Below are a list of Wisconsin cities, villages and towns that will hold advisory referendums April 4 asking whether U.S. troops should be immediately brought home from Iraq. The list came from here. Conspicuously absent from the list is the city of Oshkosh, due to the efforts of 6 members of the common council that can find technical reasons to meet in closed session with a developer who does not want to discuss his finances publically, but couldn't find it within themselves to allow the public to vote on the referendum. Shame.
- Algoma
- Amery
- Baraboo
- Town of Draper in Sawyer County
- Town of Edgewater in Sawyer County
- Egg Harbor
- Ephraim
- Evansville
- Forestville
- Frederic
- Kewaunee
- La Crosse
- Madison
- Monona
- Mount Horeb
- Town of Newport in Columbia County
- Osceola
- Shorewood
- Sister Bay
- Sturgeon Bay
- Watertown
- Whitefish Bay
4 comments:
It should be noted that this referendum is as pro-war as pro-peace, as a strong vote against the referendum would send a strong pro-war message, just as a strong vote for the referendum would send a strong pro-peace message.
The 6 council members who voted against this simply did not care to allow citizens the chance to voice their opinions on an extremely important issue.
Of course this is no surprise, as this is the same council that suggested eliminating citizen statements at council meetings. More recently, they also went into a very questionable closed meeting session with the 5 Rivers Developer - a move that only furthered the mistrust of our city government.
Or, you could blame the people pushing for the referendum for not working hard enough to secure the proper amount of signatures.
Or, you could say that signatures are only one way of getting the item on the ballot. The other way is a majority vote of the council. This council had almost 1,800 signatures and the law on its side to do the latter. (Plus as the experience in Watertown shows, there is no guarantee that the council would have put the referendum on the ballot even WITH the proper number of signatures.).
P.S. People worked extremely hard to get those signatures. And if Doug Boone's almost 3,000 signatures gathered over the summer had counted (and a council that really cared about the will of the people would have given those signatures some weight at least)we would have had more than enough. The problem is that six members of this council (the six that will go to lengths to protect developers' preferences for closed meetings) looked for reasons not to place the item on the ballot rather than look for the ample reasons that existed to place it on the ballot. This is the same group who could not explain why a closed meeting was required on Tuesday night.
If you are not willing to do the work it takes to get the signatures, why is it the city council's job to pick up your slack? If Doug Boone could gather 3,000 on his own, why couldn't your entire group? Stop blaming other people for your failures. take some responsibility for your own actions.
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