Here & Now

Here & Now for July 9, 2021

Announcer:

The following program is a PBS Wisconsin original production.

Tony Evers:

And I hope the Legislature will join me in this important work so that we can continue our state’s economic recovery.

Frederica Freyberg:

And with that, Governor Tony Evers signed the biennial budget, a plan that includes more than $2 billion in tax cuts. Tax cuts that largely came compliments of the Republican version of the bill passed by the state Legislature. I’m Frederica Freyberg. Tonight on “Here & Now,” Will Kenneally covers state budget news. UW-Milwaukee Professor Emeritus Mordecai Lee helps determine who gets credit for what in that budget bill. Clean Wisconsin wins two big environmental cases in the state Supreme Court this week. And efforts underway in Milwaukee to dispatch unarmed responders rather than police to calls where suspected mental illness plays a factor. It’s “Here & Now” for July 9.

Announcer:

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

Frederica Freyberg:

With the countdown clock ticking for Governor Tony Evers to act on the state budget, he did so a day before the legal deadline. Governor Evers signed the state budget into law Thursday, wielding his veto pen to make some changes to the final document. “Here & Now” reporter Will Kenneally has the details.

Will Kenneally:

The governor left the GOP-written budget largely intact, though at the same time admonished Republicans for not doing more.

Tony Evers:

The biggest problems with the budget are not the things that need to be removed by a stroke of a pen, but rather the work the Legislature has left undone.

Will Kenneally:

Speaking from an elementary school in Whitefish Bay, Evers who is the former head of state public schools, said education should have been prioritized more in the Republican budget.

Tony Evers:

They could have done the right thing. They still can do the right thing. There is money left in the state coffers that can be used for schools and other issues. So we — I’m very hopeful that they’ll spend some time thinking through this instead of just going home and spending the rest of the summer enjoying themselves. There’s work to be done.

Will Kenneally:

During his news conference, Evers said he would allocate $100 million of federal money to stem the shortfall he says Wisconsin schools face. The governor included 50 partial vetoes that removed specific parts of the budget. His vetoes included keeping the existing formula for rural school districts transportation aid, preventing drug testing for those seeking unemployment insurance, maintaining funding for a Food Share healthy eating incentive program and stopping a transfer of $550 million to the state’s rainy day fund. Evers says that last veto keeps those funds available to meet future needs of Wisconsinites that the current budget does not address.

Tony Evers:

There’s work to be done. There’s work to be done for these kids. There’s work to be done around criminal justice reform, a whole number of areas. The money is still there.

Will Kenneally:

The governor did tout measures from the budget, however, including an income tax cut for a large portion of Wisconsinites. In the budget, Wisconsinites making between roughly $24,000 and $263,000 per year will have their income tax reduced by close to 1%. Republicans cried foul at this saying Evers was taking credit for a tax cut proposed by the GOP.

Mark Born:

I think it’s been pretty clear from the headlines we’ve seen so far exactly what happened today and that is Governor Evers signed the Republican-written state budget.

Will Kenneally:

Though Evers introduced a budget proposal earlier this year, the GOP-controlled Legislature threw out his plan and started from scratch to write the current budget.

Mark Born:

Once again, Republicans are leading. The Legislature have led the way. Sent Governor Evers a common sense budget that invests in priorities and puts money back in the hands of families of Wisconsin.

Will Kenneally:

Reporting from Whitefish Bay, this is Will Kenneally for “Here & Now.”

Frederica Freyberg:

So Republicans in the Legislature are praising the tax cuts Governor Evers signed into law, while blasting his original version of the budget and saying he deserves no credit for this one. Our next guest has seen and voted on his share of state budgets. UWM Emeritus Professor and former Democratic state senator Mordecai Lee joins us with his take. Nice to see you again.

Mordecai Lee:

Thank you, Frederica.

Frederica Freyberg:

So you had musings that Governor Evers might well veto the entire budget. That didn’t happen. Republicans had said that they worked at making the document veto-proof. Is that what happened here?

