A week from today the Madison City Council will vote to put a first-ever city referendum on the November ballot, asking voters to increase taxes beyond state limits. When it does that the Council could show good faith with Madisonians if it also moved to eliminate the senseless office of the Police Monitor.
Here’s the deal. Madison, like many other Wisconsin communities, is facing budget constraints not entirely of its own making. The combination of state-imposed levy limits (Madison can’t take full advantage of its growth) and an unfair distribution of state shared revenues (Madison gets $28 per head compared to a statewide average of $140) has created a long-term structural deficit that shouldn’t exist. Essentially, growing, successful communities get punished.
The whole crummy state system should be tossed out and replaced with something that allows communities to benefit from their own success — something you’d think Republicans would be all about. The cynical former Madison mayor in me suspects that maybe Republicans just don’t like my city. Oh, what am I thinking? Perish the thought.
But while the referendum is probably justified, that doesn’t mean the city is off the hook to cut some costs on the other side of the ledger. As I wrote on my blog in Isthmus this week, the city shouldn’t waste a good crisis. Lacking a profit incentive, governments need these kinds of shocks now and then to stimulate some creative thinking in regard to what can be done more efficiently, what agencies might be merged and what things can be eliminated altogether.
First on my list for elimination is the Police Monitor and its Civilian Oversight Board. Rushed into existence in the hysterical moments after the murder of George Floyd, this body never made any sense. For one thing, the Madison Police Department is among the most progressive in the nation. Where an independent office of this sort might make some sense in other communities (I’m looking at you, Milwaukee) it was wholly unnecessary here.
Moreover, there’s plenty of civilian oversight of the cops already. There’s the Police and Fire Commission, which by the way, is the only body that can actually fire and discipline cops to begin with — the Monitor has no real power. And in addition, there’s a Public Safety Review Board made up of citizens and of course there’s the Mayor, to which the Police Chief reports on a daily basis, and there’s the City Council, which controls the department’s budget and some broad policy questions.
But while this thing was unnecessary from the start, it has also proven to be a circus in its implementation. Let us recount the ways.
A last minute amendment on the Council floor required that at least half the Board be made up of Black members, a clear violation of law, which was demonstrated when the city was promptly sued and lost. And then things went downhill from there.
Now, over three years later, the Monitor hasn’t even so much as come up with a complaint process to be used by citizens who feel aggrieved by the cops. And, by the way, nobody has asked for one. There have been no complaints to follow up on.
And this is only the latest chapter in a story that might be funny if it weren’t so pathetic and costly. The Board took months just to get itself organized. When they finally were ready to start the hiring process for the Monitor they couldn’t get a single executive search firm to help them, a bad sign when you consider that these firms should want the business.
So, they took the process in-house but dragged their feet and were less than transparent about their process even while board members took to social media to air their biases about the candidates, resulting in a discrimination lawsuit. When they finally did hire a monitor it came to light that, at a previous job, Byron Bishop had discriminated against an employee who he had had an affair with and he had owned a private security firm that had dropped the ball in supplying security personnel for the city’s first Freak Fest (something I recall all too clearly).
One might stop here and wonder how well the Board was vetting its candidates even as it took an inordinate amount of time in the hiring process. In any event, after Bishop withdrew they picked another candidate who thought better of it (how can you blame him?) and he also withdrew. They finally got down to second runner-up Robert Copley who has spent his time ever since… doing what, exactly?
Copley was hired more than two years after the Board was established during a period when simply making that hire was the only substantive thing on its agenda. And in the 18 months or so he’s been on the job he hasn’t accomplished the first thing on his to-do list, which was to come up with a complaint process. And just last week it was reported that Copley hasn’t even been working for the last three months while he’s been on a medical leave. He was gone for three months and nobody noticed. Tells you something right there.
And to reward themselves for all of that stellar work the board voted to recommend that they should be paid thousands of dollars in “honorariums”, a concept that has no place in municipal government even for competent people.
And the price tag for all this? Over a half million dollars a year. That referendum will ask taxpayers to increase their taxes by $250 a year. Some might justifiably ask if a city that tolerates this kind of waste and sheer incompetence deserves the support.
Among the list of possible cuts that the Council is threatening Madison voters with if the referendum doesn’t pass is a cut in the actual number of police officers on the street. And yet that list of cuts does not include eliminating this half million dollar blunder.
Come November I’m likely to vote for this referendum simply because, having written eight city budgets, I just don’t see how you cut your way out of a $22 million hole. But if the ballot allowed me to write in my own conditions I’d make my vote contingent on eliminating this wasteful office.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
Until there is a full, open and transparent accounting of where and how money is being spent, agreeing to the referendum is only feeding a bad habit. The Monitor is an egregious example. The Mayor’s staff is likely another. BRT, which I know you support, looks like more of the same. This is not a lean operating machine. It looks like an agenda-bloated tax sponge. Which I’m guessing is why, to the extent it’s not just orneriness, the State short-changes Madison.
