Governor Tony Evers visits Green Bay July 5, 2023.
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Some state legislators from both sides of the aisle are critical of Gov. Tony Evers’ decisions on the two-year state budget he signed into law on Wednesday.
Some may see that as a sign of compromise, but all parties are vowing more work still needs to be done.
After signing the two-year state budget in Madison, Governor Evers explained his partial vetoes during a stop at Live X, a live broadcast and production company in downtown Green Bay.
“Vetoing this entire budget would have meant abandoning priorities and ideas that I’ve spent four years advocating for,” said Evers. “It would have meant leaving schools and communities in lurch after rightly securing historic increases for the first time in years.”
In what may have just been a product of signing the budget the day after the Fourth of July, no Democrats from the state legislature joined Evers in Green Bay.
State Senator Chris Larson, a Democrat from Milwaukee, tweeted, “I am disappointed to see @GovEvers abandon his veto threat and sign the Republican budget today. His supporters, myself among them, fought hard to get him re-elected and it is frustrating to see so many of our priorities, especially on public ed, dismissed. Again.”
Republican State Senator Eric Wimberger of Green Bay was the lone legislator at Evers’ visit.
“I think, on the whole, it’s going to be OK,” said Wimberger of the budget. “The state is in good fiscal positions. A lot of the things that were vetoed were more political in nature.”
The only partial veto Wimberger singled out was Evers’ adding 400 years to a $325 per student increase for school districts. For the years 2024-2025, Evers took out the 20s and the hyphen to make it the year 2425.
“I thought that was an interesting way,” said Wimberger. “We’ll see if there is some legalities to be had with that, but that would be quite the extension of the concept of a line item veto I think.”
“My budget for K-12 education was over $2 billion,” said Evers. “We ended up with over $1 billion, but we were able, with various vetoes, to massage that a little bit more.”
Evers also called on the legislature to provide additional relief for the childcare industry after Republicans removed $300 million to make a pandemic-era subsidy program permanent.
Wimberger was asked if he believes Republicans will act on Evers’ request.
“I haven’t talked to my colleagues about that, how they want to approach that subject, but I think both sides are taking the issue seriously,” said Wimberger.
Evers says childcare could be taken up with other spending measures, like improving the Milwaukee Brewers’ stadium. Evers says he expects to see a bill on that soon.
Locally, $50 million was kept in the budget to help build Brown County’s southern bridge over the Fox River. And $1.2 million will go towards repairing the Ray Nitschke Bridge in downtown Green Bay.
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