 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our presentation for the day. I'm Mark Smith, Chair of the Shuegan County Chamber of Commerce's Business Advocacy Committee. And I'd like to start off with a couple of thanks, if we could. First, thanks to our sponsor, Pevea, for hosting us today. And thanks, too, to Breaking Bread for the excellent meal and for hosting us as well. I'd like to point out several dignitaries in the audience today. First, we have Chairman Tom Wegener from Shuegan County, Vice-Chairman George Muthenzie, Mark Muthenzie, and former Chairman Roger Tristruti, and, of course, Administrator Adam Payne from the county as well. From Senator Grossman's office today, we have Alan Ott, and, of course, our men of the hour today. Senator Devin Lemingew, Representative Tyler Warpagle, and Representative Terry Katzma. We're going to get right into the program today, and while our dignitaries are making their way up to the front, I'd like to also ask that the Business Advocacy Committee members, if you would, please raise your hands. And if you would, if you remember the audience today, if you have any interest in this program, additional programs you'd like to see, ideas for future programs, please talk to anyone who's raised their hand and let us know what your ideas are for future programs. We would love to hear your ideas. Quick announcement about the coming chamber of us. Wednesday, March 15th, there'll be a focal point for praise, active shooter training from 7.30 to 9.00 a.m. Tuesday, March 21st, business after hours, hosted by the Stephanie Well Center and Women in Management from 5.00 to 7.00 p.m., being held at the Stephanie Well Center. And please make note of this. This is sort of a big change. Our next first Friday forum is not going to be a Friday. Our next first Friday forum is Monday, April 10th. It's going to be at the Blue Harbor Resort. Senator Ron Johnson will be speaking to us at the Blue Harbor Resort Monday, April 10th. So please make note of that. The last thing that I would like to have is a housekeeping item. If you have any questions for our Senator or our two representatives, please hold your, if you would hold your questions to the end and there are notes of paper at your table for your use and writing down your questions so you don't forget. So no further ado, please. Before we start today, I just wanted to give you a little story. A lot of you have children or you have grandchildren. You might be able to relate to this. There's an old superstition from the East that encourages parents to predict their child's future. Folk Wisdom suggests that while the child is still a toddler, the parent should place on a table within the child's reach, a bottle of wine, some money, and a Bible. If the little one walks up to the table and picks the Bible, you will probably follow a spiritual vocation, pastor, priesthood. If you pick up the bottle of wine, then the heated is in the cards. And if you pick up the money, you'll probably be a business person or entrepreneur. So the story is told of a new father eager to plan for his son's future, who administered the test. He carefully positioned the three objects on the coffee table, watching eagerly which ones the little boy would pick. The little guy walked up to the table, surveyed everything, slowly reached out his hand for the Bible, then he paused, picked up the money as well, put it in the Bible, then he tucked the Bible under his arm and took the bottle of wine in the other hand and toddle off with all three, struggling to maintain his balance. The little boy's grandfather stood over to the side silently watching the whole scene unfold. When he saw the dismay on his own son's face, he said, this is bad news. He's going to become a politician. I just was elected to my second term. The area that I represent begins on the south by the Shabuagan-Ozaki County line, the town of Sherman, town of Holland, town of Wilson, town of Lima, and then about 60 percent of the city of Shabuagan and the city of Shabuagan Falls. And prior to that, I served at or worked at Eastburg State Bank for about 30 years, last serving as president of that. So this is a second career, a change of careers for me. And it's so much nicer being a second term than a freshman. When you're a freshman, you've got no clue what's going on. Now when your second term, you know how it is, when you start a job, you can at least ask some decent questions and you can have some influence. And what I'm privileged to do is serve as chairman of the Financial Institutions Committee, serving as vice chair of the Ways and Beans. I am on the Federalism and Interstate Committee. Tyler can talk a little bit more about that. I'm on the Insurance Committee in the Housing and Real Estate and Workforce Development. So I'm very happy with the committee assignments. So I'm on the Building Commission and then overseas all building projects in the state other than roads. So that's a significant project. So a couple things that I was asked to comment on is the HOPE agenda. The HOPE agenda stands for heroin, opiates, prevention, and education. And this has gotten a lot of publicity. Obviously dealing with the problems that are occurring statewide. It's not just a city problem, Dane County problem, Milwaukee County problem. This morning I spent an hour in random length dealing with talking to a group of parent who has an addicted son and dealing with members of a parish there to see. John Nigren has been quite active in this initiative. He's co-chair of the Joint Finance Committee. There's been numerous bills. I think about 17 bills were passed over the last four years dealing with the HOPE agenda. There's another 11 bills. The governor recently called a special session for the addiction going on. So that's a big focus of our work. The other subject that I was asked to just comment on is Dodd-Frank and then Dodd-Frank is a federal issue dealing with banking rules and with some of the changes occurring in the federal government. I believe the banking industry is excited that there's going to be less regulation. The problem with some of the abuses that occurred in