Beginning of the Fascist Takeover

Late at night, before Independence Day weekend, the Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee shoved various last-minute “Tea Party wish list” items into the state budget proposal with the passage of a 999 motion. The 999 motion includes undemocratic, unconstitutional policies that have got to receive public scrutiny, such as dramatically changing the powers and authority of the Milwaukee county board and county executive. The motion even repeals a 100-year-old law that states Wisconsin’s minimum wage must be a living wage.

With less than 24-hour notice, the public is again being shut out of their democracy. Republicans are trying desperately to outrun public scrutiny, having already been forced to retreat from their attempt to gut our open records laws. To escape additional public review, they have resorted to using extraordinary session rules that let them railroad the budget through the Senate. The public is catching on, so Republicans are desperate to get out of town with their grab bag of special interest goodies.

The damages done to Wisconsin’s reputation by this administration and Republican Legislature will take decades to recover from. Republicans already showed their lack of any long-term vision for Wisconsin by choosing to ignore Wisconsin’s middle class families and students in favor of special interest giveaways and unsustainable tax cuts for the wealthy. They prefer to once again divide our state into winners and losers by gutting $250 million from our UW System, while at the same time spending more on the scandal-plagued WEDC.

With the light of public scrutiny shining on them, GOP legislators are scrambling to grab what they can on their way out of Madison, it’s a wholesale dismantling of our democracy. Chris Larson       My hero……

Death of Wisconsin Transparency

Republicans on the Wisconsin Legislature’s powerful budget committee who approved sweeping changes to the state’s open records laws that would severely restrict access to the once-public records of elected officials refused to identify their colleague or colleagues who proposed the measure.

“It wasn’t my motion,” said committee co-chairwoman Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills.

Pressed on who asked for the changes, both Darling and co-chairman Rep. John Nygren, R-Marinette, said there were “multiple requests.” Asked by reporters to give names, Darling walked away.

The Joint Finance Committee passed its “Motion #999” shortly after 9 p.m. on Thursday. That motion is traditionally full of wish-list items for legislators and special interests and often introduced and passed in the middle of the night or early in the morning.

Included in the 24-page motion were five sections of proposed changes to the state’s public records laws that would prevent the public from accessing nearly all records created by elected officials and their staff.

The changes were set to take effect on July 1, the day before the motion was passed and the first day of the new fiscal year.

“When you not just shut the door, but lock the door and throw away the key to the records we generate … we are inviting corruption,” said Sen. Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton. “We are no longer an open government. This attacks the very spirit of who we are in this state.”

Erpenbach said the only explanation for the changes being slipped into the budget bill at the last minute is that “somebody in this building, somewhere, wants to hide something.”

Republican lawmakers on the committee who were asked for their opinions on the changes deflected and said it wasn’t their proposal.

The Capital Times has submitted an open records request for communications related to the changes. However, it’s unclear whether the request would be fulfilled under the new provisions.

“Don’t ask me,” Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, said when asked whether he thought the changes are good for Wisconsin. “I didn’t write it.”

Rep. Dean Knudson, R-Hudson, defended the changes, citing confusion over the difference between “drafts” and “notes” when developing legislation. He said the “hyperbole” regarding the changes was “overblown.”

“I think that this serves to clarify and make it easier for us all to stay on the right side of the law and the rules,” Knudson said.

The changes spurred unexpected alliances as liberals and conservatives united against what they view as an attack on transparency and open government.

In 2011, the conservative John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy asked Erpenbach for emails under the state’s open records law. Erpenbach returned the emails, with names and addresses redacted. A court eventually ruled he must release the names and addresses of those who had contacted him during the fight over Act 10.

Bringing up the lawsuit, Erpenbach said as much as he disagrees with MacIver, he will defend the organization’s right to sue him for records.

And MacIver president Brett Healy cheered him on.

“Bad, bad idea,” Healy said in an email. “The fact that the MacIver Institute and Sen. Erpenbach, opponents in an open records lawsuit and philosophical opposites, agree that these changes will be a death blow to open government shows you just how dangerous this is.”

Healy said Wisconsinites of all ideologies should be troubled by the committee’s actions.

“Taxpayers deserve an open and transparent government,” Healy said. “This is a huge step backwards.”

Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council president Bill Lueders called the proposals a “very serious full-frontal assault on the state’s traditions of open government.” And Rep. Chris Taylor, D-Madison, called it the “biggest attempt to subterfuge open records and sunshine laws” of any legislature in the country.

An attorney with the Legislative Reference Bureau confirmed that no other states have laws like one of the provisions, which would create a broad “legislator disclosure privilege.”

“If you don’t want people to know what you’re doing, don’t run for public office,” Taylor said.

Lueders called for Gov. Scott Walker to use his line-item veto to undo the changes.

“It’s a very disturbing and cowardly action that guts the open records law with regard to the Legislature itself,” Lueders said. “And to do it in this fashion, as a last-minute budget provision — I would hope that people are absolutely outraged by this.”

A spokeswoman for Walker said he will review the budget in its entirety when it reaches his desk, but did not say whether he plans to approve or veto the open records changes.

Rep. Gordon Hintz, D-Oshkosh, cited several occasions when legislative drafting records have revealed information about the influence of or changes made to bills.

Drafting records have been used frequently by journalists to gain insight into the process by which legislation is created, influenced and passed.

In January 2014, the Wisconsin State Journal used drafting records to report that a controversial bill to allow high-income parents to avoid paying tens of thousands of dollars a year in child support was written with the help of a wealthy donor to the bill’s author, Rep. Joel Kleefisch, R-Oconomowoc.

Drafting records showed in February that the University of Wisconsin had objected to a proposal in Gov. Scott Walker’s budget to scrap the “Wisconsin Idea” from the UW’s statutory mission statement.

The liberal group One Wisconsin Now, which frequently requests legislative records, said it takes the move as “validation of our effectiveness and proof that the lawless Republican machine running state government will do anything to try and stop us from holding it accountable.”

The organization successfully sued Darling for records related to correspondence with a voucher school lobbyist in 2011.

OWN executive director Scot Ross offered the following as additional examples:

• In 2013, drafting records showed that mining company Gogebic Taconite had been heavily involved in modifications to legislation that would benefit the company related to an open pit mine in northern Wisconsin.
• A school choice lobbyist was heavily involved with writing legislation designed to impose new accountability requirements on schools participating in the state’s voucher program in 2014, according to drafting records.
• A review of drafting records for a proposed 20-week abortion ban showed that it originally included language relating to the health of the mother that was later removed, then added once again as an amendment.

“You close the door on open government, and I guarantee you — I guarantee you, legislators knowingly and unknowingly will break the law and will never be caught,” Erpenbach said.

Last month, Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel launched an Office of Open Government in an effort to increase openness and transparency with regard to government records.

Asked by Erpenbach whether Schimel had seen or signed off on the committee’s changes, Nygren said, “I can’t speak to that.”

“Transparency is the cornerstone of democracy and the provisions in the Budget Bill limiting access to public records move Wisconsin in the wrong direction,” Schimel said in an email on Friday.

Read more: http://host.madison.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/republicans-refuse-to-identify-lawmaker-behind-measure-restricting-access-to/article_5dde110a-212d-11e5-9347-cb87d0ac4f74.html#ixzz3et7CqkwH

Scott Walker State of Wississippi

“Some days I look at Governor Walker and I just see a guy who’s afraid of the mob,” Schultz says. “He helped create it, he fosters it, but then he’s also fearful of it.”

Scott Walker continues to fail to stand up to those that are taking our state backwards. His attacks on science and facts should trouble those looking out for our state long-term. It’s going to take us a while to clean up after Scott Walker’s mess in Wisconsin. Major publications are finally documenting his crimes against humanity.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-scott-walker-dismantled-wisconsin-s-environmental-legacy/

By Siri Carpenter | June 17, 2015

Scott Walker speaking at CPAC 2015 in Washington, DC.
Credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

