Alder Nikki Conklin Talks about Representing Her Far West District: Representative Equity
Alder Nikki Conklin poses in front of the Wexford Ridge Apartments where she has lived for the past 10 years.
By Jonathan Gramling
Nikki Conklin, the alder for Madison’s District 9, isn’t someone who had the ambition since her youth to become an elected public official. As a single parent with two children, she was trying to survive and possible succeed while living in the Wexford Ridge Apartments. But as it is for many, something happened that propelled Conklin forward. It all came about because she was upset with something going on at Wexford Ridge.
“They were towing cars for really ridiculous reasons,” Conklin said. “There were a lot of barriers in place that prevented people from getting their parking passes. People were just waking up in the morning thinking someone stole their car. They were calling the police and lo and behold, their car got towed and nobody told them. There was no information. And they towed their cars all the way to Windsor. People have one vehicle. There is no bus route. They couldn’t go get their car and they were charging them $200 to get their car out of tow yard.”
Conklin decided to do something about it.
“There were a lot of things going on that I didn’t really care for done by the management,” Conklin said. “And so, I wondered how I could stop it.
How could I advocate for people? I remember talking to Paul Terranova about it and he said, ‘Organize.’ I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I know how to do that.’
I went through the Neighborhood Organizing Institute, which was referred to as NOI. We had city funding for that. That laid out the organizing tools that we needed. It really showed me how to be a leader, how to get a team together, build your base and your core team. And then we had to figure out who our target was and what our ask was and how we got our ask across. I’m so thankful for that program because it really helped me develop those leadership skills that I needed to organize.
Conklin and their group got a meeting with the complex manager. And they were able to negotiate some change.
“They didn’t really remove the barriers to getting parking passes,” Conklin said. “The office is only open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Most people work 9 to 5. They didn’t have night hours. They didn’t have weekend hours. They just kind of laxed on that. But now, if people do get their cars towed, they get a warning first to try to rectify the problem. And then if the cars do get towed, they have the towing information posted and a phone number they can call. They haven’t been doing the towing for probably 2-3 years now. But if they do, now they at least give you a warning and they let people know where their car is going to be.”
In 2020, the then-alder for District 9 was accused of calling a community member a derogatory name. Many people in District 9 wanted a change. Since it was built in 1976, no one from Wexford Ridge had represented the area in any elected capacity. People from within Wexford Ridge and beyond focused in on Conklin to run for alder.
“People came to me and said, ‘Nikki, this is your time,” Conklin said. “’We need change.’ It really was the community supporting me and encouraging me to get out there and run for office. That’s how this started, a push from my community. I didn’t know this was in my future. I never dreamt of this. This wasn’t a goal of mine. It just fell on my lap. It was the people whom I knew and knew me and wanted to help bring District 9 toward change. They were tired of the predecessor. He had been in office for 20 years. A lot of people felt that their voices weren’t being heard. There wasn’t a lot of communication with neighborhoods and communities here in District 9. That was definitely one of my platforms that I ran on. It was Representation Matters. And your voice matters. If it took me putting my neck out on the line to help bring their voices to the table, that is what I was going to do.”
Conklin attracted contributions and support. She won the three-way race in the primary and then beat her predecessor in the April general election.
“On election night in April, it was such a whirlwind to get there,” Conklin reflected. “Everything happened so quickly. I didn’t even announce until December. From December to April, it was grind, grind, grind. I got my voice out there. I got my name out there. I did whatever I could including flyers, phone banking — I called over 1,000 people myself and spoke to them or left messages — and other things. When the actual general election night came and I won, that feeling is hard to put into words. It was hard to describe because I felt so overwhelmed. I felt accomplished. And I just felt like this was a start of the bigger change that we needed. When I say Representation Matters, now they have a single Black mother at the table with all of these other folks who bring all of these different perspectives and lived experiences that no one else can compare to. I really felt like I accomplished something. And I made a name for myself. And people who didn’t know me before, they know me now.”
Conklin feels that her representation matters on a number of levels. For one, it brings the culmination of her lived experiences and the perspective they hewed to the Common Council.
“I think my perspective of the school system, having my children go through the school system and how important after school programs are and having that extra push for children at the end of the school day, making sure that they have their homework done, and that they have a hot meal before they go home because we don’t know what kids are going home to,” Conklin said. “Being able to have that experience and seeing it firsthand how detrimental it can be if we aren’t investing in our future, our children, how bad that can be if we aren’t making sure they have their education, making sure that they have their food. These are all just basic needs. And I think if we have people’s basic needs met, then we’re going to have a much better and a more successful community as a whole. When people have housing, education, employment and food, then they don’t have to go out and trying to get it from somewhere else and trying to figure out how they are going to pay their bills and how they are going to keep the roof over their heads. If they have their basic needs met, then they are able to invest in themselves more, invest in their children more, and uplift and empower one another.”
Being from the area and working with city staff has helped to stabilize the Tree Lane Family Apartments complex that serves homeless families. It experienced some major problems when first implemented. Conklin believes in what the project is doing and is committed to making it work.
“Tree Lane Family Apartments is a great place,” Conklin said. “When people have their basic needs met — when they have housing — then they are able to go look for a job, then they are able to bring food home to their children to cook for them. It’s a great program, but unfortunately things didn’t necessarily go as planned. The city knows now that they’ve made some mistakes when they took 45 families who have been homeless and surviving, doing anything that they can to make sure they have their basic needs met and you put them in one dense area, there are going to be problems. They are not used to having things that they never had before. Of course, there were many problems in the beginning. And there still are problems. And so the city staff and I are meeting with them every two weeks, the owners of the building, and we’re trying to get things back on track and in order. This is a great program. We need to keep using other programs like this, making sure that people have their housing secured. And then I think we’ll be seeing a lot more successful stories come out of Tree Lane Family Apartments.”