Governor's Task Force on
State and Local Government
2002
Milwaukee business leader Tim Sheehy was named in February to chair an 11-member task
force to take yet another look at the state-local partnership. Gov. Scott McCallum had
announced the task force Jan. 22, the same day he labeled local government as "big
spenders" and unveiled a since-discarded plan to eliminate state shared revenues by
2004.
The group met for the first time June 12, 2002. Sheehy, executive director of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, said the task force should attempt to make the state-local partnership a center of discussion in the fall election campaign.
"I don't believe for a minute that local governments are the problem," Sheehy told the first meeting.
By December, the task force identified what state and local issues are most pressing. Those issues were shared revenue; local and regional cooperation; barriers to efficient, quality service; local and regional economic growth; inventorying state property; and civic entrepreneurship.
The Task Force was to make final recommendations in February, 2003 (a month after Gov.-elect Jim Doyle takes office) on how to strengthen the partnership between state and local government.
Its guiding principles recognize the need for more effective economic development tools regionally; for greater intergovernmental cooperation; for the use of state revenue to achieve state goals; and for more civic entrepreneurs in local government service. The task force also called for an inventory of government property.
"Shared revenue and other inentives such as tax-base growth sharing are tools to foster innovation, equity, quality service and economic growth," the task force's draft recommendations state.
For the 10 pages of recommendations (the Kettl Commission report ran 133 pages), go to the task force's web site by clicking here.
What's missing from the task force's web site? An explanation of how it arrived at its recommendations. For example, missing are the insights provided by three individuals -- former Brookfield Mayor Kathryn Bloomberg, consultant and intergovernmental problem-solver Bill Mielke and the Alliance of Cities' Ed Huck. Their presentations to the task force can be seen by clicking on the buttons below.
The task force is the latest in a series of state efforts to re-examine the state-local partnership that began in the 1950s. To see a summary of past efforts, click here. To see Steve Walters' Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story on Sheehy's appointment, go here.
At the Alliance of Cities, we are beginning to think that the way to retool the state-local partnership is to look at state and local problems on a regional basis, and solve them on a regional basis. That won't make the state-local partnership passé, as Myron Orfield and Thomas Luce found in their February, 2002 Wisconsin Metropatterns study. But it requires a new breed of thinking, Metropatterns work group members concluded after a round of meetings in Wauwatosa. Their prescription for the issues that Sheehy et. al. revisited, is here. Our summary of the Metropatterns study's findings are here.
For the full Metropatterns report, please go to the Metropolitan Area Research Corp. website and download the large (12.9 mb) Adobe Acrobat file here. Last we checked, there was a bug in the website that allowed us to download the file using Internet Explorer, but not Netscape.
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