Wisconsin’s average age is slightly higher than the national average age.
According to data from the Wisconsin Department of Health, which shows the average of ages between 2019 and 2023, the most recent data available, the national average is 38.7.
In Wisconsin, the average age is 40.1 for the same time period.
Those numbers reflect the rapidly aging baby boomer generation, which is skewing Wisconsin’s population to individuals over 65, according to Wisconsin Public Radio.
Between 2010 and 2020, this demographic grew from 777,000 people to more than 1 million and is projected to expand to 1.3 million by 2030. Meanwhile, the working-age demographic in the state is holding steady, meaning that the population of those over 65 is growing as a percentage of the total.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
A conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justice first elected in 2007 announced Monday that she will not seek a third 10-year term next year, giving liberals another chance to expand their majority as cases affecting redistricting, union rights, school funding and other hot button issues await.
Justice Annette Ziegler, 62, becomes the second conservative justice in as many years to decide against seeking reelection after liberals took majority control of Wisconsin’s highest court in 2023. Liberals held onto their majority last year in a race that broke national spending records and saw billionaire Elon Musk traveling to the state to hand out $1 million checks to conservative voters.
There’s another election on April 7 for the open seat caused by conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley’s decision not to run for reelection. The liberal candidate, Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, has outraised her conservative opponent, fellow Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar, allowing her to spend more on television ads in what so far has been a low-profile race given that the court’s majority is not on the line.
Liberals are seeking to win their fourth Supreme Court race in a row dating back to 2020 and solidify their hold on the court.
Ziegler’s decision to step down means there will be another open race next year. If liberals win this year, their majority would increase to 5-2, and in 2027 they could grow it to 6-1. If the conservative candidate wins this year, the liberal majority would remain 4-3, and next year the best conservatives could do would be to keep it at 4-3.
Ziegler consistently sided with fellow conservatives justices, including in 2020 when the court fell one vote short of overturning President Donald Trump’s election loss that year. Ziegler was in the minority after a conservative swing justice sided with liberals.
Liberals have struck down a state abortion ban law and ordered new legislative maps since taking control of the court, fueling Democrats’ hopes of capturing a majority this November.
Ziegler, who was chief justice between 2021 and 2025, previously served as a circuit court judge in Washington County for 10 years.
“Now is the right time for me to step away to spend more time with my husband, kids and grandkids,” she said in a statement.
“I am incredibly proud that in all my elections I had support from a broad spectrum of legal, civic, law enforcement and political leaders — both Democrats and Republicans — who believed in my commitment to fairness, ethics and the rule of law,” Ziegler said.
The election to replace Ziegler is April 6, 2027.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
Two attempts to peel back the veil of secrecy over the proliferation of data centers, including one by Wisconsin Watch reporter Tom Kertscher, are being honored in this year’s Openness in Government Awards, or Opees, bestowed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council.
In advance of national Sunshine Week (sunshineweek.org), March 15-21, the council has named the winners of its 20th annual Opees. These recognize outstanding efforts to protect the state’s tradition of open government, as well as highlight some threats to it. Winners have been invited to appear at a free public event in Madison on March 19. (See WFOIC website for details.)
The winners are:
Public Openness Advocate (Popee): Vilas County District Attorney Karl Hayes. District attorneys in Wisconsin are statutorily empowered to enforce the state’s open records and open meetings laws, but in practice rarely do so. Early this year, Hayes showed how it can be done, warning officials in the town of Presque Isle that they needed to comply with a nearly year-old request from the Lakeland Times newspaper for records regarding the town’s computers. His intervention succeeded, and the records were released. Other DAs might look for occasions where they can turn the lever in favor of openness.
Citizen Openness Advocate (Copee): Midwest Environmental Advocates. This nonprofit public interest law firm last year filed two pivotal lawsuits challenging the secrecy surrounding data center projects. The first, against the city of Racine, forced the prompt release of water usage projections for Microsoft’s Mount Pleasant campus. The second lawsuit, against the state Public Service Commission (PSC), contested the “trade secret” status of energy demand data for Meta’s proposed data center in Beaver Dam; that case is pending. Kudos to MEA for insisting on the public’s right to know.
Media Openness Advocate (Mopee): The Badger Project. In recent years, this nonprofit news outlet has been requesting records from police departments around the state about internal investigations of police officers and suing when they are not provided. In 2025, it filed threesuchlawsuits — against a police department in Racine County, the state Department of Transportation and St. Croix County. All led to the release of records. The Badger Project is now appealing St. Croix County’s refusal to pay attorney fees, which could lead to the overturning of a deeply problematic state Supreme Court decision. Fingers crossed.
Open Records Scoop of the Year (Scoopee): Tie:Tom Kertscher of Wisconsin Watch; Danielle DuClos of The Cap Times. Among much other good reporting on openness issues, the work of these two journalists stands out. Kertscher pulled back the curtain on the secrecy surrounding data centers, including at least four projects in which local officials signed nondisclosure agreements with the companies. And DuClos reported on how the state Department of Public Instruction secretly investigated more than 200 Wisconsin K-12 educators accused of sexual misconduct or grooming behaviors toward students, prompting a statewide audit and legislative action.
No Friend of Openness (Nopee): Deborah Kerr, superintendent of the St. Francis School District.While there were other contenders for this award, there was also little question that Kerr would be the winner and new champion. Last June, she threatened to have a TMJ4 News reporter and camera operator arrested for wanting to film a school board meeting “because you did not give us any notice or tell us why you were here,” neither of which is required. The jaw-dropping video (see for yourself at https://tinyurl.com/zvam889a) went viral, and Kerr issued a weak apology, but her eruption is one for the ages. Credit reporter Megan Lee for her deft handling of the situation.
Whistleblower of the Year (Whoopee): John Sigwart. This former Port Washington city council member refused to keep the public in the dark about a clandestinely proposed microchip production facility, revealing that local officials had signed nondisclosure agreements. The city’s mayor retaliated by stripping Sigwart of his committee appointments, precipitating an end to his many years of public service, said an editorial in the Ozaukee Press. Sigwart died in August at age 80, but his example of courage will live on.
Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to open government. Bill Lueders is the group’s president.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments Wednesday in a case that highlights how judges can apply different interpretations of the law and constitution to suit their ideological viewpoints.
The case resulted from disagreements between the Republican-led Legislature and Attorney General Josh Kaul following the 2018 lame-duck session that limited the powers of the incoming Democratic administration.
The lawsuit, which the Legislature filed in 2021 when there was a conservative majority on the state Supreme Court, focuses on who has oversight of the dollars the state receives from legal settlements. The Legislature argues the 2018 law requires the attorney general to put money from a financial settlement in the general fund, which state lawmakers control. Kaul argues that he can put settlement funds in accounts that the Department of Justice oversees and still comply with the law.
In December 2024, the 2nd District Court of Appeals in a 2-1 ruling reversed part of a circuit court decision that said Kaul could continue to direct settlement dollars into DOJ-controlled accounts.
The Appeals Court opinion was written by Judge Maria Lazar, a conservative who is running for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April against liberal Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor. Lazar ruled the language in the 2018 law aligns with the Legislature’s arguments that settlement dollars belong in the general fund.
“Despite the legislation expressly designed to bring all settlement funds under legislative control and despite the simple and plain language of that legislation, the Attorney General has continued to act precisely in the manner which the Legislature sought to end,” Lazar wrote.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul speaks during a press conference, April 2, 2025, at the Risser Justice Center in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
But in a dissent, retiring Appeals Court Judge Lisa Neubauer, the only liberal on the Waukesha-based District 2 Court of Appeals, criticized Lazar for basing her decision on what the Legislature intended, rather than a strict reading of various clauses in the law that may give the attorney general wiggle room.
The oral arguments this week follow a series of decisions in recent years on lawsuits challenging the separation of powers between the Legislature and the executive branch. In June, the court unanimously struck down a portion of the 2018-era lame-duck laws that required the attorney general to receive approval from the Legislature’s budget-writing committee to settle most civil cases. For the 4-3 divided liberal-majority court, the rulings in these cases have shown agreement among the justices over the need for clear boundaries between the core powers of the branches of government, legal experts said.
Where this latest lawsuit differs is the debate seems focused more on the language of the law than the separation of powers, said Chad Oldfather, a professor at the Marquette University Law School. Typically the conservative approach to statutory interpretation has been to focus on the basic meaning of the law while the liberal approach has been to examine the law’s intent. That has been the opposite in this case, Oldfather said.
“The advocates are kind of flipping a little bit the usual ideology of the statutory interpretation approach,” Oldfather said. “And all that’s going on while it’s clear that there are some people on the court who want to fundamentally shift the way the court does statutory interpretation. So there’s a real interesting mix of issues going on in this case.”
The law in question has been wrapped up in a yearslong debate over separation of powers that has made its way to justices in recent years, said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. In many of those cases, the Supreme Court opinions have shown the justices interested in balanced branches of government.
“There seems to be an inclination to reinstate greater separation of powers between the branches and preserve the important roles of various actors, whether that’s the attorney general or the governor or the Legislature,” Godar said.
For example, in a 6-1 decision in 2024, with Justice Annette Ziegler dissenting, the court ruled the Legislature’s Republican-led budget-writing committee could not block spending by the Department of Natural Resources for the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund.
“While the legislature’s motivation for overseeing the public fisc may be well-intentioned, fundamentally, the legislature may not execute the law,” Justice Rebecca Bradley, a member of the conservative bloc, wrote in the majority opinion. “The people gave the executive alone this power.”
In the 7-0 decision last June on the Legislature’s approval of the attorney general’s civil case settlements, Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote that the constitution does not give lawmakers the ability to execute the law when there are financial decisions.
“If the Legislature has a constitutional interest in the execution of the laws every time an executive action involves money, there would be virtually no area where the Legislature could not insert itself into the execution of the law,” Hagedorn wrote.
There are still areas of disagreement among the court in these types of cases. Last July, the court reached a 4-3 decision in a lawsuit between Gov. Tony Evers and the Legislature, which determined 2018 lame-duck legislation that gave a legislative committee the ability to delay rules and policy changes from executive agencies was unconstitutional.
In that case, the court’s four liberal justices were in the majority. Hagedorn wrote an opinion both concurring and dissenting with the majority’s decision, while Bradley and Ziegler dissented.
“The majority has created a grave constitutional imbalance by strictly construing, and thus confining, the constitutional powers of the legislative branch while not doing the same when it comes to the power of the executive branch,” Ziegler wrote.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
As a teenager, Ryan White learned to harvest manoomin from his father and grandfather on the White Earth Reservation.
The Minnesota lakes are surrounded by towering pines, the shallows hidden by tall grass, where the sacred wild rice grows. Every fall, he rows out on one of these pristine lakes, some of which ban motor boats during harvest season to keep the water pollution-free and the wild rice beds undisturbed.
Among the tall grass, White fills his canoe with the grain that’s part of the Ojibwe creation story.
“Most ricers start out as polers, and you just push them around,” he said. “As you gain experience, you’ll kind of figure out where the riper rice is, where the thicker rice is, and just get to know the bed and know the lake.”
But White, a citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and the director of advancement and public affairs at Leech Lake Tribal College, also knows to avoid harvesting from a certain part of the lake — Pike Bay Channel.
The channel abuts an active Superfund site that is part of a federal government cleanup program for some of the most polluted areas in the country. The site sits between State Highway 371 and Pike Bay, a 4,700-acre lake just outside the city of Cass Lake. Groundwater pollution stretches east beneath the channel and is migrating to the surface. And recent testing shows that the groundwater pollution is spreading south to Fox Creek, which flows into Pike Bay.
It’s putting wild rice harvesting — and Ojibwe traditions — in further jeopardy. And if contamination spreads, it could become a problem for communities downstream. Pike Bay and Cass Lake, the 15,000-acre body of water that gives the city its name, are part of a chain of lakes in Minnesota that form the headwaters of the Mississippi River.
