Announcer:

The following program is a PBS Wisconsin original production.

Mark Born:

Exciting announcement today on legislation that will bring historic investments and reforms to the shared revenue system here in Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:

Republicans release their shared revenue plan. The Assembly debates social safety network programs and western Wisconsin sees river cresting.

I’m Frederica Freyberg. Tonight on “Here & Now,” one of the lead architects of the GOP’s shared revenue proposal joins us and we hear from both sides of the aisle on the Assembly debate to change unemployment insurance. Plus, a bipartisan measure to lift restrictions on who can have their criminal records expunged. It’s “Here & Now” for April 28.

Announcer:

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

Frederica Freyberg:

Across the state, Republicans announce their proposal for a significant bump in shared revenue, the amount of money the state distributes to local governments which hasn’t seen increases in nearly two decades. Compounded with limits on how much local governments can raise taxes, Wisconsin communities have been strapped. One mayor recalled, “I will never forget the year that we considered shutting off every other streetlight in the city of Watertown to save $250,000.” In Milwaukee, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos gave the broad strokes of the plan as well as the city mayor.

Robin Vos:

One of the things we’ve also heard from our local partners is they need to have an ongoing revenue source that is not stagnant but grows as the economy grows. This fund actually will take the increase in sales tax over time. It’ll be run through a formula where there are different buckets and each of those buckets will grow as the sales tax and our economy continues to expand. We also focused on putting money into helping local governments change how they operate. In addition to the almost $225 million that will be invested in shared revenue increase payments, we are also creating something called the Innovation Fund. It means that there will be $300 million allowed for local governments who choose, entirely voluntary, to cooperate with each other, to share services, improve the delivery that we give to our constituents, hopefully all at a lower price.

Cavalier Johnson:

I’m pleased though that we’ve made some significant strides towards a remedy to the city’s fiscal issues. From the outset, that’s been paramount, a paramount goal of mine, and this legislation starts to diversify revenue sources for the city of Milwaukee. It starts to increase the amount of shared revenue that goes to the city of Milwaukee and other units of government across the state. It puts Milwaukee on a path to resolve its onerous pension obligations.

Frederica Freyberg:

Under the plan, 20% of the state’s sales tax will go toward increasing local government funding. According to authors of the proposal, this will mean a roughly $500 million increase statewide and every community will see an increase of at least 10%. Speaker Vos appointed member of the Joint Finance Committee Republican Representative Tony Kurtz to come up with a plan and he joins us now. Thanks very much for being here.

Tony Kurtz:

My pleasure.

Frederica Freyberg:

Describe how needed this boost to local government is.

Tony Kurtz:

Well, the original shared revenue formula was actually frozen back in 2004 and some communities in my beautiful district have told me they’ve actually lost money over the years obviously due to inflationary pressures, and so I think it’s long overdue. I know you’ve had comments from Speaker Vos about this has been long overdue, and I think it’s the right time, particularly with the inflationary pressures of so many small communities. Why I got involved is I have a very small rural community and they’ve suffered as well. In the original formula, formulated years ago, actually kind of hurt small communities and I know that’s one of the things we focused on with this package.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what areas were deemed priorities in the proposal where the money is restricted to for use?

Tony Kurtz:

Well, I think — I think about it, what — in those communities, what do they need? Obviously, cities, villages, they obviously have more law enforcement, EMS, those type of providers. In our counties, it’s highway departments, it’s sheriff departments, but in townships, it’s a lot more EMS-related and also roads. You hear that from all townships, especially town chairmen about the need to invest in roads. So we’ve kind of tailored this new money, the new $227 million that we’re going to put into towns, villages and cities and counties. We would like those areas targeted. Law enforcement, our fire departments, our EMS providers, you know, our dispatch, also public works and transportation, and I think, trust me, what I hear from my constituents and my local officials, they can definitely use that money in those areas. And one of the feedbacks I got today from somebody today, to be honest with you, they said I can only use this in my sheriff’s department. Well, that’s true, but now you can use this money to fund your sheriff’s department, which should, in turn, maybe free up money elsewhere that you can use throughout the county. So I think they can be creative, but our goal was to definitely support those key components of our locals.

Frederica Freyberg:

So is there any percentage of the money that is unrestricted?

Tony Kurtz:

Well, once again, everybody is going to their current new — their current amount of shared revenue, and like I mentioned before, and like you said earlier, everybody is going to see at least a 10% increase. A lot of communities, particularly some of our smaller cities, villages and townships, they’re going to see a much larger increase. And so obviously with that increase, they’ll be able to use that money for the needs that they have in their individual communities.

