Milwaukee is...
By Tony A. Kujawa

You see it everywhere you go. Running down Brady Street on a sunny Saturday afternoon, friends sit and enjoy nothing more than good company and their city. At a bar after the Brewers beat the Cubs yet again, a Brewers fan responds to the taunts of a flatlander with a mighty haymaker. At the Harley stage as 25,000 fans show up for a man from Milwaukee with a dream. After a snow storm, from neighborhood to neighborhood, people dig each other out from piles of snow. Everywhere you go it is apparent… Milwaukee loves Milwaukee!

As it goes, if one loves something, one wants it to be the best it can be. Milwaukee has unmatched potential it simply needs the drive to become the greatest city in the region. There is a new generation dawning in Milwaukee, there are young, talented people that want their city to be more than just a place to live. Milwaukee has always been an epicenter for business from its days as a trading post, to being the machine shop of the world. Milwaukee needs to foster this tradition with policies that make it possible for the next generation to go above and beyond the days of a manufacturing economy. Milwaukee is yearning for passionate leadership, the kind of passion that its citizens show on a daily basis.

Milwaukee needs to show the business community that it welcomes not only new ideas but makes it possible for those new ideas to flourish. One way Milwaukee can do this is to come up with alternative sources of revenue. Businesses are constantly coming up with new ways to produce revenue so why can’t the city? Property taxes have long put a burden on new business; leading to business moving to the suburbs. There needs to be incentives to operate a sustainable business in the city of Milwaukee.

The goal should be to increase the tax base not to increase taxes. As a real estate professional I run in to people everyday who want to live in the city, they don’t want to live in the suburbs like their parents have. However, they are constantly running in to road blocks. People transferring in to the city from other parts of the country are baffled by the property taxes that are often two or three times more than the cities they are coming from. We need to give young, educated people a reason that Milwaukee is superior to our neighbors, once they are here long enough they will see that is definitely the case.

I am certain that people in this great city have the ideas and the know how to make this happen. We need someone to bridge the gap between ideas and results. We need people to stand up for these ideas. We need someone with not only passion for Milwaukee but the passion to make it better. A city without people is just a place, but a city with great people doing great things is a place that we all will love to be a part of.