Petty Politics Imperil Public Safety, Taxpayers

It's not a deep, dark secret that Chris Abele and David Clarke don't like each other very much.

The Milwaukee County Sheriff has repeatedly proven himself to be a disgrace to the badge.  He has promoted people that shouldn't have been promoted (read Fran McLaughlin of Walkergate fame); squandered taxpayer money on things like a personal gym; and has basically admitted he can not and/or will not do his job as Sheriff.

He has also attacked Abele with some of the most inane, boorish and infantile comments made by an elected official, including accusing Abele of being on drugs and having "penis envy."

Abele, the Mitt Romney of Milwaukee County, has been far from an innocent victim in this.  He has also launched a series of attacks on the Sheriff.  Abele has also gone so far as to abuse his office by trying to illegally dictate how Clarke administers - or more often, misadministers - his office.  An example of this comes from last fall, when Abele tried to dictate who should be laid off from Clarke's office, including a number of deputies and administrative staff.

Even though the county board restored some of the funding that Abele would have cut from the Sheriff's Office, they did not restore all the funding.

Despite the partial relief, the arrogant Sheriff showed that public safety and responsibility to the taxpayers came in second and third place to his pride and posturing.  Instead of working with the budget he was given, he still practiced cronyism and poor planning by promoting people that should have been terminated, like Fran McLaughlin.

Now Clarke's budgetary chickens are coming home to roost.  A report from the county's comptroller's office (tell me again how this wasn't a political move by Abele) shows that the Sheriff's Office is on pace to have a $4.6 million deficit by the end of the year:

"In addition, apparently they do not fully grasp the difference in staffing needs between a Monday through Friday, one-shift operation and the needs of a 24-7 law enforcement agency," the letter said.

Clarke kept all five deputy inspectors in place, even though the budget cut funding for three of them.

Clarke also kept 12 captains though funding for eight disappeared. And 18 sergeants remain in the department, though funding was cut for six of them.

In addition, Clarke kept his two inspectors — Richard Schmidt and Edward Bailey — on the job, even though the budget included funding for only one of them.

[...]

Clarke's projected deficit also included $520,000 in overtime costs beyond what was budgeted and a shortfall of $1.1 million in revenue from fewer federal prisoners being held at the county jail.

Despite a request, the sheriff's office didn't provide any suggestions for ways to fix the projected shortfall.

Something tells me that despite the budgetary shortfall and projected deficit, Clarke will still find the money to allow him to rent a horse so he can be in parades this summer, using taxpayer money to help him campaign, as he has always done in the past.

There is no doubt that Clarke is the worst sheriff this county has ever seen and he needs to go, which is why I am glad to support Chris Moews for Sheriff.

That said, I would be remiss to point out the biggest piece of hypocrisy that comes from this news report, which comes from Abele:

Abele has said the cuts were made because the sheriff's office was top-heavy with managers.

This is a pretty bold statement coming from a person who created positions for his cronies and is going as far as threatening lawsuits so that they can collect up to $170,000 in just salaries, not including benefits.

It takes a lot of gall - and shows a complete disconnect - from a man who is laying off hundreds of workers and slashing the take home pay of the other workers, more than any other government in the nation.

We need to get rid of both of these clowns before Milwaukee County even has a chance of getting better for the people who live, work and visit here.

Chris Abele and Gus Deeds

Early Tuesday morning, Virginia State Senator and former gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds was stabbed by his son.  His son then committed suicide.  It was later reported that the son, Gus Deeds, had a mental illness.

In fact, the younger Deeds had been evaluated just the day before and found in need of care - care he did not receive:

It’s quite rare that a public tragedy allows us to connect dots this clearly, but the horrifying case of Gus Deeds stabbing his father, Virginia politician Creigh Deeds, is one such case. We begin with this sentence, from the Richmond Times-Dispatch account of the incident:

The son was evaluated Monday at Bath Community Hospital, Cropper said, but was released because no psychiatric bed could be located across a wide area of western Virginia.

Hmmm. And why would that be so? Just one of those things? The usual pre-Thanksgiving rush? Not really. As Think Progress notes, the likely culprit here is that Virginia cut funding for psychiatric beds by 15 percent between 2005 and 2010. Certainly, 2005 would mean the cuts started under Democratic governors—first Mark Warner, and then Tim Kaine. They continued under current GOP Governor Bob “Rolex” McDonnell, who then proposed even deeper cuts last year.

