So you’re facing a $527 million budget shortfall and the federal government offers to hand you not only $125 million, but also to fork over hundreds of million of dollars to hospitals to help cover the cost of care they provide to the poor.
How could you possibly say no?
Quoted: UW-Madison political science professor Dennis Dresang
The Legislature apparently lacks the votes to override the governor’s vetoes. That being the case, we will continue to urge the governor to spare education – including the University of Wisconsin System’s Growth Agenda – from the scalpel when it comes to spreading the pain to state agencies.
Cutting spending can be wise. Doing that and also cutting the state’s ability to grow – education’s role – is not.
There has been a whole lot of debate over Wisconsin’s “brain drain” issue. Is it an issue? Are we really bleeding thousands and thousands of smart, college grads? Are they or aren’t they coming back to Wisconsin after getting a diploma, adding talent and paying taxes? Is the bigger problem simply generating a higher percentage of degree-holding citizens (as our rate is comparatively low in the Midwest). Some signal a “red alert” on the brain drain matter. Others argue there are bigger fish to fry.
Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle today told members of the Wisconsin Hospital Association that he plans again to propose a hospital tax that could bring hundreds of millions of federal dollars to state hospitals and provide the government with $125 million to help it through trying economic times.
“We’ll be putting forth a new budget next January for the next two years, and when we do we’ll be working to make sure that that federal money is coming into the state of Wisconsin and we are working in a way to be able to raise the reimbursement rate that you have needed,” he said.
Kevin Opgenorth, a student at UW-Platteville who recently returned to school after three years in the U.S. Army, was appointed to the University of Wisconsin System’s Board of Regents by Gov. Jim Doyle on Thursday.
Opgenorth is replacing Thomas Shields as the non-traditional student representative. His appointment is effective June 9 and expires May 1, 2010.
Opgenorth is majoring in business administration and economics. Of the three years he spent in the Army, Opgenorth spent one year deployed in Iraq, where he served as an Ammo Team Chief and Radio Transmission Officer.
A developer that claims it lost a major building contract for political reasons cannot sue Gov. Jim Doyle’s administration for damages.
The District 4 Court of Appeals has upheld a judge’s dismissal of the lawsuit by Prism, which was a bidder on a $68 million construction project at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
For some time now I have had the opportunity to offer comments on issues, both local and global, in this space thanks to the good people at the River Falls Journal.
We have explored a wide spectrum of topics and, hopefully, some of those thoughts have been useful.
Both houses of the Legislature overwhelmingly approved the Great Lakes compact Wednesday, sending it to Gov. Jim Doyle and putting pressure on the states that have not yet ratified it.
The Assembly also narrowly approved the budget-repair bill passed by the Senate Tuesday. That package now heads to Doyle, who has said he will rewrite it with vetoes.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A University of Wisconsin-Whitewater fraternity has been suspended for three years to try to stop a troubling culture of underage drinking and hazing, an official said Wednesday.
Assistant Dean of Student Life Mary Beth Mackin said the university suspended Tau Kappa Epsilon after learning that alcohol and underage drinking were the central focus of many fraternity events. Many members routinely drank to excess, she said.
Pledges also were forced to eat and drink strange things such as raw onions and prune juice, were yelled at by senior members and made to do exercises, chores and other acts of servitude, she said.
The budget-balancing plan the Senate passed Tuesday would still leave the state nearly $1.7 billion short three years from now.
The nonpartisan legislative Fiscal Bureau delivered that news to Republican state lawmakers in two separate briefings just before the Democratic-controlled Senate voted 17-16 along largely partisan lines to pass it. Only Sen. Tim Carpenter, D-Milwaukee, broke party ranks to vote no.
The Republican-controlled Assembly planned to take up the bill to fix the current $527 million shortfall on Wednesday.
State government faces a long-term imbalance between spending commitments and tax collections of almost $1.7 billion – even if the budget-repair bill that passed the Senate on Tuesday becomes law.
