Retired state employees will see an 11 percent reduction in the premium for the popular Medicare Plus $1 million insurance program for 2006, the Group Insurance Board decided Tuesday.
….The state employee health insurance program for active workers will see an 9.8 percent increase for single coverage and 9.9 percent for family coverage.
….Those increases won’t affect what employees will pay out of pocket for 2006.
Poverty hit its highest mark in a decade in Wisconsin, where it rose faster than in any other state, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.
A 1.9 percentage-point increase in the poverty rate left 11.0 percent of Wisconsin residents poor in 2003-04, raising concerns about vulnerable residents and questions about the state’s recovery from the national recession.
A debate has erupted between the UW System Board of Regents and Wisconsin State Legislation about UW employment practices that continue to pay employees in “backup” positions and after being convicted of a felony.
This debate has led to plans for reviews of employment policies by both the Joint Legislative Audit Bureau and the Board of Regents this September. Pending these reviews, backup appointments have been suspended.
Before signing the state budget July 25, Gov. Jim Doyle used his powers of veto to restore $43 million to the UW System. But a $1 million cut the legislature passed specifically for UW-Madison stood and UW officials stressed that the small increase in funding the system received is not near enough to counter rising costs.
The scores of Wisconsin students who took the SAT college entrance exam continued to inch up during the last testing period, the College Board reported Tuesday.
But even as scores were rising overall, a large achievement gap remained between Wisconsin’s white and minority students. Even though the state’s minority students averaged scores that were 74 points higher than their peers across the country, the gap between whites and minorities has grown broader for blacks, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanic students.
Out of 363 staff positions the University of Wisconsin-River Falls has just 14 staff members have backup positions.
This according to Mark Kinders, a UW-RF spokesman represents just four percent of the entire River Falls staff.
State government will spend $600 million more over the next two years than a proposed constitutional amendment would have allowed, according to a new report by the Legislature’s nonpartisan fiscal analysts.
The proposed amendment – dubbed the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR – is designed to limit how much state and local governments can increase spending each year.
Had it been in place for the $53 billion budget the governor signed into law last month, it would have required a cut equivalent to what the state will spend over the next two years to run the Legislature, the governor’s office and the court system.
Some University of Wisconsin campuses routinely violate a federal privacy law in asking students to disclose Social Security numbers without explaining how they will be used, according to an audit.
Some students at UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison also continue to use student ID cards that contain their Social Security numbers despite a state law requiring campuses to have randomly generated student ID numbers instead, the audit by the UW System found.
And some class rosters and grade reports that contain Social Security numbers are publicly posted, which may be a violation of a separate federal privacy law, the audit found.
Think of venture capital as a combination of milk money and those quarters you shove into the slot machine. Without milk, young lads don’t grow into strapping lads. And if you don’t gamble those quarters, the jackpot is ever elusive. In the world of venture capital, Wisconsin is a 98-pound weakling. And, alas, the people willing to gamble on poor ol’ Wisconsin have to play the nickel slots.
It’s not just about getting more kids to graduate from high school. It’s also about the caliber of the work they can do when they graduate. That’s true for most students. It’s especially true when it comes to closing the achievement gap between white students and minority students.
Of specific urgency in a city such as Milwaukee, with large numbers of minority students, were strong indications that even when minority students are very successful in high school, they are not graduating ready to do the same kind of rigorous college work that white students are.
It’s arguably the largest industry in town, employing nearly 20,000 people.
Some $500 million in new construction is currently in the works – including a $78 million UW Children’s Hospital, a $134 million Interdisciplinary Research Complex or “IRC” and the $174 million expansion at St. Marys Hospital.
Yet when it comes to talking about economic development strategies for the Madison area, not everyone thinks of the health care industry.
It took a few weeks of hemming and hawing, but at last the University of Wisconsin System has come to see the wisdom of having a full-fledged outside audit of its employment practices.
Anyone looking for an explanation for why the UW System has a hard time winning legislative support for its finances need look no further than the early responses of UW officials to requests by members of the state Assembly and Senate for information on how many system employees have been convicted of felonies.
Gov. Jim Doyle welcomed an audit of the University of Wisconsin System’s employment practices, saying recent media reports have noted “outrageous” wastes of taxpayer dollars.
UW System President Kevin Reilly asked a legislative panel on Tuesday to authorize the audit, about a month after outraged lawmakers pressed for a similar review.
The people who work for Wisconsin government are being demonized once again.
Government workers are either – take your pick – lazy and shiftless or coddled and overpaid.
