Fiscal Note
No appropriation required.
Title
Recognizing and commending Mary Charnitz for her professional and personal dedication to the City of Madison, on the occasion of her retirement.
Body
WHEREAS, Mary Charnitz is retiring from the City of Madison on January 5, 2018, after 38 years of service to the City, 32 of them with the Community Development Division’s CDBG Unit; and.
WHEREAS, Mary’s extensive knowledge of community development practices, particularly around neighborhood and affordable housing development, has made her an invaluable resource and advisor to City staff and community agencies; and,
WHEREAS, Mary served as the CDBG Unit’s lead project manager for neighborhood centers for most of her career; and,
WHEREAS, under Mary’s leadership, the CDBG Unit provided crucial start-up funding for half of the existing neighborhood centers, helping newly emerging, lower income neighborhoods develop needed community gathering spaces that help bring together people of diverse backgrounds and build community while also providing facilities where residents can access high quality community services and programming; and,
WHEREAS, following the dissolution of United Neighborhood Centers, Mary worked with individual centers to help them continue as independent corporations, without loss of quality of programming and leadership; and,
WHEREAS, Mary played a key role in establishing the Warner Park Community Recreation Center, chairing a team tasked with planning its development and its operation by the Parks Division with support from the Northside Planning Council, a vision for Madison’s north side first articulated in 1948 and reiterated in subsequent neighborhood plans on which Mary worked; and,
WHEREAS, in the course of her career, Mary worked with a host of non-profit organizations and private developers to advance dozens of rental housing developments that served to improve and expand affordable housing options and stabilize struggling neighborhoods; and,
WHEREAS, more recently, Mary has played a key role in helping to successfully launch a new Affordable Housing Initiative which leverages strong partnerships with developers and the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority to produce quality new rental housing affordable to lower income households in the City of Madison; and,
WHEREAS, Mary has applied her vast programmatic experience to help develop clear policies and standards for use in deploying City-administered resources; and,
WHEREAS, thanks in particular to the contributions of one long-serving Council member from the City’s south side, Mary was recently notified that she had logged a sufficient number of hours staffing the CDBG Committee to qualify her for enshrinement in the National CDBG Committee Hall of Fame; and,
WHEREAS, Mary’s checkered past with respect to her interactions with office technology is expected to cause a collective sigh of relief from computer equipment in the vicinity of her desk upon news of Mary’s impending retirement; and,
WHEREAS, based on past experience, that collective sigh will likely be sufficient to overturn the mug of coffee on her desk, spilling its contents one last time over the files she is about to pass on; and,
WHEREAS, Mary’s colleagues in the Community Development Division recognize that it will be extraordinarily difficult to replace the wealth of knowledge and experience that Mary has accumulated in nearly four decades of service with the City.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the Common Council recognizes and thanks Mary Charnitz for her service to the City of Madison and its residents, congratulates her on her well-deserved retirement from City service and wishes her well in her future endeavors.