 Hello. Welcome to the Donahue Group. We're getting started now, if you all don't mind. And in slightly different posture here, William Buckley is here. Ken Risto, director of the world at the Shawagon Area School District, is channeling William F. Buckley today. It's a tribute. It's an homage. It's an homage to a great man, Cal Potter, retired DPI, assistant superintendent of library services, state senator, and overall smart guy, Tom Paneski, math professor at UW-Shawagon. I'm Mary Lynn Donahue. I'm a lawyer at O'Neill, Cannon Holman de Young here in town. I can actually say the name now without halting, so that's... They required that in order for me to continue to get a paycheck. I am back from two weeks in India, and yet... Welcome back. I have paid close attention to the local scene, and I think we have a lot to talk about. I missed a real snow day, February 6th, a day that will live in infamy, 14 inches of snow, and some people got to stay home. When I did get back, I found that I was slipping and sliding into frozen ruts in the road, and the mayor being excoriated for bad snow plowing. I thought his editorial in the newspaper to address that was pretty good. I'm surprised the press let him do that. Did you happen to catch that? I read it. I mean, mayors live in dyes in snow plowing. Yes, they do. It cost Harold Washington his job in Chicago. Jane Byrd. Yeah, Jane Byrd took his place. No, no, Jane Byrd lost her job. Thank you, Tom. I stand correct. I stand corrected. That's right. Okay, enough homage. I really miss him already. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Jane Byrd's lost her job because she couldn't get the snow removed properly. It's been just a tough battle. I mean, it's weird combinations. A lot of our, you know, inner parts of the city just weren't designed to have cars parked on both sides, and everybody's playing, you know, municipal ping pong. It was just difficult. People won't stay home. No salt. I mean, you know. They don't stay home. They pack it down, and when the plow comes, it just can't remove it from the pavement. Exactly. Spoiling your school district wasn't any better. So, I mean, our lots, no matter where you went to, were pretty much like walking on the lunar landscape. And same challenge as the guys faced. There's just not much you can do about it. Well, I did pay my own particular homage to the ice on the sidewalk by taking a complete, full-out, legs up in the air flat on my back fall. That was just really, and I hopped right up and continued on. Good bones. And drinking, you know, good. Or something, but in any event. You were loose. I was relaxed. We hope that, I guess I heard next week it's supposed to be in the 40s or something. It's supposed to warm up. A lot of time. The average high. And all these big street ruts, ice ruts, I guess I'm calling, that they still exist somewhere. And maybe they'll finally melt away, and then we'll have the potholes, which we have to deal with. And we'll just make our way to summer, I guess. Well, as the mayor pointed out in his editorial, quite to the point I thought, an old man comes by as he's shoveling his sidewalk and says, well, that's Wisconsin in winter. The interesting question is what kind of pressure that puts on, you know, an incredibly tight city budget where there's just no extra room for anything. And although maybe we could talk a little bit about retiring the Marina debt, and buy, like, a big heap of sand, what do you think? Or beet juice. Beet juice is now being touted. Unfortunately, a $2.50 a gallon is a wonderful ice melter. Is that your investment tip for the day? Well, that's one of the stories in the press today. It was about the Marina debt. I think the finance committee in Alderman, and maybe somebody else think that would be a good idea. They retire the debt, save some interest money, but some of the money would come from the motor vehicle fund, and the public works department and the people are thinking they need that money to purchase equipment and trucks, and they're reluctant to, say, use it to retire the Marina debt. So the council has some items to think about, and motor vehicle fund is supposed to be used for motor vehicles, and my view of... Except it's got $8 million in it. Not anymore after they used quite a bit of it to what, to retire some pension debt and stuff like that. Right. Have they already done that? I mean, I think that's actually a good use of public funds. Yeah, well, they had more than they needed. But I think that's the kind of problem that at least the city is going to talk about, and it's back and forth, and I think public works has a legitimate concern. It's a rough winter. Equipment's going to take a beating. They need replacement parts. They need replacement vehicles. It'd be nice to retire the debt, but... Does anyone know how large is the Marina debt at this point? I think they said 1.3 million or something. I thought it was around a million, but... Plan to pay off Sheboygan's 1.275 million debt on the Harbor Center. So 1.3 million. I mean, the city is bumping up against its debt