Mordecai Lee:

I think that’s part of the explanation. Even though they tried to write the language so it would be very hard to do partial vetoes and they didn’t give him very many options, he still could have vetoed the whole budget. He could have tried to get Joe Biden to hold off on revoking the federal dollars, the billions of dollars. But I think when it comes down to it Governor Evers does not love politics and he doesn’t love fighting. And even though the Republicans in the Legislature in a sense enjoy confrontations, enjoy fighting, he just doesn’t want to. Two years ago he could have vetoed the budget and he didn’t. This year he didn’t either. But the slickest move he did is even though he had very few options, the slick move was he took credit for the tax cut.

Frederica Freyberg:

That was slick.

Mordecai Lee:

For those Wisconsinites and insiders who think that Governor Evers is a lousy politician, I got to tell you, taking credit for something that you didn’t really do is about as great a political move as you can imagine. So I think he handled it pretty well given that he had really a weak hand. You know, in politics you have to play the hand you’ve been dealt. You can’t change your cards. And I think he maneuvered out of it pretty well, and I think the Republicans are sort of frustrated.

Frederica Freyberg:

Well, you really think he can take credit for those? I mean, it was a Republican-written budget. They started from scratch. And that was what they did with it.

Mordecai Lee:

To insiders, this was a win for the conservative Republican ideology of government. This was their budget. They didn’t let him get a whit of anything. They can feel, as insiders and from the point of view of political science, that for them it was a win. But from the perspective of politics, of getting credit, generally speaking in politics the voters look to the chief executive, the president, the governor, the mayor rather than looking at individual legislators or the Legislature as an institution. So I think the voters will give the governor when he runs for re-election more of the credit than they will to the Legislature.

Frederica Freyberg:

I was going to ask you, in terms of the political messaging around this document, who do you think does better?

Mordecai Lee:

I think there’s no doubt that in terms of messaging, because, after all, politics is about spin. It’s about impressions. It’s not about substance. I think the governor wins. Here’s why. He’s running for re-election and he says I gave you a tax cut. And then whoever wins the Republican nomination for governor says, no, you sort of really didn’t. All you did was sign a Republican budget. That does not fit on a bumper sticker. And politics in the end is the spin of the message. And so I think he wins. And if anybody’s in a tough position, it’s really the Democrats who are running for re-election to the state Legislature. Most of them voted against the budget. He signs the budget. They probably felt that he had just knocked the stilts out from under them. But nonetheless, what does the Republican Legislature say? You voted against the budget and you shouldn’t get credit for the tax cut. I just don’t think that will wash in politics. In terms of the substance, Republicans won. The Legislature won. Conservatives won. In terms of politics, I think Democrats won.

Frederica Freyberg:

Interesting. Meanwhile, what do you think of this budget in this time of federal COVID money and a windfall of tax revenue? Does it strike you that the spending and tax cutting was well deployed?

Mordecai Lee:

Well, it’s true that when the governor introduced his budget and included some tax cuts and some tax increases, the situation six months ago was very different. And now there’s just this flood of money, both to the state and from the feds. So I think it’s a different situation. And in a sense Tony Evers showed how fleet-footed he was to adjust to the new situation. But the pressure from Republicans will be, again, keep cutting the budget, look how big our surplus is.

Frederica Freyberg:

Mordecai, we leave it there but thank you for your insight, and very nice to see you again. Mordecai Lee from UWM, emeritus professor. Thank you.

Mordecai Lee:

Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:

A major ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court late this week on high-capacity wells and wastewater permits. The 4-2 decision puts the Department of Natural Resources back in the business of considering environmental effects of such wells as well as permits for large dairy operations. The court was deciding how much authority the DNR has after a 2011 law limited that power and a 2016 opinion from then-Attorney General Brad Schimel backed that up. The decision is a big win for the environmental group Clean Wisconsin, which took the case to court. Clean Wisconsin attorney Evan Feinauer is here and thanks very much for being here.