The Environmental Protection Agency has been working to clean up the hazardous waste contamination in Cass Lake for more than 40 years. The primary solution is a water treatment plant that takes groundwater from multiple wells on the site, filters out the toxic pollutants and pumps the treated water into Pike Bay Channel, which connects Pike Bay and Cass Lake.
The system is meant to clean the contaminated groundwater and prevent its spread.
“It’s failing in both respects,” Eric Krumm, the Leech Lake band’s Superfund coordinator, told Buffalo’s Fire.
From 1957 to 1985, the St. Regis Paper Company operated a wood preserving facility in Cass Lake. During that time, it used the land as a dumping ground for its waste.
Workers placed wood soaked in hazardous preservatives next to homes, filling them with the smell of tar and mothballs. They burned waste products and discharged about 500 gallons of sludge and wastewater per day into onsite holding ponds, storm drains and the city dump.
The main chemicals of concern are creosote, a tar-like byproduct of burning coal or wood, and pentachlorophenol, a manufactured chemical that the EPA is phasing out and will ban by 2027. Both substances are considered potential carcinogens by the EPA.
When the facility was active, the community was directly exposed to these chemicals at a swimming hole dubbed “Rainbow Pond” because of the iridescent sheen on the water from creosote runoff. In the neighborhood next to the facility, residents breathed in toxic fumes from the burning of the facility’s waste product, and contaminated soil and dust were tracked into homes.
The EPA designated the 163-acre facility as a Superfund site in 1984 and placed it on the National Priorities List. A year later, the St. Regis Paper Company stopped operations. Residents were bought out of their homes. Businesses closed. And 42,000 cubic yards of contaminated sludge and soil were excavated and buried in a lined containment vault a quarter mile from downtown.
The South Side neighborhood of Cass Lake is now a vacant field called “the great expanse,” surrounded by short, stunted pines. It serves as a reminder of the paper company’s pollution.
A ‘stable’ situation … or ‘stagnant’
The cleanup plan is now led by International Paper Co., a paper manufacturer headquartered in Tennessee, which acquired St. Regis and assumed cleanup in 2000. The EPA oversees cleanup, with the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe Division of Resource Management and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency providing feedback.
The groundwater treatment plan has remained unchanged since water extraction wells and the on-site water treatment facility were constructed in 1987, but the federal government and the band differ on its effectiveness
The EPA’s 2025 Five-Year Review showed decreasing contamination at the core of the plume, but it also showed unsafe pentachlorophenol levels east of the plume near Pike Bay Channel and south near Fox Creek. Of 89 monitoring locations on the site, 58 had pentachlorophenol levels that exceeded the band’s standards, greater than 0.02 parts per billion (ppb), and 36 exceeded EPA standards, greater than 1 ppb.
The EPA calls these levels “stable.” Krumm calls them “stagnant.”
Poles covered in toxic wood preservatives by the St. Regis Paper Co. around 50 years ago lie discarded in Fox Creek Valley near the Leech Lake Division of Resource Management facility, Cass Lake, Minnesota, Oct. 20, 2025. (Gabrielle Nelson / Buffalo’s Fire)
The treatment plant was supposed to reduce the groundwater plume and render it effectively contained by 2011. Yet, the treatment plant is still required today — 40 years later — to keep the plume in check. And according to the EPA’s 2025 report, the groundwater “cleanup timelines could extend well beyond 2051 if the system were to remain operating as-is.”
Groundwater testing by the Leech Lake Band shows that the plume has spread beyond the extraction boundaries and beneath Pike Bay Channel.
The EPA said this doesn’t necessarily mean that the plume is growing. Rather, as the agency does more testing, “the shape of the plume is changed to reflect that new data.”
There are also fears other chemicals may be present.
While the plant removes most contaminants, Krumm said, treated water “regularly exceeds” healthy limits of dioxins. This group of highly toxic chemical compounds is believed to have been introduced to the soil and waters of Cass Lake by workers burning waste and wood at the St. Regis facility in the ’80s.
Limits placed on traditional foods
Brenda Eskenazi, a University of California Berkeley public health professor who studies dioxin exposure, told Buffalo’s Fire that dioxin is a potent carcinogen that interferes with hormones and can cause fertility and developmental problems.
“It has a very, very, very long half-life,” she said, which “means it hangs out in the body and in the environment for very long periods of time.”
In 2001, the EPA conducted testing on white fish in Cass Lake, which showed dioxin levels in some was 10 times higher than those in nearby lakes. That has fed concerns that community members may be taking in chemicals indirectly through their food sources, including white fish and wild rice, which are staples of the Ojibwe diet.
The Leech Lake Band advises tribal members to remove as much fat, where dioxin accumulates, from Pike Bay and Cass Lake fish, while recommending that pregnant women and children avoid eating them altogether. But as stated in the band’s 2024 report, “consumption advisories for Treaty fish are like telling average Americans to limit meat or bread consumption.”
Limits are also placed on wild rice. Though the band has not issued a consumption guide for the grain, out of the thousands of pounds of wild rice it buys from tribal members each year for processing, Krumm said none are from Pike Bay Channel.
Eric Krumm, Superfund coordinator for the Leech Lake Division of Resource Management, stands next to monitoring wells at Fox Creek Valley, Cass Lake, Minnesota, on Oct. 20, 2025. (Gabrielle Nelson / Buffalo’s Fire)
Brandy Toft, environmental director for the band’s Division of Resource Management, told Buffalo’s Fire that there aren’t enough extraction wells to capture the contaminated groundwater and prevent its spread.
Standing among the tall grass at Fox Creek next to EPA monitoring wells, she said the groundwater is like a wave pool, and the contamination is like dye dropped into it. The extraction wells are like straws trying to suck all the dye out of the pool, but there just aren’t enough straws, she said.
“Especially in a subsistence Indigenous community that has every right, literally every right, to hunt, fish, gather in these areas or surrounding areas without fear or without exclusion from those zones because of contamination,” she said.
International Paper has not included plans to update the water treatment plant, beyond replacing filters, in its most recent remediation report. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Disrupting a way of life
Back at the Leech Lake Reservation, White harvests wild rice every year with his sons, 16-year-old Debwe and 14-year-old Arrow — a tradition he is passing down.
Eight years ago, he took his sons ricing for the first time. White said they were just “moseying along,” collecting rice here and there, when Arrow saw another little boy with more rice in his boat than him. Competitive, Arrow looked at his dad with excitement, urging him to hurry up.
Arrow’s love of ricing came “naturally,” said White. “He had just seen it in our people and how much we care about that rice. Even at a very young age, you know that it’s important.”
Minnesota Ojibwe tribes, including Leech Lake, harvest wild rice in beds along the St. Louis River and in shallow lakes that make up the headwaters of the Mississippi River — and have been for centuries. Ojibwe ancestors were sent to the region by a prophecy that told them to travel west from the East Coast until they found the “food that grows on water.”
“It’s called the sacred berry, or the good berry,” said White. “It’s food, but also, it’s medicine. It’s who we are.”
He said wild rice has also provided for the Ojibwe. Today, many tribal members rely on a steady wild rice harvest to supplement their income in the fall.
Bins containing hazardous waste sit at the edge of “the vault,” which holds 42,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and sludge from the St. Regis Paper Co. Superfund site, Cass Lake, Minnesota, Oct. 20, 2025. (Gabrielle Nelson / Buffalo’s Fire)
“There’s times where I had to use my income from wild rice to pretty much pay the bills, keep a roof over my head and keep the lights on,” said White.
But they have been limiting where they harvest since Pike Bay Channel is off-limits to tribal members.
“That’s what may happen in the future for the entire Pike Bay and the surrounding waterways,” said White, “and all that connects to the Mississippi River. And we’re pumping that directly into the lake.”
Community impact
So, why can’t Leech Lake tribal members just fish and harvest wild rice at a different lake?
Harvest practices are deeply tied to place and identity for Native communities, Anton Treuer, a Leech Lake citizen and a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, told Buffalo’s Fire.
“Being a Leech Lake Ojibwe person is connected to harvesting fish at Leech Lake,” he said. “The argument that someone should just pack up their bags and drive to Lake of the Woods and harvest a walleye that doesn’t hurt them is silly for a variety of reasons.”
The St. Regis Paper Co. hasn’t used Cass Lake as its dumping ground for more than 40 years, but Treuer said it’s still in the consciousness of tribal members today. He explains it as “an icky feeling.” Is it safe to drink tap water? Is it safe to go swimming in Cass Lake?
“It never feels as safe as it should be, and people intentionally avoid that space to the degree that they reasonably can,” he said, which has an “immediate impact on people’s ability and willingness to participate in certain cultural practices.”
On top of limiting where tribal members can practice subsistence fishing and harvesting, the Superfund site also impacts ceremonies, said Treuer, who lives on the reservation near Cass Lake. Cedar, commonly burned in ceremonies, must be harvested out of town, he said, and the Superfund site occupies the area where first-kill ceremonies, a rite of passage for young Native hunters, were traditionally held.
Toft, from the band’s Division of Resource Management, called the Superfund a “black cloud over Cass Lake.”
“It just keeps hanging there,” she said.
The fight to preserve Ojibwe culture
But community members are making efforts to promote Ojibwe culture and language on the reservation.
Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig, a K-12 school, serves more than 200 students of various tribal backgrounds. Operated by the band, the school is located 15 miles from the town of Cass Lake, teaches kids the Ojibwe language and encourages cultural engagement. The school holds a Culture Camp each year where students take language classes, learn traditional crafts like drum making and beading, and take part in traditional Ojibwe pastimes.
Grass grows in the shallow waters of Leech Lake near Cass Lake, Minnesota, Oct. 20, 2025. (Gabrielle Nelson / Buffalo’s Fire)
The Leech Lake Tribal College also offers a course on nationhood and manoomin, taught by Leech Lake elder Elaine Fleming with help from White.
“When we’re on the water, I’ll be the one out there showing them how to rice — how to use the pole, how to knock, how to knock in a good way,” he said.
Treuer said other tribal initiatives are helping the band reclaim their land, language and culture. Around Cass Lake, signage is printed in both Ojibwe and English. And in June 2024, more than 11,000 acres of ancestral land, previously managed by the Chippewa National Forest, was returned to the band.
“The Ojibwe at Leech Lake, and really everywhere, we’re in for the fight of our lives,” said Treuer, “to keep our language alive and to keep our cultural practices vibrant.”
Even if part of the reservation hadn’t been turned into a Superfund site, he said, the Ojibwe community would still be building back their culture from other impacts of colonization, including residential boarding schools and the mass slaughter of buffalo.
While 40 years of Superfund cleanup has accelerated those impacts, Toft said, in the centuries of Ojibwe history, a few decades aren’t deterring the community from fighting for their land and culture.
“We think differently,” she said, “and we’re in for the long haul.”
Credibility is central to the criminal justice system.
Who is telling the truth? Who do jurors and judges believe?
A year ago, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, TMJ4 News and Wisconsin Watch published the Milwaukee County district attorney’s list of law enforcement officers with integrity violations, allegations of dishonesty or bias, and past criminal charges.
It was the first time the full list had been made public.
Prosecutors must share information about witness credibility, including that of police officers, with defense attorneys. Then the attorneys decide if they want to try to raise those credibility concerns in court.
Often called the “Brady/Giglio list” because of landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases, the list is meant to help ensure people get a fair trial and prevent wrongful convictions.
Since the list was published last year, local defense attorneys say they’ve noticed prosecutors giving more frequent Brady notifications. But they argue that Milwaukee County’s criteria of what gets an officer on the list remains too narrow – excluding officers who should qualify – and that there is still too much inconsistency among county prosecutors about when and how they share Brady material.
District Attorney Kent Lovern said his office has always fulfilled its legal and ethical obligations, but he acknowledged making changes to improve the list’s accuracy. The most significant was appointing two executive staff members to help maintain the list.
