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I received a memo from the Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau forwarded through Assemblywoman Katrina Shankland’s office upon my request to see if there was a summary of individual acts of local control-stripping by the Governor and Legislature since inauguration, 2011. I was surprised to find there were 115 separate “Unfunded Mandates and Items Which Would Restrict Local Control” in the LFB memo.

I wanted to share this one paragraph, screen-snipped from a PDF file which turned up upon searching “eliminating regional transit authorities Wisconsin Act 32” which doesn’t allow text cutting-and-pasting. I think the malicious intent (not benign neglect, malicious intent) of the WI-GOP is made quite clear in this paragraph. (Source: Veto Messages, Governor Scott Walker, June 2011, p. ii.)

In particular, eliminating regional transit authorities is a huge step backward for any sort of sustainability efforts in Wisconsin. The WI-GOP preferred model of transit is one that rewards the ultra-rich owners of road-building contractor corporations: Asphalt roads for automobiles.

Unfortunately, because the global peak of oil production is still a reality which fracking has not halted, the entire transport model for Wisconsin is unsustainable, and eventually we, the citizenry, will pay an incredibly steep price as petroleum prices resume their inevitable upward spike as the fracking boom turns to a fracking bust of oil production.

Bob Gifford, Feb. 17 2016