One-Hundred and Seventh Regular Session
6:30 P.M. WEDNESDAY, January 22, 2025
The Senate met.
The Senate was called to order by Senate President Felzkowski.
Pursuant to Senate Rule 17 (6), the Chief Clerk makes the following entries under the above date. ___________
President Felzkowski appointed Senators James and Wall to escort his Excellency, the Governor, to the Joint Convention.
Senator LeMahieu, with unanimous consent, asked that the Senate recess and proceed as a body to the Assembly Chamber to meet in Joint Convention to receive the Governor’s State of the State Address, and further, that the Senate stand adjourned, pursuant to Senate Joint Resolution 1, upon the rising of the Joint Convention.
6:35 P.M.
_____________
Recess
The Senate proceeded in a body to the Assembly Chamber to meet in Joint Convention to receive the State of the State Message.
6:45 P.M.
_____________
In Assembly Chamber
In Joint Convention
7:00 P.M.
Senate President Felzkowski in the chair.
The Committee to wait upon the Governor appeared with his Excellency, the Honorable Governor Tony Evers, who delivered his message as follows:
_____________
State of the State Address
“Good evening, Wisconsinites!
Honorable Supreme Court Justices, Tribal Nation leaders, constitutional officers, Adjutant General May, members of the Wisconsin National Guard and active and retired members of our armed forces, cabinet members, legislators, distinguished guests, and Wisconsinites from wherever you are joining us tonight, thank you for being here with us.
I’m Tony Evers, and I am so grateful and proud to be the 46th governor of the great state of Wisconsin.
My forever prom date, Kathy, is up in the gallery, as well. Kathleen Frances, you are the filling to my cream puff, and every day, I love you more than yesterday.
We begin the new year with a new Legislature elected under new, fair maps. For the first time in a generation, this Legislature was not elected under some of the most gerrymandered maps in America. I am hopeful this will mean more collaboration, more partnership, a little less rancor, and a renewed commitment to do right by the will of the people.
And that is great news—it means we can work together to make bipartisan progress on critical priorities like reforming our justice system, fixing our roads, funding our public schools, and expanding access to affordable housing.
It’s no secret that sometimes people in this building disagree and share some differences—never with me, of course. But we begin this year with, I believe, an urgent need—and a mandate—to find common ground. So, let’s get to work!
Wisconsinites, I begin tonight with good news. Thanks to our work cutting taxes, Wisconsinites are keeping more of your hard-earned income today than at any point in the last 50 years. A new Wisconsin Policy Forum report says Wisconsin’s state and local tax burden dropped to a record low in 2024. The state and local taxes Wisconsinites pay as a share of your income is the lowest it has been in over half a century.
Just two decades ago, Wisconsin was in the top five states for our tax burden and the taxes Wisconsinites paid as a share of their income. Today, Wisconsin is in the bottom 16 states in the country. We have seen the largest drop in our tax burden of any state over the last 20 years.
Cutting taxes has been a bipartisan priority over the last six years. I have proposed middle-class tax cuts in every budget I have introduced as governor. And the Legislature sent me back some proposals I agreed with, including one of the largest tax cuts in state history. All told, through the income tax cuts I’ve signed into law, most Wisconsinites have seen a 15 percent income tax cut or more, and folks will see $1.5 billion in tax relief each year, primarily targeted to the middle class.
And we’ve been able to provide real, responsible relief while still paying down our state’s debt, saving where we can, and working across the aisle to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars. After 30 consecutive years of our state’s checking account running a deficit, we have ended all five fiscal years that I have been governor with a positive balance.
And, Wisconsin, our workforce has never been stronger. I declared 2024 the Year of the Worker in Wisconsin because I want addressing the workforce challenges that have plagued our state for generations to be a top priority. And here are our results so far.
In 2024, we reported nine counties with the lowest rates of unemployment on record. We had historically low unemployment. And Wisconsin ended last year with seven consecutive months of record-high employment. Wisconsinites are hard workers by nature, and more Wisconsinites are working than ever before.
And we want Wisconsin workers to be ready for the 21st Century. For the second consecutive year, we hit an all-time high of nearly 10,000 Youth Apprentices and had record-high employer participation. And we had the highest enrollment ever in our Registered Apprenticeship Program’s 100-year history—for the third year in a row.
We launched the first-ever teacher apprentice pilot program to retain new teachers and bolster our education workforce. We created new youth apprenticeship pathways from law enforcement and fire prevention to early childhood education. And we’re partnering with over 20 bipartisan states through the U.S. Climate Alliance to train 1 million new registered apprentices nationwide with a focus on climate and clean energy fields over the next decade.
And we’re making sure our economy is built for the 21st Century, too. In 2024, we launched the largest public-private investment in Wisconsin startups and entrepreneurs in state history. We also welcomed billions of dollars in investments from global companies, including Microsoft, Eli Lilly and Company, and Kikkoman, among others, that will create thousands of jobs in Wisconsin. Businesses partnering with our administration last fiscal year committed to more than $2 billion in capital investments—the highest level in over a decade.
