This week in WEDC giveaways and corruption

Lookie here! The Wisconsin press is relaying a "major jobs announcement" for a future project in the state, this time from publisher Quad Graphics in Sussex. And like a number of other previous announcements, this announcement comes another handout from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC)

The company will be eligible to earn $15.7 million in state tax credits from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. as part of the planned expansion.....

Earlier this year, Quad won a long-term contract from Hearst Magazines to print 20 of its 21 titles, including Cosmopolitan, Elle, Esquire and Good Housekeeping. It also won a contract to print additional titles for Time Inc.

So Quad Graphics already had a contract in place that would have required an expansion anyway, before they received one tax break. And if you do the math, the WEDC package translates to tax credits of $31,400 a job- well past whatever profit would be gained from hiring another employee. In addition, WEDC allows Quad Graphics 5 years to add the jobs, and I don't see any wage requirements listed in the jobs that need to be added in order to grab these tax credits.

Now add in these details, which are conveniently buried in the bottom of the Journal-Sentinel story.

We Energies has asked state regulators for a special economic development rider that would help lower energy costs for Quad as it expands in the state. In a filing last month, the utility asked the Public Service Commission to approve a rider that would allow Quad to pay market prices in the wholesale power market for the additional energy its uses as part of its planned expansion.

Quad, which has struggled as magazines' circulation has declined, reported a net loss of $80.3 million on $2.2 billion in revenue for the six-month period ended June 30. The company posted net income of $18.6 million on revenue of $4.9 billion in 2014.

So we're giving away millions of taxpayer dollars for a company with billions in revenue, and that is expanding without the need for those tax credits. In a state where we just had to cut $250 million from the UW System, having public schools and prisons suffering from staff shortages, and a budget that has $1.1 billion in unspecified cuts built into it that have yet to be realized.

WEDC was part of another "future jobs announcement" this week regarding a new warehouse for Dollar General in Janesville, which features another $5.5 million in potential WEDC write-offs, along with local tax breaks and land gifts from the Janesville area. And the timing of these announcements are very interesting, because last Wednesday, WEDC was the subject of a legislative hearing related to another blistering audit by the Legislative Audit Bureau. And take a look at what came out in that hearing, where both Republicans and (especially) Democrats were angered by WEDC's continued inability to follow state laws on tracking loans, grants and job-making progress, combined with the loss of taxpayer dollars from previously failed projects and questionable loans.

Then look what also dropped on Friday regarding WEDC- they're continuing to refuse to take up action in light of several WEDC recipients receiving tax breaks, and then outsourcing Wisconsin jobs.

The two Democratic lawmakers on the WEDC board asked to discuss outsourcing and background checks at a board meeting in July. But agency officials said they couldn't address the matter then because it wasn't on the board's agenda.

The Democrats -- Sen. Julie Lassa of Stevens Point and Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca of Kenosha -- then asked that the matter be put on the agenda for the Sept. 24 meeting. In a letter Friday, WEDC's secretary, Reed Hall, declined to do that because the board wouldn't have time.

He said the Sept. 24 meeting is only slated to last two hours and the board is already dealing with substantive issues. Instead, he wrote that outsourcing and background checks should be taken up in October.

"I know you agree that we should implement policies that will have a positive impact on the state’s economic growth," Hall wrote. "To do so requires a holistic approach instead a piecemeal one. The October Board meeting will provide an opportunity to take that approach."

Oh, and have I mentioned that Reed Hall is quitting as WEDC CEO at the end of this month, and didn't appear at last week's Audit hearing? And that he will be replaced by mega-WisGOP donor Mark Hogan, the former head of M&I bank? Noooo, nothing sketchy about that at all!

Let's see if these projects ever get off the ground. I'll remind you that Eaton Corp announced plans for a sizable expansion with WEDC tax credits in Spring 2014 (just as Scott Walker's re-election campaign was ramping up) only to outsource large amounts of Wisconsin jobs twice in the last 18 months. Funny how these things never seem to work itself out the way the initial headlines claim, isn't it?

