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Gov. Evers Angered at Senate Vote on Sec. Designee Pfaff…Justified or Unjustified

November 21, 2019 by

For Immediate Release

 

Gov. Evers called the removal of Sec Designee Pfaff “political and amoral” & “bull…” but was it?

We all can agree former Sec. Designee Pfaff is a nice guy. No question about that. DATCP has a long history of working with the Agriculture community on various topics in a non-adversarial manner, no matter who is in office. In fact, the first siting rule was written and passed with a Republican legislature and under Gov. Doyle, a Democrat. The AG community and DATCP have long had a good working relationship and look forward to that continuing in the future.

So what went wrong this time?

  1. At the DATCP Board meeting July 10, several AG groups requested the livestock siting rule be postponed. It wasn’t, it moved forward.
  2. In the beginning of September, 10 AG groups sent a letter to DATCP requesting they stop the forward progress of the rule, specifying why it was not workable and the damage it would do to the Dairy Industry; especially after 5 years of struggle. Again, it moved forward.
  3. Majority Leader Fitzgerald and Speaker Vos sent a letter to DATCP Sec. Designee Pfaff requesting they listen to the AG groups and stop the forward progress of this rule. And, again it moved forward.
  4. Majority Leader Fitzgerald and Speaker Vos in their letter charged Sec. Designee Pfaff and his staff to work with the Chairmen of the respective Ag Committees in the Senate and the Assembly, Sen. Marklein and Rep. Tauchen. The Sec. Designee failed to even contact the chairmen.
  5. Sen. Nass sent a letter to Sec. Designee Pfaff bluntly letting him know if this rule came to his committee, he would reject it. It fell on deaf ears as the rule moved forward.
  6. Prior to the November Board meeting, 20 AG groups sent another letter to DATCP letting them know the revised rule was still not workable along with the specific reasons why is was not good for the industry – many of those reasons were in the prior letter.

Even with all of these very public warnings from the AG industry and the Legislators, the rule moved forward. DATCP did not consider it to be a problem if the AG groups fervently opposed the proposed rule. Very simply, the pleas of the AG community were ignored.

There was not any movement to prevent this rule from moving forward…that is until Majority Leader Fitzgerald told Governor Evers he didn’t have the votes to confirm Pfaff.

So was this political or just legislators supporting Farmers when they desperately needed it?