That figure is $800 million more than last fall, when the budget was adopted.
Lindsay Midtbo, a UW-Madison senior, is looking for a job â?? but not in Wisconsin.
“I was born here, I’ve been here forever,” Midtbo, a Milwaukee native, said. “I want something new and different.”
Midtbo, an economics major who graduates this month, is hoping for a job in Chicago. The city offers more financial services jobs and a change of pace, she said.
Midtbo isn’t alone in wanting to leave the state. Each year, about half of UW-Madison’s recent graduates leave Wisconsin for Illinois, Minnesota and other states.
Budget repair legislation has passed the state Senate. Democrats caucused all day, and the vote to plug the state’s $527 million dollar budget hole went off without debate. Afterwards, Minority Leader Scott Fitzgerald condemned the deal.
If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.
That good advice, usually attributed to humorist Will Rogers, is apparently lost on Wisconsin’s legislative leaders.
On Monday they announced a deal to get the state out of a $527 million budget hole by â?? shoveling as fast as ever.
The governor should note that this budget repair bill, negotiated by Senate and Assembly leadership, does not include:
â?¢ A hospital tax that makes all the sense in the world because it leverages more federal Medicaid dollars.
â?¢ Explicit protections for the University of Wisconsin System in an edict to cut $69 million in state spending.
Legislative leaders on Monday announced a budget-repair package they intend to pass over the next two days – a plan Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle said he expects to rework with vetoes when it hits his desk.
Wisconsin’s Lieutenant Governor is traveling the state, urging eighth graders to sign up for the Wisconsin Covenant. The program seeks to get kids into higher education.
In Rhinelander, Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton told students education is necessary to have good job prospects. She says every student should have some form of post-high school education if they want to have a family supporting job.
After months of negotiations, Assembly and Senate leaders emerged Monday with an agreement on how to repair the state budget. Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch (R-West Salem) says it will close a $527million hole in the current state budget and prevent government from operating a deficit.
In Australia, where the development of an air ambulance service 80 years ago made medical care available to the vast remote inland region known as the Outback, people have a reverence for that country’s Royal Flying Doctor Service.
….Wisconsinites, especially those living in remote stretches of this state, would do well to nurture a similar reverence for the UW Med Flight Service, which over the past 23 years has provided tens of thousands of patients with state-of-the-art emergency care and an essential connection to the finest hospital facilities.
Twenty-three years of accident-free medical rescues by UW Med Flight ended in tragedy Saturday, with the fatal nighttime crash of an American Eurocopter EC 135 helicopter on a wooded bluff five miles outside downtown La Crosse on a return trip to Madison after ferrying a patient to a La Crosse hospital.
The craft lost contact with the airport shortly after take-off at 10:48 p.m. Killed in the crash were Dr. Darren Bean, nurse Mark Coyne and pilot Steve Lipperer.
The cause of the accident is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, but several studies have found circumstances of such a flight — at night and without a patient on board — are linked with high accident rates in what authorities have identified as an alarming increase in the number of emergency medical services aircraft crashes.
Thoughts and prayers are pouring in for the UW Hospital Med Flight crew of three killed Saturday night when the helicopter crashed on a bluff near La Crosse.
UW Health set up a tribute web site for Dr. Darren Bean, nurse Mark Coyne and pilot Steve Lipperer and as of 8 a.m. Monday, three dozen messages had been posted, many from colleagues at UW Hospital, as well as from hospitals around the state.
The helicopter crash was the first for Med Flight since the program began in 1985.
A Wisconsin college is closed for the day after they received a gun threat.
According the Southwest Technical College President, a student reported receiving a threatening voicemail early Wednesday morning.
The state of Wisconsin announced Tuesday they paid $251,000 to the Sierra Club as part of a settlement that forced the state to reduce coal usage at a University of Wisconsin power plant.
After a four-year and nearly $700,000 battle through the court system, the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided Tuesday that Madison-area tavern owners did not violate anti-trust laws on their voluntary ban of weekend drink specials.