With that in mind, don't you think these major jobs announcement and WEDC giveaways might be a PR attempt to distract from the reality that this organization has been nothing more than a corrupt slush fund for Scott Walker and the Wisconsin GOP since they formed WEDC in 2011, do ya? And they just happen to come out before this week's release of the Quarterly Census on Employment and Wages for the March 2014-March 2015 timetable, a report that will likely show Wisconsin continues to languish in the bottom half of job growth in the U.S., and likely staying at or near the bottom of our Midwestern peers since Walker and WisGOP took power in 2011.

With the continued exoduses at the executive levels along with the hiding of information from the Dem members of the WEDC Board, it feels like something is very wrong. And the desperation of throwing out as many tax credits as possible to connected cronies Wisconsin corporations leads me to think more shoes are sure to drop when it comes to WEDC, and possibly soon.

WisGOP tries to grandfather another way to screw public schools

Here comes yet another bill that finds a way to throw more taxpayer-funded vouchers to Wisconsin students attending private schools. Assembly Bill 332 and its Senate companion SB 250 are sponsored by suburban Milwaukee legislators Rep. Joe Sanfelippo and Sen. Duey Stroebel - two of the biggest self-absorbed nuts in a Legislature filled with them.

As the Legislative Reference Bureau’s analysis of the bill points out, this would essentially allow for students who attended voucher schools in the previous year to be “grandfathered” in, and not face the prospect of not getting a voucher for attending the same private school in the next year if the child and his/her family want the kid to continue to attend that school. And the bill would be retroactive to this school year.

Under current law, the limit on the total number of pupils residing in a school district who may participate in the statewide parental choice program (pupil participation limit) in the 2015−16 and 2016−17 school years is 1 percent of the school district’s membership in the previous school year. Beginning with the 2017−18 school year, the pupil participation limit increases one percentage point each school year until the limit reaches 10 percent in the 2025−26 school year, after which there is no pupil participation limit in the statewide parental choice program.

This bill creates an exception to the pupil participation limit. The exception allows a pupil who attended a private school under the statewide parental choice program in the previous year to attend a private school under the statewide parental choice program if the pupil’s application to attend a private school under the statewide parental choice program is not accepted because the pupil’s resident school district has exceeded its pupil participation limit.

On its face, it seems like the suburb boys might merely be looking out for a constituent that might have attended a certain school last year, but couldn’t get one of the lottery spots this year for a voucher, and is in danger of having to leave the school. But the catch is that it adds to the amount of voucher students that can be in the program, leading to voucher enrollments and costs that are beyond the limitations that were put into the state budget that passed 2 months ago.And that's the giveaway that this is yet another ALEC-backed attempt to mess with K-12 education in Wisconsin.

Both the Assembly and Senate “grandfather clause voucher” bills were heard this week. Those hearings happened before the Department of Public Instruction gave its fiscal analysis on the bill, which gave an idea on how much those extra costs might be. What the DPI says is that any grandfathered students under this bill would be considered “continuing” voucher students, and therefore would be subject to old voucher rules that existed prior to the 2015-17 budget.

“Continuing” pupils in the statewide choice program will continue to be directly funded from the GPR sum sufficient appropriation; because there will be no offsetting aid reduction to school districts general aid payments for “continuing” choice pupils, the number of pupils participating in the statewide choice program as “continuing” pupils has a direct impact on the state’s general fund.

The impact on the state’s general fund due to this bill would be equal to the number of “continuing” pupils who would become eligible to continue participating in the statewide choice program, multiplied by the per pupil choice (voucher) payment amount for the pupil’s respective grade level. For the 2015-16 school year, the per pupil choice (voucher) payments are: $7,214 for pupils enrolled in grades K through 8; and $7,860 for pupils enrolled in grades 9 through 12.

In other words, state taxpayers will have to pay the full cost of each student grandfathered in under this law. This is in contrast to students that are new to the voucher program with the expansion that starts with this school year and gets larger over each of the next 10 years. Those voucher payments in the expansion program are directly offset by a reduction in state aid that is levied against the public schools that “lose” the students.

If this new "grandfather clause" affects only a handful of students, then it would not be a big deal to the overall K-12 budget, but if it’s a sizable amount of students, then it can be a significant extra expense. DPI goes on to note that if the bill did not pass, and the student transferred to public school, then state aid funds for all public schools would be redistributed appropriately (the school district receiving the student would get a little more, and all other districts may get a little less).

