Republicans in the state Legislature gave Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele unprecedented power when they enacted Act 14 in 2013, which stripped away much of the board’s power and concentrated it in the hands of Abele.
Now, the board is beginning to determine just how much power Abele really has.
In last Thursday’s Judiciary, Safety and General Services Committee meeting, Board Chair Theo Lipscomb offered a proposal to hire outside attorneys to provide legal advice on whether the board has oversight of the pay of Abele’s top appointees. In the 2014 budget, the board capped top appointees’ pay at $120,613, with some exceptions, to bring them in line with their peers at other units of government.
Yet Abele has ignored that budget item and his top aides’ salaries often soar above that cap.
Most notoriously, Abele gave Health and Human Services Director Hector Colon a $48,682 raise earlier this year, boosting him to $175,000, more than $50,000 higher than the board-imposed cap.
The majority of the judiciary committee now wants to know if that was legal.
“This is about a crony rewards system that we’ve already seen in action,” Lipscomb told the Shepherd.
Blurred Lines
Act 14, which Abele backed with the support of conservative suburban Republican legislators, took away the board’s power over the daily operations of county government and gave them to Abele. But Act 14 preserved the board’s ability to determine the county’s policies and approve the budget—functions normally overseen by the legislative branch of government.
So even in the Act 14 era, when the board adopts a policy or the annual county budget and it survives Abele’s veto, Abele must carry out the board’s wishes in his daily management of county operations.
But the line between policy making and day-to-day operations has often been blurry.
This summer Abele and the board sparred over a 1.5% raise the board approved in July for non-union county employees, which would come out of the county’s contingency fund. Supervisors also authorized $5 million for parks infrastructure projects that are not eligible for general obligation bonding as well as authorizing the transfer of $1.5 from the debt service reserve for transit improvements along Wisconsin Avenue.
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Abele vetoed the measure, which the board overrode 14-4.
When Abele failed to act on the board’s policies, County Corporation Counsel Paul Bargren provided a memo finding that the board’s pay raise and the other decisions were, in fact, policy directives that Abele would have to carry out. The raises are being implemented now.
But the salaries of the appointees in county government might be a different matter and that’s what the requested legal analysis seeks to clarify. Supervisors want Madison-based Cullen, Weston, Pines and Bach LLC to look into Abele’s executive authority over appointees’ salaries.
Judiciary Committee Chair Tony Staskunas said in Thursday’s meeting that “I wish we had done this a year ago,” noting that the previous board chair, Marina Dimitrijevic, had attempted to work things out with Abele without resorting to legal action, but failed to repair the rift between the board and the executive.
Staskunas said the suit was important since there are still open questions about Act 14’s provisions that will affect any Milwaukee County executive or board of supervisors—not merely Abele and the current board.
“Without any sort of interpretation or ruling from a court of law we’ll move forward and every county executive will have this issue and every board will have this issue,” he said.
But Supervisor Mark Borkowski warned against fighting Abele on his expanded powers under Act 14, saying there would be “interpretations up the ying-yang” and multiple appeals.
“I hate to say this but we’re going to turn the faucet on and I’m not sure when it’s going to stop,” he testified.
The committee voted 5-1 to go forward with a legal fight, with Borkowski in opposition. It now goes to the full board.
