Madison Wants to Allow 50-Foot Buildings in All Residential Districts and Access to High-traffic Uses on Local Streets

Both changes are set to pass the Common Council on its consent agenda Tuesday, backed by staff reports that do not fill a page. In twelve of fifteen residential districts, the proposed height text contains no nonresidential limit.

A four-story mixed-use building at 3722 Speedway Road, just under 47 feet tall, beside a one-story bungalow on Waverly Place. With a conditional use permit, Legistar 93404 would allow buildings three feet taller than this one in every Madison residential zoning district.

 Key Points

• On July 7, the Common Council votes on two citywide zoning text amendments, Legistar 93403 and 93404, which cleared the Plan Commission on June 29 by unanimous consent, with Legistar 93404 before the commissioners for less than six minutes.
  

• Legistar 93403 strikes the rule that ten uses, including schools, hospitals, and libraries, must have access from a collector or arterial street, which can push their traffic onto local residential streets.
  

• Legistar 93404 is described throughout the record as a 50-foot conditional height for nonresidential buildings in all fifteen residential districts, but in twelve of them, the text the Council will vote on says building heights, with no nonresidential limit.
  

• Each change rests on a staff report that fills a fraction of a page, identifies no problems, weighs no consequences or alternatives, and closes by stating that staff supports the amendment.
  

• Both files are set to pass on the Council’s consent agenda on July 7, without floor discussion, unless a resident registers to speak on them or an alder pulls them.

On the evening of June 29, the Madison Plan Commission approved two citywide changes to the zoning code. The first, Legistar 93403, passed on the consent agenda by unanimous consent. No commissioner said a word about it. The second, Legistar 93404, was before the Commission for less than six minutes, from the 9:22 mark of the meeting to the vote at 15:11: a brief staff introduction, one question from Alder John P. Guequierre, one of the file’s sponsors, no discussion, no debate, and unanimous consent.[1][2][3] Both files now go to the Common Council on July 7. If the Council follows the Commission, the zoning rules for residential neighborhoods across Madison will change, and almost nothing in the public record will explain why. The height amendment, as written, does not even say what its own title says it does. The changes would reach every residential district in the city, and the people most affected, the neighbors who would live beside a four-story building or a new driveway on a local street, appear nowhere in the reports.

What Would Change

The zoning code now requires ten types of uses to take their vehicle access from a collector or arterial street. The ten: assisted living and nursing facilities; convents and monasteries; farmers markets; hospitals; libraries and museums; accessory mission houses; outdoor recreation; places of worship; arts, technical, and trade schools; and public and private schools.[4] These uses can generate far more traffic than the homes around them. Legistar 93403 strikes that requirement, with one exception: a place of worship seating more than 600 people remains a conditional use and keeps the collector-access requirement. The rule matters because Madison sorts its 807 miles of streets into three tiers. Arterials typically carry more than 10,000 vehicles a day. Collectors carry roughly 1,500 to 10,000. Local streets carry fewer than 1,500 and, in the city’s own words, provide access directly to homes.[5] The access rule exists to keep the traffic these uses generate on streets built to carry it. Remove the rule, and the driveway serving a new school or hospital can open onto a local residential street.

Legistar 93404 is about height. As its title and drafter’s analysis describe it, it allows nonresidential buildings, such as places of worship, community centers, and schools, to rise to 50 feet through a conditional use in all fifteen of the city’s residential zoning districts.[6] Today the cap for a nonresidential building is 35 feet in nine of those districts and 40 feet in the other six.[6] Those caps are for nonresidential buildings; on the residential side, four of the fifteen districts already set maximum heights of 52 to 78 feet for larger apartment buildings.[7] Fifty feet is a four-story building, the scale of many of the new apartment buildings rising across Madison. In many of Madison’s neighborhoods, the houses next door are one story tall. Almost all of them have pitched roofs, which makes a house look smaller and less bulky than a flat-roofed building of the same height.

Both files carry the same three sponsors: Alders Derek Field, Yannette Figueroa Cole, and John P. Guequierre. And both moved on the same schedule: introduced and referred by the Council on June 9, a single Plan Commission hearing on June 29, and a Council vote set for July 7. Less than a month, start to finish, for citywide changes to height and access. That pace can fit routine housekeeping. These are not housekeeping changes.

