Tommy Washbush illustration / Timothy Hughes photo
Paul Soglin criticizing Joe Sensenbrenner, Sue Bauman, Dave Cieslewicz, and Satya Rhodes-Conway.
The only thing Paul Soglin hates more than being mayor of Madison is anybody else being mayor of Madison. I’m not sure who said that first. It might have been me.
Every time Paul has been out of office he takes the opportunity to point out how the current occupant is screwing up. He starts behind the scenes to lay the groundwork, with well placed whispers here and there, and then he goes public. Usually the next step is to send out a stalking horse, somebody who will talk about running for mayor to test the waters. And then he announces that, reluctantly, he feels called back to save the city from the incompetent who is running us into the ground. The crisis is averted. The citizens rejoice. This isn’t Cincinnati but he is Cincinnatus.
That pattern held in 1989 when he ran against Joe Sensennbrenner, in 2003 when he challenged Sue Bauman and in 2011 when he defeated me. Now he’s doing it again as he loudly criticizes Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway for her budgeting. Is he setting the stage to run for his old job yet again? I don’t know. The next mayoral election isn’t until 2027 when he’d be 82.
Bernie Sanders is 82 this year and Joe Biden would be 85 if he completed a second term. So, I wouldn’t put it past him, but let’s assume that he just really cares about the city and so let’s deal with the substance of Soglin’s complaint.
His basic charge, as reported last week in the Wisconsin State Journal by veteran city reporter Dean Mosiman, is that Rhodes-Conway has set the city up for a big budget deficit in the next few years and that she will, at some point, call for a referendum to go beyond state taxing limits. Specifically, Paul hits the mayor for proposing a new public information officer position and a related consulting contract that would have totalled almost $200,000. The new PIO would report directly to the mayor. He says that position will be used by Satya to set the stage for the tax increase referendum.
Last week the council approved the position, but at a lower salary and without the consulting contract.
On the specifics of his argument he has a point. If the city is facing dire financial straits it seems to me that the last thing we need is another public relations position. The city already has 10 of these scattered around various agencies. And, in fact, the overall 6% spending increase may strike you as pretty rich given what lies ahead, though most of that is driven by pay increases that are making up for recent years of high inflation. The council added another $600,000 to the mayor’s operating budget and another $6 million to the borrowing package, so the dire warnings about looming deficits didn’t seem to resonate, whether they came at the start of the process from Rhodes-Conway or later from Soglin.
But if the numbers turn out to be as bad as forecast, it seems almost inevitable that the city will have to go to a referendum to increase taxes in the next few years. There’s simply no other way to deal with a $75 million projected deficit by 2029, and not approving one PIO position is not going to make a difference. Any mayor, Paul Soglin, Satya Rhodes-Conway or me, would have to resort to a referendum at that point because there aren’t any pots of money big enough to fill that kind of gap and there are no budget cuts that large that the public would accept.
So, it looks to me like Paul is probably right about the PIO job and wrong about the big picture. If he or I were mayor we’d be in pretty much the same spot and our differences would be rounding errors.
And one more thing. Since March 2020 the city — and everybody else — has faced unprecedented events. The pandemic shut down the city and many of its revenue sources. No room taxes, no bus fares, no building permits. Then the federal government stepped in with a series of bailouts and all of a sudden we were flush with one-time cash. Now, we have to adjust back to normal times. Those kinds of violent swings are difficult on every level of government. This year the Legislature had to bail out the city and county of Milwaukee with new sales tax authority and the Madison school district is facing long-term dire budget projections as well. Virtually every state and local government in the country is facing similar kinds of challenges.
Every Madison city budget follows the same script. In the spring the city finance director gives the mayor budget projections for the next year that always show a deficit. The mayor always issues dire warnings about this being the toughest budget ever. I did that eight years in a row and I believed it every time I said it.
And then things work out. They just do.
And they will again. It might very well take a referendum to increase taxes beyond state limits, but after the big pandemic disruption that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Madison’s a strong community with a vibrant and resilient economy. We’ll be fine. Cincinnatus doesn’t have to leave his plow.
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.
