The Truly Essential Service

A July 11 editorial in the WSJ commended the Madison City Council for getting “back to the basics” and focusing on basic services instead of “grand gestures of social reform.” As a first-year alder, I struggle deeply with how to react to this. I recall year-long and often multi year-long battles over the minimum wage, smoking ban, and paid sick leave with both sadness and exhaustion. I still can’t fathom how measures to help the most vulnerable among us are met with such disdain and why they tear our community apart so dramatically. Although some may call our work “getting back to basics,” my reluctance to initiate sweeping policy initiatives thus far stems almost solely from my disinclination to create these huge rifts in our community.

“Essential services” are not so easily defined. I have constituents who don’t own a car. Fixing a pothole couldn’t be further down their list of priorities. Those living in challenged neighborhoods – most often the victims of crime – do not believe that additional police are the solution. Madison has a growing homeless population, and for them, a basic service is a meal and a warm bed in a safe place. Every alder in this city has constituents who are impacted by the sad reality that Dane County has the fourth worst black / white incarceration discrepency in the nation. We live in one of the wealthiest communities on the planet, yet thousands of our neighbors continue to suffer from our unwillingness to prioritize resources to address hunger, education, affordable housing, job training, AODA issues, domestic violence, and a myriad of other barriers that affect our community every day.

It is hard to imagine these services as anything other than basic. However, regardless of how we define basic services, the sad truth is that we are not focusing nearly enough attention on them. Our public transit system fails to connect those most dependent upon it to basic needs like employment and health care. Our education system slams into revenue caps annually, while the population of minority, special needs, and poor children grows at exponential rates. Our job creation and economic development programs are focused appropriately around our university but fail to recognize the importance of family-supporting jobs for people without four-year or advanced degrees. Our social services struggle to help people with food, shelter, and job training while our spending on police and prisons continues to escalate.

That is only part of the story. Equally disturbing is that our primary method of dealing with this appalling conundrum is the through criminal justice system. We somehow convince ourselves that the arrest-conviction-imprisonment cycle works for society, makes us safer, and costs less.

It is not that the council doesn’t care about these “basic” problems or prioritize their importance. The real issue is that attemps to make investments in people, investments that we know pay themselves back many times over in the long run, continue to tear our community apart and that we fail to consider these investments “essential services.”

We live in such an amazing community, a city that most of us love dearly. Yet we are increasingly surrounded by islands of abject poverty, and I am left bewildered by both our ignorance of their existence and our unwillingness to take immediate and drastic action. We all know that up-front investments pay off in the end: preventing prison is less expensive than incarceration; job training is less expensive than a family unable to make ends meet; and rent assistance is less expensive than eviction and homelessness. We are undergoing a seismic shift in demographics and huge investments will be necessary if we are to create the skilled workforce we need to meet the demands of our economy and retiring baby boomers.

Somewhere within the hundreds of millions of dollars that flow through our local economy every year, there exist the resources to attack these problems with the vigor necessary to ensure that every Madisonian has access to the basic services he or she needs. However, it can’t come from the council alone; the recognition that food and shelter are as essential as potholes and police protection needs to come from all of us. Eighty-four percent of Americans currently feel the country is heading in the wrong direction. One thing is for sure, it is not because we’re focusing too much energy on compassion and equal opportunity.