The income gap between Wisconsin’s richest and poorest families is widening, according to a report by UW-Madison’s Center on Wisconsin Strategy.
Average real incomes of the state’s richest families grew 36 percent from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s, more than five times the 7 percent income growth of the poorest families.
In the late 1980s, Wisconsin’s richest families earned average incomes 4.7 times the income of the state’s poorest families.
One of the most successful coaches at the University of Wisconsin is running away.
Jerry Schumacher, the Badger men’s cross country and track distance coach, is leaving the program to take a position with Nike coaching elite distance runners in Portland, Ore.
The position was created especially for Schumacher, who will take with him a stable of current professional runners he is now coaching in Madison – most of them ex-Badgers.
Madison’s City Council voted unanimously Tuesday night to ban sales of certain sizes of alcohol downtown as part of an initial effort to curb its purchase by some transients who have reportedly harassed downtown residents.
The ban takes the form of modified liquor licenses that apply to grocery, liquor and convenience stores in Districts 4 and 8, which include the Capitol, campus and State Street areas. Stores in those districts could no longer sell beer or malt liquor in sizes smaller than a six-pack — except for imports and microbrews — and they could not sell fortified wine or liquor in smaller than pint-size containers.
….Also Monday night, the commission approved a restrictive convenant to govern design and operation of a $10 million, four-story, 48-room hotel slated for the corner of Monroe and Regent Streets.
The agreement prevents the general public from using the hotel facilities during football games at Camp Randall Stadium or big events at the Fieldhouse. It also includes rules on parking, hotel security and outdoor music meant to reduce impacts on the adjoining neighborhood.
Also Monday night, the commission:
* Approved the Regent Street-South Campus Neighborhood Plan and the Greenbush Neigborhood Plan in separate votes.
Madison Ald. Mike Verveer’s proposal to restrict sales of cheap alcohol downtown is sound public policy that should have an immediate positive impact on a challenge that local officials have struggled to address.
Public intoxication is a problem. It is fueled by sales of individual cans and bottles of beer and malt liquor and small containers (less than a pint) of hard liquor.
Verveer, who represents the downtown 4th District, has proposed a ban on such sales at 11 outlets in the 4th and 8th aldermanic districts.
Wisconsin has a great story to tell at this week’s BIO 2008, an international convention in San Diego for the biotechnology industry.
And this fall, Wisconsin will bring the world here to see for itself.
Madison will host the World Stem Cell Summit in late September at the Alliant Energy Center. The event is expected to attract up to 1,000 researchers, philanthropists and business people.
This week, 270 dairy cows from UW-Madison ‘s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences will be moving into a new dairy research facility at its Arlington Agricultural Research Station in rural Arlington, about 20 miles north of Madison.
With a price tag of $5.1 million, the new facility can house 500 cows, doubling that of the old Emmons Blaine Dairy Cattle Research Center next door. It will be able to milk 64 cows at once. It features state-of-the-art housing, waste-management and milking technologies that dairy experts say are necessary for producing the kind of research needed by farmers in Wisconsin ‘s $20.6 billion dairy industry.
More than three months after the Big Ten Network and Comcast Corp., the nation’s biggest cable company, were reported to have agreed on the framework of a deal, the deal is essentially completed, the Chicago Tribune reported Monday.
“For all intents and purposes, it’s done,” one source close to the negotiations said Sunday, the Tribune reported Monday. Sources expect the deal will be completed and unveiled this week, the paper said.
Such a deal is significant here because a BTN-Comcast deal is seen as providing a potential framework for a deal between BTN and Charter Communications and Time Warner, Wisconsin’s two major cable providers.
“It’s Comcast first, Time Warner a distant second, and Charter third,” UW-Madison professor of telecommunications Barry Orton said of the size and pecking order of major cable companies serving states in the Big Ten Conference.
It’s time to go. I spent the past four months dreading this moment. School had become comfortable, and I didn’t want to leave. I had class only two days a week, and my day started at 2:30 p.m. Life was easy, and I didn’t want to go back to the real world. Now I can say I’m happy the time has come. It is time to move on, time to be a grown-up again, time to step into the unknown, time to continue to grow
Agriculture experts say crop losses due to heavy flooding in Wisconsin could reach the tens of millions of dollars.
