Former Milwaukee mayor to deliver public affairs lecture

Former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist will give this year’s memorial public affairs lecture in honor of Paul Offner, a Wisconsin lawmaker and national policy expert who died in 2004.

Norquist, who was Milwaukee’s mayor from 1988-2004, will speak about “Urbanism and the Value of Cities.”

He will speak at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 23, in the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St., on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus. The event is co-sponsored by UW–Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs and the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.

Norquist graduated from the La Follette School in 1988 and earned a bachelor’s in political science from UW–Madison.

As mayor of Milwaukee, Norquist oversaw a decline in the city’s poverty rate and a boom in new downtown housing. Under his leadership, Milwaukee became a leading center of education and welfare reform. His administration revised the city’s zoning code and reoriented development around walkable streets and public amenities such as the city’s 3.1-mile Riverwalk.

Norquist is now president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, based in Chicago. He promotes New Urbanism as an alternative to sprawl and antidote to sprawl’s social and environmental problems.

In that role, he has joined local activists in numerous cities as a key champion of plans to replace freeways with boulevards. A leader in national discussions of urban design and educational issues, Norquist is the author of “The Wealth of Cities” and has taught courses in urban policy and urban planning at the University of Chicago, UW-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning, and Marquette University.

Offner represented the La Crosse area in the Wisconsin Senate and ran for lieutenant governor and Congress before leaving Wisconsin in 1984 to serve as deputy director of the Ohio Department of Human Services.

He became a senior legislative assistant to U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y.; chief health and welfare counselor for the Senate Finance Committee; and commissioner of the District of Columbia Commission on Health Care Finance. He then joined the Urban Institute and contributed to breakthrough research on poverty in America before dying of cancer at age 61.

The annual Offner lecture honors his memory and his work.

“Paul Offner was known to represent the best of public service,” says La Follette School Director Carolyn Heinrich. “We are honored to sponsor a public lecture in his memory in partnership with the Urban Institute.”

One of the event organizers, Tom Loftus, says Offner made a difference in the policy debates in the state.

“Paul taught us all to challenge the conventional and embrace the different way,” says Loftus, a La Follette alum who was speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly and ambassador to Norway during the Clinton administration. “It was a time when debate about the future of the state and the country resulted in policy that moved us forward. He was amazing.”

For more information, visit http://www.lafollette.wisc.edu/publicservice/offner.html.