• Establishes a Wisconsin Quality Home Care Authority to provide services to recipients and providers of home care services.
Insurance
• Reforms motor vehicle insurance requirements to ensure that policyholders get the full benefit of their automobile insurance and to mandate that all drivers maintain vehicle liability insurance at a level adequate to meet growing health care costs. I have vetoed several related provisions that, while well-intentioned, could have the effect of unreasonably increasing premiums for liability insurance coverage. These vetoes balance the need for ensuring adequate coverage with maintaining the affordability of liability insurance premiums.
• Ensures that health insurance meets the needs of policyholders and protects consumers through changes in plans offered by regulated insurers, including:
-- Mandating coverage of autism services to children.
-- Covering dependents up to age 27 under group health policies.
-- Clarifying the coverage of mental health services provided by mental health professionals.
-- Mandating coverage of contraceptive services.
-- Improving consumer protections in the small group and individual health insurance markets.
Economic Development
• Creates a new refundable jobs tax credit program aimed at attracting and expanding business. The new program provides up to $10 million per year in payroll credits to businesses. A portion of the wages paid toward new family supporting jobs would be eligible for up to a 10 percent credit.
• Creates a flexible and streamlined forward innovation fund to support the start-up, expansion or retention of minority businesses; businesses in economically distressed areas; and innovative proposals to strengthen inner cities, rural communities, industry clusters and entrepreneurships.
• Provides tax incentives to accelerate new business growth, including a tax break for investors who reinvest their capital gains into Wisconsin start-up businesses and an income tax credit to businesses that significantly increase their research and development efforts.
• Encourages economic and business development by creating income tax credits that support market entry for new farmers.
• Supports the strategic industrial sectors of biotechnology and manufacturing by creating sales and use tax exemptions for machinery and equipment devoted to research and development.
• Launches a more efficient and effective business model for tourism in the state by closing the Wisconsin Welcome Centers and creating new grants for municipalities and tourism information organizations.
• Expands the scope of Wisconsin's prevailing wage law to assure that Wisconsin workers receive fair and reasonable pay for their labor.
Transportation
• Adds over $823 million of state funds and federal recovery grants for major highways, highway rehabilitation and local transportation infrastructure improvements over three construction seasons.
• Increases general transportation aids and transit aids to local governments by 2 percent in 2010 and 3 percent in 2011.
• Funds the next phase of reconstruction of the north-south I-94 segment in Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha counties with over $270 million of state funding and federal recovery resources. Provides $6 million in new funding to continue preliminary work on the Zoo Interchange.
• Lays the framework for regional cooperation on transit issues by creating regional transit authorities in the Chippewa Valley, Chequamegon Bay region, Dane County and the Southeast Region.
• Provides $100 million in general obligation bonding authority for freight and passenger rail and $12.7 million in general obligation bonding authority for harbor assistance grants in recognition of the diversity of means to transport goods and products to and from Wisconsin.
Shared Revenue and Property Tax Relief
• Returns excess wireless 911 funds to local governments in support of emergency services.
• Supports local governments by averting deep shared revenue cuts through the use of $76.1 million of the state's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act allocation.
• Creates a police and fire protection fee coupled with a maintenance of effort requirement to preserve local emergency services.
• Continues the municipal levy limit program to protect property taxpayers while increasing the limit from 2 percent to 3 percent to help local governments meet essential service needs.
• Encourages the creation of low-income housing by exempting certain projects from property tax and permitting local governments to extend the life of a tax incremental district to fund improvements to low-income housing stock.
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• Expands the premier resort area tax to foster growth in tourism areas.
Environment
• Guarantees continued access to Wisconsin's vast outdoor recreational opportunities without general increases to hunting and fishing license fees.
• Encourages the long-term preservation of Wisconsin's fertile farmland and supports commitments by farmers to manage their land in an environmentally friendly manner by adopting key recommendations of the Working Lands Initiative.
• Protects Wisconsin lakes and rivers and improves water quality in Wisconsin by providing an additional $20 million SEG and bonding over the biennium to reduce nonpoint source water pollution through increased nutrient management planning and other pollution abatement practices.
Justice
• Increases funding for civil legal services to indigent persons to help on targeted issues, including guardian ad litem and obtaining child support.
• Provides funding and positions to improve mental health care for female inmates.
• Provides funding and positions to ensure that serious child sex offenders are closely supervised in the community and offenders comply with sex offender registration requirements.
• Increases staffing for the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.
• Implements a smarter criminal justice policy that holds individuals accountable for their crimes, but also better prepares and supports those individuals when they re-enter the community so that they do not return to the criminal justice system. Provisions in the budget include the following:
-- Allows certain offenders to earn positive adjustment time for good behavior and progress toward rehabilitation.
-- Provides the Earned Release Review Commission (formerly the Parole Commission) with the authority to release inmates with extraordinary health conditions to extended supervision so long as public safety is maintained.
-- Allows the secretary of the Department of Corrections to release to extended supervision offenders serving the confinement portion of a bifurcated sentence for a misdemeanor or nonviolent Class F to I felony who are within 12 months of release to extended supervision and who meet certain eligibility criteria.
-- Expands the Earned Release Program and the Challenge Incarceration Program to include inmates with programming needs other than substance abuse, to allow the inmates deemed eligible at sentencing to earn early release by fulfilling certain requirements while in prison.
