Welcome, everyone, to Midday Magazine for this January 5th, 2024.
Have your host, James J. Mail, off here.
At 3.30, we're going to welcome in Dan Volert with our Wood County Parks and Forestry Department.
Talk a little bit about what's coming up with Dan and plenty more.
Right now on the phone with us, we have our good friend,
Wisconsin State Representative Scott Krueg.
Scott, good new year to you.
Happy new year to you, too.
How's it going, man?
Yeah, it's going.
I mean, it's been here there's never been, but it's all right.
That first week back after the holidays makes you feel like you've never been at work before,
and you've never had pressure before.
Pretty quick.
I want to start there with you actually.
Before we dive into that, though, how was your new year's?
How was your holiday marathon?
Your gamut?
Yeah, it's good.
I mean, the bigger our family gets, the more there is to it.
So it's nice to have this new experience with the grandkids
and first Christmas's and things like that again.
So it's pretty cool.
Very cool. Very cool.
Are you a, are you a resolution guy?
You know, I used to be, but, you know, after the last few years,
I just kind of figured out, kind of achieved most of what my resolution
is used to be.
So I would just kind of go with the flow.
I've got a couple of things I want to talk with you about the RV dealer,
bill, the firefighter, memorial funding bill, the harvest for hope,
the town of Rome's solar project.
I, I hope we have time to get to all of these things,
but I bring them up because I'm kind of curious and you touched on the start of the new year.
There's a lot on the docket every year for you guys.
What are some of your hopes, your plans for 2024?
Yeah, I think, you know, my biggest thing still is making sure
that we don't have election confusion going into the election cycle.
So that's my biggest thing right now and I, you know,
I do love all of these local bills I'm working on and we'll touch on those.
And I think, you know, those are always important to keep top of mind.
But as the calendar hits 2024, the biggest thing that keeps pounding through my head
is the elections coming, the elections coming, the elections coming.
And I have said from the beginning of this session that there's no way in my mind
that 2024 should be another 2020.
So we're just trying to do everything we can to find bipartisan agreement,
compromise, get governor to sign bills to make some simple changes to our system
to restore any lost confidence that anybody might have for whatever reason
it may have been.
Just to make sure everybody's out to vote, make sure they trust the results
when they come in election night and just avoid all of the craziness that
happened post election in 2020.
It seems like the new normal is going to be this kind of outlier, this, this,
you know, fraction of society that is going to fight on things no matter what you do.
My, my papa used to say, um, you, you could come up with a cure for cancer,
charge a dollar and some people are going to say you're overcharging, you know, there,
there's, there's always that facet of, of, or society.
I think that it's just gotten them, it's always been there.
It's just gotten a chance to have a voice because of social media and some of these things.
But you know, we were talking with Senator testing last month and this kind of came up
and one of the things that him and I, and I think you and I have even touched on before.
Going forward, states like ours have an opportunity to really be a,
an example to the, to the union.
Um, we have so much, uh, we're such a purple state and it almost think feels like nothing's
going to get past, nothing's going to get done unless it has bipartisan support.
Do you think that that's going to really help with the kind of bringing this home and
making sure that we, we feel that more, much more confident with our vote?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the whole reason that at least not grasp the
ranking Democrat, my committee have taken this new way forward and just said, hey, we're going to
agree to disagree on some things. But what comes out of this committee to get them to the
governor's desk is going to have to have our agreement. So let's figure out what works and what
doesn't. And I, you know, I talked to some old timers from the Capitol days that, you know,
in the 80s and 90s when this was the norm and these guys are like, yeah, it's great to see
you're doing this again. I mean, even Governor Thompson, when I talked to him, I want to get a
chance. He's like, yeah, this is, this is how I govern. I didn't have the majority
when I was the governor and the legislature was all Democrats and I was Republican and we still
got it all done. It's one of those things going back. Yeah, yeah, it's one of the, it's a little
like fashion. You know, just wait a little while. It'll come back around kind of thing.