The latest fuel for state worker bashers came from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, which last week issued a report that shows Wisconsin public employees pay a smaller share of their retirement costs than those in other states. Plus, they then receive higher pension benefits than nearly everyone else when they retire.
If holding conferences and talking about high-tech were the sole gauges of economic development success, Wisconsin would be booming these days like Dublin, Ireland.
Unfortunately, every other state from Alabama to Oregon is trying to market itself as the next Silicon Valley or Research Triangle. And Wisconsin is having a particularly hard time shifting gears from its traditional old economy of manufacturing and agriculture into a new economy world where brains count more than brawn.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is the top party school in the nation, according to new Princeton Review rankings. The publication also ranked UW-Madison as third in “lots of beer” and “lots of hard liquor,” seventh in “reefer madness,” and 20th in “best college newspaper.”
In a statement, UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley said efforts to curb high-risk drinking will continue.
“Junk science that results in a day of national media coverage does not do this issue justice,” he said.
In La Crosse, where the world’s largest six-pack dots the skyline, police may soon demand registration to own a keg of beer.
The proposed ordinance, which would require that liquor store owners take a name, address, driver’s license number and a $100 deposit from anyone renting kegs in the city, is the result of more than a year of municipal self-examination that followed the Mississippi River drowning death of a college student.
…while dozens of pundits and politicians paid tribute to Gaylord Nelson following his death on July 3 at age 89 and lauded him for his sterling environmental record, most made passing or no reference to the issue to which the father of Earth Day devoted the last decade of his life: overpopulation. It is, Nelson had maintained, not only a critical issue for the future of mankind, but the most compelling issue of them all.
(Dr. Dennis Maki, head of infectious diseases at the UW-Madison Medical School, is quoted in this first installment of a two-part series by Rob Zaleski.)
Nine Republican lawmakers are asking for an independent state audit to determine how many felons are employed by the University of Wisconsin System.
Led by state Rep. Scott Suder, R- Abbotsford, the group hand-delivered a letter Friday to the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, which handles requests for audits to the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau. Suder previously asked System President Kevin Reilly to provide the information after recent news reports about three UW-Madison professors who were convicted of serious crimes but remain employed by the university pending internal investigations and/or appeals.
Republican legislators are calling for an audit of the University of Wisconsin System that would determine how many school employees have been convicted of felonies, saying they were outraged to learn that UW-Madison has failed to immediately fire three professors convicted of crimes and that it has kept two of them on the payroll while they serve time behind bars.
The University of Wisconsin System will decide this fall whether to rebuild an unfinished computer system that’s already cost the university $25 million.
UW has spent five years constructing the Appointment, Payroll and Benefits System, a human resources database and payroll system for the 26-campus university system. It was scheduled to be operational last April, but is still unusable.
Keith Bellows, editor in chief of National Geographic Traveler magazine shares Sell some small-to-medium-size college towns that ââ?¬Å?have a real ability to keep the young and the young-at-heart engaged in culture and fun.ââ?¬Â
Madison, Wis.
ââ?¬Å?The University of Wisconsin is big, but there’s a small-town feel here in the state’s capital (you can’t get away from the cheese, but you can go ice fishing on any winter’s day),ââ?¬Â Bellows says. ââ?¬Å?When you think of Madison, wedged between Mendota and Monona lakes, you think of a backwater place, but really there’s an incredible eclectic urban feel to it. It’s an interesting town with buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright.ââ?¬Â 800-373-6376; visitmadison.com
(EAU CLAIRE) A concerted effort to reduce high risk drinking on the UW-Eau Claire campus will be funded by a new federal grant.
A survey of drinking by students at UW-Eau Claire last year found 91 percent drink, and 57 percent report binge drinking. Lowering that rate will be difficult because Wisconsin has the highest binge drinking level of 40 states studied by Harvard University. (Third item)
University of Wisconsin Chancellor John Wiley is aware critics have questioned the effectiveness of UW’s student-athlete discipline policy, implemented in August 2003, and is sensitive to the image of the athletic department and the university in general. Wiley even acknowledges the policy isn’t flawless and does not deter individuals from breaking the law. However, Wiley adds that the policy was not designed to deter lawbreaking but to allow school officials to mete out penalties based on one set of rules and provide students an avenue to appeal. “A law against murder doesn’t eliminate murder,” Wiley said. “And a student-misconduct policy doesn’t eliminate misconduct. It deals with it when it happens.”
When a student newspaper published a review in 2001 that said Jewish producers had caused a “Blitzkrieg” of one-sided movies about the Holocaust as a form of revenge, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee administrators denounced it as repugnant but defended the paper’s right to express such views. The Leader may not enjoy such a defense should it print a similar article this year.
