DECORUM AND DEBATE
BY NICK VANDER PUY
Some anti-nuclear activists went to the Capitol hearing on a bill to repeal the state’s nuclear moratorium, and the members of the Assembly Energy and Utilities Committee didn’t like it.

The week before Christmas, I drove with Nukewatch’s John LaForge from Wisconsin’s north woods to Madison for a hearing on Assembly Bill 346, a proposal to repeal the state’s nuclear moratorium.

Back in the early 1980s, after the Three Mile Island disaster and amid much grassroots organizing in the state, Wisconsin enacted legislation to allow nuclear plant construction only when a nuclear waste dump is established and nuclear power is economical. The moratorium is a commonsense rule that is falling in the face of utility efforts to resume building nukes all over the country.

I didn’t expect egg nog and “Away in the Manger” from the Assembly Energy and Utilities Committee and its chair Phil Montgomery, but I didn’t expect to get treated like a criminal either. I was wrong.

When I walked into the ornate, church-like hearing room I was struck how the committee sits in an elevated semi-circle with the chair right in the middle. The Energy and Utilities Committee consists entirely of white, pasty men.

Montgomery vacated the chair and testified that he wanted a full and open debate about building nukes in Wisconsin. Then anti-nuclear activists LaForge and Casandra Dixon took the witness stand. LaForge was dressed in a tweed jacket. Dixon is a union carpenter and wore jeans and Sorel boots.

LaForge gave footnoted testimony about elevated cancer rates near nuclear plants. And within 30 seconds the committee members’ eyes had glazed over. Dixon agreed with Montgomery that she would read Dr. Al Gedicks testimony against nuclear power before offering her own testimony.

When Dixon read Gedicks’s fierce testimony about the disproportionate uranium and nuclear energy burden on native people and their land, especially, the Navaho, Pueblo, and western Shoshone, Montgomery started to get nasty. Dixon began her testimony, but Montgomery gaveled her down. She talked over him, trying to offer her testimony, and she was eventually told to return at the end.

That’s when LaForge and Dixon rolled out a visual aid. They unfurled a large yellow and black banner announcing, “Fight Cancer: No New Reactors.”

Montgomery then recessed the hearing.

I left the room to interview Montgomery. I am a producer for the Superior Broadcast Network, and interviewing people is what I do. When I returned, committee member Josh Zepnick—a Democratic Assembly Representative from Milwaukee—was informing Dixon and LaForge that they had upset the “decorum” of the hearing by rolling out the banner.

I tried to interview Zepnick, but he told me to shut off my recorder.

After this excitement I was heading to the restroom when two officers, one Capitol Police and the other from the city of Madison, stopped me. They wanted to know who I was. They had been told by Zepnick to confiscate my tape; that I had illegally recorded him without his permission.

I reminded the officers that as far as I could determine the state Capitol building was still within a free speech zone. I argued that Dixon’s free speech had been denied by Montgomery. I told them that as a newsman, operating on the street, coming upon a crime I could rightfully photograph or record anything I saw or heard.

The officers decided not to take my gear. But they held me until I finally asked, “May I go back to the hearing now?”

Unfortunately, Dixon never got a chance to testify. She had to get back to work. It’s too bad, because our listeners on WOJB and KUWS in northern Wisconsin never got to hear this woman’s voice. We are all left to wonder what she would have told us.

Maybe she would have told us her mother Gertrude Dixon was one of the movers and shakers behind Wisconsin’s 1984 commonsense nuclear moratorium law. That her mother was especially concerned, back then, that the federal Department of Energy would put a nuclear waste dump in northern Wisconsin.

Back then Gertrude Dixon participated in many debates with the utility companies’ nuclear energy “experts.” Eventually she came to refer to them as “poorly informed public relations agents at best.”

According to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, in the past three years Montgomery’s contributions from the energy sector have jumped from $450 to more than $11,000. If Cassandra Dixon had testified, there is a good chance she would have advised Montgomery, Zepnick and the rest of the committee members to follow the money. But I guess we’ll never know.