Downgrading the upgrades
 These things never end. A couple of weeks ago, we took note of the Doyle administration’s ACE (Accountability, Consolidation, and Efficiency) Initiative, which was supposed to make the state’s computer operations more efficient.
The Legislative Audit Bureau found that ACE had already exceeded cost projections by a factor of seven and was likely to cost nine times more than its original estimate.
So far taxpayers are on the hook for $91 million over the past four and a half years, compared with an initial estimate of less than $13 million, with more to come.
But hey! We live in Doylistan, and the ACE boondoggle is now rivaled by a supposed information technology upgrade for the University of Wisconsin System.
The System’s chief financial officer is betting his job that an infotech project costing more than $81 million will succeed, according to an Associated Press (AP) report last week.
The AP said UW senior vice president for administration and fiscal affairs Tom Anderes told the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Information Policy and Technology he expected to be fired if the new payroll and benefits system he’s in charge of installing turns out to be a flop.
Make that another flop.
A previous attempt to set up a new UW payroll and benefits system flopped at a cost of $28 million. Committee members vented frustration over a series of failed state projects for which no one had been held accountable—except, of course, taxpayers who covered a combined $170 million in pointless costs.
Legislators’ concerns about the UW project have been heightened by the situation of Huron Consulting Group of Chicago, contractor for the project, which the AP reported was “facing uncertainty after discovering accounting problems.”
The UW didn’t inform the Legislature about the problems that surfaced in August—triggering the departure of Huron’s top executives, a Securities and Exchange Commission probe and shareholder lawsuits. According to the AP, “Anderes said lawmakers were not told about Huron's problems earlier because the system was still reviewing the potential impact. He said he was confident they would not affect Huron's work.”
The new system is supposed to help manage pay and benefits for the university system’s 67,000 employees starting in 2012.
Political Service Commission?
 Since the Doyle administration came to town, the concept of utility regulation promoting “least-cost” alternatives has been under severe stress. We may soon learn if the principle of “least cost” has morphed into “whatever it costs to serve our political agenda.”
The Public Service Commission (PSC) is deciding whether to let WE Energies stick ratepayers for costs it incurred a year ago to make the Sierra Club and Clean Wisconsin send their lawyers home.
In August 2008, WE Energies, Madison Gas and Electric and WPPI Energy announced they’d settled a lawsuit the environmental organizations were using to bottle up the expansion of WE Energies’ Oak Creek power plant.
The enviros hadn’t fared well. Clean Wisconsin and the Wisconsin chapter of the Sierra Club were repeatedly rebuffed in challenging the plant’s regulatory permits. They managed a semi-successful challenge that accomplished some delay, after which the Department of Natural Resources in May 2008 reissued a permit for the original design.
But just weeks after this victory, the utilities decided to fold.
On August 6, 2008, they proudly announced that in return for the lawsuit going away, they’d spend $100 million over 25 years for environmental projects connected with Lake Michigan water quality, plus another $5 million to fight global warming.
The $5 million materialized this July as startup money for something called the Wisconsin Climate Change Action Initiative, Inc. (WCCAI), a nonprofit to educate the public about the global warming menace. Among its founding directors are Gale Klappa of WE Energies, Roy Thilly of WPPI Energy and Mark Redsten of Clean Wisconsin. Anyone expecting the WCCAI to mention that there’s been no warming for a decade, raise your hand.
The $100 million was to be spent controlling invasive species and stormwater runoff. Nothing wrong with those activities, but neither is there anything wrong with captive utility customers wondering why the cost of performing them should turn up on their electric bills.
After WE Energies filed this summer for a $126 million rate increase, State Rep. Phil Montgomery (R-Ashwaubenon) started wondering, too. He asked PSC Chairman Eric Callisto to consider any settlement costs separately from the rate hike.
Montgomery said commissioners should examine the settlement terms—including all three utilities legally binding themselves last year to lobby for the Doyle Administration's global warming legislation, the details of which are not even public today.
So far the only word from the PSC is that it has rescheduled a public hearing on the rate hike for October 21 at Serb Hall in Milwaukee, with sessions beginning at 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. There’s plenty for the public to ask about.
Wisconsin Club for Growth encourages taxpayers who oppose environmental extortion and state compelled support for global warming legislation to stand up and be counted at Serb Hall on Wednesday October 21st from 3pm and 6pm. Send a message to Governor Doyle, the Public Service Commission, the utilities and the environmental lobby. No more rate hikes for their global warming hooey!
Badger Care Implosion
 It’s pretty clear that a key strategy to prevent anyone from effectively critiquing destructive Liberal ideas is to keep so many of them flying around that it’s impossible to focus on any one.
A corollary is that when Liberal ideas become too problematic to escape scrutiny, the reflexive answer is that making them bigger will fix everything.
So there is a perverse kind of logic in this series of events:
- July 15—Gov. Doyle’s new BadgerCare Plus program to provide government health care is activated.
- October 5—Gov. Doyle suspends enrollments in BadgerCare Plus and applicants for government health care begin taking their places on a waiting list.
- October 5—Yep! Same day, same press release. Gov. Doyle cites the suspension of enrollments and the health care waiting list as evidence of the urgent need to establish government health care nationwide.
With Liberals in Washington setting the stage for an ObamaCare cramdown later this fall, we can expect to witness the same sequence of events on a grand scale, but with one difference.
The Washington Liberals have been clever enough to delay actual implementation of their scheme until after the next presidential election. It's so urgent that it's unacceptable to take more than a few weeks to redesign this huge chunk of the U.S. economy, but no one gets to see the results until the architects have been safely re-elected? That should tell you something.
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