Arizona and Florida and California, unfortunately when the federal government makes rules, they also apply to Wisconsin and that has certainly hampered small banks and their ability to make loans and reach out on that. So there's not a lot we do on the state level with banking regulations, but as Tyler talked about too, we think there's going to be a trend toward some Lago's regulations going down to the states and we are excited about that. So with that I'll just pass the microphone. Good afternoon everybody. Thanks Terry. Closer. Maybe. Otherwise maybe we'll go without because that might be better if you can just push out. Okay well if I get too much of a problem I'll change it up. Good afternoon I'm Tyler Vorpagel. That didn't last long. And I'm the state rep for the 27th assembly district like Terry. We both started in 2014 with where we were first elected so we're both starting our second term. I live in Plymouth and represent the kind of communities if you kind of draw a line along 23 Kohler and then the north side of the city of Sheboygan up to Cleveland over to Keele and then kind of all points in between in between there. So as Terry had mentioned we're just starting our second term which means we're just getting into for the second time our the state budget and which is really kind of an interesting process maybe to back up so we can kind of talk a little bit about how the budget is formulated. It's probably the biggest focal point at least for the next six months. The governor presents comes up with a budget and presents his budget to the legislature which he just did in a joint session with some remarks that he had back at the beginning of February. Then now we're sort of in a little bit of an in-between time we're waiting for fiscal bureau kind of our number crunchers and policy people to go through the budget and come up with policy papers and things like that for us to look at and then once they get that all together the joint finance committee which is made up equally of members from the senate and the assembly go around and have listening sessions on the governor's budget and then start their process of making changes which we're all assigned a budget buddy minus the co-chairman John Nigrant and we have regular meetings and that's how we can affect changes in the budget through that process by submitting amendments to our budget buddy and then he makes the case to the rest of the members on joint finance. At the end of the day they come out with, excuse me, they come out with kind of their final product and then it's adopted by the assembly and then adopted by the senate separately and then the governor signs it and has some power to do a little bit of videos but that being said I was asked to kind of talk about transportation a little bit because that's kind of been the kind of a hotly talked about issue over the past year and a half two years so the governor's budget spends about six billion dollars on transportation in infrastructure roads bridges things like that through a number of various programs and I guess what I would consider this his budget proposal to be is one that's sort of focused on local governments rather than expanding and doing more highway projects or larger projects what they call the mega projects or the major projects throughout the state. He's increased local road aid programs called the L-Rip program by about seven million dollars each year so over the course of the two-year biennium about 14 million dollars more going into that program to help local road improvements and then about six million dollars over the next two years in the the bridge improvement program and then also his budget doesn't delay the majors program which if you think of like it's the 441 highway 10 Verona Road and Mandadouac or Madison I-30, 990 those projects stay on task but then some of the mega projects which are the southeast wisconsin zoo interchange things like that is set up to kind of see a little bit of a delay. Also kind of part of the governor's budget over the last couple of years we've been having this discussion over bonding or borrowing and things like that and how much is too much what is the appropriate amount. We've been seeing the amount of bonding as part of the transportation budget going up and up and it's kind of getting to that 20 percent point and which all kind of the fiscal bureau people in the number of crunchers say is sort of the tipping point where you want to keep it below about 20 25 percent so that's certainly a concern I have is are we you know everybody takes on debt in their lives you don't typically pay cash for a house you have a mortgage car mortgages things like that but the bigger question is at what point are you too far extended and when do we need to be ratcheting that back and actually be having a conversation about paying for the projects that we're having rather than that we're doing rather than kind of kicking the can down the road. One of the things that you've been hearing talked about a little bit is this conversation about a gas tax increase vehicle registration fee increases things like that originally the the governor had said that he would not support a gas tax increase or what we kind of call revenue uppers I guess if you hear that term for the transportation fund without an offset in a tax reduction somewhere else in the budget part of the budget process the we found out that we had sure all right part of the that was there at least that we found out that we will be ending this budget year with about a $700 million surplus so our state revenues have outpaced what the projections were so we'll actually be starting with in July 1st with a about $700 million more and one of the proposals that speaker Voss in the assembly said is okay well let's do a $300 million tax cut income property tax something like that but then also do $300 million in whether it's nothing specific but revenue uppers gas tax registration whatever then the governor came back and said that he was not going to support a tax increase so that's kind of where we stand right now today on the kind of state of our transportation budget one of the