Walkergate: Gone To The Dogs

Joan Walsh, writing for Salon, covers what she calls "Scott Walker's little known scandal."  What she is referring to is the horrible way Scott Walker and his administration treated Milwaukee County's poor while he was county executive.

The whole article is worth a read, but the beginning is the most telling:

Among the racist jokes and emails found in recently released documents connected to the criminal probe of Gov. Scott Walker’s 2010 campaign, one stood out: A “joke” about a woman trying to sign up her dogs for welfare, because “my Dogs are mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who the r Daddys are. They expect me to feed them, provide them with housing and medical care, and feel guilty.” The punchline: “My Dogs get their first checks Friday.”

Walker’s deputy chief of staff Kelly Rindfleisch replied: “That is hilarious. And so true.

The joke is bad enough on its own, but it’s also worth noting: back when Walker was Milwaukee county executive, and Rindfleisch was a top aide, he managed the county’s welfare programs so abysmally that after lawsuits by local clients, the state was forced to take them over. “They didn’t just call people dogs, they treated them like dogs,” one Milwaukee elected official recalled angrily.

Walsh goes on to explain how Walker tried to sabotage the Income Maintenance Program, setting it up for failure so that he could later privatize it. What Walker didn't count on was that an advocacy group would file a class action lawsuit against Milwaukee County and the State of Wisconsin. This lawsuit led to the state taking over the program and working for years to bring it up to snuff.

Walsh's accounting of the time is accurate.  I wrote about the ongoing series events at the time, pointing out that Walker was using the poor as political pawns as he geared up his gubernatorial campaign.  I also wrote about how Walker was too busy traveling the state campaigning to attend to the crisis at home (doesn't that sound familiar?!), which led to the state takeover.

What Walsh failed to include in her article is the fact that Walker hasn't changed.

Now that Walker is back in charge of Milwaukee County's Income Maintenance Program, he has, by the Act 10 bomb, made it into a nest of nepotism and cronyism, where it's more important who you know rather than if you can meet the needs of the poor.  Walker's people had also been trying to force the Hunger Task Force out of the building because they've actually been helping non-English speaking poor apply as well as filing complaints about Walker's continuing failure in providing these much needed services.

ADDENDUM:  In case the gentle reader is unfamiliar with the email that Walsh referred to in her article, here is a screencap of it:

Scott Walker And Chris Abele Join Forces In War On The Poor

For decades, the Marcia Coggs Building in the heart of Milwaukee has been the center where the poor would go to get assistance from the income maintenance program.  Said assistance would include things like food stamps, energy assistance and Badger Care.

Then County Executive Scott Walker deliberately tried to sabotage the program so that he could privatize it.  As a result, hundreds of people were wrongly denied benefits or had their benefits delayed for months, all at the height of the Great Recession.  But when a class action lawsuit was filed against both Milwaukee County and the State of Wisconsin, Governor Jim Doyle pulled Walker's and the taxpayers' heinies out of the fire by taking over control of the program.

When Walker became governor, he immediately set about mucking things up, using private employees when public employees were mandated, wrongly denying benefits, not providing documents in Spanish and Hmong, etc.  Within a few months of Walker taking office, he was being taken to the proverbial woodshed by the feds, again jeopardizing taxpayers as well as the poor.

Fast forward to today, and we find that Walker is still trying to play the same stunts.  Doing their civic duty, the good people at Hunger Task Force have been keeping the feds informed of this.  True to Walker's nature, instead of correcting the errors, he has decided to take it out on the Hunger Task Force. They have forced them out of an office and into a corner of the public area. To adjust to this, the Hunger Task Force started using mobile computer carts to help incoming clients. The state went after them again:

The Hunger Task Force has had employees in the Coggs Center for several years to help ensure low-income residents deserving of the help get it. After being squeezed out of its office space and placed in a smaller corner of the building, the task force last month began to use carts equipped with computer terminals to help people waiting in line sign up for benefits.

The idea was to help clients avoid a wait, communicate with someone who speaks their language and apply for benefits online, said Sherrie Tussler, executive director of the Hunger Task Force.

