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Announcer:
The following program is a PBS Wisconsin original production. You’re watching “Here & Now” 2024 election coverage.

Woman:
So wouldn’t it right there say our elections are not secure?

Kathy Bernier:
No. That has —

Frederica Freyberg:
Election deniers continue to press officials about what happened in 2020, and K-12 school budgets widen as funding significantly lags inflation. I’m Frederica Freyberg. Tonight on “Here and Now,” Governor Tony Evers joins us as we look back at the legislative session. Zac Schultz reports on school funding shortfalls and how the price of a bag of groceries could sway the presidential election. It’s “Here & Now” for March 29.

Announcer:
Funding for “Here & Now” is provided by the Focus Fund for Journalism and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:
Wisconsin voters go to the polls next Tuesday, April 2nd. This spring election includes a presidential preference vote, which may give a sense of which way our pivotal battleground state could tip. Meanwhile, in policy and politics at the state level, Governor Tony Evers with what he signed into law and what he vetoed and why. He joins us now. Governor, thanks very much for doing so.

Tony Evers:
Thanks, Frederica. How are you today?

Frederica Freyberg:
I’m well, thank you. So you have taken action on a raft of legislative bills in the past several days. What, for you, are the most important bills that you’ve signed into law this session?

Tony Evers:
It’s actually been a pretty good bipartisan session. I know the — when people hear it from the outside, we’re fighting all the time, but the fact of the matter is we have fair maps. That was a bipartisan win. Shared revenue was very, very important. Brewer stadium, affordable housing, just to name a few, and all of them were bipartisan and very meaningful and important bills, so I was really, really happy about that. We provide some more money for our schools. Clearly, we had decades worth of kind of starving our schools, so it wasn’t enough, but it certainly was an important issue and lots of resources for mental health for kids. That’s really critical.

Frederica Freyberg:
You spoke to the bipartisan nature of these bills, now signed into law, but do you look forward to a changing political landscape because of new maps should it lead to even less feuding and more compromise?

Tony Evers:
It should, and that’s critically important. Fair maps does not mean democratically gerrymandered maps. It just means the rationale here is that Wisconsin is a purple state and races should be close and hard-fought and give people the chance to interact with candidates from both parties. And so I just think it’s best for democracy, and so I’m really happy about that. I think there will be more Democrats in the Legislature than before, but it’s going to be close. And so I do think that bipartisanship will be amplified by that, absolutely.

Frederica Freyberg:
Which do you believe were your most important vetoes?

Tony Evers:
Well, I would say the important vetoes, there’s several, but the one I’m concerned about is all the ones that just never made it to me that weren’t — we didn’t have a chance to veto. Essentially the postpartum piece, where we could give — could have gave women a full year instead of 60 days, making sure that our people at the polls are doing — you know, can open envelopes the day before so that they’re not so scurrying around on Election Day. There’s a whole number of things that frankly didn’t happen, and the one thing that I’ll continue to advocate for that, frankly, is critical, is childcare. Childcare operations in the state are just barely hanging in there and if we want to have a strong economy, we need a strong industry of childcare. So those are things I didn’t veto; we just never got there.

Frederica Freyberg:
So what are some lingering issues? The 15 million in healthcare kind of help for the Chippewa Valley and PFAS come to mind.

Tony Evers:
Yeah. I have yet to understand why we can’t release that money for folks in the northwest Wisconsin. I heard directly from the folks up there that they wanted — the legislation itself just said here’s $15 million for emergency room work. That’s important, but we need to deliver babies up there. We have mental health issues in northwest Wisconsin. So it was important that I did a partial veto on that and made it more reasonable for the people up there to kind of get through until they have something permanent. But the Joint Finance Committee just cannot see fit to send them the money. It’s just very, very disappointing.

Frederica Freyberg:
On schools, you spoke to school funding earlier, but voters will be asked on their ballots on Tuesday’s election whether to approve some $1 billion in spending by way of referenda to supplement funding in their schools. What if voters feel they cannot vote ‘yes’ on those?