What the Text Actually Says

Every layer of the record describes Legistar 93404 the same way. The title says it would increase the maximum height allowed for nonresidential buildings.[2] The drafter’s analysis says the change reaches nonresidential buildings in the fifteen named districts.[6] At the June 29 hearing, the staff introduction described it the same way: flexibility for nonresidential buildings in residential districts.[3] Now read the text the Council will vote on. In twelve of the fifteen districts, the operative language is a new table note: “Additional Height. Building heights exceeding the maximum may be allowed with conditional use approval, to a maximum of fifty (50) feet.”[6] Building heights. The words carry no nonresidential limit. The only thing indicating the note applies to nonresidential buildings is its placement: each table references it only in the Nonresidential column.[6]

The drafters knew how to write the limit. In the other three districts, TR-U1, TR-U2, and TR-P, the amendment says it expressly: “Heights exceeding the maximum may be allowed with conditional use approval. If non-residential, conditional use may allow a maximum of fifty (50) feet.”[6] Where the amendment limits the extra height to nonresidential buildings, it says so: “If non-residential.” In the twelve districts, it says “Building heights” and stops. A lawyer for an applicant will draw the obvious inference: a limit written into three districts and left out of twelve does not apply in the twelve. And those three districts hold a second surprise. Under the current code, the first sentence of that note already exists there, referenced from the residential height columns and capped at nothing: “Heights exceeding the maximum may be allowed with conditional use approval.”[7] A residential building in TR-U1, TR-U2, or TR-P can already exceed its listed maximum by conditional use with no numeric limit. In those districts, 50 feet is not the maximum height, because for residential buildings, there is no height limit with a conditional use permit.

Wisconsin law makes the words decisive. Under State ex rel. Kalal v. Circuit Court for Dane County, interpretation begins with the language of the enactment, plain meaning ordinarily ends the inquiry, courts give effect to every word, and outside materials such as titles, drafting analyses, and staff statements come into play only if the text is ambiguous.[8] The zoning code adds its own rule: MGO § 28.004(1) says the ordinance “permits only those principal and accessory uses and structures that are specifically enumerated in the ordinance,” and that what is not specifically permitted is prohibited.[7] Under those rules, everything turns on what the text specifically says, and in twelve districts, the text does not say nonresidential. Perhaps a reviewing body reads the note narrowly because of where the tag sits; that argument is textual too. Perhaps it reads the words as written and gives effect to the qualifier the drafters used in three districts and omitted in twelve. And if a court calls the text ambiguous, the record of what everyone said it meant becomes fair game. Staff can say today that the note is limited to nonresidential buildings, but an interpretation is not the law; the words are, and the words outlast the staff who explain them. No one should have to guess about the height rules for every residential block in Madison, and the fraction-of-a-page reports gave no one a reason to read the tables closely enough to notice.

The cure is not complicated. The drafters showed how in TR-U1, TR-U2, and TR-P: write if non-residential into the note. What the cure requires is the process, not a floor amendment written at the meeting. The public has never seen this discrepancy addressed in writing, and a rewrite improvised on the Council floor Tuesday night would repeat the failure that produced it. The Council has two clean options: vote both files down, or refer them back to the Plan Commission and direct staff to produce a substantive report on each, so the next version arrives with its text, its title, and its analysis saying the same thing, in public, with time for anyone to check.

The One-Page Record

Now look at the record behind them. Each file carries a staff report from the Planning Division, and neither report fills a page. The report on 93404 is four sentences long, plus a four-word conclusion. Two of the four sentences summarize the change. The second says the current caps are “too constraining” in some cases, and the fourth says the mixed-use and commercial districts already allow extra height by conditional use.[9] At the June 29 hearing, Guequierre asked for examples of where the change could help. Staff offered two: gyms and churches with steep-pitched roofs.[3] Both are categories, not cases; nothing in the reports or at the hearing named a single property or owner for whom the current rules were a problem. The report on 93403 is two short paragraphs and a list of the ten uses. It says the access requirement “can be overly restrictive” and that removing it “allows Traffic Engineering to use their tools and expertise to manage vehicular access to sites.”[10] Both reports end the same way: “Staff supports this amendment.”[9][10]

Here is what neither report does. Neither names the problem the city is trying to solve, beyond a sentence saying the current rule is constraining or restrictive. Neither shows that the change is consistent with the Comprehensive Plan. Neither lays out the scope: how many parcels, which neighborhoods, and what could be built where. Neither weighs consequences, costs, or alternatives. Neither says who would be affected, or how. Neither includes a drawing showing what a 50-foot building looks like next to a one-story house. Neither compares Madison to any other city. The reports state a conclusion and recommend approval, without the analysis to support either.