What’s going on in Virginia is going on nationally. Try this statistic on for a shocker. The per capita state psychiatric bed population in 2010 in the United States was identical to the figure for 1850. Yes, 1850, around when the very idea of caring for mentally ill people first started! Then and now, the number 14.1 beds per 100,000 population.

Between 2009 and 2012, states cut $4.35 billion from mental health services, which eliminated nearly 10 percent of all beds in just those three years. This is while 10 percent more people have been seeking services. I remember when I covered state and local politics in New York, mental health services were always among the first things on the chopping block. No constituency with any political power at all, just a bunch of do-gooders pleading for officials to do the right things. Which in fairness a lot of them want to do, but most don’t end up doing.

On the same day of the tragedy, Milwaukee County Emperor Chris Abele felt that he knew better than common sense and proudly announced that he vetoed the amendments that the County Board made to the 2014 budget putting safeguards in regarding his desire to close the mental health complex. One of the amendments he vetoed included a study to make sure that there were enough beds to meet the needs of our most vulnerable citizens:

Abele said the county has a moral obligation to move patients from the complex who are able to be more independent into less restrictive settings. Patients will not be moved until there are appropriate places for them to live, he said.

"I won't compromise the health of any patient," Abele said.

He'll veto a $100,000 study on whether there's capacity in the community to take on dozens of patients who would be removed from the complex under Abele's timetable; cancel a board move to salvage 45 community care county jobs Abele wants to outsource; and veto a transfer of $100,000 for a case manager for supportive housing that the board voted to redirect to the AIDS Resource Center.

He'll also veto a requirement for quarterly reports tracking what's happened to patients moved from the complex, Abele said. The board can have its lobbyist get that information from the state, he said.

To put it plainly, Abele is lying through his teeth. His plan is already not working, with the majority of people he's kicked out of the hospital returning soon after their discharge.  And that doesn't even go into the danger to public safety that has already occurred because of Abele's negligence and his abdication of his duties.

Abele accused the Board of making the amendments to appease the county workers who would be laid off because of his austerity measures.

Supervisor Peggy Romo West quickly put that straight with the truth.  It wasn't the workers, it was the directors of the private hospitals that said they didn't have enough beds:

The Board voted last week to amend the 2014 County budget to include a capacity study so it could be determined whether there is enough space in the community to allow closure of residential units at the Behavioral Health Division that currently house consumers with mental illness and place them in community settings. The study would cost approximately $100,000, but Romo West said such a study was crucial before moving forward with a more community-based model.

“The leaders of four of Milwaukee County’s hospital systems believe that no additional inpatient beds or outpatient services should be cut until this analysis is complete,” said Romo West, Chairwoman of the Health and Human Needs Committee and sponsor of the amendment. “This County Board is in full support of a community-based model of care, but we must ensure before anyone is placed in the community that proper placements are available for them in addition to having in place the supports needed to ensure their success in the community, especially now as we begin to place our most acute consumers in community settings.”

Romo West said the capacity study would project for the County public and private inpatient and outpatient service demand based on population, acuity, age, payer mix, average length of stay, reimbursement, care delivery and management model and seasonal fluctuation projections.

“I want to see numbers,” she said. “The County Executive has said that we don’t need another study. However, this study should have been done before we began community placements at all, particularly with the changes coming with the Affordable Care Act and the recent closure of more psychiatric beds in Milwaukee County. This study is needed to realize the impact these items will have on our ability to appropriately place and support our consumers in the community. In addition, this resolution calls for creation of a surge capacity contingency plan that would ensure that back-up services and resources are in place for times of high need for our consumers.

“This study is overdue. If these individuals do not successfully make the transition to community-based care, then we are emptying our units at BHD only to fill our jails, homeless shelters and, God forbid, our morgue with consumers we are charged with protecting and providing services for. If this study prevents that, then I am 100 percent committed to making that happen.”

While Abele's efforts to make government as efficient as possible is a laudable goal, it has to be tempered with accountability, responsibility and common sense.  Saving a taxpayer thirteen cents isn't much of a saving if they have to fear for their safety and their lives.  And for Abele to propose slashing services and inpatient psychiatric care in the face of the Deeds tragedy shows just how much Abele is out of touch with the community.

The County Board will vote on Abele's vetoes Thursday. It is their duty and onus to override these vetoes. They are now the only ones that could help keep tragedies like that which befell the Deeds family from happening again here.

