Milwaukee

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's banner story today was about Gov. Scott Walker's breathtaking effort to gain unilateral power to sell state buildings and other public property. You can read this well-reported story yourself at the link below. Walker wants the power to sell state-owned power plants, unused lands -- even University of Wisconsin campus buildings that were paid for with dedicated private donations or student fees. Bye-bye, Kohl Center, maybe, or perhaps UW-Madison's student union. They'd fetch a fine price, dontcha know.

The story documents how some state property sales might make bad economic policy. Sure, the sales would bring in some quick cash to help the governor balance his budget. But in the long run, operating costs to the state might very well increase. Worse, the governor wants power to arrange sole-buyer deals without first seeking public bids.

Royally screwedIn poker it's called a "tell" -- an unconscious sign from your opponent indicating what's really going on in his head. The fellow licks his lips and you may have figured out from keen observation that means, for example, that he's planning to bluff.

Well, here's another "tell" for Gov. Scott Walker and his administration. To begin with, the Walkerites are infamous mouthers. Walker PR people will wade in at the slightest news of interest and turn out long, mostly ideological statements that may be off point but serve to soothe the boss and his enablers while reasserting his wrong-headed ideology. So whenever the Walker administration remains absolutely silent on a relatively big issue, that's one huge "tell." They don't just have nothing to say, they've less than nothing. For (and this is something Mitt Romney has in his presidential campaign been struggling to avoid, lately) if they uttered word one, it would be the wrong word and instantly show them up as the charlatans they are.

Two examples: One, the John Doe probe of the Walker administrations (both his Milwaukee County executive's tenure and now the state executive branch). He's not talking about the Doe, these days, because whenever he talked in the past about how he wasn't a target of the probe or how he was cooperating fully, his misstatements and misdirections always caught up with him.

Sen. Kathleen Vinehout's earlier post here on the state's misbegotten private school voucher program is informative and well argued. Coincidentally, Milwaukee's independent, nonpartisan Public Policy Forum just revealed in an analysis that the private voucher schools serving that city's poor students aren't producing better math or reading scores than the city's public schools, which defect proponents insisted was a key reason for starting up the program.

This is the first such comparison since the state program began in Milwaukee nearly 20 years ago. That's because Republicans had long fought any requirement that voucher school academic performance be subject to measurement comparing their results to those of the Milwaukee Public Schools. That was the district so vilified that it lost hundreds of millions of dollars in teaching monies to the voucher program. The Journal Sentinel's report today on the Policy Forum's findings said:

Extinct Milwaukee streetcarThe biggest irony in the continuing, arms-length battle over a new electric streetcar system in Milwaukee is the veiled antagonism of the very company that once ran the city's previous electric streetcar line.

WE Energies, the state's largest power utility, has been objecting to a planned route for the new streetcars through Milwaukee's downtown on the basis that it would cost tens of millions of dollars to relocate power lines along the planned route. Then there's a reported ten million dollars that AT&T says it would need to relocate its communications lines in the city so the streetcar rails and support systems could be installed.

Job may get sick, tooThe problem with representative democracy in America is that, too often, it's home sick in bed. Example:

About 70 percent of City of Milwaukee voters decided in 2008 via binding referendum to create an ordinance mandating sick pay for virtually all workers in the city, and not just the well-compensated ones. The Metropolitan Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce (MMAC) fought a losing battle against the measure in court until, finally, the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature enacted a statewide law tailored to un-do the Milwaukee ordinance.

That's right. When more than two-thirds of Milwaukee voters not only wanted something but took formal action at the ballot to enact a law making it happen, elites both public and private fought them on the basis that it would be bad for business. Now there's your definition of sickly, right there.

OutrageousBuried in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story today on local reaction to Scott Walker's new union-busting law:

Two of 17 other union locals were without contracts as of Wednesday, so those locals have been terminated, City Labor Negotiator Troy Hamblin said. The two unions represent about 375 police support staff and police aides, and would need to hold certification elections to represent those workers in bargaining for wages.

So while City of Milwaukee police officers can still collectively bargain, along with firefighters, because Scott Walker exempted them, the civil servants who dispatch those police to calls are now apparently stripped of their union, according to the city's labor negotiator. But it's even worse than that.

Little peopleIn the midst of Scott Walker's assault on the City of Milwaukee's residency requirement for municipal employees (while ignoring similar laws in smaller Wisconsin cities), below is some thoughtful commentary on the subject by a senior writer at Governing magazine. Walker maybe-oughta get a subscription and actually read the mag once in awhile.

Milwaukee sealConservative bloggers have been working overtime to counter the broad and widely echoed arguments of anti-Walker forces on many of the governor's sweeping and (arguably, since they are coming so fast and with so little review) reckless changes to state law.

Sending a fat poison pill to public employee unions was only the most visible of his assaults on the current order, which was an order crafted largely in bipartisan fashion.

But an even bigger assault -- at least in terms of its potential impact -- is Walker's attempt to smash the City of Milwaukee.