The demise of Tacoma Park
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Some years ago when I was the president of the Tacoma Park board of
directors, I worked with a woman who was getting a Ph.D. in history. Her
dissertati...
Tripp County Weather
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A few days ago temperature was around 106F, then the wind shifted to the
north and in about 30 minutes, temperature dropped to around 71F. What
looked like...
Oglala Lakota oddities from 2016 election
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In South Dakota’s 2016 general election, Oglala Lakota was the only county
to vote yes to accept election-law revisions that the Legislature approved
in th...
The Ledge #652: Covers
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I've always said that I have a folder on my laptop where I toss any great
cover version that I encounter, and when that folder is "full" it's time
for a...
The End of Another Year
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I think it's back in 2005 that I started this blog without a clear idea of
where it might go. I got a lot of fun out of it at first, had some
followers and...
Goodbye, South Dakota
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At 12:55 pm CDT on Friday, May 27, my status as a lifelong South Dakotan
ended. I crossed the state line en route to the city in which my wife and I
now ...
Walking On
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The sun always sets, no room for regrets I Walk Away – Crowded House This
is somewhat of a difficult entry to write, though it’s likely going to come
as no...
In Between the Mixtapes
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Five paragraphs about my new writing habit, and how there's more to this
life than writing about your first Def Leppard concert, apparently.
Check out Dakotagraph on Facebook
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Thanks for stopping by Dakotagraph. I hope it is useful and provides some
inspiration for taking photos in South Dakota and elsewhere. For more
active post...
First look at Floating Horses now available
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Some great historic film footage and interviews are featured in the first
extended look at *Floating Horse: The Life of Casey Tibbs*. You can view it
on th...
Northern Exposure
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It was a gorgeous day to be outside. After what seemed like a month of
sub-zero temps, some of which was designated The Great Polar Vortex Event
of 2014, i...
11 years ago
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You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff. ["Tom Joad," in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath]
Occasionally, I will mention my job, my public service activities, and other aspects of my life to offer my readers a better perspective on where I'm coming from. But to be clear:
"The views that I express represent my own opinions, based on my own education and experience, not the opinions of any other entity, party, or group to which I belong. I give these opinions in my individual capacity, as a private citizen, and as someone who gives a good gosh darn about his community, his country, and the truth."
In other words: my blog, my words, my point of view. Enjoy!
Madville Times: South Dakota's linkiest and thinkiest political blog, coming to you from the glistening green shores of Lake Herman. Always lakey, never shakey!
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Hey, don't take my word for it that President Obama's health care reform package is the best thing Congresswoman Hersth Sandlin didn't vote for. Come ask some professionals:
Health Care Matters Public Information Forum
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act The Health Care Reform Bill What does it mean for South Dakota?
South Dakota State University, my alma mater, makes some of the best ice cream in the state. The SDSU dairy program also makes some smart business moves. Ryan Woodard reports in the Brookings Register that SDSU has opened the Campanile Connection, a shop selling SDSU ice cream and cheese in downtown Brookings.
The new shop is getting up and running right next door to Sioux River Cyclery (a long bike ride always makes me hungry for ice cream!). SDSU instructor and dairy plant manager Howard Bonneman also looks eagerly to the gymnastics center next door and the spectacular new Children's Museum just a couple blocks away as sources of hungry little coneheads.
This new state-owned business (SDSU's second downtown venture this year, following a new branch of the campus bookstore to Main Street) isn't putting too much of a squeeze on other businesses. With Zesto's now moved out to the University Mall, there's no ice cream vendor within reasonable walking distance of downtown. There's no grocer downtown, either—hmm... maybe the Campanile Connection can snag some SDSU beef as well!
This kind of town-and-gown connection is good for everyone. The dairy products students make in their dairy-micro classes gets put to good use instead of getting thrown out. Students and residents get to make connections through commerce and chocolate revel. And everyone has one more reason to spend the day in the wonderful destination into which downtown Brookings is making itself.
Maybe DSU here in Madison can do something like this. Maybe our Tech Fellows could open a branch office downtown to provide cheap tech support for the community. Maybe our programming classes could open up a shop, Widgets While u Wait, whipping up quick Facebook event pages, blog polls, and other Web gizmos in under an hour.
SDSU ice cream: totally socialist, and totally good for downtown. Two scoops, please!
First, Ryan Woodard hears from a county official that the recent flooding on Six Mile Creek and elsewhere in Brookings County was of unprecendented intensity:
“I’ve had people on Six Mile Creek that were here in ‘69 say this is the highest they’ve seen it,” Brookings County Emergency Manager Todd Struwe told Brookings County commissioners this week.
