The state will have to leave 3,500 state jobs vacant, eliminate employee bonuses and cut agencies’ budgets by 2.5 percent to deal with the worst projected budget deficit in its history, Gov. Jim Doyle said Thursday.
Doyle also called for targeted tax increases and wouldn’t rule out a general sales or income tax hike, although he said he wanted to do everything possible to avoid that. He’s also ordering that $30 million in state grants not be awarded.
Former Dane County Circuit Court Judge Michael B. Torphy, regarded as one of the state’s finest trial judges when he retired in 1998, died Thursday in a Madison hospice center.
Torphy, 78, presided over numerous murder cases in his 30 years on the bench, including a stretch in the 1970s and 1980s when more than 20 consecutive homicide cases filed in Dane County were assigned to him.
(Torphy was a 1957 graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School.)
Gov. Jim Doyle said Thursday that state government faces a budget deficit of nearly $5.4 billion through mid-2011, $400 million more than he estimated only days ago.
Doyle said he was taking immediate steps to start to shore up the budget by selling 500 vehicles, leaving 2,800 jobs vacant and not filling 700 openings expected through retirements and other attrition, ending the practice of giving some workers bonuses and canceling up to $30 million in grants.
Those cuts are a down payment on the $346 million deficit that state government faces by June 30. Doyle and legislators could fix that separately with a second budget-repair bill in a year or include those changes in the budget he will propose early next year. The two-year budget that begins July 1 is off by more than $5 billion.
University of Wisconsin-Madison students and staff are preparing to move into the new the 250,000-square-foot Student Services Tower, a “one-stop shop” for a range of services and activities.
Gov. Jim Doyle has called a press conference for Thursday afternoon to detail steps the state will take to overcome an expected $5 billion state budget shortfall from the current budget and the 2009-11 budget.
In 30 cases – nearly 10% – requests for simple records were denied or ignored, according to the audit by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Dear Editor: Despite the economic hard times that are affecting private colleges and universities just like every other part of our nation, the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities is not seeking taxpayer support for our members. Instead, WAICU hopes that Gov. Jim Doyle and the Legislature will consider increasing financial aid for all Wisconsin college students.
(Wegenke is president of the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities)
Bruce Pluckhahn, a Wauwatosa native and UW-Madison grad who became a Hall of Famer for his tireless work for the sport of bowling, died Tuesday in Milwaukee. He was 84.
A University of Wisconsin research team will be joining the annual deer hunt — to look for ticks that spread Lyme disease.
More than a dozen scientists led by UW-Madison entomologist Susan Paskewitz will head to selected Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources deer registration stations Saturday to collect deer ticks from carcasses brought in by hunters.
It’s part of a fight against Lyme disease, which is caused by a bacterium that can be carried by deer ticks that bite people.
….Thanks to the twin pillars of the University of Wisconsin and state government, Madison has historically enjoyed a leg up on the rest of the Badger State when it comes to riding out economic hard times.
But with the national economy facing unprecedented challenges and government no longer the biggest employer in town, can the region avoid the pain of this latest downturn?
“No doubt Madison and Dane County have been insulated but eventually this is going to catch up to everybody,” warned Ken Harwood, a business consultant from Verona and publisher of Wisconsin Development News.
State budget writers, struggling to overcome a $5 billion state budget shortfall, likely will be working in the dark until Barack Obama moves into the White House.
Democratic Congressional leaders have spent the fall trying to enact a series of aid packages to bail out struggling states. But they’ve hit a road block in President George W. Bush. And until states know what the federal government is going to do, their own budgets remain in limbo.
It’s no secret that many with ties to higher education in Wisconsin were giddy upon learning Nov. 4 that Democrats had secured control of the state Assembly, putting the party in charge of both houses of the state Legislature and the governor’s office for the first time since 1986.
University of Wisconsin System leaders have been frustrated for years by what they perceive to be inadequate financial support from the state.
Quoted: Howard Schweber, UW-Madison professor of political science and law, and Noel Radomski, director of the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education
You’ve probably never heard of Lemierre’s syndrome. Many doctors haven’t heard of it either, and that can be a problem. A century ago, Lemierre’s syndrome all too frequently led to small unmarked stones in graveyards. And then, thanks to antibiotics, it practically disappeared. But Lemierre’s may be making a comeback, a possible unintentional result of the push to reduce antibiotic prescriptions.
One year to the day after a downtown fire left one young man dead and three others in the hospital, members of the City Council introduced an ordinance to help prevent a fire like that from ever happening again.
