 Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for attending today's First Friday forum. Let's take a moment to thank today's First Friday forum sponsors Proveya Health as well as our wonderful host Elk's Lodge number 299 for a delicious meal. Continuing our First Friday forums is Devon Lemahue. Senator Lemahue is a native of Sheboygan County, attending Sheboygan County Christian High School before graduating with a BA in business administration and political science from Dork College in Sioux Center, Iowa. Devon is elected by his colleagues to serve as a Senate Majority Leader for the 2021-2022 legislative session where he continues to lead the largest Republican majority in over 50 years. As the legislature addresses the challenges facing our communities and state, Senator Lemahue remains committed to pro-growth, pro-business policies that will strengthen our vital manufacturing and agriculture economics economies and provide broad-based reforms to our job creators and families throughout the state. Please welcome Devon Lemahue. I'll tie together. Okay, I'll leave it here. I'll leave it here, I guess, even though I'd rather walk around and be standing at a podium. But thank you to the Sheboygan Chamber for inviting me to speak today. I was given a month to prepare and as I was planning to work on this last night in a Supreme Court ruling hit yesterday afternoon and I was on the phone from six to 11 o'clock last night talking to people. So we'll see how this goes. So I was first elected to the Senate in 2014. So I'm finishing up my second term here and it's, you know, after four years during my second term, I was fortunate enough to be appointed to serve on the Joint Finance Committee. So I got to go through that process of developing a budget last session and with the departure of former Senator Fitzgerald to Congress last December, the December before, a little over a year ago, my colleagues elected me to serve as the Senate Majority Leader, which is a new role leading the Senate. I don't know if it's ideal to take over that role during a pandemic, but I had a couple stumbles along the way. But overall, I think we had a great session this year. So I'm going to, I have a bunch of slides in here. So I'm going to whip through them as quickly as possible. Just, and you can see the outline here, sort of about the capital update, talk about the budget a little bit, the current economic climate that we're seeing here in Wisconsin, some of the legislation that we're working on, and then look forward to questions at the end. So we're wrapping up our floor session. So how a typical two-year cycle works is we were elected in the fall of an even year, then during an odd year, we worked throughout the entire year. The governor introduces a budget at the beginning of a session and sends it to the legislature, where the Joint Finance Committee puts its fingers on it. And our goal is to get that done by July 1st, which is the beginning of our new biennial budget. And then we're working on legislation all along. And by April 15, which is a little over a month from now, that's when we take papers out to run again. So that's sort of a overall how a two-year cycle works. So we're finishing up our last floor date is March 8. The assembly has already adjourned, which is maybe why there's no assembly men in this room today. They're probably all vacationing, taking an early vacation. But we're wrapping things up next week. And then sort of the focus comes towards the election cycle. As was mentioned in the introduction, currently we have a 21 to 12 Republican versus Democrats in the Senate. But I think we had a relatively calm until our last session day. Good working. I had a great working relationship with a minority leader, trying to run, just keep her informed on the process and how the floor is going to work, bills that are coming up. Obviously, we don't agree on all issues, but we actually had a pretty smooth session going forward. So yes, this is my first session as Senate Majority Leader. There's been more than 100 bipartisan bills that have been signed into law. And we're focusing on some very important issues. As you can see, the economy, the workforce, shortage, education, transportation, the rising crimes since the beginning of the pandemic and things like that. So the biggest thing we do every two years is do a biennial budget. It shows where our priorities lie in the state. It's over $90 billion for the two years. I just put that into perspective. So our budget included both, as I mentioned earlier, the governor proposes a budget and his initial budget proposal, he increased taxes by his proposal, increased taxes by more than a billion dollars, had a 600 over $600 million deficit at the end of the two year cycle, had almost a 10% growth in spending, and also had a bunch of policy items. So the first thing we did was remove out all the policy items, which cut the size of the budget about in half. And we started working from there. So what we did is, and I'll go through this, but you know, after going through the process and producing a budget, it was great to have bipartisan support in both houses. Democrats in both houses voted for the budget that went through the finance committee. By the way, Representative Terry Kotsma serves on the joint finance committee. So he was a very important part in developing this budget. But we produced a budget that had the most legislators vote for it in over 20 years. And it's the first bipartisan budget in almost as long. The last bipartisan budget, there's actually split