The Register's John Kubal then turns to Dr. Carter Johnson to discuss the potential impacts of climate change on the Prairie Pothole Region (you know, the great American duck factory we live on). Dr. Johnson discusses a lot of the economic value we get from our prairie wetlands for free—lumber, hunting, water purification. Then Dr. Johnson turns to the economic costs of draining the wetlands, which include more intense floods:
Contrast some of the above with the draining of wetlands and tiling of fields, which leads to water going into small streams and creeks. Johnson noted that people living along the Missouri River saw floods in the 1990s "made worse by the fact that we drained wetlands" [John Kubal, "Could Our Duck Factory Go Dry?" Brookings Register, 2010.10.04].
Dr. Johnson proceeds to other important findings from his climate change research. But it's worth noting that, when it comes to our wetlands, we perhaps need to worry less about Al Gore's jet plane and more about our own digging and physical transformation of our land.
Got high water? Ditch and yard and back forty filling up faster after a big rain than they used to? It could be that, in addition to the heavier rain falling on your land, you're getting heavier drainage from your upstream neighbors. When farmers lay tile under their land and when developers dig up and tile and pave new subdivisions, they remove earth from the prairie-wide filtration system. Water that used to sit and seep out of those acres now comes rushing downstream. That's exactly what's supposed to happen: you plant corn or build a new McMansion, you don't want it sitting in water. But that drainage also shifts your water problem to folks downstream... who have a higher likelihood of seeing their homes and businesses washed away.
I make life difficult for opticians. When I buy glasses, I ask for circular frames. The gals (always gals—I don't think I have ever been waited on by a fella in an eyeglasses shop) invariably first show me something with rounded edges—ovals, blobs, what-have-you—thinking that's what I want. I invariably have to reiterate: "No, really, I want circles. Perfect circles. Same dimensions in all three directions: 48, 48, 48." We then turn to the catalog to track down the one or two out of thousands of designs that satisfy my criteria.
I've tried non-circular glasses twice in my 24 years of four-eyedness. Those inferior frames, including my current close-but-not-quite eggy frames, have never lasted, never made me happy. I tried the frameless, ultra-light "Silhouette" glasses—no frame means you can shape the lens any way you want—but the one spendy pair I bought broke after hardly a year of use. Plus they wouldn't stay on in a stiff wind in the Jeep.
So I keep looking for perfectly circular (and durable, and affordable) frames. I generally meet with apologies, shrugs, and the perfectly rational explanation that circular lenses can spin within the frames, turn your prescription upside down, and make your head go woogly. (I've had this happen: I recommend adding a tiny notch in the lens at the screw post. Problem solved, and everyone could look funkier.)
I am thus pleased to acknowledge the exceptional customer service effort of JoAnne at Total Eyewear in Brookings. I tromped into her shop last winter in the midst of a brewing snowstorm. Looking every bit the wild-eyed Arctic adventurer with my backpack, boots, and bushy beard, I made my usual frames query, and JoAnne and her amused staff offered the usual "Sorry!" Nothing in stock. But JoAnne took my number and said she'd keep an eye out.
The spectacles JoAnne found for me, plus the old case that came with the black pair. Attention, all opticians: these are what I want.
In August, JoAnne called. She was browsing a second-hand shop in Canby, Minnesota, when she found not one but two pairs of antique spectacles. She got out her ruler to measure the lenses and found them perfectly circular. She bought them both and said she'd sell them back to me at cost, all of $15.
I dropped by Total Eyewear yesterday to pick them up. I gave JoAnne $20.
JoAnne doesn't know me from anything other than my chance visit to her shop last winter. She stood to make no money on this odd request. But she still remembered and made the effort to find exactly what this cranky, choosy customer wanted. I am impressed and grateful...
...and more than happy to recommend JoAnne's shop. If you need glasses and you're within shouting distance of Brookings, drop by Total Eyewear in Brookings, on 22nd Avenue South, by the University Mall. 605-692-8262. ------------------------ Bonus Irony: The full name of the woman who remembered that I wanted perfect circles, not just something round? JoAnne Ovall.
Brookings enjoyed picture-perfect Sunday weather for the opening of its amazing new Children's Museum.
