Late last week the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Milwaukee County overtime might break last year’s record. The bad press sent Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker into his usual spin mode. Naturally, his comments missed the point and were little more than a distraction from the real issue and his part in causing the problem in the first place.

Scott Walker’s PR push must have really worked because the very next day the Journal Sentinel put Walker in the headline declaring: “Walker orders overtime, spending restrictions”. Based on that headline alone, one might think that he was actually doing something significant about his latest mess. Unfortunately this is just more of what we have come to expect of Walker: doing damage control and pretending to care rather than actually solving the problem.

Even with the misleading headline, a persistent reader would finally learn in the second to last paragraph that Walker’s “action” really doesn’t do much at all. Although he may have issued an order to restrict overtime, the House of Correction and the Mental Health Complex are exempt from it. Those are precisely the two areas where a large part of the overtime is happening. Rather than take substantive action to solve another mess of his own making, Walker again reaches for a PR book rather than the “Governance for Dummies” book that he so desperately needs.