houses. One was controlled by Republicans and Democrats. So having a budget that had Democrats vote for it in the governor sign, I think is a great accomplishment to what we accomplished in the legislature this year. So some of the highlights of the budget, it cut income taxes by $2.4 billion. It increased or reduced property taxes by $650 million. We fully funded transportation, which I'll get into more detail later, and invested in core priorities of government. So first, I'll talk about the rainy day fund. And I have a graph coming up sort of showing the history of the rainy day fund. But now our rainy day fund is at $1.7 billion. We ended the budget. When we passed the budget, it was projected to have a surplus of $1 billion. The budget that we passed, it has now increased, which I'll get to later. And it's the first budget in a long time that had a positive gap balance, which there's any accountants in the room that's government generally accepted accounting principles. We have to have a balanced budget every two years, but it doesn't use gap accounting principles. Faith can probably explain that to you later on. I say at least one accountant in the room. And it had a surplus. So this shows our rainy day fund starting in 2009 to 2010 where we had $1.7 million in the rainy day fund. And Governor Walker's first term, they passed a law that when you have a surplus at the end of a budget, that half of that surplus goes directly into the rainy day fund. So that's how we saw the great increase of the rainy day fund over that period of time. It is now capped. So we would have to actually do legislate because it went up to a certain percentage of the entire spending of the budget. But now we have great reserves that in case we do hit another downturn in the economy. If we hit a downturn in the economy, we have that money set aside. On top of that, it's projected that at the end of our current budget that we're going to have a $3.8 billion surplus at the end of it. So unlike many of our surrounding states, we're in really good fiscal condition at this point of time. This just shows the history since 2007 of our bonding, what we've done in bonding. So this, you can see, walk over here, I'll talk loudly. This was Governor Doyle's last budget, Governor Evers, or Governor Doyle's last budget, Governor Walker's first budget. This is when we were going through the last recession. So there was a lot of borrowing being done during this time. And as you can see going forward, we've really taken control of the amount of borrowing that our state's done. The blue line is through our general fund borrowing. The orange line is through the transportation fund. When I was first elected, 25 cents of every dollar in transportation was going towards debt service. And that's now down to about 17 cents on the dollar. So we really moved our borrowing in the right direction. Our overall outstanding debt has gone down every year that I've been in office. So I'm sort of proud of the steps we've taken in reducing the debt burden on the state of Wisconsin. A lot of what we do through the general fund in bonding is through the UW system with new buildings or updating old buildings, things like that. So a lot of the the blue line that you see there from year to year, especially in the current, the recent budgets, is building new buildings on UW campuses or updating buildings and things like that, general maintenance. I stole this from one of my colleagues who's an accountant. This shows our gap balance over the last 20 years. He likes to point out that he took over when it was at its highest and it's gone down since. I like to point out that I took over when it really started going down. That's what I was elected in 2014. But you can just see the trend of a decade of responsible budgeting, what it's been doing to our deficits. A little bit more about our tax cuts. So our tax cuts, as I mentioned earlier, were divided up between $2.4 billion towards the income tax. And I'll show later how we sort of did that. And $650 million for property taxes. And we additionally put, we also eliminated the personal property tax. Unfortunately, the governor vetoed that out of the budget because he had some concerns over how we had that set up. He wanted it to increase with inflation and things like that. But hopefully next session as a small business owner, hopefully next session we can eliminate the personal property tax. So I don't know if they'll ever fill out that form again, which I just filled out like a week ago. Yes, like I said, the income tax cut, if you look, the main bulk of it went into the third tax bracket, which depending on how many dependents you have, you hit fairly early when you have a full-time job. So we reduced it from 6.27% down to 5.3%, which is a reduction of $1,000 for the typical Wisconsin family. And that's real savings. That's annually, that's going to go on into, well, hopefully eternity, hopefully we don't raise taxes again. But additionally, which I don't have any slides on this, four years ago when we passed the law requiring all online retailers out of state that they had to collect Wisconsin sales tax, if they're selling their items to people in Wisconsin, half of the revenue that we get from that goes to reducing our income taxes. So that's also had a reduction as that number goes up every year to, especially during the pandemic, we saw a huge windfall because of everybody ordering online instead of going out to store. So that's been slightly reducing our income taxes as well. This just shows graphically from budget to