Tony Evers:
Well, certainly, you know, it’s difficult. As I said before, we did a pretty good job of having a head start on the issue of funding, but funding is different in every different — you know, it’s a very complex situation in some schools because they have revenue at home in their own district, they get less state aid. So it’s a complicated thing. Not everybody is in that position, but we have 10 years or more of essentially starving our schools and what we were able to do was — that finally got through was about 50% of what the original budget was, and so I’m not surprised that there’s more schools going through referendum, they need it. I hope that people will be supportive, but I also understand that any time we have a referendum, you’re going to be increasing the tax — the local taxes. But people at the local level make those decisions, but in the past, I’m assuming it’s the same case here, is there will be plenty of winners and a handful of losers and unfortunately those losers will likely have to make some really difficult decisions, especially as it relates to the number of teachers they have.

Frederica Freyberg:
What about the constitutional amendments that seek to prohibit outside grants in election administration or outside experts stemming from 2020 concerns? Why did you veto those when they were legislative bills?

Tony Evers:
Because they are unnecessary and, frankly, were going to make it difficult to vote. It’s a core thing for me and I think most Wisconsinites. We need to encourage people to vote instead of discouraging them, and so I felt both of those were headed in the wrong direction and so I vetoed them. Now, I find it amazing that, because they can’t override my veto, somehow the Legislature can put it on the ballot and make it part of the constitution. These things aren’t constitutional issues, but so I will be voting against those because I vetoed them to begin with. I thought both of them would make it more difficult for people to vote and we should be making it — making it a friendly opportunity. We want people to vote. We want more people to vote. Simple as that. And both of these are not headed in that direction.

Frederica Freyberg:
All right. We leave it there. Governor Tony Evers, thank you very much.

Tony Evers:
Thanks, Frederica. Have a good day.

Frederica Freyberg:
As we mentioned, next Tuesday, many voters across the state will decide on the future of their local school district. 62 districts are asking voters to approve an operating referendum which allows districts to raise their tax levy in order to fund day-to-day operations. The biggest request comes from Milwaukee Public Schools, where they’re asking voters to approve $252 million over four years, but the needs vary according to size. With the Juda School District seeking just $500,000 a year. What’s consistent is that, over the past few years, the number of districts going to referendum has increased and there’s no sign of the trend slowing down. “Here and Now” senior political reporter Zac Schultz explains why so many districts are facing this fiscal cliff.

Zac Schultz:
Inside Fort Atkinson schools, things look normal. Kids are reading, learning math, playing instruments. But things could look dramatically different next fall if the voters don’t approve the operating referendum on the ballot April 2nd.

Rob Abbott:
This isn’t a referendum that we can live without.

Zac Schultz:
Rob Abbott is the Fort Atkinson district administrator and this is his third straight year trying to pass a referendum.

Rob Abbott:
Two years ago was the first time that the community rejected the operational referendum. And in that effort, we made it clear that the needs weren’t going to change and that we would need to come back again, which we did last April.

Zac Schultz:
Fort Atkinson has a long record of supporting operating referenda for schools.

Rob Abbott:
So last spring, we failed the operational referendum somewhat significantly and it was really perhaps the first time that we really gave pause to things have really changed.

Zac Schultz:
The district cut $3.3 million from their budget, including 45 staff positions. Now they’re asking for $6.5 million a year for the next three years to avoid more cuts. Abbott says just about every district going to referendum is in the same situation.

Rob Abbott:
This spring or certainly with the next November election cycle, that districts who aren’t successful are going to be looking at significant reductions.

Zac Schultz:
But how did it get to this point? The short-term answer brings us back to the spring of 2021, when the state had received $1.5 billion in federal COVID relief aid earmarked for schools. Those COVID funds were supposed to be used to help kids catch up from pandemic learning loss and deal with increased mental health issues. But Republicans in control of the state Legislature passed a state budget with a zero-dollar increase in per pupil aid for students for the next two years, counting federal dollars as state funding.