other things we did in the last budget was commission the legislative audit bureau which is a committee made up again between the republicans democrats assembly and senate that audits all parts of state state government so part of the last budget was funding the legislative audit bureau to do a comprehensive analysis of the transportation uh wisconsin department of transportation all of their programs and without going into too much detail if the audit found that there were significant inconsistencies with their own policies and procedures things like there were about 360 projects that there was only one bidder on and they feel that they could save money by having more competitive bids again found that the through the system that where they rate our highways the number of percentage of highway that's considered good has dropped from about 53 percent a few years ago to now 41 percent being rated as good but one of the most concerning things that you may have been hearing about is not correctly using inflation to figure the total costs of ongoing projects so they've estimated that there could be an extra 3.1 billion dollars of just in the project so we kind of have in the pipeline that we haven't been working on that have been kind of wrongly figured I guess as part of their budget we've seen that locally with highway 23 from when it was first enumerated in 1999 that's going up like 325 percent I think the cost of the project I don't keep going up at the longer that it kind of sits out there which brings me to um also was asked to talk about the status of highway 23 you may see in the budget there was no money uh allocated for highway 23 and that's because of this ongoing lawsuit federal lawsuit that continues to be ongoing so back in May when all the orange barrels were out there two years ago construction was supposed to start and Judge Edelman federal court judge out of Milwaukee said that he was that he was putting a hold on the federal dollars in the project to put a halt on the project and state appealed and he um upheld his decision so since then on November uh the beginning in middle of November this past year Wisconsin Department of Transportation appealed that decision to the uh six district court appeals court in Chicago one of the questions uh Wisconsin DOT was the only entity uh to file an appeal um originally the lawsuit that was filed to with with Judge Edelman was with Wisconsin DOT US DOT and FHWA which is the federal highway federal highways administration we're all in on that lawsuit the federal entities dropped out so now it's just uh WISDOT moving ahead um with the lawsuit so one of the questions that was raised was well do you have standing to bring a lawsuit because you're a state entity or agency and um according to DOT they filed their motion with the court in a timely fashion and now we're in the process of waiting to for the court to decide whether or not they have standing to bring uh the lawsuit and I just called over to DOT and they're expecting to hear back the uh closest they could kind of get to the timeline was uh spring 2017 so um hopefully we get a couple more warmer days here and spring comes a little faster uh faster than uh sooner rather than later but uh that's the kind of the update on the court process without going into too much boring detail because I've been going on way too long already Devin usually keeps me honest on that I'm sorry I'm struggling with my throat um there's a whole process of when you do one of these construction projects you have to fill a conform and follow what's called NEPO which is a national environmental protection you have to file clean air act clean water act standards and then there's also something called WEPO which is the wisconsin environmental uh uh regulation and in order to remove the federal dollars from the project they would have to go back and amend the NEPA document and then re kind of make sure that the project conforms with all the WEPA the Wisconsin environmental protection standards so I've been trying to reach out to DOT they just had a change in administration secretary got leave left shortly before christmas uh and secretary Dave Ross just started here at the beginning of the year so I've been trying to reach out to them and figure out what uh the hoops hurdles and everything is to go through and uh try and go along with state funds break it up over a couple budgets just kind of get a little more creative to uh you know try and get things moving again so there there's still a few uh holes in there they're legislative uh um uh people who work with the legislation things like that so we're waiting to get those filled and we'll be having those ongoing conversations um I'll take a breath right there and pass it off to debon uh and then uh we'll uh answer some of the other questions that were on the list well now that our time is up thank you good afternoon everyone my name is debon lemme you I represent uh both of their assembly districts plus one more of the managewalk areas my district pretty much runs from the shavoy county yosaki county line up to the city of manitouac over to hilbert county so tather and I were actually counting my county this morning meeting with their county board members to hear some of the issues that they were concerned about um I think I'll start with just a little update from what I worked out last session um last session was as well my first uh tournament I'm in the middle of my first year in office but two years ago I was elected with these these two fine men and uh during the last session I actually wrote 27 bills uh 18 of them were passed into law and 16 of those 18 had bipartisan support so uh it was an exciting first two years worked on things from raffle reform to speed limit to online voter registration to cleaning up the voter rolls uh worked on a bill for the district attorney um great things so it was I thought it was a great year of learning and getting a lot done and uh pretty good budget last year started this year um well last year I chaired the elections and local government committee this year it's been changed to elections and utilities so I've entered