[Madison, Wisc...] Citizen volunteers are entering signatures from recall petitions into a massive, searchable database at the rate of 2.7 every second–hoping to uncover any evidence of fraud. However, all that work could go to waste if the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board gets its way.

On Wednesday, GAB staff told the Board it was decided internally that it will not accept any evidence of fraud from individuals or third-party groups. Only the official election campaigns of those officials being recalled may participate in reviewing the hundreds of thousands of signatures on the petitions.

Verify the Recall's Brown

Yet, groups like Verify the Recall, which has over 13,000 volunteers working to verify the signatures, are not allowed to coordinate their activities with political campaigns, since it could violate their non-profit tax status.

Verify the Recall, however, is not throwing in the towel. The independent effort, a project of two Wisconsin Tea Party groups, is working on a court challenge to the GAB’s decision, demanding that citizens be allowed to participate in the review process.

“The whole concept of recall is for citizens to hold their government accountable, and that’s what we’re doing too,” Ross Brown, Verify the Recall organizer, told the MacIver News Service on Wednesday. “The truth is the truth. It doesn’t matter where it comes from.”

In addition to Governor Walker, the Lt. Governor and four Republican Senators are also being recalled. The total cost of these elections could exceed $18 million. So far Verify the Recall has reviewed all the senator recall petitions, and believes it has found enough evidence to prevent at least one of the elections.

Brown feels confident his group will be able to force the GAB to accept the evidence it’s found.

“We’ve done our homework prior to getting to this point,” Brown said. “We are moving full steam ahead.”

Based on public reports, citizens not affiliated with either the recall organization or those targeted for recall this spring have found scores of problems with the petitions, but Wiscosnin’s elections watchdogs have ruled they will not consider any of their evidence.

The Verify the Recall project had three goals:

• To conduct a comprehensive review of recall petition data

• To uphold the integrity of election processes

• To publicly present all findings

On Tuesday, the Government Accountability Board ruled that the only evidence of fraud they will consider must be contained in the challenges offered by Governor Scott Walker or the four Republican state senators against whom recall petitions were filed last month. The GAB will not investigate or consider independently submitted evidence of fraud.

“Staff believes the Board should only rely on information that is developed by the staff in its petition reveiw, submitted by the officeholders in a challenge or the petitioners in response to determine the sufficiencey of recall petitions,” wrote GAB Executive Director and General Counsel Kevin Kennedy in a memo to GAB members Tuesday.

The GAB discussion on the petition review criteria and process focused on their minimum statutory requirements.

The organizers of Verify the Recall say they are prepared to go to court to see to it that the GAB does more.

[Madison, Wisconsin] As Governor Scott Walker prepares to deliver his annual State of the State address Monday night, one area of improvement to which he could point is the status of the state general fund’s cash flow.

Compared to this time last year, the projections are much rosier. The Walker Administration does not anticipate the General Fund balance to dip into the red in the next several months, a practice that happened often in the final years of the Doyle Administration.  The Administration did not need to rely on inter-fund transfers/borrowing to keep a positive balance in the General Fund in December and does not anticipate having to do so for at least the first quarter of 2012.

2011′s  Q1 forecast:

Forecast for 2012 Q1:

In December of 2010, the Dolye Administration offered the following warning to lawmakers:

“The General Fund may experience low balances intermittently from December 13th through January 3rd. During this time it may become necessary to exercise the authority granted under s. 20.002(11)(a), Wisconsin Statutes, pertaining to the temporary reallocation of certain eligible surplus moneys.”

One year later, Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebch wrote:

“It is not anticipated that the authority granted under s. 20.002(11)(a), Wisconsin Statutes, pertaining to the temporary reallocation of certain eligible surplus moneys, or the authority granted under s. 16.53(10)(a) , Wisconsin Statutes, pertaining to the delay of payments will be utilized.”

The data comes from the quarterly reports the executive branch must submit to the legislature’s Joint Committee on Finance, per state statutes.

