Rob Henken, president of the Wisconsin Policy Forum
To have rational and productive debate on public policy issues, we need a base of facts that all sides can agree on. How you choose to interpret the facts is up to you, but without agreed-upon facts, we are in real trouble. In our current highly politicized state and country, there are few institutions that are trusted by all sides to be about as objective as humanly possible, and the Wisconsin Policy Forum (WPF) is definitely at the top of the list. Now, the WPF is expanding what it is offering to us.
Until recently, inquiring citizens were in for quite a bit of research if they wanted to know if Milwaukee spends more per capita on police and fire services than other places. The same was true if they were interested in learning how Milwaukee’s property tax rates compare with those of nearby municipalities or if the city’s debt burden is unusually high.
Some of the answers could be found on the internet by visiting various websites; others might require going to government offices and digging through archives. But there was no single source for data on all of Wisconsin’s 601 cities and villages. Into this void has stepped the Wisconsin Policy Forum (WPF) with its “Municipal Datatool.” Released in July, this online database offers a trove of information on everything from municipal spending and debt to income, population and property taxes. Users who are interested in seeing how their local government stacks up against others can have reports drawn up comparing it with nine other municipalities.
“And you can look at trends,” says Rob Henken, WPF president. “This is by no means meant only to serve as a tool for people who tend to look askance at high spending amounts. It also allows us to see where spending has diminished over time.” It’s all presented in a way that’s accessible to even the most casual of inquirers but still rich enough in detail to appeal to serious policy wonks. Henken says that’s the exact balance that he and his fellow researchers try to strike in everything they do.
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A Close Look at the City and County Budgets
Take, as an example, the yearly analyses the WPF does of the Milwaukee County and City of Milwaukee budgets. “Typically, whenever you have budget discussions, you get a lot of conflict in the news media,” Henken says. “That’s true whether you are talking about wheel taxes, proposals to charge for parking at parks or spending cuts and the nature of those cuts. We feel that there is value in having additional context, showing trend analysis and the factors that create the need for new revenue and spending cuts.”
The task that the WPF has set itself is by no means an easy one, especially as public policy becomes ever more complex. Being a responsible citizen no longer simply means keeping track of how state and local politicians vote on the few biggest issues of the moment. People are now confronted almost daily with abstractions such as TIF (Tax Increment Financing) districts and tax levies.
To help ease that burden, the Wisconsin Policy Forum has gone to some extraordinary lengths; the Municipal Datatool is just one example. The forum also takes great care to ensure its main products—the research reports it releases throughout the course of a year—are presented in a way meant to appeal to the broadest group of people possible.
To that end, the forum’s findings are published both in their full-length form and in accompanying summaries and press releases. Take, for instance, the forum’s recent “Picking Up the Pieces” report. This final installment in a five-part series looking at the need to repair and replace public buildings and other infrastructure in Milwaukee (both city and county) concluded that local officials—in addition to looking at new sources of revenue—might at least have to consider selling some assets.
For those with more of a passing interest in the findings, there are both a two-page release and a three-minute video summary. For anyone wanting to go a bit deeper, there’s an eight-page “report brief.” Finally, there’s the report itself. At 51 pages long, it goes into the detail needed to adequately cover a subject as far-reaching and complex as public infrastructure, yet it’s organized in way that makes it easy for readers to skip around to specific subjects of interest.
No ‘Preconceived Notions’
The WPF develops its research agenda not just from the advice of Henken and staff researchers but also the various entities that have given the group monetary and organizational support, including local governments, businesses and nonprofit foundations. Wauwatosa Mayor Kathy Ehley says there’s no one else in Wisconsin doing quite the same sort of work. “They don’t come at it from preconceived notions,” she says, “and they explain the facts and make suggestions, but they do not get involved in the politics of things. And that’s the way it should be.”
The Wisconsin Policy Forum has received its share of official praise throughout the years. Henken, himself, was named the Rotary Club of Milwaukee’s “2019 Person of the Year” just last month. Henken—an East Coast native who first came to Milwaukee nearly 25 years ago to advocate for light rail leading a group called the Alliance for Future Transit—said perhaps his biggest goal since taking the helm at the WPF has been to return it to its research roots.
Research on municipal finance was, in fact, the forum’s main priority when it was originally founded as the Milwaukee Citizens’ Bureau of Municipal Efficiency in 1913. In the ensuing decades, the organization’s scope expanded to county and school finances even as its name was changed first to the Citizens’ Governmental Research Bureau and then to the Public Policy Forum. By the time Henken arrived in 2008, though, research on government finance had begun to drift to the side.
Henken’s attempts to put the WPF back on its original course have come in part through hiring. The organization now has six full-time researchers working for it in Milwaukee and three in Madison. Another push has come in the direction of the research itself. Within the first year after Henken took over, the forum was publishing briefs on Milwaukee’s city and county budgets; by 2014, it was doing the same for Milwaukee Public Schools.
Analyzing State Government
Perhaps the biggest event in the WPF’s recent history has been its merger (in early 2018) with the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance. Along with adoption of the Wisconsin Policy Forum current name, this combination also brought in tow a new responsibility: analyzing state government.
The forum has approached this new task in its usual way, trying to strike a balance between detail and accessibility. Aware that state government already has its own nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau that can be trusted to provide objective analysis of state budgets, Henken and others at the WPF have tried to distinguish their work by taking up topics that might otherwise receive little attention. For example, one recent report looked at the ramifications of Wisconsin’s decision to collect an excise tax on sales of e-cigarette fluid. Another considered the state’s policies on marijuana and recent proposals to either legalize or decriminalize the drug.
With its ever-broadening field of research, the Wisconsin Policy Forum’s responsibilities can no doubt seem endless at times, but to Henken, if the work helps everyone from the common voter to influential officeholders make informed decisions, it’s well worth doing. “We do want our products to help drive policy and decision-making,” he says. “We also want them to be understandable to citizens outside of government. But we do want to cover topics sufficiently so we will also be informative to policymakers.”