the uh I was sitting back with some of the utility guys back there they were growing me hard but I have the new new the utilities this now uh committee that I'm chairing so I've learned a lot about the the whole um energy production and distribution system over the last couple months that's been exciting and um maybe exciting it's a little bit when overstating for utilities but electrifying electrifying them though um but uh starting this session uh if you look at my bio you can see some of the bills I'm already working on and and I was actually asked to talk about two of those but before I begin uh representative katsuma and I actually had the first bill that was signed into laws of this section after one which was allowing usper to see their tip limits so that master's galleries can expand into usper build a 30 million dollar facility and add up to 20 new jobs which is very exciting for usper again for shmoy county employment and the whole area so that's great the two bills that they asked me to talk about you can see some of the uh all the points on your on your sheet there on my bio but uh the first is the reins act um this is a bill that's patterned after an idea from the federal government as well and I worked on this last session um my counterpart the assembly actually got it through the assembly house and I failed to get it through the senate so so giving another swing edit this section essentially does is it brings legislative control back to the rulemaking process especially expensive rules that have huge impacts on local governments tax payers all around the state of Wisconsin the way um state government and federal government works is there's a lot of different bureaucracies and they have the ability to write rules in certain areas such as the d and r rating you know commercial fishing limits things like that and when we pass a law these agencies take our law and write rules around it to how our laws are enforced well when the federal government passes a law such as the clean air act clean water act then it's a responsibility of for instance the d and r or different agencies to probably make rules based on the federal law an example of this was in 2008 when the clean water act was passed they made uh rules the state made rules this state d and r made rules about how water um treatment plants the quality of water that can be put back into to our water system and what the state d and r did was they went way above and beyond what the federal government actually required and the way the system is currently set up there was never actually a vote taken on this because the only way we can stop a rule is to pass a law over subverting that rule so what the bill actually does the way we have it written now is that if there's a rule that's going to cost over 10 million dollars over a two-year period to small businesses uh a lot of levels of government things like that that us as legislators who represent you actually have to take an affirmative vote to pass that rule to make sure that it's in line with what the intention of the federal government and things like that so I think it's a very important thing to give legislative oversight to especially things that have huge impacts on local rate bears for your uh water uh sewer and things like that um so we're excited about it the governor actually put it in the budget as well um his version is a little different than in my version obviously I think my version is better but uh but uh so we're very hopeful that that this can get done this session to make sure that uh we're we're stopping harmful regulations for getting passed on from elected uh government officials and the second uh bill that I was asked to talk about is the second start act um this was also another bill that was introduced last session by the late senator rick minutes and uh it was released at the end of the session so didn't get time to get done but what it does is it deals with the skills gap a little bit and all the three manufacturers out there know that and business owners know that it's sometimes really hard in this economy right now to find employees especially in some of the skilled trade areas uh so what this bill does is it takes um students who do not finish their traditional four-year EW education and it allows the department of workforce development to essentially market these these students for other job opportunities in the air or career opportunities in the area that they live such as apprenticeships uh LTC um nursing opportunities things like that because what what especially the uh skilled trades found is that if someone doesn't finish their traditional four-year education it's usually not till they're 28 29 years old till they actually find apprenticeships so they almost lose a whole decade of their life when they're you know working at Walmart or Culver's or whatever trying to figure out what to do with their life so this way it gives them an opportunity to uh see there's opportunities in welding at LTC or uh electricians or nursing so to help these students find the right path in their life so we've it's gotten a lot of good publicity area and we're very hopeful that we can uh can get that done but uh with that those are the two things that I was asked to talk about we can turn it over to the list of questions could I comment there's blue books in the back if they're not already they're gone okay good there's some maps probably in the past you used a paper map and we use that anymore maybe give it to your kids or your grandkids they can color on it there's also a sign-up sheet uh if you're interested in receiving my e-update I appreciate that I want to just give a shout out to the chamber the county chamber who has been very active in these ozone non-attainment and I didn't really know much about that uh until I was serving in this position but just to summarize Shabuigan County and half of Kenosha County is found to be in non-attainment and it's because we have this ozone monitoring station at the edge of Kohler at Kohler Henry Park like about 50 feet from Lake Michigan and that is monitoring ozone and a lot it's coming up it's transport ozone that