The Social Development Commission, Wisconsin’s largest anti-poverty social services agency, abruptly closed its doors in late April after the latest in a series of scandals stretching back over more than 30 years.

At this point, it’s unclear whether the SDC will ever reopen. Both its most recent board chair, Elmer Moore Jr., and its chief executive officer, George Hinton, are gone after the recent “misallocation” of $100,000 in federal home-weatherization program funds and non-payment of tens of thousands of dollars to contractors.

The shutdown has focused attention once again on a community action agency that has operated more than two dozen social programs funded at one point by as much as $60 million in annual federal grants — but an agency that has no direct state, county or local supervision.

The next time your progressive friends in, say, Superior or Eau Claire or Green Bay argue that saving the globe necessitates eliminating fossil fuel use by 2050 and that they intend to do it, ask them a couple simple questions: 

• How much are you willing to pay on a monthly basis to combat climate change?

• How much do you think it will cost to just stop using a natural gas furnace, the kind used by about two-thirds of Wisconsinites, and switch over to a heat pump run on electricity?

Make it easy on them. Tell them to forget all the other costs of eliminating gas- or diesel-powered engines, about price hikes for everything you buy that’s manufactured in factories that use fossil fuels or that’s shipped on boats or planes or trucks that burn oil or diesel...

Pat McIlheran on Your Talk Show with Tim Bremel | May 13

Birth rates are falling in many places. In Wisconsin, the state’s total fertility rate peaked in 1960 and sharply declined shortly after, falling below 2 in the early 1970s and only approaching it in recent years before turning downward again.

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