Wisconsin State Journal, April 21
Smart foreign grads help make Wisconsin great
Ravi Kalla got his master’s degrees in engineering from UW-Madison and founded Symphony Corp., a health information company that employs a couple of hundred people in Madison.
He’s from India.
Connie Li moved to Wisconsin when her husband got a job at UW-Madison. She co-founded TrafficCast International in Madison, a rapidly growing business providing traffic data to wireless devices.
She’s from China.
Ankit Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Imbed Biosciences, developed the Fitchburg company’s promising wound-healing technology while doing post-doctoral research at UW-Madison.
He’s from India.
Thomas “Rock” Mackie, an emeritus UW-Madison professor, is best known for co-founding TomoTherapy, which makes cancer treatment machines in Madison and employs nearly 300.
He grew up in Canada.
Smart foreigners who come to our universities and stay here don’t take away Wisconsin jobs. In many cases, they create the jobs of the future and expand our economy.
That’s important to remember following President Donald Trump’s visit Tuesday to Kenosha, where he signed an order targeting visas for highly skilled workers from overseas.
Trump has a point that some companies have abused the federal visa program by hiring foreign workers into jobs that Americans with similar skills could fill. Perhaps the president’s review of the H-1B visa program can prevent some abuse.
But more generally and significantly, America needs as many young and talented people as it can find. That’s especially true in Wisconsin, where our population is aging fast without enough young workers to replace retirees and further expand the workforce.
Immigration is part of the solution, not the problem. So limiting legitimate H-1B visas - which Wisconsin universities rely on to keep talented people - would be a big mistake.
“Especially the graduate students at the UW-Madison - if they can stay, they would like to stay,” said Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council. “Especially now, when Wisconsin really has a demographic crisis of sorts, it’s going to be tough to fill all of the available jobs moving ahead, from the high end to the low end. It’s no longer about a skills gap. It’s about a body gap.”
Wisconsin’s growing technology sector relies heavily on an international workforce, with many foreign-born scholars launching startup companies. In all likelihood, Symphony, TrafficCast, Imbed, TomoTherapy and many other companies would not exist in Wisconsin if their founders had not come to the United States for higher education and stayed to contribute.
If that kind of brain power is turned away, those people will create businesses and jobs elsewhere. Wisconsin’s congressional delegation - especially Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Janesville, who has been strong on the issue in the past - must ensure that doesn’t happen.
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The Journal Times of Racine, April 23
DNR falling short on service to deer hunters
In the south-central and southwestern regions of Wisconsin, the percentage of deer testing positive for chronic wasting disease surpassed 10 percent for the second straight year. Meanwhile, the number of deer testing positive for CWD reached a record high in the Badger State.
If you’re wondering why the state Department of Natural Resources didn’t announce such alarming results, well, the DNR doesn’t seem to be in the business of keeping hunters fully informed these days.
As Patrick Durkin pointed out in an April 17 report for the Wisconsin State Journal, the DNR news release said “CWD samples nearly doubled in 2016 - thank you hunters!”
We agree with Durkin that hunters should be commended for submitting 6,095 deer for chronic wasting disease tests during 2016’s hunting seasons. Clearly, there is interest among hunters in gathering evidence of CWD.
That number - 6,095 - is nearly double the record-low 3,138 deer hunters provided in 2015. But the DNR’s news release is woefully short on perspective. The 2016 sampling effort ranks fourth from the bottom of 15 annual assessments done since 2001.
The news release also mentioned 447 deer tested CWD-positive in 2016. But a raw number is useless without context: Is it a high number? A low number? What’s the percentage difference from the last time a measurement was taken?
What the DNR did not say, but Durkin did, is that 447 is a record high. It’s 90 deer, or 25 percent more, than the previous high, 357 in 2013, even though the DNR tested 567 fewer deer than the 6,662 tested in 2013.
The DNR notes that most sick deer came from Wisconsin’s “southern farmland zone.” But CWD rates again set records across that zone, which covers much of south-central to southwestern Wisconsin. Of 3,730 deer that hunters submitted for testing there, 442 - 12 percent - were infected. That’s two straight years the zone’s infection rate hit double digits. In 2015, 296 of its 2,162 samples had CWD, or 13.7 percent.
Further perspective: When Scott Walker was elected governor in November 2010, partly on the promise of improving Wisconsin’s deer hunting, the southern farmlands’ infection rate was 3 percent. Meaning that the CWD rate in that area has quadrupled during Walker’s administration.
If you’re a deer hunter, don’t you want the DNR to keep you informed as to whether the deer you harvest can be eaten? Under DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp, that has not been the case. Stepp won’t let her staff testify in the Capitol about CWD, and her communications office that won’t publicly discuss CWD’s impact on Wisconsin’s deer herd and its hunting heritage.
Durkin reported that former DNR wildlife chief Tom Hauge said the Walker/Stepp team made it clear to him that CWD was “bad news,” and to share only basic facts, not analysis.
“They viewed news about CWD as a wet blanket on deer hunting and the fun associated with it,” said Hauge, who retired in October after a 37-year DNR career, including the final 25 as wildlife bureau director. “It was frustrating at times. During the first two-thirds of my career, we routinely had an open door for sharing information. We viewed it as part of the public trust, and transparency was part of the trustee’s role.
“But communications now are tightly controlled,” he continued. “(DNR administrators) have rules of engagement for handling statewide media. They come up with their talking points, and you better follow them. It’s as if the DNR’s the corporate world, not a public agency.”
We believe the DNR, as a state agency, should be serving all of Wisconsin’s residents, and that certainly includes the thousands who put on blaze orange every November and head out in pursuit of that trophy buck. We believe the state’s deer hunters deserve better service than they’ve been receiving from the DNR, that the agency’s activities should be transparent. Maintaining public trust is about keeping Wisconsinites informed, not “talking points.”
As to whether, this fall, you can eat the results of your successful hunt? Cross your fingers and hope your venison doesn’t come with a side of CWD.
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Green Bay Press-Gazette, April 22
Keep school referendum decisions local
In the April election, 40 of 65 school referendums statewide passed as voters approved $464.7 million in building projects and $235 million for operating expenses.
In northeastern Wisconsin, voters in the Green Bay, Denmark, Seymour, Oconto Falls and Washington Island school districts approved school referendums, while voters in the Howard-Suamico, Bonduel and Southern Door districts defeated theirs.
The decisions, though, were made by the voters in those school districts. Not by legislators in Madison or lawmakers in Washington, D.C. Not by the governor or the president. Those whose taxes would be affected had the opportunity to vote “yes” or “no” - an example of democracy at its most basic level. An excellent example of local control.
However, some Republican legislators, led by Sen. Duey Stroebel, R-Cedarburg, want to wrest some of that local control away from school districts with a series of proposals that would discourage, punish and limit schools from going to referendum.
Among proposals that Stroebel has a hand in is one that would eliminate recurring referendums, which basically raise operating taxes indefinitely.
We believe voters can judge for themselves on this issue. Look at the Howard-Suamico School District, where 70 percent of the voters trounced a referendum to permanently exceed state revenue limits by $4 million a year. Perhaps the outcome would have been different had there been a five- or 10-year limit on it.
Another proposal is punitive, reducing state aid for districts that use a referendum to exceed revenue limits. The money they would lose would be redistributed to other districts. This type of petulant legislating fails to take into account how school districts differ. The needs of a rural school district facing declining enrollment are different from those of a property rich district. Also, if your district held the lid on spending when revenue limits were imposed, they’ve likely lagged behind their peers in state aid. Plus, going to referendum was the route schools were told to take when revenue limits were imposed.
One of the proposals would limit referendums to spring or fall general elections. We agree with the sentiment of this bill. School boards should schedule referendum votes that coincide with general elections, because there will be higher turnout and because the school district must pay the cost of special elections.
Again, though, it should be up to the school board and district voters, not to legislators in the State Capitol.
Another proposal limits when school boards can decide to go to referendum, confining it to a regularly scheduled board meeting for an operating referendum and the annual meeting for a debt issue. We believe school boards are fully capable of giving voters enough notice without it being state law.
The Green Bay School Board did an excellent job of letting the public know that it was interested in putting a school referendum on the April ballot. It discussed the matter with the public for over a month, adjusting what the details of the referendum before the School Board approved it. There was no surprise, middle-of-the-night vote, which is not something the Legislature can claim.
Rep. John Macco, R-Ledgeview, co-authored a proposal that would require districts to disclose the debt service and interest payments on any debt issue. Again, we agree with the sentiment. Voters should know what they’re on the hook for in future payments. However, does the Legislature need to dictate this?
This isn’t the first time Stroebel has attempted to take away local control.
It likely won’t be the last.
As we have in the past, we believe local school boards and district voters should decide these issues. If the voters in a school district are willing to fund a new building with borrowing or increase operating expenses, they should have that ability. If a referendum fails, the school district has to live with that decision.
Whatever the referendum outcome, the decisions should be made in the school district, not the State Capitol.
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