But what you can see where this bill becomes another method to expand the availability and spending on vouchers statewide, as more students can fall under the category of “continuing” voucher student each year. Therefore more students might be subject to this grandfather clause if a school or district’s allotment of voucher students is filled up, and it ends up costing taxpayers a lot of money over time, as well as expanding the voucher program well above the 1% a year limit that is under current law.

It’s also telling that the two organizations that have lobbied in favor of the bill are voucher front group School Choice Wisconsin, and the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. They know this is another way to hurt Wisconsin’s public schools and funnel more taxpayer dollars to their organizations and the causes they support (which in turn, they funnel to the politicians they support). It is a chickenshit, backdoor way to try to grab even more money and power through children’s education, as this "grandfather clause" possibility was never discussed in the state budget, and it would have likely spurred even more outrage than Scott Walker’s and WisGOP’s already-awful K-12 budget did throughout Wisconsin.

This thing is supposed to be voted on by the Assembly Committee on Education next Thursday, would likely attempt to be jammed through the Senate Committee soon after, then it would head to the floor of the full Legislature. And they’re trying to do it without the public’s notice, which is exactly why I’m writing about it here.

Portage prison guards being abused in post-Act 10 world

Sometimes in a small-town newspaper comes a big-time story. We saw this today in an in-depth and shocking article by Jonathan Stefonek in the Portage Daily Register, where the city's two representatives in the State Legislature (State Sen. Jon Erpenbach and State Rep. Dave Considine) sat down with workers at the Columbia Correctional Institute, and found out in awful detail that the damage from Gov. Scott Walker's busting of public employee unions continues to fester.

Everyone seemed to have a story of being stopped at the door on their way out at the end of an eight-hour shift, only to be told that they needed to turn around to work another eight hours.

“I had some suspicions. I got stopped at a church I was singing at two weeks ago,” said Considine. “A couple in Baraboo saves a couch for a guy. They said he would get done at midnight and [CCI management] will tell him when he gets done at midnight that he has to be back at 8 o’clock in the morning.”

Among the attendees were would-be and formerly active community members who didn’t have the time for anything outside work. There’s no telling when a person might “get ordered,” they said, which eliminates the possibility of making regular appointments with any kind of club or organization. It makes single parenting impossible without having a babysitter on call 24 hours a day. For a single person, there isn’t room to responsibly own a dog or a cat.

CCI has instituted a number of stop-gap policies to keep the facility operational. One of which has been to temporarily bring in officers from elsewhere in the area, such as Waupun or Fox Lake. This is a temporary solution, involving paying travel costs, lodging and meals for visiting workers. Despite the benefits, some of these officers quickly turned around and headed home after witnessing conditions at the prison. One officer didn’t even put in a week before telling the other officers that his safety wasn’t worth it and he was getting out.

And the reason these officers can "get ordered" with no notice for a second 8-hour shift in a day is because Gov. Walker's Act 10 took away collective bargaining rights for these correctional officers. This essentially made the guards "at-will" employees without a union that would demand procedures be put in place regarding such stopgap measures. In fact, the officers said that staffing is so short at CCI that civilian staff is sometimes called in to help oversee inmates when they are in common areas such for daily events such as eating. Stefonek's article notes that over 1/4 of the 233 correctional officer positions at CCI are unfilled, and with starting pay at only $15.20 an hour, they can't find anyone that would take on this dangerous work. So instead, taxpayers have to shell out for increasing amounts of overtime paid to the few guards that are able to stay, and the extra travel costs that are taken on to move officers from the other prisons into Portage to cover some of those shifts.

Wisconsin already has to increase spending by $29.4 million in the current 2015-17 budget to handle the increasing prison populations and contract for extra beds at previously-shuttered state facilities, and overtime pay was also increased by $81 million compared to the previous budget. Yes, the overall Corrections budget was down by $145.9 million compared to the previous budget, but almost all of that is due to a transfer of community-based juvenile services to the Department of Children and Families, and even with $40 million in savings from lower debt and energy costs, the overall amount to pay for actual housing and supervision of inmates has gone up. This is even taking into account Walker's provision to stop staffing the prisons' guard towers overnight (all figures come from the summary of the Corrections budget by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau).