Agriculture experts say crop losses due to heavy flooding in Wisconsin could reach the tens of millions of dollars.
For UW-Madison engineering Professor John Scharer, a visit from his daughter who lives in New York usually means a drive east on Interstate 94 to Milwaukee’s General Mitchell International Airport.
It’s nothing against the Dane County Regional Airport. Scharer simply can’t justify the additional cost of the plane tickets to Madison.
….UW professor Scharer hasn’t yet flown out of Rockford but does check the fares online, searching for a deal. In addition to visits from family, Sharer also travels for work and doesn’t like to waste precious research grant dollars on pricey airfares.
Concerns about pedestrian safety helped convince members of Madison’s Public Safety Review Board to vote unanimously to reject making part of Gilman Street near State Street a two-way road temporarily.
The 400 block of West Gilman Street, which includes several residential buildings and commercial businesses such as Amy’s Cafe, Laundry 101 and Yummy Buffet, is currently a one-way street, but the resolution rejected by the panel calls for a pilot project that would test the street as a two-way for 120 days, with an additional traffic light regulating cars turning onto University Avenue.
Third Wave Technologies is expected to stay in Madison even though a Massachusetts medical diagnostics company plans to buy the company, experts say.
Hologic, a Bedford, Mass., company with sales last year of $738 million and more than 3,500 employees, said Monday it will buy Third Wave for $580 million cash, or $11.25 a share. Third Wave will become a Hologic subsidiary.
“The combination of Hologic and Third Wave brings together two great companies that employ complementary technologies but share a common mission: to help save the lives of women,” said Jack Cumming, chairman and chief executive of Hologic, in a written statement.
Kikkoman Foods Inc. will open a research and development laboratory in Madison’s University Research Park this fall, chief executive officer Yuzaburo Mogi said Friday.
The firm that built the world famous Santiago Calatrava addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum has been named construction manager of the new South Campus Union at the UW-Madison.
Milwaukee-based CG Schmidt will head the $82 million project, which includes demolition of the existing Union South and building a replacement at the same site on Randall Avenue. It will manage the job out of its Madison office, with work to begin in January, 2009.
Madison – The Federal Reserve Board is done cutting interest rates for at least a while, but don’t look for higher rates before fall, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis said Friday.
Speaking at a conference on housing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, James Bullard said the Fed’s aggressive rate-cutting since last August has stabilized the economy, and inflation is now becoming a larger concern.
Speaking Friday at the 2008 Wisconsin Housing Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Morris Davis, an assistant professor of real estate and urban land economics at UW-Madison, said Wisconsin has a higher income-to-housing-cost ratio than other areas of the country.
Kikkoman Foods Inc. will establish a research and development laboratory as well as an environmental studies scholarship in cooperation with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The new lab, which will open this fall, will be located at University Research Park in Madison. It will be led by one of the company’s research scientists from its research and development facility in Noda, Japan.
MILWAUKEE — The state film’s incentives have been successful by anyone’s measure: They’ve attracted a big-budget Johnny Depp movie, independent films and TV shows. Businesses supporting the industry also are popping up.
But the architects of the 25 percent tax break for filmmakers want to rejigger the law to attract even more productions.
New boutique owner Kristin Wild hopes to bring something special to Madison’s Capitol Square with her new clothing boutique, Atticus.
“There has been a successful rejuvenation of housing, business and culture on the Square for a few years now,” Wild said. “I think that retail is sort of the last piece of the puzzle that needs to be added, and I’m very excited to be a part of that.”
That’s why, at 24, she leapt at the chance to open her own store in the heart of the city.
When customers telephone Paragon Development Systems looking for help with a balky printer they aren’t patched through to a call center in India, Eastern Europe or the Philippines. Instead, they get a friendly voice from Madison, Wisconsin usually with a Midwestern twang.
….The city’s high-tech profile has also received two more boosts in the past six months with Google setting up an engineering office to focus on software systems design and Microsoft opening an advanced development lab in partnership with the UW-Madison’s computer science department.
Nobody is ready yet to throw around the term “Madison Masala,” but viewing the region as a potential IT outsourcing destination is not so far-fetched. The combination of recent graduates from Madison Area Technical College and the University of Wisconsin, coupled with a wage scale lower than the coasts, provides some distinct advantages.
(Dean of International Studies Gilles Bousquet is quoted in this story.)
