City Offered $70.3 Million Gift to Ease Structural Deficit; Lowest-Paid State Workers
Kalamazoo City Hall Michael Grass / RouteFifty.com
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Also in our State and Local Daily News Digest: Milwaukee police chief stymied by state on hiring new officers; tribe in Wash. state decries rocket tests; and Montana ballot proposal fight over funding for medical research.
KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN
PHILANTHROPY | Should this city in southwestern Michigan take up an unprecedented offer from a foundation that could help the city address its structural budget deficit? Last week, a local philanthropic effort, through the Foundation for Excellence, offered up $70.3 million in funding that Kalamazoo’s leaders could use for three years to fund some municipal operations, which would allow the city to ease some property taxes and launch some yet-to-be identified “aspirational” projects the cash-strapped city wouldn’t normally be able to fund. The city hasn’t officially accepted the funding, but members of the City Commission have directed the city manager to study possible options on how to move forward. [The Chronicle of Philanthropy; Kalamazoo Gazette / MLive.com]
JEFFERSON CITY, MISSOURI
STATE GOVERNMENT WORKFORCE | According to a new report from Gov. Jay Nixon, the base salaries of 37,906 state government workers, including prison guards and social service workers, are the lowest in the nation. Those low salaries have contributed to high turnover rates. In 2015, 25.7 percent of the workforce in the Department of Mental Health left their jobs. The Department of Corrections, the state’s largest agency with nearly 11,000 workers, had a 16.3 percent turnover rate that same year. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN
LAW ENFORCEMENT | Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn called out state government for threatening to withhold money from his city if it puts a measure on the November ballot asking residents to raise taxes to fund the hiring of additional officers. The initiative to increase property taxes $81 million over five years to cover 150 additional officers has been tabled for now. "It can't be forgotten that the amount of money the city has received in shared revenue from the state has declined every year I've been here," Flynn said. "When I first came here, shared revenue paid for the entire police department.” [CBS 58]
HELENA, MONTANA
MEDICAL RESEARCH | The Montana Taxpayers Association is calling a ballot measure that would earmark $200 million for medical research unconstitutional and wants the state Supreme Court to strike it. Their argument: the initiative commits public money to a private group the state doesn’t control. Montanans for Research and Cures has received roughly half of the $80,000 it’s spent trying to get the measure passed from the McLaughlin Research Institute for Biomedical Sciences, which focuses on brain illnesses like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. If approved, Montana would commit $20 million in bonds, typically used to pay for infrastructure projects, every year for the next 10 years. [Billings Gazette]
JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, WASHINGTON
ROCKET TESTING | Tension has mounted here between a local Indian tribe and the U.S. military over the testing of a rocket system that can produce a loud sonic boom. The Army is looking into testing the truck-mounted M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near the reservation of the Nisqually tribe. Relations over the years have generally been good between the military and the tribe. But the Nisqually tribal council has unanimously opposed the rocket system testing, which has been previously conducted in desertous terrain near Yakima, Washington. “We couldn’t understand why they would come from a desert where there’s no population to move it back here to a populated area where the main ones affected is the Nisqually Reservation” said Farron McCloud, chairman of the tribal council. “We couldn’t understand that and we still don’t understand that.” [The Olympian]
WEST JORDAN, UTAH
CITATIONS | After witnesses said he drunkenly backed his car into a parked vehicle, a city council member here told police that he wouldn’t have to respond to a citation because he has “protection” as a government official. Some of Jeff Haaga’s council colleagues have denounced him over the incident, and he could face a censure vote. A bartender said Haaga ordered four 24-ounce beers and one shot of whiskey at lunchtime on July 19. A group of men at the bar then took away the councilman’s car keys and someone drove him home. But he later walked back to the establishment to retrieve his sedan. Around 8 p.m., he’s said to have backed into the other vehicle, causing more than $1,500 of estimated damage. [The Salt Lake Tribune]
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