Discussion of deeper cuts than Doyle's began when  Gard told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that, among other things, Assembly Republicans don't like the governor's plan to use $500 million from the state transportation fund to shore up shared revenues and school aids. To offset elimination of that transfer, he said, deeper cuts in shared revenue than in school aids are likely. To see that story, look here.

An independent, third-party review of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation's proposed $947 million upgrade of Milwaukee's Marquette Interchange won the endorsement of the Wisconsin Alliance of Cities March 21.

"To conquer this $3 billion deficit that only seems to be growing, we're going to have to do some different things," Wisconsin Rapids Mayor Jerry Bach told the Daily Reporter of Milwaukee after the vote. "It means that we're concerned about the amount of money being spent on one particular project in one part of the state."

A peer review also has been endorsed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

"An engineering firm with no ties either to the state or (Milwaukee Mayor John) Norquist's office could objectively review the state Transportation Department's plan and the mayor's plan — applying modern freeway standards and traffic projections to both — and then make a recommendation to the governor," the Journal Sentinel said. See its editorial here. See the Daily Reporter story about the Alliance action here.

The latest "charter towns" bill, AB 136, could affect Alliance of Cities members across the state. The Alliance opposes the bill because its enactment would lead to increased sprawl, unwise land use, and increased social, racial and economic disparities of the sort identified by urban researchers Myron Orfield (in Wisconsin Metropatterns) and David Rusk.

The Assembly Rural Affairs Committee is holding a hearing on the bill at 10 a.m. on April 10, in the North Hearing Room of the Capitol.

T here are 135 towns with a population over 2,500 that could qualify as charter towns, depending on whether they meet minimal criteria under the bill.

Towns would be required to offer limited water and sewer service, offer 24-hour police protection and have an equalized value that all but one town with a population of over 2,500 already exceeds.

The Wisconsin Alliance of Cities, wispolitics.com, the Wisconsin Counties Association, the Wisconsin Towns Association and the La Follette School of Public Affairs are co-sponsoring a forum April 9, Tough Times, Tough Choices: State-Local  Relations During the Budget Crunch.

The forum will bring together for the first time the chairs of three efforts to improve the state-local partnership and increase governmental efficiency. They are Milwaukee business leader Tim Sheehy, chair of the Task Force on State and Local Government, which issued its report earlier this year, UW Professor Don Kettl, chair of the Commission on the State-Local Partnerships for the 21st Century, and former Wisconsin State Journal publisher Jim Burgess, chair of the  Commission for the Study of Administrative Value and Efficiency (SAVE Commission).

The panelists and audience will have a chance to discuss whether the tough choices that state government's budget crisis imposes on the state and local level presents an opportunity for institutionalizing the types of reforms the three commissions recommended.

The forum is Wednesday, April 9, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., at the Concourse Hotel in Madison. That's the day of the last Joint Finance Committee budget hearing, in Madison. Legislators, staff members, local and state officials, scholars the news media and members of the public are welcome. There is no charge. A reception will follow.

For more information, please contact Jeff Mayers at wispolitics.com.

For the third consecutive legislative session, a bill has been introduced to hinder any municipal cable system that wants to compete against cable television providers. Senate Bill 54 and its companion bill, Assembly Bill 110, would require any municipal cable system to do some cumbersome accounting procedures, and would prohibit certain funding mechanisms.

The cable television companies also seem to have a card hidden up their sleeve: they want to create grounds for suing local governments. Only Oconto Falls has a municipal cable system, and only Reedsburg has one on the drawing board. Municipal Electric Utilities of Wisconsin and the League of Wisconsin Municipalities are working to kill the bill in committee.

By Rich Eggleston

Wisconsin has 172 centers that answer 911 calls, but only 72  — one per county — would be eligible for money from a cellular phone bill surcharge to enable dispatchers to pinpoint the location of cellular 911 calls, under Assembly Bill 61, which the Assembly passed, 67-31, on March 18. Sponsors of the bill said communities that don't get money from the surcharge are free to pay their own costs of 911 upgrades, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. The newspaper said the Assembly rejected an amendment to allow Milwaukee to recover some of the costs it has already incurred in modernizing its 911 center through the surcharge. In other words, sock it to the property taxpayer — especially the property taxpayer in Milwaukee. For the Journal Sentinel story, look here. The Alliance warned of the bill's shortcomings before it ever got to the legislative floor. See our Feb. 28 news release here.

Transportation spending in Ohio is "essentially anti-city and even anti-suburb," researchers at Cleveland State University and The Brookings Institution conclude in a new study. The study found that Ohio redistributes gas tax revenue from urban areas to rural areas, supporting exurban sprawl and imposing hardship on taxpayers in urban areas, who must fund their transportation improvements from local sources. The situation is similar in many states, the researchers say.  Find the study here.

The federal government's campaign to vaccinate thousands of health care workers against smallpox in the name of fighting terrorism is draining scarce resources in local public health departments  across the country, The Washington Post reports. The first casualties in the war on bioterrorism:  prenatal care, AIDS prevention, water testing and tuberculosis tracking. See the story here.

The city of Green Bay and the town of Scott have signed off on a border agreement that will give the city 1,137 acres for a business park and the town 90 acres of city land and the promise of no further annexations for 30 years. See the Green Bay News Chronicle story here.

Mayor Gary Kohlenberg of Oconomowoc is looking into the possibility of launching Internet voting in his city. See his web page here.

Dane County is the only governmental entity that is balking at paying Madison's stormwater management fee. County Executive Kathleen Falk said a $166,715 fee for county facilities is "extraordinarily excessive" considering that Dane County maintains the Tenny Park lock and dam between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona, and that stormwater from the   city flows into the county "E-way." Besides, she argued in a letter to Madison Mayor Sue Bauman,  the stormwater management fee is really a tax. Advocates of the fee say they have a court decision to the contrary, but they haven't immediately been able to provide the Alliance with the citation. 

The Department of Natural Resources initially balked at paying Madison's stormwater management fee, but relented.