 Hello, welcome to this week's legislative update. I'm Jim Baumgarter host and my co-host is Nanette Bullabush. I'm honored to be here. From Elkhart Lake. Yes. Where the Kettle Marine is nice. It's got Elkhart Lake. It's got all kinds of trees, the forest, and the farm you got out there. We do. My husband's a farmer. Yes, and Chal Potter, a former state senator is the person to prioritize wisdom because what we want to talk about today is issues and topics that may be important and how we can solve those problems and sort of a discussion period. And the viewers can sit there and watch us and listen. Or take some of the advice and maybe get involved. One of the issues that as a county board supervisor I had in beginning of January, people made a point because they knew I was a county board supervisor. They said these roads stink. There's big rocks in them. They're terrible. And so it was. And I said well because the legislature in Madison is not willing to pay for the bill and they want to borrow to do it and there's a big conflict. And we're not getting the money and we're paying, doing only 17 miles of roads, of county roads, and we should be doing 30. We have trouble. We have trouble. And so they said, well, fix it. So we passed the African sales tax. And now we're doing 30 miles of payment a year as we're supposed to. And we're giving every town, city and village part of the nine and a half million dollars that we get from that African sales tax. And we solved the problem. But you got to have a problem and you got to be willing to solve it, but you can't sit back and just rumble about it. So a year later now, since that it started, you're happy with the vote. You're happy with the tax. It's doing what it's supposed to do. Well, I'm not sure I'm ever happy with the tax, but I'm happy what it's doing. It's paving 30 miles of the road that will keep our roads up so people can get to work. They can move product to market. And we're doing what we're supposed to do at the government. Yeah, unlike the state. The state borrows rather than raising the gas tax like they should at a time, particularly when the gas is low on price. And at the same time, the knucklehead that we have as governor has come out and she's really chucked away high speed rail. And if you look, this nation is going to be 450 million in about 30 years, up from 330 million, and you won't be able to continue to build highways. We can't afford the loss of farmland or any type of land or in cities you can't put a fourth and fifth lane on these freeways without massive disruption of people. So it isn't going to happen. And so cities like Milwaukee and other urban areas and people in the states in general are going to have to start looking at rail and high speed rail. And Wisconsin had a great opportunity to have not only the manufacturer of the cars. We were ready to go. We were ready to go. But the governor canceled because, oh, maybe we're going to have to subsidize it. Well, he doesn't want to subsidize anything. He obviously wants to borrow for roads, but everything is subsidized. Whether you were on an airport, there's a fuel tax involved there. Whether you drive a car, you subsidize roads. Well, rail is going to have to be subsidized, too. It's just the price of being in civilization. We could have done it in a much more cost effective way until we dropped it. Sure. And it's a shame because really the high speed rail system that was being proposed by the federal government was going to run from this area from Chicago to Minneapolis. Now, if you don't participate, what is it going to do? Take a right angle to Iowa and then up through Minnesota. You know, it's just ridiculous. And this guy calls himself a thinking governor. I think he was dropped on his head at some time in his life because this is an absolutely stupid, unreasonable thing to do when we look towards the future. And as Jim has said, the county has picked up the ball on roads, but the state needs to follow suit. Well, what about, you have an issue there that you wanted to bring up? I do. I want to talk about AB 455, the Hunter in the Group. Oh, the baby bill. Well, what it does, as I understand it, and the governor, I think he signed it this morning, the last week. He calls it a sportsman law. It allows parents to decide when their child is old enough to shoot, to go hunting. Now, I know you're a big hunter, and I understand, as I understand it, since we have started allowing mentors to go into the woods with their children, or a guardian, someone who they're watching, and go in there and show them how to hunt, accidents have been reduced unbelievably since that program was started. Gun safety. That's often terrific. Gun safety classes. But now, you're going to allow a child of any age to go in with his or her own gun, and the adult can have his or her own gun. I don't think that's safe. Some people call it the Wisconsin kiddies can carry gun. I just think it's very ill-advised, and I wonder what you think. We have, I did an interview with veteran hunters, heroes for veterans, hunters, something like that in Wyoming. And two of them went there, and I did a little story in my column about the wonderful experience they had that they provided to these veterans. One of them is a mentor who's been mentoring a handicapped hunter for 15 years. He says, the guy's partly blind. I have to go out there, and I have to point out where the animal, they can see, but it's just limited. And he said, last year he got a bear. And he said, but he said, if they pass this bill, where the mentor and the hunter, mentee, both have guns, he says, I'm going to quit because you cannot do both safely. Take care of your person, your mentoring, and also hunting. It is an absolutely air. And the argument the legislators have made, well, 25 states do that. Well, in Wisconsin we have what's called Wisconsin Conservation Congress. All the citizens have a chance to meet every year to discuss issues, to discuss them, send them around to the DNR board, get them back, and then pass them. And hopefully the legislature will then take it up and provide some good legislation. This is a bunch of people who see that some states don't have it. They think Wisconsin should have it. Some discussion, but not very much. Not much. Who pushed for this bill? Well, just probably