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[Madison, Wisc…] The Walker Administration has unveiled a new Compensation Plan for state employees that replaces the old state contracts. The new plan cracks down on overtime abuses and curbs many work rules and add-on provisions that had previously been negotiated with the former employee unions.

Having already saved an estimated $600 million over the next two years through employee contributions to health and retirement plans, department heads will now be given the freedom to assign overtime in an efficient manner without regard to seniority, a move that will save more than $5 million in one state agency alone.

“Overtime is one of the major areas that will be affected as agencies will now have discretion in determining how overtime is assigned,” Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch wrote in a letter sent to all state employees Tuesday.State Employee Letter re Comp Plan

The new Compensation Plan gives administrative officials discretion over compensation differentials, but there is no bump in base pay or cost of living adjustments that had been commonplace with the union pacts of the past.

In the absence of a contact, a Compensation Plan governs pay and benefits for formerly union-represented state employees, as has always been the case for non-represented employees.

In 2010, state employees worked nearly 1.9 million hours of overtime for which they were typically paid at 1.5 times their regular hourly rates, according to a report released in May by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau.

The LAB found that premium overtime hours increased from 2009 to 2010, when they were approximately equivalent to 900 full-time staff positions.

Walker Administration officials stress that required staffing at the Department of Corrections and other departments will still be met, but that by not requiring department heads to assign overtime by seniority will save the DOC $5 million.

The LAB noted that until recently, protocols for assigning overtime hours were negotiated by the Office of State Employment Relations (OSER) in collective bargaining agreements with 19 bargaining units that represented approximately 38,100 state employees.

Act 10 removed the requirement that the State of Wisconsin collectively bargain changes to compensation and other work rules. Under changes contained within Act 10, pay and benefit packages are no longer governed by union contracts, with the exception of base pay increases (which are limited to the increase in the Consumer Price Index) for unions that have been certified. To date, no state union has been certified to negotiate for these pay increases.

Tuesday morning the Office of State Employee Relations submitted the Plan to the Joint Committee on Employment Relations.

Last November, representatives of the unions which at the time represented tens of thousands of state employees engaged in a hurried effort to ratify new employee contracts before a new Republican Administration and legislature were sworn into office.

The MacIver News Service obtained copies of the framework of those agreements, and the attempts to steamroll them through a lame-duck session of the legislature were scuttled when former Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker (D-Weston) joined Republican Senators in opposing the plan.

Largely unchanged by the Plan are items like base pay, vacation, holidays, sick leave and sick leave conversion credits.

Previously, if overtime assignments were misapplied contrary to the seniority provisions contained within state employee contracts, the state government could be subjected to penalties.

Taxpayers were on the hook for overtime hours never worked, due to the elaborate seniority-driven work rules regarding the assignment of overtime that remain in place until this new Compensation Plan is in effect on January 1, 2012. (See sidebar)

According to findings of the Governor’s Commission on Waste, Fraud and Abuse, the DOC reported premium overtime paid due to errors in 2010 cost $83,174.61 in penalties. DOC managers had assigned 2,623 overtime hours to less-senior employees and the many of the more senior workers who had been passed over later received pay for hours they never worked.  This practice will be eliminated under the new Compensation Plan.

Certain compensation add-ons and differential pay options were eliminated in the new Compensation Plan.

Additional reforms contained within the new Plan include:

• The bulletin board provided to post information about union activities can now be used for other matters
• Taxpayers will no longer finance paid time off for union activities
• Nearly 38,000 state employees will be eligible for Discretionary Merit Compensation based on Merit, Pay Equity, and Retention.  Before Governor Doyle got rid of DCA’s (similar to the new DCMs) most union contracts prohibited merit from being a consideration
• One contract allowed Police Communication Operators who work through lunch and bring a lunch a reimbursement of $4 a day for a bag lunch.  This is eliminated
• Another contract allowed certain nurses and nursing assistants an extra dollar an hour for mentoring.  Mentoring is now considered a part of anyone’s job
• Most provisions granting extra pay for carrying a beeper were eliminated

Previously, the entire legislature would vote to ratify state contracts with non-amendable up or down votes. Now the Compensation Plan merely needs to be approved by the Joint Committee on Employment Relations.

