Archive for the ‘State Government’ Category

Wow. 4:10 a.m. and the Assembly is still in session

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

This kind of thing late-night / early morning law-making generally doesn’t turn out well.

There’s always an exception to the rule, right?

Here’s to RTA creation.

Even MORE evidence the gov is lying

Monday, April 5th, 2010

Gov. Doyle says the decision to reconstruct North-South I-94 was made before he took office. That’s not true. Evidence of that was presented in a previous post. And now there is more.

From a Jan. 2004 (that’s a full year after Doyle took office) Wisconsin Department of Transportation memo:

WisDOT has created a multi-division team to analyze the SEWRPC (Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission) recommendations and develop a 30-year implementation plan.  The review will address key issues:

  • Timing of critical pavement and bridge needs and the probable need for continued rehabilitation, even prior to and during reconstruction;
  • Priority staging for corridors and interchanges, and the resulting timetable and costs for planning and environmental studies for each corridor; (Emphasis added)

So there you have it. Doyle did not tell the truth. WisDOT, which makes the actual decisions in issues like this, was still weighing the issue of timing a full year after Doyle took office.

For shame, Mr. Doyle.

The Zoo Interchange and bad spending priorities

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

The finger-pointing between gubernatorial candidates Scott Walker and Tom Barrett over who is to blame for the problems with the Zoo Interchange would be laughable, if it did not draw attention away from the real issue — the state’s refusal to take care of the highways it builds.

The past few governors and the state legislature never figured that out — if you build a highway, you need to take care of it. They got the first part of that equation — highway building — down pretty good, but the taking care of it part? Not so much.

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation has been an agency run amuck for a long time now, enabled by Governors Thompson and McCallum and Doyle and the state legislators who perennially suck up to the road builders. Got an unnecessary interchange project in Waukesha County? The Wisconsin Department of Transportation is there for you. Want to build a sometimes interchange because of a single sporting event? Just call WisDOT.

But boring ol’ maintenance? Never mind.

The facts are rather neatly and depressingly laid out in the Wisconsin Department of Transportation’s own Budget Trends report. From 1994 through 2009, spending on the three big highway-building programs — major highway development, state highway rehabilitation and southeastern Wisconsin highways rehabilitation — totaled $13.6 billion (transportation debt, most of which is incurred because of those programs, is a separate category). Spending on highway maintenance and operations totaled just $2.7 billion over that same period.

The top blue line is annual highway construction spending. The pink line is annual maintenance spending. Source: Transportation Budget Trends, 2008

The top blue line is annual highway construction spending. The pink line is annual maintenance spending. Source: Transportation Budget Trends, 2008

Yup. In a state with an aging highway system, the state powers that be decided that only one dollar should be spent on maintenance for every five dollars spent on new construction. Worse, the spending disparity grew over that time period. In 1994 maintenance spending was about 25% of the amount spent on highway construction. In 2009, maintenance spending equaled about 19% of highway construction spending.

Republican Walker, when he was in the state legislature, cast some votes for those bad budgets. But this is a bipartisan issue. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle rejected a request for a 1% annual highway maintenance budget increases for 2009-11.

No health care for you!

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

State Reps. Robin Vos (R-Caledonia) and Scott Suder (R-Abbotsford) are leading the charge to make sure that Wisconsin residents who would benefit under health care reform don’t.

(Republican gubernatorial candidates Scott Walker and Mark Neumann also favor financial ruin caused by medical bills.)

Vos and Scuder sent a letter, which they said is signed by 32 other state legislators, asking State Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen to take action to block the legislation in Wisconsin.

Suder comes up with an interesting read of the U.S. Constitution: “The 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution clearly grants the states the sovereignty needed to opt-out of federal laws such as this,” he said in a prepared statement.

Oh, really? The 10th Amendment says that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Where is that opt-out provision? Why hasn’t it been used before?

The scary possibility is, of course, is that the ideologues running the U.S. Supreme Court right now will endorse the Suders of the world and come up with a Constitutional interpretation worse than the one that gave corporations such a large financial say in the electoral process.

Van Hollen, meanwhile, is taking a cautious approach. Three conditions are necessary for his office to take action, the State Department of Justice said in a statement.

First, the President must sign the health care overhaul into law.

Second, Governor Doyle or either house of the state legislature must authorize
the Attorney General to bring or join such a legal action. Absent such
authorization, he is prevented from doing so by state law.

Third, should the Governor or either house of the legislature make such an
authorization, Attorney General Van Hollen must independently conclude that
claims have a sufficient legal basis.

Van Hollen’s staff are in contact with lawyers in other states interested in challenging the law, the statement said. Van Hollen doesn’t like a lot of what is in the law, but doesn’t sound like he will be first at the courthouse door:

The role of the state attorneys general and the courts is not to veto
those policy choices made by elected officials – that would be decidedly
undemocratic – but to appropriately examine, in the context of a case, whether
the law is consistent with the Constitution of the United States. Even if specific
provisions of the health care law are held to be unconstitutional, a court may
determine that the rest of this massive health care overhaul is constitutional and
remains in effect.

Early prison release, reality and partisanship

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

You would think that the JS, given its tough, tough economic circumstances, would understand about other institutions facing tough, tough economic circumstances.

That is not the case, however, when it comes to the state’s early prisoner release program. There’s a non-story there, and the JS was all over it. The state is letting some non-violent offenders out of prison a month or two early.

Some of them — surprise! — re-offend.

Police Chief Edward Flynn complained to the paper that the state is increasing the city’s costs. The JS, journalistic watchdog that it is, does nothing to verify or investigate Flynn’s assertion — does the chief seriously believe that if these folks are held an extra month they won’t re-offend? That the city won’t be spending time and money re-arresting them?

The early release program is pretty much of a non-issue (at least until just one of the released inmates commits some heinous crime two weeks before his original release date — then political hay will be made until the cows come home to Wisconsin Avenue) blown out of proportion to create a faux scandal. If I were in Democratic Gov. Doyle’s administration, I would suspect the paper of having a partisan agenda.

Fortunately, in its totally even-handed manner, the paper carried, on the very same day, a total non-story about two State Department of Justice press releases. Republican J. B. Van Hollen’s shop borrowed wording from other agencies’ press releases about cases they worked together.

Stop the presses! Nothing amiss here!

Gee, think the paper has ever taken a few paragraphs from press releases?

That’s it for now. I must go out and, like the paper, shovel it.