There is no reason that the Milwaukee County Board should be as big as it is. Most of the county is the city of Milwaukee, most of their programs are focused on the city and the suburbs are, generally, not concerned with propping up the city.

But the board, which is unweildy, needs more reform than a mere reduction in size. This piece from April from the website Urban Milwaukee points out that there needs to be a top-down evaluation of the way the county does business to eliminate redundancy and the adversarial atmosphere between county programs, jockeying for funding:

Suburban voters have clearly signaled their displeasure with the Milwaukee County Board (which certainly isn’t a new thing), but cutting the number of Supervisors in half and hoping for more efficiency and lower taxes is akin to giving someone half as much time to take a test and hoping for better results. Milwaukee County’s issues can’t be fixed by simply eliminating elected officials.