Frederica Freyberg:
According to the agency, since 2004, Milwaukee County has returned $4.3 million to the state gave it to run Wisconsin Shares. Money, state officials say, that could have been used to police fraud in the program. Co-chair of the Joint Finance Committee, Mark Pocan, zoned in on Milwaukee County.

Mark Pocan:
There's an 800-pound gorilla in the room. The fact there's hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting in Milwaukee County's budget to do fraud investigation, hasn't been used in Milwaukee County. The fact that we've had to pro-actively as a legislature take over Milwaukee County's delivery of this service, the only county in the state we've had to do this. I think when you scale government down to the size you don't allow it to function, you run into some issues like this.
       
Frederica Freyberg:
Joint Finance Chair, Mark Pocan. We asked Milwaukee County Executive and Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker to respond to Rep. Pocan's comments. He sent us this statement: “State licensed child care providers are where the fraud problem is and we have offered to help the state. Prior to our request, the state contract did not allow the county to use administrative funds to review state licensed child care providers. In fact, the state told us that they had a deficit and warned that funds would be cut from the county contracts, which put the brakes on new spending.  Efforts to shift the blame from the state are nothing more than grand political theater that ignores the facts.” For his part, state Rep. Mark Pocan appears to be an equal opportunity critic, not just calling a Republican executive to task but also a Democratic appointee, the state secretary of transportation. Pocan this week got mad when Frank Busalacchi failed to show at an audit committee hearing to explain why DOT spent $36 million to hire private construction engineers compared to spending $20 million on state employee engineers. Mark Pocan joins us now. Lots of Mark Pocan. What's your reaction to the part of the audit that shows 125 instances where DOT hired private engineers after determining the state workers could do the job cheaper?

Mark Pocan:
That's why we wanted the secretary to be at the audit. We have a lot of respect for the nonpartisan audit bureau. The information they put together is well respected and when they look at this and we find we're spending way more than we should by outside consultants and vacancies within state employees that could be doing this, a lot of questions have to be answered and we're literally surrounded by states that don't do this. For the most part, they do it internally but no one to the scale Wisconsin does. Our job is to watch out for the taxpayers and if there’s misuse of funds, in the sense that they should be doing it more wisely, they should do that.

Frederica Freyberg:
What about audit finding that DOT may not be doing enough to make sure our highways are structurally sound, that the pavement is thick enough and smooth enough and what not?

Mark Pocan:
That's all part of the audit, too, why the secretary should have been there. We have to make sure we're getting the best value but safe roads and we're building a lot of roads right now with the federal stimulus funds as well as state funds. If we don't have the proper actions going on, that's not acceptable to the public, to the taxpayer. We're trying to get to the bottom of it and get a fair share.

Frederica Freyberg:
What about concerns that DOT can adequately supervise private sector people doing this work?

Mark Pocan:
They already are doing that. That's why it would be easier to do it internally and that's what the audit found. Our question is why are they doing this, and more importantly, what are they doing to stop wasting taxpayers' money with this sort of practice? Until we can get those answers I think we'll be aggressive in the pursuit.        

Frederica Freyberg:
The audit bureau notes it's particularly important to ensure that highways are consistently constructed, according to contractual requirements because federal stimulus funding will provide Wisconsin nearly $530 million for state highway projects. Speaking of federal stimulus funding, this week at the state Capitol the Joint Finance Committee voted to approve more of it, including $4.8 million for Energy Star rebates on appliances and furnaces and air conditioners. $7.5 million to fund alternative fuel or high tech clean vehicles and more than $700,000 for so-called smart grid advanced metering for electricity. To all of these measures, Republican state Rep. Robin Vos cast a no vote. He joins us as we welcome Rep. Mark Pocan back into the mix for this conversation.

Mark Pocan:
Hello.

Robin Vos:
Hi, Mark.

Frederica Freyberg:
I go first to you, Rep. Vos. Why didn't you vote for rebates for energy efficient appliances or alternative fuel government fleet cars or more efficient electricity grids? It all sounds good.

