Village Spillage - Whitefish Bay

Village Spillage clicked off its second birthday last week. I wrote a 1-year recap last year, and figured I should do the same again.

Some highlights:

• 115 articles, up from 81 the previous year.
  
• Two elections, November, with extensive coverage of the State Assembly primary and April, with the WFB School Board and a Trustee race.
• Heckers, Bella Donna, Creme, and Great Harvest Closed.
• Berkeley's and What's Poppin' opened.
  
• Trustee Brennan resigned in September (and died this month). Trustee Schmid and Cheng left the board, to be replaced by Trustee Foster, Miller, and myself.
• My wife caught a bad guy.
• Media coverage from the JS/NOW crawled to a halt.
• Ice Rinks returned to WFB
• WFB created a BID

The biggest story this year was the overdose of a WFB student and the community outcry from learning a drug house was in operation for far too long in our Village. Admittedly, the consequence of a story like that had a dramatic affect on traffic to the blog, as many in the Bay were seeking information and subsequently discovered Village Spillage.

My birthday wishes from last year:

1. Silver Spring fills all the vacant properties with tenants that bring a new vibrancy to WFB -- Well, not quite. But we do have two new restaurants, which is huge.
   
2. WFB completes the street-scaping plan for Silver Spring - Will be completed in 4 days!!
   
3. Contested races for Village Trustee in April 2009 -- I was 1 for 2 on this.
   
4. Whitefish Bay brings back Trick or Treating on the day the rest of the country does it: October 31st. YEAH! I got this one right! (For 2009 and 2010, at least.)

New birthday wishes:

1. Gotta wish for more Silver Spring merchants again. With the streetscaping complete, a new BID and retail recruiter on the job, we need this wish to come true.
2. More media coverage. I realize this won't come true.
3. I have a number of wishes that I hope come true about WFB's governance, of which I am a part. I hope to learn how to execute the change I've written about over the last two years.

Finally, I encourage anyone reading this to subscribe via email. How many of the 115 articles about WFB have you read, because you don't check the NOW website incessantly? Just click here and you'll receive each column in your email box, free of course.

Posted by Kevin Buckley at Saturday, June 27, 2009 Comments