In Wisconsin, Milwaukee County residents will be voting April 1 on a referendum to drastically cut the pay and benefits of county supervisors, whose crime apparently has been an unwillingness to genuflect at all times in the direction of Republican Gov. Scott Walker (who is the former Milwaukee County executive), the state legislature and current county executive Chris Abele.
Both Walker and Abele appear to agree that the board of supervisors too often actually tries to influence public policy through the means of … lawful votes. Such reckless insolence cannot be tolerated!
Clearly, only Overseers like Walker and Abele -- greatly assisted by Wisconsin's GOP-controlled legislature, mainstream news media, and the largely invisible hand of the private marketplace -- should determine how the county conducts its affairs, not locally elected supervisors and their staffs who actually represent the interests of voting constituents in geographic districts.
The governor and legislature last year rammed into law a state measure interfering grossly with the way the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors operates and is paid. Democratic-leaning Milwaukee County is the state’s most populous by far, and the law affects only Milwaukee County and no other counties in the state. Perhaps that’s why Walker and the legislature felt the need to provide themselves some cover for making their power move to neuter the county's elected supervisors.
And so they decreed a county referendum, which basically just lets local voters affirm the fiscal portion of the larger power grab that the state legislature and Walker already have completed. A "yes" vote is being pushed by a massively funded political ad campaign -- apparently underwritten by business interests and conservative groups, and championed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's increasingly business-friendly and democracy-averse editorial board. Opponents apparently have been unable to gather the resources to match the pro-vote campaign to any meaningful degree.
The referendum is considered likely to pass, and for low-information voters, it's pretty much a no-brainer. Cut the pay of elected officials? Sure thing! But of course what's going on here is far more complex.
The campaign now underway urges Milwaukee County voters to in effect agree with what the Overseers have already decreed, wiping out county supervisor benefits, cutting their terms of office in half and cutting their salaries by more than half. The referendum focuses on the compensation part and reads:
“Shall that portion of 2013 Wisconsin Act 14 which limits the compensation of members of the board of supervisors of Milwaukee County other than the chairperson of the board and chairperson of the finance committee to receipt of an annual salary of not more than the annual per capita income of this county, which in 2012 was $24,051, and which limits the compensation of the chairperson of the board to not more than 150 percent of that amount and the chairperson of the finance committee to not more than 125 percent of that amount, subject to limitations and adjustments specified by law; and which prohibits supervisors from receiving any compensation or benefits not specifically authorized or required by law become effective in this county on April 18, 2016?”
One has to imagine how Wisconsin Republican lawmakers would react if someone introduced a bill in the state legislature targeting just them, wiping out all their fringe benefits, cutting their salaries by more than half, cutting their terms in half and trimming back policy analysts and constituent-relations staffers in their offices. True, the state legislature actually is (not just purported to be) a part-time operation. Nevertheless, Republicans probably would howl at how these changes were to the detriment of representative government.
But in the case of Milwaukee County, the GOP "solution" to the "problem" of democracy is to ensure there's less of it. Which, coincidentally, happens to benefit the Wisconsin Republican Party. The move in fact generally parallels what Walker and his GOP colleagues did two years earlier in gutting public employee unions.
Although the county referendum is expected to pass, the real damage already has been done. Milwaukee County – atop but now alone among all the counties in Wisconsin – will be forced by outside interests to run itself with an undersized, understaffed, underpaid, part-time board of supervisors. What could possibly go wrong with that?
While the move to downsize Milwaukee County's most representative lawmakers moves ahead, complementing earlier assaults on the home-rule rights of the Democratic-leaning City of Milwaukee, the Overseers are mounting similar though less sweeping intrusions into representative local government across rural Wisconsin.
We'll discuss it all. Just follow us past the orange puff of backroom cigar smoke.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorially agrees with Gov. Walker, other influential business leaders and current County Executive Abele that the county board can provide proper policy-making balance with fewer staffers, half the salaries and no benefits, among other impositions. But why make that move? For many reasons all summing up to who should be in charge.
Among the alleged county board trespasses triggering this move was that the supervisors have dared in the past to actually follow state law and negotiate in good faith with county government labor unions. Worse, after Walker stripped those unions of virtually all their bargaining power, the board at times talked informally with represented employees. How dare the board care what the employees think?! How dare the board try to work with them?! We made that against the law!
And then there was the board's vote in favor of a living wage for Milwaukee County employees. Abele vetoed that, but the board overrode him. More insolence!
Likewise, when Walker was county executive, supervisors often disagreed with his proposals and voted for alternatives, even on occasion reversing his vetoes, as they were and are empowered to do. So, the Overseers apparently decided, we'll just have to disempower them. The will of the electorate be damned, unless, of course, we can con voters into giving our pals more power, in order, of course, to curb what we'll portray as abuses of power.