Recognizing the controversy that surrounded the last frenzied attempt to ratify state employee contracts, Governor Walker has requested that this Compensation Plan be available for employees and the general public to scrutinize for ten days prior to JCOER acts on the measure.

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The 2011-2013 Budget for the State of Wisconsin is the most fiscally responsible two-year Badger State spending plan in at least a generation. It pays the bills, is short on accounting gimmicks, restrains spending and includes measures that will improve government efficiency and invigorate the private marketplace in order to help individuals and businesses here create jobs.

It is a good budget.

That being said, it could be better.

The document forwarded by the legislature still contains onerous interference into the private market. Program cuts that could have been made were modified for political expediency. And, although it has a dramatic decrease in earmarks over budgets past, is not pork free.

In a perfect world, we would see vetoes on the following items:

1. Craft brewers are gaining market share because they are meeting a consumer demand. The Legislature has no business restricting the production and marketing of a good or service on the basis of the size or scope of the actors involved.

2. On SeniorCare, the governor got it right the first time. The legislature’s moves added unnecessary expense to the budget. There is no sound reason Wisconsin’s seniors enrolled in the program shouldn’t first exhaust federal remedies, such as Medicare Part D. We are the only state in the nation with a stand-alone drug entitlement program for the elderly.

3. At a time when we are empowering management in their dealings with government labor, tying the hands of the Milwaukee Police Department makes neither fiscal nor ideological sense. The proposal that mandates that suspended officers receive pay during termination appeals has no place in state law, or this budget.

4. The legislature meddled when it decided to create an individual income tax deferral for investments in Wisconsin businesses. Why do they insist on picking winners and losers? Does the Legislature really believe an investor will commit his/her retirement savings to a Wisconsin business because the government will hand out a modest break on the capital gains? Investment of capital flows to attractive projects and businesses regardless of geographic boundaries.

5. The recycling mandate and its 19 million dollar price tag should end up back on the scrap heap. If a government entity believes a service is necessary, it should pay for it.

6. State taxpayers should not subsidize high-speed broadband internet access. WiscNet should not be a government priority. Private service providers are fully capable of meeting this need without government competition.

7. We would have preferred to see zero dollars in bonding authority for the purchase of more land via the Stewardship Fund. The legislature significantly cut Walker’s request but they should have eliminated it all together. The state owns enough land.

8. And while it will not happen, you would not hear us howl if the veto pen was used to make the School Choice plan available to all families statewide. We need an education system whose sole focus is the education of the child, not artificial boundaries or the status quo.

9. This budget modifies state law to make it easier and less expensive for government to exercise eminent domain in a few specific cases. It’s a needless increase in the ability of the state to interfere with property rights. If changes to the state’s eminent domain law are truly warranted, they should be considered as a separate piece of legislation, not in the budget.

10. Finally, the pork and earmarks remain a thorn. As we said earlier, this is hardly a pork-laden document like the Doyle budgets of the last decade. Nonetheless the habit has proven hard to break. And while this list is not comprehensive, worthy or not, these projects deserve to be line-itemed out.

• The elimination of the state per diem limit for sewerage district officials
• The new position at Crex Meadows Wildlife Education Center
• The $10,000 for the Sheboygan Aerospace port
• $300,000 for the Bay Area Medical Center in Marinette
• $25,000 for the Copper Falls State Park in Oconto

The State Budget is a solid plan. The best this state has seen in decades. It eliminates the structural deficit that has plagued this state for the last three administrations. But why settle for good?

Governor Walker will announce his vetoes on Sunday. Clearly he could make the plan even better.

In his 2003 State of the State address, then-Governor Jim Doyle said to the residents of Wisconsin, “We should not, we must not, and I will not raise taxes.”

Eight years later, we finally have a state budget that appears to be living up to those words.

When Doyle first ran for governor in 2002, he campaigned against a $3.2 billion structural deficit. When Doyle left office, he left a $3.3 billion structural deficit for his successor to solve.

