As the last meeting of the state's Joint Finance Committee was going on across the street Wednesday, leaders from state-appointed budget committees and task forces gathered in the Concourse Hotel, 1 W. Dayton St. The discussion on the table was whether the budget crisis offers peril or opportunity to local governments.
The analogy offered up was that, like the initial attacks in Iraq, the budget crisis could offer the shock and awe that Wisconsin residents and politicians need to wake up and overcome their self-interests and turf wars.
Jim Burgess, chair of the Commission for the Study of Administrative Value and Efficiency and former publisher of the Wisconsin State Journal, said there is a need for the people of Wisconsin to become angry with governmental dysfunction so they will begin to think about managing their lives, communities and towns themselves.
\We talked about using local schools as the facility for people to problem solve and support each other and run their communities,"" Burgess said.
He said if the people of Wisconsin receive the shock they need and they gather in that schoolroom, they will need to get people without political affiliations together to draw up a list of services needed, then design a system of government that will meet those needs.
UW-Madison political science Professor Don Kettl, of the Kettl Commission and author of ""Team Bush,"" said he sees the problem in Wisconsin as not a need to restructure, but a problem of economic growth. Kettl said one way to grow the state's economy is to build the workforce. He said studies have shown that companies choose to locate based upon the skills of the workforce available.
""We need to find a way to get these kids before they enter elementary school and get them on the fast track to high quality skills and intergrating both university and technical colleges with the K-12 system,"" Kettl said.
Kettl said a problem with many of the studies and task forces studying the budget is they focus solely on formulas and ignore alternative solutions.
""If there were a way to crash the computers so that they couldn't run Excel for a week, then maybe we will be able to get to a serious debate on what we should do,"" Kettl said.
Tim Sheehy, chair of the Task Force on State and Local Government, said he also subscribes to the shock and awe theory. While Sheehy sees economic growth necessary, he also said government expenditures need to be trimmed from salaries, benefits and healthcare.
""Fringe benefits for kindergarten through 12 employees are the fourth highest in the United States, that's 50 percent above the national average,"" Sheehy said.
