Another Day. Another Misleading Meme

Brian Fraley has a low threshold for "alarming." He has found all manner of purported malfeasence and misfeasence and no-fee-sense in the Legislative Audit Bureau Report. The report, released by Audit Committe Co-chairs Rep Jeskewitz and Sen Roessler, looked at fees collected by the DNR and expenditures for hunters and fishermen by the DNR.

Fraley fumes:

What the Audit Bureau uncovered is alarming.
Only 57.3 percent of user fee-funded expenditures in FY 2004-05 were spent
primarily for the benefit of those who provided those fees.
The audit also found that 2.4 percent of the $68.2 million in user fees
expended in that year, or $1.6 million, did not directly benefit hunters and
anglers.
And a whopping 11.1 percent went to administrative costs (read feeding the
bureaucracy).

He ignores the report when it adds:

29.2% Benefited Hunters, Anglers, and Other Users

He ignores the report's line which states:

DNR's administrative costs
were below a 16.0 percent limit established by
statute.

He even sputters:

This audit will be spun thusly:
Contrary to complaints of many legislative Republicans, a new audit found
that more than 96 percent of hunters' and anglers' user fees are being spent for
their intended purposes.

Well, then. I know where he came up with that piece of doggerel. If you look at the Committee Report released by the two Republican co-chairs it says:

We found that 97.6 percent of
user fee-funded expenditures in FY 2004-05 provided some level of benefit to hunters and anglers, including 57.3 percent spent primarily for their benefit. We also found that 2.4 percent of the $68.2 million in user fees expended in that year, or $1.6 million, did not directly benefit hunters and anglers.

Fraley ignores the findings of the report, abandons its conclusions and does a free form riff on the facts in a pathetic attempt to justify doubling the bureaucracy at the DNR by splitting it in two as Mark Green has suggested.

Fraley isn't alone playing fast and loose with the findings of the non-partisan bureau. Joe Leibham cherry-picks the facts in a press release. Mark Green spun out a self-serving release that just passed over the facts altogether and hoped that folks had heacontroversytrovery without looking at the reports findings. While Fraley and Green are trying to convince us that the DNR doesn't spend enough on hunters and fishers Scott Suder sails way out where the buses don't run and says that the report shows that the DNR spends too damn much money. Maybe he didn't get the memo.