Near the end of the Portage Daily Register story, there is this gripping passage from Stefonek that puts into focus how 4 years of Act 10's thumbscrews have worn down the correctional officers' morale, and hurt the level of service of CCI.

Erpenbach asked the group if there was one thing that could be changed, what they would do. This quickly got into the details of the math of scheduling --whether 12-hour days might be better — and different orientation. But the heart of the situation was a need for more staff, which by all assessments voiced at the meeting would be a lost cause without a change in the administration.

And I'm just scratching the surface of this excellent article. Keep it in mind when you hear Scott Walker promising to "wreak havoc" on Washington like he did in Wisconsin, Realize just what "havoc" has resulted at CCI after taking away the rights of public employees, and realize that the damage doesn't just happen with the one-time "bomb" of Act 10, but it lingers and multiplies over time.

$1 county land sale brings Bucks arena closer to reality

Today featured another step toward the completion of the Bucks arena project, as Milwaukee County will sell a large parcel of land in the Park East corridor to a group headed by the Bucks’ current owners, and will be used for added development around the new arena.

The land sale proposed this summer would allow the Bucks ownership group to buy the land north of their proposed arena site for $1. The Bucks owners plan a multi-year buildout of that property valued at $400 million, with new housing, offices, parking, a grocery store and a team practice facility.

The property stretches between North Old World Third Street and The Brewery, north of Juneau Avenue. The roughly 10-year buildout would bring 1.5 million square feet of new building space. That includes 496 apartments, 130,000 square feet of offices and 96,000 square feet of retail space.

The pending announcement shows Abele’s office reached terms with county comptroller Scott Manske. Due to a recent law change in the state budget, only Abele and Manske need to sign off the deal for it to proceed. As of last month, Manske said he was seeking minor changes to the proposed sale agreements.

The land has been appraised at $8.8 million, but Abele argued that the $1 sale price is acceptable since the Bucks group will handle the cleanup and preparation of the site, which would costs millions of dollars. That didn’t soothe the feelings of several Milwaukee County Board members, including Supervisor Steve Taylor. Taylor said he was happy the Bucks were likely to stay, but wasn't a fan of the unilateral nature of the negotiations.

“This is not about Milwaukee County selling the Park East for $1, this is about Chris Abele selling the Park East for $1,” said Taylor, Chairman of the Economic and Community Development Committee. “The County Executive and his administration managed to freeze the Board out of a vote on this proposal, which means a thorough public discussion did not take place, except through a public hearing held by the Board.

“There are certainly questions about transparency surrounding this sale on the County Executive’s part. The County Executive agreed to this sale without holding a public hearing or without a public vetting.”

Taylor called the sale a “momentous development,” but he said he hoped the taxpayers would see a return on the sale.

“As chairman of the Economic and Community Development Committee, naturally I want to see economic enhancements to the County,” Taylor said. “But we won’t know for almost a decade whether this particular sale was the right thing to do. I’m happy the Bucks will stay, but I want the best deal for taxpayers and I don’t know whether this is it. A public vetting of the proposal would have helped the public to know whether this was a good deal.”

In addition to Taylor’s concerns, County Board Chair Theodore Lipscomb and Supervisor Michael Mayo also expressed dismay over County Executive Abele’s ability to make this deal in private without any form of oversight.

This largely wraps up the County’s end of the Bucks arena agreement, as they have already had their other "contribution" of a $4 million cut in state shared revenues assessed for the annual budget that will be debated in the next 2 months. Now what remains is the City of Milwaukee gifting land, a Tax-Incremental District, and building a parking garage for the arena, and that proposal will be going in front of the City’s Zoning, Neighborhoods and Development Committee next week.

So it appears this thing is still on track to breaking ground before the snow flies this winter. But that final step at the City level may still be worth keeping an eye on, to see if the City puts on further demands and/or conditions to the project. After all, while the City is the one entity that would benefit the most from increased property values around the arena (particularly since it takes the burden off of residential and other current taxpayers), the City is also is taking on the most fiscal risk due to the TIF financing and property tax exemptions to go along with the one-time expenses it has to take on as part of the new arena project. So stay tuned.

