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Good morning.
Welcome, welcome to Mad Nair on Air.
Jane Mad Nair, Greg Bach, Calvin Buefnoff, coming to you live from our home at Radio Park in Racine.
You can always join us.
Call or text the number is the same, 855.
7-5-2-4-8-4-2.
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It is already Friday.
I know.
So Dan Schaefer will be here.
Civic Media's political editor, also the creator of the re-combobulation area.
Dan will be joining us after the 9.30 news.
Lots of things to break down, including the work that just got underway on I-94.
One of many projects.
Yes, one of many, many projects.
We're also going to talk about the wheel text proposals getting kicked around the state.
Robin Voss, of course, Popcorn King, pretty much halting legislation he doesn't like.
I mean, it doesn't affect him.
That's a peak Robin Voss.
Yeah.
And that gambling bill that got pulled.
at the last minute, so we'll talk about that.
With Dan Schaefer coming up after 9.30 in hour number two after the 10.30 news, the segment we call Audio Sorbet.
Where we talk about lighter things.
Get away from the news so we can all take a breath.
The second, uh, Wicked Musical.
Wicked for good.
Wicked for good is dropping today in theaters today.
So we were kicking that around before the show.
We're going to talk about your favorite movie musicals.
I love them.
I grew up on them.
I've been in a car with you in Tonalba.
I know you love them.
I can sing the entire album of West Side Story.
I'll talk more about my limited yet.
deep love for certain musicals.
Certain musicals.
So favorite movie musicals, that's what we're going to kick around for Audio Sorbet after the 1030 News.
And then we'll end the show as we always do.
With this shouldn't be a thing, we had a tough time deciding what to name this one.
Today it's the Teddy Sexpin Edition, you.
If you have a certain age, it'll make sense.
Well, yes.
Stay tuned.
For that, that's coming up at the very end of the show.
I wanted to start off with this.
This is from the Wisconsin Watchman, Willa Silva and Jade Lozada have the byline.
Farmers are feeling the squeeze from Trump's mass deportations and Congress isn't even close to a fix.
House Republicans say they're in the early stages of discussions.
as farmers raised concern about labor shortages.
This is something we talked about leading up to the second Trump term, all these mass deportations now, the signs were all over his rallies, they were all over the RNC, mass deportations now, and we were talking then about what is going to happen when farmers lose their
workers.
probably be able to play it.
I know that egg secretary Brooke Rollins had a very, it was an elegant solution.
Another one of their elegant solutions.
So
many elegant solutions, which was to take all of the people who are fraudulently on Medicare, Medicaid, Medicaid and throwing them into the fields, send them into the fields, able body folks.
And what I really enjoyed about this was.
was misinformation on one topic, using misinformation on another topic and bringing them together as a misinformation shared universe.
A misinformation sandwich.
Exactly.
It was an open face of junk right there.
And yeah, we've been talking about it.
Farmers have been talking about it.
And that is the problem with this whole thing is that it brings up so many points in so many specific.
Conversations or topics and of course it has the one thing that all of them fear more than anything else, which is nuance But they get but they get to say things like Immigrants bad immigrants cause all of these things immigrants don't like you immigrants know America and we somehow and I say we I'm gonna say we because it's our country.
He's our president and we've
We may have not voted for him, but we as a country elected him, we have eaten up this information and allowed it to make us feel better at night saying, well, if I know that brown people of all ages, regardless of criminal activity are being thrown out of the country, that's what makes my pillow a little softer at night.
Yeah, I guess.
In Wisconsin, again, we're looking at the Wisconsin Watch article that came out yesterday.
2023 University of Wisconsin study found that 70% of labor on Wisconsin's dairy farms
is done by undocumented workers.
Many of them have turned to existing temporary visas.
Those are those seasonal agriculture visas in order to staff their farms.
And then the Trump administration moved to strip back labor protections for farmers hiring workers on that visa earlier this year.
So that didn't
help.
You know, neither one of us are farmers.
We've spoken to quite a few farmers at this point.
They knew it was coming and some of them voted for it.
And
that's not something where I'm going to get into that.
I told you so.
I don't, I will never do that with anybody.
I won't say I told you so or ha, ha, ha, or you get what you deserve.
I think that's very, I don't know.
It doesn't solve a problem.
It doesn't make me feel better as a person, but also it just, I, I'm Jane, I'm becoming more and more.
confused by, and because of just the choices that we make and what brings about the consequences.
And the consequences was they wanted to get rid of immigrants and they painted it as the criminals.
And a lot of people said, okay, cool.
But then because they made up their own quota, this wasn't anything that came from on high.
This was on high saying we need to do 3000 a day.
That's Stephen Miller, but nobody.
He decided that number.
There
was nothing in a book, nothing in a report that said in order to have a functioning great America, we must have this few amount of people.
And because of that declaration, we are not throwing out just the criminals.
In fact, a great deal of people, their only crime would be being in this country illegally.
And a lot of them, I shouldn't say a lot of them,
There are people who have done that, who then take the steps to start the process of being here legally, getting protection orders, paying taxes on the money they make in their jobs, doing everything they feel like, doing it the right way.
They may have stumbled by coming in illegally, but then they're gonna do what they need to do to be here legally, to contribute, to be a part of our economy, and yet we still say, nope, you're only crime.
was crossing the border, that's good enough.
You're just as bad as the murderers that you guys purported that we get rid of last year.
And their farmers are being raked over the coals again for it.
I mean, this is, again, how the policies of the Trump administration are ruining our rural communities.
Absolutely.
Wisconsin's own Eric Van Orden has proposed legislation that would allow undocumented farm workers
to get legal employment status provided they haven't committed a crime and both the immigrants and their employers would have to acknowledge the worker's status and then pay a fine.
His bill has no co-sponsors.
So that's not encouraging.
Lawmakers formed a task force in 2023 to consider possible reforms to this particular visa program.
The Republican majority House committee ready to bill
Including proposals to streamline the paperwork and all that stuff.
The chair said the bill is awaiting technical assistance from the Department of Labor.
Oh no.
What does that even mean?
technical existence from the department of labor.
Are
they waiting on reports?
Are they waiting on maybe there are some experts within the department?
It's a very big department.
I have no idea.
Doesn't say.
But it also may be just a way to kick the can down the road.
I mean, it sounds like another delaying tactic.
I mean, with all the money we're going to give to billionaires because of the big bill for billionaires, you know, it makes me wonder if there's some of that money that could have been directed towards just immigration, visas and farming.
allowing immigrants to obtain an easier, very temporary visa, whether it's a week or a month or a season, helping farmers understand the paperwork and the language.
And let's say, hey, if there is a, if you have immigrant population and they need housing, we can subsidize you, give you a tax break on maybe building like a bunk on your property.
There are ways this country can
foster this
process and these, and these, I don't want to say problems, but these hurdles for farmers.
I'm just talking about farmers now because I feel like we always talk about farmers and they're always the ones who are going to be getting the short end of the stick, but instead we just push this violent.
xenophobic, racist, and completely misinformed logic towards people.
I mean, you showed me the tweet from Homeland Security.
This came out this morning on social media.
Every single thing that is wrong in this country is the problem of immigrants.
They have, it's a page long.
Can't find housing, immigrants.
Trouble getting health coverage, immigrants.
It's insane.
It's insane.
Meanwhile, these are people who contribute to our economy.
And not even from a point of view, I'm not even trying to appeal to people's souls and to their humanity.
I'm saying from a purely economic viewpoint, these individuals who are here, undocumented or here legally, they are massive contributors to our economy and you get rid of them and our economy will go south.
And that's not a pun.
It's literally what's going to happen.
And you want to see raising prices?
Get rid of more and more people.
Yeah.
The people who pick the produce that we eat.
It just doesn't make sense to me.
It's just so frustrating because people buy this rhetoric.
They say, yeah, you're right.
All of the- All of the ills.
All of the ills in this world are because of immigrants.
And now we are where we're at right now.
And our farmers.
who voted for Trump, who didn't vote for Trump, it was already hard for them.
It's gonna be more and more difficult now.
Without a doubt.
And then at the same time, we have more news coming out about ICE.
Yeah, yes.
And the ICE raids, and some of the highly improper, and essentially in some cases, just out and out lying.
It's really bad.
It is...
And federal prosecutors yesterday moved to move to dismiss charges against a woman who was shot by a Border Patrol agent multiple times after allegedly using her car to impede law enforcement in Chicago.
Myra Martinez and her co-defendant pleaded not guilty to last month.
They were accused of using their vehicle to impede
these agents, prosecutors say the Border Patrol agent shot her in self-defense after they rammed their car into him.
Her legal team argued it was federal agents who rammed her car and that the shooting was unjustified and essentially that is what they found.
The motion to dismiss came after it was revealed last week.
The agent who shot her multiple times bragged about it in messages to other officers, quote, I fired five rounds and she had seven holes with that in your book, boys.
It's disgusting.
And then it turns out they dismissed these charges because they lied.
Not good.
No.
and not reassuring.
No.
And again, we'll point out the fact that we keep saying, there will come a time when you are not enough.
They will come for you when they want to, and they will need no justification.
They won't have to identify themselves, and you'll be sat there going, but I thought I voted for him.
I did everything
right.
Better start coming up with that million-dollar bribe.
I mean, start our donation.
Yep.
to the Trump administration.
You can always join us at 855-752-4842.
Stay close, you're listening to Matt Nair on air.
This is the Civic Media Radio Network,
and we will be right back.
Good morning and welcome back to Matt Nair on air.
Jane Matt Nair, Greg Bach, Sweet Calbee on the board coming to you from our studio at Radio Park in Racine.
Join us.
Call or text at 855-752-4842.
Leave a comment if you're watching on the live stream on Facebook, YouTube, and what used to be Twitter.
Coming up after the 930 News, Dan Schaefer, Civic Media's political editor and creator of the Recombobulation Area will be joining us.
Right now, though, we started off the
talking about at a Wisconsin watch article.
Farmers feeling the squeeze from Trump's mass deportations in Congress is nowhere close to a fix.
Also talking about some of these ice raids and some really astonishing stuff that is coming from various judges.
U.S.
District Judge Sarah Ellis issued a scathing over 200 page opinion revealing
All the false statements that they gave, these are ICE agents that gave during this Operation Midway Blitz sweep in Chicago.
In one video footage suggests the agent drove erratically, brake checked other motorists trying to force accidents that agents could then use as justification for detaining them.
She recounted how agents were, quote, driving erratically through stop signs and red lights through Evanston, Illinois, made a right turn at a red light causing a rear end crash, then detained bystanders who were on the street.
One agent held a gun pointed at a resident filming the incident and said, step back or I'm gonna shoot you.
Three people were detained and then released without charges.
The judge also described video and witnesses seeing agents twist a man's arm bashing his head on the street at least twice.
Another woman tackled without any warning, then the agents pepper sprayed the group.
Shade harsh response to border patrol commander Gregory Bavino, who led all these charges, quote, the court specifically finds his testimony not credible.
Bavino appeared evasive over three days of his deposition.
either providing cute responses to counsel's questions or outright lying."
That's not reassuring and should concern all of us.
And that goes back to the point I just made too.
It might not be a scenario where they're knocking on your door or they're coming for you because they don't feel you're American enough, although I'm sorry, and I don't like being in this place, but that's where I'm at now.
is where this will devolve into, but it is about if you are in their wake, they will harm you and there will be no consequences.
And I guess I'm asking this question to the people who don't agree with us and think this is hunky-dory.
What are you going to feel when it happens to someone you know or love?
But that won't happen, Greg, because they're all good Americans.
Doesn't I'm not talking about good Amir.
I'm I'm not I'm just talking about like you just happened to be standing on the corner and you look the wrong way and someone pushes you down and says Move or I'll shoot you're you're impeding you're impeding us.
I'm not even talking about someone who's who's saying like even resisting I'm saying you just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and you've got a Power hungry monster who's got a federal badge and a gun saying move or I'll shoot you
What happens when your family or friends are affected by this?
Because at this rate, it can happen.
Oh, yeah.
And I want
to know what your thoughts are on this.
8-5-5-7-5-2-4-8-4-2.
That's 8-5-5-7-5-CIVIC, if you would like to join us.
Jean from OutClaire is on the line.
Good morning, Jean.
What do you want to say about this?
Good morning, guys.
Great show as usual.
This is my old panion.
You know, the large orange criminal elephant.
is sitting on his throne, watching all of the chaos and hatred, just consuming the American people, and it's just outrageous.
And the people with the R after their name are not doing anything about this.
So we don't, we're the only ones that can change it.
We can sit by.
And we can watch this happen and say, oh, it ain't us.
But the thing of it is, it's impacting you as we speak, because it's impacting our economy.
It's impacting our schools.
It's impacting everything that people work to build up in our country are being destroyed as you watch the people getting beat up.
And what happens when our economy tanks and what happens when the farmers lose their land to the rich people?
What happens then?
folks take this seriously and if you enjoy watching people get beat up go do a you know a wrestling match or you know a boxing match or things like that that we used to see this is so sick guys I just can't tell you but we're the ones that have to change it
so you've
got to start
Moving on it and talking about it and sharing the pictures and the information with everybody and no thank you so much you guys you have a great weekend.
You're wonderful
Thanks a lot.
Jean you have a good weekend.
She's right.
You can make your voice heard you can go to my vote dot w i dot gov and call your your representative leaders and and and I would say
from the federal down to the local because they need to know what you support and what you feel like they should be doing as your elected officials whose salary we pay.
MyVote.wi.gov, put in your information, find out who represents you, find out while you're there about your voting registration.
We're not in any voting times right now until next spring.
But we
will be.
But it's better to know now and get yourself prepared.
But MyVote.wi.gov because we still have A-Boys.
All you have to do is put in your address and all of your elected officials and all of their contact information will come up.
Gene Calls.
She calls them regularly.
I highly encourage all of us to take advantage of that.
We pay their salaries.
Just a little tidbit there.
Okay, we have news coming up next.
And then when we come back, Dan Schaefer will be here from the Reconpopulation area.
Also, Civic Media's political editors, so stay close.
You're listening to Matt Nair on air on the Civic Media Radio Network.
Good morning!
Welcome to Matt and Air on Air.
Jane Matt and Air, Greg Bach.
Doctors, slide on the board coming to you from our studio at Radio Park in Racine, where you can join us.
Call or text.
The number is the same, 855-752-4842.
Leave a comment if you're watching on the live stream.
Good morning, livestream.
On Facebook, YouTube, and what used to be Twitter, it's Friday, so we are joined by Civic Media's political editor and the creator of the multi-award-winning Recombobulation Area.
Dan Schaefer is with us in studio.
Good to see ya.
Good morning, Jane.
Good morning, Greg.
Always wonderful to be here
with you on Friday
to Recombobulate.
on another Discombobulating Week.
Wow, it's yes.
Someday, one day, we'll just talk about nothing.
I'll just come
in
and we'll be like, wow, a normal week.
Yes, we'll just talk about happy things.
Today is not that day.
Well, unfortunately.
Unfortunately.
Let's start off with your latest column in the Reconpopulation Area.
And work is underway on that really cheap.
work on I 94 the gargantuan mega project has begun you know there was no official as I noted in the piece here there was no official press conference groundbreaking ceremonial beginning to the 1.7 billion dollar east-west highway widening project that began officially on November 3rd in Milwaukee
and the construction for this project is scheduled, obviously these schedules can
change, but is
scheduled to last until 2033.
$1.7 billion.
$1.7 billion.
Is
the price tag today.
I
would write this down.
That price tag has increased over the past four years of my reporting on this.
A number of times it was under a billion and then it was a little over a billion and then they got the final thing and now it's 1.7.
Do we think it's gonna be higher than that?
Yeah, pretty much.
But
I also would say, some might be listening here saying to yourself, oh, well,
That actually doesn't seem like that much money.
That's probably because it's not that much road they're actually doing.
It's not like the first project back in the early.
God, the early 21st century where it felt like 94 was never going to stop being under construction.
That was like three plus billion dollars.
But the reason why it's so low price is cause they're doing so little of the freeway that no one asked for.
Yeah.
It's a 3.5 mile stretch of freeway that goes from about 16th to 70th right through the city of Milwaukee.
They're adding a lane in.
each direction.
They are expanding the stadium interchange.
And I wrote about this project when it was being proposed.
series called Expanding the Divide, which won several Milwaukee Press Club Awards in 2021.
Well done,
well
done.
High five.
And so this is, you know, this is how long things take, right?
You know, the decision on that was more or less made by the end of that year early, the following one.
But the, you know, and probably at the end of 2022, there was a county board meeting where they more or less approved it in a slim vote there.
But the,
you know, but now the rubber meets the road.
Now all of the
planning stages,
pun, uh, rubber meets the road.
And I think, you know,
We've been having the conversation, this mega project is beginning.
And in and around Milwaukee, we've also been having this kind of parallel conversation that we've been having over and over again, this circular argument about the downtown streetcar.
And this was kind of raised again by one alderman, Scott Spiker, who represents the far south side of Milwaukee, closer to the airport, was raising this saying, hey, we should not do the streetcar anymore.
Let's just get rid of
it.
Let's just get rid of it.
It's not working, whatever.
The streetcar is
a $4 million annual operating expense in the city of Milwaukee's budget, which is more than one point something billion dollars.
So this, and I made the comparison here that the outrage about the streetcar is so far.
beyond what logic should dictate with the commensurate funding of this.
To me, I compared it to saying you're complaining about a faulty door handle on a four bedroom house.
It's a $4 million expense of a multi-billion dollar budget.
It's a small...
Public Works projects in a large city.
It's not that big of a deal and when we see this compared to the lack of outrage or the lack of attention or the lack of coverage of the Opposition to the highway project it there's the we've I feel like we've lost
perspective Well, and I want to go back to the original money that was used to build the streetcar That came with very specific parameters correct correct, so it could only be used for
public transit reasons.
For a
fixed rail public transit
project in Milwaukee.
That was the only reason we... That was the
federal allocation for this project.
Right.
And so, you know, as
it... I say that because it's not like Evers could have taken this money and done something else with it.
Right.
And even going back to, so I can't believe we're still talking about this.
Like I
was
like,
I
know, but I did bring it up, but we've been talking about this generally about the streetcar for, I don't know, 15 years now.
Long time.
It feels like, you know, it was a federal allocation.
We have this project.
It's okay.
Like I've ridden the streetcar a number of times to summer fast, to, you know, around the East side, picking it up at the public market, whatever.
It's okay.
It's fine.
It is a small expense in the city's budget.
And if we are going to get mad about that, get mad about it at the appropriate level that that funding should demand.
It's a small part of the city's budget.
And it would have to, that $4 million a year would have to run for another 400 years.
and more to reach the cost
of the highway widening project.
Don't say 400 years in front of some of these people.
They love saying 400 years a lot lately.
Yeah.
If you're just joining us on Matt and Aaron there, we're speaking to Civic Media's political editor and founder of the multi award winning Reconpopulation Area.
Mr. Dan Schaefer is here talking about like all things going on in Wisconsin, including road work, which never seems to end.
And with regard to the streetcar issue,
I don't disagree with you.
I feel like every time I see someone on Twitter, not going to name names, or someone in the paper or someone in the comment section, bring up the streetcar.
I think that I want to say, you know, you got nothing else you want to
want about.
It's an
easy, it's an easy scapegoat.
Exactly.
Because you can, you can paint it as streetcar equals mass transportation, mass transit, poor people, immigrants, bad.
Not you, they're not like you.
Waste of money, all those things.
But also the fact that like, I'm gonna say something that's probably wildly unpopular.
I think we should put 10 times more into it.
I think it should actually be a functioning piece of transit that helps people get from the stadium to the airport, from the airport to Northside, to Northside.
It should be something like, there are people out there who use it for good transit, because they're their path, they're lucky enough that
their work, their
home all cross ways.
So it works for them and that's wonderful.
I remember having this conversation with county supervisor Jason Haas about this.
I was very anti this project and he explained it to me that
This is pre COVID that what they wanted to do was this was the beginning stage and
then
over time they were going to increase funding increase the routes so that it actually became not just a thing where oh we were we're hanging out downtown and or the third ward we use the streetcar it's about no I'm gonna get to work and I can use that to get to work if you can't grab a bus so I personally feel like that it's wildly underutilized therefore it should be financed and
invested in, so it actually becomes a viable piece of mass transit in the city.
But then we have at the same time, we have the existing bus system, which is having money problems.
That's a lot of problems.
It does.
But I would say as far as usefulness, actual usefulness, the bus system is probably much more useful than the hop.
100%.
Oh, yeah.
And that's part of the argument that I'm making in this column here.
If it was either or, I would much rather fund the bus than the streetcar.
100%.
I would much rather fund the bus system, but the bus system is the overlooked piece of all of this.
You will hear sometimes from conservatives just like, oh, you know, I don't like the streetcar, but I'm okay with the bus.
And then never fund the bus.
Or we talk about, you know, there's always money for these highway projects, but there's never money to really increase the funding for the Milwaukee County transit system.
And granted, Milwaukee County transit system has had a rough year.
The agency blindside,
county officials with a budget deficit of more than $10 million.
That led to multiple resignations and firings from top credentials, audit initiated by the county comptroller.
There was reports of rampant fare evasion that was not being enforced, which I think is also a problem.
And, you know, they had looked at this and said, we have to
we have to cut some bus routes.
And so cutting it, cutting a number of bus routes here, the 20, the 28, the 33, which is my bus route that I take downtown that I'm very upset about, the 34, yes, the Yanis line.
is on the chopping block, the 55 and the 58.
So we're talking about all of these different lines.
And as Urban Milwaukee's Jeremy Janine pointed out, this could be the start of a death spiral
for the system.
Because if you just make it so, if you get rid of enough lines, your people, the utility of using
it.
Yeah,
you kill the usefulness.
It is going to go.
I'm really worried about the direction that the bus system is going.
It feels like nobody is really prioritizing it.
And I think it is getting lost as we, you know, commit $1.7 billion to the highway reconstruction, the bus system, which the annual budget for the bus system is about 150 million.
a
fraction
of what we're spending to reconstruct the highway.
Another stretch of highway again.
Well, and we're talking about two lanes, right?
Yeah.
That's what they're changing.
And I want to refer to something that you refer to in your column.
Another commenter said this, the wisdom of this choice, again, putting all this money into this expansion on I-94, manifests itself all around.
Just look at the flawless free flowing utopias of Los
Angeles, Chicago and
Atlanta.
where they solved traffic congestion decades ago.
There's a little snark attached to that.
Sure is, sure is.
But yeah, but I want to go back just a second to the buses.
Yeah.
The problem with fare evasion is because bus drivers have been attacked.
Yes.
Repeatedly, and this goes back at least a decade.
Yes.
Because I knew someone who worked for the transit system and worked as a driver for a long time.
This has been a problem for a long time and nobody wanted
to get law enforcement on the buses because no one wanted to
pay for it.
And this is yet another example.
And I think we're seeing so many of them.
It shows up in local school funding.
It shows up in local government making cuts.
It showed up right here in Racine County this last week when the town village of Sturtevant eliminated their police department.
And the state is still not adequately
funding
local government at the level of it needs to.
And that shows up in transit projects, in public safety, in public works projects, all through city government.
stuff that directly impacts your life.
The state government is continuing to sit on this four billion dollar surplus and not adequately funding local government and then blaming those local governments for trying to raise a wheel tax or
having a
referendum
on
funding or trying saying that hey we want a local control sales tax like Milwaukee pushed for in the shared revenue debate a couple years ago.
Like it is just another example of that and I think this bus
You know, the mismanagement is one thing.
The fair evasion is one thing.
We can't let those types of things slide.
We also should be talking about massive increases, I think, to the county transit's overall budget if they get the right leadership in there, of course.
But massive increases to the budget because these are working people just trying to get to their jobs.
If you ride a bus, I live in the west side of Milwaukee.
If you ride a bus on the west side of Milwaukee, there's a lot of buses that go to the medical center on the west side of town.
Because that's a huge, huge job
center.
And when
you're cutting those buses, you're cutting people's, working people's way to get to their job.
We're to continue recombobulating with Dan Schaefer, creator of the Recombobulation Area, also Civic Media's political editor, so stay close.
You are listening to Matt Nair on here, coming to you across the Civic Media Radio Network.
We'll be right back.
You're listening to Civic Media.
Find the latest news, information, and archives of all your favorite shows on the Civic Media website,
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On the board, coming to you from our home at Radio Park in Racine, you can join us, call or text at 855-752-4842.
Leave a comment if you're watching on the live stream, on Facebook, YouTube, and what used to be Twitter.
Dan Schaefer is here, Civic Media's political editor, also the creator of the multi-award-winning recombobulation area, talking about the
I-94 expansion and the continued underfunding of the Milwaukee County transit system.
And as you were saying too, Dan, a lot of this goes back to Robin Boss and the Republican controlled legislature deciding who gets money and who doesn't.
Yeah.
And I think we can't overlook the contributing factor to the challenges that a lot of local governments are facing, which was in eight years of trifecta Republican rule.
