"Alternative Reporting" Offers Alternative To The Truth

As popular opinion keeps turning against the power grab being pulled off by Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele, his fellow plutocrats at the Greater Milwaukee Committee and State Representative Joe "Cab King" Sanfelippo, the supporters of this ill-advised and misbegotten stunt are getting more desperate in trying to defend it.

Sadly, I'm not referring to just the hired trolls either.

Bruce Murphy, who is now writing at the blog Urban Milwaukee, has been pushing credibility in an effort to persuade people to support this unsupportable move to usurp control of Milwaukee County and place in the hands of one man - Chris Abele.

Most recently, he has taken umbrage with an article written by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Steve Schultze, which takes a closer look at the power grab bill which was finally revealed by Sanfelippo after many false starts.

Murphy sniped that Schultze was misleading his readers by inaccurately reporting what is really in the bill, all but accusing Schultze of making it up out of whole cloth:

Schultze, for instance, claims the bill gives the executive “the authority to hire as many staff as he wishes for the county executive’s office.” Nonsense. The executive’s budget would have to be approved, as before, by the county board. “The most powerful control the board has is the power of the purse strings,” Sanfelippo notes. “What Schultze wrote is completely misleading.”

Schultze also wrote that the county exec “would gain power through authority for all contracts.” Also misleading. The exec can now approve any contract worth less than $50,000. The legislation would increase that to $100,000. For any contract worth $100,000 to $300,000, if just one board member objected, a full vote of the board would then be required to approve it. And for any contract of more than $300,000, board approval is automatically required.

Schultze writes that the board “also would lose its power to change terms of any proposed sale or lease of county property.” True, the board would not be able to renegotiate deals, but it would retain the power to set the parameters and policies for any sale or lease agreement, and the executive would have to follow those. Once a deal is negotiated within those parameters, the board would have the choice of approving the deal or not. “This forces the executive to work more closely with the board to make sure the deal gets approved,” Sanfelippo notes.

Dan Cody applauded Murphy's hit piece and offered a few kicks of his own:

For the record, I completely agree that the JS reporter in question suffers from the same problem most in his profession do: he can't burn his sources. It's true in sports reporting and political reporting and has been rearing it's head in local political reporting for years before this issue. That said, I find Steve to be a nice guy who works hard and have nothing against him.

What's become interesting to me about this whole issue is just how willing some third party groups are willing to make this their Waterloo.

The real problem here is that it is not Schultze who is doing the misleading. It is Murphy and Cody that are incorrect with their facts.

As I had pointed out in my coverage of the power grab bill, the bill was accompanied by a memorandum written by Anna Henning, a staff attorney with the Wisconsin Legislative Council. The lines that Murphy and Cody accuse Schultze of fabricating, or at least conflating, come directly from this memorandum.

To address the three issues that are in the above-cited section of Murphy's diatribe, let's look at the memo.

On the bottom of page 5 of the memo, Attorney Henning has this bullet point under "Additional Authorities of the Milwaukee County Executive":

Hire and supervise the number of employees that the County Executive reasonably believes are necessary to carry out the duties of the County Executive’s office.

So Schultze is right on the money with that one.

Right below this bullet point is footnote number 5 which reads:

The bill specifies that no contract with Milwaukee County is valid unless it is signed or countersigned by the Milwaukee County Executive.

Again, Schultze is true to the memo, Murphy's complaint is not.

As for the third issue that Murphy brings up, well, Abele is currently supposed to be following the policy set forth by the County Board, but just like his predecessor Scott Walker, Abele has simply refused to do so.

Abele refused to have his staff live in Milwaukee County, which is a requirement per county policy. Abele had proposed to give half a million taxpayer dollars away as bonuses, again in violation of county policy. Abele is trying to shut down the mental health complex on his own, which is against county policy.  The list could go on for a bit more too.

So while Murphy admits that Schultze is accurate on this account, he then makes a false statement himself regarding the county executive's need to "work with the board."

As the gentle reader can plainly see, Schultze is true to the memo, which was written by an independent lawyer, not a Teapublican politician with an ax to grind.

So, I guess, in a way, one could say that the pro-plutocratic power grab bloc is upset with Schultze's accuracy in his article.

But not because it is misleading.  Rather, they are upset because it accurately shows that this is nothing but an unjustified and unjustifiable power grab.

Disgraceful Reporting Dishonors Victims Of The O'Donnell Park Tragedy

On June 24, 2010, tragedy struck Milwaukee County.

As people were streaming in to enjoy the first days of Summerfest, a 27,000 concrete facade fell off the O'Donnell Park parking garage and struck three people, killing fifteen year old Jared Kellner and injuring two others.

