Brian Dake

While much of the state focused on the remarkably close gubernatorial race Tuesday, voters also expressed resounding opinions on ballot measures regarding school referenda.

Voters overwhelmingly approved school referenda across the state, agreeing to raise taxes by well over $1.37 billion. In all, 82 separate referendum questions were up for debate in Wisconsin. Ultimately, 77 had passed and five failed.

Of the additional spending approved by voters, the vast majority will come in the form of new debt—$1.2 billion. Another $140.6 million will be one-time spending by school districts, and $26.1 million will be recurring spending above revenue limits.

The Wheeler Report was the first to report full results Wednesday morning. 

Of the five referendum votes that failed, the largest was in Viroqua Area, where voters turned down the question of a $24.9 million debt for a district-wide school building and improvement program. A West Salem referendum question for $7.6 million in one-time spending for educational programming failed, as did $2.25 million for Goodman-Armstrong. 

Voters in Wittenberg-Birnamwood also turned down a $4.4 million debt question for a new high school gymnasium. However, the same voters also agreed to issue $13.1 million in debt for a district-wide facility improvement plan.

In a night when multiple elections appeared to come down to slim margins, most of the school district referendum questions were handily approved.

A federal judge blocked the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline Thursday, saying the Trump administration’s justification for approving it last year was incomplete.

In rejecting the permit, Judge Morris relied mainly on arguing that State, the agency that analyzed the project, didn’t properly account for factors such as low oil prices, the cumulative impacts of greenhouse gases from Keystone and the Alberta Clipper pipeline and the risk of oil spills.

“The major spills that occurred between 2014 and 2017 qualify as significant. The department would have evaluated the spills in the 2014 [environmental review] had the information been available,” wrote Morris, whom Obama nominated to the court.

The judge also said that State didn’t properly justify its switch from rejecting the pipeline in 2015 under the Obama administration to approving it in 2017 under Trump.

TransCanada and State did not respond to requests for comment. The Canadian company had planned to start construction work next year.

The Trump administration or TransCanada could appeal Morris’s ruling to the San Francisco-based Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said Wednesday he is open to looking at ways to limit the power of incoming Democratic governor Tony Evers before he takes office in January.

Vos told reporters that in a lame duck legislative session later this month or next, he would consider bills that would “rebalance” powers of the executive, without saying what limitations he’d be open to considering. Vos said he wanted to discuss it with Senate Republican Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, who was meeting with GOP senators on Thursday to elect leaders.

Evers spokeswoman Britt Cudaback said it was “unfortunate” that Vos was “doubling down on division just hours after Governor-elect Evers called on Speaker Vos and Majority Leader Fitzgerald to set aside differences and work together on the pressing issues facing our state.”

As governor, Evers will propose a state budget, the Republican Legislature will be able to rewrite it. Evers has extensive veto power and Republicans don’t have large enough majorities to override him.

Evers ran on the promise to scale back much of the conservative laws Walker and Republican lawmakers enacted over eight years. That includes reducing tax credits for manufacturers and restoring collective bargaining rights lost under Act 10 for union members who backed him.

The GOP turned back every Democratic challenger in both the Assembly and Senate with one race still too close to call Wednesday. What’s more, the GOP flipped a Senate seat that Democrats had won in a special election this summer. As of Wednesday, unofficial returns showed the GOP with a 63-35 Assembly advantage and a 19-14 Senate edge.

In a stunning upset of the political order in Wisconsin, Democrat Tony Evers won the governor’s race Tuesday ousting two-term Republican incumbent Scott Walker.

Unofficial results show Evers beat Walker by about 29,000 votes, or just over 1 percentage point, out of more than 2.6 million votes cast. State law only permits recounts for losing candidates who are within 1 percentage point.

State law triggers a free recount of the results if the margin between the candidates is 0.25 percent or less and the candidate who lost the initial count by that margin requests one. If margin is more than 0.25 percent but no more than 1 percent, the losing candidate may petition and pay for a recount.

Evers’ win means control of state government will be divided for the first time since the 2007-09 session. Republicans gained back a Senate seat in a district they had lost during a special election over the summer. Otherwise the composition of the Assembly remained unchanged.

Wisconsin exports were essentially flat in the first nine months of 2018, even as the state’s imports grew faster than the country as a whole, according to new U.S. Census Bureau data.

The state’s companies exported $17.36 billion in goods and services through the end of September, down 0.1 percent from the same period in 2017. The decrease was among the slowest growth rates in the country, which increased exports 9.1 percent.

Imports into Wisconsin, however, were up 12.3 percent to $22.47 billion, outpacing the overall increase in the U.S. of 9.4 percent.

Beyond tariffs, Wisconsin’s sluggish export numbers are also partially the result of large shipments to Saudi Arabia in 2017. More than $720 million in goods were shipped to the Middle Eastern kingdom through September last year, compared to $142 million this year.

Shipments to Asia are down 10.3 percent, including a decline of 5.5 percent to China and 6.2 percent to Japan.

Despite rising trade tensions through the early part of the year, exports to Canada and Mexico, the two largest destinations for Wisconsin goods, are up 3 and 5.2 percent respectively.

Today, the Department of Workforce Development (DWD) encouraged the public to submit comments about the state’s Worker’s Compensation (WC) program to the Worker’s Compensation Advisory Council (WCAC).

The Council is taking public comments on suggested reforms to the state’s WC laws through December 3, 2018. The comments will help form the Council’s legislative agenda during the following year.

Comments may be submitted by email to WCAdvisoryCouncil@dwd.wisconsin.gov or via the U.S. Postal Service to:

Worker’s Compensation Advisory Council
Attn: Frank Lasee, Chair
201 East Washington Avenue, RoomC100
Madison, WI 53703

This year could see the most referendums and the highest amount of total referendum funding approved since 2001, according to a report earlier this month by the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

All told, 61 school districts in the state are using a total of 82 questions to request $1.4 billion in debt and revenue limit increases. Of those, 44 are asking to issue debt totaling $1.25 billion, according to WPF’s count.

Twenty-four districts are also asking to temporarily exceed state revenue limits to generate up to $157 million, while an additional 14 are asking for permanent exceptions to state revenue limits to raise about $26.1 million per year.

Since 1999, there’s been some correlation between a growing economy and the willingness of school districts to propose — and their voters to approve — referendums. Districts have also tended to ask for bigger referendums during good economic times.

WPF, a nonpartisan policy research organization, points to a number of factors that influence referendums, including aging facilities and declining enrollments, especially in rural areas, that result in less state funding.

Also, “school funding decisions made by state officials do play a role in how common referenda are or aren’t,” said WPF research director Jason Stein. “But the overall health of the economy and the individual district’s situation clearly play important roles as well.”

The economy expanded at a 3.5 percent annual rate in the third quarter, the Commerce Department said Friday. That’s slower than the second quarter’s blockbuster 4.2 percent, but it puts the economy on pace for the fastest annual growth in 13 years.

Consumer spending jumped at a 4 percent rate in the July-September quarter — the fastest in about four years and topping the 3.8 percent in the prior three months.

Overall growth may have been affected, in part, by Hurricane Florence, which flooded the Southeast U.S. in September. The Commerce Department said Florence resulted in losses of $37 billion in property and equipment.

Exports decreased at a 3.5 percent pace in the third quarter after jumping 9.3 percent in the second quarter. Analysts had cautioned that the previous increase in exports was sparked by looming tariffs by China in its ongoing trade war with the United States.

The booming U.S. economy appears to be reducing dependence on federal health insurance for the poor.

Medicaid enrollment fell for the first time since 2007, declining by about 0.6 percent in fiscal year 2018, and states don’t expect to see much growth in enrollment next year, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation report released Thursday.

States are budgeting for a “minimal” increase of 0.9 percent in 2019, Kaiser said in its annual 50-state survey of Medicaid.

“States largely attribute the enrollment slowdown to a strengthening economy, resulting in fewer new low-income people qualifying for Medicaid,” said Kaiser, a nonprofit group that focuses on health care and health policy.

Federal and state Medicaid spending still grew despite the drop in enrollment. Combined federal and state spending rose by 4.2 percent in fiscal 2018, similar to the previous year’s increase, Kaiser said. States expect a 5.3 percent jump in spending for 2019.