(Beaver Dam) The state legislatures budget writing committee is starting fresh with a new document after dismissing the budget assembled by the governor, but some areas of agreement may be salvaged. Joint Finance Committee Co-Chair Mark Born of Beaver Dam discussed the process with us Friday on WBEV’s Community Comment. The Beaver Dam Republican says the Democratic governor’s budget bill was replaced on Thursday with a substitute amendment that establishes the current two-year budget as a starting point.
“As we rebuild it some of the things we took out will be put back in, there’s areas of agreement,” he says, “in tourism we matched the majority of the tourism things the governor was looking to do…election security we matched the positions with the elections commission with what the governor was proposing in his budget.”
Born says the governor’s budget was 1800 pages and anticipates the next budget will be about the size of the current budget, between 400-and-600 pages.
“That doesn’t mean we’re not doing any of Evers stuff, that doesn’t mean we’re not working with him at all,” Born says, “but it means that we needed to start from a base budget because his was just built on unrealistic things that was just too hard to work from.”
He has also indicated that efforts to address broadband access will also likely be an area of the budget where both parties see eye-to-eye. Born notes that the state is on sound financial footing.
