The Department of Transportation's banner is “keep the traffic moving.” Corporations and developers, supported by national and international funding, seek opportunities to improve their “bottom” line, not our “community base.”
Those agencies nosing around in our fertile territory and those wielding authority are not always the best for Shorewood. But do we remember and are we strongly for Shorewood's bottom line? Who speaks for Shorewood? Who carries the spirit of Shorewood?
Shorewood's Board is too politically functional and our village staff is too efficiently administrative to express “the spirit of Shorewood” and to relate to its citizenry. As Tim Fojtik says, we want to “know what's going on.”
It is up us, the citizens to express that spirit. The nature of the Village Board is ingrained in its structure, stimulated by its separating qualities and with its unresponsive nature, its members distancing themselves from the citizenry and the spirit of Shorewood.
We have acquired stacks of stodgy documents called plans, none interrelated nor integrated nor linked to each other within a spirit of what is Shorewood. We have no "visible component" within our village that brings all of these together, to express the total of our community spirit. We have no code or ordinance and no commssion or commission head to give us direction and leadership.
We've somewhat tried to express that spirit in what we consider the “walkable community.” That is basic to what a community is. Does DOT help us to implement that desire, that spirit, by moving more car traffic through our community, using the 30-mile requirement as the minimum rather than the maximum speed?
Is there anyone carrying the spirit of Shorewood when confronting this river of traffic? Is this "unconcerned traffic" compatible with our “walkable community?” Has anyone in authority sought the taming of this flood of cars or explained the spirit of the “walkable community” to DOT? Who speaks for the spirit of Shorewood?
Who speaks for the nature of our real river at Shorewood's western edge. Is the river in our best interest or that of the developer's and of the so-called “tax base?” Are we going to ruin our river-setting in the interest of the tax base? Isn't the job of the tax base to help us maintain what we think community is?
The spirit of community is not in spotty projects of unrelated buildings and buildings unrelated to what we are as a community. It is not fast traffic and the tax base alone. This spirit is in our “community base.” Let's keep our community walkable and let's create beautiful places to walk to. Who is going to carry this banner and who is going to lead us?
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Addendum: I suspect that there is an invisible hand in the form of a person integrating all of these plans and who has a vision as to what Shorewood is to look like and what it its to be in the future. Will this person please raise his hand and let us know "what is going on" and what his vision is for our community?
