The proposed state budget for the next two years is bad news for Milwaukee. We all understand state fiscal challenges require shared sacrifice, but Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal disproportionately hurts our city.
It undermines the long-standing partnership between the state and the city by cutting shared revenue and slashing payments for city services to state facilities. While spending on interstate highways balloons in the proposed budget, support for local roads – the money that helps pay for fixing potholes and maintaining busy city streets – is cut by 10 percent.
It eliminates recycling grants, threatening that popular municipal service.
Also, significantly, the governor’s budget lacks fairness. City residents will feel service cuts and some hard working city employees will pay much more for benefits. But police union members and fire union members will waltz along without sharing the load.
That decision by the governor reeks of political favoritism. Despite his claims, Governor Walker neither proposed nor provided the necessary tools for municipalities like Milwaukee to manage the budget cuts.
The rhetoric surrounding the budget perpetuates the myth that city governments are bloated with excess and inefficiency. That is certainly not true of Milwaukee. We have made dramatic cuts in recent years and dealt with previous state budgets that froze shared revenue.
We have negotiated concessions from unions and kept taxes in line. When a huge, unexpected pension payment was required two years ago, we cinched our belts even tighter.
The budget does not acknowledge Milwaukee’s unique challenges. We are a community with a disproportionate concentration of poverty and a disproportionate demand for municipal health services, police response and fire service.
We are a city in which K-12 education needs additional help, tainted industrial land needs redevelopment and older housing needs rehabilitation.
The budget does nothing to correct the egregious funding flaw in the school choice formula – a flaw that can cost Milwaukee homeowners hundreds of dollars each year.
And it includes a policy change that has nothing to do with the budget: eliminating teacher residency requirements. There is no evidence that this will have even a marginal positive effect on educational outcomes, but it will hurt the city’s tax base.
Milwaukee’s fiscal health and the strength of our business community are important to everyone in the state.
That’s why we need a partnership with Madison that respects local concerns and shares the cutbacks equitably. This proposed budget fails to accomplish that.
Tom Barrett is the mayor of Milwaukee.