The task force has Burmese and Hmong-speaking employees who hang out in a Coggs waiting area to assist clients.

Tussler said the help is needed because the state has not provided documents translated into other languages, as is required under federal law.

"Our staff routinely meet people who have had their case(s) closed, received an overpayment or underpayment or (who have) not been given rights information because they don't read, write or speak English," Tussler said in a letter to county supervisors.

Claire Smith, speaking for the state Department of Health Services, said Hunger Task Force workers are welcome to help clients in the task force's small office at the Coggs Center — provided they've been given referrals from state income maintenance workers.

However, roving staffers with computer carts weren't part of a 2013 agreement between the state and the Hunger Task Force, Smith said.

The carts interrupt the work flow and don't provide the necessary confidentiality when taking applications, she said.

"It's the state's responsibility to make sure their personal information is protected," Smith said.

The agreement says that the Hunger Task Force workers at Coggs work "under the direction" of state staff.

Hey, where are the libertarians on this?! The state telling a private agency how they can conduct their business? Hello? Anyone?

But then the reason for the state's conniptions comes out:

Tussler said the state wanted her employees to stop intervening with clients in reaction to the task force's collection of evidence that some people are being improperly denied benefits.

"Our interest is in helping the poorest of the poor obtain equal and reliable access to food," Tussler said.

But this is where it gets interesting. Current Milwaukee County Emperor and protege to Walker, was all too eager to please and offered to kick the Hunger Task Force out:

Tussler said she refused a request last week by Hector Colón, the county's health and human services director, to stop using the mobile stations to sign up people for benefits at the Coggs Center. The center is a public building, and her staff members have a right to be there during office hours, she said.

Colón, in a written response, said he gave no order to Tussler. State officials explained to Tussler that the roving computer cart "was disrupting other operations being carried out by state... staff."

Tussler said Colón and two county staffers on Colón's behalf had told Tussler to stop using the roving cart.

It should be noted that this whole thing is coming down just months after Abele Friedens Food Pantry evicted from the Coggs Building so that the state could take up that space as well. They must have needed the room for all the relatives and cronies they've been hiring and promoting.

It also comes just weeks after Walker signed the Plutocracy Bill into law, giving Abele unprecedented tyrannical power over the county.

Every day, it's becoming more and more difficult to tell Abele and Walker apart.  They both need to be removed from office with all due haste.  The longer they stay in office, the more people are going to be harmed.

Walker Has Found The Fraud, And It Is Him

Scott Walker, looking for something - anything - that wouldn't turn instantly toxic to his chances of surviving the coming recall, seized upon a report from his "Commission of Waste, Fraud and Abuse."

Sadly for Walker, but completely unsurprisingly, this too is blowing up on him.

Senator Chris Larson and Representative Mark Pocan, who are members of this "commission" have a more than a few issues with Walker's move born of desperation. From their press release:

The Walker report takes credit for savings the state has nothing to do with or savings already accounted for from previous actions of state government. The misleading report did not even include a final vote for passage by its members before completion. While Governor Walker has publicly touted his report, he has yet to release the report because it does not stand up to scrutiny, according to Pocan and Larson.

“Governor Walker’s commission issued a misleading report that takes credit for decisions that have already been made or that are outside of the authority of state government,” said Rep. Pocan. “Much of the supposed savings in Governor Walker’s plan are about as real as the Loch Ness Monster.”

[...]

Therefore, the commission was expected to identify new savings of state tax dollars to keep Governor Walker’s promise. According to Pocan and Larson, Walker’s report did not meet its goal.

“Taking credit for money saved under a federal bill that isn’t even law yet has nothing to do with finding current waste, fraud and abuse in state government,” said Sen. Larson. “This commission was more of a fraud upon the public than a useful roadmap into the future. In fact, Governor Walker is already ignoring a suggestion by the commission to invest more to crack down on tax cheats.”

The commission recommended hiring more tax collectors to crack down on tax cheats, which would generate much needed revenue for the state. However, the Walker Administration recently directed the Department of Revenue to lapse more than $2 million that was supposed to assist in the collection of taxes owed to the state.