Public Service Preempts Petty Politics and Plutocratic Plundering

The latest chapter in the ongoing saga of the Battle of the 2014 Milwaukee County Budget has drawn to a close.

It started when Milwaukee County Emperor Chris Abele - Mr. Accountability himself - presented an unbalanced budget that attacked vulnerable citizens, taxpayers and workers.  Not only was the budget more than $3 million off at the get go and cut a services across the county.

The Milwaukee County Board took that stinking pile of offal and tried their best to make a responsible budget out of it, without raising taxes and restoring the services that Abele had cut.

Among the more major issues were two pools; Abele's security; the transit system; the privatization of mental health services and the closing of parts of the mental health complex; the salaries of some of Abele's staff; worker's benefits and Abele's plan to downsize the Sheriff's Office again.

Two Pools

Just as his predecessor, Scott Walker, tried to do for years, Abele wanted to close the deep well pools at Noyes and Pulaski Park.  He said that they weren't making enough money.  He wanted to replace them with a skateboard park and a splash pad.

But the pools are mainly used by senior citizens and disabled adults who use them year round for exercise, aqua therapy and socialization opportunities in a safe setting.  I don't see much therapy coming from a splash pad or a lot of elderly people wanting to go skateboarding, especially in winter.

The Board listened to the overwhelming demand of the people and restored the pools.

Abele's Security

Abele had added $400,000 to the county budget to pay for a personal security detail for himself.  Not only that, but the county's own sheriff deputies weren't good enough for him and he wanted to contract for his security.  Some speculated that he wanted to hire City of Milwaukee police officers in an effort to further tweak Sheriff David "Looney Toons" Clarke's nose.

The Board noted that Abele's request was five times the cost if security was provided by the Sheriff and felt that Abele's personal beef with the sheriff wasn't worth that much money.  They cut his request back but still left him with the generous amount of $100,000 for his security detail.

The Transit System

Part of Abele's budget scheme included contracting out the oversight of the transit system to a Texas-based for-profit company named MV Transportation, which has ties to major Republican operations and campaigns.  But because of Abele's sketchy backdoor dealings this has now ended up in court.

The Board did a surprisingly logical move of putting in the consideration of bringing the whole system back in house.  The end result is that the Board gave Abele until April to clean up his contract mess or it comes in house.

Mental Health Services

Abele's budget called for the closing of one of the long term care units at the mental health complex.  His plan was to integrate all of the patients into the community by November 2014, even though there aren't the resources available to take care of them and that most of the placements already attempted have been unsuccessful.  On top of that, Abele also wanted to lay off all of the county's community support workers, which would have furthered the likelihood of the placements being unsuccessful.

The Board went along with the closing, but took out the timeline.  In it's place, they wanted an accountable system that ensured there were resources in place.  They also called for a semiannual report on the tracking of the patients to make sure things were working as they were supposed to and that these vulnerable citizens weren't ending up in the streets, in state hospitals, in jail or in the morgue.

The Board also restored all of the community support positions so that the patient who are moved out will have someone to help them succeed.

I still believe this to be a big mistake.  No matter how well meaning the idea is, the fact is that there will also be some patients that would be best served in a long term care facility.  By denying them this, the county is putting them in harm's way and could be violating their civil rights, especially if they end up being incarcerated.

Wages and Benefits

Abele's budget called for gouging county workers - who are already paying the most in the state for their health care benefits - to unconscionable levels.  His moves would have bankrupted some employees and made several more eligible for food stamps and other financial aids.  It would have meant up to $3,500 taken out of workers' paychecks, on top of the more than $10,000 Abele is already taking out.

The Board lessened the hit the workers have to take but given how much more they are already paying, what they did was not nearly enough.  However, to be fair, the Board was already hindered by the fact that Abele failed to produce a balanced budget so they had to also come up with an extra $3 million.

To help make up for some of Abele's short fall, the Board capped the pay for some of Abele's department heads at $120,000.  Unbelievably, Abele started to mewl that his staff couldn't work for such a piddly amount.  It was like listening to Sean Duffy all over again.

Sheriff's Office

Abele's budget called for the laying off of 25 deputies, handing the park patrols to the municipalities and giving the City of Milwaukee money to pay for a ShotSpotter system, to help police find where shots were coming from.  Abele also called for taking the dispatch center, the emergency preparedness center and the enforcement of arresting escaped work release inmates.