After two years in the lurch, Madhatters finally has a new home.
The popular campus bar at 3 University Square closed in June 2006 with the redevelopment of University Square mall. Ted Gervasi, who has owned the establishment for 20 years, plans to reopen it at 328 W. Gorham St., before UW-Madison students come back in the fall.
The license was approved last month by the Alcohol License Review Committee and was adopted without discussion by the City Council Tuesday night.
Bob Sieger will have to wait two more weeks to begin demolishing his building at 1501 Monroe St. after the Madison City Council voted Tuesday to send his permit back to the Plan Commission for further review.
Sieger has been planning to alter the property, near Camp Randall, for more than three years but has run across numerous complaints from nearby neighborhood associations about the plans, which have included a mixed retail and housing unit as well as a five-story hotel. The building at the corner of Monroe and Regent streets is currently a multi-business structure.
Quoted: Gary Green, director of the Center for Community and Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Mentions a report released in March from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That study says that “many skills of the greener future are closely related to the skills of today.”
As manager of Madison’s longest-operating Chevrolet dealer, Tom Thorstad has toured the General Motors plant in Janesville many times and remembers well the friendly faces of those working on the assembly line.
“It’s hard work standing there all day, but they took a lot of pride in what they did,” he said. “I was always impressed how they took the time to look up and wave at you.”
So Thorstad was obviously saddened Tuesday when he got the news that General Motors was closing four truck and SUV plants, including its iconic manufacturing facility in Janesville, which first which opened in 1919. Some 2,600 workers there are expected to lose their jobs over the next two years as the plant is shuttered.
Quoted: Laura Dresser, a researcher with the UW-Madison Center on Wisconsin Strategy
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health received a grade of D in the American Medical Student Association’s PharmFree Scorecard released Tuesday.
The scorecard said most U.S. medical schools are failing to address conflicts of interest caused by pharmaceutical industry marketing. Only 21 of 150 medical schools surveyed by the AMSA have strong policies (those graded A or B), according to the scorecard.
Madison-based stem cell company Stemina Biomarkers Discovery Inc. has learned it will receive a $150,000 Phase I grant from the National Cancer Institute through the federal government’s Small Business Innovation Research grant program, the Wisconsin Technology Council said in a news release Friday.
Stemina, founded in late 2006 by chief executive officer Beth Donley and UW-Madison stem cell scientist Gabriella Cezar, is aiming to use human embryonic stem cells to help determine whether new drug candidates will cause birth defects in humans. So-called “biomarker” research can also test drug toxicity in other ways.
Graphene Solutions is a 3-month-old company with a patent-pending technology that dissolves carbon nanotubes, graphene nanosheets and other materials so they can be purified and spread in a layer one atom thick.
That could pave the way for electronic components, like computer chips, that are dramatically smaller with much greater capacity.
“If you can very easily, reproducibly lay out a one-atom-thick layer of carbon, this is the new silicon,” said Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF, which helped the company get started. WARF is the patenting and licensing arm for the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dear Editor: Over the last few years I have had the opportunity to work at a bar on campus. I have witnessed the Madison Police Department at work. On a normal weekend there will be six to eight officers patrolling the bars for underage drinkers. On at least one occasion I witnessed them in an undercover sting operation with plainclothed officers waiting to ID suspected underage drinkers. Typically these officers will only find one or two people who are not of age.
The problem I am baffled by is that at a time where there are two unsolved murders, the department has decided that instead of focusing on problem areas they would rather find those two 20-year-olds with fake IDs.
Dear Editor: I’m responding to Mike Ivey’s May 21 story “Camp Randall hotel on hold again?”
As a former Vilas neighborhood resident, I opposed Bob Sieger’s original Fieldhouse Station condominiums proposal. I saw a poorly planned project with major retail and traffic details left unaddressed. Pitched as a hundred-year building, the all-glass structure would have looked out of place in the near term and faded and run down 30 years from today. Little mention was made of mixed use other than some occasionally open party bar (as if Madison doesn’t already have enough of those) and possible second-floor office space.
Now that school is almost done many are finding it a little difficult to enter the workforce.
“The biggest frustration is going there seeing ‘Oh there’s a job open’ and someone says ‘Well not really we forgot to take a sign down’ or ‘We forgot to remove that listing,” says UW senior, Jason Smathers.