Robin Vos:
Sounds good when you talk about the general topic but the differences in the specifics of what we saw from the administration. When we see the proposals that came out, and Mark and I voted for many of the proposals. I think I voted for almost all of the money we got from the government and Washington to help spend it in Wisconsin. We saw examples that came before us were examples of bad programs with good intentions. We see that the rebates for appliances, everyone was excited that we would have a program similar to the Cash for Clunkers where we would have an opportunity for homeowners to go out and save significantly on some of those appliances, help to save energy and also perhaps create some jobs here in Wisconsin. The program they put forward is like a $25 rebate that you have to get from the retailer if your appliance qualifies, send it in, hope you get a check back. It's not as simple as the Cash for Clunkers program. Some other ones you talked about we're going to spend over a quarter million dollars, $300,000 to come up with a plan and we don't really have any details of what the plan will be. My fear is that it will be a whole lot like the quarter million dollars we spent on the tourism logo we never ended up using and lastly, we saw some of the other programs that are being put forward, have the potential for much more waste than creating any jobs. So I thought that the department could have done a better job of coming up with a plan that stimulates the economy, easy for consumers to use and create jobs here in Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:
Mark Pocan, what's your reaction to his no votes and his reasons for them?

Mark Pocan:
I think Robin exemplifies what we see in the Republican party these days when it comes to the federal stimulus funds. They simply are not supporting the funds no matter what they do. We have seen that the strong success of these funds. In Wisconsin we've expended $3.7 billion of federal stimulus funds already. There's another $1.5 billion in tax breaks for people of Wisconsin. These are good things. We're putting people to work, retaining jobs and having tremendous success. In August there was a report in USA Today that we're the number two state in the country for getting money in and putting it back out. We're having good success and hoping to try to bring the recovery a little quicker. The problem is I think that there are some in the Republican party, I don't think this is necessarily true of Robin but in the Republican party mindset that they really find this more as a political issue. If we have recovery, as quick as we should potentially have with some of the funds, it doesn't necessarily work for their political agenda. While we've had cooperation in the past, we noticed at the national and state level and other states, this growing trend towards trying to be nay nay-sayers as opposed to creating the economy that the funds are doing.

Frederica Freyberg:
Rep. Vos, is this political nay-saying on your part?

Robin Vos:
If it would have been, I would have been voting against all of the request for stimulus funding and I think I voted for almost all of them because I thought some of those had the potential to create jobs and most likely would have. What we saw here was an expansion of bureaucracy, not an expansion of jobs. Just today we saw in the newspaper and in news that we're seeing the highest unemployment rates since 1983. We saw billions and billions, almost a trillion in stimulus funding but very few jobs being created. And in fact, what's happening is we've seen my Democratic colleagues throughout this entire year, $5 billion in tax increases in the first five months, and just today in the “Appleton Post Crescent” we saw the headline in the editorial page that said “legislators cause property tax increases.” That's the headlines people are seeing around the state. Even though they're trying very hard to say they're creating more jobs by spending money from Washington, the problem is the decisions we're making in Madison are hurting homeowners, businesses and costing more jobs than the stimulus package is hoping to bring.

Frederica Freyberg:
The stock market is taking a dive right now because the jobless numbers are worse than expected. So what can you tell us about what you know about whether jobs are being created in Wisconsin from these stimulus funds?

Mark Pocan:
Actually Robin just exemplified what I'm talking about. It's the nay-saying from the other party of not wanting to succeed. We'll have a report come out, I believe it's October 10, of how many jobs we've created with the state stimulus dollars. Because we put so much out there, I think you'll find tens of thousands of jobs have been retained or created through this type of funding in this economy which is extremely important. These monies are going to help for tax breaks for people, it's going to education and health care and public safety and across all fields. So we are seeing this have an effect. The economy has done the bottoming out now, I believe, and while the numbers, unemployment, always lag behind the rest, most economists will tell you we've plateaued and we're start the recovery. The problem is that doesn't succeed well for people who think about next year's elections versus people who have a job today.

Frederica Freyberg:
Rep. Vos, as you say you do vote for stimulus money but you have kind of a gauge. You believe that stimulus money ought be spent for particular purpose, that being job creation. Is that your belief on this?

Robin Vos:
Yeah. There's no doubt. And I think that's the problem. There is bipartisan support for creating jobs. I give credit to my friend, Mark Pocan, and those on his side of the aisle. They want to create jobs and so do we. The problem is the prescriptions they're putting in place are not doing it in any way where we need to be and they're also not doing it in a way that doesn't create government jobs. What they're doing is creating them there instead of the private sector. We need more people who are going to pay the bills, not more people in the government. When we see the budget they just passed increase the state employment at the same time, we're seeing record unemployment in the private sector. We're just choosing the wrong people to help to make sure we have this economy turned around. I want all workers to be doing better. Not just those who work for government.

Frederica Freyberg:
We want all workers to be doing better, as well. Thank you for your time.

Robin Vos:
Thank you very much.