FENNIMORE, Wis. — An apparent gun threat prompted school officials at Southwest Technical College in Fennimore to close its campus on Wednesday.
The University of Wisconsin System announced four finalists to take the place of outgoing UW-Madison chancellor John Wiley.
They are: Gary Sandefur, dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at UW-Madison; Biddy (Carolyn A.) Martin, provost of Cornell University; R. Timothy Mulcahy, vice president for research at the University of Minnesota; and Rebecca Blank, former dean, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly has announced the names of four finalists for the position.
Only one internal candidate is on the short list to be the next University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor.
MADISON â?? Madison bars that agreed to eliminate drink specials on weekends cannot be sued for an illegal price-fixing conspiracy, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled today.
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The court refused to reinstate a lawsuit brought by drinkers claiming they were overcharged as a result of the barsâ?? 2002 pact to stop serving drink specials after 8 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.
MADISON (AP) – In the weeks after Gov. Jim Doyleâ??s administration ordered state employees to curb unnecessary travel, those same workers charged the state more than $900,000 for hundreds of trips around the world.
Wisconsin state employees visited at least 30 states and the District of Columbia and eight foreign countries in more than 300 trips taken just the first three months of the year, records obtained by The Associated Press show.
Students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison wonâ??t be raising a glass to a decision today by the stateâ??s Supreme Court.
The court dismissed a lawsuit â?? filed in 2004 on behalf of students and other pub crawlers â?? that challenged local barsâ?? agreement to limit drink specials on weekends. The students had called the agreement an illegal price-fixing conspiracy and sought â??tens of millions of dollarsâ? in damages, the Associated Press reported.
The University of Wisconsin is one of the highest-ranking educational institutions in America. But its salaries and other compensation for faculty is low enough that professors are being hired away by other institutions at an alarming rate. The trend caught the eye of Robin Wilson, who’s a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, who recently wrote an article about it. Terry Bell spoke with herâ?¦(Audio.)
MADISON, Wis. — The state of Wisconsin has paid the Sierra Club $251,000 in legal fees after the environmental group settled a lawsuit that uncovered clean air violations at a University of Wisconsin power plant.
In Wisconsin, the availability of larger pools of private equity money and experienced executives have combined with the wealth of life sciences research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create a breeding ground for drug development companies.
For the second time, the Wisconsin Public Service Commission has deemed American Transmission Co.’s application to build the Rockdale-west Middleton power line incomplete.
PSC Division Administrator Robert Norcross mainly sought additional cost and environmental impact information on ATC’s proposed Beltline route for the 345-kilovolt line, in a letter sent Wednesday to the company.
The PSC determined in November that the application ATC submitted in October was incomplete. The PSC gave ATC more than 100 questions to answer, said ATC spokesperson Sarah Justus.
A majority of Wisconsinites give the state’s natural environment high marks, but want more done to protect our air and water as well as requiring power companies to produce more electricity through renewable sources.
The spring 2008 Badger Poll, conducted by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, centered on environmental issues and clean energy. The results were released Thursday.
Wisconsin Environment Director Dan Kohler said in a statement that Wisconsinites cherish what we have here and want it protected. Wisconsin Environment is an environmental advocacy organization.
Gov. Jim Doyle said Thursday that the Legislature’s failure to pass a budget-repair bill poses cash-flow problems that threaten to delay aid payments to local governments and school districts by days or a few weeks.
A poll released Thursday shows Wisconsin residents are more worried about declining water levels than about potential troubles stemming from global warming.
A 2008 Badger Poll by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center shows that declining water levels on lakes, rivers, streams and in the groundwater are the biggest environmental concern. Residents of Milwaukee County and northeastern Wisconsin expressed the most worry about water, the poll indicates.
When Brown Shoe announced it was locating its new headquarters in St. Louis, not Madison — and closing its Famous Footwear offices here — one reason cited was some $43 million in economic development incentives from the state of Missouri.
