The big, glitzy legislation gets the attention. For instance, Wisconsin will finally regulate payday lenders, thanks to an Assembly vote on the last day of the legislative session. And Gov. Jim Doyle’s green energy bill died the ignominious death you might expect for a messy, controversial bill proposed by a lame duck executive.
But in the fast-paced action of the final week of a legislative session, it’s easy to forget all the yeoman’s work lawmakers need to do to keep the machinery of government running.
Such is the case of Senate Bill 684.
It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t high-profile. It passed both houses of the houses of the Legislature unanimously.
But it was the kind of legislation that we’ll be needing more and more of as local government, schools boards and counties find that collaboration is the only way to efficiently deliver services in a tighter and tighter budget environment.
SB 684 will allow a consortium of counties to continue to help fund Lakeview Health Center in West Salem. That consortium and another, associated with a Dodge County long-term care center, were in danger of losing their ability to help support these facilities for Medicaid patients.
La Crosse County patients make up about half of the population at Lakeview. The rest come from other members of Mississippi Valley Health Serv-ices, a cooperative in which 13 counties pay $5,000 to join and $45 a day per resident to fill the gap between patients’ Medicaid payments and the true cost of the care they receive at Lakeview.
An October 2009 opinion by Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen put the cooperative approach at risk. SB 684 paved the way for continued collaboration between La Crosse County and other counties that don’t operate such specialized care facilities on their own.
Don’t get us wrong: Debate on big issues is an important part of the legislative process.
But equally important is the accumulation of small victories toward making local government more effective: Rep. Jennifer Shilling and Sen. Kathleen Vinehout’s successful effort to protect the cooperative that keeps Lakeview from becoming a much greater burden on local property taxpayers – to the tune of about $1 million – was one of them.
Posted in the La Crosse Journal Opinion, Editorial on Wednesday, April 28, 2010 12:15 am
