Thursday, September 18, 2008

The Battle Of The Budget Has Begun

In 2001, when Milwaukee County was still involved in its own child welfare program, the people running the show, Ralph Hollman and Renee Booker, ran up a deficit of several hundreds of thousands of dollars. This opened the door the state was waiting for to kick the county out of the system completely and to privatize everything that they weren't legally responsible to keep.

A few years later, after Scott Walker, Tosa Ranger, took over the helm of the county, the Department of Aging kept running deficits in the millions of dollars.

Because of these types of occurrences, the County passed an ordinance stating that if any department head found that they were running in the red, they needed to notify the County Board immediately.

I learned this week that George Torres, head of the Department of Public Works, is currently running a $330,000 deficit in transit. He has yet to formally notify the County Board, and they found out from irate workers at their public hearings that have occurred last week and this week. The workers were angry because to make up for his deficit, and again without notifying the County Board, he issued layoff notices to every worker in County Fleet. These are the people that keep the county cars, trucks and snow plows running and on the roads.

I guess Torres and Walker are hoping for a real light snow fall this winter.

It has also been no secret that Walker has been wanting to lay off all the facility (read housekeeping and food service) workers at the Behavioral Health Division (aka mental health complex. He put it in his budget last year, only to have it reinstated by the County Board. This year, including the cuts weren't enough for Walker. He has issued layoff notices to the nearly 80 workers there as well.

The real kicker is that he has offered no proposal on how to feed the patients at BHD, or how to keep the facility clean. Likewise, there has been no plans made regarding who is going to maintain and repair the county vehicles. At least none that he has made public yet.

While I have no admiration for Walker, I cannot believe that he has not thought of something to cover these issues. One possibility is that he is trying to bluff the County Board into a corner regarding the layoffs, and forcing them to once again take the actions he should of, if he had any leadership skills to speak of. Also, this kind of behavior got the county sued by the unions last year, until he dropped the layoffs.

The other possibility is that he has already signed contracts with private agencies. The problem with that is that this would mean that they were no bid contracts, and that would definitely raise concern among many people, and not just people like me who don't care for the way that Walker's been driving the county into the ground anyway.

ADDENDUM

In another dazzling display of Walker's undeserved arrogance, he has threatened to veto any resolution that the County Board would pass regarding the status of the mental health complex.
The County Board is poised to pass a bill that would authorize building a new facility on the county grounds, across the street from the current facility. Walker has threatened to veto it.

I am still waiting for someone to explain to me why Walker is so tenacious on wanting to move the complex to the old St. Michael's Hospital. There are many areas to be concerned about this push of Walker's:
  • St Mike's building is even older than the building that BHD currently inhabits. Does he think that this building will improve with age?
  • The lease to rent St. Mike's would cost $9 million more than building a new structure. And that is even after a discount from the developer and Wheaton Franciscan. And that is not including the escalator clause in the contract that the paper refuses to report on.
  • The contract is based on a no-bid contract with WEAS Development. How do we know that WEAS is even offering the best deal.
  • What does Walker think would happen to the rent when the lease is up? It's not going to go down. So do taxpayers get hit with whatever they want to charge, or will they get hit with having to buy land and build a new building after all?
  • St. Mike's is far from any medical hospital, whereas the county grounds are close and patients can get faster care.
  • Proximaty to the medical-surgical hospitals would allow BHD to regain its accreditation, and bring in more money from Medicare, instead of losing it.

I am really beginning to seriously question what Walker's motivation is in this whole thing. Did he promise someone something, and is desperate to deliver on it?

Something tells me that Walker won't be telling us the truth about that any time soon.

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