Month: September 2023

The Wisconsin Department of Safety and Professional Services (DSPS) has added four more trades exam testing dates to the 2023 calendar as the department continues to look for ways to stay ahead of demand.

“Since I was appointed to lead DSPS, we’ve put an emphasis on making our department more efficient in licensing and strengthening our state’s workforce. We want to pave the way for qualified professionals to become credentialed more quickly, without compromising our commitment to safety,” said DSPS Secretary-designee Dan Hereth. “We have seen, and expect to keep seeing, increased demand for trades exams in Wisconsin. Looking into the future, our agency wants to position itself to meet that demand and help hard-working Wisconsinites get into a variety of rewarding fields.”

The four added dates more than double the number of exam dates available through the end of the year. The new dates are:

October 12
December 19
December 20
December 21

DSPS is notifying people currently signed up for exams in 2024 to offer them a slot on one of the added 2023 dates on a first-come, first-served basis. People registered for trades exams in January and February of 2024 have been offered the first opportunity to move up their test dates, with the department sending each a date change request form.

Currently, DSPS offers trades exams about four days per month at one of five testing locations across the state. In addition to adding more exam dates through 2023, Hereth says DSPS is exploring more ways to increase options and offer more flexibility to Wisconsinites entering the trades.

The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) has been awarded $11.25 million in federal funds to strengthen and modernize its unemployment insurance system, part of a continuing improvement process to make its system more reliable and accessible to users.

The grants will allow Wisconsin and other states to adopt new strategies to upgrade and redesign unemployment insurance programs, better defend against fraud, and make the systems easier to maintain and change.

“As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance services, we continue to seek ways we can leverage technology to improve the speed and accuracy of unemployment benefit payments and make the system easier to navigate,” said DWD Secretary Amy Pechacek. “We look forward to investing these funds in additional efforts to overhaul our state’s decades-old unemployment insurance infrastructure and benefits delivery system.”

Since 2021, DWD has received more than $28 million from the U.S. Department of Labor to improve equity, reduce fraud and modernize Wisconsin’s unemployment system.

Learn more about the U.S. Department of Labor strategy to modernize the unemployment insurance system.

New single-family home purchases plummeted 8.7% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 675,000 units, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday. Sales remain up about 5.8% from the same time one year ago.

“The pace of new home construction is slowing, but there is still a large backlog of homes in the funnel that should continue making their way to the market in the coming months, giving more opportunities for home buyers to jump on the new construction train,” said Nicole Bachaud, Zillow senior economist.

At the current pace of sales, it would take roughly 7.8 months to exhaust the inventory of existing homes. Experts view a pace of six to seven months as a healthy level.

The decline in sales indicates that a resurgence in mortgage rates is pushing many would-be buyers out of the market. That slowdown in demand contributed to a decline in prices last month.

The median price for a new home fell to $430,000 from $436,700 the previous month. Still, that remains far higher than the typical pre-pandemic level.

Rates on the popular 30-year fixed mortgage are currently hovering around 7.19%, according to Freddie Mac, well above the 6.29% rate recorded one year ago and the pre-pandemic average of 3.9%.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is setting up a new division with the billions in new funding it received in the Inflation Reduction Act to go after uncollected taxes sheltered in companies that pass their tax liability through to their individual owners.

These kinds of businesses are known as “pass-through entities” and often take the legal designation of limited liability partnerships, S-corporations, general partnerships and sole proprietorships.

The new division will be contained within the IRS’s Large Business and International (LBI) Division, which collects taxes on corporations, S-corps, and partnerships with assets greater than $10 million.

The IRS said in a Wednesday statement that the creation of the new unit is part of an effort “to restore fairness in tax compliance by shifting more attention onto high-income earners, partnerships, large corporations and promoters abusing the nation’s tax laws.”

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has released its Strategic Enforcement Plan (SEP) for Fiscal Years 2024 –2028. The SEP establishes the EEOC’s subject matter priorities to achieve its mission of preventing and remedying unlawful employment discrimination.

The Plan calls for the EEOC to continue its focus on promoting promising practices to prevent discrimination; combatting pay discrimination and advancing equal pay; preventing and remedying systemic harassment; and tackling retaliation. Changes to the SEP include:

• Targeting discrimination, bias, and hate directed against religious minorities (including antisemitism and Islamophobia), racial or ethnic groups, and LGBTQI+ individuals.
• Expanding the vulnerable and underserved worker priority to include additional categories of workers who may be unaware of their rights under equal employment opportunity (EEO) laws, may be reluctant or unable to exercise their legally protected rights, or have historically been underserved by federal employment discrimination protections.
• Updating the emerging and developing issues priority to include protecting workers affected by pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, including under the new Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) and other EEO laws; employment discrimination associated with the long-term effects of COVID-19 symptoms; and technology-related employment discrimination.
• Highlighting the continued underrepresentation of women and workers of color in certain industries and sectors, such as construction and manufacturing, finance, tech and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields.
• Recognizing employers’ increasing use of technology, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to target job advertisements, recruit applicants, and make or assist in hiring and other employment decisions.
• Preserving access to the legal system by addressing overly broad waivers, releases, non-disclosure agreements, or non-disparagement agreements when they restrict workers’ ability to obtain remedies for civil rights violations.

Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled Legislature on Wednesday ignored Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ call for a special session to pass a $1 billion package that would keep a pandemic-era child care program running, send more money to the University of Wisconsin and create a paid family leave program. The special session remains open, giving lawmakers a chance to revisit Evers’ bills or, take up other proposals at a future date.