ceiling, and they've imposed, self-imposed a lower debt ceiling that state law would allow, but nonetheless, it's a lot of debt. And while it certainly supports municipal bonds and so forth, it's, in my view, kind of a stupid way to spend your money. So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I can eliminate that perpetual analysis every year about the Marina losing money. It's just something that sort of rubs salt in the wound about whether that should have been done in the first place. I mean, Sheboygan needed a Marina. It's built. Without the debt aspect of it, it's probably doing fairly well. So let's get back to seeing it as an asset for the community. Which I think it clearly is. I mean, you go along cities on our sea coast, our lake coast. I think the Sheboygan Marina is the most beautiful that I... I mean, certainly, to my view, nicer than Manitowoc and nicer than, I mean, Algoma and Kiwani are kind of charming, but they're not... I mean, I just think that our Marina is quite nice so it has a lot of big buildings, but maybe they didn't need to make it quite so luxurious, but in any event. Well, the next time, dear viewers, that we talk about this, hopefully the snow will be at least somewhat melted and we won't get an April blizzard. Although I'd like another snow day, I feel. Oh, let me just throw my snow shoes and go to work. When we go to India, you can see me. Let me throw a little political twist Alderman Vicky Meyer is chair, I think, of the Public Works Committee and they're arguing to use the motor vehicle fund for motor vehicles. Alderman Gisha is chair of the Finance Committee or on the Finance Committee. No, Hannah is chair of the Finance Committee. But... Are you supporting it? Yeah, they're supporting it. So they also had that rift between the two on what was said outside of council. So we got the political people back again. Well, I think you need that. In order to make a good decision, you have to have some knowledge of what your capital costs are going to be in terms of motor vehicle replacement. If it's two million, then you know what you need. And if it's eight million, then you know what you need. And if it's a hundred thousand, well, then maybe we can spend it in other ways. But I think, you know, you need some fairly decent finance or financial figures to tell you that. Yep, yep. Well, let's get off the snow and stop being old grumps about things and move on to County City put shared services back on the table. There was actually a meeting of the City County Shared Services Committee at the end of February. And Alderman Mark Hannah said, quote, I'm the glass is half full type of person and I believe we have a renewed level of enthusiasm here. I have to agree. I think it's a good idea to, I mean, that group had not met for really a very long time and to get back in the saddle again. And I think it's over the HR human resources. Oh, yeah, yeah, I forgot about that. You know, possibilities of sharing services and so forth. So that's us moving them off the dime now again? I think so. I think so. Because I really think to move a really hard concept forward, you need some issue that will kind of propel you. And I think the HR position may just be there. Where is that? It's still unresolved. We don't know what we're going to do. Right. Well, I was acting HR right now. Susan Hart. She's still acting. Okay. I think she's been doing that since November if I'm not mistaken. Yes. Any prognostications as to whether there will be success in terms of shared services? Well, I don't think it looks good for a lot of success. I think there have been previous attempts. And, you know, a lot of it isn't just city, county. It's just whether we need the number of units of government we have at all in the county and in the state generally. I've talked about before, you've got sanitary districts, you've got water districts, you've got this district and that district, and then you've got all these towns and you've got various... How many fire departments do we have? And probably eight police departments. At what point do you say there's a better way of delivering a service to 110,000 people that live in this county? That's not a lot of people, 110,000, but yet you have a lot of different units of government. And it's sort of like consolidation school districts. They don't want to give up their own little town or their own little village. And until you get that change in attitude, I'm not so sure it's come about. People still are very, very parochial. They live in Oostburg and they live in this town or that town, and that's how they view it. And, you know, if you look at communities like around Nashville or around Jacksonville, Florida where they've gone to metro government, where their fire department, their police department and all their services, it's all county metro. Those are people who've had large population growth around the big city, and they just said, this is crazy to have all these units of government because you don't even know where, when you cross the street, what municipality you're in, they have seen a