The Supervisor Pay Scam:
How the County Board Misled Taxpayers
Part 1 (Includes comparison to City of Milwaukee Common Council)

Audit Director Jerome Heer is one of Milwaukee County's most dedicated managers.  He along with other managers like Director of Administrative Services Rob Henken and recently retired head of the County Election Commission Janice Dunn are the kind of people who keep the county afloat despite the best attempts of some politicians to run it aground.

Naturally, we were surprised to hear of the Audit Department report that backed up the county board's "low pay lament" and the wailings of Supervisor James "Luigi" Schmitt.  When CRG read the report we knew something was up so we called on Director Heer who provided us with a copy of his department's working papers for the 2002, 2004, and recent 2007 review of supervisor pay.  The facts were all there.  Unfortunately, the county board and Supervisor Schmitt conveniently withheld vital information which paints a completely different picture about supervisor pay.

Here is the Part 1 of "the rest of the story."

Great Facts Versus Sloppy Spin

One would think that with all the problems facing the county that the Audit Department would have better things to do besides helping supervisors increase their pay.  Nonetheless, they are at the beckon call of the county board and know better than to get in the way of a politician and a pay raise.  As a result, they did a first class job, pouring hours of research into finding 18 comparable municipalities (including the City of Milwaukee Common Council) to use in evaluating supervisor pay - as indicated by the mountainous stack of working papers we uncovered.  The counties on the list  fall into a reasonably narrow band of governmental jurisdictions based on budget and population.  Here is the list.

Note that the average population and budget of this list is extremely close to that of Milwaukee County suggesting a great match for doing a comparison.  Also note that based on this simple comparison, poor old Milwaukee County is mired in 14th place in supervisory salary rank.  Armed with this slim data set, Super Supervisor Schmitt flies into action and announces it will take a 40% increase in supervisor pay just to bring the downtrodden Milwaukee County Supervisors to the middle of the pack at $71,000 per year.  But, it seems old "Lucky Luigi" left a few important facts out.

A Little More Information Please

Let's try this again again after adding a few more salient facts to "Slick Schmitt's" table.  For example, let's consider how many supervisors each "comparable" county has and what their total expenditure is for supervisor salaries.

Oh my, Milwaukee County jumps near the top of the list in total supervisory salary.  In fact, had the City of Milwaukee not occupied the #1 spot (do we see a trend here) our poor poverty level "supes" would be in the #2 spot!  Hey, Luigi, here's a newsflash.  Want to double your pay?  Then just cut the size of the county board in half so it is "comparable" to the average of the rest of the nation!  Figure it out, everybody else does what you do with half the number of supervisors.

You Earn What You Are Worth

But why stop with one simple counterpoint?  Let's keep adding more data.  Heck, you don't even need the Audit Department data if you can use the Internet (although we must admit, it was much easier to use their data - after all, the taxpayers did pay for it).   Now, let's compare the constituent workload of our bone-weary county servants.

Oops, there we go again with some inconvenient facts that somehow were left out of the county board's report.  Seems our county crew anchors the bottom quarter of the list. Most comparable counties have 5 to 10 times the constituent load.  Based on constituent load, county supervisor salaries are already about double what they should be!  If that were not enough, the Audit Department found back in 2004 that the county board has 73% more internal staff than do comparable counties to further lighten their workload.  Oh well, at least they have good company with their overpaid city brethren (hmmm, there is that darned Milwaukee trend again).

Just for fun, let's slice and dice those figures another way.  We wonder what county residents pay per capita for the expertise of our crack team of pension pushers (sorry about that, it's old news but we couldn't resist).

My oh my, there we are again at the top of the list in cost per capita for supervisory salary with the two "Milwaukees" solidly bracketing the top of the list.  According to these figures a 40% DECREASE is what is called for.  We guess the trend continues unabated.  Milwaukeeans already pay a lot for their politicians.  Now they want more?  Gee whiz!

While We Are at It, We Might as Well Pile On

We're almost done but before we retire to work on Part 2 of the Supervisor Pay Scam, let's toss out one final bit of easy math the supervisors could have told us about.  The audit guys really burnt the midnight oil assembling a ton of data for you at taxpayer expense.  We assume the county board READ it, or did their eyes glaze over at certain points?  Anyway, let's take one more glance at what taxpayers get for their dollar by analyzing what we pay for supervisory (ahem, we use the phrase loosely) "expertise and management" per million dollars of budget expenditures or what we call "Cost per $MM of spending responsibility."  This is another rough indicator of what they get paid based on what they actually do.

Once again the Milwaukee County Board is paid in the upper echelons.  I guess we should be thankful we are only in the upper third of this category rather than at the very top of list.  But really, is this something to be proud of?

Conclusions

It is safe to say the last thing Milwaukee County Supervisors are is underpaid.  In fact, a strong argument can be made that they are substantially OVERPAID for the comparably little work they do.  The problem is NOT that we pay too little.  We already spend 50% more than the national average on supervisor salaries. The problem is that we have TOO MANY politicians. 

Here is one win-win solution.  Reduce the county board to 11 members and reduce the total county supervisory salary pool to $770,000 and, voila, the supervisor pay increases to $70,000 and taxpayers get a 20% reduction in salaries (not to mention benefits but that is for Part 2 of the series).  Of course, there are some problems with concentrating the power in the hands of fewer politicians but you cannot have it both ways.  We already pay a lot more money to a lot more supervisors than the national average.  Increasing salaries to an already over-sized, overpaid, under-worked county board is just plain nuts!

CRG CALLS ON THE COUNTY BOARD TO DROP THIS RIDICULOUS PROPOSAL AND STOP MISLEADING THE TAXPAYERS!

Hey Luigi, Lee, and the rest down at the county board, we hope you now understand things are not so bad after all.  In fairness, we had a lot of fun poking fun at you and don't want to lump you all in the same category.  While there have been many disappointments, there are still a few bright spots.  But PUH-LEEZE, if you are going to waste the precious resources down at Audit (and it should be made clear these fine public servants are not the problem) tell the whole story next time!

Part 2: Wait Until We Add BENEFITS to the Analysis

You cannot do a complete job of analyzing total compensation without a look at benefits, and we all know Milwaukee County offers their employees a "Cadillac" package.  The County Audit Department did a bang-up job of looking at everything down to which counties provide free parking.  It's going to take a while to wade through it all but, man-oh-man, it looks like these numbers will really turn a few heads!

Auditor's Note

The above data came from the County Audit Department working papers, the websites of the indicated counties, and US census data.  Although the data is believed to be accurate, CRG auditors were unable to reach each county directly to verify all data before the end of business on the day of publication.  Updates will be made if required after independent verification.  However, it should be noted that all County Audit Department data used in this report does include verification by direct contact with each governmental unit.

Copyright 2007, CRG Network