Some examples: an officer wrongly described as involved in a custody death, another listed for a criminal case that had been expunged, and others listed with the wrong agency. A handful of officers were deceased.
A new list, released in October 2025, did not have those kinds of problems.
“We put more eyes on the list that were beyond my two eyes,” Lovern said, adding: “We think that’s enhanced, at least, the information, making it as current as possible.”
In the last year, the District Attorney’s Office added 13 officers and removed two. Most of those officers were added because of internal, not criminal, investigations, and about half remain employed with their agency, according to public records.
For Caitlin Firer, a defense attorney, the public list has served as a backstop.
“If I’m watching a body camera and it’s striking me as something’s not right, I will run that officer’s name on the Brady list,” she told TMJ4 News, later adding: “It’s a resource now where we see those names, and we know they’re on the Brady list.”
Last year, the city’s largest police union, the Milwaukee Police Association, criticized the district attorney’s decision to release the list and news organizations’ decision to publish it. Others in policing praised the transparency.
“We’re given so much more credibility and respect when we take the stand as opposed to the average citizen,” said David Thomas, a Maryland-based policing consultant and expert.
The Brady list, he said, “goes to the very question of integrity.”
District attorney’s office using same strict criteria to add officers to the list
What has not changed is the strict criteria used to get an officer on the list.
Officers are added only if they have a pending criminal charge, a past conviction or an internal investigation “that brings into question the officer’s integrity.”
Experts told the Journal Sentinel last year the policy appeared improperly narrow and omitted other potential Brady material, including when a judge finds an officer not credible.
Lovern stood by that practice. His office still does not track those judicial decisions, commonly known as adverse credibility rulings.
“Credibility determinations, which are frequently made by courts, don’t constitute judgments of untruthfulness,” he said in a recent interview.
When prosecutors are weighing whether to call an officer to testify, it makes sense to distinguish between overt dishonesty and credibility rulings, said Rachel Moran, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, in an interview last month.
But an officer who was found not credible in court still belongs on the Brady list, she said.
“An officer who has misstated information in his police report, that’s exculpatory regardless of whether the officer intended to do it,” Moran said.
With long internal investigations, it can be years before an officer lands on the list
If an officer is referred to prosecutors for a potential criminal charge, he or she is placed on the Brady list immediately.
But when it comes to internal investigations, police departments often notify prosecutors at the end of the process, if an officer is found to have broken any department rules.
That can leave a gap.
Milwaukee police officer Eian West was added to the list in 2025, two years after he and three other officers came under investigation for their response to two domestic violence calls days apart that involved the same couple.
The officers were accused of failing to make mandatory arrests or file prompt reports, despite the woman saying the man had threatened her with a gun and tried to set her on fire, according to department records.
West and another officer went to the second call, on April 11, 2023, after two witnesses reported a man beating a woman in a front yard. The officers called her an ambulance.
Later that day, the woman woke up in the hospital and called Police District 4, prompting a sergeant to send two different officers to reinterview the woman and file a report.
Two days after that, the woman had a miscarriage.
Internal affairs asked West why he waited until his next shift, on April 12, after the other officers had been dispatched, to write his report. West’s report also listed the woman as the suspect and did not document the fact that she lived with the man, which is one of the elements of domestic violence, according to a summary from internal affairs.
West maintained he “was not trying to cover up that he was sent to a battery (domestic violence) and did not file it,” police records show.
Still, the officer agreed that he had violated the core value of integrity because he was not completely honest and accurate about all relevant facts in the case, the records say.
The domestic violence calls took place in April 2023. Internal affairs interviewed West that July. But the internal investigation did not end until 2025, and only after that was West added to the Brady list.
During those two years, prosecutors did not know his integrity was under question in an investigation that ultimately resulted in a 20-day suspension.
Since prosecutors did not know, they could not disclose it to defense attorneys.
Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman acknowledged it sometimes takes years to complete internal investigations, depending on the complexity.
“We are not trying to delay for delay’s sake,” Norman said in an interview. “It is unfortunate that we have a number of investigations on our plate.”
More urgent internal investigations, such as police shootings, can take priority, and the department must respect the officers’ due process and collective bargaining rights, the chief said.
Angel Johnson, a regional attorney manager with the State Public Defenders Office in Milwaukee, said that the office’s clients also have rights.
“If there’s an officer that has credibility issues and they’re going to testify in a proceeding against my client, (my clients) have the same right to due process,” she said.
Why some officers were removed from the Brady list
The Brady list is fluid.
As officers come on, others come off.
Kenton Burtch and Elric Erving, both of the Milwaukee Police Department, were removed in the last year.
Erving was investigated for disorderly conduct in 2019. No criminal charges were filed, and his name came off the list, Lovern said.
Burtch was accused of improperly filing his time card and claiming an estimated $1,700 he was not owed. He was demoted from sergeant and suspended for six days.
He appealed to the city’s Fire and Police Commission, which found the situation was a mistake related to the officer’s remote work arrangement and confusion over how to handle it. The commission overturned his discipline, finding “no indication or evidence of intentional misconduct,” and restored his rank.
Because of that, Lovern said, his name came off the list.
In the past, Lovern has removed officers who complete deferred prosecution agreements or who win appeals to get their jobs back.
Some defense attorneys have argued that officers should only rarely, if ever, come off the Brady list.
“Once you’re placed on the Brady list, if you continue to testify in court, you should not be removed,” Johnson said.
As of September 2025, the list had 217 entries involving 190 individual officers. The district attorney’s office released the list in October in response to a public records request. Reporters filed records requests to gather more information about new individuals on the list. Some of those requests remain pending.
In the months since, the list continues to change. For example, the district attorney’s office added a Milwaukee officer recently charged with accessing sensitive license plate data for personal reasons, despite tagging the purpose of his searches as “investigation.”
It was not the first time the officer, Josue Ayala, had been accused of dishonesty on the job, with one defense attorney even telling a federal prosecutor that Ayala exaggerated so much that it seemed to be a “compulsion,” the Journal Sentinel previously reported. Ayala has since resigned.
Defense attorneys continue to rely on media reports, decisions from the city’s Fire and Police Commission and civil lawsuit judgments to identify officers with questionable credibility – and that’s a problem, Johnson said.
“It should be happening from the DA’s office, but we are still finding ourselves doing that legwork and it’s not our obligation or ethical duty to do so,” she said.
This story is part of Duty to Disclose, an investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, TMJ4 News and Wisconsin Watch. The Fund for Investigative Journalism provided financial support for this project.
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race could have spurred another bank-breaking election cycle. Instead, national super donors have kept their pocketbooks closed, and with only a month until the election, the liberal candidate appears to be sailing ahead in contributions.
Wisconsin Court of Appeals Judge Chris Taylor, the liberal candidate, has raised more than $3.8 million over the past year, compared to the $438,000 conservative candidate Maria Lazar, who is also an appellate judge, has brought in.
The low-key nature of this year’s race is a sharp reversal from the 2025 state Supreme Court contest, in which the candidate campaigns, political parties, outside interest groups and mega billionaire Elon Musk combined to spend a record $144.5 million on the contest. Brad Schimel lost to Susan Crawford, maintaining the liberal majority on the court.
But the financial landscape of the election is not a done deal, both camps say.
“We can’t take anything for granted on our side,” said Sam Roecker, a Taylor adviser. “We know that there are supporters of (Lazar’s) who have the capacity to dump a lot of money in this race, and we saw what happened last time around when tens of millions of dollars got poured in.”
And as more voters start paying attention to the race, Lazar has a “window of opportunity” in the weeks leading up to the April 7 election, Republican strategist Bill McCoshen said.
“The truth is a lot of folks on the conservative side thought that our candidate wasn’t going to have a very strong chance a month ago. Now we think she could actually win,” McCoshen said.
Without big spending, this year’s state Supreme Court campaigns aren’t breaking through to voters like they did in 2025. Just 6% of voters said they had heard a lot about the election, compared to 39% at the same time last year, according to a Marquette Law School Poll released last month.
Despite Taylor’s wide fundraising advantage and outsize TV advertising, about two-thirds of voters are undecided, the same poll found. Taylor polled 5 percentage points higher than Lazar among voters who have made a decision, narrowly outside the margin of error.
“The real point is it’s not getting through to voters, or voters haven’t tuned into it. But you know, that’s more than a six to one greater awareness a year ago than it is today,” said Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll. “I’m not saying that we’ll go into election day without anybody having heard anything, but it was an earlier campaign last year and with more resources behind it.”
Generally, liberal candidates have an advantage in spring judicial elections, Franklin said. College graduates and older voters, who have shifted leftward over the past several decades, are the primary voting blocs in spring court elections.
The stakes are different this cycle. The court’s liberal majority is secure. The winner will replace retiring conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley. Still, losing this race would make it even harder for conservatives to regain power on the state’s high court. If they lose this year, they would have to retain the seats held by conservatives Annette Ziegler next year and Brian Hagedorn in 2029 and then flip seats held by liberals Rebecca Dallet and Jill Karofsky in 2028 and 2030.
“Last year’s was to determine which ideological faction will have control of a majority of the court, and this year’s won’t change that. This year’s is to replace a conservative on a court that leans liberal already,” said Jeff Mandell, the co-founder of the progressive organization Law Forward.
Janine Geske. a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, said that liberal voters have been galvanized to turn out for judicial elections by hot-button national issues like abortion and gerrymandering that have taken center stage in the state’s highest court.
“Those issues became really the issues on the ballot versus the candidates themselves. As a result, I think we had more progressive candidates,” Geske said.
It’s a playbook that was adopted by Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz, who won Wisconsin’s high-profile race in 2023 on a platform of sharing her “values” regarding political issues that were likely to come before the court.
Lazar just might find success with that strategy, too, McCoshen said.
“Judge Lazar is doing a better job of at least tipping her hat to what her conservative leanings may be so that voters have a better understanding of what they’re voting for,” McCoshen said.
This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.
Reading Time: 6minutesClick here to read highlights from the story
After a federal appeals board barred most detained immigrants from seeking bond, court filings challenging their confinement have surged in Wisconsin and nationwide.
Over the past six months, dozens of immigrants held in Wisconsin jails awaiting deportation have asked federal judges to review the legality of their detention — a legal strategy rarely used here in recent years. Judges have ruled in their favor in more than half the cases.
Two forces are driving the influx: an ICE enforcement surge in neighboring Minnesota and a ruling that makes nearly all unauthorized immigrants in ICE custody ineligible for bond.
A federal judge in California has since invalidated that bond restriction everywhere except Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi — states in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the rule. Immigration attorneys are now working to keep clients’ cases in Midwestern courts and out of the South, home to some of ICE’s largest detention facilities.
Update: March 9, 2026:
A panel of judges in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday paused a federal judge’s February order overturning the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy in most of the country.
The Trump administration is appealing Central District of California Judge Sunshine Sykes’ order, and the pause applies while the appeal is pending. Multiple federal appellate courts are considering challenges to the administration’s policy, which bars detained immigrants from seeking bond; the 7th Circuit, which includes Wisconsin, heard arguments in a related case last month.
Wisconsin immigration attorneys who hurried to file bond motions for their detained clients last month are now in a holding pattern.
Original story, March 6, 2026
Over the past six months, dozens of immigrants held in Wisconsin jails awaiting deportation have challenged their detention in federal court. Judges ruled in their favor in more than half the cases, pushing back on new federal immigration enforcement practices.
Wisconsin’s federal courts have not seen comparable volumes of immigration-related habeas corpus petitions, which challenge the legality of a person’s detention, in at least a decade. More than a third of the petitions heard in Wisconsin since 2016 were filed in the past six months.
Two forces are driving the influx: the Trump administration’s effort to halt bond for virtually all detainees and its enforcement surge in neighboring Minnesota.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Board of Immigration Appeals ruled last September that all unauthorized immigrants in ICE custody are ineligible for bond, meaning they must remain in custody while their case plays out.
