Republican pro-jobs' Wisconsin Gov.-elect Scott Walker derailed his post-election honeymoon over a political mess of his own-making: he had campaigned against a federal high-speed rail grant to the state, then realized that shutting down the project as he had promised meant immediate jobs losses and perhaps a manufacturing plant shutdown in Milwaukee.
Oops! There's more to governance than ideology, pleasing talk radio and adhering to campaign rhetoric in a Tea Party-influenced state, I guess. Read on...
Walker had worked against trains for an urban constituency throughout his eight-year tenure as Milwaukee County Executive - - bashing downtown trolleys, waffling on suburban commuter rail, icing a federal transit grant to be shared with the City government - - so when the Obama administration gave Wisconsin $810 million for the entire cost of the Madison-Milwaukee high-speed rail component in the Midwest system (there is already Amtrak between Chicago to Milwaukee on the way to the Northwest, but no service to Madison, a state capital city with the UW-Madison), and even agreed to pick up 90% of the $7.5 million annual operating expense, Walker continued to pledge to stop the train.
He was created by talk radio, and those talkers use rail to gin up fears about urbanites among the talk radio suburban listenership.
So two days after the election, pro-rail Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle suspended ongoing work on the train. About $300 million of the total grant had been awarded, and officials had, on the eve of the election, agreed to commit the rest of the money, thus making it harder for Walker to stop the train.
But when Doyle and the DOT suspended some of the work, contractors laid off workers, and the dominos began to fall. Ugly headlines about job losses began appearing. The Spanish train builder Talgo, which agreed to refurbish a shuttered factory on Milwaukee's depressed west side to assemble Wisconsin's trains, and for other states, said it wasn't sure if it could remain in Milwaukee.
125 assembly jobs are at risk, and New York Gov.-elect Cuomo said he'd be glad to take the Wisconsin money, thank you very much.
Walker has tried to weasel out of the contradiction - - having run to create jobs, but almost immediately causing layoffs, and perhaps a plant closing and the loss of an eventual 4,722 road-bed and line construction jobs - - by a) urging Talgo to stay (talk about chutzpah) , and b) claiming he could get the rail money reprogrammed for state road and bridge projects.
Except that the high-speed rail funding is for high-speed rail only, as the feds have repeatedly said.
Walker cited a precedent, but it never happened:
He claimed former Gov. Tommy Thompson had the Congress reprogram $241 million in light rail once ticketed more than a decade ago for Milwaukee into an Interstate reconstruction instead - - except that $241 million was never designated for light rail.
And Thompson agreed in 1998 to split the money; half to the state, half to the city and county. I was at the dinner where the agreement was struck ( I was chief of staff at the time for then-Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist).
The money was broken out according to a signed agreement for several state and local projects, including a freeway spur teardown, a rebuilt bridge, a new state park off Milwaukee's downtown lakefront, new County buses, a projected downtown City trolley system, and the interstate interchange to which Walker referred.
And Walker continued to claim the state couldn't afford to pay the assigned operating costs - - $7.5 million-to$ 10 million annually, he continues to say - - except that the feds have agreed to pick up 90% of that cost, making the no-construction-cost train an even bigger bargain.
Plenty of details on how not to start your Governorship at my blog, here.