Chuck Oehler is preparing his PowerPoint and pamphlets, getting ready to show off his company, Primorigen Biosciences, to the world.
Primorigen is one of the Wisconsin companies chosen to make a presentation at BIO, the international biotechnology convention being held in San Diego June 17-20.
With an expected attendance of 20,000 from the global bioscience industry, BIO is a chance for Primorigen and hundreds of other biotech companies to see and be seen.
Madison: A Madison developer says an city council member has a personal vendetta against him and his hotel plan across from Camp Randall.
But the council member says she’s just looking out for her constituents.
t seemed that after years of proposals, a Madison developer finally won city approval to put up a hotel near Camp Randall.
But now, the neighborhood’s city alderwoman has filed a last-minute appeal.This development is leading some area residents and business owners wondering whether it’s all legitimate scrutiny or neighborhood overkill.
UW Madison’s biggest building boom in forty years is in full stride, and that means it’s going to be a busy summer and early fall on the sprawling, 935 acre campus. “We’ll be starting and finishing about eight or ten new projects on campus,” says Alan Fish, associate vice chancellor for facilities.
The State Journal’s front page article on student commencement campaigns on May 17 implicitly raised questions about the appropriateness of such campaigns at a public university – particularly within a unit that has raised undergraduate tuition by $1,000 and received an $85 million gift within the past year.
How dare we even broach the topic of “giving back” with students? Are we like the hiker climbing a mountain just because it is there? Or is there something more important about the journey?
Pharmaceutical companies and even some high-tech companies such as General Electric are pushing back – countering that some of the changes their opponents want could reduce protections for patent-holders by limiting the damages innovators could seek from copycats.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which patents the discoveries of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers, has some of those same concerns.
If the Madison area has earned a reputation as a biotechnology hot spot, one huge reason is Promega Corp.
“For people in Madison, it’s the granddaddy of biotechnology,” said Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF).
Quoted: Barry Gerhart, the Bruce R. Ellig professor of pay and organizational effectiveness at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.
Summer jobs are a great opportunity for students, whether they’re a chance to test drive a career or to simply fatten their wallets. And many opportunities may be available.
“If there is a student who wants to work, there are jobs out there â?? that’s the bottom line,” said Tim Putzier, administrator of the UW-Madison Student Job Center.
To some people, entrepreneurship is a dirty word.
“I used to have a piece of paper on entrepreneurship and on one side it said ‘greed’ and ‘exploitation’ and on and on,” said Anne Miner, a professor of management and human resources at UW-Madison’s School of Business. But the other side, she said, had terms like “‘creativity’ and ‘new forms of values’ and ‘self reliance’ and ‘autonomy’ and ‘taking responsibility.'”
Being entrepreneurial is not all about making money or knowing how to develop a business plan, added Miner, who also is the director of the cross-campus Initiative for Studies in Technology Entrepreneurship. It’s also about looking for creativity and innovation in one’s personal life and across a wide range of disciplines, she said.
And that is the underlying philosophy behind UW-Madison’s newest residential learning community.
The way architect Bob Sieger sees it, there are a half-dozen residents in the Vilas neighborhood who won’t be happy until the Badgers stop playing football entirely at Camp Randall Stadium.
Sieger has been trying for the past three years to redevelop his property at the corner of Regent and Monroe streets, right across from Wisconsin’s largest sports arena….
Climate skeptics, take 3
Turns out there are two lists of global climate change skeptics being circulated by the Heartland Institute, and both contain people who say their names were wrongly included. (See Business Beat from April 30, May 14.)
In fact, the UW has now written a letter to Chicago-based Heartland on behalf of five scientists who want their names removed, including John Kutzbach, the former head of the UW Center for Climate Research.
Produce doesn’t get more local than when it is grown on the roof of the supermarket where it will be sold.
Keith Agoada and Troy Vosseller, business students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, developed that prize-winning idea for the university’s annual G. Steven Burrill Business Plan Competition last month. First place earned them $10,000 to invest in their business model, which they call Sky Vegetables.
Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle today told members of the Wisconsin Hospital Association that he plans again to propose a hospital tax that could bring hundreds of millions of federal dollars to state hospitals and provide the government with $125 million to help it through trying economic times.