The ruling reversed a long-standing practice that previously enabled many immigrants to continue their cases while out on bond. In its wake, habeas petitions became one of few remaining paths to an exit.
Soon after the board’s ruling, the Trump administration targeted Minnesota in its immigration crackdown, deploying thousands of federal agents to patrol the Twin Cities and nearby rural communities. The White House claimed in early February that the campaign resulted in the arrests of more than 4,000 immigrants.
Since January 2025, ICE has transferred at least 108 immigrants from Minnesota to the Douglas County jail in Superior, Wisconsin. The sheriff’s office contracts with ICE for detainee housing, as do three other Wisconsin counties.
ICE transferred at least 108 immigrant detainees from Minneapolis to the Douglas County Jail in Superior, Wisconsin, between January and October 2025
Source: Wisconsin Watch data analysis
At least 15 immigrants held in Douglas County have filed habeas petitions in Wisconsin’s Western District Court since September 2025. Judges have thus far sided with immigrants four times, including two Ecuadorian men arrested in a raid on a construction site in a Minneapolis suburb. Five of the cases remain pending.
Those detained in the Douglas County jail made up two-thirds of the Western District’s immigration-related habeas petitions between September 2025 and February 2026.
While arrest locations were not available for every case, available data indicates that 60% of immigrants who passed through the Douglas County jail between January and October 2025 were arrested in Minnesota.
The Madison-based court had not previously handled an immigration-related habeas case in over a decade.
Habeas petitions in the recent past were a “hodgepodge,” said Milwaukee immigration attorney Benjamin Crouse, and were often dismissed or denied by judges in Wisconsin’s Eastern District.
Prior to last September, many habeas petitions challenged the legality of detaining immigrants for months at a time without a clear end date. A Colombian man transferred into ICE custody after a drug arrest in 2014 filed a habeas petition after spending more than 20 months at the Dodge County Detention Facility in Juneau, arguing his detention had stretched beyond reasonable time limits.
Judge William Griesbach denied the man’s petition in 2016. Griesbach has ruled on 17 habeas petitions in the past decade, granting only one: a 2018 petition filed by a Mexican asylum seeker who spent more than two and a half years in the Kenosha County Detention Center without a bond hearing.
In some cases, Griesbach and other federal judges had no choice but to deny or dismiss habeas petitions: In at least 10 cases filed in Wisconsin’s Eastern District Court since 2016, federal immigration officials deported immigrants before the court could fully consider their petitions.
Nearly as many immigrants left ICE custody through other routes, including community supervision and asylum, before a judge could rule on their habeas petitions.
Despite the influx of new cases in the Western District, the Eastern District has still heard roughly two-thirds of the immigration-related habeas petitions filed since September.
Most federal district court judges who have considered habeas petitions since September have ruled against the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision prohibiting bond hearings for detained immigrants.
Wisconsin’s Eastern District judges are split. Griesbach called the board’s position “persuasive” in December, rejecting a habeas petition filed by a Venezuelan man arrested alongside his wife during a routine check-in at the Department of Homeland Security’s downtown Milwaukee office earlier that year. That man, Diego Ugarte-Arenas, left ICE custody after receiving asylum in January.
Judge Brett Ludwig also sided with the Trump administration’s position on detaining immigrants without bond. Trump appointed Ludwig to the Eastern District bench in 2020; then-President George W. Bush appointed Griesbach to the court in 2002.
Eastern District judges Byron Conway, a Biden appointee, and Lynn Adelman, a Clinton appointee, have both criticized the board’s ruling. “Courts have nearly universally rejected the conclusion of the Board,” Conway wrote in an October order granting the habeas petition of a Nicaraguan man arrested during an incidental run-in with ICE agents.
Western District judges have uniformly ruled against the Board of Immigration Appeals’ bond decisions.
Keeping cases in courts like Wisconsin’s Western District is a high priority for attorneys representing detained immigrants.
“It’s less about jurisdictions where you’re successful and more about avoiding jurisdictions where it’s more problematic,” said St. Paul immigration attorney Solomon Steen, who has represented two clients detained in the Douglas County jail.
When a client arrested in Minnesota lands in a Wisconsin jail, Steen said, attorneys can find them within “hours or days.” Tracking clients’ locations becomes tougher once they are transferred to larger detention facilities elsewhere, he added.
With thousands of immigrants now bouncing between distant detention centers, Steen said many face pressure to give up on their legal cases. “You won’t know if you’ll be able to contact a lawyer if you get detained,” he said. “So wouldn’t it be easier to just take a voluntary departure or take a removal order in immigration court just so that you will know where you are and what’s happening?”
Steen and other attorneys are now working to keep clients’ cases in Midwestern courts — and out of the 5th Circuit’s jurisdiction — even when their whereabouts are unclear, preserving their chances of a successful habeas petition.
Even before the Board of Immigration Appeals blocked most detainees from seeking bond, voluntary departures — wherein an immigrant leaves the U.S. to avoid a deportation on their record — increased 21-fold between January and September of last year.
Meanwhile, an order from a federal district court judge in California has opened the door for many of Wisconsin’s current ICE detainees to request bond for the first time in months.
Judge Sunshine Sykes of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California initially ruled in November that the Department of Homeland Security’s practice of denying bond hearings to most immigrant detainees ran afoul of federal law.
DHS didn’t budge, maintaining that the Board of Immigration Appeals’ rulemaking authority takes precedence over a ruling in federal district court. Chief Immigration Court Judge Teresa Riley, a Department of Justice employee, later directed judges in immigration courts nationwide to continue denying detained immigrants’ requests for bond hearings.
Sykes doubled down last week, rebuking DHS for ignoring her earlier order.
“It is not the executive department’s province and duty to say what the law is,” she wrote.
Sykes vacated Board of Immigration Appeals bond rules in all states outside of the 5th Circuit, which still leaves most immigrants in ICE’s largest detention centers unable to request bond hearings.
Crouse recently observed one Chicago immigration court judge notify immigrants about Sykes’ latest order.
“They’re taking this a little more seriously now, but we still don’t know exactly what this looks like,” he said. He and other Milwaukee-area immigration attorneys are again filing bond motions for their clients. “We’re getting hearings,” he added.
Aissa Olivarez, an attorney with the Community Immigration Law Center in Madison, confirmed that immigrants detained in Dodge County are receiving notice that they are eligible for bond. So far, she said, there is no indication federal immigration authorities are rushing to move Wisconsin detainees to holding facilities farther south.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
The Wisconsin Ethics Commission confirmed in an email that online records reach back to 2008, though Hoffman only began donating to the state party in 2019. Wisconsin passed legislation in 2015 that allowed unlimited contributions to state parties.
State online campaign finance records show Hoffman’s name twice; he has profiles under different addresses.
Hoffman’s combined donations place him far above the second-highest donor, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, whose donations total about $5.9 million.
Hoffman’s name appeared hundreds of times in the latest release of files related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Hoffman apologized in 2019 for his role in rehabbing Epstein’s image.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
If we care about addressing alcohol addiction in Wisconsin, we must start thinking about it as a public health issue. Alcohol use is deeply embedded in Wisconsin’s history and has maintained its prevalence through the socialization and normalization of drinking culture.
Rather than focusing on an individual’s capacity to remain sober in a state known for its beer-battered you-name-its, pub crawls, wine walks, and pedal taverns, we need to shift our focus toward making our communities more welcoming spaces for sobriety.
To consider something a public health issue, it must pose a physical or mental health risk to populations rather than just individuals.
Alcohol use is a highly socialized activity and has been embraced by Wisconsin since its inception, due largely to its population of German immigrants in the 1800s. German-founded breweries laid the economic groundwork in Wisconsin’s early years, supporting farmers, employing families, fostering community and generating profit. With a culture that has prospered from the industrial, financial and social aspects of brewing throughout the years, it is no wonder that Wisconsin carries on this tradition.
In a state where drinking runs generations-deep, so do the health effects, and addressing a widespread issue calls for widespread changes.
Alcohol addiction must be considered a community risk rather than an individual’s shortcoming. The majority of Wisconsinites, more than six in 10 adults, reported consuming alcohol within the past month, and nearly 20% reported binge drinking. In 2024, alcohol-related hospitalizations in Wisconsin reached their highest number since 2015. Reports from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that more than 3,450 Wisconsinites die from excessive drinking each year.
Wisconsin is the only U.S. state in which every county has reported engaging in excessive alcohol consumption among at least 23% of its adult population. We are also home to 10 out of 20 of the “drunkest cities in America” as reported by 24/7 Wall St.last year.
The average number of alcoholic beverages consumed throughout Wisconsin has decreased in recent years, but people are consuming more ethanol over the same time span. This means people are tending to consume drinks with higher alcohol content. As the data illustrates, this is a statewide concern, not a private matter.
We can make our communities easier places to be sober, not only in the interest of addiction recovery, but for the sake of promoting community well-being. On a structural level, this looks like advocating for greater access to recovery facilities and services. It also looks like supporting and sustaining local third spaces that are sober-friendly.
Want to be part of the solution? Then consider hosting alcohol-free gatherings, socializing at a café or a mocktail lounge and welcoming conversations about your choice to do so. Setting the bar starts with us, and this time, it’s not a bar with alcohol.
Kayla Doege is a graduate student at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater’s Master of Social Work program. She lives in Neosho and has spent five years working in youth mental health and substance use intervention.
Guest commentaries reflect the views of their authors and are independent of the nonpartisan, in-depth reporting produced by Wisconsin Watch’s newsroom staff. Want to join the Wisconversion? See our guidelines for submissions.
Reading Time: 7minutesClick here to read highlights from the story
The federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit rewards companies for hiring people who often struggle to get jobs.
Lawmakers are currently in the process of reauthorizing the $2 billion tax credit, which has been around since 1996.
Proponents of it argue that it helps people get jobs and get off government assistance.
However, a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Southern California found that the credit fails to increase hiring or pay for workers.
Furthermore, large businesses disproportionately use it.
A new study of Wisconsin data finds what some researchers and policy wonks have long suspected: The $2 billion Work Opportunity Tax Credit doesn’t work.
Congress created the credit in 1996 as it overhauled the country’s welfare system. It rewards companies for hiring people who often struggle to get jobs, including some people who receive government aid, have disabilities or felony convictions or have been out of work for a long time. Employers can typically claim up to 40% of the wages paid to qualifying workers, with a maximum credit of $2,400.
The credit subsidizes around 4% of all new hires, according to 2022 federal data cited in the study. Overwhelmingly, they’re low-wage, short-term jobs at large employers, including major retailers and temporary staffing agencies, researchers have found.
Researchers have wondered for decades whether the credit pays off, but most states don’t offer the kind of records that would answer that question. Wisconsin does.
Thanks to an unusual collaboration between the state government and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, researchers can track the earnings and employment status of participants in certain social safety net programs.
In a 2025 working paper, researchers from UW-Madison and the University of Southern California studied two decades of records of Wisconsinites who received food aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the most common way an employee qualifies for the tax credit. Researchers compared SNAP recipients who were eligible for the credit with similar recipients who weren’t.
Their findings were unequivocal.
“We find that these subsidies do not increase hiring or earnings among eligible groups,” the authors wrote. In fact, they said, their findings rule out even so much as a 0.2 percentage point effect on hiring.
They estimate 97% of the hiring subsidized by the tax credit would have happened anyway, a phenomenon known as “windfall wastage.” It’s possible, they wrote, that every one of the subsidized jobs falls into that category.
The companies that take advantage of the credit are disproportionately large. In Wisconsin, they found, half of the subsidies go to just 48 businesses. Nationally, they estimate the credit costs more than $2 billion a year.
“Without reform, the program will continue as a costly transfer to firms with little benefit to the populations it is meant to support,” the researchers wrote.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers wants to increase the credit, which expired in December.
