Legislature
pass the tax rebate only and drop the tax holiday.
Assembly Bill 953 would close Lincoln Hills School — the state’s only youth prison — and replace the facility north of Wausau with smaller, regional lockups, some of which would be run by counties. The $80 million proposal passed the Assembly unanimously last month.
The move was a response to a 3-year-old criminal investigation into prisoner abuse at the prison and to a judge’s order last year curbing the use of pepper spray and solitary confinement there.
Fitzgerald has said that GOP senators will vote to close Lincoln Hills by 2021 but will mostly leave it to future legislation to decide where and how to hold teen inmates after that date.
As a result, the Senate bill would allocate less funding, though it does include $15 million to expand Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in Madison, which holds inmates with mental health problems.
There are no gun control measures in the school safety package unveiled by Walker last week in the wake of a Florida school shooting.
But the legislation would give schools $100 million for making building improvements, training staff and putting police officers in schools.
Assembly GOP leaders have backed Walker’s school safety bills, but Fitzgerald has said he planned to make some as-yetunnamed changes to the package. That once again raises the question of whether the bills can pass in identical form and get to the governor — something that clearly got Walker’s attention Monday.
“We don’t want to be sitting a week from now scratching our head wondering why they couldn’t get it done,” Walker told WITITV. “That’s what happens in Washington.”
Walker released his school safety plan a day after roughly 3,000 high school students protested at the Capitol to demand gun control measures such as universal criminal background checks for firearm sales.
Lydia Hester, a 16-year-old Madison sophomore who participated in the protest, said Monday she was disappointed that Walker hadn’t backed any new regulations on guns.
“The demands that we brought to Walker were not even listened to at all,” she said.
The Assembly Committee on Education will hold a public hearing on the school safety bills Tuesday. But Senate Minority Leader Jennifer Shilling (D-La Crosse) criticized GOP senators for scheduling floor votes on the Senate version of the $100 million package in that house without any hearing for students and other members of the public.
“It is disheartening that Senate Republicans would ignore these pleas and prevent students from sharing their concerns about gun violence at a public hearing,” she said in a statement.
Assembly Bill 963 aims to head off a decision by Kimberly-Clark to shut down plants in Neenah and Fox Crossing and eliminate 600 jobs.
The Assembly last month voted, 56-37, in favor of the bill, which would provide state subsidies at levels previously only offered for a flat-screen plant that Foxconn Technology Group of Taiwan is building in Racine County.
If Kimberly-Clark kept the plants open, the state would cover 17% of qualifying wages paid to workers there and also cover 15% of any factory upgrades. The state would also waive sales taxes on any equipment upgrades at the plant.
The wage incentives alone could cost state taxpayers $101 million to $117 million over 15 years, according to estimates from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.
Fitzgerald hasn’t committed to passing the Assembly bill in any form.