In June, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago ruled that college newspapers can be subject to the same type of censorship as high school newspapers. The decision, which applies in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, came in a case out of Governors State University in Illinois. It could affect more than newspapers. Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, said all subsidized college activities involving student speech, such as groups that bring speakers to campus, are subject to censorship unless they can prove they are a public forum, a place or publication for free expression.
The No. 2 official at the University of Wisconsin-Madison moved up his retirement after he decided to pull out of an agreement that would have kept him on paid leave through the end of the upcoming school year.
Provost Peter Spear originally announced in April he would step down after the fall semester. At the time, the school did not disclose a plan that would allow Spear to collect his $227,000 salary for five months of paid leave after he left campus.
Madison, Wis. — A report is due next month that will help University of Wisconsin System officials determine whether and how to proceed with an IT project that was put on hold after approximately $25 million was spent working to implement it over a five-year period. The project was determined to be fraught with problems, including a lack of good project management.
The Medical College of Wisconsin has leveraged a $2.5 million grant, part of the Bush Administration’s “War on Drugs,” to partly fund a new, wide-ranging research facility. The school’s technology transfer office calls the $8.3 million facility another step forward in its efforts to move scientific discoveries into new products that can help patients. Among other things, its high-powered imaging equipment will be used to study the effects of cocaine on the brains of rats. The facility also will be available for other projects by scientists from across the state.
A strand of hair collected from a 1985 crime scene has led to a proposal for wide-ranging reform of the state’s criminal justice system. The root of the hair, which police saved for nearly two decades, contained DNA evidence that ultimately exonerated Steven Avery, a Manitowoc County man who was released in 2003 after serving 18 years in prison for a sexual assault he didn’t commit. On Wednesday, state lawmakers and Gov. Jim Doyle unveiled a package of legislation addressing the problems that were highlighted by Avery’s case. The proposals would change the way suspected criminals are questioned and prosecuted. The bill is expected to be a top priority when the Legislature returns in September for its fall session. Avery was freed through the work of the Wisconsin Innocence Project at the UW Law School.
What’s billed as the world’s largest public art exhibit will help promote the state’s dairy industry next year.
“CowParade Wisconsin 2006” – a collection of life-size, painted, fiberglass cow statues – will kick off Cows on the Concourse in Madison on June 3, 2006, and continue through Oct. 13, 2006. The cows will travel to events across the state, including the World Dairy Expo.
….After the promotion concludes, about 50 cows will be auctioned off with the proceeds going to UW Children’s Hospital and other local nonprofit organizations.
Wisconsin state and local government retirees got a better pension deal than almost all their counterparts across the country in the 2001-02 fiscal year, a report released Tuesday found.
The average monthly pension payment to state and local government retirees for the year that ended June 30, 2002, was $1,958, second only to Rhode Island, where government retirees got an average $1,969 a month, according to the study from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance. The national average for that period was $1,427 a month.
For the first time in a decade, Wisconsin slips to No. 2 nationally when it comes to the record of high school students on the ACT college admissions test. They averaged 22.2 on a scale of 36; the average score in Minnesota was 22.3.
Public employees in Wisconsin receive some of the richest retirement benefits in the country while making the smallest contributions to their pension systems, according to a new report by a non-partisan taxpayers group.
MADISON CRIMINAL defense attorney Chris Van Wagner was in Rusk County on Monday, meeting with his new client, a UW-Madison Law School graduate named Cherie Barnard. The charge is lying to a grand jury being party to first-degree murder.
The charging and extradition of Barnard are the latest twist in a 26-year-old murder case with several Madison ties.
There�s a growing awareness statewide that we need our state�s University of Wisconsin System to get the present episode of quirky employment problems behind us, both for the state and the System�s reputation.
For educated people, those folks over in the University of Wisconsin System sure seem to have a predilection for stepping into it with the state Legislature.
The success of the Social Security program, which marks its 70th anniversary today, is beyond debate. The program has allowed tens of millions of Americans to retire with dignity. And hundreds of millions more will know that same sense of dignity and peace of mind in the future. The Social Security program has never missed a payment and, unlike most federal initiatives, it is solvent today and will be for decades to come. With minor tinkering – such as a fair tax on wealthy Americans, who contribute far less of their earnings to support the program than do working class and middle class Americans – Social Security checks will continue to arrive so long as there is a United States of America.
That is the genius of the program envisioned by University of Wisconsin professors and implemented by President Roosevelt….
A system built by the UW-Madison Division of Information Technology (DoIT) played a key role in winning $1.6 million in federal research funding for Wisconsin health agencies.
