ALTOONA — Three Eau Claire County Republicans spoke at a press conference on Thursday at River Prairie Park in Altoona to encourage voters to vote ‘yes’ on the two questions being presented on the Aug. 13 ballot, stating that their intention was to both express their support and dispel recent misconceptions about the questions.
Gov. Tony Evers had visited Eau Claire on Monday to urge voters to vote ‘no’ to the two questions on the Aug. 13 Partisan Primary ballot. The questions pertain to the appropriation of power and the allocation of federal funds, seeking to amend the state constitution so that “the legislature may not delegate its sole power to determine how moneys shall be appropriated” and to “prohibit the governor from allocating any federal moneys the governor accepts on behalf of the state without the approval of the legislature by joint resolution or as provided by legislative rule.”
Evers criticized the proposed amendments on Monday, stating they “will essentially give Republicans more power in areas that, frankly, are things that traditionally the governor takes care of.”
Karen Voss, an Eau Claire County resident and board member of Wisconsin Conservation Voters expressed concerns on Monday that “these amendments could slow or block federal funding for emergencies like floods or a bridge collapse or a pandemic.”
At the Republican press conference on Thursday, State Assembly Representative Karen Hurd (R-Fall Creek) stated that the governor had been granted this authority during the Great Depression.
“Our state was in a dire situation,” said Hurd. “Almost a hundred years ago, we didn’t have the communication, the transportation, like we do now. We didn’t have Zoom. So the legislature made a decision to say, ‘we’re going to give our authority to spend this emergency funding coming from the federal government to the governor to get it out to these people who are starving, who have no homes, that are dying.”
Senator Jesse James (R-Altoona) said that “there’s four states right now that give (this) power to the governor. There’s 18 states where the legislature has sole control over monies that come from the federal government. The rest of the states, they work together, and I think that’s what needs to happen. We need to bring the support and we need to have input from our legislature.”
Hurd expressed that giving the power back to the legislature allows for better representation of the regional needs across the state.
“There are certain projects that (Evers) wanted to get done, but is that really the best for the entire state?” she said. “Southern Wisconsin (is) where a lot of the money went. What about us up here in northern Wisconsin? It needs all 132 of us to look at the issue.”
Hurd offered assurances that “We do work well together. We really do. We’re really pretty good friends. We’re working together for the people.”
Hurd added that the legislature passed the HSHS bill in “eleven days flat, so we can move and we can move quickly. We can call special sessions.”
James said, “What sells (is) negativity, right? Political divisiveness. That’s what gets the time, not all the good things that happen when we do work together.”
Both the Republicans at Thursday’s press conference and Evers at Monday’s press conference accused each other of holding up the distribution of funds in Madison.
Representative Rob Summerfield (R-Bloomer) said, “We saw what happened with COVID and see that today, the governor still has a billion dollars from COVID money. If the legislature was involved with these, these amendments would allow us to be advocating and working with the governor to get the rest of that billion dollars off instead of having him sit on it as a slush fund.”
“The money that was set aside is still there because I had some minor changes that I made to the law,” said Evers on Monday. “They did not have the ability to override my veto. The money’s still sitting in Madison. How can we continue to essentially make the legislature a part of the executive branch of government?”
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