Legislative leaders need to remove all of the policy items out of Governor Jim Doyle's budget proposal. That opinion from Green Bay state Senator Rob Cowles , reacting to a Legislative Fiscal Bureau report showing 80 policy items in the budget, ranging from the statewide smoking ban to providing domestic partner benefits.
"The budget is complicated enough already," said Cowles. "This is not the way that we should be operating. These items should be taken up as separate items, they should not be buried and hidden inside this massive, 1700 page budget. The Republican lawmaker says Governor Doyle included the items in the budget to avoid scrutiny. "It's an easy way to get things done," said Cowles, who has been a critic of previous Doyle budgets while serving on the legislature's Joint Committee on Finance. "It's just not the way our state democracy should run." Cowles said he hopes to embarrass other lawmakers into taking those proposals out of the spending plan.