When Wisconsin’s new state treasurer Matt Adamczyk took office in January, his first act was to order a highly symbolic change in stationery. Adamczyk, a Republican and one of three members of the board that oversees a small public lands agency, “felt passionately” that Tia Nelson, the agency’s executive secretary, should be struck from the letterhead. As soon became clear, his principal objection to Nelson, daughter of former Wisconsin governor and environmentalist-hero Gaylord Nelson, was that in 2007–08 she had co-chaired a state task force on climate change at the then-governor’s request. Adamczyk insisted that climate change is not germane to the agency’s task of managing timber assets, and that Nelson’s activities thus constituted “time theft.” When he couldn’t convince the two other members of the agency’s board to remove Nelson from the letterhead, he tried to get her fired. When that motion failed, he moved to silence her. In April the board voted 2–1 to ban agency staff from working on or discussing climate change while on the clock. The climate censorship at the public lands agency made national headlines.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has kept his distance from Adamczyk. It is easy to see why: Walker is widely expected to announce a bid for the Republican presidential nomination. And his environmental legacy—which so far has gone largely unexamined in the national press—has reached much farther than anything the board of a tiny public lands agency could accomplish.

Since taking office in 2011 Walker has moved to reduce the role of science in environmental policymaking and to silence discussion of controversial subjects, including climate change, by state employees. And he has presided over a series of controversial rollbacks in environmental protection, including relaxing laws governing iron mining and building on wetlands, in both cases to help specific companies avoid regulatory roadblocks. Among other policy changes, he has also loosened restrictions on phosphorus pollution in state waterways, tried to restrict wind energy development and proposed ending funding for a major renewable energy research program housed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Most recently Walker has targeted the science and educational corps at the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which has responsibility for protecting and managing forests and wildlife, along with air and water quality. In his 2015–17 budget, released in February, he proposed eliminating a third of the DNR’s 58 scientist positions and 60 percent of its 18 environmental educator positions. (The cuts were approved by the state legislature’s budget committee in May, and the budget is currently making its way through the legislature.) Walker also attempted to convert the citizen board that sets policy for the DNR to a purely advisory body and proposed a 13-year freeze on the state’s popular land conservation fund—both changes that lawmakers rejected in the face of intense public objections.

Walker’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comments for this article. But he and his allies in the Republican-controlled legislature have said that such policy shifts will streamline regulations that they say interfere with business development. Many scientists and environmental advocates as well as some conservative political and business leaders say Walker’s actions diminish the role of science in policy decisions and undermine key environmental protections that have long distinguished Wisconsin as a conservation leader.

“I just see a guy who’s afraid of the mob”
One of the biggest environmental controversies to mark Walker’s tenure came in 2013,when he signed a law paving the way for Gogebic Taconite, a mining company later revealed to be a major political donor, to build a 6.5-kilometer-long open-pit mine in the Penokee Hills region in the Lake Superior watershed. Citing a 2011 study funded by Gogebic, Walker argued the mine would bring thousands of jobs to the struggling region. Gogebic helped write the new law, which allows companies to dump mine waste into nearby wetlands, streams and lakes; doubles the area around a mine that a company can pollute; allows the DNR to exempt any company from any part of the law; and strips citizens of the right to sue mining companies for illegal environmental damage.

The new law also included a philosophical shift: Where the old law specified that mining should impact wetlands as little as possible, the new one says that significant adverse impacts on wetlands are presumed to be necessary.

Gogebic dropped the Wisconsin mining project after finding more wetlands than expected in the area, raising questions about the cost of meeting federal mitigation standards. The rewritten Wisconsin law, however, would govern any future projects.

Phosphorus pollution has been another flashpoint. In 2010 Wisconsin was the first state in the U.S. to adopt rules imposing numeric limits on phosphorus pollution, which impairs hundreds of Wisconsin waterways and can harm aquatic life and human health. When Walker took office in 2011, he argued that the rules would be too expensive for manufacturers and communities to follow and proposed to delay implementing them for two years. In 2014 he signed a law allowing polluters to postpone meeting the phosphorus restrictions if they could demonstrate that complying with the rules would pose a financial hardship. Environmental groups say that by diminishing polluters’ responsibility for reducing phosphorus discharges, the law is a step backward for water quality.

Walker has also resisted measures to reduce carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. Like many Republican governors and lawmakers, he has avoided making public remarks on climate change. But his actions paint a picture.

