Wednesday, November 19, 2008

County Board Falls Short Of Goal Line

After learning the results of the County Boards override votes, it reminded me of seeing your favorite football team's star cornerback intercepting an errant pass in his own end zone and running it back for a touchdown, only to fumble on the opponent's five yard line. It gets you cheering your head off and then it feels like the rug is pulled out from under your feet.

Seeing the report from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel isn't any better.

The County Board did very well by overriding most of Walker's foolish and possibly illegal vetoes. They managed to preserve the parks from any further damage, and they showed fiscal responsibility by opting to keep county workers in the billing department of the mental health complex. That move alone gave up a spending cut of $200K, but brought in a revenue of over $2 million dollars.

They actually did a little bit to restore basic transit services, maintained the integrity of the courts, and a lot of of other good work.

So kudos to them for that.

But they really dropped the ball on two issues.

One, they failed to finally kill the insane proposal to move the mental health complex to St. Michael's. Walker's argument is that the current facility housing the mental health complex is too old and out of date. His solution is to move the complex into a building that is even older and not appropriate for psychiatric care. The physical layout of the building dictates that safety would be unconscionably sacrificed.

When my old '96 Dodge had too many miles and was starting to cost more to repair and maintain that I would be paying for a new car, I bought a car that, even though it was used, was newer, in better condition and safer than the old one. If I used Walker's philosophy, I would have gotten rid of the Dodge and bought a '73 Gremlin with a leaky gas tank.

Yet the Board could not see the folly of this type of thinking and voted to keep the option alive.

Just as, if not even more, incredulous was their vote on the call center. The Board recognized that the call center was being understaffed and mismanaged, and had originally removed Walker's profiteering plans and not only restored the 25 positions, but added five more.

Walker, of course, vetoed it, so that he could get some extra campaign donations.

Even though Supervisor Clark read out loud the state statute that the only people allowed to do actual case management of this nature need to be civil servants, the Board chose to sustain Walker's veto.

Just so that everyone is clear, let me spell it out. Instead of having 30 people to answer phones and to make immediate changes and/or updates to a case, the plan now is to have only 10 people from UWM be able to do this. The other 28 people would be nothing more than glorified message takers.

Walker and the board just cut the productivity level by 67%, and they think that this will somehow fix the problem of long wait times and slow responses. Go figure.

Walker's motivation is pretty clear. He is trying to curry favor, both political and financial, by throwing taxpayer dollars to private agencies.

The Board's motivation is also pretty clear. They're upset because they are getting phone calls from people complaining about the long waits and slow responses. But instead of doing their job, and holding the people responsible for this mess accountable, they decide to go for the easy placebo. I wonder if they really think that this is going to cut back the complaint calls they receive. After all, they not only didn't fix it, they made the problem worse.

Not only did they make their own problems worse, they laid off 25 workers, but the effect on the tax levy was only made a few cents worth of difference to the taxpayer. And it will be a lot more expensive when they realize that they did screw up by listening to Walker, and now have to fix it.

ADDENDUM: Channel 12 has a item by item breakdown on how the votes went during the override process.

No comments:

Post a Comment