This news arrived dramatically in my email yesterday:

“Today we are filing a lawsuit and a request for a restraining order to halt the implementation of the harmful impacts of the Governor’s budget on the people who use the services of the Office of the Secretary of State,” Doug La Follette said.

The 2015/2017 Biennial Budget slashes the Office staff to just one and moves historic records to a remote location in the basement of the capitol; this would have a devastating impact on service and to the public wanting to find these important historical records that have been maintained by Wisconsin Secretaries of State since 1848.

The office processes 15,000 apostilles each year and if clients who want to adopt a child, transact international business, study abroad or ship a body overseas cannot receive the documents in a timely fashion they will be harmed. This is hardly a business friendly move to make as Wisconsin’s economy is already in poor shape.

La Follette stated that with only one staff person remaining it would be impossible to provide the needed service to these clients and would create unsustainable stress to the one remaining staff member. The staff person will get sick and has a right to vacation resulting in the office being closed with harmful impacts to many people.

The Office is the custodian of thousands of current and historical documents including: Statutes, laws of Wisconsin, Blue Books, and gubernatorial filings requiring application of the Great Seal (executive orders, proclamations, and pardons), boundary agreement filings, and charter ordinance filings, oaths of office, political action committee filings, special counsel contracts and state bond filings.

The Constitution and statutes require these records be maintained by the Secretary of State and must be secure and available for public inspection.

And relocating of the Office of the Secretary of State into a space that is not easily accessible to the public would be a great inconvenience and create confusion to the dozens who come to the office each day and would violate state laws requiring accessibility to the public.

Further if the current staff are terminated, it would take months to recruit and train new employees [one current staff person speaks Spanish fluently which is not easy to replace].

In brief, allowing the provisions of the budget impacting the Sec of State’s office to go into effect will do great harm to many people for many years.

Therefore, we are asking for an injunction to prevent this immediate and long term harm to the public.

This, for those who forgot, is the same secretary of state who illegally delayed publication (one of the few duties he is assigned) of Act 10 in order to facilitate a lawsuit against Act 10. For that, La Follette was not recalled from office, and he continues to get nearly $70,000 a year from us sucker taxpayers. I am also told, though I cannot confirm this, that La Follette once lost the state seal; keeping the state seal is one of his few duties.

State Treasurer Matt Adamczyk had a response, reported by WisPolitics:

I am quite shocked that La Follette took the extreme action of filing a lawsuit because he does not like the location of his office. …

Until now, the taxpayers paid annual rent of $80,000 for La Follette’s unnecessarily oversized office overlooking the State Capitol building.

It makes no sense for taxpayers to be paying rent when free office space is available across the street in the State Capitol building. In fact, the office he is being moved into is the office that I am currently occupying. In an effort to save taxpayer money, I’ve agreed to give La Follette my office.

To put this into perspective, La Follette’s office is being moved less than 400 feet. His new office previously housed four full-time employees in the former treasurer’s office. On the other hand, La Follette will have only 2.75 employees in the same amount of space.

Additionally, La Follette complained that the office will not be accessible to the public, which is simply not true. The office will have full public access when the Capitol building is open and will be handicap accessible.

It is clear that after being in office over 35 years, La Follette has become out of touch with middle class Wisconsinites. La Follette should be looking for ways to save taxpayer money instead of wasting it with frivolous lawsuits.

I’ve advocated here before that the few duties of the offices of treasurer and secretary of state should be assigned to the lieutenant governor, after which those two offices should be abolished and the lieutenant governor office should be placed separately on the state ballot from the governor. That would require changes to the state Constitution, which the Legislature should begin immediately.

By the way: A Facebook comment on the page of state Sen. Leah Vukmir (R-Wauwatosa) claims La Follette is a state treasure because he’s the grandson of Fighting Bob La Follette. That is false. The Fighting Bob grandson who was involved in politics was Bronson La Follette, the state’s attorney general until 1986. Douglas La Follette is approximately a fifth cousin.