Robin Vos:
This budget, more than any other one that we have seen in my lifetime, gives huge increases to public schools. Huge. More than they will probably even be able to effectively spend.

Zac Schultz:
Right before the vote, Heather DuBois Bourenane of the Wisconsin Public Education Network made this prediction.

Heather DuBois Bourenane:
The budget that has been put forward to our state Legislature that they will vote on one week from today in the Assembly is a promise to make existing gaps wider and to make existing disparities worse. I couldn’t have been more right about that.

Zac Schultz:
Today, she says the state has underfunded schools for 15 years, drawing a straight line from the state budget to local referenda.

Heather DuBois Bourenane:
Oh, that’s an ‘a’ to ‘b’ line. That’s as straight as a line can get. The reason that districts are forced to go to operating referenda right now is because they are enduring these decade-long cuts.

Zac Schultz:
Since the start of April 2021, 152 school districts in Wisconsin have gone to the voters asking them to pass an operating referendum. Some of them multiple times. 123 districts, shown here in green, have passed an operating referendum. 29 districts in red were turned down by their voters, some of them multiple times. 62 districts have operating referenda on the ballot on April 2nd. One of those is the Richland School District.

Steve Board:
It doesn’t surprise me at all that many, many school districts are going to have to go to referendum just to maintain the services that they’ve been providing for our students.

Zac Schultz:
Steve Board is the district administrator. He says Richland used some of their federal COVID dollars for their intended purpose. They hired teachers to help with learning loss. Now they need the community to approve an operational referendum if they want to keep them.

Steve Board:
We tried to invest back into our students, and in doing so, we were rolling the dice a little bit because we didn’t know if those positions would continue, and obviously they wouldn’t without the support of a referendum.

Zac Schultz:
Richland is also asking for a capital referendum to update things like an old roof and broken bathrooms.

Steve Board:
Our community feels that our, quote, unquote, new high school, which is built in 1996, is new, but it’s pushing 30 years old.

Zac Schultz:
So how did we get to this point? While the short-term points to recent state budgets, the long-term answer is older than the Richland High School. The school levy limits were imposed by the state in the early ’90s to control property taxes. Each budget the state would increase the levy by the amount of inflation, but in the wake of the 2009 great recession and continuing through the Scott Walker era, the levy increases were uncoupled from inflation.

Scott Johnson:
The shortfall now is over $3,000 per student. That’s a monumental change.

Zac Schultz:
Representative Scott Johnson is a Republican in the state Assembly. Fort Atkinson is in his district and he used to sit on the Fort Atkinson School Board.

Scott Johnson:
Republicans have been in charge of the biennial budgets and it’s pretty clear that most of us Republicans want to favor school choice, voucher schools, charter schools.

Zac Schultz:
Johnson says too many of his colleagues in the Legislature are unfamiliar with school funding.

Scott Johnson:
Many do not understand it. It’s a convoluted, challenging system.

Zac Schultz:
Even fewer have driven a school bus, as he still does, and been able to see the kids that are heading off to class in the morning.

Scott Johnson:
I want to give that child a good morning greeting so that they’ve heard something positive.

Zac Schultz:
Johnson says the simple truth is school districts have to pass operating referenda just to balance the budget, because state funding has not kept up.

Scott Johnson:
We’re going to balance local school budgets by referendum, and so basically, every school district is facing this cliff. Every three, four years, depending upon how long they run their sunset referenda.

Heather DuBois Bourenane:
So what happens in that situation? Local property taxpayers simply have to pay a larger share of the cost and we’re seeing that all over the state.

Zac Schultz:
In much of the state, the same voters who are deciding these referenda are the ones who elected the Republican lawmakers who underfunded the schools in the first place.