Frederica Freyberg:

The plan also calls — or allows the city of Milwaukee to impose a new local 2% sales tax if voters agree. But again, restricts some of how it can be spent. Like, for example, no money toward street cars. Why is that provision in there?

Tony Kurtz:

Well, let’s talk a little bit about Milwaukee. Milwaukee and the mayor, and I give the mayor a lot of credit, he has been at the table. He has been very helpful and it’s been refreshing to work with him, to be very honest with him, and also the county executive, David Crowley, who I would consider a good friend of mine. I think it’s been very refreshing to work with both of them. But the city particularly is in financial stress. I mean, we’re not talking about do they — if they would need to declare bankruptcy, it’s a matter of when they would need to declare bankruptcy. So I think our position is if you’re in such dire straits financially, which they are, maybe you just need to focus those — that money in areas that you truly need it. Now, one of the things that’s not getting told is we’re not saying you can’t fund that streetcar. You just can’t use this money. You can still get federal grants. You can still get private donors. There’s still ways to fund that, especially the city of Milwaukee, they’re very creative. Mayor cavalier, I think is very resourceful, and I think in the end, he wants to get that streetcar funded, I think he can find a way to do that.

Frederica Freyberg:

Just very quickly, this is a bipartisan effort. Did you work with Governor Tony Evers on this, whose plan that he announced in the budget mirrored the 20% of state sales tax?

Tony Kurtz:

Well, the speaker and the majority leader actually on Wednesday evening, met with the governor, and I perceived many more meetings in the future and, like I said a few minutes ago, David Crowley, the mayor, I mean, we’ve met quite a bit over the last six months on this issue, and I give them a lot of credit. My counterpart on Joint Finance Committee, Evan Goyke, a Democrat from Milwaukee, he and I have talked about this. He’s been in the room for the last month. We do want this to be a bipartisan bill. We want buy-in. I think that’s why we brought them early on into the process. And the last month, we’ve had some very good discussions. Some back and forth, and it’s been very healthy, very respectful. Personally, I’m very proud of what we’ve done. We’ve got a little bit more work to do, to be fair, but I think we’re in a good spot, and I think for my area, this is a wonderful package that will definitely help rural Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:

That’s great news. Republican Representative Tony Kurtz, thanks very much.

Tony Kurtz:

Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Frederica Freyberg:

Following the passage of a non-binding referendum on the statewide ballot in the April 4 election, where more than three quarters of voters supported a question about government benefits that read, shall able-bodied childless adults be required to look for work in order to receive taxpayer funded welfare benefits? Assembly Republicans this week passed a slate of bills, mostly aimed at unemployment benefits. The six bills include tightening unemployment insurance, work search requirements, and drug testing, as well as tightening BadgerCare eligibility. For more, we go to one of the authors, Republican Representative Jerry O’Connor. Thanks very much for joining us.

Jerry O’Connor:

Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:

So why are these provisions in these bills needed?

Jerry O’Connor:

I come from the private sector. I’m a first-term representative. I came out of a position as a community bank president after many years. I really look at this as going back and looking at a series of policies as the private sector would do and saying, okay, we have some issues here. So if we’re going to update these issues, let’s take a look at a broader section and see what we can do to improve them, especially when we get to unemployment. That fund is funded by employers, and to that extent, they’re the ones that bear the burden. At the state level, we have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure we have the most effective and cost-efficient program available and we just have some areas we need to tighten up.

Frederica Freyberg:

Overall, is it your sense that the 25,000 people who are currently getting unemployment benefits right now is too many people?

Jerry O’Connor:

I wouldn’t say that. I would say that, as in most things, we create laws, policies, and statutes to address a few in our society. Maybe the best example is when you go to the airport and you go through the metal detectors and you wait in long lines, not because everyone is a terrorist, but because you’re trying to figure out, we need to weed out certain or identify certain characteristics that are a problem. And that really is what this bill does. So I would spend less time trying to figure out who doesn’t qualify in terms of personality or characteristics, but it’s more important we have laws in place and we want to enforce them as they exist or improve them as they need to be.

Frederica Freyberg:

Is the message that people on unemployment insurance are gaming the system, as one of your colleagues said on the floor, or lazy?

Jerry O’Connor:

I can’t speak for the representative. I would speak from what I get feedback from the general public, and that would be over a period of time that they’re concerned that we spend a lot of money at the state level or at the federal level, where the money is unaccountable. We don’t know if it’s working, we don’t know if it’s going to the right places. We don’t know if the agencies are applying the law as intended. The drug testing bill would be part of that that was passed in the last budget bill, but it has not been implemented. I can tell you the general public does not want to invest money where you have people using the system without using that system to get to the next level, to be employed, to gainfully engage in the society around us in that manner.