Open records debacle takes another step- but who gave the orders?

What, you thought these WisGOP crooks would actually learn a lesson from that open records debacle over the 4th of July weekend, did you? What a silly thought. ,

Less than three weeks after being forced to retreat from scaling back Wisconsin's open records law, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos put his aides back to work on elements of the controversial proposal, new documents show.

Records released Tuesday showed that an aide to Vos requested a new legislative draft on July 23, seeking a bill to give the Legislature and individual lawmakers a different status on open records from other government bodies and officials in Wisconsin. The documents were made public by the liberal Center on Media and Democracy in Madison, which acquired them under the open records law....

Under the proposal, lawmakers would make their own emails, memos and other documents subject to legislative rules, rather than the open records law. As such, they could rewrite their rules of proceeding to restrict which of their records would be publicly available.

That would allow either house to set its own rules limiting access to records without having to get the approval of the other house or the governor, as now required.

These people clearly have something major to hide, and are so full of themselves and disrespectful of the public that they think they can get away with this.

The thanks for exposing this scheme goes out to the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy, who filed the open records requests and connected the dots between the more recent moves by Robbin' Vos and the notorious 999 measure that was attempted to be jammed in the state budget bill (and immediately withdrawn after major outrage across the political spectrum during the holiday weekend).

As the CMD mentions, these moves were not something that Speaker Vos came up with on the spur of the moment, but were instead calculated maneuvers done in concert with Gov Scott Walker's office.

In addition, emails released by Speaker Vos’s office reveal that the strategy of hiding the changes and then springing them on the public at the last minute was carefully worked out at least six weeks in advance of introduction. On May 26, Vos’ staff says the plan to gut the open records law will be introduced on “the last day [of the budget process] under a [Rep. John] Nygren motion.”

Newly-obtained emails also provide further evidence of the Walker administration’s role in adding a broad “deliberative materials” exemption to the law. Shortly after a June 3 meeting with the Governor’s office, a Vos staffer sends an email to LRB and Legislative Counsel drafting attorneys: “Sorry for the rollercoaster ride, but I think all of the privilege language (ie – the “big” draft) is back on the table.”

Two weeks later, the drafting request for a “deliberative process exception”—which is also the subject of a lawsuit CMD has filed against the governor—was submitted via an email with the subject line “Governor's request.” A week later, an LRB drafting attorney suggests that the “deliberative materials” exception be removed from the proposal, unless it was “specifically asked for by the governor” – and the provision was left in.

The new emails also contain two drafts of misleading talking points, here and here, that were used to spin the public on the reasons for the changes to the law. On June 14, a Vos staffer asks the LRB to fact-check a one-page set of talking points arguing for closing LRB drafting files since these “are mostly used for ‘gotcha’ games between political foes,” but he frets, “there is a decent chance that the press will get a hold of this.” Then, after the proposal to gut the public records law provoked public outrage, Vos’ office created a second set of talking points on July 3 that are rife with factual inaccuracies and deceptive assertions.

The CMD also has released an impressive timetable that shows not only how the drafting of the open records changes went about, but also ties it back to CMD's lawsuit from February which exposed Gov Walker's office as being the ones who attempted to strike "the search for truth" and the Wisconsin Idea from the University of Wisconsin's missions statement in Walker's budget.

CMD goes onto note that Gov Walker's office started to deny open records requests in early May, and gave a now-familiar set of excuses for doing so.

The main two arguments are that 1) the public interest in exposing the records is not outweighed by the purported public interest in protecting the “deliberative process” involved in developing the budget; 2)the records requested do not constitute “records” as per the statutory definition, which excludes drafts and preliminary documents....

Nearly identical denials were given to several other organizations and news outlets, including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Wisconsin State Journal

And of course, the infamous 999 motion mentioned "deliberative process" as the main protection that could be used to deny open records claims. Funny how these guys just happened to be on the same page with this, isn't it?

Not a coincidence at all, as the CMD notes an email on June 3 where one Vos aide sends an email message to another with the subject of "governor's meeting," and she asks the other aide "Do you want to come? We will likely talk about the open records thing today." The spin in most regular media is that this is a Robbin' Vos and Wisconsin Legislature production, but it's pretty clear from the CMD's timetable that the Governor's Office had significant input, and there's a legitimate question as to whether the initial orders to try to jam this into the budget were top-down from Walker's office.

