 Oh, and welcome back to the Donahue Group. We're having a good time here talking about the great issues of the day, at least, as relates to the city, local politics, and the state. I am sitting with Cal Potter, Tom Pineschi, Ken Ristow, and may I just stay for the audience as a whole, who don't seem to really have a fine enough appreciation for the pearls that I'm wearing today. And it hurts, but that's OK. Life does go on, and we'll continue to talk. The pearls are hurting you? Is that what you're saying? Your lack of sensitivity to this issue is troubling, but in any event, let's get on to the real news and talk about all sorts of things going on at the state level. We discussed in our last program talking a little bit about local issues as relates to the school district, the police liaison officers, school reading scores, and so forth. A big deal in Florence County, far away in the northeast part of the state, they're going to close their school district. Now, we have 72 counties in the state. We have well over 400 school districts. 426. 426, I was going to say 416. 426 school districts. Now it appears 425 school districts. This hasn't happened for 15 years. Cal, you're a former DPI person. What's your take on this? Well, this is a major occurrence, because once the school board votes to dissolve, the state comes in and now has to set up a special committee that involves the state superintendent to try to work out the dissolution of a county literally and divide it amongst the adjoining school districts, which is something that has not happened in a long time. And it reflects, I think, the very inflexible revenue caps that we have in this state that don't reflect the needs of districts that have very little economic activity or growth in districts that have declining enrollment. You're talking about a district in Florence County with less than 700 kids. It's a small district, but yet it's a large district. And so you're going to deal with a situation of busing kids, appropriation of monies for debt that they incurred on buildings, where the buildings are going to be moved to, and how far these kids will have to go if indeed they are transferred into a new district. And Florence, I think, got crunched not only with declining enrollment, so school districts now get money per student on a three-year average, but high-property taxes because at least for vacationers, Florence County can be a nice place to go to. So you have property taxes rising, which is happening all over the northern part of the state. Well, it's happening, not property taxes, property values. And so in that state formula, it's a double crunch and they're kind of out of luck. I haven't been following the process other than just what I read a couple of days ago, but I gather they had three referendums over the course of time because they were always spending more than they could get in revenue and they were having to cut programs to, or they always had more costs than they had revenue so they had to cut programs. And this was like in the third time around they had to cut programs and they had referenda before and the people in the community voted down the referenda. Last one was only by 1%, I think it was 21 votes. It was pretty close, it was very close, yes. But it comes down to, and then there are five school districts surrounding the area, that's what I read. You probably have a better sense of what Florence is and so the students who had to bus long ways to Florence, the school, now we'll be divvied up and bust. So people are making a decision for their children. Cal, you can answer this question. Who makes the ultimate determination then of what parcels, if this continues to go down, which parcels go to which school districts? There is a committee that's set up by the state superintendent that does the actual dividing and I would presume they'll just bring in the superintendents and the school board members from the adjoining districts and say let's, some group think here as to what's logistically good in what, particularly probably debt, you might have a new school in one area that needs to be put in another, who's gonna share that debt? Those are the type of questions that are very difficult questions. This is not something that's easily done and so usually what happens is a district decides to merge with an adjoining district and in that way there's sort of an amicable agreement when you start divvying up a whole county between five adjoining districts, that starts to get into, everybody sits down and says well now if I get all the sequels of evaluation and this number of students, what happens to my state aid and then they start taking positions and so it gets to very real hairy situations. That's where I was headed with my question is the politics of that. It's gonna be very difficult, yes. I'll play devil's advocate. Suppose I'm a family member and I have kids in the Florence district but I'm closer to another district which seems to have a better school and I'd like to send my kids there but I gotta go to Florence. Well actually, you could do that. But I could do that. On the school choice, yeah. Yeah, there's school choice provisions. That's what's kept Kohler alive, quite frankly. Yeah, I mean the Kohler school district has grown through. Providers agreement amongst the parties, it's particularly. And there has to be room. Yes, and that's usually the case. It has to be room for the receiving school district. And so they would probably not support the referendum because they're gonna send their kids to another district. So I don't wanna spend for the school. Well part of the problem though is this. There's a mixture of different politics. The funding formula, as far as I can tell which is incredibly complex and I will never fully understand. But at least the basic skeleton I have down it's a profoundly unfair system. And so you get, if your population is declining what we're doing with our funding formula is speeding up the decline of those communities by the fact that they can't afford their schools anymore. And that has a profound, in my opinion, a profound ripple effect. And the Supreme Court has said the funding formula as it stands with revenue caps but also with that property valuation where you came in at