Larson and Pocan also issued their own, truth-based report which rebuts Walker's bloviations rather effectively.

It should be noted that Larson and Pocan also have the quote of the week with their closing line in the report:

It is our hope that whoever is Governor in 2012 will have a more sincere interest in safeguarding the integrity of Wisconsin government and services

But there's more to the story than what even Larson and Pocan covered. And to be honest, it's something that Larson is all too familiar with from the days he served as Milwaukee County Supervisor.

In the Milwaukee Business Journal, they have this blurb at the end of their report on this issue:

The report said $177 million could be saved with changes to various state social service programs. FoodShare, for example, should hire internal inspector generals to conduct audits and implement measures to prevent sale of QUEST cards, which are the modern equivalent of food stamps.

What's not included in Walker's release or in the news report is another area where fraud was rampant, child care.

Nor is it included anywhere that I saw that the largest areas of these cases of fraud occurring was Milwaukee County, during the time that Walker was county executive.

In fact two years ago, I brought up this very issue. The state received an email from the federal government expressing concern regarding the poor performance of the Economic Support System in Milwaukee County. The poor performance is directly tied to Walker willfully failing to fully staff the program even though he had the funding to do so. You can read my entire post here at Milwaukee County First, but I would point out this section specifically:

The interview process is has two concerns tied into it. One is that if the ESS workers are not doing sufficient interviews, people might not be receiving all of the benefits that they are eligible for. In these dire economic times, every bit of help becomes vital.

The other side of the interview coin is that without sufficient in depth interviews, it could open up the Foodshare program for fraud, such as had happened with child care services.

By the way, after Governor Jim Doyle ordered the state take the program over and fully staffed it, in order to avoid a class action lawsuit, things improved.

I iterated and expanded on this point three months ago, here on Cog Dis, when Walker claimed he was going to resolve all the fraud:

The funny thing about all this is that it is the equivalent of Walker announcing he is going to clean up some milk that he spilled.

When he was Milwaukee County Executive, he actually helped foment and grow the problem by cutting the number of staff that were assigned to do fraud investigation. His mismanagement of this entire program led to a class action lawsuit being filed against Milwaukee County and the State of Wisconsin. Governor Jim Doyle saved Walker's political hide by taking over the state and bringing the program back to full staff and within compliance of the law.

One of the county workers that did do fraud investigation, Cynthia Jaeger, who was a county worker until her retirement a three years ago, was so good at her job that she won state recognition for her work and was the only worker in the entire nation to recoup more than $1 million in a single year. Cindy saved tax payers more than $5 million in a three year span. And she did that just at county wages, including furloughs.

So how did Walker, who claims that "preventing waste, fraud and abuse of tax payer dollars" is his top priority, recognize the hard work of Ms. Jaeger and all of the money she saved the tax payers? Employee of the month? Special commendation?

Nope, he let her retire without a word and without filling her then vacant position.

So much of the fraud that Walker's commission "found" was actually caused by Walker and his "money-saving" stunts that he pulled as county executive.  And as always, it will be the taxpayers and the most vulnerable citizens that will end up paying for his maleficent negligence.

I could have saved the taxpayers tons of money and expense by writing the commission's fraud three months ago, with the perfect solution as well:

See how easy that was?

Walker Channels His Inner Marie Antoinette

We all know what a screw up Walker was as county executive. Now that he's governor, he's really fudging thing up.

This time, he's willing to cost the state millions of dollars just so he can screw over the poor.

What a guy!

Oh SNAP, Walker's Cost Cutting Measure Could Be Costly. Again.

Some people just cannot or will not learn from their mistakes.

Scott Walker is one of the most glaring examples of that type of person.

As Milwaukee County Executive, Scott Walker thought he'd be clever and grossly short staffing the Income Maintenance Program, most notably the call center of said program. Instead of having the thirty workers that the County Board had provided funding for, Walker would have as few as five people trying to do the job of the missing thirty. It should be noted that Walker played this cruel political stunt just as the country was entering the worst recession in the nation's history and unemployment rates soared. Instead of getting the help they needed, many of Milwaukee County's most needy citizens got only busy signals.

