Should the Milwaukee County
Board be reduced?
Local municipal leaders have felt like their voices have not been heard by the Milwaukee County Board over the last several months.
On Monday they made a loud statement directed at those who they feel are ignoring them.
At a meeting in Franklin, Intergovernmental Cooperation Council members, village presidents and city mayors of the 19 municipalities within the city, overwhelmingly supported taking initial steps to add an advisory referendum to next spring's election ballots.
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Murphy's Law: County Comptroller Craziness
Back in 2002, in the wake of the county pension scandal, I did a story for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigating whether Milwaukee County should have an independent official analyzing the fiscal impact of proposed bills.
"If you had something like this pension plan at the city, I would be the first one to disclose the facts to the mayor and the Common Council," city Comptroller Wally Morics told me.
The city has had an elected comptroller since 1853. And Morics and his predecessors have often disagreed with the mayor or Common Council or both on proposed policies. The result is more checks and balances.
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An Alabama county grapples with record debt
Last-ditch efforts by the governor of Alabama to prevent a record-breaking municipal bankruptcy in his state broke down, as the Jefferson County Commission voted 4 to 1 to declare bankruptcy on roughly $4 billion of debt.
After the vote, lawyers for the county filed a Chapter 9 petition in federal bankruptcy court in Birmingham, Ala., according to one of the lawyers.
At $4 billion, Jefferson County's bankruptcy eclipses the $1.7 billion bankruptcy filing by Orange County, Calif., in December 1994, the previous record. Jefferson County's debt grew out of poorly conceived efforts to finance a court-ordered rebuilding of its decrepit sewer system. The county used a complicated combination of debt instruments and derivatives that was supposed to save money, but it failed in 2008, leaving it with more debt than it could repay.
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