In 2008 before he was governor, he signed the Koch-backed “No Climate Tax Pledge,”vowing to oppose any climate legislation that increased government revenue. In 2014 he appointed a utility commissioner who said in a confirmation hearing that “the elimination of essentially every automobile would be offset by one volcano exploding,” a remark he later recanted. In February a child asked Walker what he would do about climate change if he were president. Walker’s reply: as a Boy Scout he believed in leaving his campsite cleaner than when he found it. Nevertheless, this spring Wisconsin joined 13 other states in a lawsuit challenging U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan, which would cut carbon emissions from Wisconsin power plants by 34 percent by 2030. (A federal court dismissed the suit on June 9.)

Walker has argued, based on a study funded by the coal company Peabody Energy, that the new rules are “unworkable” because they would be too expensive for manufacturers and residents and has implied that Wisconsin might not comply with them.

Although some conservatives in Wisconsin praise Walker’s actions, he’s attracted the ire of others, including former Republican state senator Dale Schultz, who retired from the senate last winter after 32 years in the legislature. “I think what’s going on is appalling,” Schultz says. “As somebody who thinks that should be the first thing conservatives ought to be doing is protecting our environment, it’s embarrassing. I’m a pretty pro-business Republican. But a clean environment is essential to business. This is just wholly unacceptable.”

Schultz attributes Walker and other far-right Republicans’ policy positions to the demands of wealthy benefactors, especially those connected to the energy industry. “Some days I look at Governor Walker and I just see a guy who’s afraid of the mob,” Schultz says. “He helped create it, he fosters it, but then he’s also fearful of it.”

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“The term ‘climate change’ has become a red flag”
The Walker administration’s policy changes have been accompanied by efforts to weaken scientists’ role in policymaking. Even before taking office, Walker signaled his environmental agenda by appointing former Republican state senator and construction-company owner Cathy Stepp as DNR secretary, explaining that he wanted “someone with a chamber-of-commerce mentality” at the agency’s helm. Stepp, who does not have a background in science or natural resource management, had publicly derided DNR staff as “unelected bureaucrats who have only their cubicle walls to bounce ideas off of” and who thus “tend to come up with some pretty outrageous stuff that those of us in the real world have to contend with.”

Recently retired scientists spoke to a sharp shift under Stepp’s leadership. Adrian Wydeven, a wolf biologist who ran the DNR’s wolf management program from 1990 until 2013 and retired last year, points to the 2013 restructuring of all the DNR’s wildlife advisory committees. In that restructuring the agency removed university scientists and greatly reduced the number of DNR professional staff; it also gave special interest groups, such as politically influential pro-hunting groups, more slots. Wydeven says the DNR has also restricted scientists’ opportunities to speak directly with lawmakers about proposed regulations and has become deferential toward the legislature. “In the past, if the legislators were proposing anything that wasn’t scientifically sound, the DNR was much more forceful in disagreeing with the legislature and making recommendations to improve the legislation,” he says. “Now there’s much less of that.”

Although DNR researchers haven’t been explicitly forbidden from mentioning climate change (as Tia Nelson was at the public lands agency until the board yesterday amended its policy to ban staff only from engaging in advocacy on climate policy), they nonetheless describe a “chilling effect” on discussion about politically controversial subjects. In November 2010 the DNR’s main climate change Web page was a rich portal containing detailed information about climate trends, forecasted impacts of climate change and DNR programs aimed at addressing the problem. The page also acknowledged that “the most renowned group of scientists working on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stated that it is very likely [more than 90 percent probability] that human activity is responsible for rising temperatures.” Today, the page contains a single paragraph describing, in general terms, a partnership with the University of Wisconsin to study the impacts of climate change and a link to the university’s project Web site.

The chilling effect is also evident in internal discussions, DNR scientists say. Sally Kefer, a land use expert who retired from the DNR in 2014, says that she encountered increasing institutional resistance to discussing climate change in the course of helping communities prepare for a warmer and wetter future. “I was being told to quit contacting the communities to determine their level of interest in having a discussion about climate adaptation,” Kefer says. “I was told to wait until they called me. And can’t I figure out a way to call it something other than ‘climate adaptation’? Can’t we just call it ‘sustainability’?” A current DNR scientist, who requested anonymity, says that the term “climate change” has become a red flag in internal grant proposals. “It’s impossible to work on natural resources without incorporating climate change in some way,” the researcher says. But “we’re less likely to cause problems if we just call it something else. ‘Environmental variability’is sort of our code word.”

