Another One Cashes Out!

By Jeff Simpson

Career Government worker, and current previous republican assembly representative Chad Weininger is leaving the Assembly, he just is not going to resign. 

Weininger is leaving the Assembly to become director of administration for Brown County, the top appointed post in the county’s government. He said the county post enables him to be closer to his growing family; Weininger and his wife, Heather, have two pre-school aged daughters.
 
County Executive Troy Streckenbach nominated Weininger in March; the County Board approved the nomination March 19. The previous administration director, Brent Miller, now heads the county’s human resources department.

Weininger will be paid $98,125 in his new position. Miller received the same salary.

Because he didn’t resign from the Assembly, Weininger still is eligible for state benefits until his successor takes office in January. He said he will discontinue those benefits once he obtains coverage from Brown County.

 Once again we have a republican "small government" representative who uses his position and power and contacts to cash in on government.    Double Dipper Weininger will also keep his Wisconsin taxpayer funded benefits and salary, despite the fact that he will no longer be working. 

Weininger is a former Soap Box Derby champion, I guess that qualifies him for $100/yr taxpayer funded non accountable position!

More on Weininger's "qualifications" here.  And here.

That brings to 20 the amount of incumbents(who gerrymandered their districts to stay safe) who are resigning and cashing out on the backs of taxpayers.  

The rats are always the first to leave the ship!  Could be they know how the sausage is made and do not want to be around when the house of cards comes tumbling down? 

 

WI - Occasionally Broke

By Jeff Simpson

Everyone knows that Wisconsin is broke, and that "pension reform" will be coming soon.  (Forgetting the fact for the moment, that when Scott Walker talks reform he means take more money from working WI and redistribute it to his donors).   The problem with the Wisconsin State pension system, it is only broke occasionally(H/T Wisconsin Reporter who also occasionally stumbles on an actual story):

MADISON – The good people of Wisconsin’s 6th Congressional District first elected Tom Petri to serve as their representative in the U.S. House in a special election in April 1979.

Times have changed in Wisconsin and national politics, but the 6th District’s representative hasn’t.
Now into his 18^th term, Petri, a Fond du Lac Republican, is a fixture of Wisconsin’s congressional delegation. He also is the beneficiary of a $174,000 annual salary and will ultimately benefit from what the National Taxpayers Union calls the “single most personally valuable perk to a Member of Congress” – his federal government pension plan.

As it stands, the veteran congressman expects to earn a pension north of $100,000 per year, based on his earnings and what would be his 36 years in Congress upon the close of his latest term.

“Congressional pensions are typically 2-3 times more generous than those offered to similarly-salaried workers in the private sector, and are even more generous than pensions for most federal workers,” the National Taxpayers Union asserts on its website.

But Petri isn’t waiting to draw a federal pension. The long-serving lawmaker came to Congress after a six-year political career in the Wisconsin state Senate.

Last year, Petri collected $14,878 from his Wisconsin Retirement System pension, in which he was vested after five years of public service.

In 2011, Petri received $14,950 in legislative pension payments, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

Since 2008, the congressman has pocketed some $64,000 in state legislative pension payments, according CRP, a campaign fundraising and political information tracker. Admittedly, the pension payments are a drop in the bucket for a lawmaker whose net worth, placed somewhere between $9.52 million and $45.41 million, ranks him 22th wealthiest among his House peers, according to CRP.

Petri sees nothing wrong with cashing the pension checks he rightfully earned.

$15K/yr for serving 6 years in the Wisconsin legislature that works  about 3 months a year.  Not a bad gig if you can get it.  Especially when you are worth on the north side of $45 MILLION dollars and do not pay taxes!  

Remember this the next time politicians star attacking YOUR pension.  They need you to take a  pay cut so there is more money for them! 

PS:  It appears that "double dipping" is acceptable for republicans only!

 

Disclaimer:  1.  Petri is NOT the only person to double dip and pull such large pension payments from the state, he is just one example.   2.  Its not bad pay for someone whose job has devolved into just votin gno on Obamacare!  

Double Dipping Causes Selective Outrage

Double dipping.

In the past year or two, it's been the term used to describe the practice of a public employee who had retired coming back to their old job as a temporary and/or contract worker.

No one likes the practice.

Conservatives hate it because they consider it to be a waste of taxpayer dollars. (Of course, they hate it when any money is ever spent on anything but making corporations and the wealthy even wealthier.)

Unions hate it because it's taking jobs away from active union workers.

The only ones that like it are government officials that are trying to look fiscally conservative, even though it's rarely the actual case.

Politicians also like to use double dipping against opponents, trying to paint them as fiscally irresponsible.

In that sense, double dipping has again made the news.

Dan Bice, most likely working on a tip from Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele's office, wrote an article about how the Milwaukee County Board hired a retired aide for a few weeks as a contract worker, to help clean up Abele's poorly done and illegal budget proposal.

Colleen Henry, reporting for WISN (Channel 12) news, did a slightly better job on the story. She at least reported that it was not only the County Board bringing back retirees, but also the Sheriff's Office and Abele himself.

Sadly, both reports suffer from horrible tunnel vision and allow Abele to proceed with his hypocritical attacks unchallenged.

The practice of double dipping has been going on in Milwaukee County for years. It rose to prevalent levels during then County Executive Scott Walker's gubernatorial campaign, when he would use it to cover the extreme staffing shortages he caused in order to falsely present himself as a fiscal conservative.

While not illegal to do, there were limits regarding the use of contract workers, such as the kind of work they could do and how long they could be used. When Walker would try to push these limits, the union would step in and file grievances which would curtail this behavior.

