Lawmakers push for caucus curbs
2:05 PM 5/25/01
Dee J. Hall Wisconsin State Journal
State lawmakers began pushing for legislation Thursday to abolish or dramatically scale back the activities of the four partisan caucuses.
State Rep. Marty Reynolds, D-Ladysmith, said he had been planning to wait until after the state's two-year budget was adopted to introduce a measure to do away with the caucuses and save taxpayers an estimated $3.9 million a year.
But following this week's Wisconsin State Journal series about widespread and possibly illegal campaign activity at the four state agencies, Reynolds said he decided to introduce the measure now.
Also Thursday, Sen. Jim Baumgart, D-Sheboygan, said he is redrafting a bill from last year that would replace the four caucuses and their 60 or so employees with a smaller staff headed by a nonpartisan director. Baumgart said he is "open to suggestions" about how large the staff should be.
"We need to take action to separate legislative business from blatant partisan politics," he said.
In an interview, Reynolds said he'd been trying for at least six years to kill the caucuses, which are controlled by the Legislature's top four leaders. There is one caucus each for the Democrats and Republicans in both houses of the Legislature.
"It's pretty obvious that the caucuses have been used for campaign purposes for many years," said Reynolds, who has served in the Legislature since 1990. "What really grinds me is people who say, Gee, I didn't even know about this.' "
"It's time to raise the curtain on the wizard," he said.
Reynolds' proposal calls for abolishing the four agencies by July 1, 2002.
Reynolds said he hopes legislators will consider it one small step toward balancing the two-year state budget. As of last week, the budget had a more than $600 million gap between spending and revenues.
"Let's see what happens. Let's see if people are really as offended as they're letting on," the lawmaker said. "The budget's pretty tight. Here's $4 million."
Also Thursday, the attorney for the state Elections Board said that agency probably would not initiate an investigation into the State Journal's findings that some caucus staffers may have violated the state's campaign-finance law.
The State Journal reported Tuesday that a former Assembly Republican Caucus worker said she and other caucus employees helped an independent campaign group put out radio ads attacking Assembly Democratic candidates in the last election, in possible violation of the law.
Elections Board attorney George Dunst said unless the board receives a "verified complaint" from someone with "personal knowledge" of wrongdoing, the board is unlikely to investigate.
"The board can always on its own motion initiate something, but it won't," Dunst said. "It wants to see a verified complaint."
The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign's Mike McCabe called that stance "ridiculous." McCabe's reform group, along with Common Cause in Wisconsin, has called on both the ethics and elections boards to investigate the information contained in the State Journal's series.
"It's sort of like a police officer seeing a crime being committed and waiting for some citizen to report it," McCabe said. "I just want the police officers in this case to do their jobs."
Ethics Board Chairman Jim Morgan said the board is reviewing the State Journal series and is taking the allegations in it seriously.