No written city standard prevents this. In February 2025, I sent the head of the department whose staff writes these reports a memo asking two questions: how the city ensures that staff reports provide a neutral, objective, and thorough analysis, and whether written policies guide their preparation. The answer came instead from City Attorney Michael Haas, who wrote that “there are no written policies or procedures in place to guide the process of staff report preparation.” He described the reports as reflecting “the professional analysis and opinions of staff with expertise in the subject matter,” and wrote that members of city bodies and elected officials are “always free to accept or reject the recommendations of staff, ask questions, challenge assumptions, and request more information.”[11] So the content of a Madison staff report is governed by no written standard, and the check is the decision makers asking for more. On June 29, that check took less than six minutes.

The planning profession has written for decades about what a staff report should contain. The American Planning Association published a practice guide on the subject in 2004, and its advice is not exotic: describe the request, analyze it against the adopted plan and the ordinance standards, lay out the facts, separate the facts from the analysis, and give the decision makers a reasoned basis for a vote.[12] In 2016, the Journal of the American Planning Association published a study by Bonnie Johnson and Ward Lyles called “The Unexamined Staff Report: Results From an Evaluation of a National Sample,” one of the few systematic looks at the documents planners produce most often. It found that many reports provide basic information but do not summarize it, and that most include no maps, no arguments for their recommendations, and no references to soliciting public input.[13] The guidance keeps coming. A Planning Advisory Service primer for public officials states: “At minimum, a staff report should include sufficient data and analysis to put the case in context for the commissioner and to support the staff recommendation.”[14] A 2022 APA memo tells planners to ask three questions of every planning idea: “Who is helped? Who is harmed? Who is missing?”[15] The reports for 93403 and 93404 do not meet these minimum requirements and do not ask the questions. For a citywide legislative change, the standard is not lower. It is higher. One vote changes the rule for every residential district in the city at once. And after that vote, no application ever tests the rule itself: an applicant has to show only that a project meets the rule, not that the rule should exist. If the case for the rule is not made now, it will never be made.

The Profession’s Own Standards

There is also a professional code that speaks to this. Planners who hold the AICP credential are bound by the AICP Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. Madison’s Planning Division Director, Meagan Tuttle, holds that credential; she signs the division’s annual report as “Meagan Tuttle, AICP.”[16][17] The Code has two operative parts. Section A is a set of aspirational principles that the Code itself says are “not enforceable” but “present the foundation for the profession’s shared values.” Section B sets out the Rules of Conduct that the Institute enforces. The Code ties the two together in the preamble to those rules: “We adhere to the following Rules of Conduct informed by the Aspirational Principles, and we understand that our Institute will enforce compliance with these rules.”[16]

Several of the aspirational principles read as if they were written with these two files in mind. Certified planners aspire to “Provide timely, adequate, clear, accessible, and accurate information on planning issues to all affected persons, to governmental bodies, to the public, to clients and to decision makers.” They aspire to “Identify the human and environmental consequences of alternative actions including the short and long-term costs and benefits.” They pledge to “Examine the applicability of planning theories, methods, research, and standards to the facts and analysis of each particular situation and do not accept the applicability of a customary solution without first establishing its appropriateness to the situation,” and to “not participate in any matter unless adequately prepared and able to render thorough and diligent services.” The principles also call for “fair, honest, skilled, informed and independent professional judgment,” special concern for “the long-range consequences of past and present actions” and “the interrelatedness of decisions and their unintended consequences,” ensuring “meaningful, timely, and informed participation” by the public, a commitment to “Conserve and preserve the integrity and heritage of the natural and built environment,” and a duty to “Educate and seek to empower the public about planning issues and their relevance to everyone’s lives.”[16]

The enforceable rules go further on one point. Rule 1 states: “We shall not deliberately fail to provide adequate, timely, clear and accurate information on planning issues.”[16] To be clear, nothing in this record shows that anyone deliberately withheld anything, and the enforceable rule requires that. But the aspirational principles set the standard the profession says it works toward, and in my judgment, a fraction-of-a-page report that recommends a citywide change and skips the analysis falls short of that standard. The people who wrote these reports know how to do this work. The reports do not show it. Whether the gap is deliberate is a question this record cannot answer. What it can answer is why reports this thin survive: the bodies that receive them accept them. The Plan Commission approved both files on these reports, by unanimous consent, in minutes, and the Council is set to do the same on its consent agenda.

