Patrick McIlheran, Always Unpredictable

McIlheran takes off after Ald. Bob Bauman and me in this disorganized bit of typing - -and speaking for myself, that's OK with me.

But poor Bill Mielke and New Berlin's Mayor, Jack Chiovatero!

Mr. Mielke, the region's senior municipal consultant and arguably a really powerful guy in Wisconsin, gets ID'ed in the lede as "the engineer it hired to find it some water."

Which he is, but he's also the CEO of Ruekert-Mielke, served as a member of the Legislative Study Committee on the Great Lakes Compact, and employs the experts who wrote both New Berlin's Great Lakes water diversion application and who are writing the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission's water supply study.

Ruekert-Mielke consults with the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage Commission and a list of municipalities too long to enumerate.

Could be that Patrick didn't know.

Worse, Mielke and Mayor Jack are both described by McIlheran as "groveling" before a Milwaukee Common Council committee that was taking testimony on the water sale to New Berlin.

Hardly.

I was there for the entire, four-hour hearing. It was a very comprehensive hearing, described by Ald. Willie Wade, a committee member, as "historic" when he mentioned it later in the day at a SEWRPC task force meeting.

Chiovatero and Mielke's views prevailed at the committee Tuesday, and the next day's full Council vote.

An objective analysis of their presentations deserved more accuracy, and respect.

I'm still wrestling with the McIlheran graf below which says he wasn't taking notes, didn't have a tape recorder running, but couldn't wait for the Channel 25 replay that would have been available at 7 p.m. the same night for the quote he missed.

The perils of live-blogging, or impatience, I guess:

"I missed the exact quote, so I'll paraphrase, but Bauman is saying that it sounds like New Berlin really, really needs the deal, so it's prime time for Milwaukee get peel some more money out of New Berlinites to make up for the fact that New Berlin has been attractive to people and businesses while Milwaukee has not."

"Get peel?"

I'm lost.

The next graf steers the reader to a credible source for help - - my blog - - so thanks for the props and the blog hits, Patrick:

"You can get the more coherent version of this argument from blogger, anti-suburban fanatic and former Norquist aide Jim Rowen. As he put it:"

But "anti-suburban fanatic?"

Hey, some of my best friends live in the suburbs.

Finally, there is this dollop of shaky analysis:

McIlheran lays out the case that a median-valued home in New Berlin - - by 2000 census data, $162,000 - - is "affordable" for most non-Milwaukee families in the region (my argument was about affordability to Milwaukee households who earn far less, but let that distinction go for a moment).

Says Patrick:

"New Berlin's average house value, as Rowen points out, is about $162,000. Assuming taxes, insurance and a 10% down payment, this is affordable -- that is, payments wouldn't top 28% of income -- for a family making about $56,000 a year. That is more than what the median family income in the city of Milwaukee is, but it's considerably below the median family income for our metropolis as a whole. "

The major problem with this analysis is that 10% down payment statistic. How relevant is that today?

A recent CNN panel of national mortgage experts disclosed that the current credit crunch has made 20-30% down payments a necessity, even for very credit-worthy borrowers.

Do we think this family with the $56,000 household income has $32,000-$48,000 available for the down payment?

And even at 10%, that's a $16,000 down payment, and more can be expected from borrowers without great credit scores.

In today's economy, those are hefty numbers.