A balance
Dogs and cats will forever quarrel. So, too, state and local governments. But, as citizens, we should expect some basic cooperation between branches of government. We want state legislators, as partisans, to set policy, but to allow non-partisan county, school and municipal boards to carry out policy based on the needs of local people and commerce.
We are alarmed, then, by recent proposals from the Republican-led state legislature to micro-manage local governments. We fear for the future of local government:
_ Rep. Chuck Wichgers (R-Muskego) would bar public schools from teaching “critical race theory,” a 40-year-old legal doctrine which holds that racism can persist after laws, such as those that enforced segregated housing, have been overturned.
_ Rep. John Spiros (R-Marshfield) has co-authored a bill that would tell any community with 30 or more police officers, firefighters and EMTs that they can’t cut public safety personnel budgets without getting their state shared revenue docked by an equal amount.
_ Sen. Kathy Bernier (R-Chippewa Falls) has co-authored a state budget proposal that will train teachers to adopt a “scientifically-proven” phonicsbased reading instruction method.
We express no opinion whether these proposals are good, bad or indifferent. We wish to point out, though, that each represents a serious intrusion into what is properly local government.
Maybe no teacher anywhere should teach “critical race theory” to any student, but it should be a local school board, in collaboration with social studies teachers and local parents, who decides the question. Already, every public school is teaching a Core Curriculum mandated by the state. Censoring teacher lesson plans by state law is an overreach.
Likewisewithmandatingpolicestaffingnumbers. Perhaps Rep. Spiros is right to fight the “defund the police” movement, but robbing local governments of the ability to shift around staffing because of changing budget priorities or fiscal emergencies takes away the power of local officials to make wise decisions with the public’s tax dollar. Rep. Spiros says he sponsored the bill because he was, at one point, a law enforcement official. That’s fine, but Spiros was also a member of the Marshfield City Council. He knows the headaches caused by overzealous state legislators.
Sen. Bernier thinks that Wisconsin reading education is horrible and, if she was a school board member, we can see her promoting her brand of phonics-based reading instruction. But the state senate is not a state school board. It’s insulting to local school officials, who hire reading specialists and review their standardized student test data, to say that all students everywhere across the state should be taught reading according to this one, magic bullet instructional program.
Do these bills spell the doom of local government? By themselves, no. But we listened to Wisconsin Republican Party officials say at their state convention in Wisconsin Dells this past weekend how they plan to dedicate “resources” to elect kindred spirits to all offices at all levels of Wisconsin government. This includes school board, county board and, we suppose, even town constable.
We see a two-front attack on local government. On one front, state legislators seek to impose an increasing number of partisan mandates on locally elected boards. Simultaneously, these same legislators dedicate party dollars to elect partisans to every Wisconsin elected board. The independent, non-partisan elected official could become an endangered species. We appreciate the role party politics plays in Wisconsin. We appreciate, too, however, the role nonpartisan politics also plays. We seek a balance.
We fear the day when state politics rules every board in Wisconsin. We are liberal enough to want a government of the people and conservative enough to want that government close to the people. A thoroughly partisan government, from town hall to the governor’s mansion, gives us neither.
Editorial by Peter Weinschenk, The Record-Review