It should be noted that Walker, as governor, is continuing to use this practice to fill the holes that he has created with his myopic and mean-spirited policies. Funny how that never gets reported by the supposedly liberal media, eh?

Abele has not only continued the practice of using retirees as contract workers, he has expanded the use of them to a much higher degree than the public is aware of, since the media has failed to report on this. Some contract workers were allowed to stay much longer than they were supposed to while others have been brought back time and time again.

Ironically, since Walker finally got his Act 10 rammed through, the unions are not able to take any actions to curtail this irresponsible and expensive practice. And now that Act 10 has been struck down as being unconstitutional, Abele continues to fail the taxpayers by not recognizing this court ruling, thereby allowing him to continue to squander taxpayer dollars to cover up his shortsightedness.

So why is this becoming a news story now and why is it mainly focused on the County Board?

Bice's article gives us the answer:

[Abele spokesman Brendan Conway] noted that the County Board added the temporary worker at the same time it was refusing to let Abele hire two more people for his seven-member staff.

In other words, Abele is lashing out at the Board because they curtailed the expansion of his own office.

But when one looks at the numbers and where each one comes from, Abele's complaint looks even more petulant and hypocritical.

The backdrop, the sick time payout and the pension are from Tom Ament's pension scandal from ten years ago.

So what Abele is really complaining about is that the Board spent $4,845 for a highly experienced and knowledgeable former staffer to help out for a few weeks in repairing his budget. Yet Abele has been spending much more money for a much longer time doing the same thing.

The wonder is why the media is focusing on the County Board's one time hiring of a retiree while ignoring the fact that Abele is doing the same thing at an exponential level and that Walker also did it as county executive and is still doing it as governor.

Could it be the bias of a corporate media or just lazy reporting?

Cross posted at Milwaukee County First.

Wanggaard: Double Dipper

Wanggaard proving once
a cop, always a cop.

Bruce Murphy, recently of Milwaukee Magazine, has found a new home on Urban Milwaukee, which should make for an interesting combination.

Anyway, Murphy has revived his Murphy's Law column and is first story is about the double dipping of Representative Van Wanggaard, who is collecting a policeman's pension, a legislator's salary and a per diem, all on the tax payers dime, even though he voted to kill the same benefits for others:

Wangaard downplays his union roots: his 2010 campaign bio was quite long and detailed, but omitted any mention of his union jobs. He was a Racine police officer from 1972-2001, earning lifetime health insurance and a fine pension. After serving 29 years, he would have earned around 62 percent of his final average salary, which for a Traffic Investigator (his last position with the department), would have been in the neighborhood of $54,000, an insider with the Racine Police Department estimated. That would put Wanggaard’s annual pension at around $33,000. In an interview, Wanggaard conceded this was an accurate estimate.

Wanggaard is now double dipping from the government, earning $49,943 as a legislator plus $88 “per diem” for each day the legislature is in session. (The average legislator earns an additional $7,700 per year from this.) He could also earn an additional pension, but this would require him to freeze his retiree pay and Wanggaard says he preferred to continue collecting on his pension, so he is forgoing all state benefits that accrue to legislators.

Since Scott Walker has come out against double-dipping, I'm sure that his condemnation, as well as those of the zombie parrot echo chamber's, will be forthcoming. As soon as he's done kissing wealthy wingnut widows and Koch bottoms, that is.

Walker's Double Dipsy Doodle

Before becoming governor and proving to the world that labor relations was a foreign concept to him and something that he couldn't wrap his little pea-brain around, Scott Walker was doing much the same thing as Milwaukee County Executive.

Through excessive and illegal furloughs, cuts to pensions and the continuous threats of layoffs (sometimes just as a manipulative "joke"), Walker made Milwaukee County an unpleasant and unhealthy place to work for.  Understandably and not surprisingly, many workers who were eligible for retirement took it.  Some even took an early retirement just to get away from the miasma Walker was making of Milwaukee County.

Walker, however, would not hire new recruits to replace these workers as they left.  Instead, if the need was great enough, the county would hire the retirees back through a temp agency specializing in professional staff.
That way he could brag about how he kept county staffing levels down while "saving money."  They were obviously great political talking points.  Too bad they weren't exactly true.

What Walker would do was hire the retirees back through Personnel Specialists, LTD, a temp agency that dealt with professional and white collar workers. (I've heard some workers were told to apply there by management after they retired.)  And Walker paid this agency well for their role in bringing back the retirees, in the tune of more than $5 million in the past three years.

Click on picture to embiggen

The retirees made out very well also.  They were able to collect their pension and free health insurance and receive a salary on top of it. They were double-dipping* with Walker's blessing.  Not a bad deal if you could get it.

Of course, the unions were none to happy about this, since it was taking work away from current and potential county workers, but Walker kept doing it anyway, squandering tax dollars for political gain.

Given this history of Walker's, it was mildly bemusing to find out that now, as governor, he has come down against the practice.  Of course, when one gets into the details of the bill Walker is supporting, it's quickly obvious that it doesn't have that much teeth to it and is more for show than practical use.

For someone who has only been aware for a few months of just how horrible and destructive Walker this might seem amazing hypocritical of Walker.  And they would be correct, of course.

But for those of us that have suffered long-term exposure to Walker, there is not one thing surprising about it.  Walker's propensity for hypocrisy and flip flops are nothing new for him.

*I can't help it, but whenever I hear Wisconsin and double-dipping, this always comes to mind.