The package Governor Evers called on Republicans to pass would spend $365 million to make permanent the pandemic-era federally funded Child Care Counts program that’s set to end in January. The program distributed nearly $600 million to more than 4,900 child care providers from March 2020 through March 2023, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

Governor Evers’ proposal goes beyond child care funding.

It would also provide up to 12 weeks of paid family leave for Wisconsin workers starting in 2025 at a cost of $243 million, and would give UW an additional $66 million.

The Evers package also includes $40 million more for the Wisconsin Technical College System; $100 million more for a grant program targeting healthcare-related worker shortages; $60 million for programs targeting nursing shortages; and $16 million to address teacher shortages.

The U.S. Federal Reserve held interest rates steady on Wednesday but stiffened a hawkish monetary policy stance that its officials increasingly believe can succeed in lowering inflation without wrecking the economy or leading to large job losses.

“People hate inflation. Hate it,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a press conference after the end of a two-day policy meeting at which central bank officials held the benchmark overnight interest rate in the current 5.25%-5.50% range, but sketched a stricter policy path moving forward in an inflation fight they now see lasting into 2026.

While Powell said the Fed was “in a position to proceed carefully” with future policy moves, he also made clear the jury was, to some degree, still out on the central bank’s fight to contain the worst outbreak of inflation in 40 years.

“We want to see convincing evidence really, that we have reached the appropriate level” of interest rates to return inflation to the Fed’s 2% target, a judgment its policymakers have not yet made, Powell told reporters. Inflation by some measures remains more than double the Fed’s desired level, though Powell said the pace appeared to be in decline across several key parts of the economy.

Municipalities are struggling to keep pace with rapidly rising home prices, creating the largest gap between local property tax assessments and market values in recent years. That’s according to a new report by the Wisconsin Policy Forum. The report says the gap between assessed and market values has spawned concerns about the fairness of Wisconsin’s property tax system.

Over 800 Wisconsin municipalities have assessed values for the properties in their borders that are lower than 80 percent of their market value, according to the report. That’s the largest gap since at least 2011.

Ari Brown, a researcher for Wisconsin Policy Forum and the report’s author, said the main cause for that gap is “the hottest housing market in recent memory” over the last few years.

“When property values are rising so quickly, it is hard for local assessors to keep up with that,” he said. “There’s just a lack of supply and housing right now to meet demand.”

On top of trying to catch up to a booming housing market, revaluations can be a major expense for local governments, on top of other necessary costs like infrastructure investment, Brown said. A revaluation is a program undertaken by a municipality to appraise all property within its boundary to its full and fair value.

For example, a full revaluation for the city of Rhinelander — which has a population of roughly 7,800 — would cost nearly $160,000, according to the report.

Staffing constraints also make it difficult for local governments to catch up on assessments, said Jerry Deschane, executive director of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities.

“Municipalities are trying to do their job — they’re trying to catch up,” he said. “But there’s a limited number of human beings out there, called state-certified assessors, and there are not enough of them to go around.”

Republican legislators announced a bill Monday that would devote more than $614 million in public funding to repair and renovate the Milwaukee Brewers’ stadium — far more than taxpayers spent to build it more than two decades ago.

Under the proposal, the state would give the team $60.8 million next fiscal year and up to $20 million each year after that through 2045-46. The city of Milwaukee would contribute a total of $202 million and Milwaukee County would kick in $135 million by 2050.

The team would contribute about $100 million and extend its lease at American Family Field through 2050, keeping Major League Baseball in its smallest market for another 27 years.

“It’s a win for Wisconsin,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said at a news conference at the stadium, American Family Field.

Seeking to justify the public spending, Vos said losing the Brewers to another city would cost the state and local economies tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue each year, which could lead to diminished state aid for communities around Wisconsin. Baseball operations at American Family Field generate enough tax revenue that lawmakers can afford to give the team money without imposing any new taxes, Vos said.

Rick Schlesinger, the team’s president of business operations, called the proposal a “good first step” during a separate news conference later Monday. He said he expects the plan will be amended, but that he’d be happy with it if it were passed today.

The proposal would have to pass the Republican-controlled state Assembly and state Senate and get Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ signature before it could become law. Evers’ office issued a statement Monday saying he looked forward to reviewing the proposal.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has raised its U.S. diesel price forecast for 2023 and 2024 in its latest short term energy outlook (STEO) report, which was released last week. The EIA now sees U.S. on-highway diesel fuel prices averaging $4.31 per gallon this year and $4.07 per gallon next year.

“We raised our diesel price forecast because of higher than expected August diesel crack spreads (the price of a gallon of diesel minus the price of a gallon of crude oil) and our expectation for lower distillate inventories in the fall,” the EIA noted in its September STEO.

“Announced maintenance at the Irving Oil refinery in St. John, New Brunswick, and at the Monroe Energy refinery in Trainer, Pennsylvania, will reduce distillate fuel oil supplies to the East Coast,” the EIA added. “Total distillate inventories in the United States have been well below average since last year, and we currently estimate U.S. distillate inventories will decline by about 11 million barrels in October, more than the average October draw from 2018–22 of nearly 8 million barrels, largely because of the maintenance,” the EIA continued.

The EIA’s latest gasoline and diesel fuel update at the time of writing, which was released on September 11, shows a rising price trend in U.S. on-highway diesel fuel prices.

As of September 18, the average diesel price in the U.S. is $4.575 per gallon, according to the AAA Gas Prices website. Yesterday’s average was $4.571 per gallon, the week ago average was $4.475 per gallon, the month ago average was $4.347 per gallon, and the year ago average was $4.960 per gallon, the site highlighted.