Wisconsin State Fair is a decades-long success, a beloved place for family fun and great cream puffs. So how could it be generating headlines, as it did last week, about financial troubles?
The answer is that the red ink has little to do with the fair and everything to do with bad planning and naked politics. State Fair Park’s problem is not the fair but the debt associated with two other institutions it oversees: the Pettit Ice Center and Wisconsin Expo Center.
The Pettit Ice Center, one of just two covered Olympic ovals in the country, was created in 1992 through the generosity of the late Jane Pettit . But it was the idea of former Milwaukee insurance executive Robert Doucette , who got the state Legislature and former Gov. Tommy Thompson to sign off on the project based on feasibility estimates that exaggerated its potential to earn revenue. Billy Greiner , State Fair Park director at the time, opposed the Pettit Center plan and was pushed out of his job as a result.
Last week, the State Fair Board agreed to sell the Pettit Center and the nine acres on which it sits to a private, nonprofit board for a net cost of about $4.7 million. That will end the problem for State Fair but leaves the Pettit Center’s board with a huge challenge.
The Wisconsin Expo Center is another creation of the Thompson era. Thompson once called himself a builder, and he proved it repeatedly. “As governor, he expanded state spending dramatically,” Thompson admirer Mark Belling recently wrote. In the case of the Expo Center, even some Republican legislators questioned why the state was (once again) approving a project with suspiciously rosy revenue projections. Another key proponent was Bill Drew , former Milwaukee Department of City Development head who had a falling-out with then-Mayor John Norquist and was then closely connected to Thompson, who had appointed Drew to chair the State Fair Park Board.
The plan Drew backed depended upon hurting the city by stealing bookings from the Downtown Midwest Express Center, according to one close observer. Sure enough, once it was built, the Expo grabbed away the Journal Sentinel Sports Show, the realtors’ home show and the Con Ex heavy equipment and machinery show from the Midwest Express Center. The Expo Center has also grabbed the Journal Sentinel’s Golf Show. (Considering the paper’s editorial stance in favor of a strong Downtown, its desertion of the Midwest Express Center seems questionable.)
As in the case of the Pettit Center, the director of the State Fair (this time a gentleman named Rick Bjorklund ) had qualms about the feasibility of the Expo Center. But Bjorklund, like Greiner, soon was gone from the job. Later, Drew told the press that he never would have supported the Expo Center’s creation had he known the projected numbers were “seriously flawed.”
The creation of the Expo Center has added a state tax-supported entity to compete with a locally taxed entity, the Midwest Express Center. The facility cost some $45 million and is now so strapped that it is making interest-only payments on the construction debt. This was empire building with no thought to the tax consequences.
The problem was inherited by Gov. Jim Doyle and State Fair Park Board Chairman Marty Greenberg . Doyle, of course, hasn’t been able to be much of a builder since the state government he inherited had a multi-billion-dollar structural deficit.
The Lottery Paradox
As a feature story in this month’s Milwaukee Magazine documents, lottery winners aren’t really that lucky. Reporter Mario Quadracci requested the names of every Wisconsinite who won at least $500,000 since 1988, when the lottery began. What he found was a high incidence of financial problems (including frequent bankruptcy), criminal arrests, divorce and alcohol and drug problems. Similar results have been found for lottery winners nationally.
When the lottery was created, the law barred the state from running promotional ads, based on the obvious theory that the state shouldn’t be pushing a vice. But the lottery provides some property tax relief, and the state has become dependent on this. So the Legislature has looked the other way as state gaming authorities have proceeded to run “informational” ads that are intended to encourage gambling. In past years, Wisconsin spent just as high a percentage of its lottery budget on ads as other states.
As bad as the results are for many lottery winners, the impact of gambling is even worse for the losers. Studies have shown that compulsive gambling leads to crime and other social problems. To have a government running ads promoting gambling hardly seems like the way to promote the general welfare.
Short Takes
A Sunday New York Times feature story on Racine was ho-hum at best. It noted the decline of manufacturing (hardly news at this point) and the impact of global economic changes but offered little insight other than the general idea that the city is modernizing. The big question for Racine, the impact of its giant southern neighbor, Chicago, was all but ignored. Increasingly, new residents in Racine County are coming from Illinois, where they may still work. Is Racine going to become a part of Chicagoland? That would have been an interesting question to answer.
Speaking of the Windy City, Milwaukee’s airport has often been described as Chicago’s third airport. The idea is that people from Chicago’s northern suburbs can get quicker, more pleasant service in Milwaukee. A recent story in USA Today on passenger waiting times in security lines at 80 airports mostly buttressed that point. The percent of people waiting more than 10 minutes in the security line was 11.2% at Chicago’s Midway airport and 6.9% at O’Hare, compared to just 2.2% for Mitchell International. Milwaukee was among the top 20 airports in this category.
However, the longest wait for any one customer at Milwaukee was 88 minutes, compared to 63 minutes at O’Hare and 45 at Midway. That poor Mitchell International customer waited longer than at nearly any airport in the country. So maybe our airport still needs to make some improvements in the security system.
