A sticky Finley

County Executive Dan Vrakas may be wondering if life was so bad at the state legislature. After all, there he didn't have to deal with Jennifer Finley, his former chief of staff who apparently did not hear him say, "Please leave quietly."

Finley is out with her story of why she abruptly resigned on December 13th. She claims,

I can no longer stay silent about my resignation.
My original preference was not to discuss the reasons for my departure on a public platform, because I had hoped to keep things publicly positive. However, I can no longer remain silent about my resignation because Mr. Vrakas has mishandled the management of my resignation – and he needs to be accountable as a public servant for it.

I resigned because I felt that Mr. Vrakas did not present a conservative budget. As Mr. Vrakas' former campaign chairperson, I feel that Mr. Vrakas promised but then did not deliver a conservative enough budget to the taxpayers. Mr. Vrakas ran as the fiscal conservative in this race and I believed in him. He argued to the taxpayers that he was more fiscally conservative than County Board Chairman Jim Dwyer. As his Chief of Staff, I presented to Mr. Vrakas a series of cuts and other actions that would have delivered significant relief to the taxpayers in the budget, among themeliminating the County Board lobbyist position and a vacant project/program analyst position.

Mr. Vrakas rejected my recommendations and many others that would have provided far more significant relief to the taxpayers. Ultimately, he whittled down the budget cuts to what I consider an unacceptably low amount. I do not believe the taxpayers of Waukesha County expected Mr. Vrakas would cut a few dollars off their property tax bills when they elected him. I will concede that we had a short amount of time to deal with the budget vetoes, but Mr. Vrakas could have, and should have, done more. I believe in fiscal conservatism that is supported by actions, not words or hopeful promises. Thus, I can not be part of an administration that is all rhetoric and no meaningful action. I also can not be part of an administration that does not live up to the campaign promises that I helped to espouse.

I hope that Mr. Vrakas takes this message to heart and next year delivers to the taxpayers the budget they expect.

So according to Finley, she resigned over the budget. Patrick at Badger Blogger is willing to give her the benefit of the doubt (and a $5 wager). Owen at Boots and Sabers, too, weighs in to praise Finley, but he cautions against wanting to recall Vrakas. Dad29 says now is not the time for "maturity". Bill Christofferson gives some insight on the role of the chief of staff and the campaign manager, and how the roles are different (for example, who's responsible for the fresh fruit).

Me, I'm stuck on the timeline. You see, the timeline doesn't really work for Finley's explanation.

Vrakas was elected October 18th. Finley was appointed shortly after. Vrakas made his tepid vetoes of the county budget on November 14th, with the County Board upholding his vetoes the following day. Laurel Walker of the Journal Sentinel reported on December 5th that all communications are to go through the County Executive's office, a departure from Jenifer Finley's husband's time as county executive. Finley resigned December 13th.

Finley must've taken a long time for her protests on behalf of the taxpayers of Waukesha County to bother her enough to resign. It took her a whole month after the Vrakas vetoes, and two months after she was given a $6,000/year increase over the last county chief of staff. She either has a slow moving conscience, or there's more to this story.

If she was willing to follow up her protests of the tepid budget cuts by Vrakas with her resignation, shouldn't she have done so immediately? At least by the weekend after the vetoes were upheld? What did she have to gain at that point by sticking around?

But if it were another issue, or some combination of issues which she leaves out of her statement, then how convenient to pick the one issue everyone would praise her for? How nice to hear one more time, "Finley for County Executive", especially if you get to stick it one more time to the person who accepted your resignation (possibly even if you didn't tender it in the first place).

Jessica McBride made a comment at the time, "In some ways, it's more interesting than people think and in other ways... it's more banal." Given her closeness to the situation, I think it would be unfair to expect her to say more on the issue*. But it leads me to believe that instead of some grandiose principle causing Finley's departure, it may have been a case of, "That's not how my husband would have done it" or, "If I had been elected this is the way I would do it" once too often. Perhaps it could even have been over the issue of routing communications through her office, which would've been closer to the timing of her resignation.

I join Brian Fraley in warning conservatives not to be too gleeful in embracing the Finley story. He writes,

...prospective employers of Jennifer Finley would be wise to look at how well she carries water for her bosses when the heat is on.

Conservatives would be wise not to praise her move. Regardless how you feel about Dan Vrakas' failure to cut more spending out of this first budget that reached his desk, it's clear his biggest failure was hiring Finley as his chief of staff in the first place.

Vrakas comes up for re-election in April 2007. That gives us plenty of time and a complete budget cycle to make an assessment of Vrakas as county executive. The Finley story, on the other hand, does little to fill in that assessment.

Update! 12/27/05 Fred at Real Debate Wisconsin calls Jennifer Finley the "Queen of Integrity." I don't see that fitting on a yard sign.

Update! 12/28/05 Dennis York thinks Jennifer Finley's "whole act is a charade."

Regardless of what happened between herself and Vrakas, she knew the conservatives would jump at the bait in her defense if she threw the tax increase chum out there in the water.

Dad29 gets to the point,

Jennifer, you've been fired. Your remarks are ridiculous; one may conclude that you think you have some sort of Divine Right to an office in the Courthouse.

You don't. You're done. Go find a real job someplace.

*I'm willing to broker a deal where Christofferson tells everything he did for the Doyle campaign and everything that happened in the Norquist administration in Milwaukee (inluding the Figueroa story) in exchange for McBride spilling her guts on this story. We'll do it over beers at the Delafield Brewhaus. Since they have the paying gigs, they can split the check.