Kimberlee Wright, executive director of Midwest Environmental Advocates, an environmental law center, works closely with DNR engineers and scientists to review and comment on pollution permits for activities such as wastewater disposal and groundwater pumping under the Clean Water Act. In the past, Wright says, the process was typically straightforward, and she and colleagues were routinely able to hammer out permits that followed the technical requirements of the law. But since Gov. Walker took office, she says, “We have not been able to settle one permit—we’ve had to litigate every single challenge. We’re often told by [DNR] staff, ‘We know you’re right, but you’re going to have to sue us because the people above me won’t let me issue a technically sufficient permit.’ That’s a really big difference—the interference in science-based decision-making is pretty complete.”

The DNR Office of Communications did not permit agency scientists to be interviewed for this article and did not make Sec. Stepp or Bureau of Science Services Director Jack Sullivan available for comment on whether the agency restricts scientists’ freedom to communicate about areas of their expertise. The department’s spokesperson, William Cosh, said in an e-mail that “When it comes to making decisions the agency remains committed to doing so by using sound science, following the law and using common sense.”

But Walker’s 2015–17 budget proposal, which called for eliminating a third of all research scientist positions and more than half of environmental educator positions from the DNR, would dramatically decrease the influence of science on natural resources policy and public outreach.

According to the state’s bipartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, which provides fiscal information to the lawmakers, about half of the scientist positions Walker slated for elimination are federally funded. In March Stepp said the agency was considering subsuming remaining positions into other parts of the agency, dissolving the Bureau of Science Services altogether. Walker has indicated that he wants science to inform policy decisions on “an as-needed basis.” The agency spokesperson said the cuts do not eliminate the agency’s research capacity. “What these cuts require us to do,” he said in an e-mail, “is to better prioritize the research that our scientists are engaged in to help inform management decisions.”

DNR scientists reject that assertion. “I don’t understand how they can say with a straight face that cutting a third of the research program will not diminish their capacity to do research,” says one researcher, who requested anonymity. “We already have a pretty formalized process of prioritizing research; every two years we go through a process where they identify their research needs.”

Walker’s proposal to shrink the DNR’s scientific capacity appears to have been the brainchild of Tom Tiffany, a GOP state senator who is a longtime critic of the DNR’s science bureau. In May he confirmed on a regional radio program that he requested Gov. Walker cut the DNR scientist, educator and communications positions. Tiffany said he thinks the agency’s scientists have a wildlife management “agenda” that has driven the agency to mismanage the deer herd, curtailing sportsmen’s hunting opportunities. He has also said he believes the agency’s scientists spend too much time on controversial subjects like climate change, which he views as “theoretical.” (According to DNR records, just under 3 percent of DNR scientists’ work hours during the last fiscal year involved activities related to climate change.)

The DNR changes are “an assault on the science side of policy making,” says Curt Meine, a conservation biologist and biographer of conservation pioneer Aldo Leopold. “Wisconsin’s conservation has always been built on a broad public commitment to building and sustaining the health of the landscape and the inherent connection between a healthy economy and healthy land and waters,” he says. “We have a long record of bipartisan support for that. There’s always been tensions, there always will be tensions, maybe—but science has always been a way of talking across those divisions because everybody wants good information to make decisions. Now that legacy, fostered by the likes of Aldo Leopold and Gaylord Nelson, is eroding away.”

Nick Ibarra contributed reporting to this article.

Idiot in Thief

More disturbing news about a questionable $500,000 loan to a high dollar donor to Scott Walker. Even after WEDC staff became aware of the troubled company’s problems, they still tried to secure federal funds to help pay off business debts like the lease on a Maserati.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/wedc-backed-firm-after-learning-state-money-was-for-luxury-car-debts-b99525593z1-309866451.html

Madison — Officials at Wisconsin’s top jobs agency sought federal tax incentives for a failing Milwaukee business for a year after being told that the owner was seeking the money to pay off business debts such as the leases on luxury cars.

