Don't just do something, stand there!
On the April 5 referendum to reduce the size of the Common Council
…it is to be remarked that, however small the republic may be, the representatives must be raised to a certain number, in order to guard against the cabals of a few; and that, however large it may be, they must be limited to a certain number, in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude. […] It must be confessed that in this, as in most other cases, there is a mean, on both sides of which inconveniences will be found to lie.
- James Madison, Federalist 10
I.
On April 5, residents of Wauwatosa will vote on a referendum to reduce the size of the Common Council from 16 to 12 alders. In this smaller council, one alder will represent two wards rather than two alders representing three wards as they do currently. This referendum would also limit each alder to two consecutive 4-year terms. More on that next week.
The wording on the April 22 ballot is:
Shall the Charter Ordinance be adopted as presented to the Common Council on July 20, 2021, to reduce the number of alderpersons per district from two (2) per aldermanic district to one (1) per district, define twelve (12) aldermanic districts, create term limits for alderpersons, establish transitional procedures and establish effective dates?
The City of Wauwatosa’s FAQ on the referendum lists a short time line of discussion going back to May, 2021, but it actually goes back much further.
The idea of reducing the size of the Common Council has been discussed since at least 2007. In 2012, a nonbinding referendum proposed a reduction in the size of the common council and 72% of voters were in support. Because the referendum was nonbinding, the common council was not obligated to take any action and nothing was done until 2015 when another proposal was put forward which either failed to pass a vote or was never put to a vote.
Notably, the original motivation for the 2007 proposal was a long-term decline in population. Wauwatosa hit a population high of 58,000 residents in 1970. In 2012, the motivations for the nonbinding referendum were to bring the number of representatives into alignment with other municipalities (most have fewer), because constituents were confused about who their representative was since there were two per district, and some felt meetings ran longer than they needed to since everyone liked to talk.
Alderman Byrne resurrected the idea of reducing the common council size in November, 2020. There was further discussion in February and March, 2021, which ultimately led to a proposal during the July 20, 2021, Common Council Meeting to place a binding referendum on the April, 2022 ballot. The proposal passed 8-5.
II.
During discussions in the Government Affairs Committee, the Equity and Inclusion Committee, the Common Council, and the Committee of the Whole, supportive alders cited various benefits to reducing its size.
Fewer council members would make government more efficient. Meetings would be shorter, residents would not be confused about which alder represented their district, and there would be less workload for city staff.
It would bring Wauwatosa into alignment with other municipalities around Milwaukee and within Wisconsin. The Wauwatosa Common Council is the largest in south eastern Wisconsin.1
Less deadweight. With two alders per district there can be an uneven distribution of work. It is not always clear who is responsible for what, and there’s opportunity for a less motivated alder to skate by.
More accountability. With one alder per district, residents would be able to more easily hold their representative accountable.
More diversity. Smaller districts would require fewer people to elect minority or female candidates. Once elected, the voice of those minority and female alders would have more weight on a smaller council.
Representation will actually improve. Instead of an alder being responsible for three wards totaling approximately 6,000 residents, he or she will be responsible for two wards totaling approximately 4,000 residents.
Fewer alders with proportionally higher pay would encourage better quality and more economically diverse candidates. I.e., the low pay discourages less well-off candidates from running.
On the other hand,
More council members make government more efficient. With two alders per district, they can share the load, respond to constituent concerns more quickly, and attend more meetings while allowing for more complete district representation across various committees.
Representation will be improved. Two alders per three wards of approximately 6,000 people effectively gives the city one alder per 3,000 residents. Two alders per district provide residents with more points of contact. If someone feels one alder does not take their complaint seriously enough, the other can be contacted.
More diversity. More alders means more opinions and perspectives are presented. More alders increases the likelihood that minority and female candidates will be elected.
More alders with a proportional reduction in individual workload encourages higher quality and more economically diverse candidates. I.e., making the job part-time reduces the costs of running for people with families and other jobs.
