Marketplace of Ideas Blog

Eleven months from now, we will be voting for candidates for statewide office, the Assembly and half of the state Senate.

I’ve argued here that the number one issue in the election should be the state’s business climate. Number two, which is related to issue number one, should be the mess that is state government finance. (Perhaps issue number 2B could be the nest of dysfunction that is our legislative branch, as non-Wisconsinites are noticing.)

It is not enough to merely nibble around the margins, assign furlough days or whatever to cut spending by an infinitesimal amount. Bolder ideas must be considered.

The state of Indiana, for instance, considered doing what Iowa did several years ago, eliminating township government and having counties administer all of a county’s unincorporated areas. (Wisconsin is one of only 20 states that still have towns as a unit of government.) That proposal didn’t fly in the Indiana General Assembly, so smaller-scale reforms are being considered.

Wisconsin has 1,259 towns, the most numerous form of the 3,120 units of government in this state. (In fact, only six states — Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Illinois, North Dakota, Ohio and Michigan — have more towns than Wisconsin.)

Back in the 1990s, there was a proposal to create an “urban town” form of government to cover such towns as Grand Chute and Greenville, to allow them more control over their development destiny instead of having the nearby city annex them into nonexistence. After the urban town proposal failed, a few towns took matters into their own hands and incorporated as villages, including Bellevue and Hobart in Brown County and Kronenwetter and Weston in Marathon County.

I’m not sure that eliminating towns entirely is a good idea, let alone doable given political realities. (For one thing, incorporating requires determining what happens to islands of towns within incorporated areas, such as the Grand Chute island on Northland Avenue in Appleton.) There are also towns that have no incorporated communities within their boundaries. But in the case where there is only one incorporated community wholly within the town boundary (say, Ripon, whose city limits are within the Town of Ripon), it is hard to understand why those bodies of government should exist separately.

As has been argued in this space before, 444 school districts in this state is some number too many as well. (Half of the school districts in this state have fewer than 1,000 students, which computes to fewer than 100 students per grade level, and one-fourth of the school districts in this state have fewer than 500 students.) That is approximately 444 sets of school district administration overhead that need to be reduced.

Another reform idea follows workforce trends: Changing the state government work week to four 10-hour days instead of five eight-hour days. This has been tried in Utah, Hawaii, Washington and Iowa, is being considered in Virginia and West Virginia, and is being considered as a permanent step in Iowa.

Utah, a state with less state government than Wisconsin, saved $200,000 in custodial services in six months of four-day state work weeks. In the first year, Utah saved an estimated $4.8 million in vehicle-related fuel costs and $500,000 in utility bills from the four-day work week. Clearly some state government services can’t go on a four-day schedule, but many can, particularly with the number of services available on state government Web sites.

State government’s continuous loop of deficits requiring budget repairs can be blamed on our elected officials, but it can also be blamed on the structure of state and local government. (We can discuss the redundancy of having 13 two-year UW System schools and 13 technical college systems some other time.)

It will be interesting to hear what the candidates for governor, Republican Scott Walker (the Milwaukee County Executive and a former state representative) or Mark Neumann (also a former state rep) and Democrat Tom Barrett (the Milwaukee mayor and a former state rep and senator) have to say in the months to come about reforming government in Wisconsin. That issue needs to be part of this year’s campaigns.