reason to meld into one. And that's where metro government has seemed to been very successful. But when you get these units of government kind of spread out, it's tough to get people to start thinking differently. I'd like to see it. I think we have too many units of government. There's savings to be wrought in school district mergers in other areas. But I don't know how you get people in a democracy to say, yes, I'm part of the problem rather than somebody else's problem. People are, you know, in the school district, they're people who just really, really, and perhaps it's just part of our, we've talked about this before, part of it is people feel they have so little impact on other things in their lives that local government is about the only place where they feel they can still have a say and can still have an impact on what's really, really going on. And, you know, and so if you're living in Kohler or Sheboygan Falls and you're looking at, say, merging with the Sheboygan area school district, or Usberg for that matter down the road, there just isn't any kind of interest in that. They know who their school superintendent is. He's on a face-to-face basis at the diner. You know who your alderman is. You know, it's just that sort of, yeah, that sort of, that kind of familiarity is really tough for people to let go. Do you remember maybe when Governor McAllum was proposing a reduction in shared revenue and he said all these entities get together, find out to save dollars because we're proposing to cut back on the shared revenue? He mentioned it. He knew it was a losing proposition because everybody rose up. Not me, not me, not me. Well, and unfortunately I think McAllum kind of made municipalities out to look like bad guys and they're not. I mean, I think that, you know, our local units of government try very hard to deliver good services and they're thoughtful about it and some are more successful than others, some are more intentional about providing good services than others, but I mean, overall, I think you can actually accomplish things without bribing people as in India. You just need to have a wad of bills with you if you need to get anything done in a society which seems to have almost nothing in the way of infrastructure. So I kept asking our guide, I do municipal law, I'm interested, where do you get your water? From the rivers. I saw not one healthy river and of course it was before the monsoon season, but I digress. Let's get back to Sheboygan and as soon as I got back, I was lucky enough to again be the voting, the vote reporter for the League of Women Voters calling in vote returns and so forth. What really surprised me in the Democratic primary, I mean, Barack, as we say, those of us who've run for office say, Hillary got a schvetsing in the state of Wisconsin as a whole. I mean, a serious schvetsing. Of course, Obama spent, I think, five times more money here than she did and so maybe that's what spending five times the amount of money will get you, but what was interesting to me in Sheboygan County, the numbers were closer. Obama got about 53% and Clinton got about 46%. So those numbers were smaller. Interestingly enough as well, Mike Huckabee got closer to John McCain in Sheboygan County and that was a 51 to 41 split and I think on the state level again, those numbers were quite a bit more spread out. 55, 37, McCain Huckabee. There you go. You misspoke. It's right here on the beat, right here. It's right there. Have it here in front of me. I'm only doing this for the whole episode, I'm sorry. Do you remember? That's not too surprising. I mean, you think back, within the Sheboygan County jurisdiction we've got a pretty strong conservative religious base of folks within the city certainly and Usberg and Cedar Grove sort of pride themselves on the Dutch reform tradition and I think Huckabee was really obviously focused on, he's focused his candidacy on that and so the fact that he got 4% points more in Wisconsin, I mean, Sheboygan County than in Wisconsin is not too surprising. And Hillary did well with older folks in Sheboygan County demographics because we do have a rather sizable elderly population. An organized labor I think tends to be not necessarily uniformly by any stretch but tends to be more pro-Clinton just because she's been around longer and has built those relationships I think that Obama doesn't have and so I thought it was interesting. It does point out to me though again that this will make you a happy person is that Sheboygan County grows more and more and more and more and more conservative as time goes on. Just overall, I think that... I live in a wise county, don't I? What a radio station they're going to hell with. But it's interesting. Well, not well, but again, the time times from the radio, from the noise radio was really anti-McCain and people are pretty much ignoring that crowd of who is screaming that he's not conservative enough and he can't be trusted and it's the end of the Republican Party as we know it. I mean, what do you think? Because you're a Rush Limbaugh fan. Oh, yeah. Rush was one