Wisconsin Officials Make Temporary Agreement On Vets Funding

County veterans service officers and the state Department of Veterans Affairs have reached a temporary agreement to resolve complaints about state veterans program funding.

Service officers must now have their budgets double-checked by county executives before getting funding from the WDVA.

The agreement came after some veterans service offices complained that a change to state funding resulted in more than half of their reimbursement requests being denied without explanation last month.

Bill Rosenau, of the County Veterans Service Officers Association, said having budgets checked by county executives before asking the state for reimbursement acts as a sort of “stop-gap.”

“That would buy the department time to promulgate rules, change the administrative code, to actually outline the reimbursements more definitively,” Rosenau said.

State funding for local veterans service offices used to be doled out through block grants to counties, but in last year’s state budget, lawmakers changed it to a reimbursement program. The switch could be viewed as an attack on local control, Rosenau said.

“(In) a perfect world, it would return to a block grant with the supervision and operating control being returned to the county level where it belongs,” said Rosenau.

However, WDVA spokesman Bill Clausius said there has been misinformation regarding the grant program and that the changes were meant to get additional information about how the county veterans service officers were spending state funds.