While I love Green Bay, I often get frustrated at how state agencies refuse to work with us when it comes to improvement projects. Today, we’re going to talk about that lack of teamwork downtown and how it’s jeopardizing the Christmas shopping season for some small businesses.

Wisconsin Public Service decided that the holidays were the best time to do improvements on Washington Street. (story HERE).

I feel like I should write more. But that sentence on its own is probably enough to make you wonder “why?”.

Why would Wisconsin Public, which on the day to day, is pretty friendly for a utility (if you need proof, I can show you some real energy sharks down south), decided to do these improvements now?

I don’t know.

But it’s putting the businesses on Washington Street in a tough spot when they need to make the Christmas shopping process as easy as possible for customers.

With parking downtown already limited, shoppers will now likely give their money to Amazon, than trek through the snow, and through construction, in order to keep their money local.

And this project flies in the face of the efforts for a vibrant downtown during the holidays. What exactly are we doing?

It also bothers me because state agencies can’t work with us on timelines or even the details on projects.

There was the rail commission exerting its will on our common council with a recent project (story HERE).

Then there is Shawano avenue improvements, which we need at this very moment, but wont’ become a reality until years from now (story HERE).

But, we’re getting our WPS improvements right now. Whether we’re ready or not.

The City Of Green Bay is doing their part. They’re giving out parking vouchers for the ramps. That might help some.

But then we’re losing revenue at a time when the city can’t afford to lose anymore revenue. This is why we raised to parking ramp prices to begin with (story HERE).

Hopefully, the city and small businesses on Washington will fair okay.

But Wisconsin Public Service is going to make it extra hard. They should have just put coal in our stocking, but probably would have billed us for that too.