Once again, Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele is following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Scott Walker.
Both county executives proposed budgets with no property tax increases and both Abele and Walker sought to balance their budgets by asking workers to do more with less.
“For the fourth consecutive year,” the Public Policy Forum notes, Abele eliminates his budget gap by changing the county’s health care plan. Combined with the elimination of wage and step increases, Abele’s budget hits workers very hard, according to the county comptroller’s staff analysis. Abele’s budget proposes that the average employee (with no spouse or dependents on the county’s insurance plan) will see a wage and benefit cut of $2,326, a 4.8% decrease in his or her paycheck next year. Workers with their family on the health care plan will see an even steeper cut of $4,588 next year, or an 8% hit to their paycheck in 2015.
In addition, Abele is taking Walker’s lead by privatizing and outsourcing jobs and services. Building security, elevator maintenance, inmate health care, IT services and zoo concessions are all outsourced in Abele’s budget, cutting 263 full-time equivalent job positions, or 5.7% of the county’s workforce.
But there is a difference between the way Walker and Abele announced their attacks on county workers. Walker was very open about it. Abele, on the other hand, is much more secretive and deceptive. In fact, the comptroller’s research staff stated that they had a difficult time analyzing Abele’s personnel changes because his proposed budget didn’t include that information, “but were provided to Research Services staff just prior to the publication” of their overview analysis.
As Milwaukee County residents have discovered, Chris Abele is a very secretive man, one who forms his plans in private with his advisors from the conservative portion of the business community and then presents them as done deals in public. Whether it’s trying to sell off lakefront land without a proper public bidding process or cutting workers’ pay, Abele acts more like an oligarch than an elected official who truly believes in a transparent democratic process.
