Tech school taxes -- the rest of the story

The horror over Milwaukee Area Technical College's proposed -- brace yourself -- FIVE PER CENT budget increase knows no bounds, at least at the Journal Sentinel and in the Republican suburbs, where most JS editors seem to reside.

Following up on its top line story and screaming headlines of last week, the paper asks in a headline, "Lessons in Tax and Spend?"

Cute. That must be what they're teaching at MATC -- Wild Spending 101.

The story offers some numbers:

From 2001 to 2006, Milwaukee County increased its tax levy 6%, the City of Milwaukee boosted its levy 18% and Milwaukee Public Schools raised its levy 26%.

Over that same time frame, MATC raised its levy 35.7%, from $93.2 million, to 126.5 million...

From 2001 to 2006, the state's 16 technical colleges collectively raised their levies 33.4%. That outpaced inflation and the increases in the collective levies of the school districts, the municipalities and the counties statewide, according to the Taxpayers Alliance...

No explanations or investigation, of course. Just scratching the surface might have produced another number, since it comes from another Journal Sentinel story:

Technical college officials say they have little choice but to turn to property-tax payers and increase levies. General state aid has held steady at $118.4 million for the last six years, said Morna Foy, an executive assistant at the Wisconsin Technical College System, which oversees the tech schools.

At the same time, state aid is covering a smaller portion of technical schools' budgets. In 1980, state aid covered 35%; today, it's about 17.5%.

The same legislators who berate the MATC board for its spending and want an elected board -- Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin) and Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) -- have voted to freeze state aid. When you freeze aid for six years -- not tied to inflation or the cost of living, but a real, solid, absolute freeze -- you are forcing property taxes up. To then complain that property taxes are going up takes more than a little chutzpah.

What on earth makes Darling and Lazich think that electing board members would rein in spending and taxes?

Darling herself, a reader points out, was a member of Joint Finance, the legislature's most powerful committee, when the Republicans were turning the state budget into the nation's laughingstock with a $3.2 billion deficit. The deficit was so bad the state's bond rating was reduced even as MATC continued to receive the highest bond rating possible. The situation was so dire that the Wall Street Journal called Wisconsin's budget a "basket case." Was this accountable and responsible behavior from elected officials?

Our elected members of Congress -- including "fiscal conservative" Mark Green -- and the guy in the White House, whom we sort of elected, have run up deficits in the trillions of dollars.

Even Milwaukee Magazine's Bruce Murphy has bought the idea that electing the MATC board would solve its budget problems. But there is no evidence that has worked anywhere else in government

Finally, an Xoff reader makes this observation:

The Journal Sentinel continues to echo anti-public education extremists in its articles on MATC. It acts as if a 5% increase in tax levy, $14 on a median priced home in Milwaukee County, were a 50% increase.

Is a cup of coffee a month, the price of this modest tax increase, too much to ask the citizens of this community to contribute to support their technical college and its 58,000 students? Is this too much to ask to ensure that this community has an adequate supply of nurses, dental technicians, police and firemen, IT network specialists, web page designers, welders, auto and heating and air conditioning technicians and skilled tradesmen? Is it too much to ask to retrain our laid off workers and provide English language and skills training to the growing community of immigrants?

The JS, which has written several articles on how the state's labor shortage is undermining economic growth, seems to have forgotten that if we are to solve the growing skilled labor shortage we actually need to train and retrain the labor force. We do this by investing in MATC. Is a cup of coffee a month really too much to ask?

In the latest article the Senator from the North Shore, Alberta Darling, raises the issue of accountability. Darling equates elections with accountability. But as the article notes in 65% of local elections there are no competitive races because no one runs against the incumbents.

Recall that while the state was reducing its support for the tech colleges by over 50% in the 1990's, Darling and company told the colleges that they should make up the lost state revenue through the local property tax. Now they turn around and act as if the colleges are thieves for doing exactly what Darling and company urged them to do! This is not accountable. This is hypocrisy!

MATC's property tax increases pale in light of the state's 655% increase in prison spending including the purchase of speculatively built Stanley prison which is already in need of millions of dollars of repairs. Wisconsin has the dubious distinction of spending seven times as much on prisons as we do on the entire WTCS system! Is this what Darling means by accountability?

Darling and company are playing a duplicitous game of political "gotcha!" The fact that the Journal Sentinel seems to have bought into the tax freeze zealotry is a discouraging about face. It was not too long ago, in 1999, that the paper was advocating a 4.1% increase in state support for the tech colleges. Darling and company never took the JS advice to increase tech college funding. Instead, they cut it.

Skilled labor shortages are now more acute, Milwaukee poverty rates higher and hourly wages are lower. The single largest obstacle to job creation is the state's labor shortage. Contrary to the Darling and the Journal Sentinel's headlines, it is irresponsible not to invest in MATC.