By Andrew Fefer, Reporter/Editor
A leader in the campaign to retain the State Treasurer’s office believes voting “no” in today’s referendum on abolishing the position would help safeguard effective state fiscal management.
Sarah Godlewski, a 2000 Eau Claire Memorial High School graduate, left the area to attend college but always intended to come back to Eau Claire. (See related story.) She opposes a proposed change to the Wisconsin constitution that would eliminate the Treasurer’s office and pass its responsibilities on to the lieutenant governor.
She finds herself at odds with the current Treasurer, Matt Adamczyk, who is campaigning to abolish the office he holds.
The proposal has been approved by the state Legislature twice (in 2016 and 2017), as required for any proposed constitutional amendment. To take effect, proposed amendments must also be approved in a statewide referendum. Therefore, the referendum on today’s ballot is binding, meaning the Treasurer’s office would cease to exist if the “yes” votes prevail.
On a sample ballot, the referendum question reads: “Shall sections 1 and 3 of article VI and section 7 and 8 of article X of the constitution be amended, and section 17 of article XIV of the constitution be created, to eliminate the office of state treasurer from the constitution and to replace the state treasurer with the lieutenant governor as a member of the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands?”.
Godlewski said that approval would remove an internal control and open the door to fraud and abuse. She also fears that it could lead to mismanagement of trust funds and Wisconsin failing audits which, she said, could also affect the state’s bond rating and lead to a cut in federal funding.
At this point, Godlewski said she and others supporting a “no” vote are depending on what she calls “organic, earned media” to share their message, as opposed to paid advertising. Supporters have worked with several groups to spread the message to their membership, written op-eds and discussed their viewpoint on television and radio.
On Feb. 21, the Eau Claire Area School District’s Board of Education approved a resolution to retain the Office of the State Treasurer. In it, author and school board member Joe Luginbill said that the treasurer helps to oversee the Common School Fund, which allocated almost $380,000 to the district in the 2016-2017 school year for library materials and IMC resources.
Godlewski said the “vote no” effort is bipartisan, while noting that it goes against the wishes of Adamczyk, the current Treasurer and a Republican.
“It’s just more about effective financial management,” Godlewski said. “Money’s not red or blue. It’s green, and so that’s why we want to make sure we have the best financial practices in play.”
She said that state treasurer’s offices across the country have been taking on an economic empowerment role, which involves providing startup companies with access to capital or investing money in the state rather than in companies that are not Wisconsin-based.
“I think, just kind of changing the mindset of how things were to what they are today, because everything is local, can make a difference in our economy,” she said.
Godlewski and her husband run a business and are in the process of moving it to Eau Claire. She said the referendum’s outcome will not affect the business directly, but if the state’s bond rating is downgraded because of poor audits, she said that would create a secondary impact.
Godlewski said she was alarmed when she first heard about the proposal in summer 2017, calling it “bad business.” She added that, in her world, she would never fire a chief financial officer and auditor, and give those responsibilities to the CEO.
“That’s completely reckless in business, so why do we think this would be good government in Wisconsin?”
History of the proposal
Godlewski acknowledges that the proposal’s history includes the idea of making government smaller. She said Republican Kurt Schuller, who was state treasurer from 2011 until 2015, discussed the idea of eliminating the office in the spirit of reducing the size of state government, but changed his mind after serving in the role and understanding its core responsibilities.
“So, whether it is to inspect and review financial transactions of government officials because they’re not in that budget process, so kind of serving in that independent, internal checks and balances role, to helping to oversee the four different trust funds that amount to over $1,200,000,” she said, “Kurt’s somebody who saw that and goes ‘No, this is actually a legitimate role.'”
Efforts to reach Schuller for this story were unsuccessful.
Current treasurer supports proposal
After discussing his plan to eliminate the office while campaigning in 2014, Adamczyk took office in 2015 and found he had three full-time employees. He said they simply did not have enough work to do, so he eliminated the positions. Over the course of his four-year term, he said that move will end up saving almost $1 million.
His message on the homepage of the Office of the Wisconsin State Treasurer reads “I vowed to eliminate this office and I will work with the legislature to pass legislation to eliminate the treasurer’s office. I fully support the elimination effort.”
Adamczyk said the Senate and Assembly passed the proposal twice in bipartisan votes. He pointed out that the lieutenant governor also has no say in the state budget because it is the Legislature and the governor who determine it. He added that, in the past, there have been “plenty of lieutenant governors that didn’t necessarily see eye-to-eye with their own governor” (they run for office on the ballot with a gubernatorial candidate in the general election, but are elected separately).
“I myself am a fiscal conservative,” Adamczyk said, “and I look at it and say, ‘You have an office (whose administrative) duties have been basically moved to other agencies . . . for efficiency purposes. So, basically what you’re left with is an office that doesn’t have that many specific duties left, and therefore, why keep it?”
Adamczyk said that if the referendum fails, the state Legislature would have to decide if it wants to put duties into the office, but that he does not know what those duties would be.
“Probably the most substantial thing the office handled was something called the Unclaimed Property Program,” he said. The purpose of the program is to return a financial asset that has not been with its owner for a year or more back to that person or group. The Wisconsin Department of Revenue has maintained a database of unclaimed property and returned it to its rightful owners for several years.
Adamczyk said that his only constitutional duty is to serve on a board.
“Probably nobody’s ever been more focused on that board than I am,” he said, noting that other treasurers have simply voted “yes” on every issue.
If the state’s voters pass the referendum, Adamczyk said the office would be abolished at the end of the year in what he said would be “a symbolic victory for smaller, limited government.”
Descriptions of the treasurer position vary
Godlewski said that Wisconsin would be the first state to truly abolish its treasurer or the equivalent office if the referendum passes.
She said some people have pointed out to her that Minnesota successfully removed its treasurer when voters approved a constitutional change by nearly an 8-1 margin in November, 1998. The change took effect in 2003, but Godlewski said Minnesota already had an independently-elected auditor who bears many of the responsibilities that fall on Wisconsin’s state treasurer. In the case of New York and Texas, two other states that removed treasurers, Godlewski said they each have an independently-elected comptroller (a senior accountant in a government organization).
Adamczyk insists that the office carries out only administrative functions and does not have the power of oversight. He compared the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau to the Congressional Budget Office, an independent, non-partisan group that prepares reports.
Godlewski sees it differently. She describes Wisconsin’s state treasurer as an “independent fiscal watchdog,” adding that the state’s founding fathers were brilliant for deciding that the treasurer would have nothing to do with the budget process. She called the state treasurer the best person to have oversight over financial transactions made by government officials.
“I don’t want Wisconsin to lead with this,” she said. “I think there’s a reason why every state has this, kind of, independent fiscal officer. And so, ensuring that we do the same, but we actually look at it as an opportunity to build our economy and to grow Wisconsin in the 21st century.”
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