Walker, Stepp were ready for a Foxconn. Just ask them

It will be interesting to see if Scott Walker and Cathy Stepp, should she attend, bring their their self-serving, environment-be-damned A-game to the Foxconn deal signing ceremony Friday that he paraded in a business magazine story posted on a WEDC media web page:

"The eagle has landed, it has spread its wings, and it is taking off again,” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said at the ceremony announcing the game-changing Foxconn investment at the famed Milwaukee Art Museum on the shores of Lake Michigan...

Publicly, it was reported that the entire site selection process took about four months. But Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker says he began laying the groundwork for this breakthrough deal six years ago... 

“The overriding factor — the one that separated us from our competition — was the fact that we were ready,” Gov. Walker told Site Selection. “We changed our business climate. We cut our tax burden. We wiped out almost all the tax liability for a manufacturing project like Foxconn’s. We became a right-to-work state. We adopted regulatory reform. Some states were just not ready. I had been working on this six years ago.”

Prescience - - and environmental dismissal - - also echoed by former Wisconsin DNR Secretary and climate change information-scrubbing implement Cathy Stepp who told agency employees she left holding the bag as she moved on to help run the US EPA into the ground from its Kansas City office:

When we started our alignment plan two years ago we had no idea a Foxconn project was on the horizon but it’s exactly what we accomplished in alignment that makes us even more ready than we were two years ago to work on this transformational project in a One DNR spirit. 

"One DNR," by the way, was Stepp's buzz-wordy, in-house managerial campaign to help implement Walker's "chamber of commerce mentality" vision for the agency that produced Stepp's "alignment" - - equal parts business consultant talk, corporate retreat mysticism and robotic, top-down control, as I noted in 2014:

Apparently, Cathy Stepp's management-by-Halloween costume contests and treats on every floor needed to be taken to another level.

And you catch in the materials a whiff of internal dissent from top management's decisions, as employees were told that working in One DNR "means supporting and promoting a final decision even if a program may have preferred a different outcome."

Shiver.

Colorful, glossy materials are being sent around under the "One DNR" banner with motivational thoughts attached to head shots of senior staffers, like Assistant Deputy Secretary Scott Gunderson, whose team-building One DNR maxim is "an assist is as important as a goal."

Promising better outreach through buzzwords like "Improve customer service metrics," One DNR materials come with mind-bending, top-down patronization (you get the impression that Stepp got into editing mode at this point) and even delivered a truly weird double-begative, verbatim below:

Working in partnership as One DNR supports our vision for  excellence in customer service. When one of our many employees  interacts with a member of the public, the person outside the  agency generally does not draw a distinction about which program the employee works for. 

If, for example, the citizen has a  question about deer (doesn’t everyone?), it likely does not matter  that the employee works for the water program. 

Turning questions from citizens, stakeholders and policymakers into  positive interactions reflects well on the entire agency.  Of course, One DNR does NOT mean that you should not take pride in the great work that you and your program are doing. 

Embrace of One DNR should produce and promote success stories through team work, and help avoid public relations mistakes" due to "the simple fact" the left hand doesn't see what the right hand is doing," says a One DNR emailed attachment.

On, Wisconsin Foxconn.