This is a guest commentary by Patrick Small.
A cornerstone of Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele’s agenda, unmentioned in his carpet-bombing campaign ads, is his zeal for privatization. In January 2011, Abele told PolitiFact Wisconsin that he is “wide open” to privatizing county services “if it saves money, preserves an important service or improves poorly delivered programs such as mental health.”
Whenever Abele angles to cede county-owned resources to corporations or crony developers, he does so with a blueblood-plutocrat’s certainty. The son of billionaire John Abele, he’s a sixth-generation Boston Brahmin. Abele’s claim that he “can’t be bought” may reflect a belief that he merely “chooses” to hand off public assets to those he deems most worthy. Perhaps he equates such giveaways with hand-picking grant recipients for his family’s Argosy Foundation. It’s a perverse version of feudalism and noblesse oblige—at the public’s expense.
Abele’s privatization schemes are usually hatched behind closed doors without involvement of county supervisors or the public. For example, he acknowledged that secret negotiations with Northwestern Mutual began two years before a proposed contract was announced for the mega-insurer to buy, and repurpose for itself, the lake-view O’Donnell Park. The no-bid price was less than a third of what taxpayers paid to build the park. The kicker: O’Donnell’s vista alone is priceless.
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In a memo pitching the O’Donnell Park deal, Abele factotum Teig Whaley-Smith distorted and omitted major facts. The memo outlining this insider deal never mentioned the park’s multi-purpose pavilion. It deceptively described selling the “O’Donnell Parking Garage,” not a seven-acre, actively used park. Most media simply repeated the NML-county-coordinated obfuscation, thus misleading the public. Prior to the proposed sale, routine maintenance of O’Donnell Park facilities appeared to be minimal; the park’s neglected condition was then cited as the reason to virtually give it away. (Abele later appointed Whaley-Smith to head the county’s administrative services, the most powerful job under Abele’s supervision.)
The proposed O’Donnell scheme began to unravel when Urban Milwaukee’s Bruce Murphy revealed aspects of the “sweetheart deal” buried in the contract’s fine print. Despite assertions that NML would “preserve” O’Donnell Park, the loopholed agreement guaranteed only limited parking and temporary pedestrian access to Milwaukee Art Museum’s bridge. After intense public protest, the county board rejected the deal in December 2014.
Undeterred, Abele continued trying to sell O’Donnell Park through a bidding process. He even got tea-party legislative allies to tuck a midnight measure into the state budget before the Fourth of July weekend in 2015. It specifically allowed Abele to sell O’Donnell Park without county board oversight or citizen input. The park was identified only by its legal description, not its name. Once exposed, this legislative subterfuge was thwarted at the 11th hour by public advocates.
Abele’s end-run outraged the art museum’s supporters. There was no apparent reason—beyond a power play—for him to sneakily undermine MAM’s county board-approved negotiations regarding O’Donnell Park. The museum wants to protect its downtown access and patron parking and to preserve the park. Abele’s determination to sell/demolish O’Donnell—to the detriment of the museum and the public—seems especially sinister since he has served on MAM’s board.
The executive also recently telegraphed that he does not support long-term preservation of the iconic Mitchell Park Domes, and that perhaps they should be razed. He had ignored repeated urgent warnings from engineering consultants and his parks director that measures needed to be taken for their continued safe functioning. Abele’s actions reflect a cynical management strategy: neglect a public asset and then use an eventual maintenance crisis to rationalize privatization—or elimination.
Abele has also pushed to privatize the airport, transit system and zoo, usually involving out-of-state contractor/vendors. Previously, the board was able to foil those deals. However, now Abele can pursue full-throttled privatization, because the now-weakened board lacks oversight or approval powers. In the budget bill, the Legislature granted Abele unprecedented powers to execute contracts and dispose of any county property not zoned parkland. That includes thousands of acres of open and developed land. He merely needs one other person to concur—either the county comptroller or a compliant “real estate professional” in the municipality where an asset is located.
These powers, which no other Wisconsin county executive has, were also middle-of-night legislative amendments. Abele immediately flexed his newfound muscle by committing $80 million from county taxpayers for the Milwaukee Bucks arena and giving away prime Downtown land.
Another privatization project Abele embraced and is overseeing is the takeover of some Milwaukee Public Schools to become voucher or charter schools, again arranged by the Legislature. That Milwaukee’s schools are not part of county government has been lost on Abele and his interfering Republican allies.
A recurring motif throughout Abele’s Milwaukee years is to act imperiously, unilaterally and without involving people with pertinent interests or responsibility for outcomes. Building consensus and extending professional courtesies are not his style. For example, he did not consult elected County Comptroller Martin Manske before getting GOP legislators to appoint Manske as a “certifier” for county real-estate contracts. This cobbled “oversight” board recalls sham privatization methods of Russian oligarchs.
