Tuesday, October 12, 2010

The Most Ridiculous Thing That Will Come Out Of This Election Season

Of course, the most ridiculous thing that will come out of this election season had to come from Scott Walker, which says a lot. After all, Walker already has had some doozies, such as:
But all of those pale compared to what came out of his camp today.

Walker said that he would use state workers to identify waste, fraud and abuse. His reasoning went like this:

“Frontline state workers are where the rubber meets the road. They can provide a wealth of information on more efficient ways to provide services and identify cost savings.”



Soon after taking office as Milwaukee County executive, Walker held brown bag lunches with employees to get feedback. 



Well, he is correct that it is usually the front line workers that best know how things work or doesn't work, and how to best change them. Otherwise, his comments are laughable.

Walker has already estranged the state workers by promising to attack them as soon as he got elected. How does he think that they will want to cooperate with him when he has already said he would slash their benefits, as well as lay several of them off?

Furthermore, for the first three years of Walker's tenure, I was at the House of Correction. I can promise you he never came down there to eat his ham and cheese sandwiches and learn how things were going.

But even if he did have those listening sessions like he claims, he sure as heck wasn't listening.

If he had listened to the workers at HOC, he might have hired enough guards thereby sparing the tax payers the expense of having budget busting overtime pay outs. It could have also preserved public safety by stopping the rash of escapes that were occurring while HOC was under his control. It might have also prevented such unnecessary and tragic deaths, like Alexander Orlowski's.

If Walker had listened to the parks and public works workers, he might not have destroyed their budgets, and there wouldn't be hundreds of dollars in maintenance and repairs being kicked down the road. It might have also prevented tragedies like the one at O'Donnell Park. It could have also meant that you wouldn't need a off-road vehicle to travel down county roads.

And Walker sure as anything never listened to the people at BHD. If he did, they wouldn't have had four years of record breaking overtime pay outs. He could have also prevented a lot of the other problems out there, including the failing structure, the sexual assaults, and the escapes.

If Walker listened to staff in the Income Maintenance Program, he could have been told that there weren't enough people to help those in need, and it might have prevented the state to have to take over the program.

Most significantly, if Walker had listened to the workers, he would have realized he needed to negotiate concessions from them, and not try to dictate them. That would have gone a long way to keep the county from facing the potential of being bankrupt in a few years.

Then again, it was never Walker's intent to do right by Milwaukee County, much less listen to the workers. Nor is it his intent to pay attention to the state workers or try to resolve the state's problems.

All this is is just another part of his "say anything" campaign approach to get elected as governor.

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