The Wisconsin state senate is reportedly set to vote on a Milwaukee Bucks arena bill today, and since they weren’t going to vote until they had the votes lined up to pass it, presumably if they vote, it will pass. And since the senate was considered a harder get than the assembly, this likely means the plan will be on track for final approval.
Now, the only question is what, exactly, they’ll be voting on. Fox6 News reports:
Senator Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) told FOX6 News Tuesday evening a deal appears to be in place. Lawmakers are set to vote on the plan Wednesday. Senator Taylor says to get the ‘yes’ votes needed to pass it, there are changes as to how the city of Milwaukee, Milwaukee County and the Wisconsin Center District will pay their portion of the $250 million in public funding.
Changes to the deal could involve not how much, but exactly how the city of Milwaukee, Milwaukee County and Wisconsin Center District portions would be paid.
Ooooookay, then. Another Democratic senator, Chris Larson, said he’d flipped to support the deal because it will no longer include using $80 million in unpaid county debt collections — money that may well be uncollectable anyway — but told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the county would still be putting up the same $4 million a year toward the arena, and County Executive Chris Abele could still hand the debt collection over to the state and fund it that way if he wanted to. So that sure sounds like a meaningless provision, but Larson said that previously the “optics of it just looked horrible,” which presumably translates as “I want Abele to be the guy garnishing the wages of poor debtors to pay for a Bucks arena, not me.”
This sure sounds like all Democratic senators got were some CYA provisions to make them look less like the bad guys, but not anything that will actually change who’s paying for what. Everything is still in flux, though — or as pro-arena senator Alberta Darling said yesterday, “nothing’s poured in concrete” — so we’ll know more after today’s vote, if it happens.