Wisconsin officials had also attempted to lure Brown Shoe, offering up free land and other perks if it would build its new headquarters here. Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and Chamber of Commerce President Jennifer Alexander even flew to St. Louis to give the pitch.
But rather than spending limited resources fighting each other for new jobs, Midwestern states must work together if they hope to compete in the new world economy, development experts say.
Quoted: Dean of International Studies Gilles Bousquet
The Badger State Summer Games are moving to the Fox Valley in 2009, a move that organizers hope will inject enthusiasm and new sponsorship dollars into the annual amateur sports festival.
The event has been held in Madison for the first 23 years of existence and gets one last run in the capital city this summer.
The Wisconsin Sports Development Corp., which coordinates the Games from its Madison offices, announced Wednesday a three-year commitment to Appleton and surrounding areas. The agreement was buoyed by a $180,000 grant from the Fox Cities Sports Authority through its charitable fund.
Wars of the 20th century will be the focus of a grant of nearly $1 million working to spruce up K-12 education of American history in Madison-area schools, the U.S. Department of Education announced Tuesday.
According to results of a Badger Poll on Tuesday, 91 percent of Wisconsinites think gas prices are extremely or quite problematic.
The poll also found growing concern about the economy and state residents’ ability to pay their bills.
The effects of war on soldiers and their families at home is the focus of a new, million-dollar teaching project. The Wisconsin Veterans Museum is teaming up with the Madison Area Technical College and the University of Wisconsin on â??Life During Wartime,â? which will use veteransâ?? testimonies, photographs, and artifacts in creating a unique curriculum. Coordinators plan to connect state veterans and historians with 150 history teachers during the three-year program.
Stanley Schultz, professor emeritus of History at UW-Madison, says war is such a valuable tool to learning American History. He says they believe that using the wartime experience as a window or a lens onto the American past, they can get people, both teachers and ultimately students, far more excited about the history of their nation, the history of their parents, their grandparents, and ultimately the history of themselves.
STEVENS POINT — Randy Udall gave a presentation on energy consumption on the local University of Wisconsin campus here during Earth Week activities. It was billed as an upbeat look at the future, but the scenario he described was overwhelmingly depressing.
Were it not for the fact that about 150 college students showed up in an auditorium on a sunny spring day, the whole hour might have been too much darkness. Udall, a Coloradan and son of former U.S. Rep. Morris Udall, has given his life to the study of energy, which he believes is the real world currency.
Eric Apfelbach is happy to talk about the promise of using plant sugars to produce synthetic gasoline. But anyone wanting to take a tour of Virent Energy Systems, his Madison-based company, must first sign a confidentiality agreement pledging not to reveal any trade secrets.
The request is not necessarily unusual in the world of biotechnology, but rather reflects the fierce competition among companies working to find an alternative to carbon-based coal and oil that also avoids the downsides of corn-based ethanol.
….The search for a new biofuel is in its third iteration, says Timothy Donohue, a professor of bacteriology and the lead scientist at the UW-Madison-based Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.
On Tuesday, Vietnam veteran Jim Kurtz was among those presenting a plan to teach an estimated 150 fifth- through 12th-grade history teachers in the region about American wars since the Civil War and how they played out at home. The three-year collaboration is being paid for with a $934,966 federal education grant.
MADISON â?? The headline-grabbing claim from Gov. Jim Doyle in March 2005 couldn’t have been clearer.
At a news conference, Doyle said his administration would save taxpayers up to $200 million over four years through better management of the state bureaucracy under the so-called ACE Initiative.
Thousands of state employees will be voting on a new contract the next two weeks after a tentative agreement was reached between the Wisconsin State Employees Union, AFSCME Council 24, and the state of Wisconsin on a new contract for five units of the union representing 23,000 state employees.
Terms of the new deal were not released, pending ratification by union members, with the ballots expected to be counted May 12.