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I agree that the Commission should be put out of its misery. It’s hard to imagine what actually gets talked about at the meetings.
But I think the way to do it would be to lower the referendum amount by 20% (about $17.5) and to require that the Mayor/Alders first reduce the proposed budget by$4.5m.
That would assure that the elected officials first work hard to cut some costs
The list of current proposed cut reminds me of EV Dirkson‘s observation that the National Park Service always listed closing the Statue of Liberty as the first thing to go on the chopping block.
I suspect that the Police thing would be part of the proposed cuts.
Ken Streit
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I fully support the removal of the unnecessary and apparently non-functioning Police Monitor. If nobody missed the man who occupies that position while he was on medical leave for the last three months, then no one will miss him for the next three years. I would rather use the funds freed up by the removal of this embarrassment to pay for an increase in the number of police positions, which I would much rather see. But I’ll settle for the pulling the Police Monitor and all related funding up by the roots. My alder and the Mayor’s Office will hear from me soon on this.
That brings us to the next logical step. I believe that Madison has a fair number of functions and/or programs of questionable benefit that should likewise be pulled up by their roots, freeing up much-needed cash, now and going forward, to deal more effectively with the structural deficit. Knowing that she would be coming to the citizens of Madison with a referendum to cover (for now) the shortfall in the operating budget, Madison’s Mayor jammed the throttles forward on BRT anyway, an action that can hardly be construed as moving our severe fiscal problems in the right direction. I would rather see BRT and other nice-to-have projects axed as a demonstration of fiscal responsibility than continue on the current unsustainable path.
Finally, Madison’s so-called budget process needs to be restructured to reflect not only the reality of the state’s levy limits and the (deliberately) tiny trickle of shared revenues, but the process also needs to reflect the City’s own ongoing operating priorities. Public safety (police, fire protection, ambulance services) and public health should be at the top of the list of spending priorities, and therefore the LAST place to come when cuts are required. The list of threatened cuts published by the Mayor’s Office, if the referendum does not pass, is infuriating and a direct slap in the face of Madison’s citizens. The Mayor “solves” our fiscal problems by cutting both the must-haves and the weeds to a uniform height, after which the weeds will still be there to claim their unjustified share of limited funds.
We are overdue for a showdown with the Mayor’s office and the Common Council on reforming the budgeting process and openly questioning where the City is spending the money that it collects from its increasingly angry citizens. I will direct my energy into applying pressure on the Mayor and Common Council to delete non-essential spending, and also identify where efficiencies can be realized by merging departments and removing the resulting redundant positions. Then I will work on replacing the current Mayor and any alder who still thinks that it’s a good idea to “defund the police.” That damn phrase is one of the greatest gifts that the far Left ever gave to the Republican Party and it is a gift that keeps on giving. As a centrist Democrat who has watched these insufferable nincompoops cause Democrats to lose winnable elections to the likes of Scott Walker, Donald Trump and their army of right-wing nutcases, I have had enough.
It is true that the corrupt Republican legislature in Wisconsin has done its best to hobble Madison and “own the Libs,” by passing legislation deliberately constructed to cause deep and lasting harm to Wisconsin’s citizens, including harm to the idiots that voted them into office in the first place. That being said, we Democrats helped to create the monster that the Wisconsin Republican Party became and still is. We could have implemented non-partisan redistricting when we held all of the levers of power, and have paid for that act of stupidity and for failing to listen to an increasingly resentful rural Wisconsin ever since. We have worked hard since the rise of Scott Walker and the passage of Act 10 to restore democracy in this state by slowly and patiently prying the levers of power from the fingers of the Republicans by electing a Democratic Governor, Democratic Attorney General, and Democratic-leaning State Supreme Court Justices, who support Wisconsin’s State Constitution and also support the rule of law.
If you think that this long-winded response to your excellent suggestion of removing the Police Monitor in Madison means that I am angry, then you are perceptive. I see how this is all tied together, and how we got to where we are today with our meager and insulting slice of shared state revenue, from where we were thirteen to fourteen years ago, when Walker and his gang swooped in. We may yet succeed in replacing the gerrymander-enabled Republican dictatorship in Wisconsin with the democracy that Wisconsin once was, but we must be eternally vigilant and eternally conscious of the consequences of both our actions and our failures to act. More than that, we need to clean up our own act and then learn and forever internalize the hard lessons that we have largely deserved to experience, beginning with unscrewing Madison’s budget process, spending priorities, and tone-deaf city government.
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