Core Questions on DOT Story Remain Unanswered

There are some questions arising in the last few days about DOT secretary Frank Busalacchi's decision to send state attorneys to help resolve out-of-state tax disputes regarding Dennis Troha's trucking firms.

It's no surprise that this is being made into a political issue. It seems reasonable enough to believe that at least part of the reason the attorneys were sent is because of Troha's donations to the Doyle campaign.

After all, the last trucking firm known to get this type of treatment was Schneider National in 2001, when the state sent attorneys to Georgia to settle an out-of-state tax dispute for the Green Bay trucking giant.

And a quick look at campaign finance records shows that Schneider CEO Donald Schneider has been a major donor to Tommy Thompson, Scott McCallum, and a number of other GOPers since the 1990s (although the JS, WSJ, and other news outlets haven't seemed to notice that, yet).

McCallum, of course, was governor when the state sent an attorney to Georgia in 2001 to help settle Schneider's tax dispute, though much of the administration was probably still Tommy's, who would've just left in January of that year to become DHHS secretary.

It would be little surprise to me that the Schneider donations to Thompson/McCallum or those made to the Doyle campaign by Troha impacted the decision to send state attorneys to settle the out-of-state tax disputes. Any major business in the state is surely going to get heard on some level by the administration regardless, but I bet a little donor love can go a long way toward cutting through some of the red tape that otherwise might exist.

And a big wild card for the issue of whether anything blatantly improper was done is something mentioned in a WSJ article yesterday (emphasis mine):

Trucking companies pay taxes on the fuel purchased for their vehicles in various states as they drive across the country. Under a multistate compact, the home state for a given company, in this case Wisconsin, is responsible for auditing company reports and making sure the correct amount of taxes goes to each state in which the trucks are operating.

It seems to me that this multistate compact is a pretty big piece of the puzzle. WKOW in Madison also noted the compact, called the International Fuel Tax Agreement (IFTA), in a recent story, but important questions still remain.

What are the specific expectations for states participating in this compact when disputes arise? Do those expectations entail sending state resources out-of-state? Has any other state sent resources to Wisconsin or another state in the compact to help settle disputes? Has a company ever been denied state services pertaining to the compact? These are all rational questions, and I'm sure there are others, that our media should be answering.

The IFTA section on the DOT website gets the ball rolling on the basics of the compact, but more pertinent info on the issue of resolving disputes surely could be gained through a minimal amount of media digging.

Instead, much of the media has opted to engage in more speculation over the issue -- such as whether it's right for the state Senate to proceed with confirmation hearings for Busalacchi next Tuesday -- rather than spending time finding answers to the core questions of the story.

A cynic would almost think some media outlets believe it's more beneficial to leave those core questions unanswered -- stories about them are not nearly as enticing.

Budget Talk is Cheap

It's very typical for members of the opposite party to attack the governor's budget proposal. It's a large document that can be picked apart from a number of angles using a variety of calculations that suit the attacker.

For instance, while the GOP was glad to quickly estimate the total amount of new taxes and fees that Governor Doyle's budget includes, they are not so quick to consider how the new tax breaks for health care, child care, etc., will offset those increases.

Nevertheless, in spite of how commonplace this is, it's still worth pointing out that it's ridiculous at best and counterproductive at worst.

Taking a trip down memory lane, it's interesting to look at how Governor Doyle's budget proposal, on the whole, compares to the last Republican governor's budget proposal, which would be Scott McCallum in 2001.

That year, McCallum released his budget proposal to the legislature on February 20. The next day, Steve Walters of the Journal Sentinel opened his article titled "Governor Seeks to Curb Spending" with the following:

Republican Gov. Scott McCallum on Tuesday handed lawmakers the smallest budget increase in 30 years -- balanced with $350 million from the one-time sale of future tobacco industry payments -- and asked that future spending be tied to increases in personal income.

Walters followed up by noting that the "smallest budget increase" line was in reference to a 3 percent increase in GPR spending in FY 2001 and a 2.9 percent increase in FY 2002. And, later in the article, then-Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen (R-Brookfield) praised McCallum for "hold[ing] the line on spending and taxes."

Fast-forward to earlier this week, the day after Doyle released his budget proposal to the legislature, Steve Walters, Stacy Forster, and Patrick Marley of the JS wrote in their article titled "Doyle Seeks Tax, Fee Boosts":

The governor proposed $57.7 billion in total spending, including state and federal funds, over the next two years - a 9% increase over the current budget.

And the current Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch (R-West Salem) added that Doyle "outlined a number of priorities to a lot of different groups tonight, but the one priority he seemed to forget was the taxpayers."

Seems like two completely different budget proposals, right? Well, not so much.

While McCallum's budget proposal did only include a 5.9 percent increase in GPR spending, as Walters noted in his article, the total budget increase -- which was the figure Walters, Forster, and Marley noted in their recent article on Doyle's budget -- was 9.6 percent. That's 0.6 percent more than the increase in Doyle's current budget proposal.

And while Doyle's budget proposal does include a total revenue increase of 9 percent, when only considering the increase in GPR spending -- which was the figure Walters noted in his 2001 article on McCallum's budget -- the increase is only 3.5 percent. That's quite a bit less than the 5.9 percent increase that McCallum proposed in 2001.

Thus, it's fairly clear that Doyle's budget proposal, on the whole, isn't out of step with previous state budget proposals, even the one that came under the last Republican governor who was openly praised for his proposal's fiscal restraint.

So can we move past the attempts to score cheap political points on the budget proposal and get on with using it to craft the actual budget that will get adopted this summer?