Murphy's Law

Politicians can’t afford to alienate the media, which is why they seldom go on the record criticizing anyone in the business. But in the September issue of Milwaukee Magazine, I wrote a column quoting the mayors of Mequon, Hales Corners and Elm Grove all chastising the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and talk radio for misleading the community about the Deep Tunnel.

The truth is that the Deep Tunnel works as planned and Milwaukee has one of the best sewage treatment systems in the country. Prior to the Deep Tunnel’s construction, Milwaukee spilled 19 times more sewage into the lake than is does now, some 8.5 billion gallons of sewage per year, compared to less than 450 million gallons per year today. Milwaukee went from averaging 60 or more overflows per year to less than two, just as planners had expected. (To reduce the overflow as close as possible to zero would cost another $7 billion, and would still provide no guarantee of total success, which is why community leaders rejected this approach.)

The magazine’s September issue started arriving in the mailboxes of subscribers on Aug. 16. On Aug. 20, both Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling went into defense mode, with Sykes laying on the ridicule of yours truly (nicely done, Charlie) and Mark Belling attacking me as only he can (ouch). Then, on Sunday, the Journal Sentinel entered the debate, with a banner editorial declaring “the tunnel mostly works.”

The glaring line in the editorial was this: “Due to the constant and often uninformed sniping by talk radio and other critics, many people have mistakenly come to think of the tunnel system as a colossal, obscenely expensive public works failure.”

And just who are these “other critics”? It was the JS news editors, who for nearly a decade ran screaming front-page headlines about occasional overflows, leading readers to think Milwaukee had a huge problem rather than an imperfect but nationally laudable system. This kind of coverage gave Sykes and Belling all the ammunition they needed to attack the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. But last fall, the paper did a historic about face, pulling Marie Rohde and Steve Schultz from this beat and replacing them with Don Behm. The coverage of the MMSD changed radically. Last week, with the historically unprecedented downpour of rain in late August, the MMSD had an overflow of 117 million gallons of partially treated sewage, and the news was buried in a couple paragraphs at the back of a story about the weather. Wow, what a difference.

The Badger Blogger has condemned the JS editorial board for not crediting Milwaukee Magazine as inspiration for its editorial. That would be asking an awful lot from any newspaper. You can bet there have been fierce arguments at the paper about its coverage, and certain news editors are probably still livid at the complete change in how the paper covers and runs headlines on this issue. Meanwhile, it has been the editorial page, under the leadership of O. Ricardo Pimentel, that has occasionally run correctives to the news coverage and has helped readers get a more balanced view of the news. Its Sunday editorial made plain to readers what its news coverage has more subtly suggested for the last year: The Deep Tunnel works. That’s a service to the community.

The change in coverage will leave Sykes and Belling with no oxygen on this issue, no factual verification of their complaints. Long-term, the community will go forward and can stop talking about wasting tax dollars on hugely expensive megafixes to lake pollution. It’s high time to address a cheaper and more effective fix to the major remaining problem facing our lake: stormwater runoff throughout the nine-county watershed that causes pollution.

The Real Story on Johnson Controls

In January 2006, JS reporter John Schmid did a two-part story for the

Last week, Schmid was at it again, writing a story that criticized the administration of Mayor Tom Barrett for not pursuing a partnership with Johnson Controls more aggressively. It was an astonishing story on several levels.

For starters, Schmid tells readers that Johnson Controls has had “modest success” in Baltimore, Cleveland and New Orleans, without offering any figures on jobs created. He tells us Johnson Controls wanted to emulate the “social mission” of Pittsburgh’s Manchester-Bidwell Corp., which had success providing job training. But this nationally celebrated effort was started by a nonprofit organization and one of Pittsburgh’s famed nonprofit leaders, Bill Strickland, who turned Manchester-Bidwell into a for-profit spinoff of a community group with a social mission. This provides no proof that a large for-profit corporation like Johnson Controls would or could emulate such a mission.

But most damning is the fact that Schmid once again fails to give readers any details of what happened in New Orleans. His story tells us Johnson Controls “ran into a buzz-saw of bureaucratic and political delays” there, without mentioning all the corruption and indictments or the fact that a Johnson Controls project manager was among those accused of getting a payoff.

Under the circumstances, many citizens might want Mayor Barrett to at least exercise caution in making any deal with Johnson Controls. Schmid’s story merely shows us that one city bureaucrat thinks Barrett should have been more aggressive. But the city apparently offered sites where training centers could be located, and Johnson Controls never followed up on them. So what exactly did the city do wrong?

The fact that the Johnson Controls effort has been delayed strikes me as a minor story at best and certainly not a front-page headline. Its importance was inflated in the first place by Schmid’s two-part series foolishly anointing the company as an inner-city savior, which then required an update of what is nearly a nonstory.

The JS has a strong staff of copy editors and fact-checkers who would never approve selective reporting like this unless it was approved by a top editor. On at least one occasion, the editorial page has offered some insight on this issue, noting the messy Johnson Controls situation in New Orleans, but not in its editorial last week.

The Buzz:

-Reporter Alan Borsuk’s Sunday profile of Joe Zilber, who recently donated $30 million to Marquette University, delicately let careful readers know that Zilber had long been considered tight-fisted when it came to making charitable donations.

-I was surprised no one checked the clips on Arthur Bremer in light of his impending release from prison. Back when Bremer shot George Wallace, I vividly recall a newspaper reporter here checking for any documents or revealing materials he left behind at his Milwaukee flat, which, if memory serves, was located at around 12th Street and National Avenue.

-Staff of Mayor Barrett and the Greater Milwaukee Committee are still stinging at my column questioning whether foundation leader Dan Bader is qualified to run the board of the Private Industry Council. In letters you’ll find a protest from GMC leader Julia Taylor, who says Bader is qualified to run the PIC board because he is board chair of two companies. But federal law stipulates that the PIC board leader must be a company owner, chief executive or operating officer. Bader clearly doesn’t fit that definition.

I’ll be back with another column in two weeks.

And don’t miss critic Ann Christenson’s delicious Dish on Dining.