comes up from Illinois and Indiana and because of that our whole entire county is found to be in non-attainment and this is a big deal because this has an effect on our economy on businesses that that want to expand we've had reports of folks that have not been in the county they've expanded out of state we've we hear reports of folks that want to move to to Shabuigan County and then they go on the website and and look up uh American Lung Association and find out that Shabuigan has bad air and did you all know that that Shabuigan had bad air and so the problem is the federal EPA regulations prevent us from moving that monitoring site at Kohler Henry a couple years ago there was a new site that was down on Highway 42 near Haven that is reporting below ozone levels and and thanks to the work of Alliance and many many many other companies in the county that are working hard to produce clean air we could have all the companies closed down and all the cars out of the county and we would still be in non-attainment because of the ozone that comes up over the lake so just a couple weeks ago a few of us were in Milwaukee meeting with Senator Johnson's office there they've been very active on this along with with Congressman growthman they understand the urgency of this matter and I want to give my hat to Jane and Betsy and so just so you know you're when you you know when you write down that check for your chamber dues that's one of the good things among many that they do but uh so thank you for your emphasis and your work on that so do you want to moderate moderate these questions or you're going to let us moderate the questions actually I have two questions okay actually I have two questions and then we'll take questions from the audience if you anybody who's writing down I'll come around and pick them up in between the answers here a gentleman recently the governor suggested reviewing the law that requires public school districts to start their year no sooner than September 1st understanding what this means to the tourism industry and I have to say also the education of our students because we have some educators in the audience do you believe that this is a local decision that should be given to the local school schoolboys based on the needs of their district and in their community one thing I've learned being in the legislature every issue is local control should there be local control should there be state standards so that's same rule throughout the state and every every every decision comes down to that and so the arguments from the educators are that we we need to start early because the kids are there anyway doing volleyball and football and and we need the those extra time to for EP and for academic reasons and it should be left up to the local school district and then you have the tourism industry and I used to think it was because they needed those workers but their argument is for family vacations and and the water temperature of all these inland lakes in wisconsin in june is much colder than what it is in in august so so it's important that we don't cut into that and and but one of the the largest opponents of changing it is as senator luther olson who represents the wisconsin dels area and his chair of the education committee so whatever I think may not make a big difference because it's going to be up to him you know this is an issue that has kind of come up the last few years in different forms last year there was a bill to allow for school districts or high schools or school districts who had a certain number of kids in advanced placement courses and things like that to start earlier um trying to get around it um I really am uh conflicted and uh trying to learn from both the education and the tourism folks I've been uh talked to a lot by the folks at the l car lake chamber and the Plymouth chamber about the impact that tourism has on their communities um and so I I guess I'm still trying to do my my due diligence and figure out what is the best option for the area um I tend to lean a little closer to letting uh the the local school boards decide but um but like I said I this is something I'm really really you know I know it does have a big impact on this area and really want to be sensitive to to that fact as well I lean towards local controls while I talking to the superintendents in the area most of them just want to start the Monday before Labor Day as you can imagine Labor Day moves every year it's not the same day every year so every year you're starting calendars different every year and I think all that all they want to do is especially in this area is just start on that Monday before and then actually provide a longer weekend over a week in which would provide more opportunities for family vacations um or going to the fair or things like that so um I do uh understand a little bit the concerns of the uh of the tourism industry but I I'm going to need to see some more evidence from it but like like these two guys said it's oh maybe somebody will find a compromise it can be the Monday before Labor Day rather than September 1st because I think that would I think that might make everyone happy I have another question for you I have one more question and then we have some questions in the audience and I'll warn you gentlemen that they're coming from the county commissioners um how does what's happening in Washington DC impact us at the state level it has a huge impact the the state budget I've grown to learn a third of the state budget comes from the federal government so and and I think it's the department of workforce development 60 percent of their budget comes from federal dollars so when we get these federal dollars of course they set strings and set requirements on that uh and and but as I said before this whole federalism are we gonna are we gonna see more go to the states but I think in a way that's kind of a pipe dream because people have power they don't want to give it up and and so um so this is kind of the third uh item that I wanted to talk about um so we had the speaker created a new committee that we didn't have in the assembly last session uh calling