According to a recent report in the Wisconsin State Journal by Matthew DeFour, WEDC, the public-private hybrid job creation agency created by Gov. Scott Walker in 2011, in many cases acted irresponsibly in doling out taxpayer monies in order to benefit supporters of Gov. Walkers.
Of course, this should surprise absolutely no one who’s been paying attention to the cronyism that’s taken root in our state since Gov. Walker and his Republican rubber-stamp majorities in the State Senate and State Assembly started running things in 2011.
Even as it developed new systems and overcame early hurdles, WEDC and other top Walker officials pushed for employees to move quickly to approve economic incentives, which sometimes led to costly shortcuts.
In September 2011, just months after WEDC was formed, Department of Administration officials at the direction of Secretary Mike Huebsch pushed the agency to assist a Milwaukee construction company whose owner had made a maximum $10,000 donation to Walker’s campaign. Within a week, WEDC awarded a $500,000 loan but failed to perform a thorough financial review, which should have revealed the firm erroneously reported that it had not been sued in the previous five years.
Emails and records obtained by the State Journal under the state open records law show Brenda Hicks-Sorensen, then WEDC’s vice president for economic and community development, hustled to get the loan out the door, expediting the normal timeline for cutting a check at the urging of a DOA administrator.
Months later, after Huebsch urged Jadin to have WEDC give the company more money to no avail, Hicks-Sorensen was informed by another employee that the company’s owner planned to repay debt to a luxury car-leasing company with state funds. Yet the agency continued for the next year to seek additional public assistance for the company.
The loan, which has not been repaid even after a successful lawsuit against the defunct company, was one of 28 awards totaling $126 million in the agency’s first two years for which there is no record underwriters wrote up a formal financial review, according to an internal report.
Just to sum up, Scott Walker’s “job creation” agency doled out $126 million in taxpayer funds to companies ostensibly to create jobs but with little or no assessment of the risk associated with doling out funds to those companies.
That certainly doesn’t sound very fiscally responsible to me, but maybe Wisconsin’s conservatives have a different definition of fiscally responsible than I do.