In November, legislators introduced a bill to extend the credit and expand eligibility to older SNAP recipients and spouses of military service members. The legislation would increase the amount companies can receive and automatically raise the credit amount with inflation.
In a statement, co-author Rep. Lloyd Smucker, R-Pa., called the credit “a proven tool” that serves workers and employers. “WOTC is a bipartisan, commonsense approach that every Member of Congress should champion,” Smucker said.
Neither Smucker nor co-author Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., responded to a request for comment.
Troubleshooting the tax credit
So why doesn’t the Work Opportunity Tax Credit work? The authors think one important reason is that hiring managers often don’t know which job applicants qualify.
To receive the credit, employers must certify that they knew the applicant was eligible on or before the day they hired the person. Researchers surveyed 170 companies that use the credit. Less than 1 in 5 screened for eligibility on job applications. At companies that do collect this information, it might stay in the human resources office, never reaching the person who decides who to hire.
That may well be intentional, said UW-Madison economist Corina Mommaerts, one of the authors of the study. Federal and state law bars employers from considering certain factors in hiring decisions. That includes age and, in some cases, criminal record. There are ways to screen applicants without violating such laws, Mommaerts said, “but you can see why employers might still be very concerned.”
In addition, she said, some job applicants may hesitate to tell a prospective employer that they’re eligible. People with felony convictions, for example, may prefer not to draw attention to their criminal records. In the last two years, Wisconsin authorities certified the hires of just over 3,000 people with a felony conviction as qualifying for the credit.
“The concern is that there might be this stigmatizing effect,” Mommaerts said, explaining that some employers try to minimize that by asking applicants to review all the WOTC eligibility categories and indicate whether any apply to them.
Melissa Riccio, director of inclusive hiring at the national re-entry nonprofit Center for Employment Opportunities, is an expert on that stigma. It’s her job to convince employers that hiring a formerly incarcerated person may not be as risky as they imagine.
Asked about the tax credit, she said such policies won’t singlehandedly make the kind of change she’s looking for, in part because many employers may see them as more work than they’re worth.
“You would never hear any of us say that it would be a bad thing,” Riccio said. “But I don’t think that that alone is enough to move the needle in encouraging employers to make a change in their hiring practices.”
Some policy experts say the new study proves that the temporary tax credit shouldn’t come back.
Until now, there was little evidence on how well the Work Opportunity Tax Credit works, said Jen Doleac, executive vice president of criminal justice at the philanthropy Arnold Ventures, who researches strategies to reduce recidivism and help formerly incarcerated people get jobs. She and former colleague George Callas penned an October op-ed in Tax Notes calling the credit “completely ineffective.”
“The evidence is clear: The WOTC does not serve its stated purpose and is a waste of taxpayer dollars,” they wrote. “Encouraging the hiring of workers from disadvantaged groups is a worthy goal. We must devote scarce public resources to solutions that actually achieve it.”
Lobbyists hail a proven, bipartisan tool
Initially authorized for just one year, the Work Opportunity Tax Credit has stuck around far longer — in part because of a powerful lobby. Major backers include payroll processing companies, temp agencies and groups representing the hospitality and retail industries.
In 2022, a variety of industry groups seeking “solutions to the U.S. labor shortage” joined forces to form the Critical Labor Coalition. One of the coalition’s top priorities: lobbying for WOTC. The group spent $60,000 on lobbying last year, according to watchdog Open Secrets.
“Members of the Critical Labor Coalition — representing restaurants, retail, hotel and lodging, construction, food manufacturing, and other sectors — consistently affirm that strengthening and reauthorizing WOTC is essential both to their industries and to addressing the nation’s ongoing labor shortage,” Critical Labor Coalition Executive Director Misty Chally said in an email.
Asked about the new Wisconsin study, Chally questioned its “narrow” focus on SNAP recipients. She said her group places “greater confidence” in a 2025 study commissioned by multinational talent management company Allegis Group. The authors of that study estimate renewing WOTC would subsidize 131,000 jobs, but they note it’s not clear how many of those jobs would have existed regardless.
“The exact impact of WOTC on net new job creation is uncertain … While some studies find that WOTC leads to meaningful employment gains among eligible groups, a significant share of the cost may stem from subsidizing hires that would have occurred anyway,” Allegis Group wrote. For their analysis, they assume more than 85% of those jobs would have existed without the credit.
Why has WOTC stuck around?
Sarah Hamersma has been worried about WOTC for more than 20 years.
In the early 2000s, she was an economics graduate student at UW-Madison interested in programs designed to reduce poverty and help people work. She wanted to study the much larger Earned Income Tax Credit. Her adviser suggested she instead examine the smaller, newer and unstudied Work Opportunity Tax Credit.
At the time, the credit was just 4 years old and limited to people who received cash welfare assistance. She asked state officials for access to the data. What she found matched what Mommaerts and her colleagues found decades later. Unlike the Earned Income Tax Credit, which gives money directly to low-income workers — and which studies show increases employment and boosts incomes — this tax credit seemed to just boost employers’ bottom lines.
“They’re not passing it along to the workers in the form of higher wages. They’re just sort of being like, ‘Awesome, I got more money,’” Hamersma said.
She wanted to do similar analyses on other places, but she couldn’t find any other states willing to share their data. Now an economist at Syracuse University, she researches programs like Medicaid and SNAP.
“I started studying other programs that seem to make more of a difference … but I always come back to this,” Hamersma said.
From time to time, reporters contact her to ask about it. Lawmakers, not so much.
“I still wait for them to someday call me and say, ‘What should we do, Sarah? Should we reauthorize this?’ Congress has never called,” Hamersma said.
She’s sure legislators didn’t read her research. But she hopes they might read the new study, and that it might sway them.
“They’ve checked every angle you could possibly check, and the program is not working,” Hamersma said, calling it an “ironclad case.”
The new research was enough to convince Elena Spatoulas Patel, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, who saw the authors present their findings at a conference. “That really changed my mind about how we think about the credit,” said Patel, who co-authored a December op-ed calling for an end to WOTC.
But Congress has reauthorized the credit each time it lapsed before, and it will likely do so again this year, Patel said. It’s not just that there’s so much industry power behind the credit (“a classic case of lobbying versus good tax policy”), she said — it’s also that lawmakers like the idea of it.
“Unless and until something better is offered, it’s probably easier to renew the credit than to let it expire,” Patel said. “But again, it’s sort of ignoring the point, which is that we are spending taxpayer dollars on this by offering this credit, and it really isn’t helping employment.”
Exactly what the alternative might be is “the million-dollar question,” Patel said. Policy experts say options could include supporting evidence-backed job training programs or expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit.
“If you’re trying to reduce poverty, putting money in the hands of working people is a great way to do it, which is what the Earned Income Tax Credit does … Those low-income working families get more money to spend on the things they need, and we kind of cut out the middleman of the employer altogether,” Hamersma said.
Still, Hamersma doesn’t think Congress will follow her advice anytime soon.
“This is my cynical take: It’s kind of the perfect program because it benefits corporations, which Republicans historically like, and it seems like it’s supposed to be for poor people, which Democrats historically like,” Hamersma said.
“The facts are kind of irrelevant, the facts where nobody gets helped — it doesn’t quite make it to the top.”
Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus. Email her at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
But some positive news is emerging in Wisconsin: State legislation is advancing that would make it harder to use the courts to silence people speaking on matters of public concern — whether they’re journalists or private citizens — by draining their time and resources.
About 14 months ago, I wrote about how Wisconsin is particularly vulnerable to these kinds of lawsuits, one of just 11 states without legislation to shield residents from them. Our friends at the Wausau Pilot & Review felt the consequences firsthand, spending $200,000 to defend themselves against a since-dismissed defamation lawsuit.
There was little momentum for anti-SLAPP legislation when I wrote the column. But that has since changed.
Lawmakers last year introduced bills that would create a clearer process for quickly dismissing SLAPP suits and require defendants’ legal fees to be paid by plaintiffs who bring meritless claims: AB 701/SB 666, introduced by Republican Reps. Jim Piwowarczyk and Sen. Eric Wimberger, with a suite of co-sponsors, including Democratic Reps. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez and Randy Udell.
The Assembly passed AB 701 last month with unanimous consent — a rare show of bipartisan agreement. The legislation still requires Senate passage before reaching Gov. Tony Evers’ desk.
If it makes it to the finish line before the Senate wraps up for the year, its impact would extend well beyond newsrooms. Everyday people face SLAPP risks, too. People in other states have been sued for leaving negative reviews online.
As a fiercely independent newsroom, Wisconsin Watch doesn’t typically opine on specific policies; we assemble information on matters of public concern so residents can form their own views through their own value systems. But free expression is fundamental to what we do — and fundamental to a functioning democracy.
That’s why Wisconsin Watch is joining other newsrooms and free speech advocates in urging the Senate to enact protections against frivolous lawsuits.
Have thoughts about this legislation or this moment for free speech in Wisconsin and the U.S.? I’d love to hear from you. Reach me at jmalewitz@wisconsinwatch.org.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Reading Time: 6minutesClick here to read highlights from the story
In most states, career and technical education programs have received increasing bipartisan support and financial investments. That includes lawmakers creating funding flows in several states that previously lacked them.
But Wisconsin hasn’t done the same, despite efforts from some state leaders.
As a result, access to these courses is uneven across the state, and the programs rely on federal funds many school leaders say are insufficient.
Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly said she’ll continue to press the Legislature to fund career and technical education programs in the next budget cycle.
As Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly traversed the state last month to visit classrooms, she saw students harvesting and selling farm-fresh food, managing coffee shops and learning in wood shops, among other hands-on training.
Through career and technical education programs, high school students can take unconventional classes like these that train them for in-demand jobs.The classes are popular among students, and schools want to offer more of them.
“Kids’ imaginations and their talents completely jump to life when they’re immersed in these settings and in these classrooms,” Underly said.
But whether students can access classes like these largely depends on if their school district can cobble together the funding. That’s because Wisconsin is one of just five states that don’t dedicate state funding to public schools for career and technical education programs.
In most states, programs teaching students hands-on job skills have secured increasing bipartisan support and financial investments in recent years, with lawmakers creating funding flows in states that previously lacked them.
Wisconsin hasn’t done the same, leaving access to career and technical education uneven across the state. The programs rely mainly on federal funds many school leaders call insufficient.
During Wisconsin’s most recent budget process, Underly requested $45 million for schools to spend on career and technical education. But as other issues took precedence, lawmakers rejected that proposal, likely leaving schools without guaranteed state funding for at least another two years.
Senior Thor Tuura, 17, shows Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly a project he worked on as part of Northwestern High School’s career and technical education program on Feb. 25, 2026. Wisconsin gets $25.5 million in federal funds for career and technical education, $8.3 million of which is appropriated to high school programs. (Erica Dischino for Wisconsin Watch)
“I want to make sure that every kid has these opportunities, and if we were to have dedicated state funding, we can make sure that they do,” Underly said. “Otherwise, we’re just leaving it up to districts. And sometimes whether a district can pass a referendum or not is going to be the difference of if they offer these programs.”
Schools and state education leaders say the federal funding schools get right now falls short of covering these programs, which are often pricey and require high-tech tools and teachers with field experience.
To make up the difference, schools often rely on piecemeal funding such as grants and donations, or ask voters to approve tax increases to fund new programs. The state has offered more piecemeal grants in recent years, but those funds are unpredictable.
“Career and technical education programs are among the most effective tools we have to keep students engaged, prepare young people for good-paying jobs, and address Wisconsin’s ongoing workforce shortage … Wisconsin employers are already facing serious labor shortages, and failing to invest in our workforce pipeline only makes that problem worse,” state Sen. LaTonya Johnson, D-Milwaukee, a member of the Joint Finance Committee, wrote in a statement to Wisconsin Watch.
Wisconsin an outlier
Early hands-on job training for students has emerged as a popular solution for nationwide skilled worker shortages.
States passed 90 policies bolstering high school career and technical education in 2024, illustrating its increasing political support.
