Senate Passes Budget, Paving Way For Assembly Vote

The state budget cleared its biggest remaining hurdle in the Legislature Tuesday night after Republican state senators passed the bill, with many major spending decisions getting overshadowed by sweeping last-minute policy changes.

For all the discussion this year over how the budget would transform the University of Wisconsin and all the arguing over how it would pay for everything from state parks to roads, it was telling that the Senate’s debate began on a different topic: the myriad ways the bill would weaken Wisconsin’s open records laws. Republicans on the Legislature’s budget committee had only added the open records changes last Thursday. The full Senate voted unanimously to take them out.

Middleton Democratic Sen. Jon Erpenbach told Republicans they should still be ashamed.

“This doesn’t make you a hero. At all. This doesn’t. And for the six of you in this chamber that voted for this, you will still have explaining to do, because this vote doesn’t take away what happened last Thursday night,” he said.

The Senate’s vote came on the same day that Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald told reporters he helped write the open records changes, along with staff for Gov. Scott Walker. On the Senate floor, Fitzgerald said Wisconsin’s open records laws still need to be modernized.

“I’m hopeful that we can eventually figure out what we can do to update this section of the statutes,” he said.

It wasn’t the only issue discussed Tuesday that Republicans added to the budget just last week. Another would let employees work a seven-day week without rest. Fond du Lac Republican Sen. Rick Gudex stressed that it would be voluntary.

“Everybody loves a day off, but once in awhile, businesses just run into this situation and they have a couple employees that want to say, ‘Hey, I’ll stay. No big deal. I ain’t got nothing going on anyway,’” said Gudex.

But Milwaukee Democratic Sen. Chris Larson said the changes would pressure employees to work more. He said that the weekend was as American as apple pie and that workers deserve one day off in seven.

“I mean, I haven’t read the Bible since my days in Catholic high school, but I recall even our Lord and Savior needed a day off,” said Larson.

Republicans also made an even bigger change to Wisconsin’s labor laws Tuesday, amending the budget to repeal the state’s prevailing wage law for local government construction projects starting in 2017. Ashland Democratic Sen. Janet Bewley asked Republicans how they could defend deliberately lowering the wages of their constituents.

“I’m the last person that’s going to tell my constituents that they’re overpaid, and not only that, that it has to become public policy to be the state that is allowed to lower wages,” she said.

However, conservatives like Whitewater-area Sen. Steve Nass viewed the prevailing wage vote as a major victory, especially when other Republicans said it would never happen. Nass said it was time to move beyond prevailing wage, which he called a “Depression Era law.”

“Government should not be in the business of artificially inflating wages,” he said.

Nass, who was widely expected to vote against the budget, ended up voting for it after the prevailing wage changes were tacked on. But with all of the other policy changes Republicans added to the budget, they did lose a GOP vote: Green Bay Sen. Robert Cowles.

Cowles said the budget was full of policy proposals that had no business being in the budget.

“I would say this is an excessive amount,” he said. “I can’t think of a time when there’s been anywhere near this. And I’ve always fought against it.”

Cowles said the open records changes were indicative of the rest of the budget, a document he said was full of policies that should have been set aside and scrutinized more carefully.

But there’s little time for extra scrutiny now: The Assembly is scheduled to pass the budget Wednesday.