The Milwaukee County executive campaign has started in earnest over the past week. Apparently responding to recent internal polls showing his low approval ratings, County Executive Abele has begun his multimillion-dollar multimedia advertising blitz with a glossy mailer sent to many homes in the county and television ads trying to get across the same messages.
Unfortunately, like so much of Abele’s life and his biography, what he claims and what is actually true are often very far apart. In either his brochure or his TV ads he tries to claim that he is working to improve the lives of women and working families, that he balanced the county budgets without raising taxes over the past five years, and that since he has family money, “Chris Abele can’t be bought.”
To start with, his concern for women is apparently totally poll driven because along with his low approval rating, his concern for women and working families also polled very low and for good reason. Since women are still paid less and since single women are often the ones raising their children on their own, they live on very tight budgets and any change in their paychecks has a huge impact on their family’s well-being. One way to help low-wage working women—such as nursing assistants and home care workers—is to enact a living wage policy, which in many cases simply brings salaries in line with past cost of living increases. But when county supervisors passed a living wage ordinance, Abele vetoed it, which the board ultimately overrode.
In addition, Abele also aggressively used the Republicans’ Act 10, which gutted public employee unions, to dramatically shift the health insurance costs to employees. This benefit was something that the unions bargained for; county employees gave up some wage increases over the years in exchange for the county covering a larger part of their health insurance costs. This shift significantly reduced the take-home pay of lower-paid county employees such as a single mom struggling to raise her kids alone. There are good reasons for women and working families to distrust Abele.
Abele’s second point about balancing the county budgets with no tax increases is a page out of the playbook of his mentor, Scott Walker. First of all, state law requires every mayor and county executive to balance their budget. Second, like Walker, Abele submits a totally unrealistic and unsustainable budget to the county board and the board has to be the adults in the room and craft a real and sustainable budget. The second question is whether he raised county taxes. The facts are the facts, Mr. Abele. In Scott Walker’s final county budget, the property tax levy was $269,554,701. In the last budget proposal Abele presented to the county board his property tax levy was $282,985,125, a $13.4 million or 5% increase in the property tax levy submitted by Abele.
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Abele also committed county taxpayers to pay an additional $80 million for the Bucks arena, where he has courtside season tickets. It is not a question of whether you like the new arena or not, it is a question of who should pay for it. Scott Walker understood that the entire state benefits from a national sports franchise like our Green Bay Packers, and that most people attending Bucks games live outside of Milwaukee County, so he proposed that the state bond for the public portion of the cost of the arena and have all of the state taxpayers share the cost.
But Abele stepped into the process and used his “negotiating skills” to end up sticking Milwaukee County taxpayers with an $80 million tab. Regarding his negotiating skills, Donald Trump would say, “CHRIS ABELE, YOU’RE FIRED.”
Then there’s the final point Abele is trying to make, that since he’s from a very wealthy family, he can’t be bought. That line of argument worked for Sen. Herb Kohl because in Kohl’s case, it was true. Sen. Kohl was willing to stand up for the average working Wisconsinite against the special interests in Washington.
Abele, who claims to be a Democrat, has been very willing to do the opposite. He is anxious to give away the county to the elite 1% at the expense of the average Milwaukee County resident. For example, he sold prime Milwaukee County land adjacent to the proposed new Bucks arena for $1. Perhaps Abele doesn’t realize the true value of Milwaukee County. As one small business owner in town whose family goes back generations said, “When the county assets were not paid for with the sweat and toil of your ancestors, it is pretty easy to give them away to your pals.”
Abele’s campaign theme is that he can’t be bought, but he believes that we, the voters, can be bought. Abele feels he can ignore and work against the average county voter for four and a half years and then, come election time, buy our votes with his slick, expensive and deceptive advertising campaign. So for those who can remember the 1988 presidential campaign debates, in the same vein as then-vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle was admonished when he tried to compare himself to the late President Kennedy: Mr. Abele, “We know Herb Kohl, Herb Kohl is a friend of ours, Mr. Abele, you are no Herb Kohl.”