Advance CTE, a nonprofit representing state career and technical education leaders, reported in 2023 that state funding for high school programs was increasing, while Wisconsin was among a handful of states with no such funding formula.
Technology and engineering teacher Laurence Charlier checks in with his students on Feb. 25, 2026, at Northwestern High School in Maple, Wis. Wisconsin lawmakers created “incentive grants” to help fund career and technical education programs statewide, bumping the allocation to $8 million in the 2023-25 biennial budget. (Erica Dischino for Wisconsin Watch)
States have since continued to increase funding, and at least one — Nebraska — has created a funding formula.
Underly made her $45 million request during the 2025-27 biennial budget process. Gov. Tony Evers then suggested a pared-down version – dedicating $10 million – which was scrubbed by the Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee and not included in the final bill.
Underly believes lawmakers rejected her request due to widespread pressure to boost funding for the special education services schools are legally required to provide.
“I do think, though, that our Legislature values these programs,” Underly said. “They’re very proud of the programs that they have in their school districts, but it’s one of those things where it’s just, ‘What’s the most pressing need right now?’”
Students in Northwestern High School’s career and technical education program built signage for their sports stadium, seen on Feb. 25, 2026, in Maple, Wis. Advocates for career and technical education say reliable sources of state funding expand access, offer stability and allow programs to be flexible as workforce needs change. (Erica Dischino for Wisconsin Watch)
Wisconsin Watch asked all 16 lawmakers on the Joint Finance Committee why these funds were not included in the budget. Just three responded. Two Democratic lawmakers pointed to the lack of bipartisan communication during the budget process, making it impossible to know why the funding didn’t make the cut.
“There is no discussion. It is not like we’re having a Mr. Smith goes to Washington, kind of a debate,” said state Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison. “There’s no WisconsinEye footage where I can point to them, where Democrats say, ‘Well, we should do this,’ and Republicans say, ‘Well, actually, we don’t want to do that.’”
Continuing the status quo?
The number of Wisconsin students enrolled in career and technical education courses has remained stagnant over the past few years, the most recent state data shows.
Roughly 64% of Wisconsin high schoolers have taken one of these classes, while just 25% have taken more than one career-focused course.
Certified nursing assistant students speak with Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly during a tour of Northwestern High School’s career and technical education program on Feb. 25, 2026, in Maple, Wis. (Erica Dischino for Wisconsin Watch)
Wisconsin gets $25.5 million in federal funds for career and technical education, $8.3 million of which is appropriated to high school programs. Schools have used these funds to “keep the lights on,” said Sara Baird, the Department of Public Instruction’s career and technical education section director. In fact, 23 states give more in state dollars than they receive in federal funds, said Laura Maldonado, senior research associate for Advance CTE.
In the meantime, Wisconsin has allocated career and technical education grant money to schools. Rather than directly funding programs, the funds are “incentive grants,” meaning they give schools money after students graduate from a career and technical education program and earn a certification in a high-need industry. In the 2023-25 biennium, lawmakers bumped the pot from $6.5 million to $8 million, where it stayed in the 2025-27 budget.
In a response to Wisconsin Watch’s request for an interview, Joint Finance Committee Co-Chair Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, didn’t say why the committee denied the request for career and technical education funding. He pointed to the incentive grants as proof the Legislature “has consistently supported career and technical education by investing in workforce focused programs.”
Jill Underly, Wisconsin’s superintendent of public instruction, visits with students from Northwestern High School’s Tiger Manufacturing and Metals shop on Feb. 25, 2026, in Maple, Wis. (Erica Dischino for Wisconsin Watch)
Advance CTE advocates for states to have dedicated funding because it expands access to more students, lends stability and allows flexibility as workforce needs change, according to Maldonado.
“You’re trying to keep up with that labor market demand, and oftentimes it’s harder to do that with the federal funding,” Maldonado said. “You want to have that more flexible state funding source to be able to adjust that. So I think the main thing is that (federal funding) is often insufficient.”
In December, Wisconsin Watch reported on an Appleton technical charter school that struggles to manage high program costs and secure donations to stay afloat. The school received state grant funding to open, but a decade later, after those initial funds dried up, staff must chase down donations from local businesses.
Underly, whose term ends in July 2029, said she’ll continue to press for the creation of a state funding mechanism in the next budget cycle.
“If it was up to me … It wouldn’t be $45 million, it would be a lot more,” Underly said.
When this legislative session began, Wisconsin Senate leaders made the unusual decision not to create a committee dedicated to election policy for the first time in nearly two decades. That choice has had a measurable consequence: The Senate has taken up far fewer election bills than the Assembly, and several measures that cleared the lower chamber are now stalled with no clear path forward.
Of the 19 election bills that Votebeat has tracked this legislative session, 18 have gotten at least a public committee hearing in the Assembly, compared with nine in the Senate. Fourteen of those bills passed the Assembly, compared with six in the Senate.
Even in a session when the Senate has generally moved more slowly than the Assembly on many issues — as of Feb. 25, the Assembly had passed 439 bills since the start of the current two-year session, while the Senate passed 276 — the disparity is especially stark on elections.
Both chambers’ election activity is down compared to last session. With a dedicated election committee in the Senate, about 30 election bills received a committee hearing, compared with about 45 in the Assembly. Republicans have controlled both chambers for more than a decade.
“The lack of the dedicated committee has definitely changed things,” said Sen. Mark Spreitzer, a Democratic member of the local government and government operations committees. Without a clear Republican point person on election policy in the Senate, he said, the chamber is allowing the Assembly to drive most of the legislative action.
Some of the bills that have moved through the Assembly but haven’t passed the Senate include proposals to expand early voting hours and to bring the state in line with a 2022 federal law regarding the timing of casting electoral votes and certifying election results in presidential elections, designed to prevent the kind of post-election chaos that President Donald Trump and his allies sowed after the 2020 election.
“The lack of the dedicated committee has definitely changed things,” says Sen. Mark Spreitzer, D-Beloit, who is shown in a Senate session, June 7, 2023, at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis. (Drake White-Bergey / Wisconsin Watch)
Clerks have told Votebeat that some of the stalled bills would significantly improve their efficiency — including an omnibus proposal to create a system tracking voters adjudicated incompetent and also send voters text notifications on the status of their absentee ballots, said Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, a Democrat. That proposal passed through the Assembly in November, but hasn’t been heard in the Senate.
Given the absence of a dedicated Senate election committee, Tollefson added, the Assembly has been doing the heavy lifting. But even with ready-made bills, the Senate does not appear to be eager to pass election legislation.
In every legislative session since 2009, there has been a Senate committee formally tasked with covering election legislation. Committee chairs typically serve as the go-to experts on their panels’ subject areas. They consult with lobbying groups, schedule public hearings and set up committee votes — giving them the power to advance or stall legislation.
But when election bills are scattered across multiple committees, there’s no clear point person in the Senate to guide them through the process.
In the absence of a dedicated election committee in this session, several committee leaders declined to explain whether or when the stalled election bills might move. And some voting groups say it has made it harder to know who to consult with in the chamber to discuss election legislation.
At a WisPolitics event in Madison on Feb. 12, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu said that the absence of a Senate committee “doesn’t make it hard to pass election bills.” He added that there are “definitely avenues where election bills can run in the Senate,” including the Senate Committee on Government Operations, Labor and Economic Development and the Senate Committee on Transportation and Local Government.
LeMahieu, a Republican, didn’t respond to Votebeat’s request for comment. Sen. Dan Feyen, the chair of the government operations committee, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Sen. Cory Tomczyk, who chairs the local government committee, also didn’t respond to a request for comment.
But even some of their fellow Republicans are seeing the effects. For example, Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara is the author of two of the bills languishing in the Senate, which would require and fund a certain number of early in-person voting hours in every municipality. Those reforms, she said, are “crucial to restoring confidence in our election process.”
She said in the Assembly, municipalities and clerks are working on a few details before the bills receive a final Senate vote, though both proposals passed the Assembly in November. The proposal to require the in-person hours got a Senate hearing in late January but has seen no activity since, while the bill to fund it hasn’t gotten a hearing at all.
There could still be a late flurry of committee activity. On Feb. 27, the Senate government operations committee approved the proposal to bring the state in line with new federal laws regulating presidential elections. But the next presidential race is two years away, and most of the bills that would affect all elections — not just presidential ones — remain stalled. Another bill to require the Wisconsin Elections Commission to hear complaints against itself was scheduled for a March 3 hearing.
With the legislative session entering its final stretch, though, the stalled bills face increasingly long odds. The last general floor session period of the biennium ends on March 19, and the Assembly is effectively finished for the session. That means the Senate only has a few weeks left to consider election bills that already cleared the lower chamber, and if the Senate modifies any of them, the Assembly is unlikely to return to approve the changes.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Reading Time: 4minutesClick here to read highlights from the story
While no hyperscale data centers are operating yet in the state, Wisconsin companies are helping power massive facilities elsewhere by supplying parts and equipment.
Just three Wisconsin companies have already amassed more than $1 billion in data center-related business.
It’s still unclear how much large-scale Wisconsin data centers will ultimately contribute to the state’s economy — and some question their long-term impact.
None of the billion-dollar-plus data centers planned for Wisconsin are yet online, but the nationwide, artificial-intelligence-fueled market is already spurring economic growth in the state.
Wisconsin business leaders say no comprehensive accounting has been done. But just three Wisconsin companies have already amassed more than $1 billion in data center-related business:
Regal Rexnord, a Milwaukee maker of motors, announced in February it had received $735 million in orders from data centers.
Generac, a Waukesha-based manufacturer, told Wisconsin Watch it has a backlog of $400 million in orders for backup generators for data centers. Moreover, Generac announced Feb. 19 it is acquiring a 120-employee Illinois engineering company to help meet data center demand.
Racine-based Modine announced in February 2025 it received $180 million in orders from a new customer for data center cooling systems to be manufactured in Virginia and Mississippi. In addition, the company in November opened a 155,000-square-foot plant in suburban Milwaukee to manufacture the systems.
Many companies don’t publicly report details on data center business they do, so it’s impossible to tally total economic impact in Wisconsin. But there are other examples.
Trane Technologies is manufacturing cooling systems for data centers in La Crosse, where it was founded in 1913, and says data centers are a strong part of its business. In November 2023, Excellerate opened a 385,000-square-foot plant in Little Chute, primarily to manufacture “modular electrical buildings” for data centers. Maysteel, a Washington County manufacturer, opened a data center hub in November 2024 and announced in February it is expanding the operation.
The sheer demand to outfit data centers has meant that some business has trickled down from larger companies to smaller ones.
Modular Power & Data has 90 employees in Dane County and suburban Milwaukee to manufacture electrical distribution products. Chief Operating Officer Erik Thompson told Wisconsin Watch that Modular did $10 million of data center business in 2025 and expects to more than double that in 2026.
That work is “transforming a very small company into what I believe will be a very large Wisconsin manufacturer,” Thompson said. “Without this growth, we’d always be much smaller.”
Employees at Modular Power & Data work on modular power systems in Cudahy, Wis., Feb. 25, 2026. (Trisha Young / Wisconsin Watch)
Copper is shown at Modular Power & Data in Cudahy, Wis., Feb. 25, 2026. It’s used in electrical components that help power data centers. (Trisha Young / Wisconsin Watch)
Because no hyperscale data centers are scheduled to begin operating in Wisconsin until later this year, their ultimate economic impact remains unknown.
Nationally, data centers are known for spurring construction work. That includes companies such as Brownsville-based Michels Corp., a lead contractor on the $15 billion data center under construction in Port Washington, and Waukesha-based Boldt Co. But those jobs are often temporary.
“The standard data center development model — speedy dealmaking and opaque negotiations — delivers short-term construction jobs and revenue, but little durable local economic upside,” the Washington, D.C.- based Brookings think tank concluded in February.
In Wisconsin, data center expenditures are projected to raise the state’s gross domestic product from $354 million in 2024 to $881 million in 2029, according to University of Virginia economist João-Pedro Ferreira, author of a study done for the Joyce Foundation. The data center workforce is expected to triple from 360 to 1,143 jobs, but constitute only 0.09% of the overall labor market.
“The impacts might seem a lot, but they are not,” Ferreira said.
At least $46 billion in hyperscale data centers are under construction or under consideration in Wisconsin. Besides Port Washington, $20 billion worth of data centers are under construction and planned in Mount Pleasant, and a $1 billion facility is being built in Beaver Dam. Proposals are pending in Janesville, Kenosha and Menomonie.
That’s as concerns about impacts on land, water and electricity spur loud opposition to data centers in Wisconsin. On Facebook alone, more than 24,000 people have joined groups to fight hyperscale centers that are proposed or under construction in the state.
But Wisconsin businesses see more growth from AI. In November, a foundation connected with Waukesha County-based Pieper Electric announced a $2 million donation to expand Waukesha County Technical College’s Applied AI Lab.
Dale Kooyenga, CEO of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and a former Republican state lawmaker, said skills being developed for data center construction have value after the facilities are built.
“These men and women building these data centers aren’t building just buildings, they’re building the world’s largest computers,” he said.
A generator for use in a data center manufactured by Waukesha-based Generac is shown at its plant in Oshkosh, Wis. (Courtesy of Generac)
Kooyenga also pushed back on claims that AI will be bad for the economy.
“The concept that robots and technology are out to get your jobs has been a concept in America since 1900. That’s not a new fear,” he said. “But the fact is, is that there will be a different-looking economy and different opportunities.”
AI’s growth is affecting workers unevenly across industries.
It’s reducing employment in the most AI-exposed industries, such as computer systems design, and it’s especially hitting younger workers, according to a new Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas analysis.
But wages in those sectors have continued to grow as AI tools are benefiting veteran workers — those who have gained knowledge from experience.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Seventy-two Wisconsin school districts are going to referendum in April seeking just over $1 billion from taxpayers at a time when voters indicate they are less likely to support increased funding for schools.
A record high 60% of registered voters said reducing property taxes was more important than increasing spending on public schools, according to the recent Marquette University Law School poll conducted in February. Fifty-seven percent of voters in the same poll said they would vote against a school referendum, same as October, but a reversal from six years ago when 57% said they would support one.
The public concern about property taxes creates an especially difficult environment this year for the school districts seeking financial approvals from voters. Sixty-two districts are pursuing operational referendums this spring, according to data from the Department of Public Instruction. Operational questions ask voters to approve whether school districts can increase taxes to pay for things such as educational programs, technology and transportation services.
The rest of the referendums in April would allow districts to borrow money for capital construction projects. Two districts, Howard-Suamico and Sauk Prairie, are asking voters to approve both capital and operational referendums.
Approval rates for districts have declined since 2018, according to research from the Wisconsin Policy Forum. A record number of school districts proposed referendum questions to voters in 2024, but the 70% approval rate was the lowest passage rate for referendums in a midterm or presidential election year since 2014. More than 20% of the districts going to referendum this April are returning to voters after failed referendums in 2025.
In the meantime, debates continue at the Capitol over state funding for public schools. Gov. Tony Evers and Republican legislative leaders are expected to continue negotiating over how to use the state’s $2.4 billion surplus and what amount should be used to lower property taxes and support public schools. Just last week, a group of Wisconsin parents, four teacher unions and five school districts sued the Legislature arguing it’s failing to fund public schools. The Necedah Area School District, one of the plaintiffs in the case, is asking voters in April to approve a $5.8 million operational referendum across the next four school years.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin school districts continue to battle with the financial impacts of declining enrollments and rising costs as district leaders say state funding they receive has not kept up with inflation. The Appleton Area School District is seeking a $60 million operating referendum spread out over the next four years, which would fund efforts to help students struggling with poverty and mental health issues and plug a $13 million operating deficit that formed over three years of high inflation rates that outpaced available funding, Superintendent Greg Hartjes said.
“Certainly the timing is not good,” Hartjes said of Appleton’s operating referendum. “But it is because of that three years of high inflation that we can’t sustain another year. If we don’t pass a referendum, we are going to cut $13 million from our budget next year. And that’s a lot of services for kids.”
Why a school district goes to referendum
The two main sources of revenue for Wisconsin school districts are state funding and property taxes. In 1993, Wisconsin lawmakers put limits on how much school districts can increase funding from those two revenue sources. State law allows districts to go to referendum to ask voters to exceed the revenue limits with additional property taxes.
“It sometimes gets talked about as if it’s a fluke, or if it necessarily means that something bad is happening. That isn’t always the case,” said Sara Shaw, the deputy research director at the Wisconsin Policy Forum. “You might have an instance where a local community says, ‘Actually we’re fine with this. You tax us more. We have the means to be taxed more and we have the desire to fund education more.’”
School district revenue limits were connected to inflation until 2009, during the Great Recession, when a Democratic-controlled Legislature and Democratic governor chose to decouple them. Since then, as Republicans took control of state government in 2011, state education spending has not kept pace with inflation or the national average, according to the Policy Forum.
In recent years, the lack of inflationary increases to revenue limits and declining school district enrollment are among the main reasons why districts have gone to referendum, said Dan Rossmiller, the executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
“At the same time, your fixed costs, such as transportation, heating, lighting, insurance, health insurance for your employees and the salaries of your employees and the portion you pay toward their retirement are all coming up generally,” Rossmiller said. “So that puts school districts in a bit of a vice.”
The Wisconsin Rapids School District, which is asking voters to support a $19 million operating referendum over the next five years, is one of those examples. The district has an existing five-year operating referendum approved in 2021 that expires this school year, but was boosted by pandemic-related funds that are no longer available. Inflation, rising insurance costs and declining enrollment have put the district in a difficult position, said Wisconsin Rapids Superintendent Ronald Rasmussen.
“The district is in a situation now where our expenses exceed our revenue,” Rasmussen said.
But referendums are about compromise, Sen. Romaine Quinn, R-Birchwood, said at a February meeting of the Legislature’s budget-writing committee. It’s also not just schools that are feeling the impacts of inflation, Quinn said.
“There isn’t anybody in their family budget, a local entity unit of government or state government that can afford to keep up with the inflation that we’ve had to endure over the last four to six years,” Quinn said.
What about the 400-year veto?
During the 2023-25 state budget process, Evers used the governor’s veto powers to provide an annual $325 per pupil increase to school district revenue limits for 400 years.
Republicans have repeatedly slammed the veto and advanced proposals seeking to limit the governor’s partial veto powers in the future. In February, the Legislature added to the November ballot a constitutional amendment to prevent the governor from using veto powers to increase taxes or fees. It’s unclear if the proposed language would have affected the 400-year veto because the veto didn’t directly increase taxes or fees. Instead, it gave school districts more discretion to increase property taxes.
School leaders say they’re appreciative of the revenue authority coming from the 400-year veto, but it doesn’t make up for the lack of consistent inflationary increases since 2009. Districts are also still dependent on how the Legislature acts on revenue limits or general state aid.
“The more state aid we get means we get less property taxes,” Rasmussen said. “And this year, the revenue limit changed by $325, but the aid we got from the state that line stayed the same, so the difference was made up by local property taxes.”
Hartjes and Rasmussen said they are approaching frustration about property taxes by trying to inform residents about the basics of school funding, being transparent with potential voters about district finances and breaking down the cost of the referendum on a typical home in their community.
Districts across the state that are going to referendum this spring are holding similar information sessions to answer questions from potential voters and creating webpages for people seeking more information.
It’s not an easy task, especially as the cost of living remains the top issue for Wisconsin voters this year.
“Your price of everything else that you have to buy as a consumer is difficult,” Hartjes said. “And then to ask to have your property taxes raised? We understand the challenge for families.”
The election is April 7. Early voting starts March 24.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Members of an ad hoc Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources committee are urging wildlife regulators to work with a national expert as they finalize recommendations to guide state beaver management policy for the next decade.
Researchers and conservationists serving on the advisory body — which is largely composed of DNR staff and government and tribal representatives — hope that including additional scientific expertise, and even a potential computer-guided aerial beaver dam mapping survey, could assist regulators at a time when climate change is beginning to significantly alter Wisconsin weather patterns and pose widespread ecological risks.
“We’re taking our species out faster than they can recover, and when we are overexploiting our trout, when we’re overexploiting animals, plants, habitats, that’s going to make us lose these species faster,” said University of Minnesota ecohydrology professor Emily Fairfax, who has helped review and fact-check several beaver management plans and recently spoke to the committee. “I don’t think we have time to wait — full stop.”
A shift would transform long-standing beaver policy that frames the critters as a nuisance species.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s wildlife services program has removed beavers and their dams in Wisconsin since 1988 under contract with the state, along with local governments, railroad companies and Indigenous tribes.
At least five states across the Mississippi River basin and Great Lakes region contract with the federal wildlife services program for beaver removal, but Wisconsin stands out among states for the quantity of beavers and dams USDA employees clear, the millions of dollars Wisconsin has invested to do so and the state’s justification.
Current trout policy includes killing beavers
USDA killed roughly 23,500 beavers across 42 states in 2024, about 2,700 of which were in Wisconsin, ranking the state among the top five in the nation.
In Wisconsin, the agency focuses on abating transportation hazards, such as flooded roadways. But, perhaps most controversially, about a third of sites where USDA traps beavers are coldwater streams.
Wisconsin currently prioritizes maintaining free-flowing conditions on the state’s prized coldwater streams, partly to appeal to its “customers” and their fishing preferences.
Henry Nehls-Lowe, Southern Wisconsin Trout Unlimited board secretary, casts his fly-fishing line in Sixmile Branch, a Class 2 trout stream, Oct. 7, 2024, in Grant County, Wis. Federal trappers killed about 2,700 beavers in Wisconsin in 2024. About a third of those were in coldwater streams. Wisconsin prioritizes free-flowing conditions to benefit anglers. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
But the strategy has faced increasing scrutiny, even among anglers, who are divided over the issue. Some beaver advocates say the state agency charged with protecting and enhancing natural resources shouldn’t let commercial interests unduly guide its decisions.
In 2025, the agency trapped and cleared dams in more than 1,550 miles of coldwater streams — roughly the driving distance from Milwaukee to Salt Lake City, Utah. The DNR uses proceeds from annual trout fishing stamp sales to finance the annual undertaking.
At least two other states, Minnesota and Michigan, have employed the USDA for trout stream clearing, but at a significantly reduced scale.
The DNR doesn’t know the impacts of these policies on Wisconsin’s beaver population, as it ceased conducting aerial surveys in 2014. Agency staff, instead, estimate beaver numbers and harvest impacts using trapper surveys and voluntary reporting of annual take. Staff believe the population remains stable statewide or is even growing.
Conservationists are calling on the DNR to systematically survey the state’s beaver population. Without obtaining a reliable count, they say, it’s impossible to devise a science-based management plan. Even if beaver removal continued on trout streams, critics say the state could better estimate the population by having trappers register their beaver take, as the DNR requires for turkey, deer, bobcat and bear harvests.
Meanwhile, an expanding body of research is showcasing beavers’ ecosystem and economic benefits and the drawbacks of removal.
Beaver dams help limit flooding
When beavers remain on the landscape, they create wetlands, which mitigate climate change impacts like drought, wildfires and flooding. Problemsthought to be endemic to the American West are now creeping eastward.
Thunderstorms wreaked havoc in southeastern Wisconsin last summer, bringing more than 14 inches of rain to some parts of Milwaukee within 24 hours on Aug. 9-10. Roughly 2,000 homes sustained major damage or were destroyed in the ensuing floods, and the county now faces more than $22 million in public infrastructure repairs after being twice denied federal disaster assistance.
Beaver dams can dissipate torrents of water when the sky opens — even to the city’s benefit.