The Brookings Children's Museum is on the site of old Central Elementary, just one block east of downtown. Within a two-block radius of this remarkable facility, you can walk to the public library, the community arts center, the bike shop, Nick's Hamburgers, the used book store, and George's Pizza... assuming you can manage to get through all of the activities in the children's museum. Walk a couple more blocks, and you can catch a movie. All Brookings needs now to complete the downtown tourism picture is a nice downtown hotel.
Both of us think the hanging sculptures in the bright, sunny atrium are wonderful.
A big crowd hung around after the museum closed to hear Recycled Percussion give an outdoor concert. The musicians took a break from their gig at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas to open the museum with a bang. Several bangs, actually.
Among the crowd enjoying the museum and music: Brookings resident Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, who made time after the Habitat dedication to bring her son Zachary and dad Lars to the museum. Both Herseth gents report enjoying the water farm immensely.
Can anyone tell me how long it has taken six new businesses to open in Madison's downtown? And can anyone tell me how long it will take Madison to follow Brookings's lead and engage in a serious downtown revitalization program (like the one the LAIC killed two years ago)?
The South Dakota Board of Regents appears ready to swing the eminent domain stick on SDSU's Alpha Xi Delta sorority. Vicki Schuster at the Brookings Register reports that SDSU wants to bulldoze the Alpha Xi Delta house on the south side of campus to build Phase II of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science complex. The project has already replaced a lot of trees and old houses with brick and pavement. The Legislature this year authorized the Regents to offer the sorority $275K for the property. The sorority has thus far said no thanks... and if I were them, I would, too.
During my undergrad days, I had the pleasure of living three blocks west of Alpha Xi Delta, right at 8th and Medary, where the SDSU Foundation building now stands. I loved it. I lived within a two minute bike-sprint from class. I never had to drive to the Union or the library, even on the coldest night. If I owned the choice Alpha Xi Delta property in a tight housing market like Brookings, I would expect a much better deal from the Regents to give it up. Alpha Xi Delta won't find a location as good for its replacement, and I suspect they won't be able to build a house of comparable size for $275K.
The value isn't just the building and location. The Regents are also taking away a prime recruitment tool for the sorority. Banish the sorority to scattered on-campus housing for a year or more while ΑΞΔ builds a new house, and the organization loses a year of easy recruitment, weakening the group for more than a couple years.
I'm no fan of the Greek system, but they're entitled to protect their organization's interests and demand a fair market price for their property like everyone else. Eminent domain is acceptable for cases of absolute public necessity. I haven't heard the case yet for the absolute necessity of another new classroom/lab building on the south edge of campus.
I haven't gotten the minutes from this week's Regental meeting yet, so I don't know for sure that they passed their condemnation resolution. Let's hope they don't ned to use it and can instead make a deal that satisfies all parties.
Planting must be done: 265 jobs disappeared from Lake County in June. The latest South Dakota Department of Labor statistics say that the number of people working in our fair county decreased from 6425 in May to 6160 in June.
255 laborers also disappeared from our workforce, down from 6740 in May to 6485 in June. The number of officially unemployed people thus only increased by 10, from 315 to 325, for a June unemployment rate of 5.0%.
Now some economists will tell you 5% unemployment is actually full unemployment—after all, you're always going to have some people between jobs. But that's cold comfort for the LAIC's Forward Madison committee, which is now has to create 925 jobs by the end of next year to meet its "400 new jobs!" goal set in 2006. Uff da.
The news from the septa-county area is mixed. Brookings County remains the beacon of eocnomic hope with the lowest unemployment in the area, 4.1%. Still, that's an increase from May's 3.9%.
Miner County also saw an increase in unemployment, a full percentage point from 4.8% to 5.8%. But don't be fooled: Miner County actually added 25 jobs in June; they just had 15 more people than that jump into the labor pool.
Same situation in Moody County: they created 45 jobs, but had 140 new people come to town and say "I wanna work, too!" Moody's unemployment rate thus junped from 5.2 % in May to 7.4% in June.
Kingsbury, McCook, and Minnehaha all managed to post declines in unemployment, with jobs created growing faster than the increase in their county workforces.
I don't want to move to Brookings. But I'd sure like to make Madison as cool as Brookings. While Madison dithers about the menace of tall grass and residents think a Wal-mart on the edge of town would improve our local economy, ever-progressive Brookings is building a thriving downtown.
Downtown Brookings Inc., an association dedicated to real Main Street development, not just banners and flower baskets.
People who don't see a lack of parking as a problem. "People like to complain that we don’t have enough parking in downtown Brookings," Downtown Brookings Inc. President Kris Struwe tells the Brookings Register. "That’s a good problem to have. That means people are shopping and eating here." If you go to a Twins or Vikings game, think about how far you walk from the parking lot to your stadium seats. It's probably longer than the length of either Madison's or Brookings's main street.
