County Exec Raises Fares, Cuts Routes For Working People
January 9, 2008
County budget cuts denounced
Speakers’ funding pleas include transit, drug treatment
By STEVE SCHULTZE
sschultze@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Oct. 29, 2007
Don’t cut bus service, drug treatment or University of Wisconsin Extension programs, speakers exhorted the Milwaukee County Board on Monday night.
The crowd of about 350 at the board’s annual budget hearing skewed heavily against cuts that County Executive Scott Walker made in his 2008 budget.
The board’s finance committee already has restored nearly $8 million in tax levy funding, including dozens of parks, court and correctional officer jobs that Walker wants to abolish and bus routes he targeted for shortening.
The board was urged to stand firm on those actions. Personal stories of how important programs have been for participants were mixed with denunciations of Walker’s trims.
Several self-described recovering drug addicts and alcoholics and advocates pleaded for the county to fill in for $2.6 million in lost federal drug and alcohol treatment money. The spending helps avoid crime and other social costs of addictions, they said.
Although expensive and politically difficult, the treatment spending makes economic as well as moral sense, said the Rev. Joseph Ellwanger, a retired Lutheran pastor.
“The time is always right to do the right thing,” he said, paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr.
Route cuts and bus and paratransit fare increases should be resisted, speakers told the board at the listening session at the Washington Park Senior Center, 4420 W. Vliet St.
Richard Riley, a transit union official, said the reversal of cuts to several bus routes was important and asked the board to delete Walker’s suggested 25-cents-a-ride fare increase, which would raise the one-way charge to $2.
“I’m tired of the same old song and dance every year,” Riley said, referring to the annual rounds of budget cuts and partial restorations under Walker. He and others called for a dedicated funding source for transit, such as a penny sales tax.
About 40 supporters of UW Extension programs wore blue T-shirts and held signs opposing Walker’s plan to cut some $172,000 in the county tax levy. That would also mean the loss of some $2 million in federal extension aid, a bad trade-off, they said.
