What is Alberta Darling trying to hide?
On Monday, the public finally got to hear the details of the proposed Bucks arena plan, which requires $377 million of taxpayer money, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB). Unfortunately, the public didn’t get to participate in Monday’s meeting of the Joint Finance Committee, co-chaired by Darling, and only got to hear testimony from hand-selected participants who support the current deal and public officials.
Those who are involved in the deal—Bucks representatives, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele and state officials—explained their responsibilities. Also testifying was Tim Sheehy, president of the very conservative Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, as well as LFB staffers to explain the complex proposal to legislators.
Guess who was shut out? Critics of the deal, state taxpayers and representatives of the Wisconsin Center District, which would oversee the new arena and a wide swath of Downtown Milwaukee assets. The Wisconsin Center District would be asked to come up with $203 million to finance the arena, the biggest stakeholder in the deal. The district will pay more in interest than it borrows, because it won’t begin paying off the loan for another 13 years or so as interest accrues on it. Nothing like pushing the financial burden onto our children and grandchildren, right? The taxes the district collects will never sunset, either, under the current proposal.
This is a huge responsibility for the Wisconsin Center District, yet Chris Abele systematically ignored its longtime board chair, Franklyn Gimbel, who was totally cut out of the negotiations. Gimbel and other current board members will be kicked off the board as soon as this deal is done, and nobody from the Wisconsin Center District was allowed to testify on Monday. Unfortunately, this totally fits Abele’s modus operandi. Gimbel has spent 20 years as chair of the board, a volunteer position, and has by virtually all accounts done an excellent job. LFB staffers testified that they didn’t reach out to the district when analyzing the deal and, instead, relied on figures provided by Abele, who plays fast and loose with numbers and appears to feel very threatened by Gimbel because Gimbel is both honest and competent.
Democratic state Sen. Lena Taylor, the only Milwaukee representative on the JFC, decried the lack of public input during the hearing, including the lack of testimony from Wisconsin Center District representatives. But Darling, the JFC’s co-chair who ran the hearing, repeatedly shut down her colleague, saying, “We’re not debating the issue.”
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Alberta Darling has come a long way from her first election as a seemingly honest, sincere and very naïve suburban do-gooder. She has morphed into someone who has shifted to the far right on many important issues, such as women’s reproductive choice, in order to rise within the Republican-controlled Legislature. Darling’s Joint Finance Committee also signed off on last week’s horrible attack on the state’s open records law, which Republicans immediately backed away from after the public learned what happened. All of this was done in an omnibus amendment that Darling slipped into the budget through her committee going into a holiday weekend. She will not disclose the names of the individual Republican legislators who authored the individual amendments within this catch-all bill. This sort of sleaziness is not the sort of Wisconsin government we grew up studying in civics class. That was how government functioned south of our border in Illinois, but not in our Wisconsin, which had a national reputation as a leader in clean and transparent government.
We call on Alberta Darling to hold a fully public hearing on the proposed Bucks arena plan in Milwaukee before it goes to a vote. If Darling doesn’t allow the public to weigh in on the proposal, then the simple question we have to ask Alberta Darling is: Alberta, what are you trying to hide?