For the last state budget under Doyle, the state faced an even larger structural deficit. Rather than make the necessary cuts to deal with the continuing structural deficits, Doyle and the legislature actually increased spending by $3.6 billion.

To pay for the increased spending, Doyle and the state legislature raised taxes by over $2 billion and allowed a local property tax increase of $1.5 billion. Even worse, the state budget used $3.4 billion of one-time federal “stimulus” money, including over $2 billion on existing programs.

Want debt? There was plenty of that in the last budget. Doyle and the legislature increased borrowing to  $3.58 billion. This is in addition to owing Minnesota $60 million for past due tax reciprocity payments, and owing the state medical malpractice compensation fund over $200 million because of illegal raids of that fund.

Raiding the state’s medical malpractice compensation fund was not the only budget raid under Doyle. Doyle and the legislature raided the state transportation fund for $1.3 billion during his time in office.

What a dramatic change in two years. The state budget that was sent to Governor Scott Walker Thursday night is a wholesale  reversal of the kind of budgeting under Doyle and the previous legislature.

Under the proposed budget, Wisconsin will actually have a budget surplus of $306 million. The current budget does it without a general tax increase, it freezes local municipal property taxes, and actually lowers taxes overall by $24 million.

Legislators and Walker actually tackle the state’s debt by lowering it nearly $2 billion. When the legislature was told that the state expected $636 million more in revenue than previously estimated, the legislature on a bipartisan vote paid off the more than $200 million owed to the medical malpractice compensation fund.

What the state budget does not do is raid the state transportation fund. Money for the state transportation fund was collected from the taxpayers in the form of gas taxes and registration fees with the reasonable expectation that such money would actually be used for transportation. Under the previous administration that was not the case. However, legislators and Walker again recognize not only the importance of the roads to commerce in this state, but also the importance of taxpayers trusting the state to use the money collected for the intended purpose.

On education reform, the legislature also took steps in a new direction toward restoring Wisconsin’s position as a leader in alternative educational opportunity. School choice will now be expanded to the Racine County for the first time. The enrollment caps were lifted for choice schools and for public charter schools, including the state’s online charter schools.

Already the impact of such responsible decisions is being felt. A recent survey by CEO Magazine has Wisconsin going from 41^st in the nation in to the 24^th most competitive state. A recent review of member attitudes by Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce showed 88 percent of them believed the state was headed in the right direction, while just a year ago only 10% said the state was headed in the right direction.

While there are still plenty of flaws in the current state budget, including the ridiculous use of the budget process to enact policy items like the changes in the craft brewing law, the budget that is now sitting on the governor’s desk shows that Wisconsin can live within its means without raising taxes. Instead of looking for new ways to squeeze more revenue out of individuals and businesses, the legislature worked to find more ways to squeeze public services out of a bloated state government.

For many years Wisconsin lived taxpayer paycheck to taxpayer paycheck hoping that the bill collectors could be kept at bay with a promise that the check was in the mail. Now Wisconsin is paying its bills, and doing so without threatening the state’s long term economic growth. That’s a welcome change indeed.

Wigderson is a veteran participant and observer of Wisconsin politics. He and his family live in Waukesha County and his commentary can also be found at Wigderson Library & Pub.

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John Nichols, writing in The Nation, even called Governor Scott Walker a “dictator” because of the steps proposed to fix the shortfall in the current state budget.

Gene Gowey of the Teamsters even compared the Governor to Adolf Hitler.

State Senator Spencer Coggs even accused Walker of creating “legalized slavery.”

So much for the post-Tucson shooting era of civility.

Walker’s announcement on Friday of a plan to fix the current state budget and begin to address the long-term budget deficit has caused his critics a case of hysteria. It’s a wonder that many of them do not require medical assistance, or at least tranquilizers.

Let’s try to gain a little perspective here. The current state budget is $137 million out of whack. The state is facing a $3.6 billion structural deficit in the next biennium, or as the MacIver Institute has pointed out, much higher when you include the  $ one billion plus we owe the feds for unemployment benefits.

