’s rapist just got out of jail on a $500.00 dollar signature bond while awaiting trial? Do you think she feels safe? What about her state of mind?
Here is an example of what percent of crimes get a signature bond in Dane County. A bit old but still valuable: https://university.pretrial.org/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=7c5831b1-a6c2-11f3-b439-2e76f50ffe0d&forceDialog=0
Do the crime, do the time. No excuses!
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They can take the fox-con facility. We already dumped a ton of money into Scooters con job; might as well use it.
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Bill, Good thoughts and you offered them sincerely. However, bail is NOT a “deterrent” to future crime -far from it it. Bail is merely an amount set that “should” ensure that the accused shows up for future court dates, and ultimately his/her trial. However, the more serious the charge and the more potential danger to the community SHOULD drive the bond/bail figure higher for obvious reasons. But currently, it is still only a method to ensure the accused shows up for subsequent court dates.
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