David Michael Miller
Listening to Derailed, Wisconsin Public Radio’s new podcast about the Milwaukee to Madison high-speed debacle, is a little like reliving junior high school or your divorce or the Packers in the Forrest Gregg era. It’s just as painful as those things, but it’s actually worth remembering what happened to the train because the story helps identify what’s at the heart of our current troubles in the state as well as nationally and even on the international stage. Fundamentally, this is a story about hurting everyone in the state just because rural folks were willing to take a small hit as long as the urban folks took a bigger hit.
As reported in the seven-part podcast, here are the facts not in dispute.
Immediately after being elected governor in late 2010, but before even taking office, Scott Walker gave back $810 million of guaranteed federal money to build a fast passenger rail line between Milwaukee and Madison with improvements from Milwaukee to Chicago.
That money went to California. But because the Los Angeles to San Francisco project was a long way from ready, the funds, designed to stimulate the economy after the 2008 recession, still have not been spent. By contrast, the Wisconsin project’s right of way was already in place and engineering had been done. Ground could have been broken right away and our project was scheduled for completion by 2013.
In 2012 under the leadership of then Joint Finance Committee Chair Robin Vos, Wisconsin reneged on its contract with the train builder Talgo. The result was the loss of jobs at Talgo’s new plant in Milwaukee and an inevitable lawsuit. The state ended up paying $50 million to Talgo and the company got to keep the trains. That was $50 million in taxpayer money incinerated. We paid $50 million and got nothing for it.
Those two trains sit idle on a siding in Indiana, still painted Badgers red and white.
After turning back the $810 million, Walker had the gall to ask the Obama administration for $150 million for improvements to the Milwaukee to Chicago service. As you would expect, he got turned down.
That’s all in the podcast and in the public record. By my account, here’s what else happened.
Vos also was the prime mover in repealing the Dane County Regional Transit Authority, which was poised to levy a sales tax that would have funded improvements to local and regional transit services, some of which would have connected to high-speed rail. Almost a decade later, we’re still struggling with how to pay for those local and regional transit improvements.
The high-speed train station would have been across the street from the Municipal Building and was planned to be part of the Public Market Square development, which later morphed into Judge Doyle Square. It would have spurred the public market, a new hotel to serve Monona Terrace, and a transit center. All of those projects are needlessly a decade late in their development.
Momentum would have been created to complete the line up to the Twin Cities, with a stop in La Crosse or Eau Claire. This would have created a crackling dynamism between Chicago and the Cities with at least three or four Wisconsin stops in the middle. It’s impossible to calculate the benefits of that to Wisconsin, which would have been the connective tissue between a world-class city and a major American metro area.
Of course, the jobs, the increased property values and the change in national perception from “Rust Belt” to renaissance would have benefited the entire state, though Madison and Milwaukee would have certainly received more.
And that is the crux of it all. Scott Walker and Robin Vos played on the rural-urban resentment to their own political benefit and to the whole state’s disadvantage. (While rural residents perceive that they are over-taxed for benefits that go to urban areas, the opposite is true. In UW professor Katherine Cramer’s influential book, The Politics of Resentment, she shows that on a per capita basis, rural residents pay less in taxes to the state and federal government than residents of metro areas while getting about the same back in services.)
And it’s exactly that kind of willingness to exploit the worst human emotions, rather than the broader public good, that is driving politics right now all over the world.
The story of how Wisconsin had high-speed rail and all of its benefits in its hands and then gave it away is a tragedy. But it’s a tragedy that gets repeated daily in the continued pettiness of the Republicans who run the Legislature, in the tweets of our president, in the Brexit debate and in so many other bitter controversies around the world. A rising tide may lift all boats, but if your boat gets lifted higher, well, then let’s scuttle all the craft in the sea.
For those who think only of how to exploit resentments for their own benefit, it all makes perfect political sense. But for those of us who like to think about the common good, it’s all madness.