50 Feet Without a Rezoning

There is another problem with 93404, separate from the thin record: Madison already has a way for property owners to build taller in residential districts. The owner can ask the Council to rezone the property. Rezoning is a public, legislative act. The neighborhood gets notice. There is a hearing. The elected officials who answer to residents take a recorded vote. Legistar 93404 increases the limit from 35 or 40 feet to 50 feet and moves that decision out of rezoning and into a conditional use granted by an appointed commission, one application at a time. The base district height limit stays on the books, but it no longer means what it says. And as more decisions migrate into case-by-case review, the districts lose their defining character. A resident can no longer read the zoning map and know what may be built next door.

That collision runs deeper than preference. Wisconsin’s zoning statute requires that zoning regulations be made “in accordance with a comprehensive plan” and “with reasonable consideration, among other things, of the character of the district and its peculiar suitability for particular uses.”[18] Madison’s own code says the SR-C residential districts are established to “stabilize and protect the essential characteristics” of their neighborhoods, and directs that new buildings be “designed with sensitivity to their context in terms of building placement, facade width, height and proportions.”[19] The zoning code’s statement of purpose promises “To encourage reinvestment in established urban neighborhoods while protecting their unique characteristics.”[20] A 50-foot building among single-story homes is the opposite of all of that, and the staff reports never engage the question.

The city’s answer is that the conditional use process is the safeguard. It is a weak one. The conditional use standards are general; none of them fixes a height that is too tall for a particular block. And Wisconsin law tilts the process toward approval. Under Wis. Stat. § 62.23(7)(de), if an applicant meets or agrees to meet the requirements and conditions in the ordinance, “the city shall grant the conditional use permit.” A denial must rest on substantial evidence, which the statute defines as “facts and information, other than merely personal preferences or speculation.”[21] The harm from fifteen extra feet of height resists that kind of easy measurement. Neighbors can describe shadow, bulk, and the feel of a street; turning that into the record a denial needs is hard. Once the ordinance is passed, the safeguard is built to ensure its approval.

The Case for the Amendments

The other side deserves a fair hearing, so here it is. On access, the city’s Traffic Engineering Division supports 93403. Its director, Yang Tao, wrote that the amendment “gives Traffic Engineering staff more flexibility and allows engineering judgement to determine the safest and most efficient vehicular access to proposed sites through the Commercial Driveway Permit process.”[22] The staff report adds that at some sites, conditions such as slope and safety mean that Traffic Engineering does not want access taken from the larger street, but the code requires it.[10] Part of that is real. A blanket rule is a blunt tool, and on a constrained site, the current requirement can force the driveway onto the busier street even where slope or site conditions make that the more dangerous choice.

On height, the city’s answer is that 93404 hands no one 50 feet. Extra height comes only through a reviewed conditional use, and, as the staff report puts it, “Our mixed-use and commercial zoning districts already have a provision for conditional uses for height, and these requests would follow the same standards and process.”[9]

Neither defense survives contact with the actual record. Consistency is not fit: the fact that a commercial corridor allows height by conditional use says nothing about whether a block of one-story houses should. A 50-foot building reads differently next to single-story homes than it does on a shopping street. On access, relief for a constrained site may be the right answer, but the report never explains why the fix is to strike the rule citywide rather than to write an exception for the sites where it fails. The Commercial Driveway Permit process the letter points to governs the driveway, not the access. Chapter 10 of the Madison General Ordinances sets how many entrances a site may have, how far they must sit from intersections and property lines, what sight distance they need, and how wide they may be, and it directs that a permit shall be granted for construction that conforms to an approved application.[23] Nothing in it authorizes Traffic Engineering to decide which abutting street a driveway comes from. Strike the zoning rule, and the ordinance directs the city to permit a driveway on a local street that meets those standards. And on both files, the reasoning, whatever it is, is not written down where the public and the Council can test it. If the case for these changes is strong, it should survive being put on paper.