Abele did this in part to retaliate against Sheriff David Clarke.  This is understandable since Clarke is a disgrace to his uniform and to his office.  He is grossly incompetent, has utterly politicized his office and has embarrassed the county with his inane antics.

Abele also did this to further his agenda of dismantling the county and abdicating his responsibilities and duties to the public.

The Board eliminated all of Abele's cuts and subsidies to the municipalities except for the ShotSpotter funding.

The saddest part of this is that Abele and his supporters started to attack the Board, stating that they were in cahoots with Clarke and that they supported his poor behavior.  What the Board did do was save the jobs of 15 deputies, preserved public safety and kept from shifting the tax burden on to the taxpayers of the City of Milwaukee.  It also kept the majority of the force intact for Chris Moews when he becomes the new sheriff next year.

In other words, they kept Abele from cutting off his nose to spite his face.

Yet to some of Abele's supporters, this was tantamount to funding al Qaeda, of all things.  Talk about losing all perspective.

As one might have expected, Abele griped about the repairs done to his faulty budget and took things beyond the pale with this:

"I wish our disagreements weren't rather self-evident in their wrongness," Abele said. He singled out the board's vote to cut the pay of six of his top aides as particularly unwise.

Abele said those cuts seemed to be motivated by anger by supervisors over the new state law that curtails County Board power. Abele was a prime backer of the legislation.

"If the board is angry about something, well they can take it up with the state (officials) who changed the law," Abele said.

Hmmm, Abele must have so much money that he forgot he was the one who paid the state legislators to ram this poorly thought out law through the process.

The budget now goes to Abele for him to veto the parts he doesn't like.  It will be interesting to see what he does do, since most of the amendments and the budget itself passed with veto proof majorities.

Milwaukee County Board Gets An Earful At Budget Hearing

On Monday evening, the Milwaukee County Board held their annual public hearing on the county budget.  The meeting was packed with hundreds of people.  Among the people there were some notables, such as Senator Nikiya Harris and Representative Mandela Barnes.  Surprisingly, Milwaukee County Emperor was there, but he did not mingle with the little people.

The Board took care of some unfinished business.  Unfortunately one of the items was the de facto agreement to privatize the parks by approving John Dargle as the new Parks Director.

The topics addressed were varied, but there were basically six topics:

• Funding for homeless shelters
• The treatment of former county housekeeping staff
• The Transit/Paratransit System
• Parks and Pools
• Mental health services and the mental health complex
• Employee pay and benefits

Funding for Homeless Shelters

A number of executives and board members from various homeless shelters spoke to the board, asking for more funding.  They pointed out that they've seen the demand for their services double in the past year even while federal and state funding has been cut.  One executive said that their organization is forced to choose between feeding their clients or maintaining staffing at safe levels.

Former Housekeeping Staff

This is an involved story which is appropriate for another post, but in a nutshell, the former county housekeeping staff have been getting the shaft from Abele's administration.  The workers were only asking to be given a fair shake and for the county to follow civil service laws.

Given the high level of turnover due to Abele's mismanagement, one would think that finding them jobs within the county system shouldn't be too difficult.

Transit and Paratransit

There were a number of citizens with disabilities who asked the board to maintain Abele's proposal to cut fees for the paratransit system from four dollars per ride to three dollars.  Unfortunately, Abele's "fudged math" (which I'm not convinced was an accident) prevented that.  However, the board was still able to reduce fares by 50 cents despite Abele being short $1.5 million in this one area.

Likewise, the same people, plus many others, warned against going with Abele's cockeyed scheme to give the transit contract to an out of state, for profit agency with a very bad track record.  

Parks and Pools

In his proposed budget, Abele wanted to close the indoor pools at Noyes and Pulaski Park and replace them with a splash pad and a skate park.  Apparently Abele feels that the disabled and elderly citizens who use these pools all year long for exercise would get the same benefit from three months on a splash pad or by riding around on skate boards.  There was an overwhelming demand by citizens to keep the pools open, which the board proposes to do.

On a humorous note, Supervisor Deanna Alexander, Abele's personally owned supervisor, decided she would make a token effort to show she too supports the parks, even though she doesn't really.  Her focus was on just one, Lindsay Park.  Hilariously, her supporters - at least one of which doesn't even live in Milwaukee County - came to show their support of her facetious effort with signs like the one pictured, which you can see it misspelled.  

Mental Health Services 

This was perhaps the most contentious issue.  

