WHY PICK ON THE PIC?

By Michael Horne

The Governor’s made it clear: he will send job training money direct to Mayor Tom Barrett’s new city agency, and we will see the demise of the Private Industry Council. If the council and its director are to be judged as failures, -- whether or not they are -- well then that’s just collateral damage, and the way things go.

If this is a repeat of the OIC scandal, then where are the goods? Where is the “smoking gun?” Or is this a case of a black man being guilty of being Republican?

PIC ain’t OIC

Two years ago, when the Opportunities Industrialization Center – Greater Milwaukee lost its funding and disbanded, it had long been under a cloud of suspicion. As Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) put it, “published reports of scandals involving kickbacks, cell phones, home weatherizing and exorbitant staff salaries reveal sufficient evidence that too much corruption and misuse of taxpayer dollars have already taken place.”

Indeed, OIC-GM was a rotten agency, as its misdeeds showed.

So what are we to think when Mayor Tom Barrett calls for the abolition of the Private Industry Council in his State of the City address last month, and when Governor Doyle agrees in a letter today?

Barrett said he hired Donald Sykes, a former Milwaukeean, to study the creation of a city Office of Workplace Development to be designated as the area’s lead job-training organization, thus entitling it to ninety per cent of the PICs $14 million budget, and eliminating the job of PIC director Gerard Randall, Jr.

Barrett liked the study so much he hired Sykes to run the proposed agency. Isn’t this similar to how Dick Cheney became vice president?

Barrett and Sykes made no claims of mismanagement or corruption at PIC, originally a department within the County Executive’s Office, and a private, non-profit entity since 1989. His harshest criticisms of the organization, and of the workforce development situation in Milwaukee are these, as iterated in the State of the City speech:

Low level of employer involvement

Lack of coordination of current funding sources

No clear leadership

A fragmented delivery system prone to duplication of services

Where’s the beef? This is hardly an indictment of the PIC – you could say the same of any social service agency, any government or any large corporation. It can be much more readily understood as a power play by Barrett and Governor Doyle to remove a Republican appointee (Randall) in favor of their own man (Sykes). That’s the Wisconsin Idea!

As far as “low level of employer involvement,” this is a questionable assertion, and a rather subjective one. Randall’s board, unlike that of the OIC, is loaded with employers. Just last October, the PIC, the Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC) and Bucyrus International created the “Express Ramp” welding training program aimed at filling 100 heavy-plate welding jobs in the Bucyrus plant in South Milwaukee. This program had heavy employer involvement, and last week the first 11 graduates of the course began work at Bucyrus at an average wage of $22 an hour. Still, some claim that the PIC was not able to “turn around” jobs quickly enough, or to be responsive to employer-initiated training needs.

Barrett sees a “lack of coordination of funding sources at the PIC,” which is odd since virtually all of the PICs budget comes from state and federal job training funds.

Barrett finds “no clear leadership,” although Randall has been quite prominent in the news and at the helm of his organization.

Barrett also accuses the PIC of having a “fragmented delivery system.”

If by “fragmented,” the mayor refers to PIC involvement in projects like “Express Ramp,” or its partnership with all health care organizations in the area, its jobs programs that bring central city youth to Wisconsin’s resorts for summer employment, its work with non-English speaking populations, its operation of 7 job centers, and its scores of other programs, the mayor may have a point. But “fragmented” is a negative word, and it is hard to conceive of a grand master plan that could deliver all of these diverse products in a “cohesive” manner.

Governor Doyle, who approved Barrett’s request to strip the PIC of its funding as of July 1, has already grappled with grand plans to integrate the various workforce development programs in government with his “Construction Center of Excellence,” announced in November, 2004, and forgotten immediately thereafter.

His coalition there included the PIC, the Helen Bader Foundation (which gave Barrett the $500,000 he used to hire Sykes and jump start his proposed city agency), and, “the City of Milwaukee under the leadership of Mayor Tom Barrett,” as Doyle rather grandly put it.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorialized in favor of the Mayor’s plan on February 12^th, 2007, saying “Barrett makes a compelling case for the shift from the Public Industry Council, one underscored by County Executive Scott Walker.

“Because of organizational and governance issues, ‘PIC isn’t cutting it right now,’ Walker told us. ‘No doubt about it.’

“…We await details on what a city-run effort would look like, but the mayor’s proposal has merit. The plain fact is that the current approach just isn’t working.”

Notice that neither the editorial writers or Walker specify any particular failures of the PIC on organizational or governance issues. Both had years to identify and study them; in fact a letter from Walker has been a regular feature of the PIC annual report since he took office.

Another attack of the PIC (or is it of Gerard Randall?) came from Tim Sheehy, the Executive Director of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce.

“Is the PIC working? My answer is no,” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on March 10^th, 2007. Sheehy, ominously, is a member of the PIC board of directors, so this is an odd thing for him to say. He was quoted in a story about a welding program at Tramont Corp. that, while not funded by the PIC, was very similar to the one at Bucyrus, and similar to a program unveiled by PIC in 2004.

The council’s model in that case won a 2004 U.S. Department of Labor Innovation Award.

If the Private Industry Council had been operating so poorly for such a long period of time, it would have served the public good if the Journal Sentinel, Mayor Barrett, Governor Doyle, County Executive Walker or the head of the Chamber of Commerce had told us about it and given us some facts.

The absence of any scandal, actual charges or material deficiencies in the operation of the PIC can lead us only to conclude that a good man was brought down for political purposes. There is nothing I have found to suggest otherwise. Maybe that’s why this city has such problems with job development and retention.

For further study, refer to these articles from The Daily Reporter

Daily Reporter: Davis Disagrees:

http://www.dailyreporter.com/item.cfm?recid=20044132&snippet=f

Councils told to cooperate:

http://www.dailyreporter.com/item.cfm?recid=20044047&snippet=f

Barrett proposes development office

http://www.dailyreporter.com/item.cfm?recid=20043907&snippet=f

http://www.dailyreporter.com/editorial/index.cfm?fuseaction=print&recid=20043581

Randall Innovator of the Year

http://www.dailyreporter.com/item.cfm?recid=3692&snippet=f