What 50 Feet Looks Like in Eastmorland

To see what 93404 means on the ground, walk a block in Eastmorland, on the east side. Its housing stock is modest one-story bungalows, with a median size of 988 square feet.[24] Many of the roofs have the low pitch typical of post-war construction, which further reduces the houses’ size and massing. A new place of worship, school, or community center built to 50 feet would stand far taller than the homes around it. And Eastmorland is not unusual: Sunset Village, Midvale Heights, Sherman Village, Buckeye, Elvehjem, Glendale, and Meadowood were developed in the same post-war years, with the same modest one-story bungalows and ranches. Nothing in the staff report acknowledges that neighborhoods like these exist.

What You Can Do Before July 7

The Common Council votes on both zoning changes on Tuesday, July 7, and both are set for the consent agenda. If you want a say, four steps take a few minutes each.

• First, write to the full Council at allalders@cityofmadison.com and reference Legistar 93403 and 93404.[25]
  

• Second, send a personal email to your own alder; the city’s lookup tool will find them by address.[26]
  

• Third, register in opposition to both files through the city’s meeting registration page; you can register a position without speaking.[27]
  

• Fourth, register to speak at the July 7 meeting, in person or online; doing so takes a file off the consent agenda and forces a floor discussion. The agenda and participation details are posted for the meeting.[27][28] On that agenda, Legistar 93403 is item 12 and Legistar 93404 is item 13.[29]
  

Under the agenda’s own rules, a consent agenda is moved with the recommended action listed for each item, and the recommended action on both files is to adopt. The rules make two exceptions: items with registrants wishing to speak, and items that an alder separates out for discussion or debate. Unless one of those happens, the Council will approve both files, without a word said on the floor.

Step back, and the pattern is familiar. Staff write, recommend, and present the changes. The file holds the conclusion but not the facts or the analysis. The text does not match its description, and no one notices. The hearing happens. The vote follows. Each step is legal. Together, they treat public input as a box to check rather than a reason to show the work. On July 7, the Council has two clean ways to break that pattern: vote these files down, or send them back and direct staff to produce the reports the public should have gotten the first time.

Analysis: What This Adds Up To

What follows is my analysis. The reporting above stands on the documents and the video; the conclusions here are mine. And so there is no mistaking the argument: I support density, infill development, and more housing in Madison. The question these files raise is not whether the city grows; it is whether the rules that govern growth mean what they say and rest on analysis anyone can read. Start with the districts themselves. Zoning’s promise is predictability: a district is a set of rules a homeowner can read and rely on. Each amendment like this one converts another fixed rule into a case-by-case permission, and a cap that any lot can exceed through a permit that state law tilts toward granting is not a cap. When every residential district can host the same 50 feet by permission, the districts stop being distinct. Madison’s zoning districts are losing their meaning, one conditional use at a time. Homeowners lose the ability to know what can be built next door; applicants gain the ability to negotiate for what the rules once prohibited.

The Plan Commission is not the check the system assumes. A body that takes up a citywide change for six minutes, asks one question, and votes by unanimous consent is ratifying, not reviewing, and on this record, its approval functioned as a formality. And the objections were in the file. Before the vote, I sent the Commission a memo urging it to recommend that the Council not approve either file, or to send both back for real reports,[30] and resident Linda Lehnertz wrote the commissioners opposing the height change, because a 50-foot building among one-story homes “is not protecting the essential characteristics of residential areas.”[31] No commissioner mentioned either one. No member of the public spoke at the hearing, and that silence is not agreement. People cannot weigh in on what they never hear about: two files created June 1, one hearing 28 days later, a consent agenda at each end, and no effort to put the change in front of the neighborhoods it reaches. The quiet was produced by the process, not chosen by the public.

