Senate leaders’ budget provision would repeal measure for local governments
Madison — Republicans who control the state Senate plan to insert a provision into the state budget Tuesday that will repeal the prevailing wage law for local governments.
The law sets the minimum salaries for construction workers when they build roads, schools and other publicly funded projects.
Senate President Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin) said leaders did not yet have the votes they needed but believed they could get them by Tuesday. The Senate is scheduled to start at 11 a.m.
“It’s safe to say we’re putting
the finishing touches on how to get the votes,” Lazich said Monday.
The proposal’s fate in the Assembly also remains unclear. Republicans control the Assembly 63-36 and the Senate 1914, but GOP lawmakers have been divided over the prevailing wage law.
“Assembly Republicans will caucus (Tuesday) and will discuss this new development,” said a statement from Kit Beyer, a spokeswoman for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester).
Republicans who control the Legislature have said for weeks
they didn’t have the votes to fully repeal the prevailing wage law, which applies to all government units in Wisconsin, including the state, school districts and municipalities.
But in recent days, conservatives have rallied behind a plan by Sen. Frank Lasee (RDe Pere) that would repeal the prevailing wage law for all local government projects, including those by municipalities, school districts and technical colleges.
The Lasee plan would also simplify the system at the state level by adopting prevailing wages for different construction professions as set by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In doing so, the proposal would eliminate the system in which wages are calculated for those professions by the state Department of Workforce Development, saving $358,000 and cutting four jobs.
The proposal would keep in place the cost thresholds for triggering the wage requirements on state work — $48,000 for projects involving workers in one trade and $100,000 for projects involving workers from multiple trades.
The changes are strongly opposed by unions and Democrats, who say it amounts to a pay cut for the working class. Republicans say they would save money for taxpayers.
Grab-bag proposal
The push to advance the budget came after the Legislature’s budget-writing Joint Finance Committee last week passed a grab-bag proposal known as “motion 999” that would weaken the state’s open records law, allow payday lenders to offer people more services and limit the ability of Dane County to regulate an oil pipeline.
The motion passed late Thursday 12-4, with all Republicans voting for it and all Democrats against it.
Legislative leaders and GOP Gov. Scott Walker, who plans to launch his presidential bid next week, over the weekend said they will abandon the proposed changes to the open records law.
The motion adopted Thursday would also:
Give lawmakers more authority over a committee that monitors the retirement system for public workers.
The Joint Survey Committee on Retirement Systems is responsible for making recommendations to the Legislature on changes to the retirement system for public employees. It consists of six lawmakers and four others.
The motion would change that to make all 10 members lawmakers. The change would kick off of the committee an assistant attorney general, the commissioner of insurance, the administrative head of the retirement system and a member of the public who doesn’t participate in the retirement system to “represent the interests of the taxpayers.”
The change has raised concerns from state workers that reviews of the retirement system would become more political. The Legislature is not supposed to consider any change to the retirement system until receiving a report from the retirement committee on its costs and actuarial effect.
Allow the Milwaukee police and fire departments to help determine whether their employees receive duty disability retirement for mental stress.
Duty disability was designed as a safety net for police officers and firefighters injured on the job. In most cases, the benefit consists of 75% of a worker’s salary, taxfree.
Under the change, before an employee can receive duty disability, the police or fire department must certify that the mental injury was dutyrelated. Workers who disagree with their employer’s decision could appeal to the state Department of Workforce Development.
The proposed language says that to receive compensation, the employee’s stress must be the result of “a situation of greater dimensions than the day-to-day mental stresses and tensions and post-traumatic stress that all similarly situated employees must experience.”
A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation published in 2013 found that since 2006, at least five Milwaukee police officers had been approved for duty disability during or after a disciplinary investigation. Some of the officers cited the investigation or media coverage of it as the cause of stress. Some of the investigations resulted in discipline but others didn’t.
Roll back some of the controversial proposed changes to teacher licensing requirements for middle and high schools. The previous GOP plan would have allowed anyone to teach elective subjects in certain cases regardless of their level of formal education, and anyone with a bachelor’s degree would have been able to teach English, social studies, math and science.
The new motion removes those changes to the teacher licensing system and would also require the Department of Public Instruction to issue licenses to anyone licensed in another state if the individual taught in that state for a year or more.
The original budget changes also would have removed the state’s course options program, which allows high school students to take some classes at other institutions including colleges. The new motion maintains the course options program, with the student’s family footing the bill if the student opts to receive postsecondary credit.
Provide $220,000 to hire two assistant district attorneys to prosecute gun-related offenses. The provision comes as Milwaukee is facing a significant spike in gun violence. The city has seen some 80 homicides this year, nearly double the totals for this time last year.
Bar the decades-old practice in some communities of requiring property owners to submit to a local government inspection and make repairs before selling the property, and fining those who fail to comply.
Some residents and real estate agents have long complained about such code compliance ordinances, which officials in older municipalities say are essential to maintaining their housing stock.
“This is very detrimental to us,” said Chris Swartz, manager for the Village of Shorewood, an inner-ring suburb of Milwaukee, whose code compliance ordinance, first drafted in the 1970s, is considered one of the more stringent. “This (ordinance) is a centerpiece of maintaining our property values and solid neighborhoods,” he said.