Today, the went to a number of the county's municipal mayors to get their opinion of Walker's suggestion. I guess the paper was trying to give Walker's folly some credibility. Unfortunately for Walker, it had a much different result.
Let's first look at what some of the mayor's had to say in their quotes (all emphasis mine):
Oak Creek Mayor Dick Bolender said he is open to cities taking over maintenance of county roads, calling S. 13th St., a county road that runs through Oak Creek, "the worst road in the state of Wisconsin."
[...]Greenfield Mayor Michael Neitzke said that if cities receive the funding now given to the county, they could do a better job at tasks such as maintaining county roads. He noted that 19 cents of every $1 in property taxes paid by Greenfield residents goes to the county.
"Quite frankly, I'm not sure there is a good return on our investment to taxpayers," Neitzke said. "It's apparent that something needs to be done that's dramatic, and the old business-as-usual model, it seems pretty clear it isn't going to work."
[...]"If elected governor, would (Walker) support adding thousands of jobs to the state's payroll, because that is what would have to be done under his proposal," McCue said in an e-mail.
"Why blow up one form of government only to turn around and create another one, i.e. parks and transit? I do not support unelected boards like MATC and MMSD having the authority to levy taxes, and I fear that is what could happen under his proposal."
[....]
Franklin Mayor Tom Taylor, who worked for the county for 29 years in labor relations and human resources, didn't endorse Walker's plan but said changes must be made.
"The municipalities and the county and the state, we're going to have to do something to save the county parks and the county trunk roads; they're in dismal condition," said Taylor, who advocated for more cooperation and intergovernmental agreements.
The significant thing about the mayors' complaints is that these are things that Walker is directly responsible for. As I've stated before, it is the County Board that is responsible for determining and setting policy, and it is Walker's job to administer the policies set forth by the board.
Given that all of these mayors are complaining about the condition of the county roads that go through their municipality, it is evident that Walker has failed to ensure that the County's infrastructure is in good repair, even though that is one of his duties.
That's not exactly something you want as a bullet point on your resume, especially if you are running for governor. I can't imagine a campaign slogan of "I couldn't do my job as county executive, so you should make me the governor," is going to catch on any time soon.
I also still don't understand how anyone can think that breaking the county up will save money. While it is true that there are duplication of services, instead of having one regional provider, like Walker wants to do for transit and the parks, there would be 19 separate entities doing the same things. And for each task, there would be nineteen new departments to oversee and perform the duties. Given that the county assumed many of the roles it now performs because it is less expensive and more cohesive than nineteen different groups doing it, I can only see the need for higher taxes grow massively.
But that's not all of the problems Walker gave himself today.
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While running between meetings this morning, I caught Walker on Vicki McKenna's show. They started out touting Walker's plan to break up the county and disperse all these services into the smaller communities.
But then they started talking about school systems and what Walker would do if he could ever get to be governor. Walker said that his plan would be to offer incentives to communities to consolidate their school districts into larger ones, so that they could save money.
Of course, both of them kept prattling on, never once noticing the disconnect. On one hand, says break up larger units of governing bodies into smaller ones to save money. In the next breath, he is saying smaller governing bodies should be merged into larger ones to save money.
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The third problem that arose for Walker today was the fact that his administrative staff had to scramble to try to explain the ever-shrinking budget deficit.
Steven Kreklow, Walker's number cruncher, was forced to admit that according to his calculations, the projected deficit is now down to $3.8 million. Remember, just three months ago, he was telling us that it was $14.9 million.
After the article was originally posted, MJS reporter Steve Schultze went back and added some spin from another one of Walker's aides, Fran Mclaughlin, who made a lame attempt to make the deficit more serious than it really is.
But the most telling part of the story, as is the norm for MJS articles about Walker, comes at the very end (again, emphasis mine):
The more modest shortfall number issued Wednesday was helped primarily by lower-than-expected health care costs. A report from county Controller Scott Manske estimated a year-end surplus of $5 million in the county's fringe benefit budget. However, some county departments were projecting larger potential shortfalls than earlier this year.
With all the ways that Walker has lied about this year's projected deficit, it should make any rational person question his claims of a $90 million dollar deficit for next year.
I'm just thankful for the fact that the County Board was able to restore some level of sanity to the budget. If Walker had gotten his way last year, we would be much worse off than we are now.
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