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Every so often Madison gets the itch to change its city government. The latest iteration of that impulse comes to us now courtesy of the Task Force on the Structure of City Government.
After almost two years of work and no less than 90 meetings the task force issued its report and it is now formally before the city council for its consideration.
There is some good stuff in there and some things that don’t seem to add up. Among its two dozen or so recommendations here are the ones I found most interesting:
The task force recommends reducing the council from its current 20 members down to 10, making them full time and paying each a salary of about $67,000 a year. Council members currently earn about $13,500 a year for what are considered part-time jobs.
The report notes that this recommendation was adopted on a narrow vote. I wish it had gone the other way because it’s a terrible idea. The report tries to argue, counter-intuitively in my view, that somehow a full-time council will make it easier for low-income people to serve.
I think just the opposite is true. Right now anybody can get elected to the council by knocking on doors and dropping off a brochure and maybe spreading around some lawn signs.
But doubling the size of the districts makes door-knocking less effective. With larger districts it would make more sense to buy radio, TV, social media and newspaper ads. And with that we invite big money into our local politics. And who has that money and an interest in who gets elected? Mostly developers and bar owners.
Moreover, the prize of a modest full-time salary (and no doubt benefits) would make it attractive to the kind of self-employed professionals that would view this as a full-time job in name only, while they continue being lawyers, accountants and real estate agents.
Finally, while the report doesn’t deal with it, full-time council members will demand office space and staff. This is going to be very expensive and not only will it fail to get low-income people into government, it will make it harder for average people to run for council.
Not only should we not reduce the council, we should probably expand it a little. I would add a seat during the 2020 redistricting and adopt a policy that no alder should have more than, say, 12,000 constituents. That would limit the strain on part-time alders as the city grows.
The task force also recommends increasing council member terms from two to four years.
I don’t have a strong opinion about this. Shorter terms generally make bodies more sensitive to constituent concerns. Longer terms might make a body a little more contemplative and encourage long-term thinking.
They recommend council term limits of 12 years but no term limits for the mayor.
I’ve always been against term limits for anybody. Some of our best alders stuck around for a long time. I’m thinking of people like Warren Onken, Tim Bruer, and current Ald. Mike Verveer. If their constituents want to keep them why should those voters be denied the choice? And, oddly, the report claims that term limits will “discourage career politicians.” Won’t a full-time council encourage career politicians?
If the council goes full time, the task force recommends a council governance committee have the power to appoint council members to committees, rather than the mayor.
This was the original impetus for the task force. Some council members proposed taking away Mayor Paul Soglin’s appointment authority. That wasn’t going to happen, but Madison did what it does: It created a committee to study the issue and what eventually became the Task Force on the Structure of City Government ended up with a much-expanded mandate.
As a former mayor I hate to say this, but the council should make its own committee assignments even if it doesn’t go full time. Why one branch of government (the mayor) gets this kind of power over another branch (the council) was always a mystery to me. This would weaken the mayor somewhat, but as a matter of good government, I can’t defend the current set-up.
The task force recommends that the council president be elected for a full term, not just for one year.
This makes a lot of sense. Just when a mayor gets used to working with one council president the council sends the mayor another one. Not only should a president’s term run for the full two or four years (if that change is made), but the council would do well to elect the same president for several terms in a row. That has been the practice on the Dane County Board and it has helped make the board much more effective vis a vis the executive.
The task force recommends consolidating the city’s 100 or so boards, commissions and committees, more clearly defining the roles of each and providing more consistent staff support.
This is the Lord’s work! They are absolutely right about this and good luck with that. The city has been talking about untangling its arcane committee structure since Fred Risser was in knickers. It is an absolute mess and the task force has done an excellent job of documenting just what’s wrong.
But the problem is that every one of those committees exists because somebody wanted it to. They have members and they have constituencies, which sometimes lie dormant until you threaten the committee’s existence. So, it’s never been worth the political capital to eliminate any of them or to reduce their power. By linking the city committee tangle to social justice (however unconvincingly), there may finally be enough political firepower to do something about it. Maybe. Don’t count on it.
The task force recommends creating an Office of Resident Engagement and Neighborhood Support.
The stated goal here is to somehow improve participation in city government by people of color and the poor. But the proposal basically just reorganizes some bureaucratic deck chairs. I don’t see anything here that would address what the committee identifies as the real impediments to participation: “lack of time, resources and knowledge.”
I was also surprised that the report doesn’t discuss the potential for addressing this through the city’s existing Department of Civil Rights.
Which brings me to my skepticism about the big idea behind the report. The committee makes a bold statement, which it says underpins all of its work. “The city’s structure is fundamentally unfair to a large portion of the city’s population, including, most notably, the city’s residents of color and low income.”
I understand that in a liberal town most people probably believe that intuitively, but the task force had a responsibility to back up a strong statement like that with facts. Not only did it not provide much to support its conclusion, at least one data point provided argues in the opposite direction.
The “[boards, commissions and committees] also suffer from a lack of racial diversity, with only 21 percent of BCC members being people of color,” states the report. But actually the U.S. Census reports that 78.4 percent of Madison’s population is white. In other words people of color make up 21.6 percent of Madison, almost exactly the same percentage of citizens of color on boards, commissions and committees.
Moreover, the citizen committees are probably the best indicator of how well people of color are represented in city government. They have some measure of real power and, with a total of about 700 members, this is a sample size that is meaningful.
And as for its assertion that the city’s committee structure is unfair to low-income people, the task force admits it has no data at all. “While the Task Force did not have data related to the socioeconomic status of the BCC members, it suspects residents living with low income are also greatly underrepresented on the city’s BCCs,” the report says.
It’s striking that the task force was unable to collect any data on incomes of those who participate on city committees (why didn’t they at least do a voluntary survey?) and still saw fit to make an unequivocal statement about how unfair the city process was to poor people.
My experience is that the many nonprofits that provide all kinds of services to low-income people have extraordinary influence in city government. They may be advocating for their own bottom lines as much as they are for the best interests of their clients, but the task force should have considered the voice these nonprofits that lobby city government provide to low-income residents.
Moreover, the city’s Finance Department estimates that if all these changes were enacted they would cost a little less than $2.2 million a year, though the task force’s most vociferous advocates say the estimate is “premature.” Still, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway has chafed at that number, particularly the lion’s share of it that would go to a full-time council. I agree with her basic assessment: If we had $2 million laying around wouldn’t we be better off investing that into direct services for residents rather than alder salaries and bureaucrats?
So, the bottom line, based on my reading of the report as well as my eight years as mayor, is that the task force’s overall conclusion about the unfairness of city government is at best over-stated and certainly not well documented. And task force members haven’t come anywhere near to justifying the spending of $2 million or whatever that number turns out to be.
Nonetheless, many of its specific proposals — ones that would cost little or nothing — make a lot of sense. Now, it’s up to the council and the mayor to work through them and to enact those they find useful, and for which they can summon the political will.