budget, how we've done reductions, numbers are small. I didn't get a chance to update. I want to take some of these slides out. So some of them I might move through fast. This shows sort of the breakdown of our property tax cuts, which works out to $200 for the annual median valued home. But it's also important to note that local referendum has an impact on what you pay in property taxes. And I'm going to show that on the next slide, I believe, no, slide after that. This just shows over the last five years what the effect that referendum, local referendum, have had on property taxes. The gray box is, it's like if your local school district builds a new high school, so it's building projects. The light blue is recurring referendum. So if they, if you pass a referendum to increase your levy limit going forward, and the dark blue or purple, whatever color that is, is non-recurring referendum. So if you vote to increase over your levy for like a five-year period, that just shows the effects of, of referenda around the state of Wisconsin. This graph shows the increase in spending in the transportation fund over the last five years, including next year in the budget that we passed. So as you can see, we've been steadily increasing our investment into transportation around the state of Wisconsin. This highlights sort of the, the bonding issue again. We bonded in the past on transportation projects through the general fund and also through the transportation fund. And this just shows that we've reduced, this is through the general, this is through the transportation fund, how we've increased that, that borrowing over that decade, because it's, yeah, over a decade. Highlights from the transportation part of the budget. So once again, we did a one-time, set aside a one-time amount of money. This, the previous budget I believe was 75 million. This budget we put 100 million to be split up between towns, municipalities, and counties to help them get caught up on their, their local road projects. It was great on this last round that a bunch of these ended up in my district. And hopefully we can keep moving this forward in future budgets to make sure local units of government can address the problems that they need most in there. We also increased general transportation aids by 2% each year and kept all state projects on, on point, such as the I-43 expansion down just south of here, Highway 23, which is going to be done here soon, which is fantastic, and other projects around the state. Some other highlights from the budget. We increased the tech college funding by 2.25 million annually, and also did some property tax through the tech colleges, property tax relief, through DISPIS, the Department of Safety and Professional Services, which is a, it's a licensing agency, which is important to a lot of different industries who, who have employees who, who are licensed. They've been having a hard time for as long as I've been elected, being, keeping caught up with providing those licenses, getting them through the system. So we made an investment into their IT system of 5.3 million. So hopefully they can get caught up. Tourism, we, we increased funding to tourism to try to get people into our state of Wisconsin to drive that sales tax revenue and tourism hospitality, which is so important to especially this area of the state, Door County, Northern Wisconsin, things like that. And we also increased under Department of Workforce Development increased apprenticeships by 1 million and did some other good things. Additionally, we included $129 million for broadband expansion, and that can be coupled with the billion dollars that's coming in from the federal government. We just actually passed a bill last week to try to wreck that these sources to hit that last mile, rather than, you know, upping where, where there's already high-speed service, providing multiple vendors in those areas to make sure that we're using taxpayer money to hit that last mile to the unserved, not the underserved, to make sure that, you know, if you're out in the country, you have access to broadband. And also an important thing that we did is require WEDC to use at least three million dollars of existing funds for talent attraction and retention to try, try to draw people into our state. We did this under Governor Walker's last budget and we've seen some good results of trying to get people to move to Wisconsin. And, you know, when I talk about the workforce shortage later on, you know, that's probably the biggest challenge that we hear about the state of Wisconsin and others, but probably the biggest one. So as we all know, inflation has been a challenge lately in the state of Wisconsin. I think I'll get in a slide later that so there's a couple reasons I think why inflation is, is having such a huge, is, is a problem right now. Part of it is just the amount of federal money that's been pumped into the system since the start of the pandemic. In Wisconsin alone, if you add up the PPP loans, the unemployment enhancement, just straight checks to people, the money that's gone into directly to local government, schools, counties, municipalities, if you add all that up, I should probably play a guessing game to try guess what this actual number is. And by the way, this has not all been spent yet, obviously. It's, you know, does anyone want to try guess how much money has in the last two years has been earmarked and has been partially spent in Wisconsin? The size of our two-year budget is $92 billion to give you a reference point, $100 billion. The ARPA one was $5.8, $5.7 