With, with, with confidence in elections, what is one of the bigger factors that you think that
we have to get, get beyond get over to be able to really bring that home?
I think, you know, the, all of the conspiracy theories and things like that are always going
to be there, but at least in my mind, my understanding of how unique our election system is,
is one of the challenges we also faced low two is most other states. They count their absentee
ballots before election day, you know, and then the report results in time with the in-person
vote. So there's nothing going on. Two, three in the morning, things like that. They could
stir controversy and some people's minds. So as long as we pass the early processing of
absentee ballot bill, which would allow it to be done Monday, I have the Tuesday in-person vote.
So all the results can be reported late night Tuesday instead of overnight into Wednesday.
I think it's 90% of our problem is the perception that there's some ballots showing up in the middle
of the night somewhere, Milwaukee, you know, all this perception of that drove all this controversy
nationwide. So it's just fixing that thing. I mean, it's a heavy political lift. We've got it through
the State Assembly working on State Senate right now and fighting the noise makers who have come
back out of the woodwork and started rattling cages again on the other side of it because
they think they're losing on the issue so they want to keep being able to yell and scream and
fight and set us all problems. Yeah. So I think that's where all the money has to be hung
right now is, you know, making sure we're putting everything into getting ballots processed more
timely. Well, I'll say this and I say it confidently to you to Senator testing because I've
talked to you guys. I know you guys well enough to know you you don't fall into this category.
To the politician that does kind of lean on that that does lean on, you know, just hot takes
and and basically division and trying to separate people. Our voting has shown in the last couple
of election cycles. That's not working. Those people are not getting reelected. That is not
that shelf life is done. That's I'm not saying that we're not still going to see some people,
but overwhelmingly throughout the whole entire country, we are seeing more and more of that voice,
not being not getting reelected. Right. Yeah. It is exactly what's going on. I mean, if you look
through election results throughout the 2022 cycle, even past 2020, where, you know, you've had
Rod Johnson at the top of ticket win on the same election as 20 years away. I mean, Wisconsin voters
are smart enough to know they're picking the best people for the job and if they split their ticket,
then they're going to split their ticket. And there's the only way that I've ever wanted
much in the beginning was having tickets splitting going on where Democrats vote for me and still
vote for a Democrat U.S. Senator, a Democrat governor candidate or Democrat president candidate.
So it's commonsense candidates who do hard work, who report back their constituents, who do the
right thing. Those are the ones who get elected and those are also the ones you should probably
be listening to more. So the keyboard warriors on Facebook who are in our own caucus. I'm not
going to deny it, but just trying to fight through their noise and just get the right thing done
at the right time for the right people. There's always a fire, even from the very first politician voted
into office. There's been a fire for them to get things done. But would you say that going into 2024,
that has been heated up a little bit. The seat has gotten a little hotter. There's a lot more that
not only needs to get done, but a lot more press to get things done again, especially in an election
year. Yeah, it is. I mean, because you throw in all the pressures of election year and everybody
gearing up for the end of the session, which usually comes late February, early March in the
campaign year. So I mean, our calendar is short. We've got a big election year and we've also got
the Supreme Court throwing unknowns at us left and right. So we don't know how we're going to have
to react on the time we have to react. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot going on. The big ticket items
that we don't agree on, like the tax cuts we try to get the governor to sign. Some of the other
things that we just keep looking for agreement on push the smaller, more important local stuff to
the side sometimes. So every legislator right now, all 132 are looking for their local bills to
get done. While all this big stuff that we've argued about for a year now, the session is still
hanging out there. So there's tons of pressure right now and we're hitting this bottleneck that we
always hit where the assembly gets the kind of bills through and then the Senate being a smaller
chamber has to deal with this mad rush of bills that are flooding across into their chamber.
And hopefully we try to get them to understand they've got to take them all up. But this bottleneck
really occurs really right now in January February. And the best of the best of the best of the
fields are the only ones that rise to the top of this point. We're speaking of Wisconsin State
Representative Scott Kruggen. We didn't have a chance to touch base last month. So I do want to
rewind a little bit and go into some of that with you. But we'll start with the RV dealer bill
and start there and I wanted to let people know what that is Scott. Yeah, basically the RV dealer
bill came from a local issue here where you have a local business owner looking to transfer his
business to family member. And the manufacturers that he works with kind of holding that process
up because of you know arbitrary agreements that manufacturers can control over dealers,
licensing and products they sell. And so this bill basically just is a big long laundry list
of agreements between manufacturers and dealers on how franchising should go on how dealer issues
should be taken care of, how product lines should be transferred over. It just sets some more
standards in place to help local business owners have some certainty that manufacturers can't
play games with their livelihood as much as they're able to right now. So it's been a heavily
negotiable between the manufacturers and the dealers and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.
We have gone to anybody in everybody in the industry nationwide, statewide, just to make
sure everybody's on board to codify all of this agreement. So it's a lot more stable industry and
I think we're for 90% done with this thing. So we're six years into this process and we've got about
three more conversations to go to get these bills out of the committees and the legislature onto
the floor of the State Assembly and State Senate. One of the reasons I know I personally like talk
with you and I know our listeners do from talking to them. We usually give us a little bit of how
the sausage is made. And you mentioned that that six years to make this happen. I don't think we
think about that very often. I think a lot of people might think that a bill, the idea comes,
you try to get it up the flagpole, it doesn't go, you move on to a new bill. There's certain things
and especially for somebody like you, Scott, where you're not letting this one go. You're going to
make this happen, no matter what it takes, even if it takes six years. Yeah, I mean, absolutely,
it's the same exact thing with the firefighters memorial bill. And you know, these local things that
other legislators have no idea about because it doesn't affect their district, but we expect them
to vote for it. So it takes a lot of time to, you know, educate every other legislator, or at
least the majority of the legislative chambers to say, okay, that's a good idea. Sometimes people think
legislators take an idea to Madison, write a bill, it goes to the, it goes right to the floor,
it's going to vote because everybody likes them and trust them, but it's not how it works. I mean,
there is a massive amount of work behind even just putting a bill together, letting along
it through the process. And then after two years where it doesn't, you know, make it to go back to
the drawing board, find the things that didn't work, talk to the stakeholders who didn't like it,
figure out what it could take to get them to be happy with it and get the other legislators back
on board with it. I mean, so it is a massive amount of work just to get a smaller, I call it,
bill done because there's more education has to be done with these smaller size bills.
You mentioned the Wisconsin Ravis Firefighters Memorial funding bill. That's one that's certainly
close to home for us around here. I can look over from our studio and see the memorial. It's one
of my, it's where I start with all my walks. It's an important part of our community. How is
that one going? That one's got a little more of a struggle because we're in this tax argument
in the state of Wisconsin right now and how we deal with taxes and, you know, all of the big
ticket items surrounding that make it harder for these other bills to deal with taxation to get
to the top of the top of the realm. So I think our biggest challenge right now with the
firefighters for memorial bill is again, we're not letting this go because when Tommy Thompson
was governor and put the memorial here in Wisconsin Ravis, he promised the state would take care
of it into perpetuity. So I'm just trying to fulfill that promise by getting this back onto the
tax form where you can make a donation via your tax form like 10 other item
items on there, endangered species, cancer research, some other things like that. So we're looking
to put a voluntary donation line on a tax form for people to be able to donate to the memorial
to help for maintenance costs. So we've tried it a few sessions. There's been some challenges to it
because this used to have a line on the tax form but didn't generate a lot of money.
So most other items on there if they don't generate a certain amount they get taken
off. That's what happened to this. Putting it back on this way is getting to be a bigger and
bigger challenge because of all the bigger conversations we're having with taxation. So if it comes
down to it next session, we're probably just going to go right to the state budget and fund it
directly instead of making a voluntary checkoff on your tax forms. So we're staying on it,
we're just going to find the right way that's going to be acceptable in the right environment for
people to vote for. Interesting to hear with this one too. And when this happens with bills,
there is a plan B, a plan C, that kind of thing. I think that's just as interesting as some of
these other things, especially with something like this that again hits so close to home.
Yeah, I mean the path at least resistance is to restore what it used to be.
But the harder path would be directly funded in the state budget. So that's going to be
even a harder challenge to get done depending of course on what the political fires look like
when it comes to budget time next session. So I'd rather much get this bill done.
Let people do a voluntary checkoff. So there's no mandate for the taxpayers to have to pay for
if they don't want to. I think that's more palatable for legislators to vote for. So we're in the ways
and ways and means committee in the assembly to argue and fight through that one. So we're not as
close on that as we are in the RV bill though. We'll keep up on that one and we'll let people know
how that's progressing. I was really looking forward to getting into this with you and I'm glad we
have the time. The Harris for Hope initiative. Can we tell people what that is? Yeah, so this is another
one. We've worked on this one for just as many years. So I've always looked at that. I've always
looked at my district, you know, from a 30,000 foot perspective to see what things I can match up.
So in my district, I represent Adams County, North Sheriff County. Adams County is the third
poorest by income in the state of Wisconsin. But next door, and we'll share a little
in supported County that I also represent are the third highest food producing, you know,
counties in the state of Wisconsin too. And we've got food insecurity issues throughout my district
in the state of Wisconsin. We've got food surpluses from excess, you know, vegetables grown in our
field. So this end up sitting on the fields to rot because processes just can't take as much as
we can grow. So the thought is to marry these two things and say, okay, if we've got extra vegetables,
it could be processed. They're a way that we can get them to processing, get them back in the
food banks and food shelters and food pantries. So that was initially how the bill was, you know,
set up was to find a way to help pay for processing the vegetables. We took a different tack
this session and just said, you know what, we're going to let this go a different way since we
haven't had much success with it. And this bill, this session says, there's a ban on county
governments funding the ability for food banks to purchase and stack up on food. So right now,
a county government couldn't even allocate money to a food pantry to help them fill their shelves.
So while we're trying to figure out the processing of food products, we're going to say in this bill,
in this version, county government, since you would like to have more local control on these
issues, we're going to give you the ability to help your local food pantry with county tack
sellers to start building up their shelves and ability to buy products from farmers. So in turn,
that ability for the county to give the money to the pantry, the pantry can buy the products
in the farm where the farmer can afford to go process more. So there's, you know, this being the
third session of this bill, that's what the plan B was and the plan B is actually working better
than the plan A. So I think we're a wide bipartisan support on this where the counties feel like
this is something they'd like to deal with, the state having to take care of it. So I think this
one's going to be the quickest of the three we talked about and getting done.
Was, and this was the one that you last month, you talked to the committee on local government
regarding, is this the one that you were testifying about? Yeah, that's my testifying, yeah.
And how did that go? It was great. I mean, we, I even seen a few spots for some Democrats in
that committee have gone on their local television stations talking about how great an idea this is
of theirs and they're, I'm not up there as of how great an idea is of the committee to take this up
and how it would help their counties. And these are people from Dane County and Milwaukee
County and Brown County who think that the bill that was generated to help Adams County would
actually help them too. So I think there's a lot of wide bipartisan support for this area.
And it feels like one of those ones, especially on the surface, you don't have to do a lot of
digging on it. It feels like it benefits everybody and especially some major factors in our state,
our ag industry are certainly a population that is in need, that is growing in people in need of
food. It seems like a win win in many ways. Yeah, it really is. And I think it just comes down to
some hand in issue with government pain to process food products and the original version, whereas
some now would see the county government taking over the role that the state legislators may not
be the best geared for to make decisions locally and how to spend the money to help build up the
pantry's stock. So I think that that taking it down the level out of the state has given it to
the county has bought a little bit more support for us. Scott, as we're getting into our last
couple of minutes here, I did want to take a moment to talk about the town of Rome Solar Project.
I don't think we've gotten a chance to touch on that for a while. How is that going?
Yeah, I am a hard-known. I love solar. I have my community solar bill that we're going to have
here in our next session where I think everybody individually should be able to make the decisions
that these mega utility farms are able to make. Right now, they get to operate outside of local
zoning and just go to the PSC and say, okay, little town, I don't care what your zoning is.
We're just going to do what we want because PSC is going to let us do it. I think that is
absolutely ridiculous the way we do this. So I'm not against solar. I'm against the idea that
you can go against local zoning and just put these 3,000 acre projects in the middle of wherever you
want. But on the backside of it, if I wanted to put in a five acre project in the back 20,
then I might own. I'm not allowed to. I just think the rules are just absolutely ridiculous and
how these are put together process allowed to happen for mega companies, but just not for the
little guy. So that's what we're fighting this fight for in Rome and 99% of the time,
when a project gets the PSC, it gets approved, but I'm still going to make a hell of a lot of noise
on this one because I just don't think it's right that utilities can do this process where a local
landowner can't do the same process. And we're not the only state or county for that matter that
is struggling with this work of we want to integrate more solar power, more other energy resources,
but how we do it and the process that we do it with it. I think it has some pushback. Not just
and I think the thing that gets clouded in all of this is it's something that you've hit on a
couple of times and I appreciate. It's not about solar power. It's not about that. That is not something
you have an issue with. It's the way that this is going about, the way that they're handling this.
I think that is a key part of the conversation that seems to get lost in the shuffle a little bit
of this when it comes to anybody really talking about it. Not so much when we're able to talk like
this, but on the masses when you're reading on these articles and that and sometimes the way
that some of these things can get kind of shortened and full conversation isn't had.
Well, and that's the other side of it too is that there are some people out there who absolutely
hate solar, who see me fighting for solar in a different way and say, well, why are you fighting
for solar? Well, here's the deal people. Sometimes when you lose an issue, you just have to deal
with it. I'm not stupid enough to know that solar isn't here to stay. So why not just figure out a
way to make it fair to be used equally amongst the individual and the corporation that are in charge
of it. There are so many projects right now between wind and solar and atoms and wood and
quarters and we'll share it right now. People are up in arms and hating the idea of the generation
of the power. Well, that's not what this is all about. This is about just making sure it's done
right because Wisconsin right now is a net in-quarter of energy. We buy our energy from other
states right now. We shouldn't have to do that. So I'm not saying I'm necessarily in favor or
against wind or solar or anything else. I just want to say if a lion energy can do it, why can't
Joe Schmel? Scott, the Los Angeles Dodgers just signed every free agent we want. Just this breaking
news. I don't know how that's going to go. What did you think of that Otani deal when you saw
that the numbers of that and the him being able to kind of like they worked it out where they're
paying him in 10 years and that whole thing? I can't believe how bad an accountant and lawyer
this guy has. The first thing is like okay there's no interest on this. I mean just maybe it's
because there've been a government too long that I know that the value of his dollar today is not
going to be the value of his dollar in 10 years from now. So he's basically making next to nothing
in 10 years because of inflation. So you know I just like do it. Just take two percent interest.
Yeah. If you're set forever. Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. It's not our money right? It should be
interesting. I'm looking forward to baseball. I just wanted to mention baseball with you especially
the heart of winder here. So we are more I heard a word I see maybe a baseball for something that
we are past the base or the baseball soul to soul system. We are closer to the start than we are
away from the end. It feels good. It feels good. Brewers, rafters right around the corner
and talking with you again right around corner as well. We always appreciate the time. Scott
thank you. Good week to you and yours. We'll talk again next month. Absolutely. Take care.
Scott representative Scott crew joining us. He'll be with us next month. Looking forward to that.
Right now we're going to take a quick break and we'll come back with more midday magazine at 97-5 FM
13-20 AM WFHR locally grown radio.
