POLITICS

Assembly Republicans expand staff ahead of budget fights using former aides to Scott Walker

Patrick Marley

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is shown during the swearing-in ceremony for Assembly members at the Capitol in Madison, Wis.

MADISON — Top Assembly Republicans are stocking their offices with aides to former Gov. Scott Walker as they prepare for a budget fight with a new Democratic administration.

The move to beef up staff comes at a time when some Republican leaders have said they will craft their own state budget instead of working off Gov. Tony Evers’ spending proposal.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos of Rochester has hired three former Walker officials to his staff and Rep. John Nygren of Marinette has taken on Walker’s former budget director.

Those new positions are adding more than $300,000 to the Assembly payroll, records show. In addition, Vos has given his chief of staff a 20 percent pay boost, bringing her salary to more than $120,000 a year.

Assembly Minority Leader Gordon Hintz of Oshkosh accused Vos of building a costly “shadow government” to take on the Evers administration. Vos said he’d found savings over the years to accommodate the new hires and deserved the best team possible to develop a budget and legislation.

Assembly Democrats aren’t getting any more staff. Vos said he offered them the ability to hire two more aides, but Hintz said he rejected the idea because Vos wanted it coupled with a plan to have all Democrats vote with Republicans to choose Vos as speaker.

Among those joining Vos’ team is former Rep. Joe Handrick, who served as the unemployment insurance administrator for Walker and in 2011 helped Republicans draw legislative districts that have greatly helped them win elections. Litigation over those election maps is ongoing.

Vos has also hired Heather Smith, Walker’s Medicaid director, and Evan Bradtke, a former campaign and policy aide to Walker who most recently served as the legislative liaison for Walker’s Department of Workforce Development.

Smith will make $104,300 a year, Handrick $75,700 and Bradtke $56,700.

Vos increased the pay for his chief of staff, Jenny Toftness, from $102,300 to $123,400, records show.

Smith stepped down as Medicaid director this fall to help Walker prepare for debates with Evers. She also worked for Walker’s campaign during his 2014 re-election bid and his brief run for president. She served as a deputy chief of staff in the governor’s office.

Medicaid is a program jointly run by the state and federal governments that provides health care to the low-income, elderly and disabled. Evers wants to expand coverage under the Affordable Care Act — an idea resisted by Walker and Republicans in the Legislature.

Handrick served in the state Assembly in the late 1990s and as Minocqua’s town chairman until 2011. His Twitter account is watched closely on election night by conservatives and liberals for his analysis of early voting returns.

Handrick has worked as a lobbyist and political consultant and was retained by GOP lawmakers to help put together the election maps that have helped them keep large majorities in the Legislature.

Litigation over the maps began even before they were unveiled and is continuing. A trial is scheduled for April, but Assembly Republicans have asked to delay it until after the U.S. Supreme Court issues decisions in redistricting cases from other states this summer.

Handrick is serving as Vos’ member outreach coordinator. Vos said he did not expect Handrick to work on drawing legislative maps during this two-year legislative session unless judges require the Assembly to do so. No matter what happens in the case, new maps will have to be drawn in 2021 to account for the results of the 2020 Census.

Nygren — the co-chairman of the Legislature’s budget-writing Joint Finance Committee — has hired Waylon Hurlburt, who served as Walker’s budget director and before that worked as a policy adviser in Walker’s office and for his campaign. A decade ago, Hurlburt worked for Nygren.

Given his past work, Hurlburt has intimate knowledge of the state budget and can help Republican lawmakers develop their own spending plans. He is making $80,000 in his new job.

Both sides have said they hope to work in a bipartisan way but acknowledged they have deep differences on health care programs, school funding and other budget issues. Evers will meet Tuesday privately with Republican lawmakers from both chambers.

“I think we got a lot of people at a bargain,” Vos said, saying the former Walker aides were making less than they did in the administration.

He said he expanded staff because the Legislature is the equal of the executive branch but over time has ceded too much authority to it.

“I don’t want to just assume whatever the executive branch tells us is automatically accurate," he said. "I want to have someone double check it.”

Vos said he could afford to hire more workers because he has found efficiencies in running the Assembly since he became speaker in 2013, noting he’d left positions unfilled in the chief clerk’s office, ended a program that allowed some Assembly workers to make more than their salary range, cut back on leased space and reduced researchers at the Legislative Reference Bureau. (He said the number of researchers was cut because “we have a thing called Google, so you don’t need people there waiting for a call from staff to do research.”)

“Overall, even with some of the changes we have made, I would make the argument that we are more efficient today even with the increased folks that we are adding on than we were when I started as speaker,” Vos said.

Hintz dismissed Vos’ claims on efficiencies, noting some of the unfilled jobs in the clerk’s office were for low-paid messengers. Now, Vos is hiring people making big salaries with rich benefits, he said.

“Taxpayers are going to pay $150,000 more than they paid for the unfilled messenger position to fulfill the undermining of the executive branch by having a duplicate Medicaid director in the legislative branch,” he said.

Hintz said one of the two positions Vos offered to him recently was promised to him more than a year ago. He said he rejected the latest offer for more staff because Vos was adding so many more Republican aides and wanted a commitment that Democrats would vote for Vos for speaker, as they have in the past.

Hintz said Democrats weren't willing to vote for Vos as speaker after Republicans approved laws in a lame-duck session to reduce the powers of Evers and Josh Kaul, the newly elected Democratic attorney general.

The Assembly on a party-line vote Monday chose Vos as speaker for the two-year session, with all Democrats voting for Hintz. Afterward, Vos called Hintz "a hardcore left partisan" who was trying to "puff out his chest" by having Democrats vote against him as speaker.

He said Thursday he had hoped for a unanimous vote for him as speaker to highlight bipartisanship.

In the Senate, leaders from both parties this month agreed to hire five more aides to senators — three for Republicans and two for Democrats. So far, just one of the jobs has been filled.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald of Juneau has said he wants Republicans to develop their own budget instead of working off Evers' plan. Vos said he hasn't decided if he wants to take that route.