It’s municipal budget season in Whitewater, Wisconsin, and in towns across America. Whitewater’s budget will be presented in stages, over more than one Common Council meeting. That’s been a practice here for years; this year is no different.
I’ll offer a few remarks on a municipal budget, before commentary another time when the city’s proposed budget is unveiled. (Between now and then, I will write in detail about a recent analysis of the City of Whitewater’s fiscal condition.)
A small, rural town with a college campus. We’re a small town of 14,454 people, with a college campus, located in southeast Wisconsin. That’s the easiest way to describe our town. It’s an accurate, but superficial, description. From that single sentence, one would be ignorant of much of what Whitewater’s like. One might expect — and there are more than a few in town who would expect — that the town was a Hallmark card brought to life. I’d say that we are a beautiful, but also a troubled, small town.
A town of considerable poverty, especially among children. Sadly, across all groups within our schools, there’s significant hardship among children — 35.4% of Whitewater’s students require free or reduced lunches. Over one-in-three children in Whitewater — a supposedly “Banner Inland City of the Midwest” — require financial assistance merely to buy a school lunch. Whitewater ranks 11th of 50 schools in this unfortunate category.
(For a recent study from the non-partisan Public Policy Forum, see Report shows wide disparity in Walworth County per-student spending. The report is available online in pdf format, and there’s a section about Whitewater available online, too.)
(The report covers the City of Whitewater and towns nearby that are part of the Whitewater Unified School District. Complete Census data for the city alone are not yet available.)
One hundred carefully circumscribed trolley routes, happy pictures, or proud declarations are no substitute for seeing Whitewater’s poverty as it is today — so that we may be better off tomorrow.
I’m not a progressive, but at least the New Dealers knew how to depict conditions honestly, so that they might spur their fellow citizens to action. Dorothea Lange’s pictures were haunting, yet useful.
New Dealers didn’t favor photographs like this because they disliked America, but because they loved America. (No matter how misguided some of their efforts were — and they were misguided — I recognize that they cared about ordinary people; today’s big-spenders often hawk silly projects that don’t help the needy, but are simply welfare programs for white-collar workers.)
Reducing spending to reduce the tax burden is a good thing. One will sometimes hear that “people just want to pay less in taxes.” One hears this exclaimed with disdain, as though it were the same as saying “people just want to eat kitten and puppies.”
Having earned something, by their own labor, one might expect people to be able to enjoy those earnings for themselves and their families. There’s considerable temerity in bureaucrats smiling and mugging for the camera with the millions they didn’t earn, but only took by compulsion as taxes, from those who did earn that money. It’s not productivity, or success, to play with the millions that others earned.
Indiscriminate reductions are a bad idea — our situation is too dire. Mere austerity — simply spending less — is not enough. We should spend less than we do, so that we might tax less. Simply spending less might be enough for an otherwise prosperous town, in temporarily hard times.
We’re not that town. There are too many poor and working poor in Whitewater to contend honestly that this is a successful, thriving town. No small faction of residents wishing to insist that we’ve arrived will change the truth of our condition. In any event, a few striving men, successful only in promoting themselves through an endless campaign of cheerleading, is the last group whose word anyone should take.
Reductions in spending should affect those at the top, not those most vulnerable. We have too many bureaucrats, and tiny Whitewater’s City Manager was next-to-absurd last year to contend that one solution in Whitewater is to trim the bureaucracy. Tiny Whitewater shouldn’t have a bureaucracy at all. I’ll take him up on his offer, though. Salaries of principal leaders should be held steady or reduced. Others across America have had to take wage cuts — it’s time for Whitewater’s officials to do the same.
That’s also why I am opposed to cuts in spending for a library or even for recreation. Those cuts disproportionately affect the poor and disadvantaged. They’re a middle class official’s idea of seeming responsible, while he leaves less for the poor, as he goes off a trip, etc.
Reducing spending in some areas to reallocate or defend existing commitments is a good idea. Our priories should reflect poverty in town. Spending under the fantasy of a thriving middle class community, when that’s not what we are, is both misplaced and wrong. If Whitewater must spend — and she must — basic public safety, growth and opportunity, and the needs of the poor should trump a manager’s silly schemes.
As for growth and opportunity, it should be real and genuine, and a reduction in fees that actual business people pay is a great place to start.
This is a good time for fee reductions. We need to spur growth. We’re losing jobs now. Spurring growth should begin with reducing fees.
Whitewater took eleven million in grants and public debt for a so-called Innovation Center, but that failing project is less useful to anyone than a single million would have been for fee reductions, or even immediate job training, and expanded food, clothing, and other assistance for the poor, particularly children.
(I understand well that the money for the tech park cannot be reallocated. In fact, we should not have taken any of it; those grants, etc. should have been left to a community that wouldn’t have so selfishly used tax money. Another community would have made better use of those millions. Brunner, Telfer, et al., should not have raised their hands to ask for money for so empty an idea.)
Yet, so ineffectual is the Innovation Center project, that even a fraction of that money spent directly in assistance to the poor would be better than how the whole amount is being spent now.
Cut deeply, beginning at the top, with most savings going to tax or fee reductions to spur genuine private growth, and other savings going to services that aid the poor, while preserving services that benefit the needy.
One or two fewer department leaders, and significant reductions in the use of consultants, would go a long way toward closing a gap, while also reducing taxes & fees, and preserving necessary services.
I’ll add detail to these ideas as the budget process unfolds, with specific suggestions along these lines.