You might notice that the benefits and advantages espoused for reducing the size of the common council are very similar to the benefits and advantages espoused for keeping the council the same size.
What’s going on here?
III.
A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.
- J. P. Morgan
It seems clear that not only do council members disagree on the relevant trade-offs but they disagree on which side of the ledger those trade-offs even lay. In other words, it is not that all parties acknowledge, for example, that one must choose between efficiency and representativeness and that a smaller council is more efficient but less representative and that the disagreement is whether we currently have too much representation and not enough efficiency or vice versa. Instead, the disagreement is even more fundamental. It is about whether reducing the size of the common council is more likely to improve efficiency or inhibit it, increase diversity or stymie it, encourage the participation of more and better candidates or discourage it, etc., etc.
More importantly, it is not clear to me that the residents of Wauwatosa are any better able to quantify these costs and benefits than the common council. We do not have access to any better information and, in fact, probably have less.
It is also seems likely that there are many ways to address each of the purported problems, some of which may be more effective and involve less friction than reducing the size of representative government. One could have 12 alderman representing two districts each and 4 representing the city at large. One could have elections for both alderman representing a district occur at the same time, so that the top two candidates are elected and perhaps this would increase the likelihood of electing minority or female candidates. One can raise the pay of council members independently of any changes to the council itself. One could fund efforts to educate residents about how their local government works so that they know they have two alders representing them.
The point is not that any of these solutions are better than reducing the size of the common council but that it is unclear why they privilege this particular solution above the others. There has been much talk in these meetings about what particular benefits will be realized by reducing the size of the council and how particular costs might be mitigated and almost none about alternative methods of achieving the same ends.
When an individual’s arguments for their preferred solution appear to so poorly support that solution, it is not necessarily because they are stupid or naïve but many times because the arguments they use to persuade others are different than the ones they used to persuade themselves.
[Update 3/16/22: After some research, the selection process for Ald. Kuhl’s replacement occurred the week after Ald. Byrne’s proposal to reduce the common council size in November, 2020. So while it may have been used to justify the proposal, it couldn’t have motivated it. Based on comments made by Ald. Byrne during a February 23, 2021 Government Affairs meeting, one motivation for the particular timing is the upcoming census reapportionment of wards. “Why now? Because of the census. […] as long as this work is being done, before we know exactly where these lines are going to be, it makes sense that if we’re going to restructure and redistrict, now is the time to do so.” I think this undercuts one of the points I make below although the others are still relevant.] One potential motivation justification for Ald. Byrne’s proposal—and which is importantly not listed in the answer to the City of Wauwatosa’s FAQ asking “Why is there a referendum?”—was the process of selecting Ald. Heather Kuhl’s replacement after she resigned in October, 2020. Her replacement with Ald. Gustafson seems to have been at least a partial motivation for Ald. Byrne resurrecting this idea although it doesn’t explain the support of other alders. During a meeting of the Equity and Inclusion Commission in April, 2021, she says:
One of the best examples I can present to the Equity and Inclusion Committee as to why this reduction in number would provide more power to people who would be elected that are non-white males is just what happened 4 months ago with Heather Kuhl's seat. The process to which we filled that seat was certainly fair—on paper. However, when you have this number of non-white males, and then you have 5 of 11 candidates be either females or people of color, all of which people say are qualified, but the power that number of people had on council—as soon as I saw that and who was selected through this process I thought likelihood of a woman or person of color being elected was pretty small. If you have a smaller number of council members, you need a smaller number of allies to move the needle and get things done.
Ald. Byrne’s reasoning seems to be that given that there are only three women on the council if there were relatively fewer men it would have been easier to get a non-white male, assuming all the women on council had similar views. They only need to convince four other alders rather than six to get a majority.
