A campaign promise is an elastic thing. A candidate often makes a promise he or she later seems to break – except that it involves an issue so complex you can’t quite prove the promise is broken.
But two Milwaukee County supervisors, Joe Rice and Paul Cesarz, ran as reform candidates who promised to give back an exact amount of their salary. Cesarz promised to donate precisely $48,000. Rice promised to give back $149,360. Those promises made them seem like bargains to the voters, and naturally helped them get elected.
Cesarz was first elected in 2002, and shortly thereafter, said the job of supervisor only takes 20 hours a week and should pay only $15,668 (he seems to like exact figures). But Cesarz collected the entire salary of $50,679, arguing there was no point in any giveback, as it would just be spent by the board.
But that got him in trouble. Faced with a tough race against LeAnn Launstein in 2004, Cesarz suddenly changed his tune. He signed on with a group of reform candidates who promised to donate $1,000 per month of their supervisor salaries to community groups, as reported in a March 24, 2004, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story. The reduced pay would create a salary appropriate for citizen legislators, the group declared.
“It’s too little, too late,” Launstein said of Cesarz’s promise. “He knows people are unhappy he hasn’t returned pay.”
But the gimmick seemed to work, and Cesarz defeated Launstein. In 2008, he defeated opponent Jan Balistrieri, and was endorsed by the Journal Sentinel, with no questions asked as to whether he ever donated the $48,000 to charity over his four-year term of office.
Rice was making his first run for the county board in 2004 and joined Cesarz and company in agreeing to donate $1,000 per month of his salary to local community groups. Rice said he would earmark his donations for “parks work.”
But Rice didn’t stop there. In an April 4, 2004 story, he told the JS that he considered the county supervisor position a part-time job, promising to accept only half of his salary and turn down any pension or fringe benefits. His opponent, incumbent Jim McGuigan, argued the job was full-time and said he would accept the full salary. Voters preferred Rice’s approach.
It’s possible Rice meant to replace his commitment to donate $1,000 in charity per month with his promise to give back half his salary. But he never offered any such explanation to the press. Which left him running as a kind of saint who would only accept $25,340 of his salary and also donate $12,000 a year to the parks system. This would leave him just $13,340 annual salary with no fringe benefits.
Those extravagant promises helped Rice defeat McGuigan. But Rice ran unopposed in 2008, so no one challenged him as to whether he lived up to his campaign promises. In August 2007, he told the Badger Blogger that he was donating $1,000 per month to charity as promised, but not necessarily to the parks system. But the Badger Blogger asked for no documentation for any charitable group that had gotten money from Rice.
Normally, it’s none of our business what politicians give to charity. But in this case, the issue is doubly important to disclose because Rice and Cesarz promised to (1) make up for the fact that taxpayers were overcharged for supervisors by giving back money to charity, and (2) give the donations to local community groups and thereby improve the community in which the voters lived. Rice, of course, went much further, promising to also relieve the taxpayers by returning half of his salary, or $101,360 over four years.
Under any circumstances, the voters deserve to know if these promises were fulfilled. (And the media, including yours truly, failed in not raising this issue when the two ran for re-election in 2008.) But in this particular case, we’re talking about two fiscal conservatives who take a tough stand on county spending and routinely criticize their colleagues for proposing to raise the salaries of county board members. But just how tough – or honest – are they when it comes to their own compensation?
Cesarz did not respond to my e-mail question or return a phone call. Rice e-mailed me to say he is now “compensated at the same rate as the rest of the members of the county board of supervisors,” and that he made no promises to give back salary when running for re-election in 2008.
So what happened to their promises for the 2004-2008 term? I think it’s a question worth asking – and one that voters deserve to have answered.
Tom Nardelli, Superstar
Last week, salary levels also generated controversy for Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker. Walker promised some huge raises for three top officials. That included an 11 percent raise for airport director Barry Bateman, who many observers would say is doing a very good job, and 13 percent increase for county facilities management director Jack Takerian (who few have ever heard of). Walker argued both were getting recruited for jobs elsewhere, so the raises were needed. Perhaps, but it’s worth noting that Walker’s disgraced predecessor Tom Ament use to make the same sort of claims.
But what really made the whole thing smell was Walker’s decision to give his chief-of- staff Tom Nardelli a princely 26 percent raise, bumping him from $75,000 to $95,000. That is extraordinary on many different levels. For starters, no one could imagine some head hunter trying to hire away Nardelli. He’s a solid, not-so-imaginative public servant, hardly the sort of superstar you’d imagine handing a 26 percent raise.
He’s also someone already collecting a military pension and a city pension of $30,000 per year. If he kept his job at the current salary of $75,000 for three more years, he’d get an additional county pension of $5,700 to $7,600 a year, as JS reporter Steve Schultz noted. In short, Nardelli has every incentive to stick around.
Finally, he’s a political operative, Walker’s chief of staff. This looks like a reward by Walker for loyalty, while he meanwhile slashes county staff and departments in addition to freezing the salary of highly regarded parks director Sue Black.
Walker noted that Mayor Tom Barrett pays his chief of staff more than Nardelli gets, but Walker himself has argued – and quite reasonably – that comparisons to the city are not valid when it comes to salaries for supervisors. We arguably have too many supervisors compared to other counties nationally. But many counties also get by without a county executive and with just a county board chair. In short, we’re paying for too much county government, period, making any comparisons to the city invalid. Given all that, who in their right mind would want to hand Tom Nardelli a $20,000 raise?
The Buzz:
-Scott Walker is quite likely to run for governor in 2010, so he doubtlessly was chastened by the results of the Public Policy Forum’s August survey of Milwaukee County residents. Tucked toward the back of the survey was a question asking residents to identify area politicians. Just 16 percent didn’t know who the governor was and 17 percent didn’t know who the mayor was. But a remarkable 46 percent didn’t know who the county executive was. That’s not good news for Walker.
-Was Mount Mary College President Linda Timm fired? She announced her resignation last week after just two years on the job and with no other job offer in hand. The college business has gotten brutally competitive. Is Timm the latest casualty?
And the Sports Nut offers a warm and funny look at all the craziness at Miller Park on Sunday.
