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The following program is a PBS Wisconsin original production.

Robin Vos:

Sometimes you can believe in something very fervently, but at the end of the day, you weigh the totality of the bill, and you say on balance it’s much better than it is to have it pass than not.

Zac Schultz:

Lawmakers caucus and compromise to pass the biggest chunk of the state budget. A long-awaited proposal would modify how the state’s alcohol industry is regulated, and perceptions of diversity and free speech on UW campuses emulate the national culture war politics.

Good evening. I’m Zac Schultz filling in for Frederica Freyberg. Tonight on “Here & Now,” the latest on the budget action taken at the Capitol this week. UW System President Jay Rothman weighs in on the state higher education budget and Attorney General Josh Kaul discusses cuts to the Office of School Safety. Plus, what changes to state alcohol regulation would mean for small business producers. It’s “Here & Now” for June 16.

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

Zac Schultz:

Work on the state budget slowed down the past couple of weeks as legislative Republicans negotiated amongst themselves and with Democratic Governor Tony Evers to reach a compromise on shared revenue for local municipalities. The solution required promises from the governor to sign off on a big increase in state payments to private voucher schools, an extra billion dollars for public schools, and dropping the requirement that Milwaukee go to referendum in order to pass an increase in their sales tax. They say the best deals in politics are often the ones where no one comes away completely happy, which was certainly the case this week as the Senate and Assembly signed off on the bills with bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition.

Man:

There are 21 ayes, 12 noes and the bill is concurred in as amended.

Melissa Agard:

This could have been a clean bill. It could have been passed with broad bipartisan consensus and instead Republicans, to my understanding, are still in-fighting because they’ve decided to insert bad policy and unpopular ideas into this vitally important piece of legislation.

Man:

There are 68 ayes and 26 noes. Senate amendment one is concurred in as amended.

Robin Vos:

Part of the legislative process is give-and-take. There are parts in the bill that we are going to be voting on today, that if it were just me, I would have done differently, by that’s disagreements even amongst Republicans. Then you add in trying to find a truly bipartisan agreement. We had to give up on some things that are really important to Republicans.

Zac Schultz:

One of the areas of the state budget yet to be finalized includes the University of Wisconsin System, of which we at PBS Wisconsin are a part of. And that budget could come with complications as earlier this week Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said he wanted to see the system budget cut by $32 million in an effort to force the schools to eliminate positions connected to diversity, equity and inclusion otherwise known as DEI. Joining us now is UW System President Jay Rothman. Thanks for your time today.

Jay Rothman:

Good to be with you. Thank you.

Zac Schultz:

Speaker Vos says efforts related to DEI are a left-wing religion and indoctrination. How do you respond to that?

Jay Rothman:

I would step back Zac and really look at the budget overall because when we started the process, we had recommended a 4% increase in each year of the biennium, which I thought was reasonable in light of inflation being at 8% last year and 5 or 6% this year. We knew we wouldn’t even keep pace with inflation. And now there’s discussion at least of a potential cut to our budget and the gulf between those two is huge. And that gulf really is going to threaten accessibility for our students in this state and it’s going to threaten affordability in the state of Wisconsin, and that’s really what we’re focused on. We’re focused on helping Wisconsin win the war for talent. We don’t have enough engineers and nurses and data scientists and so forth in the state. Those jobs are going to leave our state unless they’re filled here, which is going to hurt Wisconsin’s long-term economic viability. And as I think about the accessibility piece, I, in April, I asked our chancellors to look at the branch campuses and look at are they viable long term. How do we make them viable? How can we adjust them? That piece is ongoing. We recently retained Deloitte to help look at structural deficits in our universities and help us try to close those by 2028 consistent with our strategic plan. So this is a serious issue. That funding gap is enormous and I think we have to look at longer term, what are we going to do for the state? What is in the best interest of the state of Wisconsin? That’s why the system exists. That’s why I took this job is to help the state of Wisconsin. I’ve been a resident in this state my entire life. That funding gap creates a real issue for us.

Zac Schultz:

Speaker Vos says in terms of hiring more nurses and engineers, he thinks money is not being well spent on positions connected to DEI investments. Do you agree with that?