Sponsor Ald. Mike Verveer said the motivation to work with the fire department on the ordinance, which tightens restrictions on smoke alarms in city housing, came in particular after seeing the wreckage of the house at 123 N. Bedford St. Peter Talen, 23, a UW-La Crosse student in town visiting his brother on Nov. 18, 2007, died in a fire that spread from the porch throughout the nearly 100-year-old house.
A large stockholder is urging the board of TomoTherapy Inc. to consider selling the medical technology company or seek other alternatives to boost its stock price.
TomoTherapy, which was founded by two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers, sells a device that uses imaging technology to increase the accuracy of radiation treatments.
UW-Madison officials are being proactive this year in preparing for any repeat of the snowiest winter in Madison’s history, with a variety of snow removal improvements and storm warnings being put in place.
“After last winter, we reached out to the university and sought ideas for how to keep the campus clear and slip-free and studied how other large snow belt campuses deal with snow removal,” said Alan Fish, UW-Madison associate vice chancellor for facilities.
Many young, aspiring reporters despair that traditional print journalism is dying rapidly. For longtime reporter and editor John Nichols, however, this is the most exciting and promising time in journalism yet.
Nichols, associate editor of The Capital Times, said that while the print journalism industry is quickly dying, it needs to die to create a new, healthier and more uplifting field of journalism. He spoke to a conference at UW-Madison devoted to consider the connection between democracy and journalism.
Just when you thought everything was perfect with the new basketball floor at the Kohl Center … it has to get replaced.
The new floor, purchased by the University of Wisconsin athletic department with money given for the project by Andy and Susan North, was painted the wrong shade of red and will be replaced with another new floor sometime in December, according to Associate Athletic Director Vince Sweeney.
Record numbers of University of Wisconsin-Madison students are studying abroad, an increase that exceeds the national average and places the school among the top 10 U.S. research universities for study-abroad participation, according to an international report released Monday.
There’s a lot of fretting going on in sports pages and at the University of Wisconsin athletic department over those dreadful UW students not getting to the football games on time.
Sorry to ask, but what in heaven’s name is the big deal?
As long as the students have paid their money for the lousiest tickets in Camp Randall, whose business is it but their own whether they get to the game in time for the kickoff or arrive fashionably late halfway through the second quarter?
Quoted: Karen Holden, an economist at the University of Wisconsin- Madison.
UW-Madison senior Catherine Matloub is frequenting the new American Apparel store downtown not only for what she calls great basic clothing, but to support the company’s powerful immigration stance.
“Madison is a liberal city with ideas and beliefs similar to that of American Apparel in issues concerning the outsourcing of jobs,” Matloub said. “I think that alone will contribute greatly to the overall success of this particular store.”
The Los Angeles-based company is the largest clothing manufacturer in the United States, offering comfortable and versatile clothing and known for its issue advocacy as much as the new looks featured in Web advertisements and display windows.
The challenge of alcohol abuse will be met head-on by a new coalition announced Thursday by Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk.
The Dane County Coalition to Reduce Alcohol Abuse includes more than five dozen community leaders, physicians, politicians and citizens, working to significantly reduce alcohol abuse and its effects on the community.
(Dr. Robert Golden, dean of the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, is a member of the coalition.)
Nick Toon is emerging as a consistent threat who should only get better with time.
By noon on Nov. 4, you could have asked anyone on the streets in University of Wisconsin campus areas if they had voted and around 75 percent would have answered yes. Nearly every person proudly wore an “I voted” sticker and demonstrated enthusiasm for the night to come. When Barack Obama finally was announced as the president-elect, shouting and screaming could be heard from every direction.
Yes we can. Yes we did. We did manage to get out a huge youth turnout rate. We did change the course of our country’s future with our voices. Our generation has constantly been charged with being apathetic toward politics, but on Tuesday we proved we were anything but.
University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering students also have been involved in the project. Dan Negrut, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, has worked on computer simulation models to show how the tires will behave in different scenarios.
The Madison City Council has voted to support a plan that would bury any stretch of the project within the city’s borders, including along the Beltline. Supporters of burying a stretch of the line include businesses along the Beltline and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, which is bisected by the highway. They have founded a group known as the Coalition for Underground Alternatives.
Few issues are likely to generate more emotional opposition than federal funding of stem cell research. Handled wrongly, it could energize conservative opponents and derail Barack Obama’s presidency. There is no question that we must move ahead, but caution is key.
The University of Wisconsin System is tightening its hiring as the state faces a huge budget shortfall.
UW System President Kevin Reilly has ordered chancellors who lead the state’s universities to approve all new hires on their campuses.
In a memo, Reilly says chancellors should only fill the jobs they consider “most essential to the university’s mission at this time.”
Local vaccine research and development firm FluGen Inc. is getting a $250,000 loan from the state to help in the development of a bird flu vaccine. Gov. Jim Doyle announced the Technology Venture Fund loan to FluGen on Wednesday.