Kellner's parents have since filed a lawsuit which has been working its slow way through the courts. Recently, expert witness reports have been filed with the court. The reporting on this by Steve Schultze of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is absolutely disgraceful in its inaccuracy (emphasis ours):

Milwaukee County has long blamed faulty installation for the 13-ton concrete panel falling from O'Donnell Park two years ago, killing a 15-year-old Greenfield boy.

Implicit in that view was that the county had no blame in the tragedy, in which two others were injured.

New theories advanced in the accident shift the focus back on the county, alleging that improper maintenance may have played a role or that snow removal equipment bumped and loosened the panel that dropped from the O'Donnell ramp facade over the Lincoln Memorial Drive exit, according to expert witness reports filed in a lawsuit that is a year away from trial.

[...]

Advance raises a series of possible contributing factors to the panel collapse, including water infiltration weakening the connections, pressure on the panel connection caused by problems in the ramp construction and impact damage. Snow removal equipment and heavy trucks likely damaged the panel and it may have been slammed from inside the ramp by vehicles parked near the panel that fell, according to a Thornton Thomasetti report.

There is absolutely not one thing new about the concern regarding deferred maintenance and its role in the O'Donnell Park tragedy.

As Milwaukee County Executive, Scott Walker was infamous for his preference of kicking the can down the road by deferring maintenance and delaying repairs on many county buildings, especially those in the parks. In an audit done just six months before the tragedy, the county auditors presented a report listing almost $300,000 in deferred maintenance and delayed repairs just to the parks buildings.

Nor was it the first time that a county building fell apart from the poor care they received under Walker's watch. A piece of cornice fell off of the Milwaukee County Courthouse fell off just months before the tragedy.

Immediately after the tragedy, then Milwaukee Board Chairman Lee Holloway issued a statement of sympathy and ordered that the rest of the county buildings immediately undergo inspection.

Not only did Walker show deplorable behavior by condemning the statement, but his own actions showed exactly where his priorities were, and they weren't with the victims:

What makes Walker’s accusations even more egregious is that the first thing Walker did was to check in at the courthouse to see if there was any deferred maintenance. At the press conference that occurred shortly after the tragedy, after appropriately expressing his sympathy for the victims, Walker felt it necessary to keep repeating that there was no deferred maintenance that he was aware of. It was as if his first concern was that he didn’t get blamed for this catastrophe.

If one wanted further proof that deferred maintenance is not a new theory by any stretch of the imagination, one would not have to go further than the same paper. On July 6, the paper had a report that included this snippet (emphasis ours):

Though the connections are drawing the interest of investigators, including the sheriff’s department and district attorney’s office, it’s not yet clear whether a change in design would explain why the panel dislodged and fell.

Engineering experts caution that there is rarely one villain in such accidents, and unlikely suspects can play a surprising role.

“Usually the small details cause big problems,” said Al Ghorbanpoor, chairman of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s civil engineering department.

Also to be explored is whether the county took steps over the years to block moisture from getting into the joints connecting the panels to the walls. Moisture could have corroded the connections, said Ghorbanpoor, who has investigated building failures.

And then on the very next day, they had another article which had this in it (again, emphasis ours):

Experts agree that the top of the slab, where the panel was connected to the parking garage wall, is the key weight-bearing point. They also say that hanging such panels – which are purely a decorative feature – is a straightforward job that doesn’t require sophisticated engineering.

“There could be 10 different ways of doing this,” said Al Ghorbanpoor, chairman of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s civil engineering department. Investigators will want to check the design, the quality of construction and maintenance of the panel, he said.
Indeed, a review of the maintenance records from the 2009 audit shows that a lot of work needed to be done on the parking structure.

Walker and his apologists claimed that the repairs had been made in the six months between the audit and the tragedy.

However, an independent study of the building by Inspec revealed otherwise. It was so bad that engineer Dwight Benoy said that the parking garage was "one of the worst ones" of the hundreds of buildings he's ever seen. Their 66-page report verifies that the building was in horrendous condition with many needed repairs as a result of obviously very poor maintenance.

Perhaps the most egregious part of the whole story is why the maintenance was deferred and the repairs went undone.

In a article appearing in the BizTimes, Milwaukee County Supervisor John Weishan exposed the fact that in Walker's eight years as county executive, he raided the the capital fund, diverting $112 million in sales tax revenue, which was earmarked for maintenance and repairs and used it to fill gaps in his operating budgets.

Whether the recent article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is the result of sloppy reporting or part of the paper's ongoing history of under-reporting Walker's responsibility for many of the problems that Milwaukee County has and is still experiencing as a result of his poor leadership skills, it is utterly disgraceful and downright shameful for the way it dishonors the victims of this horrid tragedy.

It also is a gross disservice to the people who rely on them for factual and honest reporting.  They have the solemn responsibility to do better than that.

Cross posted at Milwaukee County First.

The Good, The Bad And The Truly Incredulous

Last night, I wrote about the facts revealed by two motions filed by Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf in regards to motions to dismiss and suppress charges against Tim Russell.