billion alone. You're high actually, but, but $58 billion. So it's almost like it's over an extra year of government spending in our state, which is why, you know, all this money is being poured into the system. People are spending it. It's causing prices to go up. And then you combine that with the supply chain issues with, you know, shortage with trucking companies, things like that. It's really driving inflation and it's becoming quite a problem as a small business owner who has some supply chain issues. So yeah, inflation is at 7.5% currently, which is a 40-year high. Obviously, there's the number. Good thing I didn't turn to this page. $58 billion. This comes from a WMC survey, the impact of inflation on companies. I'm not sure who the 9% of companies who find it positive, but 82% of companies find it negative. This just shows the 18-month price of gas, which is driving inflation in other products. And just a point, in Governor Evers' first budget, he proposed raising gas taxes by $0.08 a gallon and then indexing it to inflation. So if we would have passed that three, four years ago, you'd now be paying an extra $0.10 per gallon and it'd be going up even more because of the high cost of inflation. So not only would gas be at $0.350 a gallon, it'd be at $0.360 a gallon at this point. So this is, since 2011, we've really, well I haven't been there since 2011, I haven't been there since 2015, but the legislature has really worked on reducing the tax burden in the economy. And if you look at all the taxes that we've reduced over the last decade, it's, it totals up to $22 billion. We got that from the non-partisan fiscal bureau who treks, treks keeps, does our accounting for us. And this will, you know, what we did with reducing income taxes and things like that will help, at least help families somewhat combat inflation and things like that. And we went from the fifth highest tax burden state in 2009 to 23rd in 2019, which is the fastest decline over that 10 year period. I'm just going to talk about a couple of the bills that we've done, which I think are pro-growth and pro-business. The first bill we did was sort of a response to COVID, AB1, and you know, helping hospitals deal with COVID and things like that. It was sort of a hot potato that went back between both houses for a while. It was really fun being the new majority leader at that point. But ultimately, we got a bill signed into law by the governor, which was great. And it provided COVID liability protections for business, nonprofits, churches, schools. So that way, you know, operating in this environment, we, you know, organizations don't have to worry about frivolous lawsuits. We have the strongest protections of any state that has split government between Republicans and Democrats. And so it was great that we could get that bill done. Senate Bill 189, which is actually the budget, repealed the personal property tax, which unfortunately was vetoed. Assembly Bill 220 is encouraging youth apprenticeships, actually requiring schools to focus on youth apprenticeships and let their inform their students of opportunities in that area to try, you know, fill that skills gap in the labor market. Senate Bill 629, these last three bills are actually on our calendar for next week and have already passed the assembly, is a helping WEDC work with workforce housing to try and encourage that take, eliminate some of the red tape and things like that. Assembly Bill 932 is another bill promoting youth apprenticeships and 912 gives legislative oversight to future, make sure that no future governor can deem some businesses essential and some business is not essential that that's to be a standardized approach for a business, not because personally, I believe all businesses are essential. So obviously, the biggest challenge that businesses are facing is the workforce. And a lot of this is caused by the demographics of the state of Wisconsin, sort of an aging demographic, which is why it's so important that we're investing in talent attraction and, you know, making sure our tax code is competitive and better than other states. And I mean, you guys all know the unemployment numbers here in the three counties that I represent parts of, you know, 1.7%, 1.5%, 1.4%. Fortunately, Wisconsin's workforce participation rate is higher than what it is nationally, but it's still lower than what it was pre pandemic. This is more from the WMC survey. Are you having trouble hiring employees? 88% of businesses are. I was planning on taking this slide out, but it shows over the last 20 years, the labor force participation rate went from 73%. Now it's at 65%. So it just shows that trend and some of that is an aging demographics, but we need to do at the state level, anything we can do to incentivize people to get back into the workforce workforce solutions. There are currently 135,000 jobs on the state of Wisconsin's website. So you can see sort of the challenge that all businesses are facing. So we did a workforce package that we took up last week when we're on the floor. And if our bills are signed into law, it's estimated that 50,000 people will get back into the workforce. Just some highlights of the bills indexing UI benefits to unemployment rate. So the lower the unemployment rate is the less amount of time people can spend on unemployment. If you ghost, I'm sure if you guys are in the hiring process, you have people who apply for a job just to meet that requirement. And then they never show up just so they can say they applied for the job. So if they sign up for interviews or