Walker: Did I Mention That Executiving Is Hard Work?

During the budget process to set up the ready-to-fail 2010 county budget, Walker learned that “executiving is hard work.” In what he thought would be a fine act of grandstanding, Walker couldn’t stay between the lines with his veto pencil, and ended up giving sheriff’s deputies eight days of furlough.

Walker was quick to backpedal, complaining that wasn’t what he meant to do. Unfortunately for Walker, and for the deputies, it turns out that his blunder was legal, and that the deputies were included, regardless of what his intentions may or may not of been:

Domina’s opinion flatly states deputies fall under the budget’s furlough mandate.

“The floating furlough days imposed under the adopted 2010 Milwaukee County budget apply to employees in all departments . . . including, in particular, deputy sheriffs,” Domina wrote in his opinion.

The issue arose shortly after the budget was approved last month and Walker said he hadn’t intended his budget veto on furloughs to subject deputies to the eight floater furlough days. The budget also included four fixed-date furloughs that excluded deputies and jailers.

This must be particularly upsetting to Walker, since he planned on attacking Tom Barrett for giving police officers two furlough days, and trying to spin it so that Walker could look like he was the law and order candidate.

To make things worse, Walker’s law and order meme gets totally trashed when Sheriff David Clarke stated that he was not going to follow the furlough. Walker, who was just told that the furloughs were the legal thing, quickly rolls over like a submissive puppy and says that he would not fight the Sheriff’s stated intention to break the law.

The greatest blow to Walker must be that this is just another shining example of his incompetence.

After all, if he can’t handle the county budget without making a mess of things, why in the world would anyone entrust him with a budget that is 50 times as big and much more complicated?

Under The Walker Plan…

I just can’t tell if these will be in the bathrooms at the parks or at the courthouse:

Another Meme That Doesn’t Work For Team Walker

A common meme from Team Walker is along the lines of complaining that President Obama might have an influence on the gubernatorial election.

Frankly, I would be surprised if Obama didn’t come at least a couple, three times to stump for Tom Barrett.

But is this a line that Team Walker wants to take? Especially in light of the fact that Walker Reince Priebus, WISGOP top dog, has been trying to woo Sarah Palin. It’ll even be worse if Palin decides not to, showing that she was just using Walker and her Wisconsin fans to shill her book.

I think it would be more impressive to have the President of the United States backing you rather than a gubernatorial dropout.

Brawler has more thoughts on this.

Don’t Rule Neumann Out Yet

Xoff, who knows a thing or two about politics, thinks it may be too early to rule Neumann out as the Republican nominee for governor:

Neumann, in Nichols’s world, is so extremely conservative he could never win a general election, and so far behind Scott Walker that the only way he could beat him in a primary is with a vicious negative campaign.

First of all, there’s not a nickel’s worth of ideological difference between Walker and Neumann. Watch them scramble to see who can get the farthest to the right in the primary, outdo each other in promising to throw programs for the ill, the young, the elderly and the poor under the bus, to slash government to the bone, to trash climate change science, rail against unions, and force women to give up their reproductive rights. Then tell me who’s the most extreme, if you can.

Xoff goes on to point out how Herb Kohl won his U.S Senate seat in 1988, even though he was in a situation much like Neumann’s current situation.

The other thing to remember is that Scott Walker has never one regular election. All his victories were in special elections or as an incumbent. Whenever he has gone straight up against someone in a regular election, he has failed in epic proportions.

Who’s Indecisive?

Pretty Important Politics has noticed the WISGOP head honcho Reince Priebus following the party meme in attacking Battling Tom Barrett, calling him indecisive because the Mayor decided to do some silly things like making sure his hand was healing and balancing the city’s budget.

I wonder why they don’t look at their boy Scott Walker? After all, he’s only been running for governor for about six or seven years, including two times when he ran for Milwaukee County Executive.

You want indecisive, I’d say someone who can’t even decide what he wants to be when he grows up to be pretty wishy-washy.

