Monday Catch Up: The Fat Lady Sang

Welcome to Monday from rainy Luxembourg. Here’s some stuff that happened last week.

The fat lady finally sang. The inevitable happened and the Brewers got their big taxpayer funded payday. The state Senate made it go down only slightly easier by nudging up the Brewers’ contribution (which they’ll get from their fans by raising ticket prices) by a little bit and taking a little bit of the burden off taxpayers by imposing a ticket surcharge on stadium events outside of Brewers games. What was most interesting about that vote is that every Milwaukee senator voted against it. Sen. Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee) said it best. “All of those things (like improve child care and help clean up PFAS chemicals) you can’t do but something that’s unpopular as having the taxpayers on the hook for half a billion dollars is here,” he said. Democrats missed a golden opportunity to make this an issue in next year’s elections.

Murphy is now the law. Speaking of the Brewers, the team unsurprisingly replaced Craig Counsell with his long-time bench coach Pat Murphy. That’s fine, but what was interesting from last week was Counsell’s comment when the new Cubs skipper was introduced to the Chicago media. He said he had been thinking about leaving the Brewers for the last couple of years. That suggests to me that the disastrous trade of closer Josh Hader right at the deadline in 2022 told Counsel everything he needed to know about the Brewers ownership groups’ commitment to winning.

You can’t get out of jail free. As predicted here at YSDA, the Dane County jail saga is back to square one. Earlier this year when the County Board approved only enough new money to meet the current cost estimates at that time for the long-debated jail consolidation project, we noted that the bids could come in above that and we’d be right back in the soup. Sure enough. The county got only one bid and it came in about $27 million over what’s in the budget. And that’s for a project that would provide 20% fewer beds than what we have now and in a county that is the fastest growing in the state. This opens the door for those who think we can deal with incarceration by reducing jail sizes instead of crime to push for a still smaller facility. It’s like attacking a weight problem by buying smaller clothes.

Seattle goes moderate. And speaking of law and order, in last week’s local elections Seattle voters elected a moderate majority to their city council. At least five of the nine seats, and perhaps more, will be occupied by members who support increasing the police force. The one “progressive” incumbent who did survive did so only after disavowing his previous “defund the police” stance. This comes a year after these same Seattle voters elected a moderate mayor and prosecutor.