By sabotaging the program this way, he was hoping to show that the county workers couldn't do the job and that this would open the door for privatization of the program.  However, things didn't work out the way Walker wanted them to.

Before he could privatize the system, a class action was filed against the county as well as the state.  In order to save tax payers millions of dollars in fines, the state reached an agreement and took over the program from the county. While it saved state tax payers a lot of money by not having to pay for Walker's folly, the move did cost county tax payers more to clean up the mess Walker made.  The cost was more than what Walker said the short staffing would save.  My, how did Walker howl about that!

Now fast forward to today and Walker is now governor.

Instead of wanting to preserve local control like he claimed to value just a few years ago, in his proposed budget, Walker is suggesting taking the FoodShare program from the counties who are administering it and put it strictly as a state function. Walker claims he wants to do this in order to streamline the process (and lay off 270 workers).

The one thing that Walker is consistent on from that time to this one is wanting to privatize the income maintenance services, especially the FoodShare program (otherwise know as food stamps), or as the federal government calls it, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)

One problem with that plan -- it's against federal rules.

And the feds know about it.  In a letter from Ollice Holden, regional director of United States Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, to Dennis Smith, Secretary of Health Services, it is made perfectly clear that the feds won't accept Walker's plan:

As when he was county executive, we see Walker continue with a pattern of acting first and worrying about the legality and viability of his actions later.  If Walker and the Republican legislators follow through with this plan, the state will lose the federal share of the cost to run the program, which is 50% of the total administrative costs.  Considering that the fully federally funded portion, the benefits themselves, is now at a staggering billion dollars, the administrative cost is quite considerable as well.

Also of concern is the Walker's proposal to generally cut the staffing numbers.  In the letter, Holden warns that the feds will not abide with another drop in quality of services or a loss of accuracy.  However, indications are that Walker would also cut back staff whose job is to make sure that money isn't being paid out where is shouldn't be.  And this comes at a time, as Holden pointed out, that the system is wide open and ripe for fraud and abuse.

If Walker and his GOP cohorts do follow through with this plan, and the federal funds are cut, they will have to find that money somewhere without cutting these services or staffing, because that class action lawsuit is still pending.  Failure to meet their end of the agreement would expose all of the state's tax payers to millions or tens of millions of dollars in fines.

Apparently, in Fitzwalkerstan, it's more important to give the appearance of cutting spending than actually being fiscally or socially responsible. Walker's cost cutting actions will cost us much more, in more ways than one, than any savings he could ever hope to claim.

And In The News From Bizarro World...

I was not only flabbergasted but experienced a sense of surrealism when I read that Scott Walker had been named to chair the National Governors Association's Health and Human Services Committee.

I mean how could someone who willfully abandoned the needy during the height of the recession or made a such a complete debacle of Milwaukee County's mental health services be named to such a post.

But when I reread the article again, and saw the part about "The panel is expected to play a leading role on issues involving health care and Medicaid reform," I thought it might make sense after all.

Walker can share with the committee on how he for seven years successfully ran the GAMP program, a government controlled health care system that not only worked, but saved Milwaukee County tax payers millions of dollars.

That's when I laughed at myself and realized that we are indeed in Bizzaro World.

Removing Walker's Control Benefits Entire State

A year and a half ago, the State of Wisconsin was forced to take over Milwaukee County's Income Maintenance Program due to Scott Walker's inability and/or refusal to manage the program competently.

Since then, the State has made incredible progress in rectifying the short comings of the programs. Among the reasons that helped the State achieve this accomplishment was the fact that they required the County to keep the program fully staffed, as opposed to Walker only filling a tiny fraction of the positions despite the fact that they had been fully funded by the Board.