schedule interviews and don't show up, then they lose a week of unemployment insurance just to incentivize people to actually do it. The food share work requirement, this is for able bodied adults without dependents that they have to have work requirements if they're going to collect food share and a bunch of other technical things to try. Probably the other important one is checking from system to system to make sure people are still eligible for unemployment to make sure there are people still collecting unemployment who should be collecting unemployment. So with that, I think I got done maybe quicker. I thought I had more slides on that, but I got done maybe a little quicker than I thought. I would love to open it up to any questions that you guys might have. Yeah. Yes, Dave. I don't know. I hope he signs all of them. But yeah, I don't know. Someone gave me some questions ahead of time, but I didn't have a chance to read it. So I'm going to read the questions out loud. Let you guys think of questions. Joint Finance Committee members here in Passema, from to White County, and of course, representative of the title of four popular groups in White County. So we are so fortunate to be represented by such good people at the state level. And I want to thank the senator for his support for Highway 23. We're all so pleased to see that getting done. I also want to thank the senator for his key leadership with the National Opioid Settlements nationally. Every local unit of government that was involved with his lawsuit is going to see some opioid settlement come their way to help people in need. And Senator Lemieux was a key leader in Wisconsin. In fact, Wisconsin has one of the best arrangements or opportunities to help people in need thanks to to Devon's leadership. And if you aren't aware of it, Devon is a humble person. You're looking at an eight-time Iron Man standing up there. He served on the county board as did his dad before them, both of them went on to serve in the Assembly and Senate, and we're very proud of his leadership. So, Devon, thank you for your public service. I should bring Adam along to all my speaking engagements. Thank you, Adam. Now, it was great. I enjoyed my time on the county board. The nine years I spent, I developed two of my former colleagues back there. So it was great working on the county board. I will read this question first. Assembly Speaker Robin Voss, it was reported recently visited former President Trump at Mar-a-Laga or however you say that in Florida. The question is, would you please, my glass is back on, getting old, would you please comment on why he visited him? I don't know if he did recently. I know he was back in the summer. He hopped on a plane with the President. You know, the sort of gets us into election law, which I was hoping not to talk about tonight today, but you know, there were a lot of concerns over the 2020 election. The election commission did some things that either the law gave them no ability to do using the pandemic as an excuse to do it, such as letting not allowing people into nursing homes, democracy in the park with drop boxes everywhere, the Zuckerberg money being dropped just into the big cities, things like that. So there was a lot of concern over the last election. And obviously, our former president has been very vocal about his view of that election. We audited it with the nonpartisan audit bureau will the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty also did an audit of it. And they found, you know, a lot of what we knew went on that there was, you know, some municipalities taking advantage of either places where the law didn't say that they could do it or, you know, sort of taking some liberties with that. Would it did it or did it change the election results? No one will ever know, frankly, because, you know, who knows what went on at those areas. So we we just sent a host of bills to the governor using the audit bureau's suggestions, the nonpartisan audit bureau, which has historically criticized both Republicans and Democrats. I mean, they they're auditors, they do a great job. So we took their suggestions, put it into legislation and governor said he's going to veto them. But we we did our job to address those issues as much as as much as we could as being one of three branches of government. Yes, ma'am. I wasn't going to bring it up. But you brought it up regarding regarding the WEC. Forgetting about drop boxes and all this other stuff that people are talking about, they haven't cleaned up the voter rule. What is the legislation going to do to spank them, oversee them or something to make them clean up the voter rolls? For example, we have about four million voter legal voters in this state, and yet there's over seven, not four million, yeah, so there's over seven that are registering the WEC. Well, how can we have more voters than we have people? So the answer to that question is the seven million referring to our non active on the voter rolls and that tracks people who've been at current addresses. So for example, some addresses, there may be like rental units on college campuses might have 30 people at that address. They're not active voters. It's having a history of who's voted at those places. The active voter list is cleaned up and because of a law that I passed my second session, using Eric by mailing up postcards to people who haven't voted in the last, forget all the details, but haven't voted in the last four elections. Unfortunately, it took WEC to institute it before the last election, but they now have cleaned, use