Janesville City Council Candidate K. Andreah Briarmoon Answers Our 5 Questions

Question 1: Rock County currently ranks #1 in the state for unemployment. Much of this is due to business closings and layoffs in the City of Janesville. What will you do to bring jobs back to the City of Janesville?

Much of our current unemployment is due to bad planning:

1. No exit strategy for g.m., which has been a vocal campaing concern of mine for the past 5 years.
2. Investing in the big-box folks w t.i.f. welfare and ignoring the existing local small businesses from whom come 90% of all new job creation.
3. Allowing a fat-cat to flip a property 30 days before city annexation whereby he keeps all the profits of the increased value of the parcel due to it's annexation, and the city does not bother to take a cut for the increased value of the property to go toward the expenses of this annexation.
4. Not untilizing our rich farm land and distribution assets for a bread-basket economy. Everyone has to eat.

Question 2: Janesville is known for its automotive heritage, however, much of that industry is now gone. If you were to define Janesville’s heritage for the next 20 years, what would it be?

1. The bread basket of the mid-west. Geologists travel here from all over the entire world to see our glacial deposits of the finest farm land on-the-planet! Bar none. Is that in our brouchure? No.
2. GM designed an amazing electic car, then put it on mothballs per some oil company deal. See docu-video 'who killed the electric car'. Let's force them in court to put it into production. And then they could re-use the janseville plant

Question 3: During the past year, several projects surfaced and were met with a great deal of public debate: the bike tunnel, the childrens' museum, the aquatics center, and the ice arena. Please explain what guidelines you will use to make decisions on projects such as these.

The bike tunnel, museum, 14 mil aquatics center, ice arenas, and let's not forget the annual sidewalk fiasco... are redherring diversions by the prior city manager to stir everyone so that he could slide the budget through without a glance. so he could slush money to Westphal for the 'riverfront purchase', get another bus garage so a buddy of his can claim the location of the current bus garage, and on it goes.

We need our ward supervisors to monitor these things, and to inform us, and to get our input.Then we would have a list of meaningful 'shovel-ready' projects for the Obama stimulous.

Question 4: What steps should the City of Janesville take, if any, in redeveloping the downtown area?

The city can get out of the way. Then devvelopment will be allowed to happen. We have the most ruthless and unfriendly code department in the state of WI and that needs to change yesterday. A citizen nomination committee that chooses the citizen board members instead of the city manager choosing his own supervisors, will help fix this. And our citizen appeals board needs to be made funcional again. Then our code inspec can not be used as henchmen, and growth would longer be impeded. As an example, ask forward janesville chamber of commerce about their code experiance during their new-building renovation.

Question 5: Explain your approach to budgeting and taxation: do you start with adding the expenses up and then setting taxes based on those expenses? Do you start with setting a cap on taxes and then working backwards? Do you strike a balance in between? Please explain.

With ward supervisors, our own choices for citizen boards, then we can monitor and trim the fat on the budget and improve our priorties and have a channel to input our tremedous citizen good-will into our community.

Example; our snowmobile clubs were STOPPED from assisting citizens trapped on I-90 during a recent snow blizzard becauses our government employees did not want to "look bad" (!) and wanted to do it themselves. They need to orchestrate our energies. We do not staff them at the capacity of a full blown emergency - only to the expected day-to-day operations.

Set the budget limit at a certain percentage of folks' income and then make it work with what you got - like real people need to do - every day.