Jay Rothman:

When you look at the gulf, we’re talking nearly half a billion dollars in terms of that gulf, and I appreciate the concerns around DE & I, but I look at it and say it’s that gulf, that investment, and we’ve been dealing with shrinking budgets for 10 years in the system. There is a point at which you cannot do this any longer and it is threatening accessibility, but it’s also threatening affordability. You look at it and you say we are — we did a study last year that said we are the most affordable public university system in the Midwest and we are proud of that. We think that is important for the state of Wisconsin, and to have our universities be affordable, but that’s being threatened by the lack of investment that’s going into our universities, and that’s what my focus is.

Zac Schultz:

The system just announced a new chief diversity officer has been hired. Were there any thoughts to waiting on holding that announcement? Did you think that the connection between that and the budget would cause conflict?

Jay Rothman:

That position has been in place at the system for many years. It was in position with President Cross. It was in a position — that position was there with President Thompson. So we were simply filling a vacancy. That search started last November for that position.

Zac Schultz:

So Governor Evers says that he’s threatened to veto the entire state budget if the UW’s budget is cut in this way. Have you reached out to either the speaker’s office or the governor’s office to talk specifically about DEI and the budget?

Jay Rothman:

We’ve had a number of conversations with both the legislators across the board. What’s been reassuring to me is the bipartisan support for the UW system in the legislature. We’ve certainly had conversations with Governor Evers. The veto in my mind is down the line. We’re hopeful we can make our point that why investment in the UW system is an investment in the people of the state of Wisconsin. That’s what we’re focused on, because I do worry. I think we have to look back, and if I’m still on this earth 10, 15, 20 years from now, this is a critical period about accessibility and affordability in our state.

Zac Schultz:

For the people that are listening to this interview that do support DEI and the mission involved with that, they’re not hearing very much from you speaking specifically about your support for those efforts in those programs. What would you say to them?

Jay Rothman:

I have reiterated on a number of occasions my support for DEI. I came from the private sector. In the firm that I was in, we focused on that because it was good business, it was important, and my support for DEI has not wavered.

Zac Schultz:

Slightly connected to the budget, the UW School of Engineering building was not approved by the Republicans on the Joint Finance. Is that another area that you’re pushing for or do you think that one — that ship has sailed on engineering for now and right now it’s just on the system budget?

Jay Rothman:

I think we continue to advocate for engineering. It was the top priority in our capital budget and I think the logic for building that building is compelling. There is enormous student demand for it. The applicants, we can’t even satisfy anywhere near the number of applicants that are there. We know there are jobs available for those engineers, and critical jobs including in the state of Wisconsin. We know that the business community is very supportive of that building. We know that we need to expand the — because it’s not the number of graduates, it’s also the world class research that’s done there. We need to enhance the facilities so that we can continue to grow that world class research that redounds to the benefit of the state and finally, you look at the private support. Well over a hundred million dollars of private money goes into that building. This is a building that I would think the legislature would look at and say, “we need to build that building.” For those reasons, we think that argument is compelling and we are going to continue to advocate for that engineering building.

Zac Schultz:

We just have a few seconds left but do you think some of this in-fighting is about political posturing, or are there real concerns the Republicans will cut your budget?

Jay Rothman:

I think — I look at the gulf. It’s not just the cut in the budget; it is that gulf and are we going to invest in the UW system. We are the best talent magnet this state has. We are the best developer of talent this state has. That is critical as we move into a technology-driven knowledge economy. Where are we going to be five, 10 and 15 years from now? The investments that are made today or the investments that are not made today will define Wisconsin’s future.

Zac Schultz:

We’ll leave it there. UW system Jay Rothman, thank you for your time today.

Jay Rothman:

Thank you very much.

Zac Schultz:

Another big ticket item taken up by the Finance Committee recently was the budget for the state’s Department of Justice. Similar to the rest of the state budgeting process, committee Republicans passed a fraction of what Democrats proposed for an increase and the department’s Office of School Safety created in 2018 did not see a renewal of funds effectively eliminating it. We’re joined now by state Attorney General Josh Kaul for more. Thanks for your time today.

Josh Kaul:

Thanks for having me.

Zac Schultz:

So what were the reasons you were given for these cuts?

