Another week, another flurry of expensive flyers flooding the county with the mission of improving Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele’s image ahead of his re-election campaign.
In one of his latest mailers, Abele boasts of his support for jobs “beyond the minimum wage.”
We’re not sure what he’s talking about, because his record in office shows the opposite of what his high-priced campaign operatives are claiming. Since becoming county executive in 2011, Abele, the son of a billionaire, vetoed a $10.10 minimum wage referendum, vetoed a living wage ordinance, vetoed a jobs program for hard-to-employ Milwaukeeans and Abele had absolutely nothing to do with an agreement struck by the Milwaukee Bucks, Milwaukee Democrats and labor leaders to provide high-paying, permanent jobs as a side agreement to the arena deal.
Let’s look at the facts.
* Abele opposes a $10.10 minimum wage. In 2014, Abele vetoed placing an advisory referendum on the county’s ballot to gauge public support for raising the minimum wage to $10.10. Supervisors overrode that veto and the resulting referendum earned 67% support on the November 2014 ballot.
* Abele opposes a living wage for county employees. Again in 2014, Abele vetoed the county’s living wage ordinance, which raises wages to about $11.33 an hour for county employees and employees of county contractors. Supervisors overrode Abele’s veto 12-6. State Rep. David Bowen, who authored the ordinance when he served on the county board, told the Shepherd last year that after the ordinance’s passage, Abele ran to the Legislature to ask his Republican friends to introduce a bill prohibiting local governments from passing their own living wage policies, but no bill resulted. Perhaps in retaliation, Abele ran a candidate against Bowen for the 10th District Assembly seat—Abele’s top campaign aide, Tia Torhorst, who obviously lost.
* Abele’s new workforce development program builds on an initiative he vetoed. Abele is also promoting his UpLiftMKE plan, a job-training program for hard-to-employ Milwaukeeans. But what he isn’t telling you is that he’s building on an initiative he vetoed in 2011, the Ready-to-Work initiative sponsored by now-Board Chair Theo Lipscomb and then-Supervisor Eyon Biddle. The board overrode Abele’s veto and the program has trained and placed in jobs more than 500 Milwaukeeans who now earn an average wage of $15 an hour, according to Lipscomb.
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* Abele was AWOL on Bucks’ jobs agreement. This summer, Abele helped to negotiate a Bucks arena financing deal, but not in the way he wants you to believe. The original plan offered by Gov. Scott Walker was totally funded by state bonds and county residents didn’t have to chip in any extra funds through our property taxes. But when Abele got into the room to use his “negotiating skills” with his Republican allies and the Bucks owners, he wound up putting Milwaukee County residents on the hook for $80 million for the next 20 years. He also wanted to finance the county’s portion of the deal with uncollected debt from the county’s most cash-strapped property owners, all of them exclusively from the suburbs. Property owners in the city of Milwaukee were excluded.
The Abele-backed deal wasn’t going to pass the state Legislature. So at the last minute, Milwaukee Democrats were asked to come to the negotiating table. They were able to make some changes in the actual legislation, such as adding a ticket fee so that arena attendees would help to pay for the new facility, and they took out Abele’s “bad debt” collection scheme. That’s the deal that was able to get enough support from legislative Republicans and Democrats, but Abele had nothing to do with it.
But that’s not all. Throughout the summer, Milwaukee Democrats and labor leaders negotiated a side agreement with the Bucks owners. The deal hasn’t been formally announced, but Abele is taking credit for it in his latest mailer although he had absolutely nothing to do with it. The deal—which state Sen. Chris Larson discussed briefly in his interview with the Shepherd earlier this month—secures permanent jobs for hard-to-employ Milwaukeeans, a living wage agreement and labor peace. “We never talked to Abele about it,” Larson told the Shepherd on Monday. Larson is challenging Abele in the April Milwaukee County executive race.