Would You Like Flies With That? Problems With Privatized Food Service At BHD

If you or a loved one had to go to the hospital, for whatever reason, you would expect to receive a certain level of care.  You would expect the equipment to be sterile, the floors and the linen clean, and a certain amount of professionalism from the people taking care of you.

And while you would not expect to have gourmet food, you would expect to at least palatable and nutritious.  You would also expect it to meet any special considerations, such as if you happened to be diabetic, or could only eat soft foods.

If they gave you bad food, or food that you couldn’t or shouldn’t eat, I’m sure that, like most people, you would send it back and if it got to be a habit, make a formal complaint.

Unfortunately, that no longer seems to be the case at Milwaukee County’s Behavioral Health Division.  In the 2009 budget, Scott Walker initiated a proposal to privatize the food service at BHD, even though the privatized food service at HOC and the County Justice Facility (county jail) was being less than successful, being ever more costly and having near riots due to the poor quality and quantity of the food.

The County Board initially took a wiser path, but ended up stipulating to the privatization, fearing the political backlash for not feeding into the distorted view that privatization was less expensive and more accountable than if the public sector provided the work.

It wasn’t until the middle of 2009 before a private food service agency was hired and able to take over the responsibilities.  In the six or so months since they took over, there has been countless problems.

Most of the complaints were that the portions were drastically cut back and the patients weren’t getting enough to eat.

Another big problem was that the food service agency was not following the specialized diet that many of the patients required.  People without teeth were given foods that could end up being a choking hazard.  Diabetic patients were  not being given diabetic meals.  Special orders by the doctors were being ignored.

It quickly ended up getting to the point where the already understaffed nursing staff had to take extra time to not only make sure the trays were correct, but then to waste even more time trying to get the agency to send up the proper food.

If the trays are not vetted before being served and a wrong tray gets served to a patient, the state comes in and fines Milwaukee County (it has already happened).  In other words, the private agency gets to collect all the money, but faces no accountability for when they screw up.  No wonder the County Board’s Committee of Health and Human Needs have been watching this so closely.

Between the County still having to spend money on staff to monitor the trays, the County Supervisors having to oversee everything, and the very real threat of fines, it is doubtful that there are any real savings.  On top of that, I wouldn’t be surprised if the food service started charging more because they have to start serving adequately-sized portions.

Unfortunately, my friends, that is not the end of the story.

I was able to verify today that there was an incident a couple of weeks ago, when one of the trays brought to a patient was infested with bugs, reportedly maggots.

This is not only outrageous, but it completely unacceptable!

Fortunately, a county worker spotted this before it was served.  The food was not served and the worker submitted an incident report regarding this.

Having worked in the human services field for over two decades, I am fully aware of the stigma that is attached to people with mental health issues or developmental delays.  However, these are people with illnesses,  just like someone in a medical/surgical hospital.  They deserve and have the right to the same level of care and respect that anyone else does and would demand for themselves.

That the company would even consider sending a tray up to be served in that condition shows just what a poor idea it was to privatize this service.  The County Board should never have turned their collective back on their better judgment, and it is now incumbent on them to find a way to rectify this situation as soon as possible.

If this sort of irresponsible behavior from the private agency continues, it could end up being very costly due to fines and potential lawsuits.  It also put people in unnecessary danger, both to the patient for obvious reasons, and to anyone around him or her if this had set off a physical outburst of anger.

But the money considerations aside, this complete disregard for people is unacceptable, and this private company needs to go and needs to go now!

I also urge the Board to closely monitor the pending privatization of the housekeeping services there as well, seeing how poorly it’s already started out at the courthouse.

Problems Promoting Milwaukee County?

In the relative recent past, there have been two stories in the news about the groups that are supposed to be promoting Milwaukee County and helping our economy. Both of them raises some serious questions.

One story deals with the Milwaukee 7, which is co-chaired by Michael Grebe. Grebe stated that Milwaukee 7 is seeing some success, but then uses his pedestal to take swipes at Governor Doyle:

One obstacle to recruiting and retaining businesses in the region is the tax and regulatory climate in Wisconsin, which Grebe said “got worse” in this year’s state legislative session led by Democrats and Gov. Jim Doyle. He predicted the M-7 will become more outspoken on public policy issues.