that to eliminate those from from the rolls. And that's an ongoing process as well as people who are registering to, you know, go with with death certificates, real estate transactions, you know, all state state records to sort of true them together. Just another question. You talked about median home value. Is there a number that you have for that? Or how is that right? Are they using the tax assessed feelings or are you using market values or what are they using to arrive at this median home value? It's the assess value. The question was what what is the median home value? And it's the it's based off the assess value, which you know rises, but it's the it's not the average, it's the median. So the middle house in the fictitious middle valued house in the state of Wisconsin. Yes. My name is Benjamin Horvath. I have two questions. One particular was just mentioned a business associate of mine said that there was a independent council that recently, I guess last week that showed these findings of the 2020 election. Is that what you were referring to just now when you said that there was an audit or is that something separate? You said within the last week. Right. So as far as I know, there's been three audits done. The one which both houses of the legislator did legislature did through the nonpartisan audit bureau. We got those results in like October of last year. Will the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty did their own audit? And that came out last fall as well. And the assembly through the speaker hired former Justice Gableman to do his own audit. And that he issued a report Tuesday this week. And there's a hearing on it. And I haven't had a chance. I'm a little busy this week. I haven't had a chance to actually read that audit yet. But I look forward. That's on my list of things to do this weekend. Okay, great. That must be what my friend was referring to. Second, the totally different subject. We're a start up factory process in the environmental sector. And it seems oftentimes that Democrats have been known as the environmental party where they kind of get all of the credit for being environmentally conscious. And as a Republican, I don't agree with that. But I don't think Republicans regain the ground of saying we care about the environment. We're not hysterical about it, but we care and we're responsible. And what can you do for businesses that are looking to move into that sector? That is a fantastic question. I'd love to sit down with you and pick your brain and ideas on how to do that. I think we've done some bills to address like the PFAS issue up in, especially in the like the Marinette area of the state. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a bunch of things we've done over the last eight years that I've been around. I'm not on the Natural Resources Committee, so I don't work on them directly, a lot of those bills. But even a lot of the things we've done for sporting heritage and things like that, we invest in stewardship. We've increased stewardship spending while we've kept it steady to help local counties and municipalities and groups to purchase land through the stewardship program for recreation or parks and things like that. I know back when I was on the county board, we had a big one for the Amsterdam Dunes down in the southern part of the county, which the state has helped out. So, you know, we've invested in stewardship, things like that, but definitely love to, you know, sort of, it's interesting that a lot of the Democrats have wanted to like increase the renewable energy standard from I think it's at 10 percent now to like 25 percent, 50 percent, things like that. We don't need to have a government mandate to do that because it's some of the renewable energy is becoming more affordable and power producing places are adding more solar farms, more and different things. And it's good to have a diverse energy portfolio, but it's also important to have something that's going to always be producing energy. And that's typically a fossil fuel type of power plant because we can't, as we all know, as business owners, if you're, especially if you're running a factory, you can't have brownouts and rolling outages and things like that. So yeah, I think we often see the role of government differently in the area of the environment. You know, it's maybe incentivizing not hammering people for doing things. I think I saw another handout back there. A common first and then a question. Frank Lemmington, the judge in the Milwaukee Journal, just to the rule unconstitutional, the law and law gave him referring to the 2020 election, which started in October of last year for 600,000 factors money was extended to December, then extended to February. And of course, it's going to be appealed. The question is, when does this all end? I will leave that up to the speaker to answer that question when he's going to stop his Gabelman investigation. He asked me to join him back last summer. And, you know, I was comfortable with what the audit bureau was doing. And I knew that will was very, I trust will as investigators doing their jobs. So I feel we needed another another investigation going on. But I, you know, regardless of how you believe what went on in 2020, I think we need to focus on 2022. I mean, we can see we're not going to be able to pass any laws without a new governor, apparently on truing up our elections. We can either be like Georgia, where Republicans sat home, and Democrats won or it could be like Virginia, where Republicans were energized, it came up and