(WisBusiness) THURS News Summary — 12 Mar. 2009

From WisBusiness.com …

— During Ag Day at the Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin farm groups told state legislators to “be frugal.”

“Stop spending money you don’t have. That’s the message to tell your legislators today,” Farm Bureau President Bill Bruins told 500 farm-group representatives on Wednesday. “If we are spending more than we make, we got to stop that. We need to be fiscally frugal.”

Bruins reminded farmers about all the trouble they’d faced and why they mattered to state legislators.

“The ratio in agriculture is 98 consumers compared to two producers. Agriculture is one of the main economic engines in the state of Wisconsin, bringing in $50 (billion) to $60 billion dollars a year,” Bruins told the crowd, urging them to tell legislators to “keep use-value property tax assessment in place. Please tell your legislators to oppose any changes in that law.”

Rod Nilsestuen, secretary of the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, told the crowd the meat and milk production incentives in Gov. Jim Doyle’s budget plan were something long overdue.

“If it’s a felony to attack an Italian sausage at Miller Park, the professional team football team in Green Bay is named the Packers, we ought to be treating this industry the way it deserves to be treated,” Nilsestuen said.

See more from Ag Day: http://www.wisbusiness.com/index.iml?Article=151932

— Young biotech companies stand to gain significantly from improvements in Act 255 contained in Gov. Jim Doyle’s recently passed budget repair package, representatives of BioForward said. (BioForward is the new name, adopted last month, for the Wisconsin Biotechnology and Medical Device Association.)

“The reason this happened is because BioForward and 10 other groups worked hard together,” Paul Radspinner, president and ECO of FluGen, Inc., said at a breakfast gathering Wednesday.

“When the governor put his stimulus package together, we got everything we wanted,” added Radspinner, a director of BioForward.  “This was a big success.”

Radspinner said he hopes the success of his group’s lobbying efforts on Act 255 could be repeated in future legislative efforts both on the state and national levels.

He said BioForward is weighing in on plans now under consideration by Congress to expand and renew the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program and its parallel Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program.

Together, these federal programs provide more than $2 billion a year to small companies that are developing leading-edge technologies of interest to federal agencies.

See more soon at http://www.wisbusiness.com

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TODAY: HOW THE FEDERAL STIMULUS AFFECTS WISCONSIN, WITH GARY WOLTER

11:45 a.m. at the Madison Club

The event is open to the public, and the price for lunch is $15 for WisPolitics.com subscribers and Madison Club members, $19 for the general public. Call the Madison Club to register at (608) 255-4861. The luncheons start at 11:45 a.m. and ends at 1 p.m.

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