the revenue cap level back in 1996 depended so much on what your property tax structure was which may or may not have been fair. And how frugal you were in the past. And how, yeah, exactly. You got punished for being frugal under these for this existing system. Exactly. That's the problem with codifying in the legislative arena, revenue cap formula that applies to 426 school districts and keep it in place for 10 years. It's just, it should be revamped. It really should. And it's so complex and those are difficult, difficult issues. There's no right or wrong answer but this is just not a, it's not a good thing. Now, do we need 426 school districts? Probably not. Probably not. But we have, we've talked in prior programs, how many local units of government do we have in Wisconsin? Thousands. Do we need all of those? No. No, not from a practical standpoint but for the pride that you have in your school district and what it means to your community and so forth. Those are big deals. The Plymouth School District, the Elkhart Lake School District are facing precisely these same kind of issues and it's tough. There are a number in the state. I think the CESA director, Bob Kellogg from the northeast part of the state has indicated he has several districts that are very similar to Florence and that this continues. More things will hit the fan in the near future. I was gonna ask you, do you think that Florence being the first might be a catalyst for more? It's hard to say, you know. Like you said, the people voted several times. Racine went through a difficult time and the second time around they passed a referendum. But again, Racine has a lot more tax base and a whole different situation than Northern Wisconsin. Well, we're going to talk a little bit today about the budget where it stands now passed by the Republican legislature. Now goes to Governor Doyle with what we call the Vanna White Vito. Take a letter. Governor Doyle, give us a letter. There's been some talk as to whether he should just veto the budget in its entirety and have folks just start over again. Those are fairly grizzly kinds of things but the Governor Doyle had requested, I believe, over $428 per student as an increase for revenue purposes. Republicans are very proud about how much they've increased funding for schools but in fact it's less than half of what the Governor had proposed. So it's really a kind of a difficult issue. Segway's into the University of Wisconsin system taking quite a hit and of course, having that little embarrassing glitch, I guess, is an administrator to the tune of 191,000 a year and not clear what kind of leave he was on and why he should have been and bad timing, I guess, would be a fairly... How do you fire somebody? That's sort of the issue and you don't. How do you let people go? I mean, that's the issue with the Chancellor Wiley. Wiley? Wiley. Even in the University, the local UW colleges, you move people around. They don't fit in one position or you move them to another position or I guess in the school system, or in the city city, if you discontinue the incinerator, what do you do with the people? You move them to another place. You just don't let them go. Well, that's not... I mean, there are layoffs, you know, but... Absorb people through retirements. We've been pretty fortunate to manage in the district. A lot of the changes in staffing that we had to do is we'd never, we'd had a layoff in the Schwoinger School District quite some time. And it's pretty much through retirements and attrition. Let me get us back just to the UW system, which is I'm a University of Wisconsin graduate. I was there as my parents would have told you for years and years and years and years and years and lots of degrees all of, you know, buy one, wrap one fish, but it's a wonderful school system. It's an honor, I think, to this state. Well, 26 campuses is really a testament to the state of 5.2 million people. 13 four-year campus, 13 two-year colleges. And it provides, has provided both geographic access and economic access. And right now we're seeing a transition to very, very high tuition increases every year. This year, Board of Regents last week was a 7%. How many more of those can you indeed expect the poor students to absorb without being priced out of the market, which then starts to take a historical part of this economic access to a great institution out of the picture? And with the Pell Grants, which have long been, I think, as I understand it, a pretty substantial building block and the basis for poor kids going to college, being substantially cut back at the national level. I was interested in going back to school just why not and checked into the price of a graduate, one graduate course at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which is a very good graduate school, is over $1,600. Is that per credit or for three credits? For three credits. For three credits. I think in terms of classes. $1,600, that's a lot of money for one course, one three credit course. And we can all sit around and reminisce about what it cost when we went to school, but it's pretty stunning. So, Tom, you're our Republican. Do you? And a university person. And a university person. I just feel the Republicans is having a real antipathy to the University of Wisconsin system. Oh, to the contrary. To the contrary. I think they support the university system. I mean, Doyle's budget last year decimated the university. And I think it was a split. And he was chastised for not cutting enough. And then he proposes cutting it again this year. So, I don't know. I think the university is a big ticket item, and everybody looks at it as some place. It's gonna survive so we could take a little money and they're loaded with administration, so let's take some money away from it. But I don't think that you could say it, because the Republicans are in office, why do they always think that of the university? I think we support the university. Just like the Democrats say, they support the university, but then, you know, they take money. So, if the Democrats come up with more money for the university, they're support for the university. Well, last year, Doyle, and yeah. So, I think the university is, I always wonder, this is not a side story. I wonder