Murphy's Law

Call it the “gloom and doom tour.” That’s what Journal Sentinel reporter Steve Schultze jokingly dubbed it, according to Scott Walker . The county executive has been playing Chicken Little, running around Milwaukee warning that the sky is falling. No wonder he wanted to flee to Madison.

It’s difficult to take Walker’s dire projections at face value because he has loaded the deck in every negative way, assuming annual increases in health insurance costs of nearly 20%, no increase in the contribution to health insurance by employees or retirees, no cut in the number of employees, a continuing drop in sales tax income and a drop in state-federal aid. It’s quite unlikely that all of this will come true and completely impossible if Walker provides some proactive leadership.

But Walker’s power point presentation, officially called “The Reality Tour,” doesn’t offer any real solutions. After hammering home how dreadful things are, suggesting that the county is nearly broke while noting it can’t go legally bankrupt, he asks us unlucky duckies to support, well, what? Walker doesn’t say. When asked it he had costed out some possible solutions, Walker said no.

There are times when Walker seems not like the county executive but the anti-county executive. This is the man who called Milwaukee and the six other counties of southeastern Wisconsin a pig. Walker said the effort to promote its economy was unlikely to succeed, declaring, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.”

Tommy Thompson used the bully pulpit to tell us how great Wisconsin was. Mayor Tom Barrett calls cheerleading for Milwaukee a key part of his job. Scott Walker’s style is to blacken the reputation of the county he runs.

Yes, it’s disgusting to see the kind of pensions some county employees have gained. But they appear to be legally protected (not that Walker’s administration ever put much effort into researching its legal options on this issue). So at what point do you quit bellyaching and start making improvements?

The fact is the County Board has passed considerable legislation to roll back benefits (most of this before Walker was elected), and there has been some progress working with the employee unions. Two-thirds of the current employees are no longer eligible for lifetime health insurance and few remaining employees will ever see a big back drop payment because the retirement age was moved back to 55. More recently, Walker and the board restructured the health insurance plan so that employees and retirees have an economic incentive to choose a plan that costs the county less.

Are there other things that can be done? Of course. The county might ape the City of Milwaukee, which got its unions to agree to require out-of-state retirees to contribute more to their health insurance coverage. The county might join the state prescription drugs pool. Walker might go to city officials and the business community (which is also getting killed by the cost of healthcare in greater Milwaukee) and push for a public/private effort to address the problem.

Walker’s entire approach to governing has always been short-term, given his intention to run for governor. Thus he has refused to raise property taxes enough to fully fund the pension plan, in defiance of actuarial recommendations. This means citizens will someday have to repay not only the several years worth of pension contributions that should have been made, but the compounded stock market return on the money (about 8% per year) because the money wasn’t invested in a timely manner.

There’s no doubt the county faces tremendous challenges. It may have to consider selling some asset (a sale of the airport is already being floated), it may need to petition the state for permission to raise the sales tax

The War Between MATC and the Teachers’ Union, Part II

It looks like Milwaukee Area Technical College President Darnell Cole won the latest skirmish in the war between him and the MATC teachers’ union. Union President Mike Rosen was appointed to the Wisconsin Technical College Board by Gov. Jim Doyle . This would have put an employee and chief union antagonist of Cole on the state board that oversees the MATC administrator. But on a little noticed 19-to-10 vote, the state Senate killed the appointment.

Behind this decision was some interesting politics. Doyle has two black adopted sons and has enjoyed considerable support from African Americans in Milwaukee. But some were reportedly upset that he agreed to the Rosen appointment, which looked like a poke in the eye of Cole, who is black. The Republican senators who voted against Rosen gave Doyle the perfect result: He looks strong supporting Rosen and the teachers’ union but doesn’t get black supporters of Cole upset since the appointment wasn’t approved.

Rosen is a bright, articulate union leader and would, under most circumstances, be a fine appointment to such a board. But given that he would be overseeing his boss, and given the level of antipathy between Rosen’s union and Cole, the appointment seems questionable.

In a union newsletter, Rosen has declared that Cole’s proposals for this round of contract negotiations “would destroy almost everything the union has spent decades building for this college.” Rosen and the union also released a survey of MATC staff, which gave Cole a D for his leadership of the college. And Rosen was recently re-elected union president, so the staff is clearly behind him.

State public records show that the average full-time instructor at MATC earns $91,000, while Rosen himself earns about $118,000. Rosen and most instructors work “above load” to earn this pay, with the end result that the average pay is far above that for UW-Wisconsin and UW-Milwaukee instructors. Cole has promised to hold the line on salaries and benefits, which have been rising precipitously — with little or no press coverage — for many years.

Short Takes

• Mark Green was already having trouble raising enough campaign donations, given the power of incumbency for Doyle. So it couldn’t have helped that Tommy Thompson was running around promoting his own candidacy. Of course, Thompson wouldn’t have done this if he hadn’t gotten so much attention from gullible reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. How many stories did the paper do about Thompson maybe, possibly running at some point for some office? Oh well, turns out there’s no news after all.

• A Journal Sentinel story last week offered an interesting prediction from developer Sheldon Oppermann that once the expressway project is finished, there will be a burst of interest from suburban businesses wanting to move Downtown to be near the nightlife and new housing. Makes you wonder why the city needed to offer a tax subsidy to Manpower, whose leaders said the same thing about wanting to be near the attractions Downtown.

• Is any special interest more mighty than the Potawatomi tribe? The tiny Lakeland Times has already reported that the tribe had budgeted $7 million to spend on political efforts in 2006. But legislative insiders say lobbyists for the Potawatomi are now whispering that the true figure could be more like $14 million. That’s an unprecedented level of spending that would blow away the state teachers’ union, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce and any other interest group. Maybe the tribe would like to buy an airport.