The Capital Times, May 23
A fix-the-roads Republican should mount an anti-Scottholes challenge to Walker
Taking care of the roads is smart politics.
Just ask Michael Bilandic.
Bilandic was elected mayor of Chicago in 1977, after the death of Richard Daley. He was headed for re-election in 1979 when a January blizzard dumped 21 inches of snow on the city. The streets were not cleared quickly or well - especially in African-American neighborhoods - and the crisis lingered for weeks. When voters cast their ballots in a February Democratic primary election, the party machine collapsed and a little-known former city official named Jane Byrne beat the boss.
There’s a lesson there for candidates who are challenging Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker - or who might yet decide to challenge him.
Walker has been running for governor since 2005. He was forced out of the 2006 race by national Republican operatives, who wanted the nomination to go to a better-funded contender, Mark Green. Walker got the message, raised a ton of money, won the party’s nomination in 2010 and then went on to victory in November of that year. He’s been the boss ever since.
But he is vulnerable this year - not merely because a lot of voters are troubled by what the Republican Party is becoming under President Donald Trump, not merely because a lot of voters are tired of the cronyism that Walker has infused into state government, and not merely because Walker’s Foxconn scheme is costing a fortune, forcing homeowners off their land and threatening the environment.
Walker has a more pressing problem: the roads.
They’re a mess.
It wasn’t a snowstorm that created a crisis on Wisconsin’s highways and byways. It was neglect. Under Walker, a refusal to make even minimally adequate investments in highways, public transit, rail lines, harbors and airports has created a crisis.
As in so many areas, Walker has tried to balance budgets by refusing to do the basic work of state government.
Now it’s election time and voters statewide are dodging potholes - or, as they’ve come to be known, Scottholes.
There may be a few pundits in Madison and Milwaukee who do not understand what a big issue this is, but anyone who gets around Wisconsin recognizes that the governor’s neglect of the state’s infrastructure could be his greatest political liability.
How vulnerable is Walker? If an honest conservative were to enter the Republican primary and challenge the governor on his many failures, it could get interesting. Just imagine what might happen, for instance, if former Wisconsin Secretary of Transportation Mark Gottlieb were to make a fix-the-roads run against Walker.
A Republican legislator before he took charge of the Department of Transportation, Gottlieb was a Walker ally who served in the governor’s Cabinet for years. But he didn’t fit in. As a transportation engineer by training, Gottlieb understood the need for investment in infrastructure. As transportation secretary, he chaired a commission that determined that the state was failing to make adequate investments in infrastructure. As The Capital Times has reported, the report that Gottlieb and his fellow commissioners produced five years ago had an urgency to it: “In order to maintain a ’safe and efficient system,’ the commissioners said the state should invest $479.5 million more on an annual basis through 2023 in its state and local highway program, public transit and rail, harbors and airports.”
Gottlieb, who had known Walker for years, assumed that the governor would recognize that it was necessary to follow the commission’s recommendations. When his agency produced a budget request for the needed funding, however, Gottlieb got a rude awakening to Walker’s cynical approach to governing. “It was well understood at that time by the governor and other people in the governor’s office that that’s what we were going to do, that we were going to propose a budget that we felt addressed these issues. That’s what I thought we had been asked to do,” Gottlieb recently told Cap Times writer Katelyn Ferral. “It took the governor less than 48 hours to reject that budget.”
Thus began a period of wrangling between the transportation secretary and the governor who had appointed him. By late 2016, Gottlieb was openly warning legislators that Walker’s budget proposals would cause the state’s roads to deteriorate. At the end of that year, Gottlieb resigned.
But he did not go silent.
He’s been talking about the state’s crumbling transportation infrastructure. “You have to make investments there and we’re not even thinking about doing it,” Gottlieb told Ferral.
But he is also talking about the bigger problem with Walker’s approach to governing, recalling how, during those days when he was arguing with the governor over priorities, “We got to a place where the facts were being ignored in favor of political spin.”
Scott Walker has never left that place.
This is a serious problem for Wisconsin. Not just for Democrats but for Republicans. Not just for liberals but for conservatives. The state’s transportation crisis is emblematic of the broader crisis: Walker always puts politics ahead of common sense.
Many Democrats are convinced that this is what all Republicans and all conservatives want. Don’t buy it. Walker remains personally popular among Republicans - with roughly the same approval rating in the most recent Marquette University Law School poll as Trump. But among mainstream conservatives (as opposed to the most extreme right-wingers) his approval rating is down to 74 percent, and among moderates it has collapsed to 30 percent.
Could an honest conservative who appealed to common sense and the “better angels” of the Republican Party mount an issue-based challenge to Walker in a GOP primary? Is it possible that, after a summer of driving on Wisconsin’s broken roads, a campaign to fill Wisconsin’s potholes might prove just as appealing as did Jane Byrne’s campaign to plow Chicago’s streets?
Mark Gottlieb, or someone like him, should give it a try.
A slogan? How about: “Conservatives Don’t Like Scottholes Either.”
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Kenosha News, May 25
Time for state to make a priority of hiring and reducing prison overtime
A longstanding problem in Wisconsin cost taxpayers $42 million last year.
That problem, a shortage of correctional officers, exists in other parts of the country but is particularly nagging here. The state Department of Corrections has struggled to contain overtime costs during the years of Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his Democrat predecessor Gov. Jim Doyle.
There are currently 920 unfilled corrections jobs in the state, or a vacancy rate of about 12.5 percent, the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau reported last week.
Overtime pay grew 1.3 percent in 2017 from 2016, a smaller increase than previous years.
“It’s very stressful, is what it is,” said Paul Mertz, an officer at the Redgranite Correctional Institution, where more than 20 percent of the jobs were open. “You never know if you’re going home at the end of the day.”
Besides Redgranite, which has had to close its library and visiting room on certain days and has made the weight room off limits to inmates, the problem was most severe at Waupun Correctional Institution, also with more than 20 percent of jobs vacant.
Tristan Cook, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Corrections Department, said the low unemployment rate is making it difficult to fill prison positions, a situation the state also encountered in 2001 and 2004.
At this point, the state needs to find creative ways to hire corrections officers and reduce the steady and heavy overtime cost to taxpayers.
A state that can bring in Foxconn and achieve business growth and low unemployment should be able to come up with some incentives to recruit and retain prison staff.
We’d like to see this get some new bipartisan attention in Madison. Any improvements made in Wisconsin could draw attention nationally.
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Wisconsin State Journal, May 27
Hold parents responsible for loose guns
The teenager who shot and killed eight students and two teachers this month at a Santa Fe, Texas, high school got his weapons - a shotgun and a .38-caliber pistol - from his father.
The teenager who shot and killed his principal 12 years ago at a Cazenovia, Wisconsin, high school (about 70 miles northwest of Madison) got his firearms - a shotgun and a .22-caliber handgun - from his father, too.
So far, law enforcement officials haven’t said if the guns used in the Texas massacre were locked away or equipped with locks that prevented them from being fired. But Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo has said he thinks the suspect’s father should be punished.
Sensible limits on firearms and better school security won’t solve every shooting, but they will stop some.
“I believe that anyone that owns a firearm, that doesn’t secure it properly, ends up in the wrong hands, and used to kill innocent people, that that should carry significant consequences,” Acevedo told CBS’ “Face the Nation.” ’’We need to think about that on the national level across this country.”
He’s right.
Gun-loving Texas is one of 14 states with “negligent storage laws,” according to The New York Times. Wisconsin isn’t among them.
The laws hold parents with guns criminally liable if their children commit crimes with those weapons. But in the recent high school shooting in Texas, the suspect is 17. The law applies only to children 16 and younger.
Wisconsin is one of 28 states with a child access prevention law affecting gun owners. But that applies only to children 13 and younger.
When a Weston High School student brought his father’s two guns to his rural Cazenovia school in 2006 - killing Principal John Klang, who heroically stopped the student from harming others - he was 15. His father had stored the guns in his bedroom, where the student used a screwdriver to pry open a cabinet.
At a minimum, steel-cable locks on those guns would have slowed the student, forcing him to think longer about what he was doing. The locks also could have stopped the guns from being loaded and fired.
Most handguns are sold with gun locks. Yet many owners disregard or lose the devices.
That needs to change - with significant penalties for those parents and adults who fail to responsibly secure and store their weapons.
Some gun enthusiasts contend a lock defeats the purpose of a weapon. They want to be able to quickly pull their gun from a drawer and potentially use it to impede an intruder.
But disabling a gun lock should take just seconds for an experienced owner, and the technology of locks is constantly improving.
That’s why the State Journal editorial board launched a gun-lock giveaway after the Weston High School shooting. Nearly 8,000 gun locks were distributed for free at hospitals across south-central Wisconsin.
Gun locks won’t stop every senseless shooting. But they will prevent some.
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