if, let's see, the former president, Catherine Lyle, if she saw the writing on the wall, or she just said, you know, it's time to move on. This is, the university is being the target of all kinds of cuts, and maybe it's, there's a cultural change here that's going on, it's time to move on. And- Well, I think there is a change. I mean, it's historically Wisconsin provided itself with low tuition, and that's not the case anymore. People are simply saying, let's compare ourselves to any number of institutions in the country, saying we're not charging is enough or equal to them. Let's get to that norm or above the norm, and that's the change in philosophy, very much so. Wisconsin's now more or less in the middle of the Big Ten. Sure. As far as the tuition. Well, it used to be about seventh. Yeah, we used to be about seventh. We kind of held that, because we, again, had the access, economic access, driving the train, but it isn't anymore. One of the issues, too, I think, was we used to get out of state students, and that tuition was generally higher, which supported some of the activities in the teaching, but we still get that, but there's certainly a cap on that. Didn't they pass some sort of legislation to eliminate or to hold a line on how many out-of-state students? I don't know. It's astonishing to me, just having had a child graduate from high school, how incredibly competitive the university system has become. Madison, in particular, but I also understand Cross. Very, very, very competitive in terms of admissions, where when we were graduating, going into the system, they took a lot of kids. It was not that kind of competitive sort of situation. Well, that's another reflection of starving the university. You can't have the number of sections, because you don't have the personnel to handle. So eventually, you're putting literally caps on the enrollment in your own public institution, and that's a question, again, of whether that's a good thing. Should all comers be able to go to college and give the old college try and be hopefully better citizens and better economic producers, or do we put caps on simply because we don't have enough money in the system? Well, those who indicated the university system is large and really spread out through the state in a pretty effective way, so that, I mean, if you can afford it, there's probably a two-year or a four-year campus somewhere fairly close to you that you can get into. But let me just segue into a matter that we had talked about, which is real complex and difficult to get your arms around completely, but one of the ways the University of Wisconsin, particularly in Madison, financially survives is through private grants, research grants, truly one of the foremost research universities in the world. Dr. Jamie Thompson generally recognized as the, not the creator of stem cell research, but certainly one of its first pioneers, you know, heading up the effort in Wisconsin. We are a leader, the leader, from a university perspective in the United States on stem cell research proposal in our legislature to not ban stem cell research, but a bill that at least by some argument would have certainly a chilling effect on research capabilities within the university system. What do you think's gonna happen with that? Well, I would hope that science would be a strong desire of our legislature because not only is it a feather in our cap to have that research, it's for the betterment of mankind. Recent Newsweek special on health concerns had its whole section on stem cells and its relationship to cancer. I think we need to be very careful in the legislative arena not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I mean, I don't think anybody's opposed to, we don't wanna clone and raise human beings to carvest organs and doing some type of atrocious thing, but study of cells and their relationship to disease and growth and so on, I think is something that science needs to be listened to and we ought to be very careful in my opinion about a legislature who simply has a neat jerk reaction that says we can't spend money on this and can't do this. When in many cases, the money that's coming into the university is private money. Exactly. When you talked about the university, where I think we're number three in the nation in public universities, the amount of money we garner every year and it's like three to $400 million to pay for research, which we all gain from for better drugs, better healthcare, whatever it happens to be, we should take pride in the fact that that university is doing for the good work. It's doing good work for mankind. Our whole standard of living is affected by what comes out of our universities and sometimes you get politicians who get on bandwagons and they do sometimes not have indeed all the facts and they do overreact. So I think my picture is that the legislature ought to sit down with our scientists that are doing good work and see where it is that we ought to be when you're talking about good science. And it is so complex. Yes it is. The issues that people have and we've been dealing with this for years and years of science and scientific progress outrunning our ethical structure that allows us to deal with issues. The money that comes into the university system for research supports the university in so many respects that if that money begins to dry up again, kind of like a little mini or a major Florence County, you just start circling the drain, as we used to say. And you get kind of sucked down and it's kind of hard to pull out of it. I haven't seen the bill, so I haven't. I mean, my issue was, and I think it's a moral issue is for a lot of people is the embryonic stem cell. Stem cells, non embryonic stem cells, I agree, it's continued. You have to respect some of the moral issues that people have with embryonic stem cells and you need to work around that or try to work with that. But see, I haven't seen the bill, so I don't know what the bill is saying. Well, and it's a broad bill that talks in terms of human cloning and in terms of complexity, we're talking about a wide range of issues and it is complex stuff. I certainly don't understand it all either, but I just worry about when you couple legislative cutbacks at the university