(UW-Madison professor of virology Yoshi Kawaoka was a co-founder of FluGen, along with Gabriele Neumann, an associate scientist at the School of Veterinary Medicine)
At least 45 students who live in the same residence hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have reported falling ill with symptoms of gastroenteritis since Nov. 7, university officials said
The Madison City Council finished the entire city budget a day ahead of schedule, passing its 2009 operating budget — which included funding for a Madison Metro bus fare increase — just after 2 a.m. Thursday.
….The council debated 45 amendments put forth by council members Wednesday night into Thursday morning, the most controversial being an effort to keep Madison Metro bus fares at their same prices that received widespread support at Wednesday’s public hearing on the budget.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — New University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin is moving to put her stamp on the school, remaking the administration with an eye toward improving communication.
Two months after she succeeded John Wiley, Martin is moving to replace two Wiley aides with staff members of her own and to create a new high-profile communications post.
Leaving the chancellor’s office will be Casey Nagy, who played a key role in running the state’s flagship university during Wiley’s seven-year tenure. Nagy, a lawyer, was Wiley’s chief of staff and involved in many of the most sensitive decisions on personnel and other matters.
Also leaving her job, the school confirmed Wednesday, is Wiley assistant Deb Lauder.
On the week of what would have been Brittany Zimmermann’s 22nd birthday, the Madison Police Department announced that the private reward fund being offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for her April murder has grown to $14,000.
Zimmermann, a Marshfield native majoring in medical microbiology and immunology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was killed inside her Doty Street apartment on April 2.
State consumer protection officials are warning of a local door-to-door sales scam touting $20 books purportedly being sold to benefit the UW Hospital.
An out-of-state crew is apparently canvassing neighborhoods in Wisconsin including areas of Middleton and Madison, claiming they are UW students or just live down the street and also apparently using names of residents as ones who’ve purchased the books when in fact they haven’t.
University of Wisconsin health officials are cautioning students in dorms to wash their hands after using the bathroom and before preparing food after what’s being called the biggest outbreak of the norovirus on campus in the last 10 years.
Up to 40 students were sick last weekend with a norovirus, commonly referred to as stomach flu, with the outbreak basically confined to the sixth floor of Sellery Hall, a large high-rise dormitory that houses over 1,100 students on West Johnson Street.
UW Health Services epidemiologist Craig Roberts told The Capital Times the virus is extremely infectious and tends to be most common in confined living areas such as cruise ships, nursing homes or dormitories.
Dropping out of college to make homemade beer didn’t look like a very good career move initially.
But Shane Welch, founder and brewmaster of Sixpoint Craft Ales, followed his passion, even though his parents were unenthusiastic about his plans to quit the University of Wisconsin-Madison to concentrate on brewing beer in the basement of his student apartment on Vilas Avenue.
….Sixpoint brews created by Welch and former college roommate Aaron Stumpf, 29, have become the toast of New York City.
A proposal by a UW-Madison biochemist to create “stealth” drugs that hide inside cells until activated by a pathogen has received a $100,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Biochemist Ron Raines and his research group were awarded the funding through the foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative.
As many as 30 students at UW-Madison have become sick with the norovirus.
Many of the students live in the Sellery dormitory.
As Bo Ryan put it, the Wisconsin Badgers found a way Tuesday night.
For the first 30 minutes of their exhibition game against UW-Whitewater, the Badgers were in danger of becoming the latest Division I basketball team to fall to a Division III opponent. When it counted most, though, they buckled down on defense, crashed the boards and starting clicking on offense.
The result was a 64-47 victory over the Warhawks in a game that was as difficult as Ryan predicted.
A new coalition said Tuesday it would push to toughen Wisconsin’s lax drunken driving laws, try to force insurers to cover injuries in such accidents and battle underage drinking. We welcome this new group, which calls itself All-Wisconsin Alcohol Risk Education, to the fight. The Journal Sentinel continues to highlight the need every day on Page 1B as part of its “Wasted in Wisconsin” series.
The coalition, led by UW Health in Madison, is encouraging health care organizations, law enforcement, school groups and advocacy groups to join with it to try to reduce the tragic results of excessive drinking.
Gov. Jim Doyle said Tuesday that the state budget deficit would top $5 billion through mid-2011, making it by far the biggest funding gap in state history.
Muscle and ferocity are the most apparent qualities of Li Chiao-Ping’s dancing. She’s one tough dancer.
Madison’s new far-west side fire station will be named in honor of the fire department’s former medical director who died in a Med Flight helicopter crash in May, officials announced at Fire Station No. 12’s groundbreaking Monday afternoon.
