Sunday, April 27, 2014

Endorsement: Eyon Biddle For Milwaukee 15th Aldermanic District

On Tuesday, there will be a special election in Milwaukee's 15th Aldermanic District.  The candidates that are vying for this seat are Eyon Biddle, a former county supervisor, and Russell Stamper, a current county supervisor.

Both men are young and intelligent.  Both have also run a very clean and mutually respectful campaign and should be proud of their efforts, regardless of Tuesday's results.

Milwaukee's 15th Aldermanic District is one of the most put upon districts in the city.  It has one of the highest poverty rates in the city, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the state and country.  Tied into that is that this area also has a very high crime rate.

It is definitely a community in crisis.

The area needs a leader that is driven to find solutions and get results.  It needs someone who can help the residents get jobs.  Not only jobs, but good paying jobs that will help lift them out of the poverty and give them a chance of making it.

And that is the area that clearly divides the two candidates.

While a county supervisor, Biddle helped develop a "Ready to Work" program that teamed up with the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership & BIG STEP to help get people trained for and connected with public and private sector, family-supporting jobs.

By all accounts, it has been a huge success.

In contrast, Stamper's big suggestion was to take inmates from the House of Correction and have them filling potholes.  The are three big problems with this suggestion:

  • It doesn't create the jobs needed for his constituents,
  • The inmates get paid less than minimum wage, making it nearly slave labor
  • The costs for extra security, etc., would outweigh any money saved.
It should be noted that Mayor Barrett did develop a similar plan that would call for the temporary employment of people with a criminal record in order to allow them to develop a work record to help them in the future.

But as I said, this area is in crisis and needs answers from their leaders now, not in a year or two. 

This is one of the many reasons why I support Eyon Biddle in this race.  He has shown that he knows what works and how to get it done.  He would be able to hit the floor running and start getting things done in the first day.  He knows first hand the pain that the people in his district are in and he is driven to giving them the chance to improve their situation.

To learn more about Eyon and support his campaign, please visit his website.

3 comments:

  1. I would urge anyone thinking of voting for Stamper to look at his latest piece of campaign literature. It's a checklist of lies designed to attack Eyon Biddle. Sad that a campaign that had previously been far classier took this turn.

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    1. Biddle did one with Stamper's picture photo shoped and saying lies about stamper.Biddle should spend more time talking about him self than trying to damage Stampers image.

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    2. Stamper damaged his image all by himself.

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