2007 – A Year of Bold Approaches

I worry a lot about this peninsula I call home.

Yes, I realize I’m prone to cynicism (hence, I write news). I probably overreact and sometimes too readily expect the worst and find the dark inside the silver lining of too many issues. In the year about to end I spent many hours fretting.

I worried about the business climate. I worried about how long our schools can survive the arcane public school funding formula and how long there will be any young children to be sent to whatever kind of school we have. I worried about the tremendous amount of money the county and its municipalities have spent on public works projects like fire stations, jails, marinas, libraries, and feasibility studies in recent years.

I worried about room tax and tourism. I worried a lot about the shoreline that seemed to fade before my very eyes and the future of tourism in a county of increasingly empty retail storefronts.

And as the year nears its end, I worry because we don’t seem to have enough volunteers to go around up here any more. Pick a month and go to a meeting of your community school board, plan commission, board of trustees, and business association and you’ll start to recognize a lot of the same faces. The same pool of folks stretched ever thinner as they try to make the community stronger and fill our gaps.

We have a dearth of firefighters and first responders. Coaches are hard to find, as are ice rink flooders. Towns scramble to find warm bodies to sit on plan commissions and ad hoc committees, and villages scramble to get able-bodied humans to run for a trustee seat. In those seats we don’t often get pros, but thankfully we somehow get enough of the willing. I wonder how long a retirement community can reasonably expect to be so fortunate.

Over the last couple years I’ve sat in on more public meetings than I care to recall (and several that I couldn’t if I did). They are rarely – very, very rarely – exciting. I fidget. A lot. And though I’m almost always the youngest in the room, I challenge the cliché that only the oldest doze off in halls of public business.

I have to confess I don’t witness a lot of scheming or selfish-minded maneuvering so many assume is commonplace. Maybe I’m naïve. I also don’t see public policy experts, urban planners, or politicians (well, a couple maybe). Not too many finance experts either.

What I do see are gas station owners, restaurateurs, and retirees genuinely, often painstakingly, trying to get it right. Teachers and innkeepers managing budgets in the millions for relative pennies. Mothers and fathers giving up evenings at home for long hours under bright lights, working before sparse audiences largely bent on finding opportunities to criticize them.

They plow through agendas that on any given night could include items as diverse as what the speed limit for an obscure road should be, how a parcel should be zoned, how to entice better bands for the July 4th parade, what way is best to stimulate the local economy, and how to fight water contamination at the beach. And all this after a couple hours spent on a multi-million dollar marina proposal or condominium development.

So yes, often they fail. There are mistakes both honest and stupid.

This year there were many frustrations, but there were some incredible successes as well, both large and small.

A little slice of waterfront in Egg Harbor and Sister Bay won’t become condos. An ice rink will get some long-lusted for improvements. A baseball field will be built. And the biggest marketing initiative in the county’s history was launched with the approval of a room tax by 11 municipalities.

What do all of these have in common? They represent new ideas, new approaches, and a long-term vision on a peninsula often tied so tightly to right here right now. It remains to be seen how successful any of these measures will prove to be, but in 2007 Door County’s leaders could not be accused of complacency.

Think democracy and we think of the flag, of voting booths, of Capitol Hill and other dramatic monuments to the ideals set forth 230-some years ago.

But where you find our government at its strongest and democracy at its most authentic is in the non-descript buildings that house local government. The cold rooms where neighbors gather to argue passionately about the future of their community, and quite often about the past.

In these rooms people stand face to face with those who their decisions will affect, look out the window at the town they are shaping, and go home to the tax bill on which they see the rates they approved.

In this issue you’ll find our annual look back at the year that was in the pages of the Pulse, much of it shaped by what happened in those aforementioned “cold rooms.” We’ve tried to supply an ample sampling of the most noteworthy, memorable, moving, and well-written snapshots of our humble effort. If our excerpts should leave you wanting more, please visit http://www.ppulse.com and browse our archives for complete articles.