The Journal Times of Racine, July 23
A look at Foxconn’s fringe benefits
Here in Racine County, we have been talking about Foxconn coming for more than a year now. It’s anticipated to bring thousands of much-needed jobs to our area, transform our county into a technology hub and bring with it new housing and new developments.
Elsewhere in the state, many looked on anxiously. There was concern about the tax credits for the project. Granted most of the tax credits are dependent on a certain number of jobs being created, but some of the tax money is already being spent on new roads.
Many people who watched from the other side of the state wondered, “what’s in it for me?”
A year later, we are starting to get those answers.
Over the past month, following President Donald Trump’s visit to Mount Pleasant for the ceremonial groundbreaking, Foxconn has announced its plans to open innovation centers in both Green Bay and Eau Claire. Both centers are part of an initiative to spur innovation, attract talent and connect with supply chain partners.
In Eau Claire, Foxconn plans to invest in and create a technology hub in the heart of the Chippewa Valley through the acquisition of a historic office building and creation of innovation and test centers in Downtown Eau Claire. The company plans to close on these properties later this year and open new operations in early 2019.
Foxconn said the new centers, to be named Foxconn Place Chippewa Valley, will create at least 150 high-tech jobs in Eau Claire. Employees will work with companies that will become part of Foxconn’s large supply chain and contribute to the development of the AI (artificial intelligence) 8K+5G ecosystem that Foxconn is building across the Badger State. The term 8K refers to super-high-resolution imaging, and 5G refers to the next generation of cellphone technology.
In Green Bay, Foxconn Technology Group has purchased a six-story office building along the Fox River that once housed a Younker’s Department Store. The company plans to open the innovation center by the end of the year and create at least 200 high-tech jobs at the center.
In addition, Foxconn extended its footprint into Downtown Milwaukee when the company announced that the former Northwestern Mutual building at 611 E. Wisconsin Ave. would become the Taiwanese company’s North American headquarters.
Also, this month Aurora Health Care and Foxconn announced a partnership to provide health care to the new employees.
Foxconn in May also announced a $1 million investment in public and private universities and college through a Smart City, Smart Future initiative. The initiative includes a competition, which will offer winners and award recipients prizes, financial awards, and technical support, in addition to a platform to attract investments to support them in bringing their ideas to life.
While Racine County has the most to gain from the Foxconn development, the rest of the state will also feel the benefits. That is clear with the recent announcements in Milwaukee, Eau Claire and Green Bay.
And it’s inevitable there will be more announcements and partnerships to come.
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The Capital Times, July 23
No, Tammy Baldwin is not contradicting the will of the people
State Sen. Leah Vukmir is all wet when she claims that U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin will be directly contradicting the will of the people when she votes against the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court.
When people in Wisconsin voted for President Trump, Vukmir claims, they knew Trump would choose “judges who would uphold the Constitution” (those are code words for “take very conservative positions”). It may be true that Trump’s voters expect him to appoint such judges, but it is also true that even though Trump won Wisconsin’s electoral votes, he did not come anywhere near getting a majority of the votes of Wisconsinites. Trump won 47.22 percent of the vote and beat Hillary Clinton in our state by a razor-thin margin - if 11,375 out of 2,976,150 voters had picked Clinton instead of Trump, she would have won. Having captured Wisconsin’s electoral votes with well under 50 percent of the ballots cast, Trump did not get a mandate from our state.
Furthermore, there is good reason to speculate that a chunk of Trump voters might want to reconsider how they voted. Fresh evidence of that came in the July 18 Marquette Law School poll: 50 percent in Wisconsinites disapproved of the president while his approval rating stood at 42 percent. That’s obviously less than the 47 percent who voted for him - another indication that opposing his court nominee is not contradicting the will of the people.
During the campaign, Trump made it clear that he would nominate people who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade if they were appointed to the high court. Kavanaugh will no doubt be asked during his nomination hearing whether he supports overturning the ruling that made abortion legal in the United States, and he will no doubt decline to answer the question. So senators will be left to vote on the nomination without getting a straight answer from the nominee, but it is a reasonable assumption that he would vote to overturn the abortion ruling. On this specific issue - one of the hot button issues surrounding Kavanaugh’s nomination - contrary to contradicting the will of the people, Baldwin will be clearly supporting it by opposing the nominee. The Marquette poll found that 63 percent of Wisconsinites want abortion to be legal in all or most cases, while just 29 percent want it to be illegal in all or most cases.
Vukmir can certainly argue that “Kavanaugh is an extremely well-qualified nominee who deserves our support” (we don’t agree), but she needs to think again before she claims that Baldwin is contradicting the will of the people. From where we stand, it appears Baldwin is in touch with Wisconsin voters when she opposes Trump’s pick.
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The Daily Reporter, Milwaukee, July 13
Lawmakers running on empty for reasons to put off raising gas tax
When it comes to reasons for not raising the state’s gas tax, lawmakers are fast running out of excuses.
Recent years have seen legislators doing nearly everything they could think of to make existing transportation dollars stretch just a bit further and put off an all-but-inevitable increase in the gas tax. The latest of those attempts came last month when the powerful Joint Finance Committee approved a “swap” plan that seeks to concentrate some federal transportation dollars into a relatively small group of projects. The basic idea here was to prevent these projects from coming under federal Davis-Bacon pay requirements, which many of the Republicans who control the Legislature believe artificially inflate construction costs.
This swap plan comes on top of lawmakers’ elimination of Wisconsin’s prevailing-wage laws, which Republicans similarly tend to think make public-works projects cost more than they would otherwise. Lawmakers have also eliminated hundreds of positions at the Department of Transportation and required sales of surplus, underused land.
After all these pushes toward efficiency, it’s easy to wonder: How many more of these tricks could lawmakers possibly have up their sleeves? The far more important question, though, is whether everything that has been done so far will make a noticeable difference for Wisconsin’s roadways. Here, a little skepticism is warranted.
For all the words that have been spoken and printed in debates about the state’s transportation budget, the entire situation is really quite easy to summarize using a few simple numbers.
Wisconsin’s gas tax - still the state’s primary means of raising money for transportation projects - has stayed at 30.9 cents a gallon since 2006. Meanwhile, in the ensuing decade, the cost of various highway-construction components went up by 46.5 percent, according to a memo the state’s non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau released in 2016.
This has come at a time when lawmakers have become increasingly leery of borrowing for transportation projects. Debt anxieties in the latest budget debate led Republicans to approve the lowest level of bonding seen in any state transportation plan since the state’s 2001-03 budget.
The results are easy to guess. The state has nearly $246 million less set aside in its current budget for its highway-improvement program than it had in its previous plan from two years ago. That’s money not only for “megaprojects” in the southeast corner of Wisconsin but also any other major highway or bridge elsewhere in the state.
To be sure, the state has found a way to give local governments more money for road work. And, aside from pushing back the schedule for the north leg of the Zoo Interchange reconstruction, there have been no delays to ongoing major roadwork.
But neither has there been any progress toward starting work on other long-needed projects. Plans to rebuild another section of I-94, the one running between the Marquette and Zoo interchanges, have been dropped. And talk of rebuilding Interstate 43 north of Milwaukee has all but evaporated.
Not enough time has passed to know if eliminating prevailing wages and swapping federal dollars out with state and local money on certain projects will really lead to savings. If these policies do end up producing the results their advocates say they will, then taxpayers have every reason to rejoice.
But no one can seriously believe enough money will be found to pay for the reconstruction of I-94 west of Milwaukee - a project whose $1 billion cost estimate is only likely to go up with time - or to fill the many potholes riddling the state’s streets. For those jobs, the only thing that will do is additional revenue.
Of course, there are many ways states can raise money to pay for roads. In Wisconsin, the usual means has been the gas tax. And that’s exactly what lawmakers should turn to again, at least in the short term.
For all its unpopularity, the gas tax has at least three undeniable merits:
- It’s familiar, meaning nobody has to get used to the idea of paying an entirely new sort of tax, fee or toll;
- It’s already being levied, meaning the state can raise more money from it without having to set up an entirely new collection apparatus; and
- It’s a very close approximation to a user fee, meaning it’s paid almost entirely by people whose use of the roads leads to the most damage and the greatest need for expansion and repair projects.
Sure, politicians can always find excuses for avoiding the sorts of choices that could make them unpopular at the polls. But anyone who is up for re-election this November should keep this in mind: As much as voters may hate paying gas taxes, they also hate seeing their vehicles damaged by bumpy, crumbling roads.
At some point, people living in this state are going to start wondering if all the policies lawmakers have adopted in recent years in the name of efficiency were really just means of putting off the inevitable. At some point, they’ll want more than excuses.
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