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.