Josh Kaul:

There weren’t any specific reasons. Our Office of School Safety has been really a huge success story over the last several years. They’ve developed both innovative and effective programs that schools around Wisconsin have relied on to help keep kids safe. We’ve relied on some federal grant funding to launch those programs. That’s actually one of the things that we and DPI were directed to do in the statute creating that office, and the legislature, unfortunately, at least so far, has decided not to continue providing — to provide additional funding that we need to keep the operations of that office going and what that would mean for schools is that they would loses some critical programs, like our 24/7 confidential tip line that has helped keep schools in Wisconsin safe.

Zac Schultz:

I know some of the work that the office did was how to do planning and scenarios for law enforcement and schools, especially active shooter scenarios, which are happening more and more. What will schools do in lieu of that? Do you think they have relationships now with local police departments that can substitute for what the office provided?

Josh Kaul:

There’s been some real progress made over the last five years, but there’s nothing that can substitute for having this office in space. I’ll give you one simple example. One of the programs launched by our Office of School Safety is this tip line I mentioned. Anybody associated with a school can provide a tip at any time, get a trained analyst to respond to that tip and then get resources deployed. We’ve now received thousands of contacts through that line and it includes things like reports about a student who had a gun on a bus. We got that information to locals and then that gun was recovered and an arrest was made. In another case, there was a student overheard talking about meeting up with a stranger on the internet. We got resources to that student working with local partners. That student didn’t ultimately meet up with a stranger. And in another case, there was discussion about a potential planned school attack where there was a response that happened and there was a check done to make sure the school was kept safe. That kind of information prevents violence from happening in our schools and there’s nothing that’s in place that would replace that.

Zac Schultz:

Do you have any ability to reallocate staff within your remaining department to try and help fill some of that gap?

Josh Kaul:

We’re going to explore what opportunities are available, but the clearest and best way to continue funding that office is to have a long-term investment through state resources. It’s something that the state absolutely can afford. We have a historic budget surplus and the amount that we have requested for that office is about $2.2 million over a two-year period. Our kids deserve that kind of investment in their safety.

Zac Schultz:

And now another area of the budget that didn’t get the bump you were hoping for is the state Crime Lab. What will that mean for prosecutors at the local level?

Josh Kaul:

You know, it was disappointing to see there wasn’t more of an investment there. There was some which we certainly appreciate but far less than we requested. Eric Toney who’s the president of the DAs Association and who ran against me, joined us to advocate for resources for the labs, but again, at a time when we have historic budget surplus, the legislature provided just a fraction of what we had asked for and the more analysts that we have, the more efficiently we can process evidence, the more effectively our justice system works. It’s disappointing there wasn’t more investment there. But really our focus right now, in light of what we’ve seen, is on the Office of School Safety because that office will be dismantled without a renewed effort to include funding in the legislature.

Zac Schultz:

And what have you heard since they declined to fund it in the first place? Is there any chance they come around on this? Is there something the governor can do?

Josh Kaul:

We’re going to keep working. I’ve begun reaching out to legislators. I’m going to keep doing that. I know that there’s bipartisan support for this office, but where things end up is going to depend on what decisions legislators make and we are reaching out to partners. We’re communicating about this because, at the end of the day, if we lose this office, that’s going to impact schools across the state of Wisconsin and leave our kids less safe. I certainly don’t want to see that. I’m hopeful that legislators will agree that that’s not what they want to have happen.

Zac Schultz:

In past budget cycles or past political cycles, you’ve had issues with some of the bills coming out of the legislature that seemed politically maneuvered. Do you sense politics here because you’re a Democrat running this office, or is this simply funding or they don’t see the need for this office?

Josh Kaul:

Well, the statements we’ve heard were pretty general. There was a party line vote in the Joint Finance Committee. It’s Republicans who voted to block this funding, but I am hopeful there will be bipartisan support here. The office was created in 2018 with bipartisan support. It was signed into law by Governor Walker. School safety is something we should all be able to agree is a worthwhile investment for our kids, and so I hope we will see that.

Zac Schultz:

In terms of where you go from here, are you hoping that locals will actually speak up, that schools will speak up? In 30 seconds or less, what can we hope to see outside of just you and the political process?

