Don’t shrink the Common Council and County Board

Here’s an experience just about every reporter will have at some point: You’re working on a story about an important policy issue. You reach out to some elected officials for comment about it. But it turns out they weren’t aware of it until you reached out. They’re finding out from you. This feels like a cute thing to brag about until you think about the implications. These elected officials aren’t prepared to make a decision about the issue in question. They might have to discuss it or even vote on it at a meeting mere days away, but they’re pretty much in the dark.

Every reporter who covers the Madison Common Council or Dane County Board has definitely had this experience, or I’ll eat my hat. City of Madison Alders and Dane County Supervisors work part-time and earn part-time pay. Most of them are balancing full-time day jobs, constituent inquiries, appointments to various government committees, and of course Council or Board meetings of excruciating length.

This reality has convinced me that we need full-time Alders and Supervisors, and that shrinking these bodies is a terrible idea—a capitulation to the grumbly old American “whatta chore!” attitude toward representative government.

For a long time, I was wishy-washy on the question of a full-time Common Council. I can’t even remember how I voted on a failed 2021 advisory referendum proposing it. The low pay makes it harder for younger and poorer people to run for office, in a country where elected officials are already disproportionately wealthy. Then again, it’s not like I want to give a lot of these people full-time jobs. But that’s politics. We, the public, end up paying salaries for a lot of people who suck, all for the privilege of enjoying a massively flawed system of representative government. In local government, the people who suck most aren’t even set up to suck competently, and neither are the people who suck less.

There is no chance in hell that someone on a part-time schedule can show up anywhere near adequately prepared to make informed decisions about a meeting with 75 agenda items, like the Common Council’s February 24 meeting. Even with the best possible support of government staff and thoughtful input from constituents, that is just asking too much of the human brain. These people are governing a city whose population will cross the 300,000 mark within the next few years, and a county just shy of 600,000 and growing (and not just in the City of Madison). The job is only going to get harder. The agendas are only going to get longer. The meetings are going to get long enough to strain the very fabric of space-time.

Set aside the question of whether or not individual elected officials deserve a full salary or our sympathy. The public deserves representatives who have a fighting chance of understanding complex policy matters and putting a respectable dent in a mountain of constituent inquiries.

I don’t think these bodies necessarily need to get bigger, especially the 37-member County Board. We should, however, expand our notions of what good local representation and constituent service look like. Imagine if Alders and Supervisors could devote at least one full workday per week to directly helping and advocating for individual constituents. Dane County residents don’t have nearly enough help when dealing with landlord-tenant issues, accessing government services, getting a crosswalk put in at that dangerous intersection nearby, and so on and so forth. I also literally think that every City of Madison Alder and Mayor should have to physically help at least one renter in their district move during the annual “everyone has to move in August because we live in hell” period. Perhaps they could get ceremonial hernia belts for the occasion.

To be fair, recent proposals to downsize the Common Council and County Board are not created equal.

Common Council President Regina Vidaver in February suggested scaling down from 20 to 15 Alders, who would still be part-time but would receive a pay raise of $5,000 per year. A memo from Vidaver projects that the size of an average Alder district “would increase by approximately 4,755 residents.” Even then, Alders’ base salary would be about $22,000—not really enough to make it affordable to put more time into the job, which would also then involve serving thousands more constituents.

The Mayor and County Executive are full-time. So are a number of other people with the power to shape policy, budgets, and public opinion: department heads, advisors, public-relations professionals throughout local government, staff experts on a number of policy areas, the City and County’s in-house attorneys, staff at lobbying groups, leaders of likely government contractors who specialize in cultivating relationships with local governments. Oh, and don’t forget the staff members in the Mayor and County Executive’s offices—both have a 2026 operating budget for a total of 14 full-time-equivalent employees (including the Mayor and Executives themselves).

Alders and Supervisors need the capacity to keep up. They’re the people we actually elect to cast the deciding votes on local policy. Putting them at an informational disadvantage makes government less responsive and accountable.

The asymmetry here also weakens the legislative branch’s ability to balance out the power of the executive. Vidaver touched on this when discussing her proposal, as The Cap Times reported. Vidaver argued that under her proposal, “I think you would probably see more policies actually coming out of the alders, whereas right now, honestly, most of the policies come from the mayor.” That’s a very good goal, even if I don’t think this is the best way to accomplish it. Even when the Mayor is proposing good policies, individual Alders should still be contributing their own ideas based on the needs and opportunities they see in their districts.