On one hand, there were several advocates for the closing of the mental health complex and putting the patients in the community and that this should happen as soon as possible.

On the other hand, there were other advocates that agreed with moving the people out of the complex, but wanted it to be done in a safe and appropriate manner, pointing out that the way things were being done now were not working.  It was again pointed out that as of a month ago, the county has only been able to successfully integrate seven people. It was also pointed out that there was no way that the county would be able to meet their own quotas and that will put them in an emergency situation at the hospital, where there would not be enough staff.  Workers testified that they were already having to hire pool people - at much higher costs than the regular workers - to fill the gaps left by workers forced out by Abele.

It is rather disconcerting that there is no tracking system on what happens to the patients that are being evicted from the hospital.

There was also another group of people, many of them workers, who asked the board approve some amendments by Supervisor Peggy Romo West which would restore the targeted case management and community support programs that Abele wants to abolish.

Employee Wages and Benefits

There is no denying that county workers, notably AFSCME members, showed up in force at the meeting.  They argued that the hikes in health care costs and pension contributions were becoming much too much for them to bear.  It was pointed out that, each year, workers were already losing thousands of dollars each while Abele was mewling about a cap of $120,000 for his staff.  

This is a subject that I will go into more detail at a later date, but suffice it to say that Milwaukee County employees are paying much, much more than employees of the City of Milwaukee or the State of Wisconsin for worse benefits.  

What I found to be particularly egregious is the fact that as airport workers were emphasizing the importance of their work and the poor way they were treated, Abele left the room laughing.

And Abele and his staff wonder why there is such a high turnover rate.

There were a couple of other notable testimonies.

One was from Rob Henken, president of the Public Policy Forum, which gets most of its funding from the Greater Milwaukee Committee, advocating for closing the pools, privatizing mental health services, downsizing public safety and restoring the excessive pay of Abele's staff, even as the room was full of people who depend on these services and workers who were getting the shaft.  Talk about conflict of interests.

The other was from Orville Seymer of the misnamed Citizens of Responsible Government, who went into a nonsensical and misogynistic tirade against Chairwoman Marina Dimitrijevic.  It is a testament to Dimitrijevic's leadership that she did not have him ejected from the room like former Chairman Lee Holloway had to do a few years ago.  Seymer's conduct was so boorish that he actually got booed by the crowd.

In summary, I would simply remind the board of their campaign from earlier this year when they were holding hearings on OUR Milwaukee.  The prided themselves on being the representatives of the citizens of Milwaukee County, which is so very true.  They are not Abele's board and they are not the Greater Milwaukee Committee's board.  

They are our board and should make their decisions based on the will of the people, not the plutocrats.

Abele Won't Fight Double Decker Highway

Once again showing his true colors, Chris Abele is ignoring the will of the people in favor of currying favor with his mentor, Scott Walker, per the reporting of Gretchen Schuldt:

County Executive Chris Abele said Wednesday night that he will not fight the state on freeway

expansion because he does not want to offend the Walker administration.

Asked during a Story Hill Neighborhood Association meeting whether he would allow the health of a neighborhood to be endangered, Abele responded, “I oppose endangering a relationship with the state.”

Abele trotted out a sports metaphor, comparing the Walker administration to a baseball umpire. Public arguments with the ump don’t help the team, he said.

Abele at one point referred toWisDOT’s proposal for a double-deck freeway or “whatever.”

It's not surprising that Abele won't fight Walker on anything, no matter how loudly the people might speak out against it.

First of all, Abele and Walker are more like kindred spirits than most people are willing to admit.

Secondly, Abele needs to keep rebuilding all of the political capital he has spent in the last two years in getting an unneeded and unwanted comptroller and usurping power from the County Board.

After all, who knows when he might want to usurp more power from the board. Or maybe, given how his "balanced" budget is more than $3 million off and illegal as hell, he might need his Republican allies to pass a law that his budget doesn't have to be balanced either.

Abele's Fudged Budget Numbers

When Milwaukee County Emperor Chris Abele presented his proposed budget for 2014, he made some grandiose statements, including this doozy:

Before looking forward to the 2014 Budget, I want to take a quick look back to 2011 when I took office. In 2011, the Public Policy Forum looked at Milwaukee County’s fiscal trend and
predicted that by 2014 the County would be facing an $86 million deficit. Think about that for a minute, an $86 million deficit: that’s more than the entire budgets of the Parks Department, the
Zoo and the Department on Aging combined.