it the federalism and interstate relations committee with the thought being with uh with a new administration and a congress who had their leadership have all said that they support devolving giving some power back to the state whether it's block granting medicaid um loosening strings and other programs things like that is to work with and kind of be on the front end of that whole process it was actually just out in uh Ohio last thursday um myself and uh a few other speaker boss and my broadcast who works did some of the aging and or the Alzheimer's and eventual stuff um the speaker boss and speaker cliff Rosenberger from Ohio have a really good working relationship and we went out to meet with some of their folks and I met with um representative robner who's the Ohio chair of the newly created federalism and interstate relations committee in Ohio um and actually we just sent today to the wall street terminal and I brought copies in op ed of the things we're trying to do a little bit of a primer on what federalism is and kind of a call to action for the other 50 states to to join us in having this conversation and continuing to push for more of that uh power to come back to washington because when you think about it uh think about your history lesson uh we originally were under the articles of confederation which wasn't working very well and then what happened when they wanted to make a change they decided to send representatives from virginia and representatives from maryland to go and come up with the great compromise that we now have as the u.s constitution and throughout the last century or so particularly with lawsuits um disrupting the tenth amendment and uh you know the uh very commerce clauses and um things like that we've seen a lot stronger uh central government than i think was uh initially uh or you know we were were considered the laboratories of democracy so um i'm really if you can't tell i really geeked out about this and uh um and just i think it's a great opportunity and one that uh we don't want to uh squander we all need to talk i'm excited you can have all the rest i believe we have one of the best relationships with our county board and our legislators i mean that's sincerely we have a very access you give us and the response from you to you or your staff i mean doesn't mean we're always gonna agree but we have access to you and you respond to us and we appreciate that being said i know your way it's right in shawarma county it's in every community and we're working on trying to do some more things at a county level so anything i know you can do at the state i can't tell and i think it is and going to get worse read the audit ebony knows i read the audit you wonder what the other day i just wanted to close this is not ready to just tell you that and coming back from washington you see i spent an hour and 15 minutes on the runway going from the north end to the south end the back and forth and all that who's was he's for me i don't know who was for him uh speaker they said well you brought the boss we'll see you next to me so i had three hours of FaceTime with the speaker to be assembly uh whether he wanted to have FaceTime with me or not and i have a transportation department here and we talk about it so it's a challenging issue i just feel that the momentum is kind of waning a little bit i realize the courts have a lot to do with that uh but i think it's about safety it's also about economic development so these are questions from the audience where's the question i hate to speech i'm sorry you want to respond to anything i'm sorry i really just highway 23 i was going to say something similar just to to give some love back because you were very nice and complimentary of the chamber and i think everyone in this room feels that our white coming chamber is second to none of the gala that was just held bringing the whole community together is wonderful so appreciate those remarks terry i was going to share something similar to tom that i'm just so proud of our area of representatives and thank you all for your leadership if you're new to this group i do know we have at least one person in the audience who hadn't been to a friday forum before senator lemme you as a former coming board supervisor as was his father dan and his father dan and former chairman rife was drudy hired me so i'm very grateful for that i'm still disappointed in his voice terry katsuma and i used to play racquetball together and don't let that smile fool you he is one tough competitor and then tyler living in plymouth high school grad has a wonderful family in fact it's better half now the description of the county health and human services department so we have some good people here they're always good about attending legislative breakfasts and communicating with us the key thing that tom and i wanted to share today and i do have a question highway 23 um 1999 when it was enumerated or approved it was about 42 million dollar project or so estimated and today it's over 140 million there'll be a letter letter to the editor from german weger and i was weekend raising attention to it and encouraging all of us to support their leadership to bring more attention to this and personally though the lawsuit has slowed progress when you have the kind of resources that we have in the state state funds whether they're general funds segregated funds or bonding we don't have to rely on federal funds to complete the work that i was going through and every year that is delayed that cost just goes up and up to the point where you wonder is it worth waiting for the federal funds or we all this taxpayer is going to end up spending more to get the job done to begin with so there will be a letter out there for those of us involved and i know the chamber's been involved caller companies are gentle company there are a lot of really important companies and people in this community behind scene 23 get done we encourage you to push that envelope so the question is the governor has taken a point of view where he doesn't want to raise any revenue and none of us like to see taxes increased but when you see the kind of data