The entire State benefits from these improvements as well. Due to the increase in accuracy in Milwaukee County, the overall accuracy rating in the State improved as well. This in turn as led the State to receiving commendation from the feds as well as a nice bit of extra cash:

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Vilsack announced that Wisconsin will receive nearly $3 million in bonus payments for having one of the highest FoodShare accuracy rates in the nation and making the most dramatic improvement of any state.

A USDA review found that 98.9% of the benefits issued in Wisconsin were for correct amount and that 95.4% of the individuals deemed eligible by the state were indeed eligible.

Proof positive that Milwaukee County, and the entire state, would be better off without Walker in control.

About That Move Of The Income Maintenance Program

New post up at Milwaukee County First. The State wants to move the income maintenance program out of the Coggs Building. It is not a good idea for the clients or the tax payers.

The remarkable thing is that this is something that Scott Walker and I can both agree on.

Can We Keep Affording Walker's Tax Saving Methods?

The State has announced today that they have rejected Milwaukee County's bid to house the income maintenance programs that they had to take over:

The decision could cost the county up to $1.2 million next year, unless the county is able to rent the space to outside vendors, Lisa Jo Marks, interim director of the county's Department of Health and Human Services, said Wednesday.

The county had hoped the state would select the county's Marcia P. Coggs Human Services Center, 1220 W. Vliet St., for home to hundreds of income maintenance workers. Instead, the state selected a bid from C.D. Smith Construction, Inc. for remodeled space at 2151 N. King Drive, according to a state announcement.

This is more bad news for the County. But I can't help but notice that now that Walker has officially announced himself as a gubernatorial candidate, that the cost of this happening is a heckuva lot less than what it was four months ago. At that time, as I pointed out, the cost was estimated by Walker's own people to be about $14 million:

Most of that $14 million comes directly from Walker's inability and/or refusal to do his job as County Executive, just so he can waste his time, and our tax money, on his futile run for governor:

Kreklow told the panel that the state takeover would cost the county up to $6 million in 2010, including loss of money the county gets for computer services linked to the assistance programs. The county also will lose about $1 million by vacating about two-thirds of the office space in the Marcia P. Coggs Human Services Center at 1242 W. Vliet St., where many of the assistance programs are now housed, Kreklow's report says. The county gets partly reimbursed for the space by the federal government.

A portion of a second county building housing public assistance offices also is expected to be vacated.

The county also will have a small loss of revenue this year linked to the state takeover of public assistance programs, Kreklow said. The state announced the takeover in February, saying chronic mistakes by the county had caused many poor families to be unfairly denied or delayed food, medical and child care benefits.

Walker sent his lackey to the County Board yesterday to give them the bad news and state that he wants to cut the county budget by 6%.

So, was he lying then or is he lying now? If he was lying then, it was as I had surmised and nothing more than another ploy to try to hold over the head of the unions, like he did with the alleged budget deficit of $15 million that he claimed the county was facing this year. If he is lying now, then it is probably because he wants to minimize how badly he has screwed things up, so as not to hurt his campaign too much.

It should be pointed out to the gentle reader that this whole situation was caused by a class action lawsuit filed against the state and the county, claiming that people were being habitually wrongfully denied the services and benefits they were supposed to be getting.

The reason that the poor and needy were unable to get the benefits they deserved was due to Walker's willful sabotaging of the program, especially the call center, where he would have only five to ten people working instead of the thirty that had been authorized and funded.

These were only part of the 717 fully funded positions Walker failed to fill, but the money that was supposed to go to providing these services has never been accounted for.

And what does Scott Walker say about the bad news that was dumped on us today? Well, according to his tweet:

Off 2 Sheboygan Co 2night for an event.

What a show of support for Milwaukee County!

And then there is the several hundreds of millions of dollars of neglected infrastructure that will have to be addressed someday. As well as the pension mess that he had not only failed to fix, like he promised, but actually made worse by continuously short-changing it and then pushing for a questionable and highly risky pension obligation bond scheme, that is now not even expected to succeed.

With all the bills that are piling up due to Walker's "money saving" actions, I don't think we can afford anymore of his nonsense. And if the State's financial woes are as bad as the conservatives would have us believe, there is no way that we could possibly afford him as governor.