Brett Healy, president of the MacIver Institute, takes a look at some items slipped into the DemoBudget, including items I have missed:
- Eliminate the requirement that, in any single fiscal year, revenues exceed expenditures, specifically for FY2011 (the second year of the budget).
- The rest of us, most of whom have already paid for our recycling bins, get to buy the fine folks of the Town of Wrightstown their recycling bins.
- Likely because of the criticism of the DemoBudget heaped by the various members of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a provision added by Sheridan and Decker that will allow the micro-targeted Shepard Express be the state “newspaper of record” in Milwaukee County. The last I checked, the Tuesday paid circulation of the Journal Sentinel, the lowest day for the daily, far outstripped the weekly free circulation of the Express. There’s no word on how those in Waukesha, Racine, Kenosha, Ozaukee or Washington Counties, or those not on the East Side of Milwaukee, will get the few state notices that are still required to appear in a newspaper, but because most of those areas are Republican, Sheridan and Decker probably don’t give a <expletive deleted>.
- A requirement, first added by the Senate, that the Department of Commerce fill the area develpment manager position in western Wisconsin by October. While speculation is that it was to secure Rep. Jeff Wood’s (Alcohol-Chippewa Falls) vote for the budget, I doubt it as Wood abandoned his supposed “fiscal conservative” values to vote for the first Assembly version, which did not contain this.
- A $600,000 giveaway from the Public Service Commission to the Citizens’ Utility Board. As Brett put it, “Let’s give a group state taxpayer dollars so they can turnaround and sue state government. That makes a whole lot of sense.”
Gov. Doyle will conduct the final act later today with the signing and issuance of his line-item vetoes. If memory serves, while the Legislature can reverse a veto with 2/3rds votes, it has not done so in over two decades.