The station will be named for Dr. Darren Bean, who in addition to being the medical director for the fire department, was also a Med Flight physician for six years. When a flight returning to Madison from La Crosse crashed just outside of La Crosse on May 10, Bean was one of three passengers who died.
Kurt Leswing, a UW-Madison senior killed in Hong Kong by a drunken driver Friday, is being remembered as a wonderful friend and excellent student who was easygoing and cared about others.
For those unfamiliar with the burgeoning field of synthetic biology, the annual iGEM competition might seem more like science fiction than a college event.
The international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, which took place this past weekend outside of Boston, bills itself as the largest synthetic biology conference in the world. Much like an electrical engineer might build a circuit, synthetic biologists construct devices from cells and genes using standardized biological parts, called BioBricks.
The theory of intelligent design cannot be tested — there isn’t any evidence, any research or any hypothesis, world-renowned biologist Francisco Ayala told a Madison audience Monday night during his Distinguished Lecture Series talk attended by about 300 people in the Wisconsin Union Theater.
A group of health care providers is forming a coalition to push for new laws to fight alcohol abuse.
The All-Wisconsin Alcohol Risk Education coalition wants legislation to curb drunken driving and underage drinking and to force insurers to cover injuries caused by drunken driving.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison student killed by a drunken driver in Hong Kong was remembered Monday as an adventurous guy who worked as a volunteer at a Milwaukee soup kitchen.
A UW-Madison senior killed in Hong Kong by a drunken driver Friday is being remembered as a “tremendous student” who was very easygoing and cared about others.
Kurt Leswing, 21, of Milwaukee was in Hong Kong traveling in the 15-week Semester at Sea program, a shipboard study abroad program administered by the Institute for Shipboard Education, with the University of Virginia as the academic sponsor.
For the first time this season, one of the members of the University of Wisconsin football team’s offensive unit was named Big Ten Conference player of the week. Sophomore wide receiver David Gilreath was honored as the league’s co-offensive player of the week along with Ohio State running back Beanie Wells.
Due to a string of recent armed robberies, UW-Madison students, faculty and staff are invited to a campus forum to discuss downtown safety issues on Tuesday.
The session, which will begin at 6 p.m., will be held at the Armory and Gymnasium, commonly known as the Red Gym, located at 716 Langdon St.
The recent acquisition of Mad City Broadband by Atlanta-based Xiocom indicates that the company sees value in the struggling municipal Wi-Fi system.
Quoted: Barry Orton, UW-Madison professor of telecommunications
A University of Wisconsin-Madison student was struck and killed while studying abroad.
Authorities say 21-year-old Kurt Leswing of Milwaukee was hit by a drunken driver in Hong Kong. The driver was arrested.
Leswing was a senior business major traveling as part of the Semester at Sea program. It sends students on a 15-week voyage that circles the globe.
A 21-year-old student from the University of Wisconsin-Madison was killed over the weekend while traveling in Hong Kong, according to the Institute for Shipboard Education.
Quoted: Barry Orton, a telecommunications professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
For an example of what does work, take a look at Dane County, where several hundred new businesses and thousands of new jobs have been created because of a hot entrepreneurial climate. Academic research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison is being turned into patents, licenses and business start-ups. The University Research Park, now 25 years old, is being doubled in size to raise the number of companies to 200 from 115 now.
Plunging world markets have hit the Wisconsin Retirement System hard, with total assets in the fund down 29 percent or some $25 billion year to date and officials renewing warnings about a pending cut in pension payouts.
It’s the University of Wisconsin System’s version of a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
On the one hand, system leaders agree it’s time to seriously address the issue of low pay — at least when compared to peer institutions — for faculty and staff. To help close this widening gap, some are asking that UW System President Kevin Reilly request a hefty 7.78 percent annual pay plan increase for each of the next two years.
Yet as determined as people seem to be to tackle this pressing issue, no one knows where the money is going to come from to solve the problem. After all, the state is facing a budget shortfall of at least $3 billion, and many system leaders are leery about making students shoulder the large pay increase in the form of significant tuition hikes.
Marcus Landry wonders where the time went.
“Just a little while ago I was a freshman, just yesterday,” he said. “It’s so crazy and now I’m here, my senior year.”
The University of Wisconsin forward is speaking only a few feet away from Joe Krabbenhoft. Just minutes earlier, Landry was ragging on his buddy’s finicky nature, chiding him for not eating some of his mother’s homemade enchiladas as Krabbenhoft tried to get brownie points for not being as picky as he used to be.
“I’m doing everything,” he said proudly. “I’m even putting ketchup on hamburgers.”
It was a good natured exchange between two players who have not only played together the past three years but also gotten to know each other very well.
