WEDC Board Of Directors Meets Tomorrow In Green Bay

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) board of directors will meet in Green Bay tomorrow.

On the agenda is a report detailing if taxpayers are getting their money’s worth from the public-private jobs-creating agency.

Part of the meeting will be devoted to a ‘compliance report.’ Rep. Peter Barca, D-Kenosha, is the Assembly minority leader and a member of the board of directors. He says the compliance report sprang from an earlier report from the Legislative Audit Bureau.

Barca says it will examine how companies that got tax incentives from WEDC are meeting the terms of their agreements, especially around issues of job creation: “So that when businesses are not compliant with the terms of their loans, their grants we have mechanisms in place to identify it, and if they’re not going to come into compliance, the taxpayers are made whole and collect money back from them.”

WEDC has been under fire from some lawmakers for not meeting job-creation goals and for some staffing issues. Barca says it needs to be kept on a “tight leash,” and that the agency is on what he calls “life support.”

“If we find out WEDC just can’t work, I think the solution isn’t just to go back to the commerce model but come up with a hybrid,” says Barca.

One item that did not make the agenda is that of giving the board of directors the power to hire or fire WEDC’s CEO. It’s a power Barca says private-sector boards routinely have, but right now the CEO is named by the governor. Barca says the current CEO Reed Hall has only been on the job a few months and that it’s too early for the board to consider replacing him.