That said, it's certainly possible that this was bottom-up from an increasingly Fascist Legislature that continually has attempted to remove any kind of checks on its power that could result from independent agencies and independent research, and one that has consistently tried to limit the public's right to know who is influencing their elected officials. Maybe these arrogant bastards think they are immune due to their gerrymandered districts and lazy constituents, and that's why they think they can continually push their luck after the public has constantly told them NO.

But I'm starting to think they've already gone a step too far, and with 8 months left in the Legislative session, there are likely more power-grabs and foolishness still to come. Perhaps this pressing of their luck will lead to a much steeper electoral price to pay than the Wisconsin GOP is gambling on in 2016.

God knows these scumbags deserve to.

The COWS come back with a look at low-wage Wisconsin

Late Friday afternoon, the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) released their annual State of Working Wisconsin report. It’s a relatively easy-to-read document, 17 pages with lots of pictures to illustrate. Unfortunately, my computer illiteracy on PDF documents is keeping me from figuring out how to send over those pictures, but I still want to focus in on a couple of stats the COWS report gives.

The first deals with the large amount of Wisconsinites that work in low-wage jobs that don’t even lift them out of poverty. COWS defines a "poverty-wage job" as a point where working 40 hours a week still isn’t enough to lift a 2-parent family of 4 out of poverty, and that’s about $11.55 an hour.

With that in mind, take a look at these stats COWS gives on poverty-wage jobs in Wisconsin.

730,000 Wisconsin workers — 1 in 4 — worked in poverty-wage jobs in 2014.

•The median age of a poverty-wage worker in Wisconsin is 29 years old.

•More than three-fourths of Wisconsin’s poverty wage workers are white. But African American and Hispanic workers are much more likely to hold poverty wage jobs. While one-quarter of white workers earn poverty wages, 36 percent of black, and 48 percent of Hispanic workers do.

•Three times as many poverty-wage workers have no health insurance as compared to other workers – 22 percent of poverty-wage workers had no health insurance in 2013; only 7 percent of workers with jobs paying above that line have no insurance.

•Hours can be as big a problem as wages. Poverty-wage work is often formally or functionally part-time. Just-in-time scheduling, where an employer gives little-to-no advance warning of scheduled work times, is an increasing norm. In many service sector jobs, bad weather, bad traffic, or just too few customers can send workers home mid-shift.

Also worth noting in the COWS report is that 79% of people in non-poverty wage jobs get health insurance through their jobs, but only 49% do with people in poverty-wage jobs, which means in addition to being three times as likely to not have health insurance at all, poverty-wage workers are more likely to rely on government and the individual insurance market to get insured.

In addition, the COWS report looks at the major increase of children in poverty in Wisconsin, with the rate of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch increasing from 24% in 2001, to 43% in 2014. But COWS adds that state policy has not matched those increasing needs, and in fact, seems to be going in the other direction.

In the face of increasing needs in our classrooms, however, our public schools are continually facing cutbacks in resources. That too is making the provision of a strong education for all children harder to supply. Schools and teachers are dealing with greater need in their classrooms, even as the resources supporting public education are declining. So these maps say something not only about our changing economy, and growing needs of our children, but also about our public will.

Wisconsin faces a choice today about what sort of future we want for our state. It is about our children and our schools, narrowly. But more broadly, that choice is about whether we will continue to become more private and divided. Or whether we will once again embrace common purpose in our communities and commit to and invest in that collective future. We can move on a different trajectory. But not without more conscious attention to both the economy and the long-term investment in our infrastructure and schools that can build a foundation for changing what is possible.

The Wisconsin Budget Project has an excellent summary of this section, and other parts of The State of Working Wisconsin report. This includes the shocking statistic indicating Wisconsin has the highest level of African-American unemployment in the country (19.9%). Perhaps some national folks should snoop around and ask presidential candidate Scott Walker why that is.

In fact, a lot of these stats in the COWS report should make any sort of reality-based conservative look at the results (if such a person exists), and ask him/herself how they can seriously say that “it’s working” for most Wisconsinites in the Age of Fitzwalkerstan.

