- We go now to the other side of the aisle
and to the State Capitol to hear from a Democratic member
of the Joint Finance Committee, Senator Jon Erpenbach.
Thanks a lot for joining us. - My pleasure.
- First out of the gates, I want to ask you what is your
reaction to the Assembly Minority Leader voting
in favor of the Foxconn bill?
- Representative Barca has to do what he feels he needs to do
for his district that he represents which rumor has it
Foxconn would be locating in that part of the state.
So I understand why he did what he did.
I would just hoped the bill would have been better.
Would have been safer for taxpayers
coming out of the Assembly.
And would have been better for the environment as well.
But there are those of us who have done this for a while
who understand why Peter did what did he.
- There's some talk of Foxconn siting
some location in Dane County.
Do you favor it at this juncture?
- I don't favor the bill at this juncture to begin with
which I'm sure we're going to get into in a little bit.
But Foxconn right now could be looking up at the Fox Valley
for a satellite-type of a situation or Dane County for a
satellite-type of a situation.
But it does sound like the bulk of what we're talking about
and what the governor is talking about
would be in southeastern Wisconsin.
- So as to the bill, Joint Finance is expected to take it
up next week.
What kind of changes would you be looking for?
- Well, there's two aspects to this bill.
We're giving away a lot of our taxpayers' money
here in the state of Wisconsin.
We're going to foot about 15% of their cost to build,
which is about $1.5 billion.
And then another $1.5 billion down the line in tax credits.
So I'm concerned about that, first of all.
And that's assuming that they reach the 13,000 job goal and
that's assuming that there are no changes whatsoever in the
market that they happen to be in through 2045 I believe it is
until we start getting some of our money back,
which really is unrealistic.
And the second aspect and just as important, it's a total
environmental giveaway by the state of Wisconsin.
Just the idea of no environmental impact on a
project this size is staggering along with some
of the other environmental issues.
There needs to be better protections for taxpayers
in this legislation.
And there needs to be better
environmental protections in this legislation.
Then you also have to bring in something that I don't know if
the governor considered or not, is the Army Corps of Engineers
as to whether or not they need to sign off on this.
And we're also involved in the Great Lakes Compact and whether
or not that becomes an issue.
And to be honest with you Fred,
this reminds me a lot of Gogebic.
Remember the mining legislation that passed through the
legislature that the governor signed into law?
Promised thousands of jobs.
Governor never reached out to the Army Corps of Engineers.
Never reached out to the tribe either.
And as a result, that law passed
but the mine was never built because of that.
I fear that the governor is getting people's hopes up and
isn't really crossing all of the T's and dotting all of the I's
in other agencies that we need to work with right now.
- Do you think Democrats might see some of their changes in the
Senate as opposed to the Assembly where 23 of their
amendments were rejected?
- I would hope there would be changes.
Everybody wants these jobs.
Democrats want the jobs.
Republicans want the jobs.
To be honest with you, politically,
the governor needs these jobs.
But at the same time, you can't have a project at this size and
this scope without an environmental impact.
That's just unbelievably irresponsible.
You also cannot let Foxconn basically walk away without
really paying any corporate taxes whatsoever in the end
because what we haven't talked about is they would be eligible
for other tax breaks outside of what the governor is giving them
already.
So in the end, their tax liability to the state
could be absolutely zero.
That's not fair either.
- Meanwhile, the budget is still hanging out there and the
Republican Senate Leader-- - Oh, yeah, the budget.
- -- wants to finish that at the same time
or very close to this Foxconn bill.
How do you think it should be handled?
- Well, I'm not certain you can do one without the other because
there's going to be about $15 million for Foxconn in this
budget that hasn't passed yet.
Obviously the budget is moving forward.
There's going to be checks written for a couple hundred
million dollars in each year moving forward.
So we need to look at that in the future.
But in the meantime, school districts right now are trying
to figure out how much money they're going to have.
When it comes to staffing levels in our correctional
institutions, which are desperately needed, they don't
know what they're looking at.
Obviously the transportation builders
are wondering what the hell's going on.
They don't want to put projects on hold.
If they put them on hold because we haven't passed the budget,
that's going to cost taxpayers more money down the line.
So ideally we'd get the budget done and then we would deal with
Foxconn because there's no rush on Foxconn.
We need to be slow.
We need to be deliberate.
We need to make sure we get this right.
Because if we don't get this right, taxpayers are on the hook
for a tremendous amount of money and there's no turning back.
- All right, Senator Jon Erpenbach, thanks very much for joining us.
- All right. Thanks.