The nine months of commission meetings and town hall discussions led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Don Kettl often came across as a blur of inexplicable incomprehensibles.

Endless discussions were riddled with the arcane terms and dense details of state-local governance: mandates, incrementals, differentials and other concepts that make the public blanch and send even seasoned governmental observers scurrying for something easier to read . . . like the Florida election law.

But now Kettl’s group -- formally known as the Governor’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on State-Local Relations for the 21st Century -- has come down to actual recommendations. The first wave is targeted for the 2001-2003 Wisconsin biennial budget. If there is a time to pay attention to how the Kettl folks want to change state-local government cooperation and financing, this is it.

However, the founder of this feast of proposals -- Tommy Thompson -- has gone off to D.C. to become George Bush’s secretary of health and human services. His heir, Lt. Gov. Scott McCallum, is not about to change the general Thompson agenda and, with future election in mind, won’t eagerly step into any controversies.

Any shared-revenue reform will face gigantic hurdles in the current political climate, which is one reason the commission deferred any total tax repackaging for future discussion and focused on a lot of revenue philosophy and only a couple of specific revenue recommendations.

The general public is going to find it tough to dig past the terms that only economists could love and see that the concepts being advocated actually could deeply affect their lives as citizens and taxpayers. Even the press and commission members themselves had trouble keeping up with the complexities, not to mention the various drafts and redrafts.

For instance, at one point, it seemed the commission had lost its consensus to shift part of the Wisconsin sales tax into a regional sales tax. Then it seemed the entire current system of shared-revenue would be proposed for sunset. Then the regionalized sales tax was back in (though at the lesser .25% rate than double that amount that many municipalities wanted). Then shared revenue was definitely not dumped but earmarked for refinement. Similar rethinking, and actual backpedaling, has affected almost the entire report.

For the labor community, there are specific proposals that will cause first-glance alarm and others that may prove valuable to contemplate, adjust and even pursue. There is also the dismay, as AFSCME 48 Local 645 pointed out in a recent newsletter, that there were "no front-line government workers" on the 32-member commission.

Then there are the flat statements in the final Kettl report that may reassure the bean-counters in Madison while troubling proponents for greater government services in such areas as education. Consider the conclusion that it had "not found a connection between the level of spending and the level of educational performance." Combine that with its push for more charter schools and smaller class sizes. Huh?

But if these statements are plucked out for oversimplified sound bites, they will not reflect the interlocked overviews within the report or the constrictions under which the commission was working. The commission believes that savvy re-examination will make current expenditure levels much more efficient, and it offers a few pertinent examples. Yet it understood the political reality of its game: State-local government reforms are supposed to occur within existing monies and taxing levels.

Even with such restrictions, the proposals could profoundly change the way state monies are defined and distributed to local government. That includes 2,738 local governmental units, if you start counting all the villages, cities, counties, tax districts and educational bodies.

The report affects nearly $1.5 billion in general and special aid the state returns to local governments each year, plus $3.5 billion in sales taxes.

It encompasses multiple units of employees and slates upon slates of educational, human, transportation and other services. Thompson may have ordered the commission to "think boldly" and be daring, but "hold the spending line" was signaled violently from the start.

Even as the committee was finalizing its report, the governor-to-be, McCallum, phrased the limitations even more bluntly: "There is not more money to be spent from the state coffers. It cannot be done."

All this has frozen revenue that many local government units and school districts felt was desperately needed. It certainly made the commission spend much of its time figuring out how to shift money around to fit the changes rather than thinking change first.

The need for change, though, is conceded by all. There is a great deal of tension and chronic unhappiness in a system where the state collects and distributes billions a year to local governments, setting caps and rules limiting both independent taxation and where and how money is spent.

The state constantly carps about how the money is used locally. Counties and municipalities feel the money isn’t enough and the mandates cripple local control or force some impossible choices among needed services. The citizens, in turn, feel walls of bureaucracy over which they have no control. The government workers face mounds of paperwork -- and the commission may thus find its most broadly embraced recommendations to be the call to update and simplify statutes, wipe out archaic rules, modernize forms and communications and eliminate silly language from legislative and bureaucratic regulations.

Many commission members concede that at times they have felt overwhelmed at the short time-frame to wrestle so enormous an agenda to the ground. One result is that the ideas are hardly locked in stone and few of the most important ideas have been explained in a way that would generate widespread public understanding and legislative support.

Dave Riemer, Milwaukee Department of Administration director, at work in his office.

Indeed, as pointed out by Dave Riemer, the Milwaukee Department of Administration director who is one of the Kettl members, the real danger as the Kettl report moves through the legislative process would be taking the recommendations piecemeal, without the totality the report represents.

"If a proposal in one place goes forward, but a proposal in another place doesn’t," said Riemer in an interview with AFSCME 48, "serious harm might be done. There is an interlock between many of the sections."

Still, credit the Kettl commission with insisting that the process be open to public involvement. From the start it shared working documents via the Internet and set open meetings around the state. Time and again, Kettl has spoken of the "basic dilemma: Everybody’s idea of perfect government is more service with lower tax, and it’s hard to achieve that by tinkering."