There were a lot of reasons and many choices that led to that dangerous trend. But I’m happy to say that, because of the difficult budget decisions we have made the past two years, we are in
much better shape today. As a direct result, we have been able to protect the County’s most valued services from cuts. Instead of an $86 million deficit, the challenge we actually confronted
in putting this budget together was a $15 million deficit. That’s still too high, but it’s a $71 million dollar swing in the right direction.

That raised a red flag for me.

Abele's predecessor, Scott Walker, used to use scary deficit numbers to justify his attacks on county workers. One of the most notable of those incidents came in 2009, when he claimed a a huge deficit to put workers on an indefinite reduced work week. The union cried foul on Walker's stunt and the matter ended up before an arbitrator.

Lo and behold, when the actual facts were presented, it turned out that there was no deficit:

The arbitrator also found other flaws with Walker's actions. These include the fact that Walker had failed to show that the County's projected deficit was severe enough to warrant such drastic actions. In fact, it was in the testimony that Walker's chief number cruncher, Steve Kreklow, admitted that the deficit was only one third the number of what Walker has been reporting. And even the new lower number of $4.5 million is almost seven times the number that the award-winning County Auditor found it to be.

It didn't take long though for this to become just a footnote in bigger problems for the county.

Even before the County Board could do its review of the budget, it was disclosed that there was a $1.5 million error in the budget due to Abele's budget director, Josh Fudge, being unable to figure out the difference between adding and subtracting:

Part of the paratransit mistake was due to a computer entry error and to initially failing to take into account the full costs of the discount fare measure, Fudge wrote in a memo to supervisors.

"While mistakes are inevitable in the preparation of a $1.3 billion budget, I regret this error and take responsibility for it," Fudge wrote. The County Board approved his appointment as budget director last week.

Fudge notes that the $1.5 million error represents less than 1% of the county's $159 million transit budget proposed for next year. The $1.5 million also is more than 8% of the $18 million tax levy portion of the transit budget Abele recommends for 2014.

Again, this produced a feeling of deja vu.

Fudge was one of Walker's number crunchers. Now he's Abele's budget director.

When Fudge was helping craft Walker's fanciful, folly-filled budgets, I thought the errors came because he was too busy reading and responding on political blogs* such as this one, much like his fellow Walker employee, Darlene Wink. For all I know, Fudge is still doing that. Abele's emails show that he has other members his staff monitoring blogs on a regular basis, so why not Fudge as well?

Sadly, it turns out that that $1.5 million screw up was just the first one.

It is now being reported that the mistakes in Abele's budget is totally up to more than $3 million:

The $2.1 million in errors were due to miscalculations, including understating the cost of Abele's proposal to cut paratransit fares for frail elderly and disabled riders by $1, to $3 a ride; and low-balling the cost of salaries of deputies who work as bailiffs.

[County Comptroller Scott] Manske apologized for overstating a fund transfer expected from airport revenue by $920,000, a figure relied on by Abele's staff in crafting his 2014 budget.

The article also points out that Abele is not including $1.5 million in payments for the use of a water tower in Wauwatosa.

So much for his claims to want to increase revenue. The only revenue he apparently wants to increase is that headed towards his fellow plutocrats at the Greater Milwaukee Committee.

I also should point out that the county comptroller position was something that was opposed by the citizens of Milwaukee as well as the County Board, but Abele did a end run to the state legislature to get the position created because it was, per Abele, absolutely necessary to save money.

Not that anyone would notice due to the duplication of services with the controller position or by screw ups like this one.

Oh well, at least we can feel confident that the County Board's staff will pick up on any further mistakes - oh, wait - that's right.  Another one of Abele's brainstorms was Act 14, the Usurpation Law, which cut their staff down next to nothing while Abele could hire all he wants.

Well then, maybe the Board could temporarily hire a retiree to help straighten out the budget, like they did last year - oh, wait - Act 14 doesn't allow them to do that, even though Abele can hire all the retirees he wants.

Yeah, it's pretty much a FUBAR.  So when your taxes go up and your services go down, don't blame the Board.  They'll be able to do only so much with what they are left to work with.

But somehow, I don't expect the spoiled, immature brat Abele to take any responsibility for the consequences of this tantrums.

*Yes, Mr. Fudge not only would read and comment on blogs, he would even save them to his work computer, as these images show: