(WisBusiness) THURS News Summary — 19 Feb. 2009

From WisBusiness.com …

— A state budget adjustment bill, introduced last week and fast-tracked through the Legislature this week, is on its way to Gov. Jim Doyle after both the state Senate and Assembly approved it Wednesday.

The bill needed to be moved quickly in order for the state to take full advantage of federal money from the hospital assessment it includes. For this fiscal year, the hospitals will be assessed a total of $275 million. Of that, the state will “skim” $79 million, which will be put in a Medicaid trust fund and used to implement a health insurance program for childless adults. Sources said to maximize the federal funds, the bill had to be signed by the end of this week.

The bill also includes $125 million in cuts to state agencies, a streamlined sales tax measure projected to bring in tax revenues of $9.4 million in this fiscal year and $61.3 million over the 2009-11 biennium and combined reporting for corporate taxes, which is estimated to bring in $22.6 million for the current fiscal year 2008-09 and $150.4 million for FY 2009-11.

See details in the WisPolitics Budget Blog: http://blogs.wispolitics.com/budget/

— While the Democrats’ budget repair bill and Gov. Jim Doyle’s proposed 2009-11 budget plan include some targeted business incentives, Republicans and business interests are complaining that tax hikes outweigh the potential benefits.

“Clearly there are things in the budget bill that we have to fight,” said Jeff Schoepke, director of tax and corporate policy for Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce. “The playing field has been changed so we have to play in some different kinds of games. There are some major corporate income taxes in there that we have to fight. We were always ready to fight combined reporting.”

Assembly Minority Leader Jeff Fitzgerald warned that combined reporting likely will force layoffs at the Deere plant in his town.

“Raising taxes on businesses is not getting anybody back to work,” he told a WisPolitics.com luncheon on Wednesday

Doyle defended tax increase proposals in his budget plan and knocked Republicans as naysayers during a media availability in Milwaukee Wednesday.

“Even in the most difficult of budget circumstances, I have kept the property tax limits in place, I have not had any sales tax increase, any income tax increase that affects anybody who makes less than $300,000,” Doyle said.

Doyle asked Republicans what they were prepared to cut.

“It’s pretty easy to just stand on the outside and say ‘I don’t like this, I don’t like that,'” Doyle said.

“I’ve already in my budget cut over a billion dollars from existing programs, made the deepest cuts in the history of the state, but I’m not going to go to a point where we’re cutting schools by hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said. “If we can ask people who in this economy are making over $300,000 to help out a little bit to make this work, then I think that’s what we have to do.”

See more on reaction to Doyle’s budget plans soon at http://www.wisbusiness.com

— In recent years, scientists have isolated two potent natural antibiotics — platensimycin and platencin — that are highly effective against bacterial infection, including those caused by the most dreaded drug-resistant microbes.

Now, those two promising agents are a key step closer to augmenting a depleted antibiotic pipeline with a UW-Madison discovery of a genetic pressure point that can send a bacterium that makes both antibiotics into overdrive.

In a report in the online editions of the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of pharmaceutical sciences and chemistry Ben Shen shows that a South African soil microbe can be engineered by manipulating a single gene to make large amounts of both antibiotics.

See more: http://www.wisbusiness.com/index.iml?Article=149628

— A hearing for a real estate executive charged with soliciting a kickback in the sale of a state office building and lying to an FBI agent has been rescheduled to Friday. Former Equis Corp. contractor Larry Lupton was originally scheduled to appear in federal court Wednesday for a final pre-trial conference before U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman.

Adelman last week denied a motion from Lupton to dismiss the kickback charge. Lupton argued he was specifically identified as not an agent in the contract relating to the transaction and therefore not subject to prosecution. Adelman ruled that was a matter for a jury to consider.

Federal prosecutors allege Lupton solicited an illegal $75,000 kickback and shared confidential bid information with brokers representing potential buyers of a $30-million state office building. Lupton represented Equis, the commercial real estate firm that had the contract to sell the building. Lupton has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which a grand jury issued in August 2007.

Friday’s hearing is scheduled for 2 p.m. in courtroom 390 of the federal courthouse in Milwaukee. A trial is scheduled to begin March 2.

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REGISTER NOW: FOCUS ON MIDWEST ENERGY CONFERENCE II
Feb. 23, 2009 at Monona Terrace in Madison

Conference includes: U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin; Obama environmental adviser Howard Learner; Gary Mar, Alberta’s official representative to the United States; and David K. Owens, executive vice president of business operations at the Edison Electric Institute. For more information, see a recent press release: http://www.wispolitics.com/index.iml?Article=147100

For more information or to register, contact Jim Greer at 608-237-6296 or greer@wispolitics.com.

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