This is an opinion piece
By Waukesha County Supervisor Robert Kolb
As you know or may not know Waukesha County is going to meet its goal to balance the budget next year, but it is costing the county more essential employees which is not saving anything.
That will require a reduction in sheriff’s deputies & public works employees. Since 2010, Paul Farrow and Dan Vrakas before that has been demanding significantly more lean budgets from every department for 15 years in a row by millions and 85 FTE’s. That is why your county tax levy has stayed virtually the same for the past nine years.
We demand fiscal responsibility of our elected officials of which Waukesha County has been and will continue to demonstrate. For comparison, Arrowhead High School is asking for $260 million to tear down two completely functional buildings to build one large one with a building full of luxury items. That is NOT fiscal responsibility.
As a supervisor during our budget meetings, we are having to cut positions to try to balance our budget. I am very worried that we have come to the point of diminishing returns where cutting is costing us more than helping us. There have been many meetings with different elements of our county to come up with solutions including local business leaders and the Waukesha Business Alliance.
According to Dan O’Donnell, we have a balanced budget this year. He is not wrong, but he doesn’t realize all of the county departments did more cuts to meet that goal. Those cuts as said before are going to cost the county more than it saves. We’re never able to fund the cost to continue.
One thing I want to bring to everyone’s attention is that county government is not the same as state or municipal government. When I first got elected to the board representing Oconomowoc (I now represent Genesee, Vernon & Town of Waukesha), I quickly learned that county government’s hands are tied to make any major changes to our structure & programs that we’re elected to oversee.
Most of what the county is responsible for is to administer the funds & programs mandated by the state. We get funds to run a specific program in Public works or HHS or Judicial which includes the Sheriff.
If we need more judges, the state won’t give them to us. We have to make do or dip into the levy to bring in more judges. If we do that, then we have to keep paying for those judges. As everyone can see with their own eyes, crime is absolutely not going down, thanks for the most part to Milwaukee County for NOT incarcerating career criminals. 40% of our criminal cases are people from Milwaukee County, and 50% of our jail inmates are not from Waukesha County.
Every year, we are sent a portion of the state budget to do our job. That is what’s called shared revenue. That money does not come out of your property taxes. Sometimes the state will demand unfunded programs or mandates which means they pay for the initial setup & then our county has to come up with the money whether we agree with it or not.
The shared revenue formula has been extremely biased towards big liberal cities for decades. If you remember, Paul Farrow was extremely angry and frustrated that the new formula to divide the money for cities, counties, villages, and towns was still lopsided to say the least.
Waukesha County residents pay about $1.5 billion (1500 million) in sales and income tax to the state. We only get back approximately $60 million. $47 million will be going to the state funding shortfall of that $60 million. We also get grants from other state and federal agencies. For example, money from FEMA went down significantly this year. (Are you surprised?)
When I first got on the board, my first committee was on Public Works. They basically take care of the roads and fleet. We come up with a list of roads and capital improvements that need to be done. We never put projects in the plan that didn’t need to be done. What I found disturbing and aggravating to say the least is many of the projects can’t get done unless we beg the state and federal governments for money for each individual project. (This is what happens when the state and federal government steals so much of your & my money that we’re forced to beg for it back). Every single time, we’re forced to ask for funds to fix a road. We are forced to follow their rules or we don’t get the “grant.”
If you want to see an example of complete failure – your federal government taking our money & then giving it back with strings attached. Every road that we build that uses federal funds has a very expensive bike path put in the roadway. Those bike paths usually end abruptly and go nowhere. If you take a ride to the 200 block of Arcadian Avenue in Waukesha, you will see the absolute idiocy of what the feds demand. There is literally a bike path down the middle of the road. An entire lane of traffic was taken away on Wisconsin Avenue for the bike path which causes a traffic jam most of the day. I travel through the city very often. I almost never see a bike utilize these paths. We also have to spend millions more for different agencies to approve each project.
One part of the budget is the Sheriff’s department. Their funding comes mainly from the property tax levy, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on the issue or situation. The county sheriff has more independence from the county because it’s an independent entity, with the sheriff being an elected office. There are advantages & disadvantages to that. The advantage is we can’t dictate how they run their department to a degree. That’s beneficial because the government can’t use the sheriff as a tool of intimidation. The negative aspect is it’s much harder to demand fiscal responsibility.
Paul Farrow has demanded every department to develop a budget smaller than the previous budget. Every department head comes up with a successful plan that cuts unnecessary expenses and streamlines the department. The county sheriff always comes up short and begs for money every budget cycle. The same thing happens in fire departments all across the county. They can never come up with smaller budgets. They always have brand new shiny fire trucks they can run through parades & brand new state-of-the-art fire stations paying full-time firemen to sit around twiddling their thumbs in most of our communities. Don’t get me started on the library system that barely gets used for the cost. The Bridges library system is a huge drain on the smaller communities.
My biggest problem is the multitude of programs in HHS. Instead of making people independent, they encourage generational dependency. I was in an HHS meeting in my second term. This program administrator was proud of a child of a lifelong recipient coming in for help as well. Don’t get me wrong, some county programs are beneficial for the money spent. Our county is often used as a template for other counties to create a program that has been proven to work. I think our county has significantly been cutting edge in dealing with our drug problems in the county. I wish we could eliminate money-wasting programs like Section 8 & put that money toward helping instead of encouraging dependency.
I am not saying we are perfect, but you do have to admit that our county executive, along with the county board, has striven successfully to keep your tax levy lower for a long time.
As you know, inflation is absolutely killing us. We got little in shared revenue, and the cost of maintaining our roads and keeping the county going has skyrocketed. In addition to inflation, we have significantly higher costs every year to our court system and sheriff’s department because of Milwaukee County crime. Milwaukee refuses to incarcerate its criminals. We are forced to arrest these criminals when they commit crimes in this county. Then we have to run them through our court system, and then we have to put them in our jail. That cost is skyrocketing.
You all know about the Christmas parade massacre. That trial in itself took a big chunk out of our budget that year. I wish we could send a bill to Milwaukee county for every single criminal who should have been in prison long ago. We are behind the eight ball with jail space.
I will personally push for a new jail in addition to what the county has now. We need that jail like yesterday. The safety of Waukesha County residents is the absolutely most important aspect of living here. The sheriff is already putting ankle monitors on Huber people because the Sheriff was forced to combine the jail and Huber due to limited funds to hire additional law enforcement employees.
All of us from Paul Farrow to everyone on the county board are just as upset about the current budget situation. We’re not like our current state governor, hoarding over $3 billion federal dollars from federal Covid funds. We don’t have a secret stash. We actually run as close to zero as possible.
