Signs championed by previous Gov. Scott Walker that invited guests to Wisconsin as a state “Open for Business” are being transformed into bypass signs.
An authority in Gov. Tony Evers’ administration said in a letter this month that the signs donning Walker’s economic development mantra will be transformed into signs utilized for detours and directions in crisis circumstances.
“Therefore, the old signs will be cut in half with no material wasted,” said the Feb. 1 letter from Department of Administration enterprise operations administrator James Langdon to Republican Rep. John Macco of Ledgeview.
Langdon was reacting to Macco’s inquiry about what the Evers administration would do with the signs that were installed under Walker.
Walker presented the signs in 2011 as a symbol of his arrangement to make a large number of new occupations in Wisconsin. He touted the phrase relentlessly in the early long stretches of his time in office.
Macco, in a Feb. 11 letter to constituents, said the action of taking down Walker’s signs and supplanting them with signs bearing Evers’ name as is basic in different states seemed to be “merely immature and petty yet his prerogative.”
“The Evers administration is literally sawing them in half and making 46 ‘Detour’ signs,” Macco wrote. “Ironically that is exactly the result his policies may produce.”
Evers protected the move, saying he was taking care of the signs a similar route governors before Walker did.
“We wanted to go back to what it used to be, essentially a ‘welcome to Wisconsin’ sign,” Evers told reporters.
“Having the sign reflect what it used to reflect in the past is where we wanted to be and so we made sure those signs are re-purposed in a meaningful way. It’s not a controversy from my vantage point.”
Evers has been critical of Walker’s way to deal with financial improvement, once proposing to wipe out the state’s jobs agency made under Walker.
The agency has been under scrutiny since it started — when it forgot about a huge number of dollars in loans continued from the state department it supplanted — and as it granted loans to businesses not legitimately confirmed, which neglected to make occupations or reimburse what was obtained now and again.
Evers likewise has been critical of a state tax credit for manufacturers and agriculture producers because the vast majority of the recipients earn $1 million annually or more.
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