“We’ll be putting forth a new budget next January for the next two years, and when we do we’ll be working to make sure that that federal money is coming into the state of Wisconsin and we are working in a way to be able to raise the reimbursement rate that you have needed,” he said.
A developer that claims it lost a major building contract for political reasons cannot sue Gov. Jim Doyle’s administration for damages.
The District 4 Court of Appeals has upheld a judge’s dismissal of the lawsuit by Prism, which was a bidder on a $68 million construction project at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Lindsay Midtbo, a UW-Madison senior, is looking for a job â?? but not in Wisconsin.
“I was born here, I’ve been here forever,” Midtbo, a Milwaukee native, said. “I want something new and different.”
Midtbo, an economics major who graduates this month, is hoping for a job in Chicago. The city offers more financial services jobs and a change of pace, she said.
Midtbo isn’t alone in wanting to leave the state. Each year, about half of UW-Madison’s recent graduates leave Wisconsin for Illinois, Minnesota and other states.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation wants Madison to significantly cut a $600,000 bond closing fee on a $150 million campus project, saying it is a nonprofit entity doing a project in the public interest.
The city ‘s Community Development Authority now must decide whether to charge the full fee and use it for city revitalization efforts or cut the fee and reduce costs for WARF ‘s much-anticipated Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation wants Madison to significantly cut a $600,000 bond closing fee on a $150 million campus project, saying it is a nonprofit entity doing a project in the public interest.
A California biotech company that had expressed frustration over Wisconsin’s stem-cell patents has signed a licensing agreement for stem-cell technologies with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
“We were able to work out our differences,” said Joydeep Goswami, vice president for stem cells and regenerative medicine at Invitrogen Corp. of Carlsbad, Calif.
Invitrogen, which announced the agreement Thursday, is one of the largest of 25 companies that have signed 30 licensing agreements for stem cells with WARF, said licensing manager Andy DeTienne.
Imagine a grocery store in Wisconsin that doesn’t get its produce from warmer states hundreds of miles away.
Instead, fruits and vegetables are grown right on the supermarket’s rooftop, making the produce as fresh as possible for consumers.
In the past year, five chancellors within the University of Wisconsin System announced their intentions to step down.
If Ald. Michael Schumacher has his way, anyone with a drunken driving violation would be barred from getting a bartender’s license for a five-year period.
Schumacher, who will likely unveil his proposal to the Madison City Council at its May 20 meeting, says “it’s a privilege to have a license, not a right.”
Microsoft and Google. Two names that any up-and-coming market in the country would be happy to welcome. And now Madison can do so, thanks to the nation’s second-biggest research university.
Neither tech giant is creating a lot of jobs in Wisconsin’s capital city yet, but the fact that both want to be near the University of Wisconsin-Madison speaks well for what UW-Madison is doing for the economy in south-central Wisconsin.
Downtown tavern owners weren’t popping champagne bottles but were “very, very happy” about the Wisconsin Supreme Court finding their voluntarily ban on weekend drink specials didn’t violate anti-trust law.
“We were very concerned (about losing) because you never know what will happen,” said Bruce Meier, whose family has owned the Kollege Klub for 55 years.
Twenty-four bars have spent in excess of $500,000 in legal fees to defend a class-action suit filed in Dane County Circuit Court in 2004 on behalf of University of Wisconsin students, said Scott Stenger, spokesman for the Wisconsin Tavern League.
The fifth time was the charm for Madison architect Bob Sieger in his efforts to redevelop the corner of Regent and Monroe streets.
The Madison Plan Commission late Monday night approved a demolition permit to allow Sieger to raze his existing retail and office building across from Camp Randall Stadium. That clears the way for him to build a four-story, 48-room boutique hotel at the site.
he Student Labor Action Coalition sent Chancellor John Wiley an open letter of protest and a mock final exam Sunday, encouraging him to take further action for apparel workers in El Salvador.
Construction officially began Friday on the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, the public-private partnership that will house much of UW-Madisonâ??s future interdisciplinary research.
Gov. Jim Doyle, members of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and UW-Madison Alumni John and Tashia Morgridge welcomed community members during a groundbreaking ceremony Friday at the building site on the 1300 block of University Avenue.
As the University of Wisconsin continues to be ranked one of the universities with the lowest chancellor salaries within its peer class, the topic of subsidized stipends from donors has increasingly become a relevant topic for the Board of Regents.
