Milwaukee Magazine’s “News Buzz” website has an update on the plans for the War Memorial Corporation to put up a parking lot on lakefront park land that I’ve been talking about for several months now:

One county supervisor says times is running out to start work on a much-needed expansion to the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center’s parking lot – a proposal that’s drawn objections from parks groups that say the facility is attempting to infringe on public  land. Meanwhile, the state DNR as weighed in to oppose the expansion.

Sanfelippo argues the parking lot must be expanded because people attending events at the Center routinely park on the grass to the north of the existing lots. “We’re talking about events that attract a lot of elderly people,” Sanfelippo says.

To his credit, Sup. Sanfelippo is very cleverly trying to confuse the actual facts about the plans from the WMC. The Park People and Preserve our Parks are completely supportive of the WMC building a new parking lot on their land. What we’re against is them paving over park land that they’re currently squatting on to increase the bottom line of a private non-profit.

In the article, he also tries to muddle the waters when talking about how the War Memorial Center is owned by the County, then goes on to talk about how because of that the War Memorial Corporation isn’t a private corporation, which is untrue. The Corporation operates out of the Center building.  It’s no different than the private corporation Coast Restaurant leasing a public building from the County or the Zoological society leasing out public space at the Zoo or a hundred other similar cases.

The fact is – as the article correctly points out in it’s headline – time is in fact running out for the War Memorial Corporation. It would be in their best interests and the interests of the taxpaying, park enjoying public for them to give up on this misguided land grab and go ahead with their plans to develop and improve a parking lot on their existing land.

(Full disclosure, I’m one of the people who signed the Notice of Claim against the County regarding this issue.)

UPDATE 06/24/10: The county board today rejected on a 9-10 vote the proposal to fast-track the lakefront takeover.

You may recall that several months ago, I outlined a plan being put forth by the War Memorial Corporation that would take over additional park land on Milwaukee’s lake front to put in a new parking lot.

Since then a lot has happened.

The War Memorial Corporation (WMC), a private, non-profit corporation,  is advancing a plan to expand the parking lot on the north side of the building (directly south of Veterans Park) to raise revenue from  special event parking at the expense of the County Parks Department’s O’Donnell parking garage located right across the street, and to the detriment of public parkland.

At a recent meeting of the Lakefront Development Advisory Commission  (LDAC) several weeks ago, the WMC plan was put on hold as park supporters turned out in force to express their concerns. Not only was this action wrong, it was also illegal. It recently came to our attention that the WMC plans to bypass all public input into this plan by having certain Milwaukee County Supervisors do an end run of existing procedures and public scrutiny and bring the plan up for a vote at their monthly meeting on Thursday (tomorrow).

The County Board is doing this through a parliamentary procedure known as “suspension of the rules,” and it does exactly what it sounds like: bypassing the existing and proper rules to ram this proposal through the County Board.

This morning Preserve our Parks and The Park People of Milwaukee County filed a “notice of claim” with the Milwaukee County Clerk which not only outlines the reason this  is illegal, but lays out very clearly that Preserve Our Parks and The Park  People are prepared to litigate this matter with the County if the WMC chooses to move forward with paving lakefront park land to expand a parking lot.

To avoid that costly and resource consuming litigation, we’re urging Supervisors to vote against suspending the rules and have issued a press release today outlining our opposition and held a press conference this morning to alert the media – and the public – to this high handed land grab.

The last thing we should be doing is paving over any lakefront park land to provide more parking for a private group whose tenants include for-profit businesses!

Please spend 5 minutes by joining us in calling your Supervisor to ask that they vote AGAINST this  parliamentary procedure, they vote AGAINST this land grab on our lakefront, and they vote FOR our parks!

For information on how to contact your Supervisor, visit: http://county.milwaukee.gov/FindDistrictSupervisor or call the County Board switchboard at: 414-278-4222

Please join me in this important fight to halt the constant “nibbling away” at public park land for the benefit of private businesses!

I should note that about half of the County Board is already on record as being against the “suspension of the rules” being proposed by the other half who are in favor. I’ll get a list as soon as I know it of who is against this land grab and who’s in favor of it.

Our press conference this morning was attended by the three major networks in Milwaukee and I’ll post video of the conference as it comes in.

Blogging has been a bit light lately, but a major project at work that I’ve been on for the past six months is finally done!

• Good news for Milwaukee’s northwest side as a committed group of neighbors turned a landfill into a great new park. Kudos to the Hartung Park Community Association!
• Your liberal media pointing out that Senate candidate Ron Johnson lobbied against victims of sexual abuse via the Catholic church. The responsibility free talk radio shows have been warning us that they’d “trash” Johnson, and their predictions have now come true! Because pointing out where an otherwise blank slate of a candidate stands on an issue is trashing him!
• Finally, the Suppon is gone. A 29-36 record with a 5.08 ERA isn’t a bad way to earn more than $20 million I guess, but good for the Brewers to do what needed to be done.

This concludes an all Journal Sentinel edition of “In brief”.