Editorial: Property tax bills will define Doyle's legacy

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The Northwestern, Oshkosh, WI

Published: 08/19/2009

On the subject of assessing Gov. Jim Doyle's legacy, we'd suggest that Wisconsinites wait until December to fully judge the impact of the two-term governor who announced Monday he will not seek a third term next year.

The fact that Doyle made the announcement 16 months before he left office speaks well of the basic decency and fairness that was never in question during his long career in public service as Dane County District Attorney, State Attorney General and governor. He made his intentions clear early on, paving the way for other candidates to come forward, and promised not to pull a Brett Favre and unretire. Doyle did not fall into the trap of settling into the trappings of his office too comfortably or seek to hog every spotlight or television camera that came his way. To his credit, it wasn't his style.

Yet December of 2009 and 2010 remain the best times to fairly judge his long-term impact on Wisconsin because that is when local property tax bills arrive in the mail. The amount your property taxes increase, particularly to fund schools, is where the Doyle legacy will be defined. That's because the budget bill that was just passed will start to impact the perennial problem facing state government: how to escape the state's high tax tendencies. Doyle didn't raise income or sales taxes, but he is responsible for pushing tax increases down to local units of government by slashing state aid and changing the basic framework for negotiating teachers' union contracts.

Leaders are a product of their times and Doyle spent much of his time in office hampered by ever-growing budget deficits. Some can be attributed to sluggish economic growth. Just as much blame is the result of how little was done to change the size and scope of state government. Candidate Doyle in his first campaign recognized that bureaucracies run from well-protected silos were an obstacle, but governor Doyle never seriously went to work to fix the structural problems and streamline the state.

As a result, Wisconsin's next governor will inherit a state government that largely looks the same, but faces the prospect of exploding education costs with Doyle eliminating the Qualified Economic Offer and a provision that allowed arbitrators to take into account a community's ability to pay when ruling on contract disputes between local school boards and teachers unions.

The question was never whether the QEO, which allowed school boards to impose an annual 3.8 percent increase in salaries and benefits in contracts, unfairly singled out teachers, it did. The matter was how could Wisconsin reform how it funded education, from labor negotiations to the overly complicated formulas for distributing state aid that continue to hurt low spending districts in Oshkosh and the Fox Valley. Instead of using a strong Democratic-majority in the Legislature to fundamentally fix problems, Doyle used the budget to reward his political allies.

Doyle gets high marks for starting the discussion on corrections and criminal justice reform, helping pass a state-wide indoor air measure that bans smoking in public places, pressing for tougher drunken driving laws and championing transparency for doling out federal stimulus dollars. Yet the prison reform and campaign finance reform remain big incompletes.

Perhaps the biggest issue clouding the discussion of Doyle's ultimate legacy as governor is why such a decent and intelligent leader didn't do more to reform state government and fix the lingering problems what continue to hold back the state he obviously loves so much.

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