In This Issue:
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1. Walker Holds the
Line
2. Eye on the Ball
3. Ace in the Hole
4. A Rough Week
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Walker Budget Holds Line on Taxes
 Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker said the opposition to his 2010 budget would be “fierce.” But it appears there will be exceptions.
A few key County Supervisors are warming up to Walker’s “Milwaukee County Works” plan to speed up bonding for almost $150 million for public works and infrastructure projects.
Combined with other spending already in the pipeline, Walker expects the new initiative to create about 1,000 jobs. Early indications are that some supervisors who have not been Walker allies may find this proposal too hard to resist.
Other aspects of the budget are sure to generate more opposition. Walker proposes to reduce county employment by the equivalent of 393 full-time positions. The 5,256 who get to stay will be asked for wage and benefit concessions totaling more than $40 million, including:
- A three percent across-the-board base pay reduction;
- Elimination of salary step increases for all employees;
- Employee contributions to pension costs equivalent to five percent of each employee’s salary; and,
- Increased employee contributions for health-care coverage, to reach 15 percent of the premium equivalent.
Walker noted in his budget address last Thursday that the county workforce has been trimmed by more than 20 percent since 2002. That would put Milwaukee somewhat ahead of the curve in confronting the public employee wage and benefit issues now coming to a boil in other parts of the state. (see next article) He also pointed out that even with his accelerated bonding county debt will be 28 percent less in 2012 than it was ten years earlier.
The spending plan prominently addresses several areas that have received high-profile attention in recent years. Milwaukee County Transit would receive funding for 125 new “clean diesel” buses. The Sheriff’s Department would get 114 new vehicles. Emergency Medical Services would be fully funded, with supplemental payments to municipalities maintained at current levels. Capital investment in the county park system would be targeted for almost $39 million.
Walker’s 2010 budget package is his eighth in a row without an increase in the county tax levy.
Citizens for Responsible Government (CRG), a network of taxpayer advocate organizations is sponsoring a rally Sunday to support Walker’s 0% tax increase budget. CRG is the same organization that gathered petitions to force former Milwaukee County Executive Tom Ament and several county board members from office in 2001 after the board voted to give themselves sweet heart pensions that devastated county finances.
Citizens for Responsible Government Taxpayer Rally
Serb Hall
Sunday October 4th
2pm -4pm
For more information, contact by email crg@crgnetwork.com or by phone at (414)-801-0800.
Eye on the Ball—at Any Cost
 You have to hand it to public employee unions. They know how to stay focused. They know how to pay attention to their objectives and put aside any distraction. Of course, single-minded concentration can have its downside: You might not see what’s coming your way.
Take, for instance, Dane County, where public employee unions have taken to the airwaves with an advertising campaign to rally public support for the union cause. Trouble is the union cause might be a tough sell even for the liberal denizens of Madison.
Union radio ads are telling Dane County residents to contact their elected officials and ask them to reject a proposed five percent pay cut for county workers. It seems even arch-liberal county executive Kathleen Falk can recognize the reality that there’s a limit to how hard government can squeeze taxpayers. The alternative to pay reductions is said to be layoffs of as many as 100 of the county’s 2,200 workers.
But the unions are having none of this reactionary nonsense, helpfully explaining that the only reason pay reductions are being proposed is that the Falk administration—are you ready for this?—has kept the county tax levy too low!
It will be interesting to see if the Dane County telephone system can handle the volume of calls from constituents demanding to pay higher taxes.
Elsewhere, layoffs were set to begin this week in Manitowoc County after unions said no to modest pay and benefit reductions—in one case even refusing to vote on the county’s offer.
But layoffs will be a thing of the past if three unions representing employees of the City of Merrill get their way. They’ve presented a joint offer calling upon the city to guarantee no layoffs over a two-year period, along with three separate pay raises of 2.5 percent, one percent and another one percent.
It would be hard to imagine a more brazen demand for privileges unavailable to the people who are forced to pay for them. Unemployment in Lincoln County has more than doubled, from 4.9 percent in August of last year to 11.2 percent now.
