No Runny Eggs

Revisions/extensions (3:11 pm 1/24/2008) – This has been bumped to the top (originally posted 8:23 pm 1/23/2008) as Rep. Zipperer has a newer version of the guest column originally released on January 10.

Representative Rich Zipperer said it a lot better than I did in announcing that he, Leah Vukmir and Roger Roth wrote the Earmark Transparency Act being circulated for cosponsors. Therefore, I’ll simply transcribe his guest opinion column released on January 10 and handed to me yesterday by one of Zipperer’s aides (my lateness to this makes me as culpable in ignoring it as everybody else except Dad29, who caught this when it was announced on the 8th). A note; I’ve made a couple of corrections in the copy I have; those are italicized repost his guest column that appeared in the Waukesha Freeman today (a copy of which I received yesterday from his office):

Earmarks. Pork barrel spending. The bridge to nowhere. When you hear those terms, you think of Congress wasting taxpayers’ money on pet projects, often hidden as part of a budget thousands of pages long. In fact, the most recent federal budget contained over 9,000 earmarks inserted by individual members of Congress with no accountability to taxpayers. But if you thought that earmarks and pork spending were only problems for the federal government, you would be woefully mistaken. After being in the state Assembly for one year now, it is painfully clear to me that the problem has permeated the culture of state government as well. Just consider some of the provisions in the recent state budget, some inserted by the Governor, some by individual Legislators, and all tucked into a budget document that was 1,633 pages long.

• 2.8 million for a Green Bay riverside boardwalk
• $125,000 to the Painters and Allied Trades Council 7
• $1.2 million for street improvements in Pleasant Prairie
• $142,000 to the International Crane Foundation
• $4 million for a soybean crusher in Evansville
• numerous highway earmarks throughout the state
• $800,000 for a bike trail in West Allis
• $1 million for youth summer jobs program in Milwaukee
• $950,000 for Kenosha streets
• $100,000 for two ice arenas in Ashwaubenon & Eau Claire
• $25,000 for a youth center in Mondovi
• $500,000 for a civil war exhibit in Kenosha
• $100,000 for a pedestrian path in Milwaukee

If you doubt your government’s ability to spend taxpayer money wisely, I don’t blame you. To help bring accountability to state budgets I have authored the Earmark Transparency Act along with Reps. Leah Vukmir (R-Wauwatosa) and Roger Roth Jr. (R-Grand Chute). For the last week, we have been asking our colleagues to cosponsor the bill, and thus far have been pleasantly surprised by the support. We have received a majority of Republicans in both the Assembly (28 of 52) and the Senate (11 of 15) to cosponsor this common sense legislation. Unfortunately, no Democrats have signed on to the bill yet.

The Earmark Transparency Act will prohibit state agencies, the Governor, and individual legislators from hiding earmarks in an omnibus budget bill by requiring the non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau to prepare an "˜Earmark Transparency Report’ to be released at least 48 hours prior to the Joint Committee on Finance, the Assembly, or the Senate voting to approve a state budget. The report will bring to light all earmarks, including the cost, location, beneficiary, and requesting representative or senator.

The bill also prohibits last-second additions by a budget conference committee, referred to as "˜airdrops,’ that were never included in a previously approved version of the budget. The most infamous airdrop during the budget debate last year was a provision to allow the sampling of liquor in grocery stores. Airdrops are especially obnoxious to taxpayers, as they are dropped into the budget only moments before the final vote, avoiding the months of public scrutiny that legislation typically must endure.

The Earmark Transparency Act will require full public disclosure of all earmarks before a budget is approved. If a specific earmark seems wasteful or unnecessary, the authoring elected official will have to publicly justify the expenditure. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, and I believe that under the pressure of public scrutiny there will be far fewer wasteful earmarks introduced. In the end, that will save taxpayer money.

When this bill becomes law, legislators will not be able to hide from their earmarks and pork requests in future budgets. That public accountability will help end the culture of pork barrel spending that has taken hold in Madison, and let you know where your tax dollars are being spent.

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