Shop owners are upgrading their facades.
Planners are considering pocket parks, little bits of green space amidst the already diverse mix of retail, services, and residences that make Main Street a place to hang out.
Madison, if you want to know how to revive our Main Street, the roadmap lies just 40 miles to our northeast. Brookings Crazy Daze is the same weekend as ours, July 30–31. I highly recommend everyone in Madison take a roadtrip to Brookings that Friday to see downtown development done right... just make sure you get back to Madison in time for Tonic Sol-fa!
I've mentioned my Madison neighbors' obsession with parking. Whenever I suggest some interesting public event or project, like turning the Masonic temple into a community cultural center, one of the first things Madisonians say is, "Oh, but what about parking? There isn't enough parking!"
To which I say, nuts! Consider the wildly successful Brookings Summer Arts Festival. They expect over 75,000 people to come to Pioneer Park this weekend. There is most certainly not 75,000 visitors' worth of parking in Pioneer Park. Do the BSAF organizers scale back? Heck no! They figure if they offer a quality program, people will find a way to get there. And do visitors stay home?
Heck no!
They just park a half mile down both sides of both lanes of Highway 14 and hoof it. Or a block east of Main Street, which was the closest open spot I could find in town.
Or the free market (in the form of a guy with a cell phone and a four-foot stick) kicks in and offers a solution.
Or folks ride their bikes (a sight like this does my pedaling heart good!). Or they ride the shuttle bus.
As thousands of people will attest, the walk is worth it.
When there are bagpipes, you know you've got a good show.
My daughter liked the dancers.
I liked Sonic Screwdriver, as much for the quality of the music as the irony of a surf band from the prairie.
The Brookings Arts Council raised some money with its face-painting station.
This butterfly blue reflects the prairie sky, not this little one's spirits.
Ecuador Manta plays guitar and pipes. Drop some money in that jar!
The National Children's Study crew from SDSU hosted a craft booth where kids could make ladybug ornaments...
...or something generally resembling a ladybug. Far be it from us to stifle creativity. We also saw a glider towed and released overhead. Gliders fill us with disco fever.
Prairie, lake, elevator, buffalo....
No ugly mugs here!
Alexandra Burg's work may unlock some deep thoughts.
Morris Johnson, folk artist, just makes me laugh out loud... and that's a good thing! Go, crabs! (Note the political symbolism, escaping the red bucket for the cool blue waters of freedom and Democracy! Wahoo!)
Chicken or fish... admit it: there is some South Dakotan in your life who would absolutely love having one of these Morris Johnsons on his or her wall.
Art must always leave room for fun.
Be the happy mullet: dance for the sheer joy of being alive.
It's not a summer festival if someone doesn't start a hacky circle. And the ladies hack in! Set me!
You can always flush out some pheasants at a South Dakota arts festival...
...or more fish (a bit more naturalistic than the Morris Johnson works above)...
...or perhaps a goose in progress.
And then a mix of real and abstract from (I think!) Franklin Arts of Sioux Falls.
The Brookings Summer Arts Festival wraps up today (Sunday) at Pioneer Park in Brookings. Bring your walking shoes and sunblock, and enjoy a grand Sunday afternoon of ourdoor art and music.
The South Dakota Department of Labor has posted the local unemployment figures for May. After a healthy drop from March to April, Lake County's jobless rate jumped back up a tick to 4.8%. The actual numbers aren't earth-shaking: 15 folks left the local workforce, but 20 jobs disappeared. But when Dwaine Chapel needs to make 835 jobs appear by the end of next year to meet the Forward Madison labor goal, we can't afford any slippage.
The job numbers are mixed for the surrounding counties. Brookings County jumped back up to 3.9%, with 90 more people out of work in May (the college kids leave, but so does a lot of business). McCook and Miner counties saw increases, too. Kingsbury, Minnehaha, and Moody counties all managed to create a few jobs. but what we're all waiting for, a good strong surge for everybody, was nowhere to be seen in May.
Thank goodness for planting season: the latest data from the South Dakota Department of Labor shows unemployment in Lake County dropped a full percentage point in April, from 5.7% to 4.7%. That outpaces the statewide drop of 0.8 percentage points. 50 more people jumped in the labor pool, but we added 110 jobs. Do that eight more months in a row, and the LAIC will meet its Forward Madison job creation goals.