We’re also working to make Wisconsin a global leader in health and medical field advancements, from developing new technologies to discovering cures and strategies to improve treatment outcomes. We worked with Senator Baldwin to secure Wisconsin’s designation as a U.S. Regional Tech Hub. Our Tech Hub is projected to create over 100,000 jobs and $9 billion worth of economic development in Wisconsin over the next decade alone.
And, Wisconsinites, thanks to our hard work, state government is working smarter and faster than ever before. We’ve been working to modernize and improve programs that can help improve your daily life. It’s about making sure government works—and works better—for you.
We expedited community infrastructure projects for drinking water by cutting the review time for engineering plans in half. We partnered with the Technical Colleges to streamline licensing for students, helping make sure they could join our strapped healthcare workforce as soon as possible. We also created the first-ever interactive mapping tool for producers to be able to monitor animal disease outbreaks across Wisconsin.
After I directed investments to bring our state’s licensing system into the 21st Century, folks can now apply for or renew their professional licenses online. And get this! Wisconsinites no longer have to use a fax machine to send in some of their materials. For those wondering what in the heck a ‘fax machine’ is—folks, that’s the point.
We created a new system to help professionals respond to drug overdoses, identify dangerous trends in our communities, and get information out quicker to folks who need it. We made it possible to purchase state trail passes online so folks no longer have to carry a paper pass on the trails. And we launched a new app for our state-run veterans homes so that loved ones can stay up to speed about their veteran’s medical care.
And, Wisconsinites, we’re also saving your tax dollars along the way by shrinking our bottom line. We’re working to consolidate building space across state government. And, by downsizing and expanding remote work options, we’ve made it even easier for Wisconsinites to join our state workforce, regardless of where you live. Our plan is projected to save taxpayers over $7 million every year while delivering another half a billion dollars in savings from deferred maintenance costs.
Wisconsin, we accomplished a lot this last year. We have shown we can get a lot of good things done when politics stay out of our way. There is, as always, more work to do, and our work together continues here tonight. I will soon introduce our next state budget, laying out our state’s top policy priorities for the next two years. Every budget I have ever built began first by doing what is best for our kids, and this one will be no different.
So, I will again propose historic investments in K-12 education. And I will again ask Republicans and Democrats to join me in doing what is best for our kids by making meaningful investments in public education at every level, from early childhood to our UW System and technical colleges.
The good news is that the Legislature need not wait until I introduce my budget to get to work. Republican lawmakers can start today by releasing the $50 million we approved with bipartisan support nearly two years ago. These funds were already approved, they are available now, and they should not still be sitting in Madison. Folks, our kids and their futures are too important for petty politics. Republicans, release those investments so we can get to work improving reading outcomes statewide.
We have to do more to improve outcomes for our kids. And, yes, that means making meaningful investments in our public schools. But our kids’ outcomes are as much a reflection of what happens within our schools as they are, importantly, a reflection of what happens beyond them. And that’s a simple matter of math.
The average Wisconsin elementary school student, for example, spends less than 12 percent of their year receiving direct instruction in the classroom. That means they probably spend, give or take, about 80 percent of their time each year outside of our schools.
So, we have to recognize that our schools and educators cannot single-handedly fix our kids’ circumstances beyond the school doors that nevertheless affect learning and success in the classroom every day.
Folks, the obligation to help address the challenges our kids are facing in the 80 percent of the time they are not in school falls squarely at the feet of elected officials in this building. So, tonight, I’m declaring 2025 the Year of the Kid in Wisconsin because I want everyone here to start taking that important responsibility seriously.
I will keep saying this until the folks in this building finally hear me—if we want to improve our kids’ outcomes, then we have to shorten the odds. If we want our educators and schools to be able to do their very best work in the hours our kids are with them, we have to set them up for success. And we have to start by making sure our kids can bring their full and best selves to our classrooms.
Kids in class should be focused on learning, not wondering when or whether they’ll eat next. Our kids should never go hungry, period, but especially not at school. In the Year of the Kid, the budget I will introduce next month will again include my “Healthy Meals, Healthy Kids” initiative. Let’s end school meal debt and make sure every kid has a healthy breakfast and lunch at school with no stigma and at no cost.
And let’s start treating our state’s mental health crisis with the urgency it requires. Yes, for everyone of every age. But especially for our kids.
The state of our kids’ mental health continues to be concerning for me, both as a governor and as a grandfather. A kid in crisis may be distracted or disengaged and may not be able to focus on their studies, if they are able to get to school at all. I fought hard to secure $30 million in our last state budget to support school-based mental health services in schools across Wisconsin. But that was just a fraction of what I asked the Legislature to approve.
Tonight, I’m announcing my budget proposal will invest nearly $300 million to provide comprehensive mental health services in schools statewide, including support for peer-to-peer suicide prevention programs and expanded mental health training.
Making sure our kids are healthy—physically and mentally—is a crucial part of improving outcomes in our classrooms. But we have to connect the dots between school achievement and the challenges our kids are facing at home and in our communities.
Take lack of access to clean and safe drinking water, for example. There is no safe level of lead exposure for kids. According to the CDC, even the smallest exposure to lead can have serious, long-term consequences, and can even, “reduce a child’s learning capacity, ability to pay attention, and academic achievement.”