Evan Feinauer:

Thanks for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

What is your reaction to the high court’s ruling?

Evan Feinauer:

Well, the initial reaction is relief. These were two cases that we and our partners in these cases have been working on for a very long time. The initial case, the Kinnard Farms, the wastewater permit case, goes back to 2012. The high-capacity wells case was filed in 2016. So these were long-awaited final decisions from the state’s highest court that put to bed issues that we’ve been fighting over in court for years. So a big win with a lot of investment of time and resources behind it.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what happens now to the eight high-capacity wells that were at issue in the court case?

Evan Feinauer:

Well, these were wells the DNR scientists had already determined were going to have significant adverse impact on surface waters, which violated the state constitution. So now all that’s left for DNR to do is sort of do the paperwork of vacating those wells. The court sent them back to the DNR with directions to do that. Those wells won’t be going in unless something changes on the ground there. In addition to that, DNR has resumed doing an impacts analysis for other wells that may have similar impacts and we’re going to continue monitoring to make sure they implement that authority effectively and appropriately to protect our waters.

Frederica Freyberg:

And then on the other case, what about the 2500-animal farm in Kewaunee County and the waste from that?

Evan Feinauer:

Yeah. So this one, CAFO permits — sorry, CAFOs are large animal dairy farms. These permits expire and have to be renewed every few years. So it’s a little bit trickier than high-capacity well permit context because there is a renewal period. What we hope DNR will do is with this affirmation of its authority, which we believe it had the whole time, it’s why we brought the case, they will begin and continue to use all the tools at its disposal as appropriate and backed by the facts in a particular instance to make sure the permits contain conditions that address the widespread and serious groundwater contamination issues we have. In this particular case we were talking about a limit on the size of the farms and some monitoring to see when and where and if contamination is occurring. And so at a minimum they should be imposing those conditions where appropriate and these permits.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what have been the effects of ten years of approvals for high-capacity wells and livestock wastewater permits under that 2011 law?

Evan Feinauer:

Yeah. So there have been, you know, taking them one at a time, in the high-capacity well context, we’ve seen an explosion and a concentration of these wells in the preceding decades. And what that means is the quantity of water in a relatively small geographic space taken out has gone up exponentially. The last ten years wasn’t good for that because it was a green light to increase water consumption. Hopefully that’s changing now. But given that the ruling outside of the eight wells is sort of prospective, it will change how wells are approved going forward, this won’t undo all the harm that’s been done. But the light at the end of the tunnel here with regard to the wells, is now we can start talking about longer-term solutions to sustainably manage our shared water resources. That’s really where we need to be going. That may require additional agency action or even legislation. In the farms case, we have widespread groundwater contamination that people use for their drinking water all over the state. This case isn’t going to solve those problems. But I think it sends another signal to DNR to use tools to impose standards that protect people’s health. So for the last ten years, frankly, a lot of folks have had significant water quality concerns and they haven’t always been getting a lot of help from their state government. We hope that that changes.

Frederica Freyberg:

Because what kind of mitigation is needed, in your mind, given water levels and this well contamination? Is there money earmarked to do that anywhere?

Evan Feinauer:

Yeah. At the end of the day a lot of this does come down to resources to your question. So all the legal authority in the world won’t change things on the ground if we don’t have the personnel and resources and budget to make it happen. So that’s why these cases, these victories are a big deal and open up a lot of really awesome opportunities to do work to help folks and protect water. But we’ve got to go out and make it happen. That means Clean Wisconsin is very engaged with the state budget to try to get our asks in there and lobbying hard to put money towards protecting water resources. We know how important it is. That’s exactly right. We need to follow up the legal ability with the actual commitment to these goals.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. We leave it there. Evan Feinauer from Clean Wisconsin, thanks very much.

Evan Feinauer:

Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:

In other legal news, Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, has reached a settlement deal with several statements, including Wisconsin. According to Attorney General Josh Kaul Wisconsin is expected to receive more than $65 million to fund opioid abatement efforts. Individuals will also receive compensation as part of the resolution of the bankruptcy lawsuit which is subject to court approval.

