Debate rages over a hot corner in Oak Creek

Richard Rothen continues his battles with the City of Oak Creek over his Cupid's Toys adult toy store.

The city has wanted it gone from the corner of 27th Street and Rawson Avenue for years and has made his life exceedingly difficult in the process.

Rothen's latest issue comes as Oak Creek denied him a license to run his store and is taking him to court to shut him down. The city created a special license for adult entertainment businesses solely with Rothen in mind.

He challenged its legality, but lost in the courts. The city has now denied him a license because he doesn't have a seller's license. It also fined him $2,300 for that violation.

Rothen's location on the northeast corner of that busy intersection is a prime spot for development. In fact, the city plans to build medical offices on land surrounding his shop. When a recent road repair was underway, Rothen found his store had been removed from a planning map.

He called it "condemnation on layaway," or inverse condemnation. The location just north of a sprawling Northwestern Mutual complex makes it attractive for more new buildings. Rothen continues to have a long list of grievances with the city. But, it's unlikely he'll win them.

Spare Change: Looking for some spare change, the City of Milwaukee sent its comptroller's office to find out how much debt the city is carrying. Most of it is in the form of overdue parking tickets, but there are also delinquent taxes out there.

The city is owed about $140 million. Of that, 43 percent is in overdue parking fines, 18 percent is in delinquent taxes and 8 percent is in current overdue tax bills.

Ald. Terry Witkowski wondered why the city couldn't sell those back debts and let some other firm try to collect them. The comptroller's office said the city's treasurer's office does that to a small extent.

Rough Water: State industries dumped 4.1 million pounds of toxic chemicals into Wisconsin waterways leading to the Wisconsin River being ranked 38th for most toxic discharges, according to a report by Wisconsin Environment.

The report, "Wasting Our Waterways: Industrial Toxic Pollution and the Unfulfilled Promise of the Clean Water Act," documents and analyzes the dangerous levels of pollutants discharged in waters in Wisconsin and across the county by compiling toxic chemical releases reported to the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory for 2007, the most recent data available.

Major findings include:

• The Wisconsin River received the most toxic discharges in the state, with 1.5 million pounds discharged in 2007, ranking it 38th in the nation for most toxic discharges.
• McCain Foods in Plover was the largest polluter of the Wisconsin River, discharging approximately 553,000 pounds of toxic chemicals.
• Industrial facilities discharged approximately 10,475 pounds of chemicals linked to cancer and 683 pounds of chemical linked to developmental disorders into the Wisconsin River.

• The pollution on the Wisconsin River leads to frequent fish kills and a fish consumption.

In order to clean up the toxic waste, Wisconsin Environment recommends the following measures:

• Industrial facilities should reduce their toxic discharges in to waterways by switching from hazardous chemicals to safer alternatives.
• EPA and state agencies should issue permits with tough, numeric limits for each type of toxic pollution discharged, ratchet down those limits over time, and enforce those limits with credible penalties, not just warning letters.
• The federal government should adopt policies to clarify that the Clean Water Act applies to all of our waterways. This includes the thousands of headwaters and small streams for which jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act has been called into question, as a result of recent court decisions.

Justices Getting Served: The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign reports that it may be possible, within the first weeks of November, to overhaul how Supreme Court elections are held in Wisconsin. Two versions of allowing for public financing of court races are being considered, with both increasing a check-off type box on income tax returns.

The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign prefers the Assembly version, saying it's only costing 90 cents per person per year. It noted the Senate version would take four times more taxpayers to check off the box on their returns, an unlikely scenario.

Recall Fever Redux: The Citizens for Responsible Government, CRG Network, is doing what it does best -- working on recalling politicians. It announced this week it was organizing a recall effort against Ald. Nik Kovac, who represents the East Side.

The argument being used to get people fired up against Kovac is that he supports a rental property inspection ordinance. It's perceived as a "backdoor tax on renters and potential violations of constitutionally protected privacy and property rights."