District 20 Supervisor Jeff Weigand said in a February interview with Channel 3000 that he’d like to cut the County Board down from 37 to 27 members. The proposal, which Weigand introduced at the February 20 County Board meeting, wouldn’t increase pay for the remaining members. Instead, Weigand proposes saving $130,750 in eliminated Supervisor pay, and using that money to create a “Merit Fund” for Dane County Sheriff’s Office employees. So, more constituents and no raise for Supervisors, which makes Vidaver’s idea look a little more appealing by comparison. Less government! More thank-a-cop! An important piece of context here is that Jeff Weigand is Jeff Weigand, who fashions himself as a lone conservative on the Board and seems to enjoy playing the heel.

But OK, Weigand was on relatively good behavior in the Channel 3000 interview, and reporter Elly Laliberte asked some good follow-up questions, so let us consider. Weigand’s proposal would set up an independent commission to redraw County Board districts in time for the Board’s 2028-2030 term. He points out a state statute that allows county boards in Wisconsin to reduce their sizes and redraw districts outside of the usual decennial redistricting cycle. The DCSO “Merit Fund” part is of course pure red meat, but does stipulate that “No more than $2,500 may be awarded to any individual in a given fiscal year,” and that payments from the fund would be one-time awards, not salary increases.

Weigand is close to noticing some of the same dynamics Vidaver has on the City side, except he doesn’t frame them as capacity issues. From a guy who blames homelessness on “sin,” there are no systemic factors, just moral failings and the malign influence of the left. “Sadly, there’s a lot of Supervisors that simply show up to meetings and they vote with the majority,” Weigand told Laliberte. “They’re not curious, they don’t ask questions of staff, they don’t offer original ideas or proposals. They simply show up and collect a paycheck.”

Laliberte asked: “Would decreasing the number of people on the board lead to less representation for folks?” Weigand answered: “Yeah, I think that’s a common misnomer because right now they have misrepresentation. There’s a lot of supervisors that aren’t representing their districts. Unfortunately, we see that the City of Madison and certain political movements within the City of Madison, they extend out into these more rural areas, and they advocate for their interests, and they’re not representing those interests of the rural areas.” OK, so it’s bad for urban and rural people to connect if they’re just gonna talk about lefty shit, or if heaven forfend they turn out to realize they might have some shared interests.

Unlike Vidaver, Weigand doesn’t come full circle to argue that a smaller Board would make for better representation, more varied ideas, more balance. To hear Weigand tell it now, he’s often the only Supervisor sticking up for a more rural and conservative perspective. Take that as seriously as you take all the other hyperbolic tales of woe about what a living hell it is to be a right-winger in Madison. Point is, you’d think he of all people could understand the importance of having more representation for smaller, distinct localities within Dane County’s patchwork of urban, rural, and suburban areas.

Under Weigand’s proposal, each County Board district would need to absorb about 4,000 new residents. We can’t predict how an independent commission would redraw Weigand’s own largely rural district in the northeastern corner of the county. It might encompass yet more rural areas, or more of the Sun Prairie sprawl, maybe a bit of both. It’s anyone’s guess whether that would dilute or strengthen representation of rural perspectives on the Board.

That said, I do have to acknowledge that other proponents of smaller, part-time bodies make some compelling points. “The real trepidation is people feeling like they don’t want career politicians in these roles,” Vidaver told The Cap Times in February. That is a valid trepidation. Running for local office should be an accessible entry point into politics, one where forging relationships with your neighbors and understanding your community matter more than working more formalized political connections. Still, better pay would make it more accessible. If this does create more career politicians, is that such a terrible thing? Local Democratic politics is too often a steady drip of mediocrities awaiting their turn to either run for a legislative seat they’re just presumptively inheriting, run for County Executive, or get humiliated in a gubernatorial primary. Perhaps we should be generating more competition for them.

A recent City Cast Madison episode about Vidaver’s proposal brought up some other good counter-arguments in the form of listener comments. One listener argued that larger districts make elected officials accountable to larger and more diverse voting bases. I can see where that would have benefits, encouraging Alders to balance the interests of their own neighborhoods with what is right for the city as a whole. (This would also be a good argument for adding some at-large seats.) I still don’t think it solves the day-to-day capacity factor, especially if these officials are still part-time.

To actually take Alders and Supervisors full-time (and so many other things we want), we’ll need to fix the state’s shared revenue formula, make the legislature spend some of the state’s multi-billion-dollar surplus, and throw out preemption laws that hamper local governments. Austerity boxes us in on all sides, but we cannot let it smother our capacity to conceive of and demand better things.

Of course this won’t solve under-informed policymaking by itself. Even the best and hardest-working electeds will have blind spots. Politicians will still make decisions based on laziness, corruption, preconceived notions, and personal loyalties. They will still dismiss voices and ideas that they shouldn’t. They will still focus on their pet projects at the expense of other issues. But if nothing else, they’ll have one less excuse.