In Milwaukee, with a spike in crime and calls for police reform, city alders are working to see whether they can both bring better emergency response and free up police officers for violent crime calls. The Common Council approved legislation to appoint a Milwaukee Police Department diversion task force to report its findings by next March. Alderperson Chantia Lewis says the goal is to reimagine the way of dispatching help and how we create a safer community for everyone and she joins us now from Milwaukee. Thanks for being here.

Chantia Lewis:

Thank you so much for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

How would you like to reimagine dispatching help to people and how would that work?

Chantia Lewis:

Absolutely. So first and foremost, I want to reiterate that this is not a reimagining for instances where officers are needed. This is literally looking at those calls that do not warrant a police, a sworn-strength officer, going to that particular situation. And so when we look at mental health, for example, and we look at the broader context of what happens when a person is having a mental breakdown, an officer should not respond to those calls because they are not trained for that. They don’t go to school for that. They don’t have that level of background. What we’ve seen over the last few years as we tried to institute that and add that to their responsibilities, but that’s not what they were sworn to protect to do. So in an instance where a mental health crisis is happening, that’s when you need a social worker.

Frederica Freyberg:

Is it my understanding — I mean, would paramedics report as well or who would be responding to a mental health call?

Chantia Lewis:

Absolutely. So the social workers, the paramedics, the firefighters, those people who are trained in de-escalation in a certain respect, but also those people that do not pose a threat. They’re nonthreatening. When you have a person showing up with a firearm, it tends to escalate the situation. And not intentionally. But it just tends to escalate the situation. And so we know that firefighters are ones that are looked at by the community as friendly. Social workers are looked at as necessary and friendly. And so when we have those types of trained individuals going into the field to respond to these types of calls, it really helps on both ends to, one, de-escalate the situation, but to ensure that we don’t have another Dontre Hamilton happening.

Frederica Freyberg:

Right, because I was just about to ask why would diverting police in this way create a safer community?

Chantia Lewis:

And that’s exactly the reason. We’ve seen not just here in Milwaukee and across the state, but across the country where an officer escalated the situation, not intentionally most often, but sometimes intentionally, and the individual that was having a mental health crisis lost their life. And so what we’re trying to do is to preserve life and to ensure that our officers have the ability to respond to those calls that they were sworn to do.

Frederica Freyberg:

How could saving police response for the most serious of violent crime calls help also kind of stem crime in Milwaukee?

Chantia Lewis:

Absolutely. So what we’re seeing is the calls for services that are needed for them to respond, the lag time is a lot longer, and so a burglary in process or someone with a gun, a suspect with a gun or a carjacking of sorts, we are seeing that they are tied up in other instances where they should not be responding to, dog barking calls or, you know, a dispute with a neighbor that’s not escalating to violence. We’re seeing they need to be freed up. They are saying — what I’m hearing as I talk to officers, I have officers in my family, and so when I talk to them, they’re saying we’re doing a lot of nonessential work. And when we need to be doing essential work. This is twofold, right? This is helping to ensure that the officers are responding to the calls that they need to respond to and that the especially mental health crises, they are able to walk away and get the help that they need.

Frederica Freyberg:

How big a proportion are the calls for help in Milwaukee that are actually kind of mental health, behavioral health calls as opposed to violent emergencies?

Chantia Lewis:

Mm-hmm. And so that’s what the task force is going to be taking a look at. Right now we have surface numbers. What we want to do is a deep dive into all of the calls that MPD are addressing and to make sure that we can see what calls actually need to be responded to and what calls can be diverted.

Frederica Freyberg:

And how are police officers and citizens responding to this idea?

