Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele once again sided with suburban conservatives, this time when making appointments to the Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC) board of directors.
In March, Abele passed over his fellow Milwaukee Democrat Sandy Pasch and other Milwaukeeans and appointed Mequon-based manufacturer Mary Isbister to the MATC board, a move that has his critics crying foul.
Shorewood resident Pasch, a former state legislator who’d had a long career as a nurse and nursing instructor, was up against Isbister for a seat on the board. Cedarburg resident Isbister and her husband Eric own GenMet, a manufacturer that’s become the poster child for the skills gap controversy in Wisconsin.
Abele chairs the four-person appointment committee comprised of the board chairs of Milwaukee, Ozaukee and Washington counties plus himself. But when the members cast their votes, the suburbanites and Abele stuck together against Milwaukee County Board Chair Marina Dimitrijevic. The committee voted 3-1 for Isbister over Pasch as well as Von Briesen & Roper attorney Mark Foley over Veolia North America communications and community relations manager Joyce Harms for another open seat. Graciela Maizonet, a machine builder and repairer at Master Lock, earned another term as a large employer representative on the board.
Dimitrijevic told the Shepherd she was shocked that Abele passed over Pasch, saying that her health care background would have been helpful to a board lacking anyone from that industry.
“Wouldn’t we want that training and curriculum development and leadership on the board?” Dimitrijevic said.
She said that MATC also would have benefitted from Harms’ experience at Veolia, since the water industry is attempting to turn Milwaukee into a global water hub.
Harms’ presence on the board would have taken MATC “to the next level,” Dimitrijevic said.
But Dimitrijevic said she was most shocked that Abele voted against adding another Milwaukeean to the board. Of the eight potential candidates, only Isbister lives outside of Milwaukee County. “I assumed that we would be united at least in the interests of Milwaukee County citizens,” she said. “That did not happen.”
Abele wouldn’t respond to specific questions about his picks for MATC, but via a spokesman he emailed, “I feel good about the candidates that the appointment committee elected. Each believes that MATC needs to enrich, empower and transform lives and I’m proud to have them on the district board.”
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MMAC Brags about Appointments
The method for appointing MATC board members has changed drastically since 2011 after years of the conservative business community’s complaints about the lack of business owners on the board.
Previously, MATC board members were appointed by school board presidents in the K-12 school districts making up the MATC area. As the largest district in the area sending the most graduates to MATC, Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) got five votes on the appointment committee, while the other districts only had one each. The MATC board was made up of two employers, two employees, one school district administrator, one elected state or local official and three additional members.
All that changed in 2011, when then-state Sen. Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend) and the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC) backed a new state law that only changed the appointment process for the MATC board but not any other technical college district in the state. The selection committee made up of K-12 school district representatives was terminated in favor of a four-person committee made up of the board chairs of Milwaukee, Ozaukee and Washington counties plus the Milwaukee County executive. While Ozaukee and Washington counties provide just 5% of MATC’s students, they now have 50% of the votes on the appointment committee, drastically diminishing the voice of Milwaukee in selecting the MATC board.
In addition, five MATC board members must represent employers, up from two previously, and the two seats for employee representatives were eliminated. Two employers must be manufacturers.
Candice Owley, president of the Wisconsin Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, said the new system will likely result in a MATC board that doesn’t truly represent MATC students, the majority of whom come from Milwaukee and are ethnic or racial minorities.
“In some ways it seems like it’s not legitimate representation,” Owley said. “This is a taxing district and, more importantly, the students overwhelmingly come from the city, not just the county. It’s a critical institution for developing a really skilled workforce in Milwaukee.”
MMAC, in an email to its members obtained by the Shepherd, recently bragged that it had “drafted” the 2011 legislation and now can get its candidates on the board. It complained that not enough business owners were appointed to the MATC board when the old system was in place.
“With the new system in place, we have been able to add outstanding business leaders like David Dull of Allis Roller, Mary Scheibel of Trefoil Group, and now Mary Isbister and Mark Foley to the board,” the email reads. “Nearly a decade after we identified strengthening the connection between the MATC board and the business community as a priority, we have largely realized that goal and significantly transformed the board.”
But is MMAC responsible for these new picks? Isbister is a MMAC board member whose 2009 bid for the MATC board failed despite MMAC’s backing. She also serves as chair of the Wisconsin Council on Workforce Investment and was chair of the Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership. She joins two other manufacturing representatives on the MATC board.
That said, attorney Foley told the Shepherd that he wasn’t MMAC’s candidate for the MATC board.
“I was not recruited to do this by anyone,” Foley said.
MMAC President Tim Sheehy emailed the Shepherd, “The business leaders appointed to the board do not come with an MMAC agenda, but are filling seats previously unavailable to business representatives.”
Politics at Work?
Although both Abele, Dimitrijevic and Pasch are Democrats, and Pasch provided Abele with introductions when he began his political career, Abele didn’t return the favor with his appointment to the MATC board. Perhaps politics was at play. When Pasch decided not to run for another term in the Assembly last year, she backed then-Supervisor David Bowen for that seat while Abele’s campaign aide, Tia Torhorst, ran and lost in the Democratic primary. Similarly, Pasch’s pick for the East Side 19th Assembly District open seat, Jonathan Brostoff, also won in the primary, triumphing over the Abele-backed attorney Dan Adams, now a conservative pundit on Charlie Sykes’ Sunday morning TV show, and Dimitrijevic herself.
Dimitrijevic said she put that rivalry behind her and backed Pasch for the MATC board because she was an excellent candidate.
“I’m not going to place retribution over values,” she said.
Owley said she was very disappointed that Abele rejected Pasch, since health care is such a critical component of MATC’s programming.
“It’s just a shame that everything has turned to narrow-minded political thinking rather than try to think about what’s good for the community,” Owley said.
Isbister, who Abele selected over Pasch, comes to the board with a bit of controversy. She and her husband Eric made headlines when complaining about the state’s skills-gap problem and GenMet’s inability to hire experienced welders. In 2012, Eric told the New York Times Magazine that his company received more than a thousand applications the previous year but only 25 applicants were qualified. GenMet hired those welders but fired 15 of them.
But critics of the state’s skills gap theory, including Marc Levine at UW-Milwaukee Center for Economic Development, say that low wages are a major factor when employers can’t find qualified workers such as trained welders. Back in 2012, the starting pay for welders at GenMet was $10 an hour; now, according to its website, the starting pay range for a second- and third-shift GenMet welder is $9-$18 hourly.
Isbister couldn’t be reached for comment for this article.