The National Science Foundation recently awarded a three-year Goal Oriented Privacy Preservation grant that promotes research on data mining strategies that preserve privacy.
….As the Social Security program turns 70 on Sunday with an uncertain future, UW-Madison is highlighting its role as the intellectual birthplace of the centerpiece of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Three Wisconsin natives who studied economics at the university shaped the program that has helped millions of elderly, disabled and widowed lead decent lives.
WEST ALLIS – Amy Hagen had no idea what a pig looks like before it gives birth.
But under the tutelage of longtime veterinarians at the Wisconsin State Fair, the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine student learned to watch for the signs: the pig getting restless, lying down, and her mammary glands filling up with milk.
….Hagen is one of about 25 University of Wisconsin-Madison veterinary students who are lending a hand, and getting an up-close education, at the fair’s birthing barn.
LA CROSSE (AP) – Students at three state technical colleges could have an easier time transferring credits to University of Wisconsin System schools under legislation introduced by two lawmakers.
State Rep. Jeff Wood, R-Chippewa Falls, said students in the Eau Claire, La Crosse and Kenosha areas don’t have the same access to a liberal arts education as students elsewhere.
Highlighting what critics called the pervasiveness of backup appointments across the University of Wisconsin System, officials confirmed Friday that President Kevin Reilly’s own housekeeper holds one of the controversial positions, although Reilly has said he learned of it only recently.
All told, the state is spending roughly $65 million a year on more than 400 information technology contractors, including at least 68 who have been on the state payroll for five years or more. That’s too much, say some state legislators who argue taxpayers would save millions of dollars if they used more state employees for the work.
Seven Wisconsin high school students posted a 36 on the ACT during the 2004-’05 testing cycle, according to data released by ACT Inc. on Friday. They were among 251 students nationwide who averaged a top score on the battery of English, reading, science and math tests during that time.
MADISON ââ?¬â? University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly says his housekeeper has a backup academic position.
The revelation stirred fresh outrage from Republican lawmakers already upset over similar fallback jobs in UW administrators� contracts.
MADISON ââ?¬â? Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation they say would make it easier for students at three state technical colleges to transfer credits to University of Wisconsin System schools.
Quoted: UW-Madison political scientist David Canon.
University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly on Thursday said he had “no doubt” that university leaders will soon move to change some personnel policies and practices as a result of intense scrutiny by state lawmakers over paid leaves, backup jobs and the treatment of professors convicted of serious crimes.
Quoted: Gordon Baldwin, a retired University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor.
A legislator who earlier introduced a bill that would reduce the drinking age from 21 to 19 for Wisconsin soldiers is now circulating a measure under which soldiers 19 and 20 would be fined no more than $5 for underage drinking.
What exactly do you have to do to lose your job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison? If you do your job poorly, that isnââ?¬â?¢t enough. If you take off seven months for ââ?¬Å?personal issuesââ?¬Â and then go job-hunting somewhere else, that isnââ?¬â?¢t enough. And now we find out that being an incarcerated child molester isnââ?¬â?¢t enough.
A north central Wisconsin legislator said he plans to send letters to University of Wisconsin officials by today to ask them if any of their employees are convicted felons, following the convictions of three UW-Madison educators in the past several months.
Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, has called for the university to fire such employees without pay once they have been convicted.
A UW Medical School professor sentenced to prison last week for sexually assaulting three girls was told in mid-June that he would be fired.
But physiology professor Roberto Coronado, 52, remains a member of the faculty — paid through accrued vacation time — while he appeals his dismissal, said Casey Nagy, special assistant to UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley.
In yet another embarrassment for the University of Wisconsin System, professors in Madison have found a new place to use their vacation time: in jail.
A legislator has lashed out at University of Wisconsin-Madison officials for not immediately dismissing several professors who have been convicted of crimes and keeping two of them on the payroll while they serve time behind bars.
Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, said Tuesday that once university employees are convicted of a crime, they should be dismissed immediately and given no pay.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison came under fire Tuesday for not immediately dismissing three professors who have been convicted of crimes and for keeping two of them on the payroll while they serve time behind bars.
A legislator has lashed out at University of Wisconsin-Madison officials for not immediately dismissing several professors who have been convicted of crimes and keeping two of them on the payroll while they serve time behind bars.
Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, said Tuesday that once university employees are convicted of a crime, they should be dismissed immediately and given no pay.
Quoted: UW-Madison entomologist Phil Pelletteri.
Quoted: William Cronon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison history professor who has spent considerable time on the Apostle Islands.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher has found that national forests have become islands of wilderness, increasingly blocked off from other forests by creeping residential development.