won. So that's my focus is on obviously identifying some of the areas we can clean up in state law, which we're doing through the legislative process, but we're going to need a new governor to get that signed into law. I do not know what you're trying to see. I don't think it is. In your presentation, you had pointed out the friendships in two different areas. Can you tell us a little bit more mechanically how with those with those bills, how the messaging of youth apprenticeships is going to get maybe a broader scope? I know Lakeshore Technical College does a perfect job with the youth apprenticeships, because when I worked at FEMA's manufacturing company, I have a number of youth apprentices that went forward. But how or what is the plan to try to make that more of a broad brush across the state when it comes to youth apprenticeships? Right. So the question is regarding the couple bills that I had up there about youth apprenticeships. And as you stated, LTC does a fantastic job with their youth apprenticeship program, partnering with high schools and businesses to give that opportunity for high schoolers to get their foot in the door to provide some work experience to show how vital manufacturing is to the area, which is probably why I didn't dig into those bills as much as I should have, because I think we're doing it really well here. But we see this problem all over the state, where there's a workforce shortage. We have seen a good, I've seen in the last decade sort of a change in view from schools to not just push kids into universities and four-year colleges and highlight, you can get a great job. If you go to LTC for two years, no debt. You develop that you can work as you're when you're going through it, earn some money. You can be 20, 21 years, 19 years old and get a great paying job. Whereas maybe some of your classmates are getting there. I should downgrade higher education too much inside. I think I learned a lot in my four-year liberal arts degree, but I worked hard through there and left without a whole lot of debt myself. But yeah, I think it's just important to give kids multiple options in all directions to make sure that we can find the correct path for them and not maybe not have them waste four years in college. But it's funny, we had our, making a funny, ironic, we had our LTC breakfast with legislators this morning and they bring in some of their students who've come through different paths. And there's, I was talking to one student who has a political science degree from a liberal arts college and is now back at LTC a couple years later, getting a two-year human resource degree. And I'm like, well, I have a political science degree too, so I don't know what job skills I have if I, if I lose one of these years, but I'll have to go back to LTC. I saw someone else's hand up. Maybe I didn't see someone else's hand. Yes, Faye. You have had some employees roughly convicted. And to the extent where a number of them are right, you know, what factual evidence was there and there was none, really to divide detractors, whatever. People are, you know, a lot of people in jail that are willing to engage. How can we turn that around, convicting people based on emotion, hearing citizens, some change at the state level, to turn this around so that we have the evil body working not the way out of prisons. So we have this, I'm going to editorialize my opinion here. This is my opinion only. I think there's two ways to rehabilitate people. One is to teach them job skills. And we do that to those who are, we still need to increase the funding on that for our state prison system. But yes, provide job skill training in that. Unfortunately, not all inmates are willing to do that or cooperate and things like that. But I think the other way is through finding Christ, I think, to turn their life around. And which is why I personally support the chaplain here in Sheboyin County financially, because the best way to have someone not get locked up again is to have their life changed, to find a reason not to commit crimes. But yes, in our state prison system, we do job skills. We started now with treatment for drug problems and things like that too. It obviously still needs work. But I mean, I think a bigger point to this is since the pandemic, we've seen homicides and murders increase. We've seen car thefts increase. We've seen judges let, I mean, I'm sure there are people who are maybe wrongfully locked up. But there are a lot of people who are committing crimes, especially in urban areas that are increasing and need to be punished and pay the crime. Because if there are no consequences for your action, these crimes are only going to go up. And, you know, obviously, the biggest issue in our state is the workforce challenge. Probably secondarily is the housing challenge. But we have a great state in trying to track people and keep them in this state through, you know, certainty in the business climate, reducing taxes, making sure we have clean lakes, a beautiful environment to recreate. But if people don't feel safe in this state, why would they stay here? Or live in an urban area if they don't feel safe? So I mean, there needs to be consequences for crime. And yeah, I'm sure there's things we can do better and we'll still continue to try work on teaching job skills. But some people don't want to learn those. Yes. So as far as workforce, I'm just curious, maybe just anecdotally, the conversations you hear around the state capital. You know, each state's don't have a state tax or, and then your answer doesn't have a burned