Among the state’s overdue obligations are two big holdovers from the Doyle era. Wisconsin owes Minnesota $58.7 million from the tax reciprocity agreement that is no longer in effect because of the overdue bill. Wisconsin also owes the state medical malpractice fund over $225 million after it was illegally raided in 2007.

According to Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch, between the current obligations and the state’s structural deficit for the next biennium, the state is facing “nearly $4 billion in budget pressures over the next 30 months.”

If anyone should be suffering a case of the vapors, it’s the taxpayers.

Last year they made it clear at Tea Party rallies and at the polls they do not want their taxes to go up any more. They also made it clear that they expect the government to rein in it’s spending. State government is going to have to cut spending rather than raise taxes, and this budget fix is the first step.

Among the budget fixes, Walker proposes ending the collective bargaining right for benefits for most state employee unions. He considers this necessary to require state employees to begin contributing 5% to their pensions (they do not contribute anything now), and 12% to their health insurance (up from the current 6% they now contribute).

Without ending the collective bargaining for state employee benefits, the state will have to continue negotiating with the unions. Given the state’s relative lack of fiscal health, those negotiations could continue far beyond the immediate crisis. Meanwhile, the state would likely have to begin layoffs of state employees.

According to Walker, 1,500 state employees for the next three months could be laid off if changes to the pension and health care contributions are not pushed through. Walker’s proposal also includes refinancing the state’s debt to allow it to pay off the money owed to Minnesota and the state’s medical malpractice fund.

And Walker wants the state Department of Health Services to be able to make adjustments to the state’s Medicaid program. These are long-term structural changes that could save $300 million in the next biennium as well as help the state meet its current obligations. What’s more, it’s a plan that does not raise taxes in this weak economy, and it does not merely kick the problem down the road to future state budgets.

Let’s compare this approach to the last time the state found itself needing to fix a state budget in mid-course. In February 2009, Wisconsin under Governor Jim Doyle had a $594 million budget deficit in the fiscal year in which it was operating. Doyle proposed a “stimulus” bill for Wisconsin to fix the hole in the state budget.

Unlike the current approach, Doyle did not engage in a long-term structural change in how much the state government is spending.

Instead, Doyle resorted to taxes.

Despite the recession, Doyle raised taxes on Wisconsin businesses by imposing “combined reporting”on them, raising an estimated $27.7 million to finish the biennium and then proposed raising $187.3 million in the biennium that just ended. Doyle raised sales taxes, “streamlining” them, by $9.4 million in his budget repair bill, and estimated $61.3 million in new taxes in the biennium that just ended. Doyle also introduced a $78 million new tax on hospitals that in the budget that shortly followed ballooned to $891 million.

Meanwhile, the spending continued. Rather than rein in spending, the state used one-time federal stimulus dollars to fill the hole in the state’s operating budget. Despite the tax increases in the budget “fix” that fell short of its stated intention, and the $2 billion in tax increases in the current operating budget, the state still could not meet it’s obligations.

Clearly the tax-and-spend method of the last administration did not fix Wisconsin’s perennial budget issues, not even in the short term. What Walker has proposed moves the state in a new direction of cutting spending, bring long-term costs under control, and not raising taxes. If it’s considered radical, it’s only because it has the novelty of not having been tried before. Like Wisconsin’s bills, this change of course is long overdue.

By James Wigderson

Special Guest Perspective for the MacIver Institue

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The rejection of tying teacher evaluation and administrative decisions to student performance was a major facet in the state’s Race to the Top failures over the past year. As a result, Wisconsin missed out on up to $250 million in federal grant money in 2010.

WEAC’s change of heart included three big changes; the fragmentation of Milwaukee Public Schools, more rigorous teacher evaluations based on value-added student data, and a merit pay system that would reward educators based on student performance. The last two are particularly surprising given the organization’s official stance to prohibit tying teacher assessment to student results.

In fact, WEAC and local unions across the state almost uniformly rejected proposals that would make teachers accountable for the progress that students made in their classrooms. Nearly two out of every three districts in Wisconsin flatly rejected a program that would tie value-added test results to any administrative action – including benefits – amongst their teaching staff.