The downsized supervisors will, for now, still be able to vote and to overturn executive vetoes, but Walker, Abele and their cohorts are essentially trying to forestall that by greatly reducing the board's expertise and effectiveness, removing most resources, including most of the supervisors' staff assistants. strong>Hereafter, as a result, a Milwaukee County supervisor who dutifully and faithfully carries out this more-than-full-time job and has no time for another job in the private sector may very well qualify for food stamps. Welcome to the WalMartization of your local government.
If Milwaukee’s poorer residents can’t spare the money or family sacrifice to run for a supervisor’s post, who can? The Overseers presumably are confident their campaign support can help install more elites to the board; wealthy or at least financially secure people who already agree with the Overseers and who will vote promptly in favor of the Overseer agenda, without all that pesky democracy or actual, thoughtful, tiresome policy analysis.
It goes without saying that this move will give far more power to the Milwaukee county executive. Can you say “unitary government,” boys and girls? How has that worked out for the Ukraine, or the current, one-party Wisconsin state government?
Speaking of unitary, it’s relevant to consider just how Walker became county executive, after which his staff conducted illegal, secret political activity on the public's dime as a springboard for Walker’s leap from that important job on up to the governorship. His rise to unitary state power began when Walker took advantage of an incident involving the Milwaukee county executive who preceded him.
That executive used his already considerable administrative authority to push through a sizable increase in county employee pension benefits, which may have seemed to make some sense, at the time and even now, but which caused a political uproar.
Walker, then a backbencher in the state’s GOP legislative delegation, supported a move to force the county executive into a recall election, leading the executive to resign. Then Walker won a special election to fill the seat. [Walker, of course, is more lately opposed to Wisconsin's recall system, having sweated out one as governor, and has even spoken of a state constitutional amendment to ban recalls.]
To be sure, a majority of Milwaukee County supervisors voted for the controversial pension plan, but they based their votes on misleading analysis supplied by a private consultant (the firm eventually paid the county a $45 million dollar settlement to end a court case), as well as the county executive’s own lobbying for the plan.
In his own turn at the county helm, Walker arguably made a number of decisions that were, compared to the pension plan, arguably as dubious. One of his unilateral moves – illegally furloughing county workers by decree – ended up costing county taxpayers tens of millions of dollars when public employee unions successfully sued. Walker remembered that and other push-backs in crafting his state Act 10 law to gut public employee unions. Dissent will not be tolerated!
Over the past three years, under new County Executive Abele, a similar scenario has played out. Business interests in Milwaukee and Republicans in Madison still see the county board (or at least portray it) as the big problem. So these Overseers are fixing that “problem” by ... giving the county's top Overseer even more power than when Walker ran rampant.
It's not sensible or subtle, but it's how the Overseers think. Power, concentrated, is how they prefer to run the public’s business. Authoritarianism is so much more efficient, don’t you agree? Why, just ask any Third World tyrant. And let’s leave business to do whatever it wants, even if that wrecks comity, polity and balance in our public policymaking. Because … jobs!
It's exactly the kind of mindset that let giant financial corporations wreck the American economy and nearly the world's economy, too, then rewarded them for their malfeasance because they were "too big to fail." And yet the Overseers are headed down this same path again. Only now, they’re drilling down past national government and even state government into local politics.
Milwaukee County may be ground zero for this attack in Wisconsin. However, right this minute, big bucks from the direction of the notorious, billionaire Koch brothers are being spent trying to influence county board elections in sparsely populated, far-northern Iron County, Wisconsin. The only big issue there right now is the potential development of a miles-long, thousand-foot deep, open-pit, iron ore mine, controversial because it’s upstream from Lake Superior and a Chippewa tribal reservation where wild rice fields are endangered, and smack in the middle of Wisconsin’s most pristine forests and waters.
Unlike the Milwaukee assault, the Koch-fueled campaign in Iron County wouldn't change the way that area's county board is structured. Rather, it would only change who's in office. And the Kochs for reasons of their own apparently would like to help install candidates who can be more depended upon to act -- or better yet, just talk -- in ways friendly to the giant mine.
Meanwhile, over in western Wisconsin, the Walker administration and GOP-controlled state legislature have been busy trying to remove local authority to put limits on massive, open-pit frac-sand mining operations. Companies are digging up beautiful bluffs and hills all over the Mississippi Valley region and trucking away an unusual, very fine sand that is useful for natural-gas fracking projects in other states. The mining has caused air-quality problems and local towns have imposed zoning or other restrictions in an attempt to protect their residents. But, say the Overseers, those towns are interfering with commerce!
Ah, but let’s go ahead and pack our local elected councils and boards with Overseers. And let’s give more power to our executive branch to all but control everything. Hey. What, after all, could possibly go wrong?