“We probably need to get more involved in some of those issues,” he said. “We do not intend to lobby, but I think we can draw attention to issues and, more importantly, draw attention to solutions. A tricky part of that is identifying a consensus within the region.”

The other story appeared in the last few days and is about Visit Milwaukee, who is bemoaning a smaller budget than in years past:

This year, Visit Milwaukee began with a $6.7 million budget that was trimmed to $5.5 million. Although the group will get a little more in 2010, a new report prepared by Visit Milwaukee concludes: “At the same time our competition for business has increased, our funding has decreased. This has affected our staffing and marketing dollars.”

[...]

Brent Foerster, Visit Milwaukee’s vice president of sales and marketing, said Friday that the area is 50,000 definite room nights ahead in 2010, compared with this year.But there is plenty of work to be done.

“We need revenue,” he said. “Because of a lack of revenue resource, we are not effective in promoting Milwaukee.”

There are many reasons on different levels to be concerned about these two stories.

Michael Grebe, besides being the Co-Chair of the Milwaukee 7 is also on the board of Visit Milwaukee. He is also Scott Walker’s campaign chair.

Both of these groups also receive Milwaukee County tax dollars in their efforts to promote Milwaukee. So when Grebe bashes the taxes in this state as being too high (even though Wisconsin’s tax rankings continues to slide lower down the scale), he is touting Walker’s campaign rhetoric at tax payer’s expense.

Both of these groups are headed up by the same people, more or less. Why are they not working together to help defray costs and bolster their productivity? Since they are both getting tax payer’s dollars that might also help alleviate the tax levels that are supposed to be too high already.

And are we even getting our money’s worth from them? Visit Milwaukee is complaining about not having enough money, but on a budget that would even equal Visit Milwaukee’s petty cash, Milwaukee County First offered up an idea, the County Pass, that would help promote tourism and without nearly the cost that these groups are accruing.

If MCF can do these things on a less than a shoestring budget, either of these groups should be doing one heckuva lot more than they appear to be doing with all of the money they are getting. And they should be able to do it without campaigning for Walker.

State Pols Respond (or Not) To Carp Threat

The Asian carp is on its way to the Great Lakes. If it makes it to Lake Michigan, the cost to business will be in the tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars to Wisconsin, Michigan, Canada and any other area bordering the Great Lakes.

The Army Corps of Engineers had put up an electric fence, but it is no good. The authorities have poisoned the canal that the carp are using to go from the Mississippi, but this will only be a temporary stop gap measure.

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen recently announced that he was going to join his Michigan counterpart in seeking answers. Apparently Van Hollen has caught all those terrorists lurking in northern Wisconsin, or he just figures these are al-Carpa.

But either way, he is way behind the game. City of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett has been calling for the canal to be closed permanently for weeks now. He recognizes the ecological and the economic disaster that would come if the carp make it to Lake Michigan.

His projected (by some) opponent, Scott Walker, has had nothing to say about the carp invasion. He is apparently too busy taking kickbacks campaign donations that just *wink, wink* coincidentally come at the same time jobs are being outsourced. and attending high priced fund raisers to actually take a moment to worry about the economy or the ecology.

It’s pretty clear where each candidates thoughts are. Barrett’s is on the best interest of the state, Walker’s is on his wallet.

B-b-b-b-but He’s Saving Us Money

This is what continuous budget cuts gets you.

Lobby Day: Save The Date

Save the Date!

AFSCME Wisconsin’s 2010 Lobby Day will be March 3!

Join your AFSCME brothers and sisters for Lobby Day 2010 at the State Capitol.  Tell Capitol insiders — face to-face– about issues that matter to you.  Our buses will be heading to Madison from all over the state and will head home by 3 p.m.  Mark your calendars now and watch your inbox for more details and sign-up postcards!

You can also visit www.wiafscme.org for more information.

In Solidarity,

AFSCME WI Action Center

Oh, I am so there!