Towards the end of your first time here in office,
Act 10 was the largest piece of legislation.
You were one of only a handful of Republicans
to vote against it.
Give us a sense of your appraisal of that bill
more than 10 years on.
- Yeah, I was here.
These were stressful times.
I mean, this was a big deal back then, if you recall.
There was hundreds of thousands of people here
breaking windows, coming into our offices.
It was tense times.
We were ushered out by police and things like that,
and it was a highly volatile issue.
And I was one of those more moderate Republicans coming
from a 19th Senate district with a senator, Senator Ellis,
and this was kind of popped out of nowhere
because he didn't give even, Scott
didn't even give us much warning on this.
And so while the merits of the bill I understood,
and I was fully supported, the concept of this,
I didn't like how it was rolled out.
I didn't particularly like the idea of exempting
police and fire, because as a local government guy
I was worried that having two classifications of local
employees, police and fire,
my dad was a cop so I loved cops, I loved firefighters,
but having two, you know, treating them differently
than the garbage men and the guys who do the
street sanitation, I thought it would cause problems in
the end.
So I just didn't like the concept of that.
And there were some other things and then
be in a 50/50 district seat,
and so at the time, I struggled for a long time and at the
end of the day, I voted no.
I told the governor, I said, "You know, my district just
doesn't want me to support this.
I see a lot of merit in it, governor.
I think if we take our time a little bit
and we work out the kinks, we might get this right.
But clearly with the volatile environment,
it was important to get this thing done.
So at the time I didn't vote for it.
I had mixed emotions, but at the end of the day,
the governor still supported me in the next election.
But what was truly disheartening was that
that the groups like the unions, they didn't support me.
You know, Act 10 was the biggest bill that the unions
had ever come up in the history Wisconsin,
and I was only one of four Republicans.
But I will also say this, when I became mayor, then it became
evidently clear to me how important this bill was
to local government,
because as a chief executive officer of the city of Neenah
I couldn't have made it without Act 10
because of the costs were rising exponentially,
and wages and cost of materials.
And now it's even, I think, gotten worse.
So as mayor, it showed me that without Act 10,
the communities that provide the services at the ground
level would have had a heck of a time without the passage of
Act 10.
So I'm glad we did it and we'll see what happens
where we go from here.