Using computer models, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers estimated that the Milwaukee River watershed could accommodate enough beaver colonies to reduce flood water volumes by 14% to 48%.
Wisconsin beaver policy understudied
But scientists face decades of institutional consensus in Wisconsin that beavers degrade stream habitat and threaten wild coldwater fisheries.
DNR fish biologists say that beavers warm water temperatures and plug coldwater streams with silt. When unobstructed, the water bodies, which tend to contain few fish species, flow fast and hard.
“Past studies have identified some positive but mostly negative effects of beavers on trout, and my research builds upon this,” DNR fisheries scientist Matthew Mitro told the beaver management committee. “The option for lethal removal (of) beavers is an important tool that should remain available for resource managers.”
Yet critics charge DNR biologists with managing streams for the primary benefit of one species by trapping out another, justifying the practice using research that hasn’t undergone scientific peer review.
Henry Nehls-Lowe, Southern Wisconsin Trout Unlimited board secretary, nets a brown trout he caught while fly-fishing in Big Spring Branch, a Class 1 trout stream, Oct. 7, 2024, in Grant County, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
A 2011 academic review of beaver-related research conducted in the Great Lakes region, which predated Mitro’s recent research, found that 72% of claims concerning beavers’ negative impacts are speculative and not backed by data, while the same held true for 49% of positive claims. The negative claims included the idea that beaver dams warm stream temperatures and block trout passage.
DNR biologists often note that academic literature largely has been conducted in the western United States and can’t be directly transplanted to Wisconsin’s comparatively flat landscape.
That is all the more reason to get off our haunches and wade into beaver ponds, Fairfax said.
“We have to follow that up by collecting our own data sets,” she said. “We have to publish them in peer-reviewed journals and get that scientific stamp of approval.”
Beaver trapping and natural predation are distinct from targeted eradication, Fairfax noted. The former can be sustainable, while stream-wide depopulation and dam removal can damage entire ecosystems.
It’s also possible that stream clearing prevents beavers from moving to parts of Wisconsin where they are wanted or where they could thrive with fewer conflicts.
Federal government assesses Wisconsin’s beaver dealings
The DNR beaver management plan’s update coincides with a new USDA environmental assessment of the potential impacts of its beaver and dam removal in Wisconsin.
A conservation organization founded by beaver management committee member Bob Boucher announced its intent to sue the federal agency to compel it to update its previous assessment, published more than a decade ago. Then Boucher threatened to sue the DNR after it wouldn’t release a draft of the new one, currently under review.
The 2013 assessment determined that USDA’s involvement in clearing streams and conflict areas did not significantly impact the beaver population. It estimated wildlife managers would only trap about 2,000 beavers annually, but the agency exceeded that figure within a few years.
The USDA recommends staying the course, using lethal and nonlethal methods. When analyzing alternatives, the agency concluded that other wildlife managers would continue trapping with or without federal involvement.
The USDA allocates some funding for the installation of flow control devices that can reduce the footprint of beaver ponds by lowering water levels. But nearly all beaver conflict sites the USDA handles in Wisconsin are managed through trapping. Levelers do have limited effectiveness in settings like high-flow streams or infrastructure-heavy floodplains.
A tree impacted by beaver activity, Oct. 25, 2024, in Alma Center, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Wildlife managers say that they need flexibility because no two beaver sites are identical.
“We’re not against beaver complexes,” DNR fisheries biologist Bradd Sims told committee members. “We’re not against ecosystem diversity, and I don’t know why people try to paint us that way. We’re an open-minded bureau that’s open to different management styles.”
Trout and beaver proponents do agree that climate change poses an existential threat to biodiversity. While the former group might view beavers as harmful to coldwater streams, the latter see their potential as a partner in creating resilient landscapes that accommodate not only fish, but also frogs, turtles, bugs, bats, birds and humans.
The committee’s next meeting is March 18 in Rothschild, Wisconsin. Ultimately, DNR staff will rewrite the current plan, release a draft for public comment and discussion at open houses, and present a revised document to the state’s natural resources board for ratification.
This story was produced in partnership with the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network, of which Wisconsin Watch is a member. Sign up for Wisconsin Watch’s newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.
The city of Madison on Monday appealed a ruling that allows it to be sued for monetary damages for disenfranchising nearly 200 voters in the 2024 election, arguing the decision would unrealistically require “error-free elections” and expose municipalities across the state to liability for mistakes.
The appeal comes after Dane County Circuit Court Judge David Conway’s Feb. 9 ruling that Madison could face potential financial liability for disenfranchising 193 voters whose absentee ballots were unintentionally left uncounted. Notably, the city did not specifically contest the judge’s rejection in that ruling of its earlier argument that absentee voting is merely a “privilege” under state law — a claim that would have shielded it from damages.
Instead, the appeal centers on who has the authority to enforce election laws and whether voters can sue for negligence. The city argues that such complaints must go first to the Wisconsin Elections Commission and asks higher courts to revisit a landmark 1866 case that allowed damages against election officials who deprive citizens of the right to vote.
“It is not difficult to imagine how the circuit court’s ruling may be perceived as an opportunity by partisan actors to influence the election,” attorneys for the city, former Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl and Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick wrote in the filing.
A permanent path to sue for damages over accidental election errors without going first through the commission could “chill the willingness of individuals to volunteer to assist with elections, and the willingness of voters to participate in the political process,” they wrote.
Madison asks court to revisit landmark voting case
Much of Madison’s appeal asks the court to revisit a key finding in the landmark 1866 case that secured the extension of the franchise to Black Wisconsinites, Gillespie v. Palmer. In that case, the court held that state law allows plaintiffs to sue election officials for damages if they “negligently deprive citizens of the right to vote.”
The case arose after Ezekiel Gillespie, a Black man, was turned away from the polls in 1865. While voters had ratified a measure extending the franchise to Black residents 16 years earlier, it went largely unenforced, as state officials still disputed whether the change was valid. Gillespie sued, and courts ultimately ruled in his favor, concluding in 1866 that Black Wisconsinites had been wrongfully disenfranchised for 17 years.
Although Gillespie was intentionally barred from voting, the court’s ruling established negligence — not just intentional misconduct — as a basis for disenfranchised voters to seek damages. The Dane County Circuit Court relied on that broader standard in allowing the Madison lawsuit to proceed.
Madison officials in their latest appeal argue the lower court misapplied the precedent. In their view, Gillespie was about protecting the right to cast a ballot — a right that they say isn’t disputed in this case. No election official in Madison denied that the 193 Madison voters had a right to vote, they wrote. Rather, they contend, the voters’ ballots were unintentionally left uncounted after being cast.
If Gillespie is extended under these circumstances, the defendants argue, Wisconsin would be the first state to allow “any voter whose ballot is accidentally uncounted a right to sue for monetary damages,” a premise that they say requires immediate review by higher courts given the impending 2026 midterms.
They also contend the 1866 ruling predates Wisconsin’s modern election system, and relying on “such an archaic interpretation of Constitutional rights in Wisconsin is grossly in error and requires intervention before the case proceeds further.”
Madison’s filing “seeks to erode the protections” guaranteed in Gillespie, said Scott Thompson, staff attorney for Law Forward, which filed the case. “This argument follows the city’s failed attempt to throw out this case by arguing that the right to vote does not protect absentee voters from disenfranchisement. The right to vote has value, and the voters the city of Madison disenfranchised look forward to having their day in court.”
Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative, clarified that a court wouldn’t need to overturn the historic Black voting rights case entirely to rule that it doesn’t apply in the lawsuit against Madison.
“You could potentially read that case in a more narrow way, as applying only to intentional deprivation of the right to vote, as opposed to negligence and deprivation,” she said, adding that it’s likely that only a higher court could reinterpret Gillespie in such a way.
Law Forward’s response to Madison’s appeal is due on March 9. Then the Madison-based District 4 Court of Appeals is expected to determine whether the appeal may move forward.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
In Wisconsin, unlike in nearly every other state, first-offense drunken driving is not a crime.
Wisconsin treats a standard first-offense operating while intoxicated as a civil violation.
Punishment includes a fine of $150-$300 and driver’s license revocation for six to nine months.
Subsequent OWI offenses generally are crimes, but there is an exception.
If a second offense occurs more than 10 years after the first, first-offense penalties apply.
Otherwise, second and third offenses are misdemeanors. Jail time is five days to six months for a second offense and 45 days to one year for a third offense.
Fourth and subsequent offenses are felonies punishable by jail or prison time.
New Jersey treats first-offense OWI as a traffic violation, but up to 30 days in jail can be imposed.
In New Hampshire, first-offense is a misdemeanor, but no jail time can be imposed.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
A federal lawsuit filed Feb. 23 by the legal nonprofit group Protect Democracy alleges the Department of Homeland Security used facial recognition technology unlawfully to track legal observers and label them domestic terrorists.
In Milwaukee County, law enforcement representatives are addressing facial recognition technology-related fears from residents. They’re concerned about a potential collaboration with a company called Biometrica, which provides access to facial recognition search results.
In August, Milwaukee County Sheriff Denita Ball signed an “agreement of intent” to enter into a contract with Biometrica, said James Burnett, director of public affairs and community engagement and acting chief of staff at the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office.
“But the contract is still considered to be in draft form – not fully signed, executed or valid – and has to proceed, like any other proposed contract, through the county’s statutory signing process,” Burnett said.
There currently are no services or technology being provided by Biometrica, and Biometrica does not have access to any sheriff’s office data, Burnett said.
County Supervisor Sky Capriolo, member of the county’s Judiciary, Law Enforcement and General Services Committee, said she and residents have serious concerns.
“It warrants more consideration, education and discussion,” Capriolo said. “I certainly am not ready to green-light a contract.”
Capriolo said she’s waiting to hear whether the contract will go to her committee again.
Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman took a different step and banned the use of facial technology by his department in early February.
On Feb. 24, Norman announced the suspension of MPD officer Josue Ayala for the improper use of a different tracking tool, the Flock camera system, to track a dating partner and a former partner.
“I am extremely disappointed to learn about the incident and expect all members, sworn and civilian, to demonstrate the highest ethical standards in the performance of their duties,” said Norman in a statement.
Ayala was charged by the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office with one count of attempted misconduct in public office. Norman said he immediately directed MPD to create additional auditing mechanisms.
Concerns remain high
Social justice and civil rights advocates have expressed grave concerns about the use of the technology by both agencies, citing evidence of inaccuracies, racial bias and privacy violations.
Facial recognition technology uses artificial intelligence to identify someone by comparing a photo of an unknown face to some database of images of known faces, said Katie Kinsey at the Feb. 5 Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission meeting during a presentation by the NYU Policing Project.
The image databases can include mug shot collections, driver’s license records or images found on the internet, Kinsey said.
Facial recognition technology and local law enforcement
In spring, MPD acknowledged it used outside agencies’ licenses for facial recognition search results for two to three years without a written department policy.
The department also announced it was considering an agreement with Biometrica – an agreement that would have provided access to facial recognition technology to the department in exchange for approximately 2.5 million Milwaukee County Jail booking photos.
This proposal prompted months of public pushback before the announcement by Norman in February that the department would no longer pursue the technology.
ACLU preaches vigilance
The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin welcomed Norman’s announcement but also expressed concerns about MPD’s past decision making.
It is “extremely concerning that MPD secretly used FRT (facial recognition technology) searches for years without any standard operating procedure – or any written guidelines – in place,” an ACLU spokesperson said in an email to NNS.
The organization is urging Milwaukee residents to remain vigilant.
“Countless Milwaukee residents and community leaders have engaged in thoughtful community education, spent hours upon hours in public meetings and contacted their local elected officials to voice their unequivocal opposition to the use of (facial recognition technology), and they will still be watching,” the spokesperson said.
The MPD spokesperson told NNS the department could revisit the issue in the future when a policy is in place that aligns with both public safety benefit and public concerns.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
Login
