Mr. Speaker:
I am directed to inform you that the Senate has
Concurred in as amended:
Assembly Bill 119
(Senate amendmet 1 adopted)
Assembly Bill 736
(Senate amendmet 1 adopted)
Assembly Bill 864
(Senate amendmet 1 adopted)
Passed and asks concurrence in:
Senate Bill 96
Senate Bill 492
Senate Bill 520
__________________
Assembly Bill
119
Relating to: special distinguishing registration plates, payments to authorized special groups, granting rule-making authority and making an appropriation.
By
Representatives Otte, M. Lehman, Hasenohrl, Ryba, Hahn, Seratti, La Fave, Kreibich, Ainsworth, Jensen, Olsen, Goetsch, Grothman, Owens and Powers; cosponsored by Senators C. Potter, Plache and Panzer.
To committee on Rules.
Assembly Bill
736
Relating to: various changes to hunting and fishing regulations and granting rule-making authority.
By
Joint Legislative Council.
To committee on Rules.
Assembly Bill
864
Relating to: recodification of fish and game laws.
By
Joint Legislative Council.
To committee on Rules.
Senate Bill
96
Relating to: homicide by intoxicated use of a vehicle and providing a penalty.
By
Senators
Huelsman, Rosenzweig, Buettner, Darling, Drzewiecki, Weeden and Welch; cosponsored by Representatives Otte, Urban, Duff, Black, Ladwig, Carpenter, Olsen, Goetsch, Wasserman, Kreibich, Green, Seratti, Schafer, Harsdorf, Robson and Plale.
To committee on Judiciary.
Referred on March 26, 1998.
Senate Bill
492
Relating to: the powers of full-time court commissioners.
By
Senator
Burke
; cosponsored by Representative Walker
.
To committee on Rules.
Referred on March 26, 1998.
Senate Bill
520
Relating to: disciplinary procedures for certain local law enforcement officers.
By
Senators
Welch, Burke, Huelsman, Fitzgerald, Jauch and Grobschmidt; cosponsored by Representatives Klusman, Dobyns, Green, Johnsrud, Musser, Turner, Porter, Jeskewitz, Travis, Gronemus, Hanson, Kreibich and J. Lehman, by request of Professional Police Association of Wisconsin.
To committee on Urban and Local Affairs.
Referred on March 26, 1998.
__________________
ENROLLED BILLS
The following Assembly proposals, which have been approved by both the Assembly and Senate, have been enrolled by the Legislative Reference Bureau:
Assembly Bill 951
Assembly Bill 952
Charles R. Sanders
Assembly Chief Clerk
__________________
Communications
State of Wisconsin
Revisor of Statutes Bureau
Madison
A778
DATE: April 1, 1998
TO: Charles Sanders
Assembly Chief Clerk
Donald J. Schneider
Senate Chief Clerk
FROM: Gary L. Poulson
Deputy Revisor of Statutes
SUBJECT: Rules published in the March 31, 1998,
Wisconsin Administrative
Register, No. 507.
The following rules have been published:
__________________
Pursuant to the unanimous consent request made by Representative Carpenter on Wednesday, March 25, 1998 (Page 746 of the Assembly Journal), the remarks made by Reggie White of the Green Bay Packers to the members of the Assembly follow:
"Thank you very much. Let me tell you first of all, it's an honor to be in your presence. I always love the opportunity to talk. I remember when I was in high school I was kind of shy, but now you can't get me to shut up when I get up to talk.
I just want to thank Carol Kelso and Scott Jensen who invited me here to give me an opportunity to share with you and just to share some of our dreams and our concerns for our nation.
And I've been often asked by people, are you going to become a politician and my response is no, and I've also been often asked will you become a pastor of a church and my response is no. You know, I want to be what God wants me to be. If whatever he calls me up to, that's the area I'll go into.
It's just interesting to me to see the things that are happening around myself and my family and my wife and really what we feel are the areas that God is really moving us into.
