Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Milwaukee County's Furlough Debts Doubles, As Does Sanfelippo's Hypocrisy

In 2009 and 2010, Scott Walker illegally ordered Milwaukee County employees, such as yours truly, to take an excessive amount of furlough days.  He issued this order on a falsely assumed fiscal emergency, claiming that  there was a $15 million deficit when the truth was there was no deficit. In fact, that year ended up with a surplus.

Due to his lying and his illegal actions and bad faith bargaining with the unions, the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC) ordered Milwaukee County to make the county employees whole for the excessive amount of furlough time they were forced to take.  Not only did the county get ordered to pay all the money back, but were also ordered to pay 12% interest, compounded daily.

JSOnline is reporting that Milwaukee County, who has been appealing and appealing the decision for the last year, has lost yet another appeal.  The sickening part is that the county could have negotiated down this bill by sitting down and working out a contract with the unions.

Instead, the teahadist and corrupt Supervisor Joe Sanfelippo refused to meet with the unions.

Now he is quoted in the article, squawking that the county can't afford to pay the bill he racked up.  Funny, but he doesn't seem to think the county is in such dire straits that they can't pay his full salary even though he spends most of his time at his taxi cab company, even to the point of delaying county business so he can county his money.  Nor does he believe that the county is such dire straits that he couldn't vote for giving his cab company a fare hike from the money he collects from the county:
In the most recent issue of Milwaukee Magazine, there is an investigative report by Marie Rohde that shows that Sanfelippo’s taxi cab company, along with all sorts of unethical treatment of his drivers,  made $1.2 million from a contract with the county.  It should be noted that it was only in the 2012 budget adoption hearing that Sanfelippo abstained from voting on these contracts, and for a while was even the chair of the committee that made these policy decisions.
But to answer the hypocritical Sanfelippo, I've already gave the solution to this dilemma: Sue Walker and his campaign, since it was obviously and provably a campaign stunt.

3 comments:

  1. The more I hear about County Supervisors "other jobs", the case for a smaller and part time board seems stronger.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Actually, quite the opposite is true. It's the part-time supervisors - Sanfelippo, Jursik, Holloway, Rice and Cesarz - that has been working against the tax payers on this issue.

      Delete
  2. I always believed that Scott Walkers budgets as Milwaukee County Executive were nothing more than exploding cigars. They smoulder and stink for a while and eventually they explode in someones face.
    Looks like Joe Sanfelippo had the stogie in his mouth when it went kaboom. Why not? He helped Walker light the damned thing by passing budgets that were not balanced. He voted on budgets that don't cover the cost of the payments that they should have expected based on the ruling of the WERC. How many appeals do they need to file and how much more taxpayer money does he need to waste to learn that contracts are legally binding?

    Hopefully Walker will be held accountable for this before he does something similar to the whole state.

    ReplyDelete