Doyle to veto GOP state aid formula
11:57 PM 7/08/03
Phil Brinkman State government reporter

Gov. Jim Doyle said Tuesday he would veto a Republican formula for distributing state aid to counties and municipalities, calling the GOP provision in the state budget "complicated, arbitrary and unfair."

While the move would restore money for communities such as Milwaukee and Beloit that depend on state aid for a large share of their budget, Madison would get about $2 million less after the veto than it would get under the Republican budget.

Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said he was disappointed but not surprised by the announcement.

"We have been preparing for this since I took office," Cieslewicz said, noting the city cut $1.3 million from this year's budget and put off new borrowing to save $600,000 in interest payments.

Cieslewicz was hopeful, however, that Doyle's move on shared revenue, the state's largest form of aid to counties and municipalities, would be coupled with a veto of Republican limits on property taxes.

In his initial budget, Doyle proposed cutting the billion-dollar-a-year shared revenue program by about $70 million. Republicans who control the Legislature restored $20 million of that money.

But lawmakers also changed the distribution of the aid, targeting it toward core police and fire services and rewarding communities whose per-resident expenses in those categories were close to the state average.

Doyle's veto keeps the $20 million but returns to his original plan of distributing the cuts on a per-person basis - about $13 per person.

Under the Republican plan, the cuts would have ranged from $28 a person in the state's poorest communities to $5 a person in the richest areas, according to a recent analysis by UW-Madison public affairs professor Andrew Reschovsky.

Republicans counter that poorer communities receive far more aid per capita than wealthier ones, so cuts should reflect those disparities.

State Rep. Mark Gottlieb, R-Port Washington, an architect of the Republican formula, said the GOP plan was intended to protect "middle-value" communities, many of which stood to lose more aid under Doyle's original budget.

"It's clear what the governor wanted to do, which was to protect Milwaukee and a few other communities that have received very generous shared revenue aid in the past .