Heather DuBois Bourenane:
Pointing out the gap between what voters want, what they’re voting for at the local level, and what they’re getting from Republican leaders in Madison I think is a really important missing link here that a lot of people aren’t really connecting.

Zac Schultz:
But don’t expect the schools to point that out.

Rob Abbott:
We’ve worked hard to be as apolitical as possible, and it’s not to our benefit to align, you know, one way or the other, but certainly the dichotomy societally is not playing to our favor.

Zac Schultz:
The Richland School District could not be in a more advantageous location politically. Both their Republican Representative Tony Kurtz and Republican state Senator Howard Marklein sit on the Joint Finance Committee which writes the state budget.

Steve Board:
I also try to have conversations with Tony Kurtz and Howard Marklein in terms of this is a reality of where school districts are at so that they understand.

Zac Schultz:
Both Howard Marklein and Tony Kurtz declined to speak with us for this report.

Heather DuBois Bourenane:
The folks in the state house are a hundred percent to blame for that.

Zac Schultz:
DuBois Bourenane says beyond school districts having to constantly return to the voters, the problem comes when you look back at the map and see in which districts the referenda are failing or where they’re not even asking for more funds.

Heather DuBois Bourenane:
It’s widening the gaps across our districts, across our schools, and it’s really guaranteeing that there are some kids in this state who simply are never going to see enough resources to thrive unless we change the direction this ship is steering quickly.

Scott Johnson:
There are going to be school districts that will be doing the bare minimums across the board and then you’re going to have the high rent districts that will spend almost twice as much and theoretically, we’ll try to tell the public that those two educational opportunities are the same, and I will suggest to you that that’s misleading.

Zac Schultz:
Reporting from Fort Atkinson, I’m Zac Schultz for “Here & Now.”

Frederica Freyberg:
Facing the headwinds of the 2024 presidential elections, the non-partisan group, Keep Our Republic, teamed up with Wisconsin Elections Commission to provide an informational session to voters about how elections work. The event, held in West Bend, aspired to bring greater transparency and accountability to election process in Wisconsin as well as dispel information that continues to simmer. The first hour of the event spoke to the mechanics of how Wisconsin elections are run. Speakers included former Republican senator and current state director of Keep Our Republic, Kathy Bernier. Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe and local West Bend officials, but despite the effort to allay concerns about state election operations, in some instances, it seemed to fuel theories about the 2020 presidential election and what’s to come in November 2024.

Kathy Bernier:
Believe it or not, they did not find fraud in Green Bay.

Frederica Freyberg:
For nearly two hours, the panelists took questions from the audience with a common theme.

Man:
You didn’t challenge the fraudulent Biden-Harris electors even though you were three days before the electoral college. This was on Friday, December 11th. And the last question is how are you going to — are you going to pledge to stop that from happening this year? Yes or no, are you going to stop that?

Frederica Freyberg:
That the 2020 election remains unresolved.

Crowd member:
I thought it was purple.

Woman:
Didn’t do anything about it! Answer the question!

Kathy Bernier:
We are in 2024.

Frederica Freyberg:
But not all attendees approached the event demanding answers about 2020.

Man in dark suit:
We just don’t yell at the people who administer the elections, but we also need to make sure that we hold the people in Madison accountable when we send them there, if they’re not doing what we want them to. That’s why we have elections coming up.

Man in stripped shirt:
We came here to learn about the process. Some other people were here that were asking questions were attacking this. This is the wrong place. This is an informational seminar. It wasn’t a place to say, hey, how are we going to change these things.

Frederica Freyberg:
Keep Our Republic plans to hold three more of these events across the state.
In economic news and the presidential campaign, what is the disconnect between lowered inflation, low unemployment and higher wages and consumers who feel the pain of high costs at the checkout and then blame the current Biden administration, longing for what they believe to be the halcyon days of Trump. We try to unpack this now with chief analyst at the Center for Business and Economic Insight at UW-Stevens Point, Kevin Bahr. Professor, thanks very much for being here.