of his worst... I mean, McCain, you know, I guess the thing about my opinion about McCain... Well, what do you... Where do you think Rush is coming from in terms of making these assaults? I mean, I don't think the Republican... He's having fun. It's Ratings, right? It's Ray. He's an entertainer and he has fun. It's like the rest of us. Yeah, he really is. I mean, if you listen to him long enough, I mean, basically he's an entertainer. Sometimes he goes off to deep in every once in a while. But these, you know... You mean like in Days Ending and Why? And he has great parodies. Yeah. That was a buckly moment, wasn't it? That was a buckly. Days Ending and Why? That was good. But, yeah. So he's enjoying it. And he basically likes... He really was anti-McCain because he didn't think McCain adhered to what he really believes in his strong conservative principle. I mean, McCain's pretty conservative. I mean, if you peel away, you know, some of the rhetoric, I mean, McCain is very conservative. Oh, yeah. He's full life. And he's national security. And there's probably some other areas that he's very conservative on. Well, wants that Iraqi word to continue. But in any event, that was not my thought as much to debate our respective candidates as much as what the radio folks were doing. Were Sykes and Wagner? Those are our folks in Milwaukee. Were they as anti-McCain? Yes. Well, Mark Belling was. The same kind of thing. Mark Belling is a strong conservative. And I don't know who, McKenna. There was a woman in the morning. Nancy McKenna, I think she was too. So they were kind of beating the drum. Channeling and Coulter. I'm going to switch to a higher level of conversation. I don't have these problems. Now, now, Cal. I like the segue from Ann Coulter to a higher plane. We're fair and balanced, fair and balanced. And not telling any lies. I want to spend the rest of our time, if we can, talking a little bit about an issue that I think is huge for the state of Wisconsin has kind of run under the radar. And that's the Great Lakes Compact, the Great Lakes Legislature to be ratified. Where the, I think the last of the eight states that are involved in this. It's kind of like passing the Equal Rights Amendment as far as I can see as we're trying to get this around and so forth. I attended a short press briefing that Lieutenant Governor Lawton did a couple days ago about this and really laying out the politics of the situation. It has passed the Senate resoundingly, 266. 266. Yesterday as we did this program. Lieutenant Governor Lawton said that Assembly Speaker Hipsch, have I pronounced that right? Correct. From West Salem. From West Salem is refusing, just clear out, refusing to put the bill in any committee which would allow its introduction on the floor. And so it's dead. And... Which is, this is right as Speaker. Exactly. Right. Right. I mean it's an enormous amount of control. People need to know that that's one of the powers of the Speaker. Yeah. And is there any way around that? You can pull bills off the committee floor or off the General Assembly floor. But if you did that over the Speaker you would probably have any committee chairperson who voted that way, no longer a committee chairperson as well as other hell to pay for the people who would buck the chairperson. The chairperson's a little dictator in essence. And so you don't see that happen. Cal, tell us if you will just a little bit about what the pact is. We don't have a huge amount of time left. Well, as you mentioned it's eight Great Lakes states and Ontario and Quebec and Canada. It's actually federal legislation. It has to be ratified by the states. And once it's ratified by the states then it gets the official stamp of Congress and goes into the power of law. And in essence what has taken place is that in 2005 the governors of the eight states and the provincial leadership in Canada got together and drew up a pact that basically says that if you draw water from the lakes you return it to the lakes and any other use other than a few exceptions such as a bottling plant they set a number of gallons per container because there's some bottling pants that basically has one in Michigan where they bottle their water and they ship it out but I guess if you don't bottle so many gallons and ship it out you can continue to do business. But in essence what you need to do is return the water to the basin. And the problem of course is Wisconsin well we're on Lake Michigan once you get beyond Milwaukee and Sheboyga you get over to Fond du Lac and so on you are no longer in the Lake Michigan Basin you are in the Mississippi River Basin so communities that now are finding radon in their water or they're finding low volumes in their wells are looking for the big sugar daddy to the east to get them out of their water problem and so this is one of the problems that they have is how do you return the water that you use for whatever purpose in that community back sort of uphill to Lake Michigan and so you've got a difference of opinion as to whether there ought to be that type of control of the water