Unfortunately, those proposals were part of Race to the Top (RTTT), a federal grant program that rewarded education reform across America. By rejecting these RTTT tenets, WEAC may have cost Wisconsin $250 million in educational funding.

Wisconsin failed on both iterations of Race to the Top, finishing worse in the national standings on their second attempt despite declarations of improvement from education leaders across the state. As the MacIver Institute covered here [LINK], six major themes emerged in Wisconsin’s failure:

1)   LEA (local district) commitment to change

2)   Teacher quality and improvement issues

3)   A weak recent history of meaningful reform

4)   Standardized testing and student data collection

5)   Stagnant charter school regulations

6)   A staggering achievement gap with inconsequential improvement.

Based on these problems, Wisconsin rated out in the bottom quartile of all applicants, failing to qualify for the second round of judging both times. As a result, the state lost out on its $250 million bid for funding to make the improvements included in their application. Many of these problems can be traced back to conflicts between teachers and statewide administration; problems with Wisconsin’s application that could have been alleviated back in July by some of the reforms that WEAC suggested Tuesday.

Though the application boasted a nearly universal buy-in from local districts, this simply wasn’t the case. The biggest sticking point on Wisconsin’s failed application was a refusal to allow administrative decisions regarding teachers to be tied to student performance. Though 94 percent of LEAs signed off on the state’s application as a whole, only 36.4 percent agreed to the stipulation that value-added test added could be used to affect teacher compensation, retention, or promotion.

Now, after sweeping changes in state government and major reforms on the horizon, WEAC seems to have had a change of heart.

WEAC president Mary Bell suggested that the Race to the Top problems weren’t based on teacher evaluations, but was rather a rejection of other proposals in the grant. However, this doesn’t change the fact that nearly two-thirds of all local educating authorities still singularly rejected any tie between student outcomes and teacher evaluations just months earlier.

“We’re prepared to talk about them now as union-supported proposals,” said Bell.

Unfortunately, the damage has been done.  Hundreds of thousands of students have been left behind because Wisconsin has refused to be an education innovator and hundreds of millions of potential funding dollars have gone to other states in the meantime.

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[Madison, Wisc...] As personnel closely tied to the Doyle Administration scrambled late last year to find civil service positions elsewhere in the state government where they might survive the transition to the Walker Administration, 17 new executive-level positions were created in state agencies. These new positions cost the state $1.4 million annually in salary compensation alone.

One prominent person to land in a newly-created job was Chris Patton.  Patton had served as Governor Jim Doyle’s Senior Policy Director and as the Director of the Office of Recovery and Reinvestment where he was responsible for overseeing the disbursement of federal ‘Stimulus’ funds. On November 21, 2010, before newly-elected Republican Scott Walker was sworn in as Governor and began to implement an agenda that stood in stark contrast to his Democratic predecessor,  Patton became a new Policy Initiative Advisor in the Department of Administration.

Senator Alberta Darling was shocked to learn of the existence and costs associated with so many new positions.

“At a time when we’re asking state agencies to do more with less, it’s hard to believe that some agencies would balloon their budgets like this,” said Darling (R-River Hills).”Government service is a privilege, not a right.  My legislative colleagues and I will give the utmost scrutiny to these positions in our upcoming budget deliberations.”

Five of the new positions were created in the Department of Corrections, more than any other agency.  Those included a Corrections Center Supervisor, Education Director, Correctional Services Manager, Correctional Management Services Director, and Correctional Services Treatment Director.

As it would happen, the Department of Corrections is currently $21.7 million over budget for this fiscal year, contributing to the state’s $145.4 million deficit.

The new positions (discovered via open records requests MacIver News Service filed with the state) will cost the department over $380 thousand annually in salary alone.

MacIver News Service previously reported on dozens of personnel shifts following the November General Election, as individuals who had served in the Doyle Administration sought positions that they could maintain during the Walker Administration.

New Career Executive Civil Service Positions Created After October 1, 2010

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