Bright and early Wednesday morning, Gov. Jim Doyle signed into law 19 state-employee contracts hotly debated for months by legislators and workers’ unions.

The state Legislature’s Joint Committee on Employment Relations rejected the contracts in February and sent them back to the Doyle administration’s Department of Employment Relations, where the contracts had been negotiated for the 2001-’03 budget cycle with state employees’ unions.

The Republican-led committee claimed that the contracts, which included raises for the employees, would cost the state an additional $63 million — $6 million more than was allotted for the budget cycle. Assembly Majority Leader and committee co-chair Rep. John Gard, R-Peshtigo, said in February that allowing additional millions to seep out of a budget already leaking $3.2 billion would be unconscionable.

“With this action, we are allowing the DER to make fundamental reforms needed to keep good faith with the taxpayers,” Gard said. “My hope is that the spirit of these contracts stays alive as we go forward.”

Incensed state employees staged a three-month-long grassroots lobbying effort to gain support for their contracts in both the committee and the full Legislature. Doyle had said on numerous occasions that he would resubmit the contracts to the committee if he felt they would choose to approve them, and workers’ unions set about creating a favorable climate in the Committee for their contracts.

State employees, including members of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Teachers’ Assistant Association, rallied in the rotunda of the state Capitol and held a daily vigil, counting the days their contracts had been “held hostage.”

On Monday, the Committee asked the Department of Employment Relations to resubmit the contracts and approved them with no changes in a seven-to-one vote. The contracts promptly passed the full Legislature on Tuesday and made their way to Doyle’s desk by Wednesday.

“These contracts were a long time coming, and the modest pay increases they reflect are long overdue,” Doyle said in a statement upon signing the contracts. “From the beginning, I pledged to cover the cost of these contracts in my budget proposals, because a deal is a deal, and it was the right thing to do.”

Marty Beil, the executive director of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, became a polarizing figure for state employees, who rallied to see their raises approved.

“We never doubted that our members would get the support they deserved if their contracts were allowed to reach the full Legislature,” Beil said in a release Wednesday. “But we will not forget the handful of legislators who decided to play political games with our livelihoods and held our members hostage for more than four months. It was as heartless as it was pointless.”

State workers will receive their raises for the 2001-’03 contracts retroactively by as early as June.

The committee also acted on Monday to approve 2003-’05 for non-unionized state employees, which are commonly used as starting points for the negotiation of union workers agreements. The non-unionized contracts included significant health care reform, which Gard and other Republican leaders feel will translate into changes in the 2003-’05 union employees contracts.

“When these contracts were originally submitted late last year, I had some serious concerns with the cost in light of the budget deficit,” said Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mary Panzer, R-West Bend. “One of the major issues that needed to be addressed was the ever increasing cost of health care.”

Beil disagrees and notes that nothing has been decided for union state employees 2003-’05, in part because those negotiations couldn’t begin until the previous arrangements were finalized.

“While some legislators are claiming some mythical breakthrough on health care costs, they are simply projecting their fantasies about the future,” Beil said.