Giveaways to “One-Percenters”
A Bucks courtside season-ticket holder, Abele also gave away to the team’s billionaire owners 10 acres in Park East appraised for about $9 million. Abele also negotiated with a friend a no-bid sale for $500,000 of the county’s Transit Center. The property had been appraised for $9 million. Those “deals” total $17.5 million in potential county income lost to corporate welfare. In contrast, local entrepreneurs, apparently out of Abele’s loop, have recently paid about $1 million per acre for comparable Park East land.
Although privatization is not championed by principled Democrats, Abele is closely aligned with his Republican predecessor, Scott Walker, in wanting public commons and enterprises to be commercially owned or controlled. Privatization has long been pushed nationwide by the Koch Industries-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Additionally, Abele seems hell-bent on rewarding his One-Percenter peers by privatizing vital institutions and services created to serve citizens. In an attempt to clarify his position, he told an East Side town hall audience that, for him, “privatization is not a goal, it’s a tactic.” That’s a distinction without a difference. The ramifications are the same.
With privatized public assets, elected representatives and sworn civil servants are often prevented from exercising operational control and oversight. Abele’s agenda of unfettered privatization and corporate enrichment is linked to misguided tea-party quests to reduce to rubble the foundations of government. This blatantly abdicates executive-branch duties. The job of the county executive is to manage county government—not to function as a liquidating real estate broker-in-chief.
Abele’s Opportunistic Obsession with “Efficiency”
Abele justifies dismantling the public realm and abandoning concern for the greater good by invoking his favorite buzzword: efficiency. That’s also a popular word with vulture capitalists—except they have no obligation beyond a profit motive. This brand of “efficient” government is often an “opportunity” for outsourced public employees to work for less money and fewer protections—so that a corporate enterprise (often not local) may extract maximum gain at everyone else’s expense. For example, Abele tried to replace middle-class county park-maintenance and courthouse-security employees with contract workers who would have been paid less and denied benefits. Abele’s privatization “tactics” diminish the local economy and citizens’ lives—both workers and those served (or no longer served).
Profit motive within the public sector devalues the essential social contract of civil society. Uncertainty—caused by shifting winds of corporate ownership, goals and pricing—undermines the consistency, and efficiency, of services. In reality, dubious privatizing frequently costs taxpayers more. Economists Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers warned about negative fiscal impacts of selling off public-assets in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel op-ed in 2014. Abele’s free rein to seal such deals without checks and balances also sets the stage for corruption.
When the Legislature recently tried to railroad a bill making privatization of water systems easier, Tom Stolp, deputy director of the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters, said, “Government has a level of accountability to citizens that private companies simply don’t have.”
Politicians sometimes sell off public assets for short-term budgetary fixes—often with disastrous results. The 2008 privatization of Chicago’s parking meters is a cautionary fiasco. Former Mayor Richie Daley rushed a vote to hand over the parking concession to Morgan Stanley, which soon resold half the contract to the Abu Dhabi government. The 99-year deal is loathed by both citizens and elected officials—now powerless to change it. It gouges parkers, shorts Chicago’s budget, and was worth many times the sale price.
Abele has not cited any models of successful privatization. Adding insult to injury, his unfair deals give away the store.
Cultural Assets Up for Grabs
Although not technically privatization, Abele also wants to dump the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts. With no justification beyond—again—“achieving greater efficiencies,” Abele wheedled the Legislature into allowing the 47-year-old county-owned complex to be transferred to the state-chartered Wisconsin Center District. Inserted into the state’s arena bill, it was passed without discussion—more logrolling payback for Abele’s arena-deal finagling. When Urban Milwaukee’s Bruce Murphy asked Sen. Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald’s office about the mystifying proposed hand-off, he was curtly told to ask Abele. Murphy called it “governing by whim.”
When WCD board members considered acquiring the Marcus Center, they voted to delay any decision until at least 2020. The county board is now loath to invest in the center’s capital projects since the county has other pressing funding needs. Abele’s capriciousness has thus placed a community gem in limbo.
Abele has attempted to sell off, lease or transfer many more assets than privatization zealot Scott Walker did as county executive. There’s mounting evidence that Abele is completing Walker’s dismantling of county government—without any significant constraints.
As for Walker, in 2013 the governor was granted authority to sell off state-owned assets in no-bid deals. Even Republican businessman/philanthropist Sheldon Lubar, who helped Abele rise to power, sharply criticized Walker’s ability to divest state property including power plants, UW dormitories and other buildings. “I really don't think (Walker) thought this through and understands the negative impact this would have,” Lubar said. Abele seems equally oblivious to privatization nightmares.
State Sen. Chris Larson, Abele’s opponent for executive, has introduced legislation to roll back the executive’s powers. Walker and the GOP-controlled Legislature seem unlikely to pass it—unless Larson, a UW-Milwaukee finance graduate, is elected. Winning another term, Abele could slice and dice county assets just as vulture capitalists do with corporations they take over. With no legislative check on his power, Abele could complete his dystopian agenda with diabolical “efficiency.”
Pat Small of Milwaukee is a freelance commentator.
