Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Holy Gish Gallops, Batman! Team GMC Is Getting Desperate!

In the ongoing battle for the future of Milwaukee County, Team GMC, the people in support of the plutocratic takeover of Milwaukee County have started taken a surreal and desperate angle to try to convince people that there way is the best
way.

In their efforts to do so, they have gone into complete Gish Gallop mode, throwing everything and anything against the wall, hoping something will stick.

In one example, Tia Tohorst, who until recently worked for Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele, wrote a short essay on how terrible she thinks the county board is.  Most of the essay is filled with vague accusations without any examples or proof.

Ed Heinzelman, who ironically writes at the same site that the essay appeared on succinctly points out that one of her major complaints would not even be addressed by AB 85.  

I would argue that the bill would actually make things worse.  If the bill would be passed, the supervisors would be working part time, so there would be no time to prepare before a committee meeting.  This means that proposals and reports would have to be analyzed in the meeting, lengthening the time.

Furthermore, the department heads would have to work long days on the days when they needed to appear before the committee.  Good thing Abele gave them such generous pay hikes already.

Tohorst also claims that she helped with two budgets.  She also complains that the Board refused to listen to "staff's expert analysis."  I wonder if she is referring to when the Board shot down Abele's proposal to illegally give out a half million dollars in bonuses to his expert staff.

Even more bizarre than Tohorst's essay is an opinion piece by Dan Cody.

The first part of Cody's piece is describing how he and his wife are so successful. I don't know if he feels that this makes his opinion more important than anyone else's, such as a waitress' or a grocery store bagger's.

He then expresses some vague complaints, like Tohorst did.  But at least Cody did offer two examples he felt proved his point.  However, they didn't really.

His first complaint was that the Board did not go with Abele's proposal to shift the burden of patrolling the parks from the County to the municipalities  He claimed that this would make the parks safer and save taxpayers money.  He also stated that it showed "regional cooperation."

The truth is that it was an abdication of duties by Abele, dumping off county responsibilities on the municipalities. Abele's proposal also called for giving the municipalities money in an amount insufficient to compensate them for their added costs.  Since the lion's share of this money reallocation would go to the City of Milwaukee, it would mean that suburban taxpayers' money would go to support the city, even as their municipal taxes went up.  The unfairness of this proposal is why it didn't pass muster.

Cody's other complaint is that the Park East corridor is still underdeveloped.  Cody blames this on there being 18 or 19 "county executives," each with their own agenda.

The reality of it is that former county executive Scott Walker kept filling the economic development positions with unqualified cronies and campaign workers, including Tim Russell.  Yes, that would be the same Tim Russell who was recently convicted and sentenced to jail for embezzling from a veterans fund and who was integral in the illegal campaigning by Walker.  And that was before Walker abolished the position altogether.

So he's blaming the board for the failure of the county executive, but then wants to give more power to the same office that has been a repeated source of failure for the county.

Like I said, they're getting desperate.

No comments:

Post a Comment