Who should be laughing now?

An opulent $800 million MGM Grand Hotel and Casino recently opened in downtown Detroit. While Milwaukee leaders continually like to poke fun at Detroit, when was the last time any developer thought that highly of downtown Milwaukee? The only Milwaukee project of that magnitude was the deep tunnel sewer. But that was built with taxpayer dollars. I can't think of any private sector development in Milwaukee as large as the one in Detroit. So who should be laughing at whom?

Public-sector salary scam

While Milwaukee Common Council President Willie Hines, Jr. is seeking a cap on police overtime, he ought to also throw in an overtime cap for janitors (Building Maintenance Mechanics) at the Department of City Development (DCD). Either that or someone ought to teach DCD employees how to be more cleanly. Perhaps a “trash sensitivity course” would do the trick. In many cases, janitors make more in total pay than DCD planners. From the jsonline.com list of annual and total salaries paid to city employees, I counted 11 janitors who made more than $10,000 in overtime last year. One made over $20,000! And DCD is located in a relatively small four-story building. I remember a summer job I had with the county 40 years ago in which I was charged with keeping a one-story park building clean. It took me three hours a day to make the place spotless, and even that was stretching it.

And Milwaukee’s mayor wants to raise taxes by how much next year?

The bigger picture, of course, is that the list of city of Milwaukee employee salaries is testimony to the con job the public sector has done in convincing people that public-sector employees are so woefully underpaid, particularly compared to their private-sector peers. Add in the princely benefits and pensions that public sector employees enjoy compared to what’s available in the private sector and the argument about poorly compensated public employees becomes even more ridiculous. To a certain degree I don’t deny public employees their largesse because that’s what they negotiated, but to listen to them whine when asked to pay something for their benefits or moan about their sad situations is just insufferable and disingenuous.

They should shut up and thank their lucky stars they don’t have to compete in the private sector.

Manpower's world headquarters decidedly suburban

I just received an invite to the grand opening of Manpower’s New World Headquarters “in commemoration of the company’s return home to downtown Milwaukee.” There’s going to be champagne, cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and valet parking. The attractive invite was die cut in the shape of Milwaukee’s skyline, which really didn’t require much die cutting since the skyline consists of one or two modestly tall buildings. Nevertheless, the invite gives the impression that Manpower’s new building is adding something to the skyline. But that would be misleading because the new building is four stories. Its parking garage is taller!

When I asked Manpower CEO Jeff Joerres during the building’s groundbreaking about 18 months ago why Manpower wasn’t putting up a tower that would be a landmark and that would make people stop and take note, he said that Manpower wasn’t a tower kind of company (does that mean no one in the company likes to move up?), not showy or flashy. I think that was Milwaukee-speak for, “We don’t want to spend a lot,” even though the city kicked in $25 million in tax incremental financing to help defray the cost of the $64 million building.

This world headquarters looks decidedly suburban. There’s nothing architecturally or even visually interesting or inspiring about it. It’s simply your typical Milwaukee red brick structure with some glass thrown in to keep its daytime inhabitants from becoming mole people. And the side most people will see – along Martin Luther King Drive – resembles the back side of a strip mall, complete with an asphalt surface parking lot. The only things that make the building palatable are that it fronts on the Milwaukee River and the colorful flags out front. The plaza that opens to the river, however, is stark. A fountain reinforcing the building’s connection to the river would have been nice, but it probably would have been considered too showy, flashy, or expensive. No, I think I’ll pass on this invite.

For the world headquarters of an $18 billion company, this building is bland and boring. And for the $25 million the city gave to Manpower, it should have held the company to higher building and architectural standards, but that’s what happens when a city has no real leaders.

TPG deal will leave Milwaukee stranded

While the Greater Milwaukee Committee and the Milwaukee media seem to think TPG Capital’s purchase of Midwest Airlines is a good deal – keeping the headquarters in Milwaukee with the same management team continuing to serve chocolate chip cookies – I believe it’s the shortsighted view.

This deal was a relatively low-risk, low-cost defensive move by Northwest Airlines to protect its two nearby mega-hubs in Minneapolis and Detroit. In its present condition, Northwest can ill afford additional competition, no matter if it’s from a small airline like Midwest or in a slowly shriveling city like Milwaukee. And this was a small price to pay to be able to eventually take control of and then remove an annoyance that is siphoning traffic from its hubs. With Midwest out of the way, Northwest will offer Milwaukeeans two options: flights to Minneapolis or flights to Detroit, from which they’ll connect – assuming the flight hasn’t been cancelled – to their final destinations.

(Milwaukee to Memphis will be another Northwest option, but that hub isn’t as close to Milwaukee as Minneapolis or Detroit.)

But, you say, Northwest is merely a minority partner in TPG so it can’t call the shots. Not yet perhaps. And let’s not be naïve. TPG is strictly a front for Northwest, like an opening act is for the main attraction. And in the not too distant future, Northwest will have the right to acquire TPG’s interest in Midwest.

AirTran’s offer, on the other hand, represented an offensive move that would have raised Milwaukee’s image and put it at least a step closer to big-league status. Milwaukee would have become AirTran’s second largest market behind Atlanta and bigger even than AirTran’s headquarters city of Orlando. The number of daily flights would have gone from the approximate 140 offered by Midwest to just over 200. New nonstop destinations would have included San Diego, New Orleans, Miami, and Montreal, among others. More important, AirTran has a presence among travelers and travel planners nationally and internationally that Midwest doesn’t have. That alone made a merger with AirTran the more logical and sensible choice, even though AirTran could have taken over Midwest only to find that Milwaukee wasn’t what it thought it was and then left town. Nevertheless, I’ll take my chances with a successful and growing airline like AirTran than with an erratic and unreliable performer like Northwest.

