Wednesday, June 26, 2019

GOP budget-writers pull well-testing fund

Remember all the WI GOP's solemn bogus concern about the groundwater pollution the Walker administration ignored and even abetted for eight years?

Well, the GOP-led assembly just further contaminated its already-disgraceful budget-writing with more 11th-hour mischief: 

Deletes provisions in the finance committee's version of the budget that would have created a $3 million grant program for testing and remediating polluted private wells.
Yeah, they're fine with this.

As I wrote a while ago, and have repeatedly:

As predicted, the Wisconsin Republican Grand Old Pollution party's Legislative budget-writing committee deeply slashes Evers' clean water funding. Downplays groundwater pollution. Continues the DNR's crippling. Refuses to recreate its Science Bureau which ex-DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp and Walker demolished. 
And hopes to further empower the big dairy CAFOs by assigning their 'regulation' to the more friendly state ag department, which was on Walker's to-do list.
WI special interests expect certainty and the pollution party is there to help.
Regardless of the GOP's studious disregard for mounting dairy closures and oversupply which has been the party's carefully-constructed policy:
Of course, Walker's priority is serving the big dairy operators' agendas, including environmental deregulation, that would help them increase their market share:
State records show that one day before Walker’s October speech in Trego, in northwestern Wisconsin, the governor’s office received detailed plans from the Dairy Business Association on legal requirements and strategic options to move the program. 
I'd noted those depressing, going-out-of-business trends in Wisconsin, here and also here: 
Walker no friend to Wisconsin family farmers. Or their water.
And regardless of how long people in the manure zones have waited for clean water:
Nancy Utesch, a long-time Kewaunee County resident and clean water activist, sent along some comments and an update some months ago, and her husband Lynn added:
“...once pollution gets into the water, it’s difficult and expensive to fix. At the end of the day, there is no way to compromise over clean water."  


The Republican's full-eight-year-brown-water-degraded-environment-special-interest obeisant story is here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This bill was to restore funding for private wells sampling cut by the Doyle administration. I appreciate that Evers recognizes the need for this funding.