This is obviously true, assuming one takes the number of women on the council as a given. However, it seems equally obvious that women (and really, anyone) are less likely to get elected to a seat as the number of available seats decreases. This point was made by other alders as well as members of the Equity and Inclusion Commission, and I never really heard a convincing counterargument. One staff member during a meeting did mention that with smaller districts, it requires fewer people to elect minority or female candidates but this would also hold true for any candidate unless people who would vote for minority or female candidates reside disproportionately in certain districts which I do not think is the case.
Ald. Byrne also made the argument that we have had a 16 person council for the last 10 years and diversity hasn't increased with the implication that we should therefore reduce its size. Mayor McBride made a similar claim with respect to diversity on the common council by saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
I don’t find these arguments particularly compelling, because it assumes that (1) there is a causal relationship between council size and minority representation, (2) that this causal relationship counterintuitively works such that fewer total representatives lead to more diversity, and (3) that there are not dozens of potential other reasons why the common council is mostly white and mostly male.
Mayor McBride does eventually acknowledge this when he notes that Wauwatosa itself is mostly white (though not mostly male):
Really, the problem we have here is a chicken-and-egg problem, and it’s caused by the fact that we were segregated for so long. And that is we don’t have enough minority population in Wauwatosa. And that’s slowly, and to my mind gladly, changing. And I think the new census figures will reflect some improvement in that. But whether you have 16 alders or 12 alders or 8 alders, you’re still going to have the problem of not enough minorities.
IV.
I was talking it over with someone and they actually made what I thought was a very astute observation. They said to me, it sounds like you have a solution, and you’re looking for a problem.
- Ald. Welch, District 3, May, 11, 2021 Government Affairs Committee meeting
One way to to do something is to notice a particular problem and then determine the most effective way to solve it. Another way to do something is to decide what you want to do, and then determine what problems it might solve and use that as justification for your actions. Both can be presented persuasively and as well-intentioned. But the latter can be misleading because it allows one to obscure vague intuitions behind plausible-seeming rationalizations, and it anchors debate not on the problems themselves but on the mechanics of implementing a preferred solution. The former, I think, is more intellectually honest.
Government can be inefficient. Is it too inefficient? How do we know? What causes it? A large common council may be only the tenth biggest reason for government inefficiency in the City of Wauwatosa, but the common council doesn’t know, because they have only focused on the costs and benefits of a solution some prefer for other reasons. And I think one could say the same about every other stated benefit.
Putting the decision to a vote through referendum appears virtuous, but a more cynical take might be that it also allows the Council to launder their vague intuitions about its potential effects by allowing the public to substitute their own equally vague intuitions and calling it “democracy.” The public is well-placed to decide questions of relative value. Do they value efficiency or representativeness more? But the referendum is not about weighing the relative importance of competing values but quantifying the costs and benefits of a particular solution, and I personally feel even less well-situated to determine this than the city council.
I think Ald. Byrne has good intentions. However, her proposal seems partly a function of historical contingency and a particularly salient event where a women alder resigned and was replaced with a man the timing of the census. Here’s a problem. And here’s this solution that comes easily to mind because people have been talking about it for a long time. In 2007, as Wauwatosa’s population was declining, someone proposed reducing the common council size. This idea has been periodically revisited over the last 15 years including a non-binding referendum in 2012 in which 72 percent of voters supported reducing the size of the council. But Wauwatosa’s population is no longer declining. And it’s not clear how many of the people who voted in 2012 are still in Wauwatosa and whether the particularly circumstances and context in which they made their decision are still present.
Overall, I just have very little idea what effects this change will have on anything or how it will all wash out. If I had to bet, I would guess that the impact will be pretty negligible. It will create new problems, people will mostly adapt, and things will feel pretty much the same as they did before.
On a side note, the best guess of members of the city staff for why the size of the Wauwatosa Common Council is 16 is that in the early-1950s the City of Wauwatosa annexed the Town of Wauwatosa. Each had four districts with two aldermen per district and when the municipalities were combined their respective common councils were combined as well.