Today, the rest of the world caught up to the gentle reader and made their reports, with mixed results.

Marie Rohde, writing for WisPolitics.com, did a very able job in her report and covered all the basis. This is what a news article should look like.

Steve Schultze at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel didn't do nearly as well as Rohde with his original minimalist article.  He then beefed it up and made it better, probably due to Aunt Bee showing him up by linking to my post, but failed to do a lot of follow through questions regarding Sykes' knowledge of the source of the information.

Furthermore, there is this:

In another disclosure in Landgraf's court filing, a copy of a letter to Russell's lawyer is included that says Milwaukee County Supervisor Joe Sanfelippo gave a statement to prosecutors. Russell had sought that and numerous other documents from prosecutors to help prepare his defense. 

Sanfelippo said Tuesday that he was an Operation Freedom board member and that he had volunteered serving food at the event.

What Schultze doesn't report, and maybe isn't even aware of, is that Kelly Rindfleisch had been observed in Sanfelippo's office a number of times, discussing campaign issues and other political topics.  This is, of course, a very distinct no-no.  It is illegal to do political work in a government office.

Then there is Rick Esenberg, who takes money from the Bradley Foundation and works hand in hand with Citizens for a Responsible Government, and yet considers himself to be a credible resource. He takes his leave of absence from reality with this:

This would make him a recipient of a leak - not its source.  There is no evidence that that he was under any legal obligation not to pass it along. Who the initial source was - and whether there was a leak that violated a secrecy order - remains unknown. And that is the more critical question.
Nor does the e-mail establish that Sykes was being “hypocritical” for complaining of leaks from the Doe. To the contrary, it substantiated his complaints, even as it did not reveal the original source.
The September 26, 2010 e-mail from John HIller to then County Executive Walker is no more illuminating. Apparently Hiller found out that Dan Bice was writing a story, talked with him about the story and reported on the conversation to Walker. In the course of the e-mail, Hiller says that Bice told him that he got "much" of his "information" from one of Darlene Wink's attorneys who send him an e-mail defending her. But what that "information" was and whether revealing it would have violated a secrecy order is not revealed. (Indeed, if the lawyer had breached secrecy, he would have almost certainly asked Bice for confidentiality which he obviously did not. If he had, Bice would hardly have identified him to Hiller.)

I don't even know where to go with this. You can't argue against insanity.  Not only does Esenberg fabricate things, he totally misconstrues what is there and tries to make it fit into his own skewed sense of reality.  Then again, I have already pointed out that people have a hard time dealing with reality when it conflicts with their own ill-formed perceptions.  Esenberg has thrown full in with Walker and cannot accept the fact yet that he was wrong.

But I eagerly await Esenberg's essay on how photos of the Earth show that it's flat.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Takes Up Writing Creative Fiction

When Patrick McIlheran completed the ultimate hypocrisy of leaving the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to become a part of the big government bureaucracy he spent years raling against, I thought that might be the end of the paper's venture into producing creative fiction.

Wow! I could never have been any more wrong!

Their county reporter, Steve Schultze, teams up with some county officials and does quite the admirable job of picking up where PaddyMac left off. His article is such a convoluted mess of opinion, unexplained facts, half-truths and unchallenged lies, it boggles the mind and makes one wonder where to even start addressing such a miasma of misinformation. It's enough to make C. S. Lewis jealous.

Schultze starts out with saying that Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele (pronounced: Walker Lite) hasn't ruled out pay cuts or lay offs to balance a $51 million deficit.  But nowhere does he say when this deficit was discovered, if it's actual or merely projected, or what caused this alleged deficit. Considering this is the first time it's being mentioned, a little background would be nice. Journalistic even.

Then Schultze forgets he's a reporter and gives us an op-ed paragraph:

The new state law, which took effect Wednesday, paves the way for changes that in the past would have been difficult if not impossible to achieve. The county's largest union, District Council 48 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, made an unsuccessful 11th-hour push to get a new contract before the legal cloud blocking implementation of the bargaining measure was lifted.

Schultze forgets to mention a few things with that opinion. Things such as:

• The unions have a federal lawsuit that is still very much in play.
• There's already been a federal ruling in favor of collective bargaining rights, whether they be public or private unions.
• There is growing evidence that Walker's "tools" aren't all Walker tried to pretend they were.

Schultze then delves into the various things that Walker's bill will allow the county to do to protect the special interests, with a surprising accuracy, but then mentions the furloughs.  What he doesn't mention about the furloughs is that they have been found to be illegal and that the county needed to cease and desist immediately and reimburse the employees with back pay for the disallowed forced time off without pay.  Nor does he mention that this finding was sustained when the County went back to WERC to appeal the ruling.