that's been produced now on the shape of our roads the escalating cost to catch up what's all been playing out what can you do what can the legislature do to bring this to some type of compromise and action to problem solve rather than the ongoing excuses whether it's a lawsuit or whatever i think what this community is looking from our friends and an area representatives what can you specifically do to help move this forward to get highway 23 done and make sure that we get some new transportation funds in the works to be sure we're being fiscally responsible and taking care of our investment our transportation system here's where we defer to our center pass the microphone yeah we're to whether we could do it right now with just state funds um i think we first need to wait at least to the federal appeal court process but it's going to be interesting since there's already federal money spent on the project so if we have to pay that back i mean we're going to need to get all those answers before we could actually just start building it with just state funds and to put in perspective how much that federal funding is it's about a quarter of the cost that people have an extra 35 million that the state would bear if we would do it all ourselves actually it's going to be closer to 40 million by the time we get around to it 40 million dollars just in its extra state funds if we don't have any federal funds so hopefully we get a hear back from the federal court appeals in the next couple months and we can go from there but when funds are tight already trying to convince uh 17 other senators and 49 other assemblymen to overpay ahead of time while your transportation project is in the court system and surpass maybe what they want done in their own district would be a pretty daunting task since the speaker he prized out of the speaker party mentioned 94 or whatever the heck he wants um expanded down there you said abe laurenbeck was on there she wants 39 expanded down there so it's you know it's all part of prioritizing between the the different projects and one-year project is tied up in the court system we have to to wait till it gets through the process is my point of view overall transportation funding um the the governor's budget proposal adds three billion dollars of spending across the board not the transportation across the board and um since i haven't commented on this budget proposal yet today um there is a lot of spending in areas and some tax cuts which if i was governor that wouldn't have been my proposal so i think we're a long ways away from from the final product i don't think either house is going to be happy with having 500 million dollars still being bonded in transportation so so i think we're a long ways from the process but um i think i think we can still find a lot of savings in transportation when you hear them testifying that they ripped up an entire lanes of road around madison when the pavement was only 20 years old with a 50-year lifespan i mean that's that's always the money are we prioritizing right there's there's a lot of stuff in that in that transportation budget devin's right there are um audit did identify a number of things that significant savings that we could see it's not going to solve the problem but again in order my my kind of default position is if i'm going to ask other people to to pay more gas tax we want to make sure uh we're being as efficient as possible so i think we'll we will and we'll need to address some of those things um there's also things that we can be doing to spend better do federal state uh swaps so that we can put all the federal dollars into one project because they're even though we got rid of prevailing wage uh in wisconsin last session there's still the federal davis bacon rule or if there's any federal dollars spent in subject to a federal prevailing wage requirement so you can kind of sort of get around that by putting all the federal federal money into one big project and you know walkie or something like that and then uh use states otherwise there's communities who i think was mesquigo uh did four miles a road and two were through a grant with federal dollars so like the two mile section that was paid paid with federal dollars was like millions of dollars more than the one same stretch a road just you know different uh percentages or whatever uh paid a lot less for the state portion so there's things like that that uh we're also going to be uh looking at and doing to be more efficient with the money that we do have i sort of comment that was previously stated the governor's budget last time for transportation it was about 20 percent of the total revenue was to go to debt service principal and interest things and that has been steadily climbing and that's not sustainable so but overall the governor's proposal in in other parts of the budget is the least amount of borrowing so the trend is down for total state obligations i mean our is there a reason that our highway 23 can't be named i mean and do the fact that the lawsuit announcement may be made in the spring to put it back in at that announcement is what we want to hear yeah that yes and but that announcement is just that announcement's just whether or not saying the department of transportation has standing to bring the lawsuit then they still have to make their arguments uh you know make make their uh argument for the lawsuit so then that's another chunk of time but there is uh especially if it is done in march or april there is still time to get things in there right but if you were the governor and you didn't live in shabuigan or managed law would you put in a project when you're delaying other projects that hold up in court if it's a project that's been on the books for since 1999 a lot of these projects have been in the works for a long time so i didn't know that but they were more recent than ours some of them are our weight house we'd love to have one who all the weight house every first friday out there um we obviously have a big uh it's very important to us that i would want to create a state here um and they built a visitor center out there to state millions