David Michael Miller
The wedge. It’s a tasty salad and a bitter political strategy. Unfortunately, this isn’t a food column.
The Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee is wrapping up its work on the 2015-2017 state budget, and the Republican majority on the committee has used the document to short-circuit local control in Dane County.
To some extent this isn’t only about quashing the state’s most reliably liberal place. The Republicans, once a party that hammered local control into its very bedrock, have moved aggressively in the direction of state power now that they control all of state government. But they have gone out of their way to impose their will on Dane County with measures that target only jurisdictions here.
This is the list of Dane County-only provisions imposed by Republican members of the finance committee in the last several weeks:
They exempted the site of the Hill Farms state office building redevelopment from local zoning ordinances, something that’s been done for only two other places in the entire state — the state Capitol and Wisconsin State Fair Park.
They took away the authority of the Madison school district to approve charter schools within its jurisdiction. Each charter school student will result in an $8,000 deduction in the district’s state aid payments.
They took away the ability of the city to control its room tax revenue, instead placing that authority in the hands of a committee of tourist industry interests. This will cost the city’s general fund about $1 million a year.
They made it harder for the village of DeForest to annex the town of Windsor despite a mutually-agreed-upon boundary settlement between the two communities that has governed their long-term growth.
They’ve prohibited Dane County from having any input into sewer extensions, a provision that applies to none of the other 71 Wisconsin counties.
They’ve ordered state officials to look at moving some of state government out of Dane and Milwaukee counties when leases expire.
They seem poised, as of this writing, to strip Dane County of its zoning authority over towns.
And that’s just the Joint Finance actions. It’s not hard to view the $300 million cut to the UW System proposed by the governor as a move to hit Madison where it lives. Joint Finance restored $50 million, but left intact a cut that matches the deepest in the UW’s history.
To add insult to injury, each of the recent moves by the finance panel was proposed by members who did not represent Dane County, and the Republicans didn’t even have the courtesy to discuss what they were about to do with the two members of the committee from the county, much less with the local officials from the jurisdictions affected.
One of those two Dane County members, Sen. Jon Erpenbach of Middleton, told me, “Republicans [on Joint Finance] seem to be laser focused on usurping local control in Madison and Dane County instead of solving the most difficult problems of this budget.”
It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the Republicans just want to punish a county that is a liberal Democratic stronghold. And it seems they believe that beating up on Dane County plays well politically in the rest of the state. After all, it was the politics of resentment against the state’s two largest cities that caused candidate Scott Walker to promise and then deliver on his rejection of $810 million of our own federal tax dollars for passenger rail connecting Milwaukee and Madison.
This is not Tommy Thompson’s Republican Party. Thompson, who served for 14 years as governor, had the confidence that comes with long-term power. He certainly did things that liberals didn’t like, but he did not single out progressive parts of the state for retribution.
And that’s the problem with legislative Republicans right now. They haven’t come to grips with the fact that they are running the state not just now but for the foreseeable future. With that kind of power comes a responsibility to govern with a maturity that treats even those who disagree with them in a fair manner.
Most citizens of Dane County understand that we live with a state government that just doesn’t look at the world the way we do. Fair enough. They won more elections for state offices. But it’s precisely because they have such overwhelming power that Republicans should have the confidence and grace to allow local citizens the local governance they want.
Republicans need to recognize that they are governing a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican for president since Ronald Reagan and in which the Democratic candidate for governor received 47% of the vote even in an off-year election. The Legislature may look deep red, but the electorate is purple. In short, they need to make some allowance for our state’s liberal tradition, which still endures.
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. He blogs as Citizen Dave at Isthmus.com