Shameless rumormongering: Could more jobs be coming to downtown Madison? Before our water quality meeting last night, Mayor Hexom told some folks that our alley renovation project would be coupled with some significant Main Street development to be announced next week. Did I mis-hear? Are we finally restoring the Masonic Temple? Are we joining the national Main Street Program? Did the alley crew strike oil and invite Hyperion to start a new Gorilla project? Someone in the know, chime in!
The job picture brightened in Brookings, too, where countywide unemployment dropped from March's 4.3% to April's 3.5. 190 more people started looking for work, and 335 new jobs appeared.
The rest of our neighbors saw good jobs news, too:
Kingsbury: unemployment down 1.3 percentage points to 5.2%
McCook: down 1.6 to 4.6%
Miner: down 1.4 to 4.4%
Minnehaha: down 0.9 to 4.6%
Moody: down 1.7 to 5.4%
Every major South Dakota city saw improvement, with Watertown posting the biggest unemployment drop of 1.2 percentage points, down to 5.0% in April.
Now remember, April had spectacular weather, so we were able to get a lot of construction and farm work done. Let's hope May is keeping workers busy as well.
But watch out: if people keep getting jobs and the economy starts humming along again, what will happen to all that anti-incumbent sentiment Rod mentioned earlier today?
When it comes to economic and cultural development, Brookings makes Madison look like pikers. Sometimes I wonder if Brookings sends its Dwaine Chapel to work at our economic development corporation as a spy just to keep us from catching up.
Alas, Brookings's pre-eminence may be crashing to an end, as our neighbors to the northeast drink the same marketing Kool-Aid that makes Madison look so silly. The city is trotting out a new logo and "branding" campaign, despite clear evidence that they don't need one:
The new logo and strapline are important, but there’s so much more to branding, says Victoria Blatchford, chair of the city’s Visitor Promotions Committee and member of the branding task force.
“A brand is something that can stand the test of time. It continues to be an experience. It’s a unified voice, and we just didn’t have that unified voice to promote Brookings" [Jill Fier, "New City Brand Tells Visitors, Residents to 'Bring Your Dreams,'" Brookings Register, 2010.05.22].
To preserve their sanity, marketing people must have to not listen to themselves. Blatchford says Brookings hasn't had a unified "branding" voice. Yet the absence of that unified voice hasn't stopped Brookings from kicking butt on the economic development front. SDSU, Innovation Campus, downtown Brookings, commercial development by the I-29 exit... all trucking right along with momentum built in those awful dark years when there was no unified branding.
More marketing-speak:
“When we looked at all the avenues of how Brookings is seen,” Blatchford said, “our looks and our sounds and how people look at us were just so different. … We have to define who we are, and we have so many different assets that are wonderful in Brookings, how do you culminate that into one feel, one statement, one look?" [Fier, 2010]
Maybe you don't. Maybe Brookings's success lies precisely in being many different things to many different people (or target markets). Maybe the effort to cram your entire city's character into one silly, focus-grouped, expensive ($84,000!!!) slogan disguises your successful diversity. Look at Madison: we go slapping our cute sailboat logo on everything. But how many sailboat owners are there in Madison? How many sailboat regattas take place here? Most importantly, what does that sailboat say about 99.9% of the businesses and events taking place in Madison? Zip.
The Brookings marketers also buy into contradictory thinking on the nature of a town slogan. Fier notes at the top of her article past slogans that have come and gone. Blatchford seems to think the new slogan is somehow different, that the new branding will "stand the test of time." Yet City Manager Jeff Weldon says in the same article, "Every organization, public or private, needs to refresh its image, update how it wants to market and sell itself to the public." In a few years, this new slogan and branding campaign will go stale and need refreshing as well.
And the marketing firms will be back to score another $84,000 contract.
For towns, slogans and branding just don't matter... at least not nearly as much as actual performance. Brookings is proof of that. Brookings could have had "Liver and Onions!" on its Chamber flyers and billboards for the last ten years, and people still would have come to Brookings for work and school and culture and groceries.
What makes economic development happen is more than any clever advertiser can slap on a banner. Madison hasn't learned that lesson... and now Brookings is unlearning it.
For 19 straight years, Brookings has kept its unemployment rate lower than Lake County's, even through three recessions, including the current one.
Finding out why, explaining that to us, and fixing that disparity are what our economic development director Dwaine Chapel is paid $101,333 a year (as of 2008) to do. Maybe Chapel has done the first (he lives in Brookings, so the research shouldn't be hard), but he certainly hasn't done the second or the third.
