GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – Members of Governor Evers cabinet were in Green Bay to discuss the Governor’s people budget, touting the advancements in two main areas.
Those areas were education and roads.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Carolyn Stanford Taylor said schools across the state will have additional funding for special education.
“We are thrilled that this will close some of those holes where schools had to use general revenue to support special education.”
The total increase in school aid is nearly 500 million dollars.
Stanford Taylor said this kind of funding was in high demand and was long overdue.
“What we heard was we wanted additional investments in special education, mental health, nutrition, and after-school programming.”
The other area that will see a major impact is transportation. DOT Secretary Designee Craig Thompson calls it a significant step forward.
“We said we need to fix what we had first and we had proposed a $320 million dollar increase in the State Highway program.”
The funding for that will come from increases in vehicle registrations and other methods that does not involve a gas tax.
“Unfortunately by doing it this way, only people from Wisconsin are going to pay for the increase, and it does not raise as much as the proposal we had.”
Despite the vetoes, the impact of the state budget will still be seen in Green Bay and the surrounding area.
Thompson addressed the Governor’s veto of funding for improvements for Southern Bridge in Brown County. He said it was vetoed because the language was very specific.
“That does not mean that we don’t think it is an important project and it is still something that we will be looking at doing as we move forward.”
He says it is the same story for the Lift Bridge in Kaukauna.
He says there will be a noticed impact when it comes to other projects.
There is a 10 percent increase in mass transit aid and improvement of Highway 41 between Brown and Outagamie Counties which has higher than average crash volume around here and increased congestion.
Thompson said all in all Governor Evers kept to his promise he made on the campaign trail.
