Category: State news

Taxpayer rage about technical college costs boiled over as state legislators grilled the president of the Wisconsin Technical College System at the State Capitol on Thursday.

“There is a horrific outcry in the western part of the state,” said Kitty Rhoades, R-Hudson, co-chair of the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee.

She told WTCS President Dan Clancy that the intensity of complaints about property taxes that support the technical colleges spiked after a state audit found that many technical college instructors are paid more than professors at state universities in the same areas of Wisconsin.

Providing domestic partner benefits to University of Wisconsin System employees would cost an estimated $1.3 million a year, system President Kevin P. Reilly told the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee Thursday.

Mentions that Dane County, fueled by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the state government, is enjoying growth and now has an estimated 463,826 residents.

Legislators have proposed a bill that could change the geographic mix of the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents, which is now tilted heavily toward Madison and Milwaukee area members.

AB 194, offered by Rep. John Murtha, R-Baldwin, and supported by several colleagues, would require that at least one of the board’s citizen members live in each of Wisconsin’s eight congressional districts.

MADISON â?? The director of the project that freed Steven Avery from prison in 2003 says Avery’s homicide conviction doesn’t affect his project’s charge.

A Manitowoc County jury found Avery guilty Sunday of killing Teresa Halbach in 2005, the culmination of a six-week trial. Avery becomes the first person in the United States exonerated by DNA evidence to be charged subsequently â?? and convicted â?? of homicide.

“(Avery’s conviction) doesn’t change the support of that mission,” Keith Findley, director of the Wisconsin Innocence project said Monday from his office at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

Republican legislators will introduce a bill today aiming to change the geographic representation of the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents.

(MADISON) UW-Madison officials say Wisconsinâ??s recent approval of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage should not affect efforts to get domestic partner benefits for state employees.

The proposal is included in Governor Jim Doyleâ??s budget. Even if it doesnâ??t encounter court obstacles, the expansion of health insurance benefits is expected to face opposition in the Republican-controlled Assembly.

Proponents of the plan say campuses need to offer such benefits to be competitive. Charles Hoornstra is Director of Legal Services at UW-Madison. He says the UW is the only Big 10 university that doesnâ??t have the benefits, which puts it at a disadvantage in competing for faculty who are skillful people and otherwise would like to come here, but donâ??t.

As part of national Sunshine Week, March 11-17, the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council is for the first time giving awards in recognition of people and events that shaped the fortunes of open government in Wisconsin in 2006, for better or worse.

Among them:

â?¢ Open Records Scoop of the Year (the “Scoopee”): Patrick Marley and Stacy Forster, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Last fall, some state lawmakers waxed indignant at reports that 80 percent of UW faculty claimed no sick leave in 2005, adding to a nest egg they can later cash in for health care benefits. These enterprising reporters, using the open records law, found that lawmakers were doing the same thing.

MADISON, Wis. – Technical college faculty members in Wisconsin are some of the highest paid in the nation, according to an audit released Tuesday. They also earn generous benefits and receive additional compensation by taking on workloads larger than those required under their union contracts, the Legislative Audit Bureau said

MADISON, Wis. — A public forum was held on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus on Tuesday to discuss whether the university should begin offering health insurance benefits to domestic partners.

The UW-Madison is the only institution in the Big Ten that doesn’t offer the benefits, but Gov. Jim Doyle said that he wants to change that. Doyle’s budget proposal would authorize and fund benefits for domestic partners of all state employees, including those of the UW System.

 UW-Madison is working to build the case for extending health insurance benefits to domestic partners.

Laurie Beth Clark, UW- Madison’s vice provost for faculty and staff programs and the campus coordinator for the issue, sent out an e-mail last week to all deans, directors and department chairs, asking for stories and numbers of faculty, staff members or graduate students who have been affected by the lack of such benefits at the university.

Picture shows University of Wisconsin-Madison tree pruner Mike Fennigkoh trimming branches of an ash tree last month on the UW campus as part of the state’s ash borer plan.

(MADISON) A provision tucked into Governor Jim Doyleâ??s budget would give faculty at the University of Wisconsin the right to unionize and collectively bargain their contracts.

The idea would give faculty and academic staff the same kind of collective bargaining rights held by other state employees. They would not be able to strike, but they would be able to bargain over wages and hours.

UW-Platteville Professor Raymond Spoto is a long-time advocate of the idea and is a past president of the Association of University of Wisconsin Professionals. He says the rights would not be granted automatically. It would be up to faculty at each individual UW campus to vote on whether they want to bargain their contracts. Spoto says without that right, UW administration will never take the existing faculty governance system seriously.

As lawmakers prepare to debate Wisconsin’s next biennial budget plan, six communities around the state will host public hearings. State Representative Kitty Rhoades (R-Hudson), a co-chair of Joint Finance Committee, says it’s a great opportunity for citizens to take part in the budget process.

With spring approaching, March signifies new beginnings but as Women’s History Month, it is also a time for reflection on past beginnings, a chance to honor the women before us who dared to live freely and in their daring provided greater possibilities for women today.

But the people honoring those women remind us that remembering women’s history is also about recognizing that it is continuous, about taking lessons from past women and applying them now to improve women’s future.

(UW-Madison Women’s History Month events are mentioned.)

A proposal in the governor’s budget that would allow faculty and academic staff in the University of Wisconsin System to unionize has met some opposition at the UW-Madison campus.

The UW-Madison Faculty Senate and Academic Staff Assembly are reviewing the proposal and have not yet voted on it, but leaders of the academic staff voiced opposition today.

Not long ago, Sarah Roberts of Madison went online to check the UW Systemâ??s budget Redbook, as sheâ??s done in the past, and discovered that salary data for individuals is no longer posted. She called the UW and was purportedly told it was removed for â??privacyâ? reasons but still available at public libraries. To her, this makes no sense at all.

University of Wisconsin System leaders never informed the Board of Regents about a troubled $28.4 million software project until they canceled it last year, a report released Friday shows.

The regents did not receive a single update on problems with the system to track payroll and benefits information, the report said, despite warnings the project was in danger as far back as 2004. Some campus officials doubted it would ever work even earlier.

The first woman dean in the UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences’ century-plus history remembers very well a meeting with a Wisconsin farmer as she was about to take the reins of the college last year.

At a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a building at the Hancock Agricultural Research Station, the middle-aged potato grower came up and gave her a hearty handshake, Molly Jahn recalled.

“He said, ‘Thank you!’ and I said, “I haven’t done anything yet.” He said, ‘I am the proud father of two incredibly capable young women. And I have to thank you for the example you’ve set for what is possible for them.'”

Gov. Jim Doyle said Tuesday he supports a plan permitting Madison and other cities to offer more domestic partner benefits to employees and same-sex partners.

Despite a reported increase in administrative salaries nationwide this past year, administrators at the University of Wisconsin continue to earn less than their peers around the country.

At noon every weekday, Randall Davidson comes on the air on WHA/AM 970 and gives the Wisconsin Public Radio statewide weather forecast. It sounds like a little thing, and it is.

But it’s also a big thing. Because the weather was the first thing ever heard on WHA/AM back when it started in 1921. And, for a while, it was the only thing.