-- Allows the Department of Corrections to manage offenders on community supervision by prioritizing resources and discharging offenders who are no longer a threat to public safety.
-- Permits judges to order risk reduction sentences to provide offenders with a chance to redeem themselves and decrease time spent in prison, while learning skills and receiving services that will prepare them for successful reintegration into the community.
-- Provides $10 million GPR for community services to reduce recidivism and provide offenders with treatment, employment services and access to mental health care.
General Fund Taxes
• Provides targeted individual income tax increases by creating a new tax bracket that collects an additional 1 percent on income over $300,000. The new bracket is estimated to impact only the highest 1 percent of income earners and increases state revenue by $163.4 million in fiscal year 2009-10 and $124 million in fiscal year 2010-11.
• Improves public health outcomes by increasing the cigarette tax by $0.75 to $2.52 per pack and provides targeted tax increases on certain other tobacco products to increase state revenue by $166.1 million in fiscal year 2009-10 and $171.1 million in fiscal year 2010-11.
• Encourages individual savings and investment by maintaining one of the most generous tax treatments nationally for capital gains income. The long-term capital gains exclusion from taxable income is reduced from 60 percent to 30 percent, increasing state revenue by $115.1 million in fiscal year 2009-10 and $127.4 million in fiscal year 2010-11. The long-term capital gains exclusion for farm assets is continued at 60 percent.
• Promotes tax equity by realigning tax treatment of nonresident members of pass-through entities with resident members and by eliminating the deduction for corporations' qualified domestic production activities, a deduction that provided a tax subsidy for business activity outside the state.
• Enhances debt collection efforts at the Department of Revenue by streamlining business processes and authorizing new partnerships for increased efficiency and revenue generation.
General Government
• Provides group health insurance and retirement survivor benefits to domestic partners of state employees and University of Wisconsin faculty and staff.
• Extends certain dependent and survivor protections to domestic partners.
• Provides the faculty, academic staff and research assistants of the University of Wisconsin System the right to collectively bargain.
• Allows for the consolidation of human resource services at executive branch agencies to gain efficiencies in delivering consistent and quality employee services.
• Reorganizes attorneys and legal support staff in order to improve the provision of legal services, including contract negotiations, in state government.
Building Program
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• Creates the Milwaukee Initiative program, providing financial support through general fund supported borrowing to attract federal and private funds to construct research and academic facilities to spur science education and research activities at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the areas of freshwater science, engineering, public health and integrated research.
• Authorizes $6.6 million general fund supported borrowing to aid Dane County in the construction of anaerobic digesters for the Dane County Yahara Watershed Project to protect water quality through reduction of nutrient loads from agricultural enterprises.
• Enumerates $250 million program revenue supported borrowing for the renovation of the Charter Street heating and cooling plant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to increase fuel diversity through inclusion of renewable biomass fuels, thereby eliminating the use of coal.
• Enumerates $18 million program revenue supported borrowing for the University of Wisconsin-Stout Memorial Student Center renovation.
• Enumerates over $6.1 million Stewardship borrowing for a new park entrance and visitor station, and water and sewer utilities at Rib Mountain State Park in Wausau.
I have made 81 vetoes to the budget. These vetoes remove unnecessary reports and requirements, clarify program implementation timelines, and improve the intended focus of certain programs. These vetoes reduce spending by over $10 million.
This budget has been forged in the worst economic conditions in many years. Already gloomy revenue forecasts made in January were reduced by another $1.6 billion in May. Despite these challenges, the Legislature worked diligently to make the difficult decisions necessary to deliver a balanced budget on time.
I commend the leadership of the Legislature for maintaining a balanced approach to addressing the global and national economic recession. I know the process toward reaching this remarkable achievement required compromises and consensus. In the end, the goals I set out in February were achieved – protect the middle class, make deep cuts, implement targeted revenue increases and preserve education, critical local services and health care access.
I remain concerned about the fragility of the global and national economies and the impact of further weakness on Wisconsin's economy. The budget I introduced included a $270 million balance on June 30, 2011. This margin is critical given the continuing uncertain economic outlook.
The Legislature's budget has an ending balance of $65 million on June 30, 2011. In order to protect the budget from further global and national economic weakness, I have vetoed approximately $10 million in new GPR spending. I have also, through veto, restored authority from the 2007-09 budget to make an additional $200 million in state agency cuts during the 2009-11 biennium.
Taken together, these actions will set the general fund ending balance at approximately the $270 million level included in my budget recommendations to the Legislature.
Wisconsin is a great state. We help each other in tough times. We protect the most vulnerable. The budget I sign today, after vetoes, protects our priorities in the face of unprecedented financial uncertainty and sets the stage for a strong recovery for all Wisconsin citizens.
On Wisconsin.
Respectfully submitted,
Jim Doyle
Governor
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Veto Message
Table of Contents
A.
AGRICULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND JUSTICE
CIRCUIT COURTS
1.
Increased Court Fees
2.
Recompense
CORRECTIONS
3.
Council on Offender Reentry
4.
Felmers Chaney Pre-Release Transition Facility
5.
Conversion of Unit Supervisor Positions
6.
Date Explanation at Sentencing
7.
Sentencing Changes
