June 15, 2009

Then the doors shut.

Most of the real work of coming up with a two-year, $62.2 billion spending plan happened in secret, outside of public view.

And many of the parts that were public, like voting on changes that had been worked out by committee members in secret, were done late at night far after the time publicly stated for when the action was supposed to happen.

It didn't get any better when the plan passed out of committee and went to Democrats in control of the Senate and Assembly. As they are allowed under state law, the caucus meetings where additional changes to the budget were debated were closed to the public.

Some of the biggest changes so far to the budget Gov. Jim Doyle introduced in February were added with no notice after secret discussions. Those included allowing illegal immigrants to get cards letting them to drive legally, imposing a new 75-cent fee on all phone users, and allowing oil companies to pass along costs of a new tax to customers at the pump, up to 4 cents a gallon.

If the public wanted a chance to see their elected officials on the budget committee in action, they had to have extremely flexible schedules.

The vote on passing the budget out of committee came around 6 a.m. at the close of a 12-hour meeting.

Another day when the committee was supposed to start at 11 a.m. they didn't get rolling until 11 p.m.

Still another time a meeting was called off at 10 p.m. and rescheduled to start at noon the following day. It didn't actually start until 5:30 p.m.

Not all lawmakers like how business is done, and has been done for years, in the Capitol.

Back in March, during Sunshine Week when open government is celebrated, state Rep. Cory Mason, D-Racine, wrote a column in which he bemoaned the closed caucus system.

"It is in these meetings that most of the real legislative debate occurs," Mason wrote. "Members suss out their positions, cajole people to a certain view, and reach a general consensus. We employ shuttle diplomacy, devise strategy, and argue passionately for our respective positions. In other words, it's where the action happens."

He even introduced a bill to require partisan caucuses to be open. Caucuses are allowed to be closed to the public under the state open meetings law. It's an exemption not applied to other public bodies like school, town and village boards and city councils.

Mason only got two other Democrats, one Republican and the lone independent in the Assembly to sign on as co-sponsors. The other 94 members, so far at least, have declined. The bill isn't scheduled for a hearing.

The only way Mason's bill will succeed is if people put pressure on their individual lawmakers to open up the process, said Peter Fox, executive director of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association. It is the only group currently registered in favor of the bill.

"The public interest is not well served by the secrecy the Legislature affords itself in secret caucus," Fox said. "The most significant decisions, the most significant input, is happening in closed caucus. While some legislators can trumpet that there were hearings around the state, that process is really inadequate."

Assembly Democrats did shed a little light on their caucus process this year. Speaker Mike Sheridan's office provided regular updates to the media about what votes had been taken in secret. And occasionally the caucus was open to the public, but not when any real debate was taking place.

On one of the four days of Democratic caucus meetings, the public was allowed in just long enough to hear Rep. Jennifer Shilling, D-La Crosse, read a poem she had written called "Twas the Week of the Budget."

"Twas the week of the budget when all through the dome," she read, "lobbyists and legislators preferred to be home."

After she was done, amid much laughter and applauding, the lobbyists, reporters and everyone else other than the 52 Democratic lawmakers were kicked out of the room so the real work could begin.

Republicans haven't been any more open. Two years ago when they controlled the Assembly, no updates were given from their closed caucus meetings. Meetings of the Assembly also stretched into the middle of the night.

"To come out and say they should do it completely differently, we weren't able to either," said Rep. Mike Huebsch, R-West Salem, who was speaker in 2007 and 2008. "Even while I was in the majority you're always uncomfortable staying into the middle of the night."

Under Republican control in March 2008, the Assembly worked deep into the night, eliciting an angry response at 4 a.m. from state Rep. Gary Sherman, D-Port Wing. Sherman now serves on the budget writing committee that regularly worked into the early morning hours.

"This is unprofessional, this is stupid. We have no business to be here," Sherman said during the late night Assembly session last year. "There's people in this room with cancer, there's people in this room with heart disease, a third of the room has high blood pressure, there's elderly people, there's pregnant people. What the hell are we doing?"

Associated Press