Kevin Bahr:
Thank you for having me back, Frederica.

Frederica Freyberg:
So by important measures, the economy is strong. Why aren’t average consumers feeling it, if they aren’t?

Kevin Bahr:
Huh. Complex question, but I think the big, probably, sticking point for some people in terms of not feeling the strength of the economy, the strength of the stock market, has basically been food prices. Food prices are up significantly, if you look over the past five years, they have risen about 26% in the United States and that food price, I mean, it’s tough because when food prices go up, it’s not like you can avoid buying food. It’s something that everybody needs, and particularly for lower and middle income Americans, that takes up a bigger portion of your overall budget, so it really hits lower and middle income Americans hard. That being said, it’s been global factors that have increased global food prices and that includes anything from Putin invading the Ukraine, which caused wheat prices to raise 50%, the Ukraine and Russia account for about 25% of global wheat exports, agricultural fertilizer spiked. Russia is the number one exporter of agricultural fertilizer. Then you throw in things like the avian flu, supply chain problems, and then overall inflation has been up so production costs are up and labor costs are up, so this is a global thing.

Frederica Freyberg:
So it’s not, as some would strongly suggest, ‘corporate greed’ where profits are up over 40%?

Kevin Bahr:
Well, you can argue that plays into it. I mean, that would be one of the factors. Global profits are basically at record levels. Back in 2022, they backed off a little bit, but they’re still up significantly, say, relative to 2019, so that plays into it, but then you also get into what can be done to maybe lessen industry concentration in some areas of the food industry, and that’s kind of a long-term thing. You’re not going to be solving that overnight.

Frederica Freyberg:
So I read a saying that prices rise like a rocket and fall like a feather. Is that what is happening here or have market forces kind of changed more significantly?

Kevin Bahr:
Well, it’s sort of a combination. Prices typically go up a lot easier than what they come down. If you go back and look at the history of the United States, prices in a given month overall, don’t really come down too often, but, again, with kind of the recent, kind of the recent run up in costs, production costs are up, transportation costs are up, labor costs are up. So it’s a lot harder to get prices to come down. Some products, yes. I mean there is going to be fluctuation in some products but the overall price level, it’s tough to drive down.

Frederica Freyberg:
What else is contributing to people feeling like the economy is bad for them?

Kevin Bahr:
You can look at the housing market. Housing’s been tough and a lot of the increase in, for example, housing prices went up about — the increase in housing prices in the first three years of this decade matched the increase in housing prices over the entire last decade, and that has really been driven by the drop in supply, which started to occur in 2020. So if you look at the overall listings, available housing, that has increased certainly contributed significantly to the cost of housing and housing prices. So between cost of housing and food prices, those are the big sticking points for the economy.

Frederica Freyberg:
So how much is political messaging contributing to consumers’ attitudes about their own economic well-being?

Kevin Bahr:
I think political messaging plays a big factor. Let me throw something out just so we kind of hit both sides of the aisle, if you will. The global price of oil tanked from $70 to about $25 a barrel on the first half of 2020. So oil companies cut their production, lowered their levels of inventory. You couldn’t blame Trump for the reduction in oil production. And there’s global factors at play as far as food prices. I don’t think Biden should be blamed for that. The only thing you could say contribute to that, we’ve had a very strong economy, strong demand, strong job market, a lot of people are working. If you had unemployment at 10% rather than below 4%, that would make a difference in the overall demand.

Frederica Freyberg:
We leave it there. Professor Bahr, thanks very much.

Kevin Bahr:
Thank you very much.

Frederica Freyberg:
For more on this and other issues facing Wisconsin, visit our website at PBSwisconsin.org and then click on the news tab. That’s our program for tonight. I’m Frederica Freyberg. Have a good weekend.

Announcer:
Funding for “Here & Now” is provided by the Focus Fund for Journalism and Friends of Wisconsin.