North Shore Officials Worried About Loss of Revenue, Local Control Under State Budget

Local officials cast a grim forecast of the North Shore’s public schools under Gov. Walker’s proposed budget in a forum sponsored by the North Shore Citizen’s Group Tuesday night.

To a crowd of about 50 in the auditorium, panelists expressed concern about the combination of decreased revenue from the state and tax freezes leaving local municipalities with few options but cutting services.

“This budget cuts funding to local governments and handcuffs local officials so they can’t make up for it with property taxes,” Jack Norman, Research Director at the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future, said.

Whitefish Bay School Board Member Cheryl Maranto said Whitefish Bay will not see a big hit this year, but she said the future is less certain. She said MPS schools will be the hardest hit immediately but more affluent schools like Whitefish Bay could be next in line.

“Each district is a car on a train. MPS is probably the engine, Whitefish Bay is near the caboose,” she said. “There’s a cliff. And when we start going over, we’re all going over together.”

Glendale-River Hills Superintendent Larry Smalley said the proposed state budget limits local authority over municipal issues.

“This is a Democrat and Republican problem,” Smalley said. “These are local control issues. When you have local control, if you have a problem you have a face to go to. Both parties talk about local control being important and then turn the other way.”

Smalley said his district is on a three-year contract with its teachers so it lacked the flexibility of other districts that will save money on health care for teachers.

He said the district decided to cut its curriculum director due to the budget cuts and the district's inability to raise property taxes.

“It’s a short term problem and a long term disaster,” Smalley said.

Smalley also said the state mandates a level of care for special needs students that cannot be met with the money they receive. He said Glenn Hills Middle School has 11 students with special needs that require a $416,000 budget.

“It’s getting to the point that I’m taking away money from other students, gifted and talented students and regular Joe Smiths, that it’s becoming inequitable,” Smalley said.

Additionally, Smalley said the mandated end of WiscNet for public schools would triple the cost of Internet, for which the district currently pays $2,000 per year.

Though the panel largely focused on education, Milwaukee County 1st District Supervisor Theodore Lipscomb discussed budget cuts on the county level to corrections, health and human services, and public transportation.

“The trend has been more and more mandates and less support,” he said. “The net effect is tremendous pressure to maintain any semblance of the quality of services we’ve come to expect.”

Lipscomb said the $7 million proposed cut to public transit would be impossible to absorb because they are unable to raise the sales tax that funds transit.

“Transit is really in crisis,” he said.

In addition to these cuts, the system will soon be losing federal stimulus money that has kept it afloat for the past two years.

While a common defense of the cuts is that the state has to contend with a large deficit, Norman said Gov. Scott Walker has made the financial situation out to be worse than it is.

“The governor has used this notion that we have an extraordinary deficit to justify his actions,” Norman said.

Norman said the state has had a deficit for years, and that this year’s is smaller than that of the 2003-2005 budget cycle.

“It is completely false that this is an unprecedented deficit,” he said. “It’s one deficit situation in a continuing series.”

Norman said this year’s deficit is somewhat larger than that of more recent years because of three factors: the recession, recent tax cuts, and federal stimulus money that will soon be cut off.

Instead of making up the deficit with budget cuts, Norman said the state should raise certain taxes to bring in more revenue, such as taxes on the wealthy and inheritance taxes.

“We don’t have to do this,” he said. “There are alternatives."

Speculating about why Walker proposed the cuts he did, some panelists boiled it down to an ideology about private institutions being more effective than public.

“What we have is a deep-seeded ideological drive to eliminate as much of government as possible,” Norman said.

Rep. Sandy Pasch (D-Whitefish Bay), who came for the question and answer part of the forum, said she worried about this attitude degrading the quality of public institutions.

“We are seeing a dismantling of the public infrastructure that guarantees a certain quality of life and education,” Rep. Sandy Pasch said.

Norman said the North Shore isn’t alone in its concerns about the state budget.

“The things that are being talked about here are being talked about in communities all across the state,” he said. “This is not a hopeless situation because what’s happening is so severe that people all over the state are coming together.”