I'm the type of person who has realized a long time ago that it takes a compassion to really deal with people. I remember a while back when I was in Philadelphia I was pretty much instructed to start taking the ministry to the streets, and I remember when God spoke to me about it I pretty much told him he was crazy and there was no way that I was going back to the streets. And the reason I said that is because I know my wife is rather hardheaded. She is going to go wherever her husband goes and I knew that she was going to make me take my kids, too.
I remember in the process of really understanding it and really going, I read a scripture in the Bible. And the scripture said that we overcome the enemy by the of blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony and by not caring for our lives even unto death. And that's the part that really hit me, the last part, not caring for my life even unto death.
I realized that I cared about Reggie White too much. I cared about the things that were surrounding him. I cared about more of what Reggie White has and more of what Reggie White was than I did about my fellow man, and because of that challenge we started doing street ministry. We went into the streets.
And I'll never forget the times we were doing it. We went to two old ladies' houses. We asked to use their electricity because we had speakers, and both of the old ladies, I'll never forget, they asked the question, what are you doing down here? We said, well, we feel like we've been called down here, and both of them said, man, we've been praying for something like this.
And I remember going into the communities and just talking to the people and preaching to them and did it for two years, and after that two years I realized something. People are tired of being preached to.
And in the process of realizing that I realized that in the process of being in the streets, as I left I felt a void, and I realized what that void was. And that void was that, yeah, we went in and talked to them and tried to encourage them and tried to influence them but we met no needs. We didn't create jobs. We didn't help the young girl that was pregnant through her problems. We didn't help the drug addict get off drugs or the drug dealers to stop dealing. We didn't help anyone.
We just went in with a message that really had no credence to it, and from the process of that I began to realize that there had to be opportunities that were created, and those opportunities created as a minister I wouldn't have to go in and preach because the people would come in to us and our message would be able to get over to them the way we wanted to by helping to meet their needs.
I realized really in reading the Bible, that really before Jesus told anybody who he was he met their needs first. He cared about them first and he tried to understand them and tried to get them to understand him by his love for them, and I began to realize that you can not help people if you don't care about people, if you don't have a compassion for them.
In the process of that we created Urban Hope. With Urban Hope -- the name before was Alpha and Omega, but we changed it to Urban Hope this past year. Carol Kelso, John Underwood, Peter Platten, who are on our board with the Green Bay Packers, really took this thing by the arm and really went out and promoted it for us to help us to get it started in Green Bay.
A779
We wanted to start it in Milwaukee first, but the problem was there were so many turf issues there we figured we'd start in the smaller city and try to get it up off the ground and get it proven and probably can get it working much quicker in a smaller city than we probably could in a bigger city and then move it around.
Well, we started in Green Bay. Some of you may have heard, we've created a microcomputer program, an entrepreneur school and a housing initiative, and the community came together to do this, from the businessman to the government. The whole community came together to do it together.
And I believe that in order for anything to work in any city, that turf issues have to be destroyed, because it's not going to take one person to change a city, it's going to take everybody to change a city. And to deal with the problems that we're dealing with in our cities today, maybe spreading across this country, we're dealing with some major problems, you know, we're trying to find solutions to.
And I believe that we're searching for those solutions in the wrong places, and we're depending more on our education to correct those solutions instead of depending more on God to correct those solutions.
In the process, we've just had our first entrepreneur graduation. We graduated 13 people. The two students that had the best business plans ended up getting a $2,500 grant apiece, and we're actually helping them also to be able to go to the banks and also get a loan to even build their businesses even stronger.
And from that our goal for Urban Hope is to teach responsibility, to make people responsible. People in our cities have been given so much free money lately that they're not toting the responsibility, and that money goes. It's only temporary. We have to make it lasting. We have to teach responsibility.
In the process of teaching responsibility we have to build families. Because the thing that is destroying inner city communities today is that the families have been destroyed and torn down.
You have a majority, and particularly in the black community, a majority of young people's fathers are either in jail or dead, and that's a problem. It's a problem when in our corrective facilities in America, that 40 percent of the men in jail in the total population, including women, are black men.
So we have a problem in our community, and the problem is we don't have enough fathers in our community. In the process of not having enough fathers in our community, we're not being able to train our children in the aspects that they're supposed to be trained in.