Liam Beran
Former Mayor Paul Soglin is leading the opposition to Madison's budget referendum.
Barack Obama is on the campaign trail for Kamala Harris and he’s got a great riff on Donald Trump. It goes something like this, “Donald says that Kamala was responsible for everything bad that happened because she was vice president for four years. Dude, you were president for four years.”
Somebody might want to point out the same sort of thing to Paul Soglin. He’s been attacking the woman who defeated him in 2019, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, for new land use plans, for bus rapid transit, for the city’s need for a referendum to exceed state taxing limits, and now, related to that, for not, in Soglin’s view, lobbying the Republican Legislature hard enough.
But, dude, you were mayor for eight years before Rhodes-Conway, not to mention two earlier stints in the 1970s and 1990s.
On Soglin’s most recent watch, which ended in 2019:
The regional transit authority that then-Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk and I had lobbied into existence was repealed. That law would have allowed the RTA to levy a half-cent sales tax that would have lifted the burden of supporting Madison Metro from the city budget and provided a true regional transit service, which in turn would have eased Madison’s housing crunch. How could he let that happen and in eight years how come he couldn’t get it restarted?
The state imposed levy limits on local governments that hold property tax increases to net new construction. That’s the root of the problem that forces the city to referendum now to exceed those unreasonable limits. Again, how could Soglin let that happen and in eight years why didn’t he get that fixed?
The Legislature had frozen state shared revenues for the entire eight years Soglin was in office. The payments to the city slowly eroded during all that time so that now, adjusted for inflation, the city is getting $6.7 million less in shared revenues than when I turned the mayor’s office over to Soglin in 2011. Just this last year, shared revenues finally increased. Madison was short-changed, but it was still the first year that the city saw an increase in more than a decade. How come Soglin couldn’t have pulled that off?
And what’s this amazing, magical lobbying touch that Soglin possesses? Former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk and I had a strained relationship over time, but we never stopped talking and, in fact, we pulled off the merger of the city and county health departments, which saved some money and provided better service. That kind of intergovernmental cooperation could have provided some efficiencies that would ease the budget burden now. But Soglin alienated his county counterpart, Joe Parisi, from the start and the two could never get on the same page. They barely talked. And if you can’t get along with the easygoing Parisi, well, who can you get along with? Soglin had the same sort of nonrelationship with County Executive Rick Phelps in his previous stint as mayor.
And as for his approach to legislators, during that same period when Soglin wasn’t talking to Phelps he was putting up banners on the Capitol Square criticizing the Legislature for not providing enough state aid to Madison. Soglin claimed later that his in-your-face approach got results, but then-State Rep. Mark Pocan said that it backfired, creating long-term ill will toward Madison.
Soglin has implied that his failures in his most recent terms were because he just couldn’t work with Gov. Scott Walker. But how many bills or budget amendments did Soglin lobby all the way to Walker’s desk only to have him veto them? None, so far as I can tell.
So, the notion that Rhodes-Conway needs to be lectured on effective lobbying by Paul Soglin is just ludicrous. He had eight years to stop or to fix the problems that have now backed up on his successor. He failed, or maybe he just didn’t try hard enough.
And on another matter…I’ve been wondering when new Madison schools superintendent Joe Gothard will make his presence felt. Maybe it’s starting. In a news story earlier this week on the impact of the referendums on rents, Gothard was quoted while three school board members didn’t respond to a reporter. It’s a small thing, but it marks a rare occasion where Gothard spoke for the district while board members let him.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
