The Public Policy Forum has issued their much awaited report on whether Milwaukee County should be dismantled and if so, what would be the best way to do it. The report (pdf) in itself is 163 pages long, and the time and effort that PPF has put into it deserves more than just one piece or a simple knee jerk reaction.
In respect of that, I will not go into specifics today, but will take a few days to carefully read and digest this information.
However, a precursory reading shows that while PPF did put some painstaking work into their research, and presented their findings in a rather neutral tone, the whole gist and focus of the report shows a strong leaning towards the dismantling, or at least, a great paring down, of Milwaukee County. Even if not intentional, it is understandable. The sponsor of this study is the Greater Milwaukee Committee, a group that Sheldon Lubar plays a major role in. Lubar is one that has long advocated for the demolishing of Milwaukee County.
The report looks at the some of the major contributors to the financial crisis that Milwaukee County is in, but not all of them. The two they identified are the cost related to the pensions and health care benefits, or legacy costs, that county employees currently enjoy. While there is no doubt that these are leading factors, there are better ways to deal with these factors, at least as much as possible on a local level, without abdicating our responsibilites.
PPF also failed to give any in-depth analysis of the role of the dysfunctional government that we are currently experiencing, and the cost of various elected leaders performing their duties to the best of their abilities in favor of promoting their own personal and political agendas. I also did not see any suggestion for a comprehensive audit of the county, its assets and its expenditures. For example, from my conversations with various County Board Supervisors, the County does not have a listing of all the properties they own and if those properties are even being used. There has also been delay after delay in getting a comprehensive analysis of worker to supervisor ratios, which would help identify departments and divisions that are top heavy with non-revenue-generating positions.
PPF comes up with three possible scenarios to resolve the current crisis: Complete eradication of the county level of government; a severe paring down of governmental services, pushing the responsibility of the county onto the state and/or local municipalities; or the removal of the major discretionary programs like transit and the parks.
While they do a splendid job of pointing out the cost savings in regards to county spending, a preliminary glance shows what appears to be minimal attention to other costs, such as to the state or to the local municapilities.
There also seems to be a lacking in the non-financial aspects of the plans. For example, while they do mention that the state has already taken over some county programs, like the child welfare system or the income maintenance program, they do not go into the specifics of the logistical problems and the supervisory detachment of ruling Milwaukee from Madison, which greatly hinders efficiency and effectiveness of these programs. This has led to increase costs to the tax payers and an unacceptable drop in services to our most vulnerable citizens.
It is also disappointing to see PPF pay so much attention to the Massachusetts example of abolishing county governments, which they admit does not translate well to our circumstances. It would have been better for them to pay more attention to the concept of “metro governments” in which services are consolidated instead of duplicated, and the control is kept on a more local basis.
But as I said at the beginning, this is only a preliminary analysis, and there may be parts that I am way off base on. After we have time to fully read it, we plan on addressing it as PPF did, section by section.
I’m glad to see at the end you admit you may not know what you’re talking about. That’s progress.
I’ll be fascinated to see what your proposed alternatives are going to be. So far you have sales tax, which I support, but which does little to nothing to solve the County’s fiscal problems (because Sales tax rises slower than property taxes and is more volatile, and leaves the legacy costs and costs to continue for other services with the County); and land sales, which are one-time revenues that should be used for deferred maintenance and can do little for ongoing personnel costs.
Frankly there’s one alternative I’d like to see considered: get state law changed to eliminate union representation of all local employees other than law enforcement and mental health services. I mean seriously, why does an administrative assistant need union representation?
I had already offered some alternatives last night. You must follow through a poor reader because if you had just come to the site, you would have to have gone past it to get to this post.
While the money that comes from a land sale is indeed only a one time benefit, you are doing two other things. One, you’re removing an expenditure by not having to maintain something, especially if it is not something that you’re using. Secondly, if done properly, the land now becomes a taxable property, so you are actually regaining a recurrent revenue source. While one property does not solve anything, the County owns a lot of unused property.
Lower pay scale jobs need unionization just as much, if not more than, the “professional” class jobs, since they are the ones most likely to be used and abused in the system.