As a result of last night's unanimous Oshkosh Common Council vote, Akcess Acquisition Group LLC (AAG) has six months to . . . well, to do something I guess. At least the Council last night had a public discussion with a representative of the development team, and at least there was an acknowledgement that the public needs to be meaningfully involved at each stage of the process. Those are good things, and represent progress over the incompetent manner in which the Five Rivers Resort fiasco was handled.
But as I've argued in the past, a major problem with large scale developments in Oshkosh is the lack of executive level leadership in place to explain the projects and build public support for them. City Manager Dick Wollangk seems content to farm out the responsibility for these important tasks to Director of Community Development Jackson Kinney. The result is that the public discussion of major development projects gets mired in a kind of "bureaucratic babble" that always seems to be concealing some crucial piece of evidence that could turn the Council or the public against any project.
AAG may end up providing Oshkosh with an outstanding, multi-use development that benefits the population at large in a way that the Five Rivers luxury condo plan never could have. Unfortunately, the lack of confidence and trust in City Hall means that we can only have faith that something good will happen. That's not good.
Regardless of what happens with AAG, the next City Council must insist that the faith based model of development be retired and replaced with a model of professionalism that is supposed to be the essence of the Council/Manager form of government.
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