Officials at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. worked to get that federal help for Building Committee Inc. even though a $500,000 loan it had given to the company had gone sour within months and the owner of the firm had provided false information to the state.

Top officials in Gov. Scott Walker’s administration pushed to get Building Committee the initial loan and worked to get more for the company. But the jobs agency had to pass on giving the company more money from state taxpayers after finding numerous problems with the firm and being told that owner Bill Minahan was promising some of this second proposed loan to pay a leasing debt on cars such as a 2010 Maserati and a 2011 Nissan 370Z luxury sports car.

Information about state officials’ long-running attempts to find help for the troubled company are coming to light just as the Republican governor prepares to announce his bid for the presidency next month. Walker said this week he didn’t think his jobs agency had cut any corners.

WEDC officials’ alarm didn’t stop them from persuading three counties to allocate $4.5 million for Building Committee from a federal program meant to spur energy conservation, according to hundreds of pages of emails and other documents recently released under the state’s open records law. Those federal incentives were never used because even with the subsidies in hand Building Committee was unable to get the financial backing it needed to move forward with its project.

WEDC officials never told those counties about the concerns that had made them email each other with statements like “Yikes!” and “I can’t believe we are actually going to do this” about earlier proposed help for Building Committee.

“I would hope that when you get a call from a Maserati dealership asking that taxpayer funds be put forward in order to pay off a loan for a Maserati, that the leader of the organization would issue a cease-and-desist order to stop any more dealings with the organization. That’s not what occurred,” said Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca (D-Kenosha), who sits on the WEDC board.

WEDC spokesman Mark Maley said WEDC’s help getting bonding authority for the project was a “moot point” because Building Committee was never able to get private financing to make the deal happen.

He said no other projects were held up by allocating the bonding authority for Building Committee.

Minahan had been taken to court for unpaid taxes in 2010 and WEDC staff was aware of serious financial challenges he faced, such as late payments on a mortgage and revolving credit accounts with banks that were over their limits.

But Minahan also had political connections and a willingness to work them — he gave a maximum $10,000 donations to Walker’s campaign in 2010 and then-Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, in 2009.

Walker’s administration secretary at the time, Mike Huebsch, urged WEDC officials to find help for Building Committee and Walker’s then-chief of staff, Keith Gilkes, attended an initial meeting on it.

(Walker later appointed Huebsch to sit on the Public Service Commission that regulates utilities. Before and after he served as chief of staff, Gilkes was Walker’s campaign manger; he now runs a super PAC supporting Walker’s likely presidential bid)

With that support from top Walker officials, WEDC loaned $500,000 to Building Committee in September 2011. Huebsch and another administration official, Chris Schoenherr, continued to push for more funding, with Huebsch personally calling WEDC’s head underwriter on the issue in February 2012.

Minahan regularly contacted top WEDC officials, the records show, and sought help elsewhere when he didn’t feel he was making progress with them. In April 2012, he contacted the office of Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch to see if she could help in releasing funds for him.

By February 2012, WEDC had decided to provide Building Committee with an additional $500,000, with then-CEO Paul Jadin deeming the plan “acceptable” in one email.

A month later, WEDC underwriter John Roos wrote the head underwriter, Steven Sabatke, to say “we are probably going to advance another $1.5 million” to the company, instead of an additional $500,000. Sabatke replied, “I can’t believe we are actually going to do this.”

But days later, Roos wrote a memo that detailed questions about Building Committee and Minahan’s financial strength. “Based upon the lack of collateral to secure additional funding, change in credit repayment status and no confirmed take out financing to repay the WEDC loan, staff recommends not providing additional WEDC funding for the project,” he wrote.

In April 2012, Sabatke emailed WEDC vice president Brenda Hicks-Sorensen to say an automotive leasing company had contacted him to find out about money for Building Committee. The firm was owed money by Minahan and he had told them he would soon receive a grant from WEDC and would pay the firm back once he received it.

“I think the sooner we officially deny this, the better,” Sabatke wrote.

Responded Hicks-Sorensen: “Yikes!” In a second email, she said she agreed it was important to deny the additional money quickly. Days later, in May 2012, WEDC formally denied providing more funding to Building Committee.