Josh Kaul:

That’s what we’ve started to see so far. We’ve worked with people who were partners of ours in the School Safety Office’s work. We’ve heard from SROs already, from others in law enforcement, from schools about the importance of this program. I think we’re going to continue seeing that and we’re going to keep reaching out to encourage people to talk about why this program is so valuable.

Zac Schultz:

All right. Attorney General Josh Kaul, thanks for your time.

Josh Kaul:

Thanks for having me.

Zac Schultz:

The results of a controversial free speech survey administered to students throughout the UW system found in some instances, conservative students not feeling comfortable to express their views in the classroom. Before and especially after the February release of those survey results, Republicans have expressed concerns that students with conservative views are shut out on college campuses or, in more extreme language, are being indoctrinated by professors. Frederica Freyberg spoke with UW Madison Political Science Professor Katherine Cramer who took issue with claims of student indoctrination in a recent essay she wrote on free speech in the classroom.

Katherine Cramer:

It just does not at all match my reality. The discussion around whether or not indoctrination is going on on the UW-Madison campus is just so far removed from my daily life and I, you know, as a person who has grown up in this state and worked at this institution at UW-Madison basically my entire career, I’ve been fortunate to have this job since I finished my dissertation. I mean, I just — I worry a lot about the criticism of this place because I know that it’s the UW-Madison, UW system is so beloved by people of this state and my experience with students on this campus is just — it’s just very different from the debate that’s going on around indoctrination.

Frederica Freyberg:

What about the free speech survey undertaken by the UW system that Republican legislators themselves call troubling, where it found that 60% of Republican students feel, “pressured by an instructor to agree with specific political views being expressed in class.” What about that survey?

Katherine Cramer:

It’s been my life’s work to create an environment in my classroom in which students of all political leanings have the space to think and talk with each other and question each other and graduate from that class with a more profound sense of who they are as a citizen. So that’s one thing that just really — disturbed me about that, because it just runs against the grain of what I’ve been trying to do for decades in my own life. And there’s another thing that really troubles me about that survey, is that it really does not comport well or match well with the results of our own UW campus climate survey, which was conducted in 2021. They had a bunch of different measures of who felt welcome on campus, about 20, if I remember right. And according to none of those measures do self-described conservative students say they don’t feel welcomed. And yet there was a question on that survey asking who do you think doesn’t feel welcome on our campus? And many, many people said conservative students. So there’s this perspective that conservative students are silenced on our campus, but conservative students themselves do not report feeling silenced. So I’m worried there’s a big mismatch in my mind between the free speech survey and our own campus climate survey.

Frederica Freyberg:

You described how students felt talking about politics at the start of your class in the midst of this polarized climate. What is that like when they first step into that class?

Katherine Cramer:

So especially when I was — I assigned to them portions of a book I published in 2016 about our own rural-urban divide here in Wisconsin. Many of the students, most of them are from an urban or suburban area, would say things like, “oh, I’ve never heard that perspective, or I’ve always wondered why, why did people in rural areas of the country vote for Donald Trump, because it seems to me like he’s a candidate that wasn’t going to help them or he would be not supporting the kind of policies that I think would benefit people like them.” I’m trying to get them to understand more deeply themselves their own views and to just basically see people with different political views as human beings, as equally as human and equally as dignified and worthy of respect as they themselves are.

Frederica Freyberg:

So the other thing that you touched on in this class was race, and what was your take-away from that?

Katherine Cramer:

I play some excerpts for these students of conversations that students of color and I organized on our campus a few years ago and I play some of the excerpts of those conversations for the broader class, which is predominantly white. And the students are shocked to hear some of these stories of students just talking about the discrimination they faced just in everyday life on campus. Not violent, but sort of just the common experience of it and it’s invisible to a lot of these students who don’t experience that personally. So we talk about that as both the way you have to really listen carefully for different facets of public opinion and the way people’s experiences are such an important part of the way they see the world, but then also as a step towards, okay, we’ve learned about what public opinion is, how it works, how to measure it, but now what’s your role in public opinion? When you leave this class, when you leave this university, what kind of a person do you want to be out there in the world? How do you want people to respect you and listen to you and what are you going to do to make sure we have the kind of democracy where, sitting down and talking with one another is not unusual.