A sixth chancellor may leave the University of Wisconsin System.
UW-Oshkosh Chancellor Richard H. Wells said in a statement that he was named one of three finalists to lead the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, where he would serve as chancellor of Pennsylvania’s 14 state-owned universities.
State Sens. Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton, and Mike Ellis, R-Neenah, again pushed for action on their campaign finance reform legislation Monday night as part of a Common Cause in Wisconsin forum crafted to discuss changes to promote good government in Wisconsin.
Common Cause Executive Director Jay Heck said the forum on the UW-Madison campus was in response to the recent Supreme Court contest between Justice Louis Butler and Justice-elect Mike Gableman, which he called the “most expensive, nasty and demoralizing campaign in state history.” Heck said that the forum was called to address the need for campaign finance reform and would have been held regardless of the election’s outcome.
According to an article in the Wisconsin State Journal, professors arenâ??t the only ones departing the University of Wisconsin for greener pastures; chancellors, apparently, are saying sayonara at an alarming rate, too.
A sixth chancellor in the University of Wisconsin System could be leaving soon.
In the last year, more than a third of the University of Wisconsin ‘s chancellors announced they were vacating the head office.
The rare exodus is causing alarm that the university isn ‘t adequately compensating its academic leadership.
Gov. Jim Doyle took an early stop on his trip to the United Kingdom Thursday to drum up support for an upcoming Madison event.
As eighth-graders across the state are busily preparing for the end of the school year, I hope each of them will take some time to stop and think about the future. Before they begin summer jobs or sports leagues, I encourage them to discuss with their families the upcoming school year and their plans for education after high school.
I don’t want any young people to think college isn’t for them, that it’s only for rich people, or that because their parents didn’t go, they can’t go. Whether they want to become teachers or engineers, or plan to work in exciting new fields in biotechnology and health care, or even if they aren’t sure what job is right for them, a successful high school career will open up opportunities for higher education that will provide many future possibilities.
With UW-Madison finances closely tied to the state Legislature, several key lawmakers Wednesday said they would like to see a diverse array of qualities in the next chancellor.
On the final day of its series on the UW-Madison chancellor search, The Daily Cardinal interviews outgoing Chancellor John Wiley on his experiences at UW-Madison and his thoughts on the search for his replacement.
UW-Madison brainpower.
That ‘s the answer to two questions worth asking this week in the aftermath of Microsoft Corp. ‘s decision to locate a research operation in Madison.
Question No. 1: What attracted the global software giant to this area?
Question No. 2: What should Wisconsin invest in if the state wants to attract more high-tech jobs and income?
Let ‘s hope Wisconsin policymakers are taking notes.
Perhaps the most significant thing about another study on drunken driving that puts Wisconsin at the top of a bad list is not the actual numbers involved but the reaction of researchers. “I’m not shocked; I’m not surprised,” said one. Nor was another: “I think that’s what weve seen historically,” he said.
That points to a need for better education, stiffer penalties for drunken driving and a change in the states notorious drinking culture. That wont be easy, but lives really do depend on making that change. [Also quotes: Paul Moberg, senior scientist in the Population Health Institute at UW-Madison and co-author of a 2007 study on Wisconsin’s alcohol and drug use patterns.]
Human beings have changed the composition of the air itself â?? the global atmosphere â?? and something has to be done about it, UW-Madison professor Jonathan Foley told the state Natural Resources Board Tuesday on Earth Day.
“Between 1950 and 2000, the world population more than doubled. The economy grew sevenfold. Food consumption almost tripled. Water use roughly tripled. Fossil fuel use increased fourfold,” Foley said. “The planet started to notice.”
A long-term rise of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide â?? mainly due to the burning of coal, oil and natural gas â?? warmed the Earth, he said.
The graduation rate for all students in the UW System is higher than the national average. It’s also greater than that of African Americans, creating a gap educators are trying to narrow. Shamane Mills reportsâ?¦(Audio.)
