Jeff Stone and Others Are Secretly Plotting To Steal Mitchell Field

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports Saturday that sneaky state legislators, politically-connected lawyers and lobbyists at the MMAC have been secretly plotting to snatch the airport away from Milwaukee County to stop local taxpayers from managing what's in their own backyard.

Among the cabal leaders: State Rep. Jeff Stone, (R-Greendale) - - the same Jeff Stone who hopes to run for Milwaukee County Executive after Scott Walker's campaign for Governor dies in the September primary.

Let's hope that Stone's behind-the-scenes ploy to take away the airport's control from county residents - - the same county residents he'd 'represent' as county executive - - quashes his plans to run for county exec. The last thing Milwaukee County needs after the Walker years is another chief executive whose concerns about the county are secondary.


The state legislature under the GOP's legislative autocracy is making a habit of stepping into local Milwaukee affairs and onto local taxpayers.

State-mandated pay for fired and criminally-charged Milwaukee cops. Excessive payments per pupil from city taxpayers mandated by the state to choice-program schools. And now the scheme to hijack the airport and hand it over to a regional body - - all at the state's insistence.

Can you imagine the uproar if legislators mandated the handover of another Wisconsin city or county's airport to a new-fangled regional authority, or meddled with their police budgeting or school property tax levies?

Local city and county taxpayers need to step up their resistance (Stone says he will push the bill next year) to these state power grabs. Mayor Barrett fought the good fight on the police and school finances, but will we hear one peep of protest out of Walker, our absentee and opportunistic county executive?

And kudos to Milwaukee County Supervisor Richard D. Nyklewicz Jr., whose open record requests produced some of the information that the Journal Sentinel used in its story.

While Stone and others were using their influence and power to keep information about the airport takeover away from the public, and to ask lobbyists, not legislative staffers, to draft the enabling legislation, Nyklewizc was doing just the opposite.