that's so close to these communities by governors who are in other states. In essence the PAC says unless if everybody agrees that this is a prohibition that stands and when you start when you get one person you can stop something. In other words if a governor of Illinois decides that they don't want Waukesha or New Berlin or some community to draw water out of Lake Michigan that's an objection that needs to be recognized so that's one of those issues that seems to be in Ohio and Wisconsin being the Stumbly Glock Ohio I think some of it's some industrial development issues because they have a number of big plants that draw a lot of water but the other states have gone along and ratified this thing and like you said the state senate has ratified it 26 to 6 I think it's a long overdue. Some of the articles that I've read are very concerned about delay which the speaker has a route to do but the delay is that at what point does Wisconsin and other states in the Middle West start losing congressional delegation and clout and right now Congress is receptive to respecting a PAC such as this and the congressional delegations that exist in the Middle West. You start losing power politically up here all of a sudden the Arizona's and Texas and Florida's and elsewhere grow in political power and say we don't need to take care of these people up there or listen to them. We want that water let's not have any type of PAC so right now we're I think in a very favorable position nationally to do something to prevent other states from raiding the lakes and it's just a shame that we've got some people who are being so obstinate about this. Governor or Lieutenant Governor Lawton described Governor Richardson, former candidate for president, talking about that absolutely Arizona needs to get great lakes water and it just needs to happen. She calls it water lust and I thought that was actually a fairly decent description. And they look at it so differently one of the articles I read too someone from Montana said this is no different than iron ore or making cars or whatever. They've got water let them sell it we'll buy it and we'll ship it out but the problem is you know the lakes historically only fluctuated about four to five feet in all the thousands of years and so if you start looking at global warming you start looking at water being diverted and not being replaced what's going to happen to the fishery what's going to happen to great lakes shipping what's going to happen to the water supply it's a quality of life in an economic situation for everybody that lives around those lakes it isn't just a matter that that water can be shipped off and somehow miraculously it's going to bubble up from the bottom and be replaced it isn't going to be. We don't have a whole lot of time Tom if you want to talk a little bit and we can certainly just go on into the state session The veto because it had to be unanimous if one governor says water cannot be given to Waukesha then that was it wherever the governor was whether it was Ohio, Illinois and one of the concerns was by the assembly leader was he thinks well it's unfair that one governor could stop development or aiding a community like Waukesha like an Illinois governor could say no and that's it and he even cited so he was kind of pushed for a majority but then I guess the governor's already signed on and they probably won't opt to go to a majority not even two thirds majority or three quarters so he was saying we're giving up a lot once we do this and he cited suppose companies from Illinois etc wanted to go to southeastern Wisconsin and they were outside the water basin and they needed water well the governor of Illinois could say no and of course then they can't relocate in Wisconsin so back in the it kind of impedes economic development a little bit for southeastern Wisconsin and the suburbs it's a way to quelch growth in the suburbs Lieutenant Governor Lawton did point out that the way the law is written now or the proposed compact is written now those vetoes are not cannot be made for just arbitrary or capricious reasons there are certain standards by which a veto is measured and you may have more information about that Cal but I think they could appeal they have to satisfy all these standards but then ultimately the governor could say well they met all these conditions but just not quite enough no I think the big measure is if you're not returning that water to the basin it's going to go down into the Mississippi and out to the ocean and so if you've got whether it's a steel plant or a bottling plant or a municipality who's going to draw millions of gallons out of the lake and not return it like everybody else has to and what everybody else has accepted I don't see how that can be permitted I don't see any objections I don't think there would be objections to maybe New Berlin drawing from the water if they somehow pipe back into the Milwaukee river or some other water to let the water go back in but when it disappears forever we have to wrap up but we'll continue this conversation thanks for joining us