I have a hard time keeping a straight face reading this from Jack Craver:

Mayor Paul Soglin is delivering bad news to thousands of city employees. He either wants to cut their pay or delay pay raises that were previously negotiated in union contracts.

With the city facing a $4.5 million gap as the mayor and the Common Council work on the 2014 operating budget, Soglin said in an interview last week that he has little choice but to seek concessions from city workers, including police officers, firefighters, bus drivers and clerical staff.

“We are now renegotiating all of these agreements,” he said. “We are going to ask the bargaining units to help us figure this out.”

Soglin blamed his predecessor, former Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, along with members of the Common Council, for negotiating contracts during the tumult over Act 10 in 2011 that resulted in small pay increases for many city employees. Contracts the council rushed through in March of that year — while Democratic state senators were still camped out in Illinois to preventpassage of Act 10 — authorized a two percent pay raise at the end of that year, a two percent raise at the end of 2012 and a three percent pay raise at the end of 2013.

“No one asked, no one calculated what that cost would be in 2014,” said Soglin, who accused Council members of grandstanding in support of organized labor instead of assessing the numbers. “If 80 percent of our budget is labor costs, and we have a one percent cap on the (property tax) levy limit, and we sign labor agreements at three percent (raises), that shoe doesn’t fit.” …

Cieslewicz now defends the rushed contracts as necessary to preserve the city’s unions, which were faced with potential elimination by Act 10. Furthermore, he says, the awarded pay increases didn’t even keep up with the rate of inflation and were largely offset by the increased health insurance contributions.

“On the night that (the Common Council and I) marched from the City County Building to the Overture to vote on the agreements, Soglin marched with us,” he recalls. “If he was against these why didn’t he speak up?”

Articles from the time refer to Soglin criticizing Cieslewicz for not having approved contracts sooner and having to rush their approval as a result. However, there is little indication that he suggested the pay increases were too generous.

In fact, Soglin sought the same level of pay raises for police officers and fire fighters when he negotiated their contracts the following year. (Since public safety unions were excluded from Act 10, Cieslewicz had not rushed through approval of their contracts in 2011.)

Soglin’s predecessor, now an Isthmus blogger, makes the unkindest cut of all by comparing Soglin to the evil Scott Walker!

First, Soglin has a relatively small budget gap to fix. It amounts to less than 2% of the city’s $255 million budget. I routinely closed gaps of twice that size and more without going after unions. If Soglin can’t fix a 2% problem without rolling back small pay increases for workers than he’s incompetent.

Second, Soglin is being disingenuous. When the contracts were approved back in early 2011, it was a way of fighting back against Governor Scott Walker’s pending bill to eviscerate public employee unions. As a show of unity, the council and I marched with union members from the City-County Building to the Overture Center where the council voted unanimously to approve the contracts. Soglin marched along and attended the meeting and he never spoke out against the wage increases.

Third, the increases were a reasonable product of a collective bargaining system that works. In the first two years of the three-year contracts (2011 and 2012), the pay increases had actually fallen below the rate of inflation. Additionally, the contracts called for union members to pay substantial portions of their health insurance and retirement benefits, which saved the city millions. City employees are already doing their part to help the budget. They don’t need to be asked for more.

Which prompted a Soglin defender to comment:

For Dave to suggest that Soglin is fiscally “incompetent” is amusing.

Who is incompetent?

Cieslewicz, who gave $300,000 to B-cycle even though they didn’t need it?

Or Soglin, who negotiated Dave’s $300K gift down to $3?

Cieslewicz, who fell for Bob Dunn’s slick sales pitch and gave $16 million to Edgewater?

Or Soglin, who played hardball with the developer which resulted in Edgewater being built without public money?

A competent mayor doesn’t give away taxpayer money needlessly.

Well, a competent mayor doesn’t give away taxpayer money needlessly by overpaying city employees either. (Are City of Madison employees overpaid? You decide.)

Watching Soglin and Cieslewicz snipe at each other is like watching the Iran–Iraq war three decades ago, or Syria vs. Syrian rebels today — you’d like to see how both sides can lose.