Monday, June 15, 2009

Another Midnight Special

Years ago, before she went over to the dark side, Judy Robson was a nice lady who helped people. Judy was a nurse. A high calling, to be sure; giver of care and solace, angel of mercy, and so on.

Now, she’s a politician. A state senator from Beloit.

Several days ago, under cover of darkness deep in the Madison night, she put a 47-million-dollar UW Nursing School building into the budget. To do it, the state would have to borrow 28 million bucks.

Slight problem: she didn’t really talk with anybody over at the big college about it; I guess she just kinda knew the dean of nursing would love to have a new building; there’d been some buzz about it; so Judy stuck it into the budget.

Now, a few days later, it’s out of the budget. Out, because Spencer Black, one of our local Madison assemblymen, got a call from a constituent…namely, Julie Underwood, who was at the time the interim provost at the UW…saying “ah, Spencer, do me a favor and pull Robson’s nursing building out of the budget”…or, words to that effect.

The 47-million-dollar building, you see, was NOT part of the UW’s capital budget request to Joint Finance, nor was it included in the budget Baldy sent to the legislature.

Apparently Judy just thought it would be a nice idea to stick it into the budget. After all, we’re flush with money and rollin’ in dough here in Badgerland, aren’t we?
You’d think after an embarrassment like that, Robson would quietly go away and hope the newsies found something else to harp about in the budget.

Not Judy.

She says she’ll try again to get it into the budget. Obviously, she knows better than the UW, which says a good time to build the new nursing school building would be about two years from now.
Perhaps Ms. Robson should return to her first profession, where she could once again do some good for people.

Just a thought.

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