Zac Schultz:

Also at the Capitol this week, a Republican bill is moving forward that would make numerous changes to how Wisconsin regulates the sale and distribution of alcohol. The current law was designed in an age where giant brewers dominated the industry, well before the boom in microbreweries and wineries across the state. Marisa Wojcik spoke with a craft brewery owner and president of the Wisconsin Brewer’s Gild, Will Glass, whose life was upended by the state’s convoluted statues.

Will Glass:

We started the Brewing Projekt because there was a void in the market. Kind of thought, hey if it’s not there, maybe we should start making it.

Marisa Wojcik:

While working through the complicated permitting process to start his brewery, Will Glass faced a significant barrier.

Will Glass:

Because my wife’s business had a municipal liquor license, I was not allowed to have a brewery. One of the things that they actually told us was that if we got divorced, we could then have this problem would be solved. When it came to be a real conversation, because at that point we were over a half million dollars in investing into this business, we also then found out that because we had children in common and there would be a fiduciary responsibility between spouses, that money would have to go between us, that that would also constitute a bridging of the tiers and made us ineligible to get a brewer’s permit.

Marisa Wojcik:

The tiers he’s referring to are the three tiers that largely regulate Wisconsin’s multi billion-dollar alcohol industry.

Will Glass:

Depending on if you want to be a producer, a wholesaler or a retailer, you kind of have to act as one and not the others. There are a lot of exceptions to that. I started looking at the statutes a little closer and I was having a conversation with my father. I was driving to the grocery store, getting some milk, I was talking to him on the phone, and he said, “Well, what if I owned the brewery?” and I said, Well, that could work.” So we basically made a deal where I transferred all of my assets into his name. So all of the debt that I had taken on, all of the money that I had saved for years.

Marisa Wojcik:

When he thought they had dotted all the “Is” and crossed all the “Ts”, another complication suddenly arose.

Will Glass:

They told us “no” again because one of the management employees that we had, his wife was a bartender at a bar in town. It’s all this crazy stuff, and it really is the unintended consequence of people not paying attention to the changes that happened in 2011 to our industry. We lost the ability to hold multiple permits at the same time. It just turned into this kind of rat’s nest of complications and exceptions to this rule and exceptions to that rule. It is very difficult to know what you can and can’t do. We host weddings up here. It helps for us to become more competitive.

Marisa Wojcik:

Glass has spent years poring over the statutes out of necessity. He couldn’t afford a lawyer to interpret them, and even then, he doesn’t think that would have mattered.

Will Glass:

Without a doubt the, the statutes have not kept up with the market. Right now, hard seltzers in the state of Wisconsin are considered wine. That’s as of about two months ago when the Department of Revenue decided to reinterpret what a hard seltzer would be as opposed to being a fermented malt beverage, now they consider it a wine. So if you don’t have a winery permit and you’re making hard seltzer, now suddenly you’re illegal. The problem with a pure 3-tier system is that it takes away a lot of opportunities from entrepreneurs. It holds up the ability for the market to change and for us to be able to respond to that.

Marisa Wojcik:

The current bill speeding through the legislature is the culmination of years of advocacy from different parts of the industry.

Will Glass:

This proposal that’s being floated right now, we’re major proponents of. It would clean up the vast majority of issues that I have run into in the past. The majority of issues that our members run into. It’s long overdue because the other members of our industry have spent so much time in it, change is difficult. Change is hard. The 3-tier system isn’t going away, but what this bill does is it creates allowances within. It gives somebody the ability to open a brewery when their wife owns a bar. It gives somebody the ability to have small levels of investment in other parts of the industry, in other tiers, that’s been forbidden for a very long time. It just kind of opens the market up in a way that makes sense today.

Marisa Wojcik:

Reporting from Eau Claire, I’m Marisa Wojcik for “Here & Now.”

Zac Schultz:

And finally tonight, Governor Evers raises the Juneteenth flag above the Capitol building commemorating the end of slavery and emancipation of African-Americans in the United States.

For more on this and other issues facing Wisconsin, visit our website at PBSwisconsin.org and click on the news tab. That is our program for tonight. Frederica Freyberg will be back next week. I’m Zac Schultz. 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.