income tax. Are there any discussions like that to make us one of the only states in the Midwest without a burn tax or a state tax, you know, there's something I think property tax is the highest revenue that Wisconsin gets, you know, to have either maybe a cash income cap that that below it nobody would pay tax or anything, maybe incentivize either incomes or anything, coming into positions that, you know, to attract some of the workforce. Right. There was just a bill introduced within the last couple of weeks. Obviously, at the end of session, so it's not going to get enacted right now to increase sales tax by, I think it was three and a half cents and eliminate the income tax. That doesn't quite cover it. That if you use, if you don't use dynamic scoring, I think we're working towards reducing the income tax rate as fast as we can. I know Tennessee eliminated theirs by increasing their sales tax by like five cents or something. So they have like a 10 cent sales tax. A lot of the states that don't have income taxes have a major state revenue source such as oil or things like that to offset the loss of an income tax. But no, I agree with you that the lower we can reduce our income taxes, it's more beneficial for our state long term, keeping companies here, keeping higher paid employees. But I think we need to think so when President Trump decreased the corporate tax rate, a lot of small businesses shifted their, how they're taking income from income revenue to corporate revenue because that tax is lower overall. And so in Wisconsin, we saw a huge increase in corporate income taxes rather than personal income taxes. So when you make a huge change like that, you have to think through how is business going to change, how income is paid out and think of everything before you do that just to make sure you're not causing just a huge shift and taking huge losses elsewhere. But I mean, we've been hitting at it. Still a long ways to go, but hopefully we can make some more transformational with our surpluses and our current higher revenue make some more long term income tax reductions in the next budget. Got me for two more minutes. Yes. The question is to the state's stance on local control of where, for example, in wind farm employees be cited. I don't know how much you're aware of the issues with wind farms, but to me they're completely not renewable because it's the heavy metal or the rare earth metal mining in China. And if you saw any of those pictures, it's horrible. Okay, it's not in our backyard, but it's still a big problem. And then you have all the fuel that's used to transport from place to place and ship these things all over. You have the fact that at least it used to be that any time they changed hands, they got a new government handout. I'm not sure that this source, I think it was federal. And I don't know if it's still happening, but that used to be the case. So you could have a wind company and change name and sell it and keep getting the same failouts all the time. These things do affect property values tremendously. So what you're doing when you're allowing something to come in is you're saying to those homeowners that what they work for and their equity in their house doesn't matter. In addition, it causes severe health issues with both people and livestock and wildlife. So my understanding is that somehow the energy companies have gone to the state and at the state level said, well, we want to come in here and do this and try to bypass local input. Is there anything or any plans that you have put in place so this cannot happen and so that the local governing authority will have to be able to see? No, you can't bully your way in here. That was a long question about wind farms. So those who couldn't hear, you know, if you contact my office, I can clarify any of that for you. I'm pretty sure local governments can deny that because I know there was a solar farm. I don't know about wind farms, not with wind farms. Okay, with solar farms. Someone in the renewable energy field who could probably answer the question better than I can. We're actually in a recycling process, not with waste energy. But I would comment, I think the best fortification against property values being hurt in the local community is really the facts. If you look at the total score of carbon emissions and the total life cycle of that technology, it's more of a mixed bag than some would say. And so I think empowering local people to understand the whole picture rather than a perspective that is somewhat skewed to only the information they want you to hear about it being beneficial, I think would actually cause more benefit and more protection to local communities that could be hurt by the technology just because they say, you know, we have to save the whales. So we have to do this regardless of whether or not it hurts you. And the facts point otherwise when you actually know the big picture. So I'd love to see some of that information be presented. And I think there's been many areas in the last couple of years where we've been presented a set of the facts and the other facts are not allowed. And that the lack of free speech lack of equal footing for the facts, whether we disagree or not just pass the take place in the use to come, we can't allow that to happen anymore. And so I think Republicans have to say, we know the facts also, and you're only presenting some of them, we're going to present the whole picture. And then we're going to let the American people decide it's past one o'clock. So thank you chamber for inviting me.