Racine County Executive Ladwig on Walker "tools:" "Will the new law allow us to deal with further cuts?"

The following story shows how even Republican county executives are worried sick about how they’re going to deal with future budgets, knowing the one time “tools” time fix instituted by Scott Walker, won't keep up with rising costs.

Stateline: James Ladwig, a Republican, recently took over the job of Racine County executive … Ladwig got a new set of rules for governing his county. Now that unions have less of a say, local leaders have more options for balancing their budgets. One way Ladwig and the Racine County board exercised this freedom is by putting volunteer inmates from the county jail to work shoveling snow from sidewalks, mowing the medians on state highways and doing landscaping. Before the Wisconsin law passed, unions blocked the move … Under the new law, unions can no longer block the program.  Other changes saved Racine County money, largely at the expense of workers. 

Here’s where the wheels are starting to fall off Scott Walker’s bandwagon:

For Ladwig and other local leaders in Wisconsin … that decline in state aid outweighs the savings they enjoy. For Racine County the first year was largely a wash: A $2 million drop in state aid was offset by all the cost-saving steps the county was able to take.

Ladwig openly admits, with brutal honesty, confirmation of what many of us have been saying all along:

Still, Ladwig worries that these kinds of tradeoffs might not be sustainable in the long run. “Will [the new law] allow us to deal with further cuts? It provides us the tools, but you get to the point of diminishing returns,” Ladwig says. “You can’t say ‘OK, now everybody has a $5,000 deductible’ and expect to have productive employees.”