So he’s been emphasizing smarter thinking and new technological possibilities.

The commission has sought to frame ideas in a way that would foster partnerships. "I think that has been one of the hidden virtues of the Kettl work," said Riemer. "I was able to sit down with officials from Appleton, Beloit and other municipalities that might reflect different political philosophies but shared common problems. I found they were smart people, good people, and a new sense of what we had in common emerged. In fact, we were the ones mainly responsible for many of the municipal recommendations and I’m proud of how fast we got there and how cooperatively."

The commission, partly as public relations and partly to help cut through the complexity of its topics and form a consensus, hopes to add a couple of catchy terms to the Wisconsin political lexicon.

The first is "Renew Wisconsin." That describes the ongoing process of rethinking state-local government. It promotes a top to bottom review of Wisconsin governmental units, establishing benchmarks for services and focusing on economic development. Kettl wants this to be a citizen-driven effort to allow the broadest possible input over the next four years.

The other term the commission is touting is "Badger Basics," and that seeks to define the minimal "basket of services" every Wisconsin citizen should expect wherever they live in terms of education, municipal service, human services, transportation, criminal justice and so forth. Part of this would develop performance contracts with every form of provider, be it government or hired companies.

Much of this will require a keen focus on what the state is responsible for and suggests that if a service is basic to every citizen and community, then the state should fund it. The commission hopes its insights will:

• Spur e-government and e-procurement to change the basis and drive cost-savings in how state and local governments communicate and do business.
• Initiate a search and destroy mission to sunset old rules and outdated mandates.
• Offer brand new approaches to the revenue system that controls Wisconsin’s fiscal life. The commission wants the state to eliminate any rules that reward local governments with more state money for higher spending. It recommends that the state be responsible for defining and financing social services and the criminal justice system, lifting all costs off the property tax. Counties would serve as general contractors in these areas -- or private companies could step in if the counties declined.
• Change the focus of the Department of Public Instruction to an emphasis on providing "performance models" for schools and making other moves to hold schools accountable, encourage charter schools and establish quality standards for students, teachers and schools. The commission backed off from a specific new financing approach, instead offering options and a plea for a new funding approach in education.
• Marry economic development to the functions of local governments.
• Rethink how villages, towns, cities, counties and the state cooperate with each other or even define each other. The commission actually tackled aggressively a problem that wasn’t overtly in its state-to-local mandate -- local-to-local government relations. Disputes over annexation, sewers, roads and other issues have created an atmosphere that undermines regional partnerships. Hence the concept of defining state areas of mutual economic benefit and shifting a portion of the sales tax to these areas, to reward communities for innovative governmental partnerships and to replace the current state per-capita shared revenue payment with a new area-wide growth-sharing system.

That could make a lot of the territorial turf wars go away, because only those communities that cooperate will get a share of the new revenue pie. And the pie would be larger. Commission estimates show a .25% shift in sales tax to this purpose producing about $170 million every year. The per-capita formula for shared revenue to municipalities amounts yearly to about $143 million.

Riemer is particularly pleased with the concept of Area Cooperation Compacts. To receive long-term reward through the sales tax, each Area Cooperation Compact must involve at least three local government units and at least two important areas of service. Each compact must also produce significant cost savings.

In theory, with financial reward from the state as an incentive and savings to the taxpayer as a goal, regions will be motivated to look at cooperation and establish performance measures to weigh the success of each partnership, all without increasing current taxation levels.

The commission believes increased efficiency and productivity in governmental services will bring a greater bang for the tax buck. Some of its work has been examining models in other states that might be adopted here.

But it discussed at length a common trap -- the belief that states can reduce or maybe freeze taxes while preserving high standards of service and even adding services. This approach not only can backfire but has. Other states that have tried to restrict the tax levels have often seen unintended reductions in services in other areas.

Some observers suggest there could be benefits for unions in this deeper cooperation among local governments in a region and even in coordinating or restructuring units of workers and management as a result. But obviously, other attempts at consolidation could prove terribly misguided and reduce staffing efficiencies under the guise of saving money.

Kettl is aware of such dilemmas. He is professor of public affairs and political science at the University of Wisconsin -- Madison’s Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, but he is also widely known for his work as a facilitator and participant in government initiatives and for seeking to bring diverse groups together for common goals.

"The municipal recommendations are aimed at providing some way to help municipalities manage their costs," Kettl said. "It’s clearly going to be a difficult issue -- but, in many ways, so is much of what we’re recommending. There’s something in the report to upset almost everyone."

Unquestionably, health insurance costs were a primary focus in the Kettl group’s fiscal thinking. The commission wants the rules of arbitration to change. It seeks to extend fringe benefit and wage caps to municipal employees as it now affects local schools. At the same time it emphasizes that "government-to-government partnership, in many ways, will be only as strong as the government-to-employee partnership."

"We are talking about some fundamental changes that are aimed at improving labor-management relations," Kettl said. "In particular, we’re recommending that labor have a seat at the table when these issues are discussed."

However, there is deep skepticism about that in the labor community. Having a "seat at the table" sounds good, but how will it work, given historic attitudes and experience?