The Senate passed their own version of Daughter-of-Necrobudget on a virtual-party-line vote (Jim Sullivan, the target of a recall, was allowed to vote no along with every Republican). Others will cover the rest of the changes, but since I’m a laser on the RTAs, I’ll distill the differences between the Assembly version and the Senate version (thanks again to Greg Bump over at WisPolitics for doing the dirty work):
- The Chippewa and Fox Valley RTAs are out.
- The provision to allow Dane County to use its sales tax to fund roads is also out.
- The Southeast RTA is once again solely focused on the choo-choo, with all funding to the existing Racine and Kenosha buses (i.e. the additional $2 car-rental tax to make the total $18) as well as the requirement of Racine’s and Kenosha’s suburbs to fund the bus systems to get a KRM stop out.
- The Milwaukee County Transit Authority gets the “Regional” title back, with the sales tax bumped up to 1.0% and the “parks, culture and (county) emergency medical services” joining transit in the 85% (no percentage specified for each category) not allocated to municipal police, fire and EMS (allocated on a per-capita basis).
On to conference, where I expect nothing less than the worst of all worlds.