The hearing order compounds the thin report. The written case is supposed to come first, in a report that the public can read and answer before the meeting. When the report is a fraction of a page, the real case, whatever it is, arrives orally, in a staff presentation delivered after the public has spoken and in answers to commissioners that no one outside the dais can rebut. Staff speak last, to bodies that defer to them. I have watched that deference decide outcomes. During a development fight in my neighborhood, I repeatedly told the Plan Commission and the Council, on the record, that the project’s parking violated the law. Neither body discussed the point. They approved the project, a group of neighbors and I sued, and the court ruled the parking illegal; the city offered no evidence to the contrary. Within weeks of the ruling, staff introduced an amendment to the parking law, and the Plan Commission and the Council quickly ratified it. The amendment was presented as a clarification, and it never discussed the intent of the original law, who the change would affect, or how: the same missing analysis this post documents. The public was right, the court said so, and the system’s answer was to change the law to match what staff had recommended. That is deference completing the circle.

The staff reports are not the neutral analyses the system assumes, either. The City Attorney told me, in writing, that the reports reflect the “professional analysis and opinions of staff” and that staff “posture and perspective may change depending on whether the initiative is part of an adopted City policy or a Mayoral directive.”[11] That is a description of advocacy that moves with political context. It is candid, and I credit the candor, but it means the one document decision makers rely on is an argument for the administration’s position, not an accounting of the tradeoffs. The Mayor has said as much herself. In a February op-ed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, on election law rather than zoning, she wrote: “So let me be clear as the chief policymaker in Madison: I urge state legislators to remove this language so there is no ambiguity in the law.”[32] The subject was different; the self-description is the point. The administration makes the policy, staff presents it, and Council approval is the formality that follows.

This is backward. The Common Council is the body with the authority to make policy, the Plan Commission exists to advise it, and staff exists to support both with neutral, professional analysis. That is the design. What Madison has is the reverse, and no ordinance changed it; it happened by practice, one thin report and one deferential vote at a time.

The fix is institutional, not personal. Madison needs written standards for what a staff report must contain, the thing the City Attorney says does not exist, and a Plan Commission that declines to vote on reports that do not meet them. Until both exist, expect more of what this post documents: rules that dissolve into permissions, a text that does not match its own description, and citywide changes that pass in six minutes.

77SquareMiles.com covers the votes, the money, and the process at Madison City Hall that mainstream media misses.

© Alex Saloutos 2026.

Footnotes

[1] City of Madison, Legistar File 93403, “Amending Sections 28.032, 28.091, and 28.151 of the Madison General Ordinances to remove the requirement of vehicular access to a collector street for ten use types,” Legislation Details (With Text), https://madison.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=8055512&GUID=BD09AC7C-7427-4725-B934-313B59AB5C9F&Options=ID|Text|&Search=93403.

[2] City of Madison, Legistar File 93404, “Amending Sections of Chapter 28 of the Madison General Ordinances to increase the maximum height allowed for nonresidential buildings in certain districts through conditional use approval,” Legislation Details (With Text), https://madison.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=8055513&GUID=FF551B5D-C80C-4396-828E-18A23F3AB876&Options=ID|Text|&Search=93404.

[3] City of Madison Plan Commission, meeting of June 29, 2026, video recording, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWlzJsK-Pi8. Legistar 93404 begins at 9:22 and the vote concludes at 15:11.

[4] City of Madison, “93403 Body” (ordinance text and drafter’s analysis), attachment to Legistar File 93403, at the URL in note 1.

[5] City of Madison Engineering Division, “Types of Streets in Madison,” https://www.cityofmadison.com/engineering/streets-paths/design-standards/types-of-streets-in-madison.

[6] City of Madison, “93404 Body” (ordinance text and drafter’s analysis), attachment to Legistar File 93404, at the URL in note 2. Nonresidential maximums are 35 feet in SR-C1, SR-C2, SR-C3, SR-V2, TR-C1, TR-C2, TR-C3, TR-C4, and TR-V1, and 40 feet in SR-V1, TR-V2, TR-U1, TR-U2, TR-R, and TR-P.

[7] Madison General Ordinances §§ 28.004(1), 28.040(2), 28.050(2), 28.051(2), and 28.053(3), current code, https://library.municode.com/wi/madison/codes/code_of_ordinances.

[8] State ex rel. Kalal v. Circuit Court for Dane County, 2004 WI 58, 271 Wis. 2d 633, 681 N.W.2d 110, https://www.wicourts.gov/sc/opinions/02/pdf/02-2490.pdf.