Months later, in August 2012, Hallease of Milwaukee sued Building Committee and Minahan for more than $220,000 for falling behind on payments for eight vehicles, including the Nissan 370Z and Maserati — a sports car painted a dark shade the manufacturer has dubbed “Nero,” after the emperor who was said to have fiddled while Rome burned. A judge ruled in the leasing company’s favor in October 2012.

A string of other lawsuits were filed against Building Committee and Minahan in 2012, including one over back payments on a 1981 Cessna airplane.

Help from counties solicited

By November 2012, WEDC was sending past due notices to the company on the $500,000 loan it provided in 2011. But that didn’t mean WEDC stopped trying to help the company using others’ money.

Early on, state officials discussed using Qualified Energy Conservation Bonds for Building Committee’s project, which involved making financial institutions more energy efficient. Such bonds are issued by local units of government and paid back by private investors, with the borrowing costs subsidized by federal taxpayers.

WEDC needed to rely on others to make that happen, so it asked counties to allocate their bonding authority to WEDC to use for Building Committee. Ultimately, Kenosha, Washington and Waukesha counties turned a total of $4.5 million in bonding authority over to the project.

Racine County was willing to put an additional $2 million in bonding capacity toward the project, but that idea did not advance as far as using the bonding authority of the other three counties, records show.

Officials with Kenosha and Waukesha County told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel they were not told specifics about the project or the concerns among WEDC staff about Building Committee. David Geertsen, Kenosha County’s finance director, said his county initially decided not to give the bonding authority to the state for the project.

But WEDC contacted the county again in 2013 and officials there decided to give the bonding authority to WEDC because the county did not have other potential projects at the time that could make use of the bonds.

By that stage, WEDC’s staff internally had shown serious concerns about Building Committee and the firm was months behind on paying its state loan, but Geertsen said that information wasn’t shared with Kenosha County.

“We believed the job of vetting the company was the state’s job,” he said. “We thought if the state could use (the bonding authority) for a good purpose, then why not participate if it can create jobs?”

In January 2013 — at a point when WEDC had known about Building Committee’s problems for months — then-Waukesha County Executive Dan Vrakas gave WEDC $1.5 million in bonding authority for the project. Shawn Lundie, who is County Executive Paul Farrow’s chief of staff and served Vrakas in the same capacity, said the county was not told anything about the project other than that it would happen in Waukesha County.

“We never had any discussion about any individual company,” he said.

The state used Waukesha County’s decision to persuade Washington County to do the same thing. In April 2013, WEDC’s chief operating officer at the time, Ryan Murray, provided Washington County’s administrative coordinator, Doug Johnson, with a copy of Waukesha County’s letter releasing its bonding authority. Johnson wrote Murray back to say he would use the letter “as my guide” on the issue and Washington County ultimately allocated $1.3 million to WEDC to help Building Committee.

Although WEDC lined up the bonds for Building Committee, they were never issued. To complete the deal, Building Committee needed to find a local government to issue the bonds and private lenders willing to invest in them, but it didn’t meet all those requirements.

Last year, WEDC sued Building Committee over the unpaid 2011 loan.

In an email to the Journal Sentinel, Murray said he approved denying additional help from WEDC for Building Committee in 2012 because of staff skepticism about whether the company’s plans to install solar panels on financial institutions would be successful. But he said he was not told of the contact from the leasing company or the legal challenges the company and it its owner faced at the time.

“In the case of (Building Committee), we viewed the request to pursue QECBs as a reasonable attempt to help a company succeed before pursuing aggressive collection,” wrote Murray, who is now a lobbyist. “Our belief was that whether (Building Committee) was able to secure such private financing would provide a market check on the value of business model they were pursuing. If they could not receive such financing, it would be a sign that the business model was not viable and we should pursue aggressive collection.

“Ultimately, (Building Committee) was not able to secure the private financing and we did pursue collection. It’s important to understand that this decision gave a Wisconsin business the best chance of success without risking any additional taxpayer funds from WEDC.”

In March 2014 — two years after WEDC declined to give the company any more of its own support — WEDC alerted Building Committee it would withdraw the bonding authority for Building Committee “and distribute it to projects that can more immediately utilize them.”

Jake Kuester, WEDC’s vice president of credit and risk, emphasized the benefits of the public help the bonds provide in his letter to Building Committee.

