Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele is making his stewardship of the Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) a centerpiece of his re-election campaign. It’s an interesting strategy, since Abele has had a very rocky relationship with the county’s bus system, which his campaign ads totally ignore. Previous Shepherd articles have described some of Abele’s dealings with our county bus system.
For example, Abele’s campaign ads don’t mention that he attempted to turn over the operation of MCTS to a Dallas-based company in a contract-awarding process that was so dishonest that the contract had to be pulled, against Abele’s wishes. And this summer MCTS workers went on strike—their first strike ever—because the contract Abele proposed was unacceptable. Abele’s conflict with the union highlighted his leadership of the system. As every successful CEO or military general will tell you, you need the respect of your people. Unfortunately, Abele has demonstrated terrible leadership, even compared to Scott Walker when he was county executive. During the Abele reign, this fall Amalgamated Transit Union Local 998 members voted almost unanimously that they had “no confidence” in Abele and the workers ultimately prevailed in the contract dispute, likely because Abele wanted to take the issue off the table before he began blanketing the county with his glossy campaign mailers.
In previous editions of “Setting the Record Straight,” regarding the transit system, we took on Abele’s claims that he has expanded service miles and hasn’t raised fares. These two campaign claims are highly questionable. MCTS has added route miles recently, but that’s due to federal grant money that will run out soon and a settlement from a lawsuit launched by community groups that had nothing to do with Abele. Nevertheless, he’s taking credit for their work.
And Abele’s claims about not raising fares falls apart as well, for example, since in his first proposed county budget Abele attempted to hike rates for the county’s Paratransit service for disabled riders a whopping 38%, something he called in a press release “a small increase.” Abele’s request eventually got whittled back, but as it stands now Paratransit fares have increased 7.5% while he’s been in office.
|
|
Which brings us to another campaign claim, but this one doesn’t come from Abele. According to the Journal Sentinel’s Politifact, in an interview with Mike Gousha, Abele’s opponent, state Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee), asserted that at $2.25 per one-way ride, Milwaukee’s bus fares are “among the highest fares in the nation.” This assertion has been made many times before without controversy, but for some reason—some believe the Journal Sentinel is trying to move further to the right as they are about to be sold to the conservative Gannett chain of newspapers—the Journal Sentinel’s Politifact rated it “false.” It contended that while Milwaukee’s $2.25 bus fare is high, it “wasn’t at the top of a national comparison.”
Politifact explained how it came to its conclusion. Although it cited a 2014 survey by the American Public Transit Association, which listed the base rate of more than 150 major U.S. bus systems, Politifact chose to ignore it, saying that some of the data is already outdated. Instead, Politifact contacted Larson’s Senate office and the Abele’s administration’s MCTS to verify Larson’s data. Larson’s camp provided a list of 11 comparable systems; MCTS’ adult fare was the second highest. MCTS responded with a list of 20 comparable systems, in which MCTS fits in the higher part of the center, the eighth-highest fare in MCTS’ list. Therefore, based on the MCTS-generated list, Politifact declared that Larson’s claim was false. Politifact also pointed out that MCTS offers discounted rates for regular riders, which, according to the Journal Sentinel somehow made Larson’s assertion even more wrong. Hey Politifact—hello, virtually every major transit system in the world offers volume discounts and other pricing options.
Getting down to the Politifact’s assertion that Larson’s claim is false is not being particularly honest. First of all, any honest researcher would have analyzed some third-party data—perhaps the American Public Transit Association survey updated in 2014—rather than ask the opponent to provide data to prove the initial assertion incorrect, except apparently the editors of the Journal Sentinel’s Politifact, which unfortunately is why so many Milwaukeeans refer to this fact-checking operation as “Politifiction” and view it as very biased.
The American Public Transit Association surveyed 153 bus systems in 2014 and some of these bus systems, like Milwaukee, had not raised their rates in years. If the researcher would remove two of the systems—one because it is a Canadian bus system and the initial claim was referring to American systems and another because it was not a bus system but a railroad—this leaves 151 systems, all of the major bus systems in the U.S., and only nine of 151 bus systems—or 5.96%—have higher fares than Milwaukee. Eight bus systems had a fare equal to Milwaukee’s. Almost 90% have fares that are lower than MCTS’ fares. Since the initial claim was “among the highest fares in the nation,” we believe that Larson’s claim should definitely not be “false.”
So does the Journal Sentinel’s Politifact owe Larson an apology?
We reached out to Politifact’s editor, Greg Borowski, to find out why he didn’t think that MCTS’ fares, which land around the top 10% of fares nationally, qualified as being “among the highest,” as Larson asserted. If you take the salaries of you and your nine neighbors, ranked them, and find that you are in the top 10%—meaning that, at worst, you had the second highest salary—wouldn’t one say that your salary is “among the highest”? Let’s see how the Politifact folks think.
Borowski emailed back, “in our estimation, we think the average reader would understand ‘among the highest’ to be at or near the very top. Not ‘within 10%.’ Consider a sports analogy for perspective. (Sometimes it helps to take things out of a political contest, and examine the same scenario through a comparable lens.) There are 350-plus Division 1 college basketball teams in the NCAA. If a team was ranked, say, 35th, would anyone think it is fair to say they are among the highest-ranked teams in the nation? I don’t.”
So, what do you think? Borowski feels that a team that is ranked 35th out of 350-plus, which means 34 are ranked higher and more than 315 are ranked below, is not “among the highest.” If you are in the top 10% so more than 90% are below you, are you “among the highest,” or, like Borowski, are you unimpressed with that ranking?
We say that Larson’s original claim that MCTS’ fares are “among the highest fares in the nation” is true, based on the best national data we could find, and give the Journal Sentinel’s Politifact a “pants on fire.”
There is a bigger issue in all this and that is we Milwaukeeans are losing out. An honest, accurate fact-checking system would be very useful, especially when you have wealthy candidates who can spend family money and spin a story with flashy TV ads to make them look good while the other side doesn’t have the resources to correct the record and the average voter doesn’t have the time to do their own research. Initially, people embraced the Journal Sentinel’s Politifact hoping it could be an honest broker, but after several years of biased or just barely competent research, many Milwaukeeans have given up on what they now call Politifiction. It’s a shame.