Schultze then brings Supervisor Joe Sanfelippo into this land of make-believe and quotes him as saying:

Supervisor Joe Sanfelippo, the chairman of the County Board's Personnel Committee, said he didn't expect the state law to usher in drastic changes for workers, though he acknowledged workers view the pension and health care payments as significant.

A twenty percent cut in pay is not significant? Would someone let Sanfelippo know that we don't all own taxi cab companies for which we can vote an increase in taxi funding for every time things get a little tight.

Schultze then starts talking about the possibility of privatization. He specifically mentions the security guards being privatized. Brilliant move there by Abele and company. After all, it worked so well last time they tried it, with the less than zero savings and the convicts the private agency hired.

What Schultze doesn't mention is that Abele and company are also looking at privatizing the entire Child Support Enforcement program. This won't help much, considering that child support enforcement actually brings in more money for the county tax payers than it uses, giving the county to support other programs or help pay off some of the debt. Now that extra money will be going to some CEO or board as profit instead of giving the tax payers some relief.

To round off this fiction comes Chairman Lee Holloway with this line:

County Board Chairman Lee Holloway sought to reassure employees they'll be treated fairly without union contracts. He said he wants to appoint a special committee that includes workers to review county work rules to see what changes might be needed. Holloway also wants the rules to apply to all workers. Under the previous system, unions sometimes had different rules than nonunion employees.

"I won't let anybody beat up on union people," Holloway said.

Do I really have to point out that Holloway has not voted in the unions favor in years and with the aid of his new pal, Sanfelippo, chose to screw over not only the unions but also the tax payers just a couple of weeks ago?

Having Holloway say that he's going to take care of the workers is probably about as comforting as when he says he's going to take care of his rental properties.

About the only truthful thing in the article comes from Kurt Zunker, president of Local 882, who pointed out that people aren't feeling very safe right now (emphasis mine):

The prospect has demoralized many of those workers, and several hurriedly retired last week, said Kurt Zunker, president of the AFSCME local that represents the guards, as well as parks and highway workers.

"They're panicking," he said. "You get jerked around so many ways, what do you believe anymore?" Many of the guards fear losing their jobs next year, as well as benefits this year, Zunker said.

Indeed, the route Abele is taking will lead him to greater problems than trying to balancing a spreadsheet. Then again, it may be what he wants, considering that he is part of a group that is trying to "blow up" Milwaukee County, or at least put it under state receivership, like they're doing in Michigan.

I think the only group that might be happy with the course of events lately are the trial lawyers as people's rights continue to get trampled on and as people start suffering real harm from the faulty policies the county is taking on.

Is Steve Schultze A Walker Plant Or Just A Bad Reporter?

In this morning's paper, Steve Schultze of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel again proves that he is not a good reporter.

The topic of his article was the actions of the County Board's Finance and Audit Committee from yesterday. His title was "Panel strays from Walker parks plan." Just the title alone feeds into the garbage editorial the paper also put forth, but does not reflect reality. Of course, I would have written it as "Panel corrects Walker parks plan," but that would have been just as biased, in the other direction. A much more objective title would have been "Panel disagrees with Walker parks plan," or "Panel changes park plans."

But that is by far not the most egregious part.

Schultze, as his norm, goes on to make a number of inaccurate statements in his report.

In the original article, Schultze claimed that an amendment to remove the proposal for parking meters along the lakefront won (it has since been corrected in the online version). The error was so grievous that Supervisor Gerry Broderick felt compelled to issue a press release to correct the matter:

Monday afternoon, the County Board’s Finance & Audit Committee denied an amendment proposed by Supervisor Gerry Broderick to remove parking meters for Lincoln Memorial Drive from the 2010 County Budget.

This morning, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel inaccurately reported that the proposed parking meters were defeated. In fact, the Committee voted 4-3 to deny an amendment that would have removed the parking meters from the budget.

“The installation of parking meters would severely restrict public access to this beautiful natural resource,” said Supervisor Broderick, Chairman of the Parks, Energy & Environment Committee. “I encourage all County residents to contact their County Supervisor and the County Executive. Tell them to oppose the installation of parking meters on Lincoln Memorial Drive and Veterans Park.”

Then on Facebook, Supervisor Peggy West points out another inaccuracy by Schultze. Schultze correctly points out that the panel restored funding for the community centers, but claimed that it added $1.1 million to the budget. Supervisor West remarked:

Steve Schultze strikes again, the total for both King & Kosciuszko Community Centers is $804,000. IDK where this guys drifts off to during our meetings but I mean this stuff is in writing! So the only conclusion I can come to is that he was trying to lie on purpose? I don't know what the problem is....

Of course, this is not the first time or the second time that I have called Schultze's reporting into question.

And then the paper wonders why their circulation keeps dropping and they don't hold anyone's respect. It really is their own fault too. They had their chance.

For an accurate accounting of what happened on Monday, please read the Board's Budget Blast.