Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway has been taking some heat for her proposed cuts in the city budget should a first-ever city taxing referendum fail. The criticism is undeserved.
On the November ballot the city is asking voters to exceed taxing limits set by the state to help fill a $22 million gap caused mostly by those unrealistically low limits combined with a state shared revenue formula designed to punish Madison. It would cost the owner of an average home, valued at $457,300, about $230 a year.
But what happens if the referendum is rejected? Last week the mayor submitted two budgets to the city council, one based on the success of the referendum, the other outlining what she would cut if it failed.
Rhodes-Conway could have avoided the two budget scenarios by simply going deeper into the city’s healthy rainy day fund, hoping that the skies would somehow brighten next year. But that practice isn’t sustainable. After a year or two of this, reserves would dip below targeted amounts and the city would almost certainly see its bond rating downgraded, making borrowing more expensive. And, of course, at some point the savings account runs dry and hard decisions can’t be avoided.
The mayor is getting knocked around pretty good both in letters to the editor and in what I’ve heard on the street. The theme is that she’s trying to scare voters into approving the referendum by putting popular items on the chopping block.
Actually, the things that Rhodes-Conway would cut are the kinds of items that are routinely offered up by agencies when a mayor asks for proposed cuts at the start of most budget processes. She would cut Sunday library hours at two of three libraries that currently offer them, reduce brush collection to three times a year from five, reduce snow removal from bike paths, eliminate ice rinks, and cut arts and some social service grants, among other things.
None of that is new. That kind of stuff gets proposed pretty much every year. What’s different this time is that, should the referendum fail, these long-standing proposed cuts would actually happen.
But what convinces me that the mayor is serious is that she would cut the Office of the Independent Police Monitor. Actually, she would eliminate its half-million-dollar budget entirely if the referendum fails, but she would still cut its budget by almost $200,000 even if it passes.
That is a politically bold, if administratively obvious, move. It’s obvious because that office has been a disaster from the start. It was created in the charged environment following the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, but it was always a solution in search of a problem. The Madison department doesn’t have the cultural problems of Minneapolis’ force and there is already plenty of civilian oversight in the Police and Fire Commission, the Public Safety Review Board, the Common Council and the mayor. Moreover, this thing has been dysfunctional since its creation. After three years it doesn’t even have an established complaint process.
But it’s politically dicey for Rhodes-Conway to propose because it is a half-million-dollars worth of hollow symbolism in a community where anything touching on race is going to be fraught. So, I was surprised she touched this third rail, but it proved to me that she wasn’t messing around.
As I pointed out last week, I don’t think this referendum or the two questions being offered by the Madison school district should share a ballot with a presidential race. They’re getting lost in the national drama. But, whenever they appear on a ballot, voters have a right to know what the repercussions are for voting for or against them. The mayor has done her job by painting a realistic picture of what we would sacrifice if we vote “no.”
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
