Walker's snow job.

• Author: Bottari, Mary
• Position: Scott Walker

The governor's race in Wisconsin between the Republican incumbent, Scott Walker, and his Democratic challenger, Mary Burke, is coming down to one issue: jobs, jobs, jobs.

This summer Walker launched aggressive ads against Burke, charging that her family's giant bike company, Trek, had outsourced jobs, an unusual line of attack for a pro-trade Republican who once sported a Chinese-U.S. flag pin. The Walker camp also dug out a failed economic development grant from the time she was the head of the state Department of Commerce.

The Walker team is cleverly trying to hit Burke where Walker himself is most vulnerable. It was not Burke who bungled a promise to create 250,000 jobs, then presided over one of the worst jobs creation records in the region. It was not Burke who created a scandal-plagued jobs agency, which has come under fire from federal officials and state auditors.

In November 2010, Scott Walker was elected governor of Wisconsin on his jobs pledge and on his slogan to make Wisconsin "open for business."

On January 3, 2011, Walker was sworn into office and immediately called the legislature into a special session to get to work on his jobs agenda. One of the first bills Walker introduced privatized the Department of Commerce's economic development functions. Walker made himself the chairman of the board of the public-private hybrid, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC).

In July 2011, the legislature launched the agency with a portfolio worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including loans, grants, and bonding authority. As a privatized agency, WEDC was designed to operate with less transparency, less oversight, and "greater flexibility" to "more effectively and efficiently assist Wisconsin business." WEDC created a four-year strategic plan "with the mission of elevating Wisconsin's economy to be the best in the world."

But the agency was soon embroiled in controversy. In May 2012, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development slammed WEDC for misusing $10 million in federal funds. Those grants were taken away from WEDC and are now managed by Walker's second in command, Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch.

In July 2012, allegations of bid-rigging forced the agency to cancel a planned award to an information systems company called Skyward. On October 18, 2012, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported WEDC had also failed to track an estimated $8 million in state loans to ninety-nine businesses...