Posted on 04/02/2002 3:26:21 PM PST by spunkets
NEW! NORQUIST VENDETTA COSTS CITY TAXPAYERS PLENTY
Mar 22nd, 2002
By: RPW
(MADISON) – The Chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin (RPW) strongly criticized Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist today for encouraging a city employee to use local taxpayer-funded resources, including a city-issued check and a city vehicle, to procure state documents to be used by Norquist strictly for partisan political gain.
City employee James Rowen, a former chief of staff for Norquist, has filed at least four open records requests with the Wisconsin Department of Administration since January. These requests include a breakdown of all expenses at the governor’s Executive Residence and all state airplane flight logs from 2001.
Rowen traveled to Madison in a City of Milwaukee-owned vehicle to pick up some of the documents on Wednesday, and used a city-issued check totaling $100.20 to pay the cost of re-producing the records. Rowen was on city time when he traveled to Madison, according to a report on WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee.
“John Norquist’s reliance on local taxpayer dollars to conduct an attack on the governor is the height of hypocrisy and does a huge disservice to the hard-working taxpayers of Milwaukee,” RPW Chairman Rick Graber said. “Instead of trying to trim the fat in his own city budget, Norquist is wasting taxpayer dollars on a self-indulgent smear campaign.”
Graber also questioned the true motives for Norquist’s actions, pointing out that the Milwaukee mayor and Democrat gubernatorial candidate Jim Doyle use the same campaign consultant, Bill Christofferson.
“Citizens have the right to file open records requests, but if Mayor Norquist wants to use these records for his own political gain, he should be paying for the information himself instead of dipping into the taxpayer’s pocket,” Graber said.
Graber added that the latest abuse of tax dollars by Milwaukee’s mayor should not go without scrutiny by the media, which has extensively probed the use of tax dollars by other elected officials.
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