The honeymoon for Milwaukee in the national press is over. Ever since the creation of Miller Park and the art museum’s Calatrava addition, Milwaukee has been portrayed as a newly cool place in countless national stories. New condos, bars, restaurants and riverfront redevelopment have been an inevitable part of the story.
It was all true, but that didn’t mean the old Milwaukee wasn’t still there, lurking in the background, and last week the national press rediscovered our grimmer side.
“It’s as if Milwaukee, Wis., had reverted to a state of lethal chaos,” a TIME magazine story led off last week before ticking off some ugly recent murders here to exemplify what it calls a new American crime wave. TIME likes trends.
About 90 percent of the story was about Milwaukee, and it ran down the expected problems: the decline of manufacturing, high inner city unemployment and workers who lack education. The freshest information concerned the impact of paroled prisoners turned criminals. “We’re charging the same guys who came through our doors 10 or 20 years ago,” says retiring District Attorney E. Michael McCann.
Weirdly, the point gets support from Archbishop Timothy Dolan, whom the story turns into some kind of expert on crime. Dolan says “people are scared” and notes the problem of paroled prisoners, adding “if we don’t want to see them again and again, we’ve got to offer them more than the clothes on their backs, a Greyhound ticket and $15 in their pocket.”
Earlier this year, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett asked for a review of arrest records, which showed that one-fifth of arrests were of people on probation and parole. “We don’t have enough corrections officers to keep tabs on them,” says Barrett spokesperson Eileen Force.
In October, Gov. Jim Doyle responded to Barrett’s plea by assigning 13 probation and parole officers to work with Milwaukee police on the problem. Barrett will be pushing for more such help from the state corrections system.
“The city as a whole is not going to hell in a hand basket,” Force adds. True, and the rise in crime could still be a one-year blip rather than a trend. But the bloom may be off the rose, as far as national coverage of Milwaukee.
The Real Story on Sick Leave Benefits
In October, a Legislative Audit Bureau report found that 80 percent of University of Wisconsin System professors claimed no sick days, meaning they could store up those days and convert them into payment for retiree health insurance. Professors gain an average of more than $222,000 they can use to buy insurance, far more than average state employees, who are more likely to claim sick days.
The situation is suspicious, but the media soon forgot all about it. Somebody, perhaps a professor, tipped off the Journal Sentinel that legislators, too, rarely report sick days, and now the paper is riding this story mercilessly. As a result, the embarrassed legislators aren’t looking real hard at sick leave for those naughty professors.
In the meantime, the real scandal of sick pay isn’t being examined. Here’s how the law works: Workers pile up unused sick time over decades, going back to their earliest years, when their pay was comparatively low. But they cash in credits upon retirement based on their highest hourly rate of pay, rather than the pay earned when most unused sick days were actually amassed. This inflation affects not just profs or politicians but every state employee. Taxpayers pay more than they should because of an inflated way of accounting that could be easily corrected: Each employee’s unused sick days should be converted to credits at the end of each year at the hourly pay actually earned.
It’s worth noting that the sick leave credits can have value for taxpayers. Every time a public school teacher takes a sick day, for instance, the school must pay for a substitute teacher. Sick leave credits can discourage this from happening. State workers, moreover, aren’t eligible for lifetime health insurance coverage, as has been the case for Milwaukee County and Milwaukee Public Schools employees.
As for legislators, the law only allows them 65 percent of the sick leave credit that other state employees get. Even if all 132 legislators faithfully reported the days they were sick, the annual savings for taxpayers would be peanuts.
By contrast, there’s a total of about 66,000 state government and UW employees. If all were given sick leave credits at the hourly pay they actually earned at the time, the savings for taxpayers would be massive. The system would also be much fairer, giving employees credit for the actual value of unused sick days. That’s the real scandal of sick leave, and a simple legal change could easily fix it.
They Hate Me, They Really Hate Me
The Citizens for Responsible Government are on the warpath again, and this time their target is, er, me. They challenged my opinion that their report on MATC had “many errors.” I think they’re right: the phrase was inflated and unfair.
That said, the report is studded with sweeping conclusions that undermine its credibility. Though it’s called an “Audit” and CRG folks say five CPAs worked on it, the report’s language hardly suggests green eye-shaded exactitude. Rather, it seems intended to prove the sole goal of every public employee, particularly MATC teachers, is to fleece the taxpayers.
The report is filled with “lies and exaggerations,” charges Mike Rosen, president of the MATC teachers’ union, in a press release.In response, CRG offered a rebuttal that concluding with the assurance the group is “not looking to pick a fight with the unions.” Its report was certainly an odd way of showing this.
Rosen’s statement, by the way, also accuses the CRG report of plagiarizing from “Bruce Murphy’s columns,” suggesting I’m in league with CRG. That will be news to them.
In a similar vein, the Shepherd Express, a knee-jerk supporter of the MATC teachers’ union, complains that I am in opposition to Rosen and his rosy view of MATC’s finances, adding that “Murphy is usually wrong and is a conservative.” This courageous salvo came in an un-bylined column (unavailable online) but holds out the hope that those few times when I’m right will some day be noted.
Meanwhile, the CRG folks have made a public records request of e-mail exchanges between Rosen and me, apparently to prove I’m actually a liberal in cahoots with the union. Rosen, a man not given to excessive merriment, probably collapsed in laughter at the request.
Yet CRG has made no retraction demand from the JS, though the newspaper suggested the true per-student cost was $17,619 rather than the $23,670 figure that the CRG’s five certified public accountants tabulated. JS reporter Tom Held’s story says the $17,619 figure came from MATC financial guy Mike Sargent. But Sargent tells me he never gave this number to the JS.
Sargent and the MATC administration, meanwhile, say the CRG per-student cost estimate is too high (which would thereby inflate its projection of future increases) because it relies on a budget figure that double-counts federal grants. CRG folks heap scorn on this contention but never made an effort to check their figures with MATC officials.
And no, I am not making any of this up.
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