with action that might have a chilling effect on research money coming into the university. And the retention of personnel. Yeah, it's the perfect storm and it's not a good thing, so. We had that whole issue not too long ago with salary increases for faculty and whether we were keeping up with other states. And we weren't and we were losing people to other states. And again, it reflects again the ability to garner grants for research. And if you don't have the right shining stars there, you're not gonna get people looking to those people and give them the grants. And so it just, it really feeds on itself. It's a systemic type of situation. It really is, yeah. And that's what I think the legislature has to be very careful about. Yeah, I think we'd ask them to sit down and carefully consider just where we stand as a state and all the issues that, well, that's a whole, a whole different topic of conversation. We would be remiss if we didn't touch on the death, the passing of Gaylord Nelson, the celebration of his life at the Capitol yesterday. Any of you there? No. No, I understand that there were 4,000 people is what I heard. A lot of people have put in their rotunda. Yes, right? Yeah, I'm sure they were kind of sticking out in this folks. I think five former governors and senators from all over the country. So it's a testament to the man and the job he did. And I think it's also a lesson to show how sometimes people vote about, what have you done for me lately? Because he was voted out of office by a person who was then voted out of office. Yeah. And not much time at all. That's right. So it's one of those things where the legacy of Gaylord Nelson, I think, is now being appreciated for what it is. I mean, the man was a stellar person in the area of the environment and concern for the environment. And we ought to thank him for the job he did as far as it's not just Earth Day. I mean, that's just the focal point for the public to think about the condition of the environment. But water standards and clean air standards and so on, he was involved very, very integrally in the production of that type of legislation throughout his career. I remember the comment that Obi made yesterday, that he was the best and sweetest man I ever knew. And I thought that that was just a pretty nice way of expressing. I got to meet Senator Nelson two years ago. He was made a fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. And for many of his contributions to the state as well as to the nation and the world. And he would have been 87 at that point. And I was stunned by how smart he was and how together he had clearly, his, he was functioning at a very high level. And he was extremely entertaining, gave a wonderful speech and you wanna recognize somebody like that. But it was an object lesson, I think. I remember when Nelson was beat, the thought was he wasn't paying attention to the folks back home. That's what I'd heard, you know, that he had kind of, unlike Proxmire, who was always, everywhere. Shaking hands. Shaking hands everywhere. Shaking hands out of the back of the Lambeau field again. That Nelson didn't make it home often enough. And I think the era started to change. I think he was a cerebral politician who did a great deal of work on issues. And I think the 32nd commercial and political arena just wasn't him. And when it hit him, I think he was just, a new era of politics began. And he was very much a victim of it. Yeah, in particular, I was a little younger. But I never, since he mastered television in particular. Whereas I thought Caspen ran, and as I watched that campaign, a pretty slick campaign. And of course, you know, Caspen rides in on Ronald Reagan's coattails as well. A number of noted senators lost. Senator Church and others lost that same year. Right, exactly. Exactly. Talking about more cerebral discussions, but I am interested just as we wrap up and segue from the environment to the most recent Supreme Court decision on the Oak Creek power plant. And we energies a decision to, or ability now to go ahead and build 2.15 billion dollar coal using plants in Oak Creek. This has been an interesting long-term fought kind of thing comes to a four to three decision. The conservative branch of the court joined by Lewis Butler, who's typically in the more liberal camp and also in Milwaukee. And all related to, did the PSC, the Public Service Commission, exceed its authority in terms of allowing the plant in issuing these various permits? Having had some minor involvement in a power plant myself, I just know that it's a real complex process. There's some allegations, and there always are, but that the PSC has become a pretty political body. The descent, the sharply worded descent in this case says that they didn't, the PSC did not require all of the environmental studies that it should have. And the statute is very clear about the 38,000 different things that you have to do in order to site a power plant. Has the political process taken over, do you think? That the PSC is more attuned to industry interests, or was it a fair decision? Well, I think it's an accusation that's being made because there are a number of plants that are now being granted permission to be built. Wind farm out near the Horicon Marsh is another very controversial one. And isn't that interesting? Because part of the power of the future piece is these two huge coal things, and then wind farms. Well, wind farms are kind of running into, the feathers are hitting that fan, or that windmill, and those nice politically correct wind farms are just running into as much trouble. I mean, it's an interesting piece to me. But I think we're seeing a public service commission that's probably observing the national scene of brownouts and blackouts and saying, can we, at this time, be ogres, or do we need to build plants in order to keep up with economic and population growth? And I think environmentalists are saying they're not missing to solar power and all the alternatives that could be implemented that they're not providing that leadership. They're simply reacting to requests to expand existing technology. And so, yeah, I think- Out of time? The wind keeps, our wind keeps going, but it's time to say goodbye. Thanks, and we'll see you again.