[9] City of Madison Planning Division, Staff Report, Legistar File 93404 (Non-Residential in Residential Districts Height Conditional Use), June 29, 2026, attachment to Legistar File 93404, at the URL in note 2.

[10] City of Madison Planning Division, Staff Report, Legistar File 93403 (Vehicular Access to Collector or Higher Classified Street), June 29, 2026, attachment to Legistar File 93403, at the URL in note 1.

[11] Memorandum from Alex Saloutos to Matt Wachter, City of Madison, February 15, 2025, and email exchange between the author and City Attorney Michael Haas, February 17 through April 24, 2025, on file with the author.

[12] Stuart Meck and Marya Morris, “Formatting and Writing the Staff Report,” Zoning Practice, American Planning Association, November 2004, https://www.planning.org/publications/document/9027979/.

[13] Bonnie J. Johnson and Ward Lyles, “The Unexamined Staff Report: Results From an Evaluation of a National Sample,” Journal of the American Planning Association 82(1), 2016, 22–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2015.1109471; see also Bonnie J. Johnson, “The Better Staff Report,” Planning, March 2017, https://www.planning.org/planning/2017/mar/betterstaffreport/.

[14] Susan Swift, “Getting the Most Out of Staff Reports,” PAS QuickNotes No. 30, American Planning Association, 2011, https://planning-org-uploaded-media.s3.amazonaws.com/document/PASQuickNotes30.pdf.

[15] Kyle Ezell, “Three Essential Questions for Better Planning,” PAS Memo No. 110, American Planning Association, February 2022, https://www.planning.org/publications/document/9228741/.

[16] American Institute of Certified Planners, AICP Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (adopted 2005, revised November 2021), https://www.planning.org/media/document/9227582/.

[17] City of Madison Planning Division, 2025 Annual Report, signed “Meagan Tuttle, AICP, Planning Division Director,” https://www.cityofmadison.com/dpced/planning/about/annual-reports/2025.

[18] Wis. Stat. § 62.23(7)(c), https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/62/i/23.

[19] Madison General Ordinances § 28.034(1) and (1)(a), https://library.municode.com/wi/madison/codes/code_of_ordinances.

[20] Madison General Ordinances § 28.002(1)(m), https://library.municode.com/wi/madison/codes/code_of_ordinances.

[21] Wis. Stat. § 62.23(7)(de), https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/62/i/23.

[22] Yang Tao, Director of Traffic Engineering, City of Madison, letter in support of Legistar File 93403, attachment to Legistar File 93403, at the URL in note 1.

[23] Madison General Ordinances § 10.08, https://library.municode.com/wi/madison/codes/code_of_ordinances.

[24] South Central Wisconsin MLS, residential sales data for the Eastmorland neighborhood, on file with the author.

[25] City of Madison Common Council, “Participate in Council Meetings,” https://www.cityofmadison.com/council/meetings-agendas/participate-in-council-meetings.

[26] City of Madison Common Council, “Find My Alder,” https://www.cityofmadison.com/council/council-members/find-my-alder.

[27] City of Madison, “Meeting Registration,” https://www.cityofmadison.com/city-hall/committees/meeting-schedule/register.

[28] City of Madison Common Council, “Meetings & Agendas,” https://www.cityofmadison.com/council/meetings-agendas.

[29] City of Madison Common Council, Agenda, July 7, 2026 (Legistar 93403 is agenda item 12; Legistar 93404 is agenda item 13), https://madison.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=A&ID=1316276&GUID=9DDDA698-4609-482F-B6DF-47E10FAC34A3.

[30] Alex Saloutos, memorandum to the City of Madison Plan Commission on Legistar 93403 and 93404, June 29, 2026, https://madison.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=15660219&GUID=5E19C313-6A9E-49BF-8AD5-4EAFE91A1C7E.

[31] Linda Lehnertz, written comments to the City of Madison Plan Commission on Legistar 93404, June 28, 2026, https://madison.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=15657788&GUID=C43C0C54-298A-4321-9F90-F4991C699853.

[32] Satya Rhodes-Conway, “Madison Mayor: Absentee ballot suit is simply about money,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, February 11, 2026, https://www.jsonline.com/story/opinion/2026/02/11/madison-absentee-ballots-voting-november-2024-taxpayers-lawsuit/88597755007/.