Category: State news

A Republican legislator is defending the GOP budget against attacks by the Governor and UW leaders.

The budget adopted by majority Republicans in the Assembly does not “slash and burn” the UW system in the ways university officials, the Governor, and union leaders claim. That’s according to State Representative Steve Nass (R-Whitewater). He says the budget does reduce spending, but much of that was done in top heavy areas of the administration.

MADISON â?? University of Wisconsin chancellors warned today that the budget approved by the state Assembly would require them to cut courses, increase class sizes and delay needed building projects.

Gov. Jim Doyle said the budget would also hurt access to the UW System by limiting financial aid for low-income students and depriving resources that campuses need to make room for additional students.

Doyle, a Democrat, hosted university officials from around the state at a round-table event to discuss the potential impact of the Republican-controlled Assemblyâ??s budget on the system of 13 four-year universities and 13 two-year colleges.

Madison: The UW Board of Regents will be forced to set tuition for the coming school year with no state budget in place. UW System chancellors are worried about making even more cuts.

“We really are at a fundamental decision point in this state about in what direction we are going to go,” says Governor Jim Doyle. Doyle says the state has reached a tipping point when it comes to funding the UW System.

The Assembly Republican’s budget contains $120 million less than the Democrat’s version.

The President of the UW System is urging lawmakers not to compromise on funding higher education.

The budget offered by Assembly Republicans includes $120 million in cuts to University of Wisconsin campuses. System President Kevin Reilly says even meeting half way on that is a bad idea. Reilly says even if Democrats and Republicans meet halfway, the UW System will still be losing $60 million in funding, which would make it difficult to keep up with the demands being placed on campuses.

Governor Jim Doyle is joining University of Wisconsin Chancellors from across the state in blasting the Assembly Republican budget.

During a roundtable hearing at the Capitol on Monday, Governor Doyle met with Chancellors from all UW campuses to discuss the impacts of the state budget offered by Republicans. Doyle says the budget cuts $120 million from campuses, during at time when the cost of higher education is increasing.

“A tangle of blackberries,” with an occasional bear and rattlesnake sighting, was how a newspaper article described Bascom Hill, long before it became the heart of a university campus.

A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s ban on gay marriage was filed Friday at the Dane County Courthouse.

William McConkey, an instructor at UW-Oshkosh who lives in Baileys Harbor, is not an attorney but wrote the lawsuit himself to “fight things that are wrong.”

A self-identified “Christian, straight, married” father of nine and grandfather of seven said today he is filing what is likely to be the first lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s recently passed constitutional ban on gay marriage.

Bill McConkey, an instructor of political science at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and resident of Baileys Harbor, was planning to drop off his 14-page complaint this morning at the Dane County Courthouse. McConkey, who is not an attorney, prepared the lawsuit on his own.

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said Thursday the University of Wisconsin System’s new admissions policy does not violate anti-discrimination laws.

Samantha Petroski of Green Bay likes to play the piano and is really into music, but if her rock star dream doesn’t pan out she wouldn’t mind being a doctor.

At age 13, Petroski’s dreams are clear cut thanks to a little push from the Wisconsin Covenant, a program that asks students to sign a pledge in eighth grade affirming they will earn a high school diploma, participate in their community, take a high school curriculum that prepares them for higher education, maintain a B average in high school, and apply in a timely manner for state and federal financial aid.

The Legislature’s conference committee on the budget made little progress in its first meeting Wednesday.
The four Democrats and four Republicans met for about 2 1/2 hours. They talked of the need to work together for the good of the state, laid out their differences and took aim at each other’s proposals.

Elliott Russell, a student at Oconomowoc Middle School, can only speculate what college might be like.

But if it resembles the summer science academy in which he and 21 other middle-school-age students are participating at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha this week, Elliott can’t wait.

The UW System budget proposed by the Republican-dominated Assembly would slash administrative and public relations positions — cuts that legislators say would save tax dollars but university leaders say would weaken their ability to perform their mission.

The proposal would eliminate 17 high-level administrative positions — including several at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — for a savings of $4.6 million in state funding. It would also cut one-fourth of the funding for university relations and communications functions “not directly related” to instruction, research and public service, a $2 million reduction.

….”Feingold: A New Democratic Party,” published by Simon & Schuster, comes out Tuesday. It is the culmination of 14 formal interviews with Feingold, as well as scores of informal ones, in between listening sessions, an examination of the historical record, and interviews with his siblings, friends and foes, journalists and other impartial observers.

Excerpts from the book will run Monday and Tuesday in The Capital Times.

