GOP Lawmakers Question Budget Requests by UW System, State Prisons

The heads of the Universities of Wisconsin system and the state Department of Corrections faced critical questions from Republican state lawmakers Tuesday over requests for new state funding.

Both leaders defended their requests for the next biennial state budget during an agency briefing held by the GOP-led Joint Finance Committee.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has proposed increasing funding for the UW system by $856 million over the two-year budget, including funding to increase wages and fund a system-wide tuition promise program for lower-income students from Wisconsin.

UW system President Jay Rothman told lawmakers Tuesday that the new investment is needed after years of reduced state funding and the multi-year tuition freeze imposed by the state Legislature under former Gov. Scott Walker.

Rothman said the system’s universities have made “painful choices” in recent years to eliminate budget deficits. But he argued the state “cannot cut your way to success.”

“We are not asking today for an investment to bail us out of our budget problems in the past,” Rothman told lawmakers Tuesday. “Rather, we are seeking funding to preserve and protect what we have to make strategic investments that will help us flourish in the future.”

But Republicans on the committee grilled Rothman on what they characterized as “administrative bloat” within the UW system. They pointed to a growth in non-teaching positions on university campuses and questioned whether universities had done enough to reduce spending.

Republican state Rep. Mark Born, who co-chairs the committee, pointed to the request for funding a new position on each UW campus to support students aging out of the state’s foster care system, which he argued only affected several hundred students.

“I think this is a shining example of the governor’s desire to grow government and your desire to grow your system, and it’s not focused on the reality of how you invest in this stuff,” Born told Rothman during the hearing.

GOP lawmakers also questioned how universities were preparing for declining numbers of K-12 students to recruit from in the state. Rothman said the system was focused on making college more accessible and looking for ways to serve nontraditional students around emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.

Lawmakers focus on safety of investing in early release programs

The Joint Finance Committee also questioned state Department of Corrections Secretary Jared Hoy around his agency’s plan to reorganize Wisconsin’s prison system.

The governor’s budget proposal includes $535 million for the overhaul, which includes closing the maximum-security facility in Green Bay and converting the troubled Waupun Correctional Institution into a “vocational village” for incarcerated people.

Hoy said the state’s growing prison population is “unsustainable,” with a current population of over 23,000 people incarcerated in a prison designed to hold less than 18,000. He said using tools like the existing earned release program could help free up capacity by transitioning nonviolent offenders who are near the end of their sentences to extended supervision after they undergo substance abuse treatment. Hoy told lawmakers there are nearly 2,500 people currently on the program’s wait list.

“We have people waiting to participate in this program who are eligible but who cannot get into a program because of the simple fact that we cannot fill our vacant social worker and treatment specialist positions,” Hoy said.

He asked legislators to increase compensation for social workers and treatment specialists and expand the early release program to include people who go through vocational training programs.

Republicans lawmakers questioned whether increasing early releases was the best choice for public safety.

State Rep. Alex Dallman, R-Green Lake, questioned whether department leadership was purposefully underusing punishments like segregation, or what’s called restrictive housing, in order to keep incarcerated people eligible for the earned release program.

“Maybe we’re trying to keep these numbers artificially low so that we can put more people out into early release, when really they should be held accountable,” he said.

Democratic Sen. LaTonya Johnson later pointed out the additional cost to the state of not allowing eligible inmates to move from a correctional institution to supervised release because of the administrative backlog.

“That goes towards the government bloat we were talking about earlier, paying additional dollars that the taxpayers don’t have to pay, at taxpayers’ expense, because we don’t have the capability to step those individuals down,” Johnson said.

The Joint Finance Committee kicked off a series of public hearings on the next state budget with a meeting in Kaukauna on Wednesday. Lawmakers will also hold hearings in West Allis, Hayward and Wausau.

Listen to the WPR report

GOP lawmakers question new spending on UW system, state corrections was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.