Frederica Freyberg:

One of the bills, as you know, looks to acquire more audits of whether claimants are doing the required number of work searches per week to get their payment. That’s four per week, including declining job interviews or not showing up for one. According to the Department of Workforce Development, the agency does do these weekly random kind of audits, but in your mind, that’s not enough oversight?

Jerry O’Connor:

Well, it’s not addressing the issue. Part of that one goes back to ghosting. Ghosting is a matter where someone applies for a job, sends in an application, notifies the state that I took care of that, but when you go back to the employer, the employer is saying, wait a minute. There was an example, I believe it’s Ariens Corporation. They’re in east-central Wisconsin. They had in excess of 400 people that sent in an application for employment, but when they responded back to set up an interview or conduct one over the phone or in person, they could not even get a single response from those people. That’s in a one-year period. Or they had appointments set up, and I believe there’s 125 appointments, people simply didn’t show up. Now, if you’re the employer, this is a high-cost exercise. Our human resource departments in any sector are taking a lot of expense to employ people, so this is one of those issues. This is feedback from employers saying this is costing us a lot of money, so I don’t think the requirements for the job search have been effective.

Frederica Freyberg:

Would you just as soon do away with the whole unemployment insurance program?

Jerry O’Connor:

Absolutely not. Again, this is — the goal of these bills is to identify those people that are really not qualified to be on unemployment because we have that as an issue. Again, that’s the minority. We also have people that — they’re not out there truly looking or working for a job. Now, come back to the basis of your question. I believe a scriptural principle that says true religion is taking care of widows and orphans. That’s taking care of people that don’t have the capacity to take care of all of their needs, and I believe there is an absolute place for government, but I believe it needs to be exercised wisely, and we live in a time where you have to put more restrictions or restraints or accountability, is probably my best word, in place in order to make that work to its optimum level

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. Representative Jerry O’Connor, thanks very much for joining us.

Jerry O’Connor:

All right. Thank you. Enjoy your day.

Frederica Freyberg:

As Republicans pass the unemployment insurance bills one by one, Democrats assailed their passage. Among them, Representative Katrina Shankland of Stevens Point. Thanks for being here.

Katrina Shankland:

Thanks for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what about the results of the statewide referendum that showed that voters overwhelmingly agreed that able-bodied adults should have to look for work to receive taxpayer funded welfare benefits and how Republicans say that this slate of bills comports with the will of the people.

Katrina Shankland:

So first and foremost, every single bill that we took up related to unemployment insurance has nothing to do with welfare benefits. Unemployment insurance is an insurance program, just like social security. In fact, Wisconsin was the first state in the nation to create an unemployment insurance program, and when the Social Security Act passed on the federal level, unemployment insurance was included in it and it was modeled after Wisconsin. So this is an insurance program that you earn because you’ve worked and it is designed specifically to ensure that when you lose a job through no fault of your own, that there is a safety net in place to help you put food on the table and fill your tank to get to the next job interview so you can find work.

Frederica Freyberg:

So unemployment insurance is paid for by employers and majority Republicans say these bills are needed to weed out people hanging out on unemployment insurance and not showing up for interviews because this costs employers time and money when these folks could be working, which would then ease our worker shortage. Your response to that?

Katrina Shankland:

Sure. So I pointed out in committee and on the Assembly floor during this debate that ghosting is a real situation and there’s already a reporting form on the Department of Workforce Development’s website for employers to report, but what my colleagues across the aisle intended to do with this legislation is one missed interview, one car breaking down, one losing your childcare slot for the day or week and you would lose unemployment for that week as well and unemployment insurance, we have one of the lowest rates in the nation. It’s up to $370 compared to states around us. That is not meant to supplement or I should say supplant or replace an income. It is an income supplement designed to help you put food on the table and gas in the tank, but really not much more than that, to be frank. So I think their argument not only is incorrect, but it also fails to understand what unemployment insurance is used for, and to be frank, the majority of claims that are filed are filed in the winter when construction workers, landscapers, vertical construction workers are all unable to do the work that is needed because, in February, March, January, December, those harsh Wisconsin winters, you cannot lay asphalt or concrete below 40 and obviously you’re not landscaping out there. Those are when the majority of claims are filed. So my Republican colleagues really need to look into the data. I pointed out on the floor that many workers are unable to work between I would say the months of November and March when it comes to construction and vertical construction, and they use unemployment insurance during that time because they’ve put in 2,000 hours of work in six or seven months and I find the attack on blue-collar workers very difficult to stomach when many of my colleagues across the aisle rarely if ever put in 83 hours a week on average like these construction workers do. So I found it interesting to discover that they failed to take up a vote on one of the bills that would have taken up to three months of unemployment insurance away from these hard-working men and women across the state and I think it’s because they were afraid of the debate and afraid to talk about how these bills could really harm blue-collar workers.

