David Michael Miller
The mayor wants to reduce the size of the Madison Common Council from its current 20 members to a full-time body as small as six or eight.
To be as accurate as possible, he went to the Capital Times editorial board to make his case for a committee he would appoint, without council input, to look at the council “structure.” In that conversation he is reported to have indicated that he “envisions” a full-time six to eight member council, but that his “dream” would be a 12 member part-time body.
It doesn’t really matter because a substantially smaller council inevitably means a full-time one. It’s not reasonable to think we could almost double the amount of constituents and committee obligations and keep the council part-time. Moreover, the only real problem I can see with the current set-up is that there aren’t enough contested races. If we doubled the workload for a part-time job, why would we think that would get more people to run?
Let me offer three reasons why we should think hard before messing with this.
First, it’ll be really expensive. Right now council members are paid a few thousand dollars a year for these part-time positions and the council staff consists of a handful of people to manage clerical needs and do a little research on their behalf. All 20 members share a tiny office where they pick up mail and can hold meetings.
What seems to have sent the mayor running to his most friendly editorial board is the council’s creation of a new chief of staff position. But if it’s cost that concerns him he should think this through.
A smaller, full-time council will be a very expensive proposition. The only full-time council in Wisconsin is in Milwaukee, where 14 alders earn about $73,000 each, plus benefits, and the council president earns $10,000 dollars more. If we figure benefit packages run about 30 percent of salary, that means aldermanic compensation alone tops out at just under $1.5 million.
Then full-time council members will demand personal staff and office space. In Milwaukee, where each alder has a staffer, total salaries are budgeted at $663,000 plus benefits for 2017. Then there’s a staff assistant for the council president at $56,000 and a council administration manager at $78,000. It goes on, but the total budget for the “common council – city clerk” (they combine these offices in the Milwaukee budget, but not in the Madison budget) are $9.2 million. In Madison, the 2017 total budget for the council is $630,000. If we add in the city clerk’s budget of $1.4 million, we get a total of about $2 million, or 22 percent the size of the comparable figure for Milwaukee.
The council in Milwaukee already has physical office space, but in Madison new space would have to be built or leased for the full-time council members. The mayor has often said that the city’s growing capital debt burden is one of its top problems. This will only make that worse.
The mayor has suggested a council about half the size of Milwaukee’s 15, but even if we halve their costs we’re still looking at expenses that will run about twice as much as the current Madison budget for these items.
Given state spending caps, where is that money going to come from? In a city where a senior center coffee maker once sparked a couple hours of budget debate (true story), how are we going to come up with this kind of cash? How many social service programs won’t get funding? How many cops won’t get hired?
Second, it’ll be the end of our citizen democracy. That’s only a slight exaggeration. One of the great things about our current system is that money plays virtually no role in city politics at the aldermanic level. With only about 11,000 constituents per district, and with only a fraction of those turning out to vote, the only effective way to campaign for alder is to knock on the doors of voters. Expensive television advertising and the polling and consultants that often come with that just doesn’t make sense for small districts. The result is that the average council race might cost a few thousand dollars, which can be self-funded by the candidate or raised in small contributions. An added bonus is that negative campaigning — while certainly present — is much less prevalent because face-to-face campaigning doesn’t lend itself to attack ads while television is made for it.
Third, there’s no evidence that it will result in better decisions. The state Legislature is full time with plenty of staff to do policy analysis. How do you think it’s doing? Perhaps the most significant policy change in recent state history, Act 10, was rushed through with a minimum of public input or policy research. Here you had a full-time, professional legislature with plenty of staff and none of it was used. Lawmakers just voted on ideological and political grounds.There's no assurance that a full-time professional policy-making body will make better decisions than one made up of part-timers.
Yeah, I know, the Madison Common Council is famous for its long meetings and for occasionally going off the rails into various aspects of foreign policy and the like. But, by and large, council members work hard, ask a lot of good questions, and make their decisions on the merits of each issue as opposed to just following a caucus position or the urging of campaign donors.
One perceived benefit might actually happen: a full-time council might attract more candidates. This spring 14 of the 15 Milwaukee council seats were contested, compared to only five of our 20. But that’s probably because it’s a plum job with great pay and benefits. It’s a subjective judgment, but I would bet that the average Madison council member is more sincere in her desire to just serve her community than the average Milwaukee council member, who may well have run for more pecuniary reasons.
Would it be good if we had more contested races? Sure, but Madison is lucky to get the quality of individual it gets to serve on its council. Before we make those alders less accessible to their constituents, invite big money into local politics and increase the taxpayer costs exponentially, we should stop and consider just what it is we have to gain.