City officials were to begin discussing the proposal in a committee meeting this week. Monday’s Wausau Daily Herald quoted Merrill City Council member Jeremy Thompson saying, “In Lincoln County and Merrill, there's people with no jobs, and I don't think the unions are feeling for those types of folks."
Exactly. No distractions, please.
ACE in the Hole
 It wasn’t the biggest shocker of the past week in terms of exposing numbskull performance by state government. In fact, a lot of people with some experience under Madison’s Big Top would say it wasn’t even much of a surprise. None of which makes it any less outrageous that the Doyle administration’s ACE Initiative—an effort to make the state’s computer operations more efficient—has already cost seven times more than estimated and by the time it’s completed it will likely cost nine times more.
ACE, by the way, stands for Accountability, Consolidation, and Efficiency, which at least proves that despite its many other faults, the Doyle administration is not without a sense of humor.
Last Thursday the Legislative Audit Bureau, one little corner of state government that actually does perform to a consistently high standard, reported that Accountability, Consolidation and Efficiency has cost taxpayers almost $91 million over the past four and a half years, compared with the less than $13 million expected.
The objective was to consolidate computer servers, address other computer efficiencies and sell off unneeded land and buildings. But the property sales fell short of targeted amounts by about 75 percent and cost overruns have turned the expected computer bonanza into an apparent loser.
We say “apparent” here because too many numbers are flying around to confidently keep track. One official seemed to say the administration deserved credit for sticking with a revised budget estimate that’s only about 8.6 times bigger than the first one. He also told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the administration had identified savings roughly double those detected by the Audit Bureau.
For its part, the Audit Bureau says the state spent more than $15 million for four consultants to tell it how to be more efficient, and that amount more than absorbed any savings.
There might be a quick way to figure out what really happened here, if not in terms of exact dollar amounts, at least in terms of certainty about whether the ACE Initiative has been a boon or a boondoggle.
Think of it this way: If any governor—but especially one as intensely political as the current one—thought ACE was saving taxpayer dollars, he’d be leaping over the furniture to get to a microphone and tell the world about it.
Twice now, the Legislature has approved a requirement that the administration do exactly that: report the savings achieved by the ACE Initiative. And twice, Jim Doyle has vetoed it.
A Rough Week in Madison
 Last week began inauspiciously for state government, and got worse.
The Department of Justice revealed over the weekend that DNA samples from some 12,000 convicted felons,
supposedly taken under a
legislative mandate enacted in 2000, were missing.
It soon enough developed that the samples weren’t technically missing; they just hadn’t ever been taken by the Department of Corrections in the first place. And when samples had been taken and forwarded to the state Crime Lab, it was not customary for an acknowledgment of their arrival to be sent back to Corrections. Through a couple of different administrations and with a varied cast of characters, it seems no one could have been completely certain whether the duty was being carried out or not.
The Attorney General and Corrections Secretary have been meeting to sort it all out, and it is only small consolation that the number of DNA samples missing or unaccounted for in the Illinois system is approximately four times that of Wisconsin.
Then at midweek, the Legislative Audit Bureau, fresh from dissecting the ACE Initiative and finding it is undoubtedly costing far more than it saves, delivered more bad news. An audit of Wisconsin Shares, a program providing state subsidies for child care, found that the addresses of four registered sex offenders in southeast Wisconsin and four licensed child care providers were the same. The sex-offender registry is of course maintained by the ever-reliable Department of Corrections.
Equally interesting, the matching addresses were discovered when the Audit Bureau dug into possible fraud and abuse in Wisconsin Shares and found some $20 million in fraudulent claims last year.
Department of Children and Families Secretary Reggie Bicha said children were safe in all four cases because no sex offender was living at the matching addresses. Perhaps the Department of Corrections knows where they are.
And finally, in what, under the circumstances, may pass for a lighter moment, the state Department of Tourism has walked away from its quarter-million dollar “rebranding” campaign and its slogan, “Live like you mean it.”
The slogan and accompanying logo, which met last spring with reactions ranging from lukewarm to outright ridicule, don’t appear in the department’s fall ad campaign.
Development of the new slogan- which was actually ripped off from Barcadi Rum,- cost taxpayers $50,000. But look on the bright side: that’s a lot cheaper than another ACE Initiative.
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