Frederica Freyberg:

What do you think the overall message is from the Republican passage of these bills this week? What is their message?

Katrina Shankland:

Their message is that people in Wisconsin aren’t working and the opposite is true. The opposite is true. We have a 2.5% or 2.7% unemployment rate, depending on the last two months that you look of data, and it’s a historic record. We know that as people are aging out of the workforce, there are not enough new workers to replace them, and so what we need to do for those who are unable to work the number of hours they’d like to work or unable to enter the workforce, is help them access childcare, because that is the number one barrier to entry right now. There are childcare wait lists across the state. Many rural areas are in childcare deserts. So we need to work together to tackle childcare. We need to make sure that people who don’t have their own car have access to transit to work. We need to make sure that people who can’t afford to live where they work have access to affordable housing so that they don’t have to rely on somebody else to help them get to work if their car breaks down and they can get to work in the city that they live. And so those three things: affordable housing, public transit and transportation for work as well as childcare access and affordability are really what we as Democrats have been focusing on. It was our core message on the Assembly floor. We mean it when we say we are extending a hand. There are plenty of incredible proposals in Governor Tony Evers’ budget that would invest in workhouse funding, affordable housing, affordable childcare and transit, and we stand ready and willing to work with our partners across the aisle to enact Governor Evers’ budget and reduce workforce barriers. We know the workforce shortage is real. Let’s help people stay working, keep working, and get into the workforce if they’re not.

Frederica Freyberg:

Meanwhile, these bills are expected to be vetoed by Governor Evers, but Representative Katrina Shankland, thanks very much.

Katrina Shankland:

Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:

Restrictions on who is eligible for their criminal record to be expunged could be loosened under a bipartisan bill making its way through the legislature. An expungement is a court sealing of an entire criminal case file and it cannot be seen without a court order. Further, the defendant’s name won’t yield any results of the case in a search of Wisconsin’s circuit court records. Current law only allows non-violent felony crimes committed before the age of 25 to be considered for expungement. Among this bill’s provisions, that age restriction would be lifted. Despite having success in previous sessions of the Assembly, it hasn’t gotten the necessary traction in the Senate until now.

Rachael Cabral-Guevara:

We’re getting rid of that limit, that age limit that’s associated with it. For expungement to be able to happen, these individuals would have to make sure that they’ve paid all of their restitution, done all of their hours, did everything that they needed to do to be qualified for this. It would also allow folks that were possibly damaged or injured to be notified that someone was up for expungement. One of the big areas that I was contacted for by judges with this expungement bill has to do with when that idea of expungement can actually be granted. Okay? So currently what happens is if you are charged with a crime, the initial court hearings will determine if you can have expungement at the end or not. A lot of judges were saying why? What happens if things happened in between there and then you’re just going to expunge this particular crime. This bill would say we’re going to look at it at the end also and say, hey, is this appropriate? Because a lot of times, if people don’t ask at the beginning of a trial or they don’t know, they will not be allowed for expungement. Constituents reached out and said, “I wanted to join the military but I couldn’t because I made an error eight, nine years ago. I wanted to get my license in selling of insurance. I can’t do that because of something I did when I was 17 years old.” Right? So this is definitely something that’s impacting people when it comes to workforce, when it comes to housing, but what about self-worth? There’s a lot of people that might have struggled with mental health when they were younger or whatever the reason is, made a stupid choice and now 10, 20, 30, 40 years later, they’re still being punished for this. So there has to be a right to a wrong, not only on their end, but our end also. I think people should have consequences for the negative choices that they make, but you can also make that right, and so do I find this weakening the tough on crime? No. What I’m saying is make good choices. If you mess up along the way, make it right and then let’s come back and let’s start over.

Frederica Freyberg:

In other news, Wisconsin is still under a state of emergency due to historic floodwaters. Flooding along the Mississippi River in western Wisconsin hit its peak in the La Crosse area over the last few days. However, water was still rising at week’s end farther south near Prairie du Chien. Latest projections had the river reaching just over 23 feet Friday afternoon and then starting to recede. In Prairie du Chien, many roads were closed and residents along main street evacuated. Tens of thousands of sandbags were filled and placed as residents tried to keep floodwaters at bay. The major flooding is the result of record snowpack followed by rainfall and saturated soil. That saturated soil may have led to a freight train derailing Thursday on the bluff side of the Mississippi River with several cars tipping over. Authorities say hazardous materials of lithium-ion batteries, oxygen containers and paint were on board but have been contained. Officials shut down a section of state highway 35 during clean up. Four workers were taken to the hospital with nonlife-threatening injuries. The incident and exact cause are under investigation.

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.

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