By Rich Eggleston

The Dane County Regional Planning Commission  voted Sept. 12 to sue Gov. Scott McCallum for bowing to the wishes of the county's vocal town officials — who had announced support for Libertarian Ed Thompson — and trying to revoke a law that he had signed continuing the commission for two more years.

The same day, in a column in the Madison weekly Isthmus, Milwaukee mayoral aide James Rowen described how the new, multi-county planning commission McCallum is trying to impose on south central Wisconsin could subjugate the interests of the region's majority to the will of a minority.

That is what happened in southeastern Wisconsin, where the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission is running roughshod over the interests of Milwaukee County, Rowen wrote.

"SEWRPC's structure . . . disenfranchises minorities, people with low incomes, apartment dwellers and non-automobile owning citizens — the very people who are most in need of comprehensive planning," Rowen wrote.

The planning agency's entire staff is white, it is ensconced in a "remote, antebellum" suburban outpost and it is trying to destroy Milwaukee with a $6.25 billion freeway expansion plan, the column asserts.

SEWRPC's bills are paid based on equalized value, but Milwaukee County, with nearly a million people, has  no more votes on SEWRPC as Ozaukee County, with just over 80,000 people. In other words, the interests of a Milwaukee County resident are less than a tenth as important to SEWRPC as the interests of an Ozaukee County resident. And it shows in the planning agency's actions, Rowen wrote.

SEWRPC's "transportation plan has no transit component. It does not address economic development, housing and other planning basics," Rowen concluded. "It produces sprawl. It is not cooperating with city residents. It is not a planning model for Madison's future."

For Rowen's entire column, look here.

Scott Meske, a representative of Municipal Electric Utilities of Wisconsin — some municipal utilities are venturing into broadband — said local governments can be a part of the solution, and the committee should look beyond just what state government can do to foster broadband.

In a case from Missouri, the 8th U.S. Circuit of Appeals has ruled that states cannot prevent municipalities from providing telecommunications services, because such laws are precluded by the Telecommunications Act of 1996

In an earlier appeals court decision from Texas, the conclusion was just the opposite: that when Congress was not thinking of local governments when it decreed that "any entity" should be allowed to compete in the industry.

"There is no doubt that municipalities and municipally owned utilities are entities under a standard definition of the term," the 8th Circuit said. The term "includes all organizations, even those not entirely independent from other organizations," the court said.

For more, see the story in the Columbia Missourian, here.

By Rich Eggleston

Local governments are "the main culprit" behind high taxes in Wisconsin, says the state's big-business lobby, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce. That's why WMC lobbied in support of Gov. Scott McCallum's since-discarded plan to eliminate the $1 billion state shared revenue program.

"The current system has resulted in government spending and taxes growing faster than inflation and personal income for the last three decades," WMC's taxation committee said last month.

Their attitude reminds me of an old saying we had in the news business: Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.

The facts, according to the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, are that Wisconsin state and local governments spend $15.65 per $1,000 of personal income more than the typical state, which ranks Wisconsin 20th nationally.  It turns out that $15.63 cents of that above-average spending is spending on education. And  state and local governments are the culprits for just two cents.

"Local officials, citizens and local taxpayer groups closely scrutinize municipal budgets every year to ensure that their tax bills are not unnecessarily increased because of excessive spending," says the League of Wisconsin Municipalities. "Residents have continuing direct input into municipal spending decisions. Local elected officials are ultimately held accountable for their spending decisions at the ballot box every two years."