“The QECB bonds are a valuable economic development tool WEDC relies on to assist businesses like BCI,” he wrote.

Andrew Hahn of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.

Assault on Education Wississippi Values

“Tampering with the University of Wisconsin is something that Wisconsin residents may well regret. Watering down tenure and shared governance risks driving away the university’s best talent and making it harder to recruit.”

Article

UPDATE: WI on pace for most layoff notifications of Walker admin – WKOW 27: Madison, WI Breaking News, Weather and Sports

UPDATE: WI on pace for most layoff notifications of Walker admin – WKOW 27: Madison, WI Breaking News, Weather and Sports.

 

Another fail in Jobs my Der Walker in the Grand state of Wississippi.

Walker Horror Story

Out of CPAC Walker compares Protesting Wisconsinites to ISIS. Idiocracy is full force.

Has no real foreign policy experience, has to make it up.

Walker’s Hanging Tree

“The Hanging Tree”          Inspired 
(with James Newton Howard)

Annotated by Robert Bauter

Are you, are you
Coming to the tree?
They strung up a man
They say who murdered We.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met at midnight
In the hanging tree.

Who Are you, Who are you
Coming to the tree?
Where dead man called out
For his love to flee.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met at midnight
In the hanging tree.

When Are you, when are you
Coming to the tree?
Where I told you to run,
So we’d both be free.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met at midnight
In the hanging tree.

Are you, are you
Coming to the tree?
[Soundtrack line:] Wear a necklace of Nope,
Side by side with me.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met at midnight
In the hanging tree.

Where Are you, where are you
Coming to the tree?
Where I told you to run,
So we’d both be free.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met at midnight
In the hanging tree.

When Are you, When are you
Coming to the tree?
They strung up a man
They say who murdered three.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met at midnight
In the hanging tree.

Are you, are you
Coming to the tree?
Where dead man called out
For his love to flee.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met at midnight
In the hanging tree.

Truth in the Telling

Gov. Scott Walker prodded outside groups and individuals to funnel millions of dollars into Wisconsin Club for Growth — a pro-Walker group directed by his campaign adviser — during the recall elections in 2011 and 2012, according to court documents unsealed for a short time Friday afternoon.

The documents form much of the basis for prosecutors’ theory that Walker’s campaign and conservative groups illegally cooperated to help him and other Republicans. Walker and the groups deny they broke any laws, noting two judges have sided with them.

Among the funds that flowed into the Wisconsin Club for Growth was $700,000 from a company trying to build a massive open-pit iron mine in northern Wisconsin. Soon after the 2012 recall and general elections, Walker and Republicans eased environmental regulations, helping the firm.

“The Governor is encouraging all to invest in the Wisconsin Club for Growth,” said an April 28, 2011, email from Kate Doner, a Walker campaign consultant, to R.J. Johnson, an adviser to Walker’s campaign and the advocacy group. “Wisconsin Club for Growth can accept corporate and personal donations without limitations and no donors disclosure.”

In the email, Doner wrote to Johnson that Walker wanted Wisconsin Club for Growth exclusively to coordinate campaign themes. “As the Governor discussed … he wants all the issue advocacy efforts run thru one group to ensure correct messaging,” she wrote.

Walker’s campaign has paid Doner’s fundraising firm $1.26 million since 2011, including more than $70,000 in his latest spending report.

Frankenstein Wisconsin

Wisconsin

Finally, no description of the failed experiments of conservative governors is complete without noting the sad record of Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, who went to great and campaign-finance-law-stretching lengths to gain and hold his office. He promised that his agenda would deliver economic growth and bountiful new jobs; the reality has fallen far short. As Marc Levine writes, not only have Walker’s policies not delivered the 250,000 jobs he claimed they would, they may have actually held back job growth in the state, as Wisconsin’s economy falls behind those of its neighbors.

So let’s go back and look at what these laboratories have produced. A simple comparison of the results with the stated hypotheses shows that these experiments haven’t succeeded. As Thom Tillis seeks a seat in the U.S. Senate and Walker, Jindal and Perry all look with one eye towards the White House, we should be asking: have these guys earned the promotion that they’re angling for?