And why was the decision made to go with TPG rather than AirTran? Well, you’d have to ask Midwest CEO Tim Hoeksema. But I would guess that somewhere along the line giant-sized egos entered into this: “This is my airline and I’ll make the decision who gets my airline.” History is littered with businesses killed off by egos. That’s especially true in the high-profile, seemingly glamorous world of commercial aviation. Eastern and Pan Am come to mind immediately.

But why approach an airline like Northwest? Not only does it have no incentive to see Midwest prosper much less survive, but Northwest at one time owned about 30% of AirTran Corp., a relationship in which there apparently was no love lost. (AirTran Airways subsequently was spun off.) So Northwest probably has a greater than normal competitive interest in seeing that airline founder as well. It just doesn't make sense, especially when Hoeksema says how much he cares about Milwaukee's future. Of course, ego has a way of trumping logic, common sense, and civic pride.

If you’re one who judges an airline by the cookies it serves, the TPG deal will be good for Milwaukee. After all, Hoeksema jubilantly proclaimed, “The cookies stay,” when announcing the TPG deal. That’s nice because I believe this deal leaves Milwaukee headed for another big bruise to its image and a half-empty airport. Rather than giving Hoeksema a standing ovation as the Downtown Milwaukee Rotary Club did the other day after his speech about the TPG deal, I'd be giving him the thumbs down.

How really proud is US Bank of the US Bank Championship in Milwaukee?

The Golf Channel scenes of Milwaukee downtown and the lakefront were excellent, but I found it interesting that the scenes I saw didn’t include the US Bank building, even though it’s on the lakefront and the tallest building in the city. I would assume that because US Bank was the tournament’s sponsor it would have asked The Golf Channel to include its Wisconsin headquarters in the scenes. But apparently it didn’t, which begs the question, is US Bank embarrassed about its Milwaukee building or at least of the cheesy signage atop the building, signage you won’t find in any other city in which US Bank has a significant presence, including Nashville, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, or Minneapolis?

There was a promo for the tournament done with Richard K. Davis, president & CEO of US Bancorp, saying something to the effect that US Bank is proud to be hosting "the tournament here in Milwaukee." The background was a golf course, but it certainly didn’t look like Brown Deer Park Golf Course to me. Perhaps US Bank was proud, but not proud enough to do the promo in Milwaukee or at least use footage of the right golf course as background

Milwaukee, put a Band-Aid on it

Milwaukee leaders are fond of publicly poking fun at Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh by condescendingly asking the question, Does Milwaukee really want to be like these cities? Obviously these so-called leaders are extremely insecure about promoting Milwaukee and consequently they feel the need to resort to such classless rhetoric. My advice to them is to knock it off because all it does is embarrass the city – and themselves – even more.

The latest edition of US News & World Report (7/23-30, 2007) ranked America’s best hospitals on a number of criteria. Guess what? Milwaukee can’t hold a scalpel to Detroit, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh. With Milwaukee having some of the highest health care costs in the country – $2,653 annually vs. $2,496 annually nationwide from 2003-2004, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics – one would think the city has a surplus of great hospitals providing great health care. That might be true, but certainly not compared to these other cities.

The magazine ranked hospitals in 17 disciplines. Milwaukee hospitals showed up a disappointing total of four times in four categories. Pittsburgh hospitals, however, showed up 15 times in 15 categories; Detroit hospitals 17 times in nine categories; and Cleveland hospitals a heart-stopping 24 times in all 17 categories.

The highest rank a Milwaukee hospital reached was 24th (out of 50) in “endocrinology.” The best a Cleveland hospital did was 1st (out of 50) in “heart & heart surgery.” In fact, Cleveland hospitals were in the top 10 in 13 categories. The highest rank a Detroit hospital reached was 12th in “heart & heart surgery,” but it also had five hospitals that made the list in “neurology & neurosurgery.” The best a Pittsburgh hospital achieved was 3rd (out of 50) in “ear, nose & throat.”

Milwaukee likes to tout its children’s hospital, but it was no where to be seen other than in a paid ad in the magazine. On the other hand, Cleveland had two hospitals ranked (4th and 20th out of 26) in pediatrics, while Pittsburgh’s children’s hospital was 11th.

Instead of cutting on other cities, Milwaukee’s leaders should put a Band-Aid on it and focus on making our city healthy in every sense of that word.

Milwaukee: The city that time always seems to forget

An article in the most recent Business Week magazine (7/23/07) noted that despite the slowdown in housing development, there is a continuing explosion in office and hotel building nationwide. In May, according to the article, nonresidential outlays jumped 2.5%, with office space spending up 1.6%. CB Richard Ellis Group, the commercial real estate services company, was cited in the article as saying that U.S. office-space vacancy rates fell to 12.6%, from 13.7% a year ago, despite a 21.5% yearly increase in new office space during the second quarter. Would someone tell me where all the office and hotel building is taking place in Milwaukee, specifically downtown? Other than the small Staybridge Suites development on Water & Juneau, there is nothing under way. And all of those pie-in-the-sky proposals for the Park East are just that, a bunch of dreams that will never come true. Once again, Milwaukee is left behind.