The funding for local government was either cut or remained flat Which is essentially a cut when you don't index that funding to
inflation
inflation exactly and so those local governments have been starved of funding for so long They have had to get creative with the ways that they fund things and that the shared revenue Debate that we had two years ago in that bill that passed, you know, Tony Evers prioritized that in his reelection campaign Which I have to applaud because it's just like it's kind of a wonky issue to talk
about in a reelection campaign
is shared
revenue and local government and I do think there's some cues that the next batch of Democratic candidates can take from that but also I think it just we had eight years of gutting
of austerity politics, and we're going to cut government.
Well, that means you cut things like public safety.
You cut services.
You cut things like key services.
And so you have this situation where I think what happened was the COVID relief dollars, particularly one through the American Rescue Plan Act passed by Democrats and Joe Biden in 2021, that had a huge lifeline to local governments that were really struggling during the pandemic.
And Wisconsin had been struggling for the decade prior.
That was kind of a lifeline there.
And then with the shared revenue funding, it was certainly meaningful.
It didn't go nearly as far as it should have, but it did save a lot of local governments, including Milwaukee's from going off the cliff.
But now I think it was like one of the refrains that I and some others were saying at the time of passing that was like, let's pass this bill and live to fight another day.
Well,
The day we're living to fight is
now.
It
didn't go far enough to fund local government.
The state is still sitting on this massive surplus.
There are still lots of challenges with the way we fund certain things.
And you see that in every community across the state, you're seeing this thing getting cut and that thing getting cut and difficult consolidation type.
Conversations being happening.
And this is not just a red city or a blue city.
No,
it is every community across the state that is struggling with this.
Well, and go back to the Sheriff's Department that you just mentioned.
Exactly.
Well, and you talked about the Sheriff's Department needing to, you know, have
public safety
officers on
buses and things like that.
County government in Milwaukee has been gutted.
I think the numbers that the Crowley administration had put out in advance of the shared revenue thing saying,
Oh, before the decade prior to having that shared revenue conversation, they had to cut basically $300 million from the county's budget net if impacts everything.
And we're seeing that in community after community.
And so one of the things that many local communities are now turning to to fund local government is they are turning to a wheel
tax.
And so wheel tax can be used to fund local road repairs or other transportation projects.
And that has increased significantly in the last
you know, the last five years really has gone from about a dozen different municipalities across the state to more than 60 units of local government across the state
that
have
passed
a wheel
tax.
And so Karahi in Milwaukee County was just talking about this.
I believe there's another one in...
One of the counties near Eau Claire in the northwest part of the state that was talking about this so it's not again It's not just a Milwaukee issue.
It's not just whatever But now Republicans I think you know recognizing that there is this real problem that funding local government they they called into session and they debated a bill and and tried to Do things to fund local government, right?
How'd that go?
No, I'm just kidding.
I didn't do that at all They
introduced a bill to make it harder for local governments to pass a wheel tax.
Of
course
they did
It amazes me.
It really does amaze me that we are sitting on and it's more than four billion dollars now isn't it?
It's about four and a half billion dollars.
The only
Policy, proposals, Republicans ever have is cutting taxes.
They don't invest in anything.
They don't invest in education.
They don't invest in infrastructure.
They don't invest in water systems.
That is their answer to everything is tax cuts, assuming that the rate of inflation is never going to go up,
right?
It's their one economic policy button.
They have the same, it's the same proposal for everything.
Over
and over and over
again.
Of course,
this time.
We'll fix everything.
The
trickle down economics that has not worked
for.
In 30 years.
Yeah,
45 years
or
whatever it's gonna be now.
This time it'll work.
This
time it's gonna work.
Yeah, it's not going to work.
Things cost money.
Things cost money for local governments.
It's hard to make ends meet as a low, you know, prioritize different things.
There was a wheel tax debate in New Berlin and Cudahay and Brookfield and all over southeastern Wisconsin because eight years of underfunding things.
followed by several years of gridlock, followed by an inadequate shared revenue bill is not going to pay for new fire engines.
It's not going to pay for more police.
It's not going to pay for road repairs.
That's how, that's how things get funded in this state is the state will allocate money to local governments and local governments, you know, serve their constituents and their local communities.
And that's not happening the way it should.
And I think the next governor needs to make it a major priority to fund local government.
Well, and maybe the popcorn
king could go find something else to
do.
Oh, we can talk about him after the
break.
OK, well, we have news coming up next.
Stay tuned for that.
Dan Schaefer will continue recombobulating on the other side.
Stay close.
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