RONALD REAGAN was famous for liking jelly beans, but he may have also been partial to ice cream, since in 1984 he named July “National Ice Cream Month” and the third Sunday of the month “National Ice Cream Day.”

This week, the Sacramento Bee ran a nearly 3,000-word story titled: “Here’s the Scoop: Everything you need to know about ice cream as its big day approaches.”

….In a section of the piece titled “Great scoops in history,” there was this: “1881 — The owner of a soda fountain in Madison, Wis., placed a scoop of ice cream into a soda glass, topped it with chocolate sauce and called it a sundae because it was sold only on Sundays. The price was 5 cents. A historical marker was erected in 1973 to mark the site.”

(UW’s Stephen Babcock and Babcock Hall are mentioned in this column.)

Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch says: We increased funding for the University of Wisconsin by over 3 percent and targeted resources to students and the classroom, not to administrators in Madison.

Not since the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay was formed has a budget appropriation been as important to the campus as the one in the 2007-09 biennium, says Chancellor Bruce Shepard.

Shepard said that was how some UW-Green Bay board trustees described the situation last week after the state Assembly scaled back proposed increases to the campus’s growth agenda over the next two years.

A recent working paper out of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that the state exported 7,000 more college graduates overall than it imported from 1995 to 2000 – not a large number, but a loss nonetheless.

Erin Hensel just finished her first year of college and is looking ahead to getting a master’s degree to become a middle school math teacher.

Hensel, a 28-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran from Milwaukee, said it was important to her that the state keep a benefit that provides full tuition reimbursement to all veterans for up to 128 credit hours.

Separate plans that have passed the state Senate and Assembly would limit the benefit to either undergraduate or graduate degrees, but not both. And the benefit would expire 10 years after a person left military service.

The Republican budget that passed the Assembly also removes $10.5 million in funding to help reimburse the state’s technical colleges and universities for the program.

(GREEN BAY) Governor Jim Doyle was in northeastern Wisconsin Tuesday (7/17) blasting a Republican budget plan. Doyle called the Assembly-backed budget an â??assault on higher education.â?

When it comes to the University of Wisconsin budget, thereâ??s a gulf of more than $100 million dollars between one passed by the Republican-controlled Assembly and the one from the Democratic-controlled state Senate. Republicans say their plan protects Wisconsin families from tax increases, but Doyle says Republicans also erased $44 million dollars in new financial aid that was previously endorsed by the bipartisan Joint Finance Committee. He says the Assembly â??took out every dimeâ? of that financial aid increase.

While lawmakers debate over funding for the Wisconsin GI bill, some veterans take the heat.

Key lawmakers are trying to restore recent cuts to the Veterans Tuition Remission Program. In a four-city tour, certain Republicans and Democrats joined forces, they say, to “keep their promise” about the bill’s “original intent,” but one Iraq veteran isn’t buying it.

A special Assembly-Senate committee that will try to negotiate differences over the next state budget will not meet this week, officials said Tuesday.

STEVENS POINT — While the state budget process is far from done, the Wisconsin Assembly’s version of the document, which calls for a $120 million cut from University of Wisconsin System campuses, is making students and administrators at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point nervous.

The wildly disparate budgets crafted by the state Senate and the Assembly are more than spending plans. They’re blueprints for 2008 election campaigns, according to state party leaders.

For all of the bluster and showboating, the so-called budget deliberations by the Wisconsin State Senate and Assembly were so much ado about nothing. Both houses rubber stamped meaningless documents by partisan votes. And thus we’ve wasted little time ourselves worrying about the extraordinarily senseless, destructive and mean-spirited actions of either party in either house.

It’s the Capitol’s version of the World Series of Poker. But it’s playing with your money.

Eight legislative leaders – four Democrats and four Republicans – will face off this week to try to decide how state government should spend $56.3 billion to $66.1 billion by mid-2009.

Budget poker now moves to the next round of betting in Madison, and eventually we’ll get to see if anyone is bluffing.

Why does there seem to be such enmity between Republican legislators and the University of Wisconsin System?

During the past several years, the University System has been subjected to budget cuts higher than many other agencies. Republicans have criticized the university central administrators for what they see as waste, and some legislators have been unhappy with what they see as overly liberal professors and speakers on campuses.

But what is at the heart of the disputes? We asked Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch that question during an editorial board session Friday.

State Representative Frank Lasee (R-Green Bay) stands behind his proposed budget cuts to the UW Law School.

Lasee says it’s simple. There are just too many lawyers. He believes taxpayers should not be subsidizing the law school to produce more lawyers to just do busy work. In fact, he says, many who graduate end up doing something else any way.