(The Center Square) – Wisconsin spent at least $160,000 to send Gov. Tony Evers, his wife and several staff members and security along with former Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. Secretary and CEO Missy Hughes and WEDC staff to Germany and France earlier this year, according to documents acquired through public records requests by The Center Square.
The costs included $69,000 for a chauffeur and limousine service, nearly $19,000 to AHP International for consulting and printed materials related to the trip and a nearly $3,200 group welcome dinner at Zucker restaurant in Braunschweig, Germany.
The expenses also included $1,600 for a VIP service that greeted Evers and his wife during layovers at the Paris and London airports with a personalized name sign, luggage assistance and moving through the airports and customs from a company called Fastrack.
The expenses also included a $182 staff lunch that Hughes purchased that didn’t include a receipt and instead had a “lost” receipt for saying the expense was from a restaurant in Wiesbaden, Germany.
The expenses included per diem food costs for trip participants along with Madison airport parking, seat upgrades and extra bags on the flights.
Evers’ office and the WEDC did not respond to multiple attempts over multiple months to seek comment related to the trip, starting when WEDC produced a press release on the trip on April 1.
The WEDC took nearly seven months to produce the records from the trip.
John Mozena is the president of the Center of Economic Accountability and recently testified about the value of overseas economic development trips in a committee meeting discussing the topic in Michigan.
“These economic development subsidy programs run all too often not as economic tools but as political tools, a way for elected officials to essentially get taxpayers to fund re-election advertising on the cheap,” Mozena said. “These things aren’t being done to create jobs, they’re being done to make voters believe that you’re responsible for creating jobs.
“These international trips are a way for governors and other elected or high ranking officials to get a nice trip on the taxpayer dime but also to show how hard they’re working, supposedly, when in fact the real issues that companies are … sitting back at home not being addressed.”
Mozena noted that face-to-face meetings with governors and economic development officials are not an essential part of bringing businesses to states and cited a survey from Area Development magazine of U.S. business site selectors showing that state and local incentives were the ninth most important factor behind things such as energy availability and cost, workforce availability, available land, skilled labor and regulatory environment.
“They don’t do nearly as much as the folks that go on them would like to have everyone believe,” Mozena said, noting that the trips always seem to be to nice places where he and tourists would also visit “but I’m paying for it and not letting the taxpayers do it.
He also noted that meeting a governor isn’t really a big or important meeting for a multi-national corporation.
Evers’ office and the WEDC did not respond to questions on how the trip was paid for but the WEDC’s budget plan summary includes $900,000 for trade missions and foreign direct investment that it says includes trips planned to Japan, Canada, Mexico and Germany.
Hughes has since resigned her post and is currently running for governor while touting her economic development work, including Foxconn in Pleasant Prairie, which is now set to be a pair of data centers within tax increment districts.
“I had to come in and clean up that mess,” Hughes reportedly said at a Thursday morning candidate forum.
“I think Foxconn is the perfect example of the problems and dangers and limitations of this kind of thing,” Mozena said. “Foxconn is easily the highest profile international economic deal that Wisconsin’s ever had and it’s a disaster.”
Mozena said that he isn’t sold that placing data centers on those properties is a taxpayer win either.
“If you were trying to design the dumbest possible thing to subsidize, it would be a data center,” Mozena said. “… They are these big, dark buildings where virtually nobody works. Most of the high-value work at those facilities isn’t being doing by people on-site, it’s being done programmers in Silicon Valley or Shanghai or Mumbai or someplace like that.”
