Monday, May 17, 2010

What Can $204,000 Buy Me?

Over the weekend the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Milwaukee County has spent $204,000 in legal bills specifically to handle the endless problems at the Mental Health Complex. Problems like starvation deaths, overdoses, massive increases in assaults on staff and now sexual assaults of patients. I'm just wondering what that $204,000 could have bought us if we didn't need it to defend incompetence?

Using this salary report as my guide, I came up with some of the following examples:

Pay a full year's salary for 3.5 Registered Nurses
Pay a full year's salary for 3 Sheriff's Deputies
Pay a full year's salary for 4 new Assistant District Attorneys
Pay a full year's salary for 6 new MCTS Bus Drivers
Pay a full year's salary for 9 veteran security guards
Pay the full median income of 5 Milwaukee County residents

Walker policies regarding the Behavioral Health Division have largely brought us to this place. Cut staffing and budgets, short-term politically motivated thinking, at an unacceptable long term cost. A cost to both taxpayers and unfortunately even to the most vulnerable. This legal expense is just another example of that endless pursuit of short-term gain, coming at a long term cost for everyone.

Afterthought: Since it is highly unlikely that Scott Walker would invest this kind of money in the items listed above, maybe the following are examples that might speak to him more clearly:

Pay for 68 campaign season joy rides across the state.

Pay for 5 members of the Millwaukee County Executive's staff to troll comments sections of blogs and other sites.

1 comment:

xoff said...

It could buy you two weeks of Tv ads saying what a great tax cutter Scott Walker is. That's what WMC partner/front group is spending this week and next, touting Walker's record. They're not running in Milwaukee, probably because people here know better.