When you have a well-funded campaign, you poll test to see how the candidate is viewed on every possible issue. Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele’s re-election campaign is doing just that and according to people close to him, the numbers don’t look very good. Perhaps that’s why this early in the campaign we county voters are receiving a number of his slick and expensive campaign pieces in the mail. Apparently Abele and his team of high-priced campaign consultants believe that if you repeat something often enough, people will believe it, even when it is not true.
One of the issues Abele is struggling to convince voters to believe is that he has helped improve the lives of women and working families. His apparent concern about improving the lives of women and working families will be a tough one for his consultants to deal with, since his record certainly doesn’t support it and he refuses to meet with the public, including community groups and activists, before crafting policy proposals.
We’ll deal with all of Abele’s deceptive advertising in future columns, but for now we’ll look at his more specific assertion that he’s expanded bus service without raising fares. This is definitely an issue of importance for many women and working families. While his mailer paints a rosy picture of the county’s bus system, in reality Abele is following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Scott Walker, and holding the Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) together with Band-Aid solutions as it faces a very uncertain future.
Walker notoriously neglected MCTS and he refused to find a dedicated funding solution for this vital county service, instead preferring to fund it with the county property tax levy plus state and federal monies. That’s unlike most other large metropolitan areas in the U.S., which have dedicated funding sources for mass transit. Like Walker, Abele is funding the bus system on property taxes and is finding short-term solutions to keep the system running. Unlike Walker, Abele has gone even further with his scheme to privatize the system. In 2014, Abele offered a $492 million transit management contract to an out-of-state company, MV Transportation, in a bidding process that was so unfair and rigged to favor this out-of-state company that the pending contract had to be withdrawn. Why Abele tried to rig the process in favor of this out-of-state company, no one can seem to explain. In addition, bus drivers never went on strike during the Walker era, but they did so in July when Abele’s team proposed totally naïve and unacceptable terms during contract negotiations with the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 998. Abele eventually gave in to reason and negotiated a fair contract, but only after the union gave him a near-unanimous no-confidence vote in September. Surely Abele wanted to take the issue off the table before he announced his re-election campaign.
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Abele often boasts that the Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) has increased route miles under his watch. What he doesn’t tell you is that the expanded bus services didn’t result from his actions. In 2014, a coalition of community groups—including the Milwaukee Inner-City Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH), the Black Health Coalition of Wisconsin with the assistance of the Milwaukee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)—won a huge case in federal court when they successfully argued that the state Department of Transportation expanded freeways at the expense of public transit. That decision resulted in $13.5 million granted to the county to expand routes out to the suburbs through 2018. The other system expansion is the result of a three-year $5.7 million federal grant that will run out by 2018.
Although Abele is duct-taping the system together to keep it running, it faces an uncertain future. According to the nonpartisan and highly respected Public Policy Forum in its analysis of Abele’s proposed 2016 budget, “The deep structural hole in the transit system’s budget […] remains one of the county’s foremost financial challenges. While the problem was temporarily alleviated during the past few years through the use of two sources of one-time federal revenue, that hole still remains. The bottom line is that MCTS’ revenue streams still do not have nearly the capacity required to cover its growth in fixed costs and its bus replacement needs. This suggests that at some point, a new local funding source will be needed to maintain transit services if policymakers wish to do so without sacrificing other important county services.”
That solution may be on the horizon, but it won’t be because of Abele. Last week, on a 13-4 vote, the county board approved an amendment to Abele’s budget sponsored by Supervisor Michael Mayo calling for the creation of a Regional Transit Authority (RTA) either through state legislation or by asking the state to allow the county to hold a binding referendum on it. If that happens, the county could eventually take the system off of the property tax and fund it with a dedicated revenue stream, in this case a half-cent sales tax, as just about every other major transit system in the country does. Remember—in an advisory referendum in 2008, county voters supported an increase in the county’s sales tax to fund transit and other important services, instead of relying on the property tax. Abele didn’t veto this budget amendment on Tuesday.
In addition, the future of the GO Pass, a new program for Milwaukee’s seniors and disabled bus riders, is unclear. Since the program was developed by supervisors, Abele has shown no support for it and initially vetoed it. Abele provided funding for it in his proposed 2016 budget but it’s unclear if he will keep the program if he wins re-election next April. He said in a WUWM interview that he was concerned about the program’s sustainability. “Not all seniors are poor,” Abele said, adding that he’d rather keep existing routes going or expand routes than provide free bus rides for seniors and the disabled.