--------------------- Note also the comparison between the Lake County unemployment rate and the statewide rate. In the 1990s, we beat the state's unemployment rate (i.e., it was lower here) seven out of ten years. In the 2000s, we've beaten the state unemployment rate four times, each time by just 0.1 percentage points.
Lake County gets a mixed report on March unemployment. 60 more jobs materialized, but 65 more people joined the workforce—a statistical wash, as the unemployment rate stayed at 5.7%. With 6185 jobs in the county, the LAIC is now needs to create 900 jobs in the next 20 months to meet its Forward Madison job creation goal.
Our neighbors in Brookings saw jobs decline, leading to a two-decade record high unemployment rate of 4.3%. Brookings was the only neighboring county to see an actual loss of jobs; like Lake, every other county on our borders added jobs last month. Moody County was the only neighbor that managed to add more jobs than the number of people entering the workforce.
Every county around here matched the statewide trend of more people entering the workforce in March. But that appears to be a seasonal trend, occurring regularly over the last 20 years.
IgniteSD launches tonight in Brookings! Come hear some of South Dakota's sharpest up-and-comers talk about what lights their fuse. I'll be there, too, giving a talk on (what else?) blogging.
Mr. Dahle offers a good summary of what the event is about: speakers boiling down their great ideas into five minutes of fast enlightenment and fun slides. More thoughtful than Twitter, more compressed than a classroom lecture... it's a challenging format (believe me—I'm practicing right now!), but it promises an action-packed evening for your brain... with real live people!
Plus, it's free (though I'm sure our nice hosts at Cottonwood Bistro won't mind if you buy a snack while you're there). So come to Cottonwood Bistro, Brickwood Plaza in Brookings, tonight, 8:00 to 9:30. Bring questions, not tomatoes. ;-) We'll have coffee, we'll talk.. make it a big whoop!
That MLK speech has come to my attention often. Some key lines:
...We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside . . . but one day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved....
...A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Martin Luther King's calls for social justice sprang from his Christianity. Those calls provoked rage from whites desperate to "take our country back!" from people who don't "deserve" America. The same rage that led to King's murder by a racist thug22 years ago Sunday sounds uncomfortably familiar to today's politics.
Dang: I got so excited with political news last week, I missed the jobs numbers from the Department of Labor! The job situation got a little better in Lake County: 60 people jumped back into our labor force, and 70 more people got jobs! Lake County's February unemployment rate thus reached 5.8%, down from 6.0% in January.
If we can continue that number of new jobs each month, we could meet the LAIC's Forward Madison job goals by the end of April, 2011. Keep your fingers crossed!
Unemployment went down two ticks in Brookings County, too; our northeast neighbors remain the septa-county region leader with just 4.0% unemployment (still one of the highest rates of unemployment in Brookings in two decades). Unemployment went down for most of our county neighbors, but jobless numbers stayed steady in moody (7.8%) and climbed in Kingsbury (6.4%).
My trip to judge debate in Brookings this weekend reminded me that our progressive neighbor to the northeast is expanding its bike trail this year. The city commission awarded local contractor Rounds Construction $608K of work extending the city bike path under I-29 to the Swiftel Center and business park on the eastern edge of Brookings.
Brookings has a nice recreational bike trail crossing the south half of town. This new extension serves business as much as pleasure. A bike trail isn't just a luxury: it can be a way for people to get to work. Ask Kevin Brady: even on cold days, biking workers are happy workers!
Right now, the only way to pedal to the Swiftel Center or Daktronics is to brave the multi-lane madness of Sixth Street past Wal-Mart and across the I-29 overpass, perhaps the least bike-friendly pavement in Brookings. Providing a dedicated bike route under the Interstate will make traveling safer for cyclists and drivers alike.
Discussing Madison's proposed bike trail extension to Lake Herman, landowner David Pitts has argued industry and recreation shouldn't mix. Brookings's bike plans suggest otherwise. Brookings is laying bike paths to the doorstep of its convention center and big industrial employers. Brookings recognizes that a bike path is essential infrastructure just like a street.
* * *
Madison should connect with Brookings's more progressive thinking. Heck, maybe Madison should just connect with Brookings! Imagine if we made a deal with Brookings to lay a bike trail kittywampus from Brookings down to the Brookings Country Club, around Lake Campbell, slant to Nunda or Rutland (preference, anyone?), and right on to Main Street Madison. Maybe we could even make a big triangle with Dell Rapids. A nice prairie loop like that could be a bike tourist's dream!
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