WisGOP trying to bankrupt local gov't through pension "reform"

On this Labor Day, there is a looming bill which offers more proof that Scott Walker's union-busting Act 10 was merely one piece of a much larger agenda. There bill is intended to further hamper the benefits and compensation of public employees, and to force local governments into a choice between not having benefits for their employees and decimating public services in order to fairly compensate such employees.

The proposed legislation is Assembly Bill 269, and it is scheduled to be heard by the Assembly's Urban and Local Affairs Committee tomorrow morning. The state's Legislative Reference Bureau explains the bill as follows:

Currently, cities, villages, towns, counties, school districts, and technical college districts (local governments) provide health care benefits for their employees. Some also provide postretirement health care benefits for their employees.

This bill prohibits a local government from providing health care benefits to any employee hired on or after January 1, 2016, for use upon the employee’s retirement, including compensated absences but excluding the implicit rate subsidy, unless the cost of the benefit is fully funded in a segregated account, based on an actuarial study conducted at least once every four years or other method that complies with generally accepted accounting principles. The bill also provides that, if a local government dissolves a segregated account established for the purpose of providing such health care benefits, the local government must provide for the equitable distribution of the proceeds among the beneficiaries.

And if this type of legislation sounds familiar, it should, because this is cut from the same cloth as the evil piece of legislation passed by an outgoing Republican Congress which mandated pre-funded retirement benefits for the U.S. Postal Service. The Economic Policy Institute described the requirements of the law as follows in 2010.

The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), enacted in 2006, required the USPS to pay an average of $55.8 billion into the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefit Fund over a 10-year period. This requirement, a 75-year obligation, has produced the worst financial crisis in the agency’s history and is the primary cause of the Postal Service’s short-term deficit. Furthermore, the USPS is the only government agency required to pre-fund retiree health benefits, let alone at an accelerated rate.

This requirement of having 75 years of post-retirement benefits up front has made the Postal Service have to put away increasing sums of money to follow this burdensome law, which then creates larger deficits for the Postal Service. In turn, these deficits can encourage more privatization of one of our country's original uses for government, and it lowers the ability of the Postal Service to give competitive salaries and benefits for its workers, as more and more funds are tied up into these post-retirement health benefits.

This Wisconsin bill goes along with model legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose ultimate goal is to stop public employees from getting pensions, and to have them put their future fates in with the stock market. Take a look at the first paragraph of this "fill-in-the-blank" legislation from ALEC, which your local GOP state legislator can slip in, and bring to your neck of the wods.

The Legislature finds that the defined-benefit model of retirement benefits for state and municipal employees is not fiscally sustainable. It is the intent of the Legislature, therefore, to direct the [state retirement board] to create and maintain a defined-contribution program in which all state and municipal employees hired on or after [date], 2011 will automatically enroll after [X] months of employment to become eligible to accrue retirement benefits.

Put the two together, and you can see immediately where this endgame is with Wisconsin AB 269. Many local governments would likely have to pay more to keep these post-retirement health care benefits for current and future employees, which constrains the ability of the local government to continue their current range and level of services, making it more likely some of those services will have to be cut and/or sold off to private interests (a common ALEC goal).

In addition, it sets up a meme of "greedy teachers/ public employees and their benefits" to be the scapegoat of these inevitable budget cuts in local government. This is intended to take the heat off of a WisGOP-run state government which has cut shared aids to schools and other local governments, and placed fiscal handcuffs such as overfunding retirement benefits and limiting the ability of those local governments to raise taxes to continue to pay for both benefits and services.

Because there isn't a union negotiating to maintain these benefits and services for public employees, and because unions aren't as able to rally support and send information to the public to cut off this ALEC bill (something Sen. Majority Scott Fitzgerald infamously said was a goal of Act 10 during the 2011 protests), AB 269 stands a better chance of slipping through the public's notice. Which is why I'm writing about it on this Labor Day, because you can bet that in the final year of a GOP majority that is increasingly falling out of favor in Wisconsin, you can bet these ALEC water-carriers will try to jam through more of these types of "create a crisis" types of bills in coming months.