Chantia Lewis:

From what we are hearing, the initial conversation is it’s needed, it’s warranted, it’s been a long time coming. I think the comments that we’ve heard that — very few comments that we’ve heard have been negative are from people who just don’t understand what the task force is slated to do. That’s why I’m grateful to be in your program today, to be able to express the true meaning and the true meaning behind it. And that’s literally having officers being freed up so they can respond to what they need to do, but also making sure that this is a trust-builder with the community. Because oftentimes we’ll see that people don’t want to call the police or call 911 for especially mental health crisis, because they don’t feel that their loved one would come out of that instance alive.

Frederica Freyberg:

Wow. All right. Well, Alderperson Chantia Lewis from Milwaukee, thank you very much for being here.

Chantia Lewis:

Thank you so much.

Frederica Freyberg:

In the city of Madison a pilot program with similar aims is getting off the ground. The city’s crisis response team is made up of paramedics and crisis workers who respond to behavioral health calls instead of armed police officers.

Looking to COVID-19 news, the variant of the virus known as delta has now taken hold as the most dominant strain of the novel coronavirus in the United States. Wisconsin appears to be keeping the spread of the Delta variant at bay with only 83 reported cases to the state Department of Health Services. To learn more, Marisa Wojcik spoke with two UW-Madison virology researchers about the delta variant and their work to prevent future pandemics.

Marisa Wojcik:

What do we know about the Delta variant?

Dave O’Connor:

Well, we know that this Delta variant is the dominant variant because it is more contagious. That means is spreads more easily. And we know that people who are vaccinated are going to be protected from severe disease. So the really good news is that if you’ve gotten your vaccine, you’re not going to get sick with the Delta virus. However, you might still get infected and be an asymptomatic carrier, which means you could potentially infect those around you who are unvaccinated.

Tom Friedrich:

I would add one important thing to Dave’s answer just now which is also we have to remember that school-aged children under the age of 12 cannot be vaccinated yet. And so when he talks about how we may need to prepare for a future where there’s more transmission, when our kids go back to school and those kids aren’t vaccinated and won’t be able to be vaccinated yet, we may see a change in the patterns of COVID transmission and that’s something that we’re going to have to pay close attention to.

Marisa Wojcik:

So does that mean we should still be wearing masks when we’re out in public? How seriously should we take it?

Dave O’Connor:

So I think it’s maybe a little bit too optimistic to say that just because we have a high vaccine rate that means the pandemic is over. I think what we should do is enjoy this moment that we’re in right now, when case numbers are low. People who are not yet vaccinated should take this moment to get vaccinated so that in six weeks or so they’ll be fully vaccinated and have the best possible protection from the Delta variant and other types of the virus that might come in the future. And we just need to be very watchful. So I liken it to being on a beach in Florida before a hurricane. Right now the sun is out, the waves are great, enjoy your time on the sand. But there might be a storm well off to sea that we need to be worried about in the future.

Marisa Wojcik:

The Rockefeller Foundation is working to create an international pandemic prevention institute and the UW-Madison is recently a partner in that effort. So can you tell us about these plans? How do we prevent a future pandemic going forward?

Tom Friedrich:

Sure. I think that one of the main things that we’ve learned in the last 10 or 15 years is that diseases like COVID will continue to emerge and threaten global health. They may threaten health locally before they become global pandemics. And what we’d like to do is be able to detect the emergence of a new disease like COVID locally where it’s happening and then hopefully stamp is out before it becomes a globally disruptive pandemic like the one we’re living through. And what has tended to happen in the past is that there is an international response to these outbreaks that kind of starts to ramp up as the outbreak becomes severe and then we take our eye off the ball. So there’s a boom and bust cycle. And the funding and thinking about how to respond to pandemic and potentially pandemic diseases. So what Rockefeller and other partners are trying to do is lay the foundations for a more sustainable approach to detecting and then hopefully stopping emerging diseases before they become pandemics.

Frederica Freyberg:

Marisa Wojcik’s complete “Noon Wednesday” can be viewed by going to PBSwisconsin.org and clicking on the news page. Look for the latest on COVID=19 variants and vaccines there as well. And that is our program for tonight. I’m Frederica Freyberg. Have a great weekend.

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