of dollars to put it on highway 23 expecting uh for the very purpose that i would want to agree if you want um quick question on the lawsuit if you do know uh do you know if the dot t's i was working with some of the attorneys on it to give them some additional data on transportation for their nipa evaluation my understanding was they were going to go back and redo the nipa analysis so that they could uh satisfy the requirements of the nipa but when i hear they're continuing the appeal do you know if they've decided to go ahead with the appeal because they can't do the new they can't make findings that would meet the nipa requirements i was hoping they could get around the lawsuit but just going back and re-evaluating the environment in the initial hearing last fall they did use the new updated traffic projections that the dot t did um so yes that the uh try to do what the chairman wrote can you put some light on this was it the traffic study yeah yeah so part of what jonge edelman had asked was that uh there'd be current traffic counts done as part of the lawsuit i i hadn't heard about it being used for opening up and revising the nipa document um maybe we can talk a little more offline about that but um but in general um they found dot t found that their traffic counts were uh slightly less than what they had projected what 16 years ago or whatever um but they then they studied uh five different alternatives doing nothing full four lane expansion uh and then two studies with um passing lanes two lane for most of it and then adding those you know kind of passing lanes for a couple of miles and they figured that going full four lanes would reduce uh a drive time from plameth to a final act by five minutes all the other ones were like negligible less than a minute um that incorporated the safety metrics that was safer to do it that way um and uh i think that was those were kind of the three uh the kind of three big points that they made but it was my impression that it was for the lawsuit not not for the nipa but can i just comment on the budget budget the last session it was 74 billion over two years the budget this session is 76 billion over two years the governor proposed uh 200 per child increase in in k-12 public education and 205 dollars the second year with the biennium uh we one of the standing meetings we meet with is with our superintendents from the county and some of the feedback we've heard from them we of course have several very efficient low spending districts here in the eastern shboyton county and so the the argument is is should everybody get across the board uh raise uh which doesn't reward those in our community that have been efficient so that is going to be in a point of contention or a point of debate with the governor's budget one maybe closing thought i think we're kind of getting to the or um just wanted to say thank you all for coming and listening to us and if there's anything we can do don't feel for make sure you call email our office we're happy to meet uh in district we're setting up some uh listening sessions on the budget coming up i think started next two weeks from now um so watch our e updates and things for that but one thing i just wanted to mention because it was on the list and we didn't get to it was uh the manufacturing and egg tax credit because it has been getting some um there's been some articles kind of calling into question the program i wasn't in office when it was first passed in uh in like 2011 i think but anecdotally what it's done for this community being so manufacturing intensive if you think back to 2010 as we were sort of coming out of the 2008 recession we were dealing with uh situations like mercury marine and fondillac threatening to leave and go to oklahoma and take you know hundreds of jobs there um and other kind of individual uh companies saying well we're going to leave unless you know we get some sort of tax package um this discussions i remember at the time was the manufacturing and egg tax credit was designed to uh lower the tax burden on all manufacturers so that we didn't have to pick winners and losers we were just saying if you're going to invest and be here uh and support jobs in wisconsin uh we want to help you with that not just because you're threatening to leave or things like that so um i think especially for shawain county and the surrounding area the companies that uh do qualify for it and use it um has just been uh a boon or to our economy um we've seen even you know mercury marine has added jobs over in fondillac since then and um i mean i think it is an important thing uh for for this area especially i was going to talk about the main before it was put into effect in uh 2011 81,000 jobs were lost in manufacturing since it went into effect 34,000 jobs have been added to manufacturing um as uh al can tell you congressman growthman is in the highest percentage of manufacturing congressional district in the country in the country it's congressional district so it's and what's probably second year is agriculture and what actually makes this area very special it's a combination of agriculture and manufacturing we do process food and manufacturing so the uh manufacturing and egg tax credits so widely important to to our districts i don't we just had that as a point down there so i don't know if you had a question about it or they were wondering if you're gonna get rid of it but uh it's i just wanted to comment on that credit as well the committees i serve on these ways and means and we had a hearing as uh we're a non-biased economics professor from madison was doing a study and compared along the border counties employment in wisconsin versus minnesota and illinois and iowa and he attributed part of the improvement in wisconsin is due to the major manufacturing and agricultural credits so even just a day or two ago uh a bill came out to eliminate that so um we still got to continue that fight to maintain that senator lemmew representative katsuma representative more more people thank you for being with us here today we appreciate your coming and of course we appreciate your service too thank you very much