Friday, May 1, 2015

Another cloud over WEDC

You gotta feel for the folks at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation.

Nothing but bad press from the get-go: Money spent on football tickets and classy Memorial Union chairs as promotional gifts. Spotty accounting practices. Favortism and broken promises. Lost loans. Media scrutiny. More CEOs and CFOs and UFOs (Unidentified Financial Objectives) in and out of the revolving management door than even an accountant could track.

Not to mention policies and plans and programs that fell 100,000 jobs short of the 250,000 promised by WEDC-creator and chairman Scott Walker.

But now we read that WEDC is going to be merged with a serious, professional and experienced state agency - - Wisconsin Housing Economic Development Agency, or WHEDA - - and I'm not sure WEDC can keep up, or if WHEDA, with its bankers' profile and long record of grassroots support statewide really wants to be associated with WEDC's partisan amateurs.

Note that in the proposed merger, Walker is canned as WEDC chair.

Something of a win-win there, as he doesn't have to lug around that albatross when campaigning on all his successes, and true fans of Wisconsin achievement can now hope for something better from WEDC.

Sort of the way Packer fans looked to brighter days when Lindy Infante took his sub par record with him when he left Green Bay.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks like DNR has found a way to bail out Walkersha with some water without radium:

DNR done with review of Waukesha's Lake Michigan request

http://www.jsonline.com/news/waukesha/dnr-nearly-done-with-review-of-waukeshas-lake-michigan-request-b99492327z1-302209011.html

Nothing will be released until June. While the best solution would be to pipe Racine's urine to Walkershaw so that they would drink, cook with, and bath in urine that would include African Americans, it is more likely they will find a way to steal Great Lakes water via Oak Creek.

If there was any justice in the world, Walkersha would instead get all of the urine from the pee tests that are to be given to those on unemployment and receiving other benefits to help them survive in the economy Walker's policies have devastated.

Anonymous said...

Most likely Scott Walker wants to merge WEDC with WHEDA so that people will forget all about WEDC, with its many failures, illegal activities and blatant mismanagement.

Regarding WEDC giving money to companies that offshore Wisconsin jobs, a number of folks posting here and elsewhere got it right: the money was most likely given to compensate for Walker campaign donations.

my5cents said...

Why does the legislature let them get away with what they are doing, or don't they have any say in WEDC? Is that one of the agencies Walker got total control over in his first three months? I know he's been pushing all the decision-making to the top in Wisconsin (meaning to himself, the king), but I am not sure if this agency always reported to the governor, or to the legislature, or if it was independent. If this was under a Democratic Governor and they were wasting millions of dollars, the people would be screaming bloody murder about it. But, with Walker in charge no one who can do anything about it says one word. What's with that anyway?