somebody who doesn't know enough about what the hazards are. People who are not fully capable of handling a rifle at that young age. Before we got on the air, we were talking about the fact that we have a lot of different ages that are scientifically based. You can't be president or run for president until you're 35. U.S. Senate is 30. House of Representatives is 25. And there's a reason for that, because experience, of course, but also brain development. The human brain does not fully develop until the mid-20s. And then, of course, there's a decline as you get older. But the pinnacle of full development is at that age. And so that's why we say you can't drive a car in most states until you're about age of 16. We raised it a number of years ago when I was known such as the drinking age from 18 to 21. All of these were based in the fact that some people just are not fully developed physically and mentally, socially, until certain ages. And to think that carrying a rifle that needs to be pointed in a certain direction when you're carrying it, that needs a safety on, that may shouldn't be loaded at some times, and you shouldn't be standing against a tree with a barrel up, these are all things that are hazards that you think a six- and seven-year-old kid is going to think about. Because our existing law already allowed you to go out if you were as young as 10, correct? Right. So now if you are, you can have your child younger than 10 with the gun, with their own gun, in the woods, putting everybody else at risk. I'm sorry. It defies good thinking and knowledge. And I think this is true of so many pieces of legislation. You know, even a health care debate, people who dump on Obamacare says, well, at one time, you know, we had 50 million people on health insurance. We cut that in half under Obamacare. And people who bought their own insurance were paying $1,000 a year more in premiums because you had 50 million people who aren't insured. Don't you want to have a better system? Why should you be paying more? Because these people don't. I mean, this is stupid, but yet people got reaction, I don't like Obamacare. Well, it was an attempt to solve a problem that was very worthy and ought to be improved and worked upon because of good reason. There's facts behind it. But so many pieces of legislation are just boneheaded ideas that come from people. In many cases, who shouldn't even be in the legislature? I often cite that Jim knows that a body of 99 in assembly and 33 in the Senate, there are some people there that, you know, for democracy's sake, they're there. But their horsepower between the ears is not anything they could be proud of and they don't contribute a heck of a lot because they just don't think very deeply into things or study things or come to conclusions that are really good solutions. And both you and you both served for many years in the legislature to state assemblymen and as senators. And isn't it true that some of that legislation is actually written by lobbying groups? Oh, sure. By Alec, by whatever, certain medical things. Well, my guess is the children's hunting thing was picked up by one of the legislators that saw another state didn't have it. They looked at their rules and he just had it drafted to our language. Well, they were in the bar one day and some guy says, well, my 70-year-old kid wants to go on. Why can't they? Why stop there? My son drove a tractor when he was 12. Well, you know, a car would have been easier. Why not let my 12-year-old son drive a car? Let's let the parents decide any of that. Let's let him drink at 10. The hunter manual that we teach youths, 100 Safety says you shouldn't take a loaded rifle and lean it on a car or put it on top of a car or truck. And what did the legislature do about a year ago? They passed a bill to allow that. Why? Because some special interest, you know, been out west where you could put a loaded gun in back of your pickup truck where there's, you know, maybe 50,000 people in half the state probably reasonably safe. But in Wisconsin, we got 5.5 million people. You don't do that. But the legislature passed and the governor signed. Another one on chronic waste disease. DNR has a management plan to try to control the spread of chronic waste disease. And, you know, it's a 40-page manual, all kinds of inputs by veterinarians and others. And one of the things that says in there, the DNR wants the legislature not to pass feeding and baiting bills. What do they just do? And the governor just asked last year to review that and they gave the governor the same information about not passing bills. And the legislature passed it. No public input by the DNR. The governor signed it. And now we have a civilian county somewhat in danger because of the lifting of some changes of the chronic waste disease. So crazy kind of bill, that's why the check is balanced. Well, they're not science-based. I mean, whether it's be that or deep wells that are draining wetlands and rivers and lakes. It's a policy being made without the benefit of studying the science. And in fact, they laid off a whole lot of scientists from the DNR, correct? There's less oversight. And DNR staff aren't allowed to speak at a bill hearing unless the author of the bill asked them to come. Well, how can they get input? And reason, they just want a special interest in others to do that. So there are some dark moments in Wisconsin's legislative history and I think we're in it. There is no reason why we can't step back and say, what got us to this point? And one of the things was deep involvement of the academic community. If you go back to the early 1900s, the legislature would frequently be addressed by people from the University of Wisconsin. They would lecture the legislature on banking, on insurance. And so you look at the 1911 session of the legislature which passed all kinds of progressive legislation. A lot of that was due to the fact that there were academics saying, here's a better way of doing it. Here's how you should do it. And the legislature listened. They're not doing that now. And now we must end our program and hopefully they will see the light, become more check and balance. And more involved. Pay attention. Call your legislator. Thank you very much for coming until next week. This has been Legislative Update. Thank you, Jim. Thank you.