Alders Mark Clear and David Ahrens have proposed “reforms” that would allegedly “re-balance the powers of the legislative and executive branches and strengthen the Council’s ability to shape the budget and future investment in our neighborhoods.” If find that the proposals don’t really do that, and they already have a strong council weak mayor system in place, they just don’t use the power they already have. There are much better reforms to be made.
Here’s the 4 proposals they have, this hardly seems to be “reform”:
– The Board of Estimates will be renamed the Finance Committee and all members will be appointed by the Council President. This reform will make a significant improvement in the Council’s ability to represent the public in the budget deliberation process.
– The Common Council Organizational Committee will be renamed the Common Council Executive Committee for clarity to the public on its function.
Oooooo, renaming commmittees! How exciting! What really matters is the committee descriptions and the powers given to them in the ordinances. Simply renaming them might make the council feel better and some members of the public might find it less confusing, but this isn’t that big of a deal and most people won’t even notice. I don’t see anything here that would give our neighborhoods any advantage when it comes to shaping the budget.
– Council leadership will serve two year terms to improve continuity and institutional knowledge
This isn’t a bad “reform” but my reasoning for thinking it might be a good idea is very different. But I don’t see this as the only solution. So meh. This won’t really allow our neighborhoods to have any better say in the budget, but it will allow the council president to not get run over by the council staff who in many regards really runs the day to day council operations. By the time the council president figures things out, they are out of office and the council staff has fresh meat to work with. A two year stint would make it easier the second year for the council president. However, I think this could also be accomplished by re-thinking the role of the “Pro Tem” (now there’s a “reform” rename the “Pro Tem” to the Vice President!), they should be given more roles and take a more active lead in helping in running the council so they are better prepared to step in to the President role. However if the President and Pro Tem don’t get along (as it was when Paul Van Rooy and I were President and Pro Tem) the Pro Tem might not get a good experience and this might not work either. Sadly, making the council president a two year stint would mean that many council members could not take on this responsibility, due to all the extra meetings held during the day. Most people don’t have jobs that would allow that. So, I do think it might lead to some improvement with continuity with the council staff, but it also might make the council presidency something only a few can do. A final thought, they really have this power now, if they like the council president and the council president is doing a good job, they can just elect them for another year. On second thought, that seems like the better system, since if they suck, you can get rid of them. (Sorry for blogging out loud.)
– The Council President will make all alder appointments to City Committees. This reform will bring integrity to the appointment process by ensuring that Alders are appointed by someone who is accountable to them.
This one cracks me up. They want to be “more like the county board”. This might be the dumbest part of this proposal. Ask conservatives and Progressive Dane members on the county board how its working out for them. Right now they have a terrible system where everyone has to swear to belong to this group call “Citizens” and if you’re a member of that group you have to vote for the budget, vote for the chair and then you’ll be protected come election time (they’ll make sure no one runs against you if they can.) That chair that you swear to elect to protect your seat on the board, then makes the appointments. If you’re in the “cool kids” clique, then you get good appointments, if you’re not in with the “cool kids” then you’re screwed. Do we really want to have some power hungry council president making these decisions? Cuz then you get the budget process that we’ve had at both the county board and city council in a few of the past years where some uber-amendment gets worked out behind closed doors and announced at the last minute. How is that good for neighborhoods? (Hint: its only good if your alder is one of the cool kids.)
This also cracks me up because . . . the alders already have the power to reject the mayor’s appointments. They approve them all, if they don’t like them, they can send them back. Tell me when a mayor actually used this power in a way that was really upsetting – the only one I can think of is when Mayor Dave threw me off the plan commission. Besides that, its a rather cordial balancing of geographies and a little bit of how much the mayor thinks you’re competent or not (incompetent = not many committee assignments, competent = carefully chosen committee appoinments) Mostly the mayors just give the new alders the committees that the previous alder had, with a few exception and Board of Estimates is one of them.
So on the reforms, I got a
– Meh.
– Meh.
– Keep it the same so you have flexibility if you have a bad president.
– Hell no!
Proposals that would “strengthen the Council’s ability to shape the budget and future investment in our neighborhoods”
Ok, off the top of my head in 15 minutes or less.
– Participatory budgeting – which the council turned down when Alder Rummel made a budget amendment to explore it. THAT would give neighborhoods some real power. We tried proposing it when I was on the council as well. It likely only works for the capital budget portion of the budget, but it would be a start. That would be a REAL reform
Some less earth shattering but simple things that would help the public:
– Get the amendments that will be considered by the Board of Estimates and the Council out to the public a week in advance. Right now, the amendments come out on Friday, and they vote on Monday. The public has little chance to see them, react to them and give input on them.
– Stretch out the budget process so the council can play a more meaningful role. The mayor puts out the operating budget October 1 and the council approves it by the second week in November. It doesn’t have to be that way. Either get the budget from the mayor sooner, or go past Thanksgiving to pass the budget – there’s a whole month and a half left in the year.
– Refer portions of the budget to more committees. Use the citizen advisory committees to get real input from real people on what should be in the budget. Perhaps those recommendations could be due to the Mayor at the end of summer so that the mayor can consider them in the budget.
– Figure out a process to involve the public in the budget sooner. We’ve had 2 or 3 different ideas, all led by the mayor’s office, perhaps the alders should devise their own process to get input from the public. Trick here tho, is that the input has to be considered and the public has to see that their input mattered, if it just gets ignored (like the online input was) then no one will participate again.
– If the mayor’s appointments are so terrible, reject them! This kinda cracks me up, what is wrong with the current Board of Estimates? They seem to be implying there is something wrong with the alders that are there.
– Board of Estimates and Council should take a more active role the rest of the year, during budget time they hem and haw over every little detail, then at the Board of Estimates tonight they are adding over a million dollars to the capital budget in three different amendments, and I bet they don’t even pull the items off the agenda to talk about them, they’ll just rubber stamp them. But man, ask for $40,000 for a non-profit and its the end of the world.
– $665,000 Budget amendment for Sewer Utility for Lower Badger Mill Creek Sanitary Sewer Interceptor Phase 3
– $351,300 Budget Amendment for Engineering for Building Addition
– $108,000 Budget Amendment for Fire Department video wall
– Ah, and that leads me to my favorite part – PAY ATTENTION TO COMMUNITY SERVICES!!! The council has washed their hands of where the community services dollars are going. They rubber stamp any process or priorities that come before them, and then they say they have done their job and don’t want to be bothered. In the past 10 years (probably 20), they haven’t had a discussion about what the priorities for community services should be. Not a peep. I don’t think most of them realize that since 2012 – many nonprofits have not been before Community Services to have their funding reviewed and it may not be done again this year. There are major changes going on and most alders have no clue. We hired some consultant to devise a new system and it seems to have crashed the system. The real issue here is that this is not a priority and they don’t want to be bothered.
15 minutes or less. I’m sure I got more in me if I think about it harder. These improvements would make a real difference. Changing the name or giving themselves powers they already have is hardly reform.
