Parts of Town of Madison to Be Attached to the City of Madison: South Madison Makeover
Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway is overseeing the attachment of significant portions of the Town of Madison to the city on October 31st.
Part 2 of 2
By Jonathan Gramling
While the ground will hardly shift — at least for the moment — there will be a seismic shift occurring in the broader South Madison area, as well as other parts of the Madison area, on October 31, 2022. That is when the Town of Madison will cease to exist and its assets, land and the people who live there will become part of the city of Madison or the city of Fitchburg through an agreement that was signed 20 years ago.
There are areas of South Madison that have been almost schizophrenic in nature. Within almost the same block, there have been buildings — and families — eligible for certain services and subsidies while their neighbors are ineligible because the city/town divide cuts them into different municipal boundaries. The attachment of these areas involves a lot more than changing the boundaries on a map. It could mean wholesale changes in the lives of the people who live in the Town of Madison.
“I expect that there will be a whole range of services that the Town didn’t provide for various reasons,” Rhodes-Conway said. “There is our Office of Business Resources. There are services we provide in terms of childcare and senior activities and youth employment. Many of these things we are funding agencies in the community to provide. But we limit them to providing services within the city of Madison. All of those services will now be available to folks who live in the Town as soon as the attachment takes place.”
Through mutual agreement, there are some services that that are already transitioning from the Town to the city.
“We’ve actually been working on the attachment for over a year now,” Rhodes-Conway said. “One of the steps along the way was that we are already providing fire service and building inspection service to the Town. And so there has been a little bit of a transition during this period. But the actual attachment happens on October 31, 2022. Between now and then, we are going to continue to do outreach and education so that people understand the process and know how to get in touch with the city when they need to. And we’re going to continue to work with the Town and with the city of Fitchburg to make sure that all of the legal ‘i’s get dotted and the ‘t’s get crossed as we figure out the final apportionment of what is left over of the Town’s assets as they wind down.”
And the Town and the city have also worked together to bring some of the Town staff into the city’s workforce in order to keep some of the Town’s institutional memory.
“One thing that we have worked out is a mutually beneficial agreement,” Rhodes-Conway said. “The Town is going to let us use their fire station while we renovate one of ours. In doing that deal, one of the things that we agreed to was to hire a few of their staff. Most of them will come into our Public Works agencies, which I think is a real advantage because they know the Town. They know the infrastructure in a way that our folks don’t. And so we are actually in the process of working that out now in terms of what agency they are going to come into and what positions they will be in. We did do a separate agreement with the Town for the use of that fire station.”
They say that knowledge is power and so the city of Madison is gearing up a massive information campaign so that the town residents will be fully informed and know what to do when the attachment occurs.
“One thing that is important to know is that going into 2022, we have a series of public information meetings and outreach efforts,” Rhodes-Conway said. “It’s a little ways off, but actually our next public information meeting is planned for March 16th. It will be great to share those details with folks. It will also be great to share the website that we have, which is cityofmadison.com/city-hall/town-of- madison. It has a wealth of information about what is going on, the time frame of everything, the content of the public meetings and information in multiple languages, which has been really important to us.”
One of the things that will happen on October 31, 2022 is the city of Madison will suddenly become more diverse.
“One of the exciting things about the Town of Madison coming into the city is the Town is much more diverse than the city population with respect to race and ethnicity,” Rhodes-Conway said. “And so we’re trying to be very mindful in our outreach to make sure that we have information in a number of different languages and that there are folks whom we hired as navigators to be out in the community working with the community on this transition. Two of them are Spanish speakers. We also have information in Hmong and Mandarin. It’s just the direction we would like to be going in overall, but we felt it was even more important given the diversity of folks who live in the Town.”
While it has been 20 years in the making, South Madison will suddenly become different on October 31, 2022 although on the surface it might seem as if nothing has changed. The people will be the same. But the way they relate to government and how government influences their lives could be radically different. And this change could lead to other change in the future. Time will tell.
