For many Milwaukee residents returning from incarceration, the difference between stability and setback can hinge on a single document: a valid driver’s license.
Without one, everyday responsibilities can become barriers that undermine a person’s successful return to the community, said Jay Tucker, administrator of community reintegration services at Wisconsin Community Services.
Tucker helps oversee the organization’s long-running driver’s license recovery program, which helps people get back their licenses after suspensions or revocations.
Although the program serves a broad range of low-income Milwaukee residents, Tucker said the loss of a driver’s license is especially destabilizing for people returning from incarceration, particularly as they look for work.
“There’s already a stigma there,” Tucker said. “If I’m already checking a box on an application just to get the job, and now I may not have this valid work credential, it amplifies that stigma.”
Black and poor residents overrepresented
Suspended and revoked driver’s licenses disproportionately affect the city’s Black and low-income residents, said Clarence Johnson, president and CEO of Wisconsin Community Services.
In Wisconsin, most license suspensions and revocations are not tied to dangerous driving but to unpaid fines and forfeitures.
According to Wisconsin Department of Transportation data from 2024, failure to pay forfeitures accounted for more than 44% of revocations and suspensions statewide – far more than operating while intoxicated or point-based violations.
For many, that process starts with a single ticket, said Taffie Foster-Toney, lead case manager for the license recovery program.
“You get one citation, you’re not able to pay it and then it snowballs,” Foster-Toney said.
Breaking a cycle
Shakia Thompson, 33, utilized the Wisconsin Community Services program to get her license back. (Courtesy of Shakia Thompson)
Shakia Thompson, 33, a Milwaukee resident, mother and student, said the cycle was hard to break.
“My license was suspended because I had a lot of operating-after-suspension tickets,” Thompson said. “I would get on a payment plan, get my license back and then get another ticket.”
With work and family responsibilities, she said, staying on top of court appearances became difficult.
“With me working a lot, I wasn’t always able to attend court,” Thompson said. “So it just kept keeping me behind, and I kept owing and owing.”
How the program works
The driver’s license recovery program at Wisconsin Community Services began in 2010.
It serves Milwaukee residents who meet federal poverty guidelines, have a suspended or revoked Wisconsin driver’s license and meet other eligibility guidelines.
Foster-Toney said the process begins with intake and a detailed review of a participant’s driving record.
Individuals are then paired with attorneys through Legal Action of Wisconsin and work case by case to resolve issues across multiple courts and counties.
Options may include payment plans or community service.
Thompson said the payment plan option helped her considerably.
“There were times that I wasn’t able to pay a fine, and then I would get backed up on other bills. So it really helped in the long run,” she said.
Participants can also attend a financial literacy workshop. In return, the program pays up to $60 in Wisconsin Division of Motor Vehicles fees once an individual is eligible for reinstatement.
Public safety benefits
Johnson said helping people regain licenses benefits the broader community.
“People who have valid driver’s licenses tend to be safer drivers,” he said. “When you have assets in your life, you’re much more inclined to make good judgment decisions. The driver’s license program offers hope. It’s a lifeline.”
Thompson said she shares information about the program widely, especially with people balancing many responsibilities, such as family and work.
“I tell a lot of people about it,” she said. “A lot of ladies in school that don’t have their license.”
After getting her license back last summer, Thompson said she’s focused on keeping it.
“I’m doing great with my payment plans, and I have my license,” she said. “I’m moving forward.”
How to connect
Wisconsin Community Services receives referrals from courts, parole agents, nonprofit organizations, city agencies, police officers, Milwaukee Area Technical College and the mayor’s office.
The program is housed at Milwaukee Area Technical College’s downtown campus and accepts walk-ins.
Eligibility requirements are:
A suspended or revoked Class D driver’s license
City of Milwaukee residency
Income that meets federal poverty guidelines
No valid license within the past eight years and completion of the DMV written test within the past 12 months
No operating-while-intoxicated charges, suspensions or revocations related to operating while intoxicated
People can contact Wisconsin Community Services at 414-297-6407 for more information.
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An eighth billion-dollar data center project is in the early stages of development, this one in southwestern Wisconsin, the Grant County Economic Development Corp. confirmed in an interview Monday.
An undisclosed company is seeking 400 to 500 acres in the town of Cassville, the town of Cassville chair told Wisconsin Watch. Not much else is known at this point.
The project comes as public scrutiny of data center projects intensifies and the Public Service Commission considers how to structure rates for large utility consumers like data centers.
A site in the Driftless Area in southwest Wisconsin is being eyed for a possible $1 billion data center, just as the state considers who should pay to provide the unprecedented amount of electricity such projects need.
It would be the eighth major data center known to have been proposed in Wisconsin, though one of those, near Madison, has been dropped.
Ron Brisbois, executive director of the Grant County Economic Development Corp., said Feb. 9 he expects to learn by spring whether Grant County remains in consideration by a company scouting sites for what it said would be a $1 billion data center.
“They’re casting a pretty wide net, Grant County just happens to be part of that net,” Brisbois told Wisconsin Watch. “It’s very, very preliminary.”
The revelation contrasts with how other Wisconsin officials have handled data center proposals.
A Wisconsin Watch investigation found that local officials in some of the seven communities where hyperscale data centers have been proposed worked on the proposals for months before making any announcement to the public. In four of the communities, officials signed confidential nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), pledging to keep details of the plans private.
Brisbois said he has not been asked to sign a data center NDA. He said he met with a company, whom he would not identify, in November before announcing at an open meeting in December that a $1 billion data center was being floated in Grant County. That mention was reported by local news media.
Brisbois told Wisconsin Watch he felt that his board of directors deserved to know about the initial inquiries, but that he wouldn’t release details that might jeopardize the project.
“I don’t know who the end user would be, all I’m being told is it’s one of the big five or six businesses,” Brisbois said. “I’ve asked not to be told that information. I don’t need that information to do my job.”
Besides storing and processing data, data centers are vital to advancing the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Major companies building data centers in Wisconsin include Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, in Beaver Dam, which used an NDA; and Microsoft in Mount Pleasant and Vantage Data Centers in Port Washington, to serve OpenAI and Oracle, which did not.
Vehicles pass through a security gate as construction continues at Microsoft’s data center project, Nov. 13, 2025, in Mount Pleasant, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
“I like to be transparent with my board of directors,” Brisbois said. “But did I give a lot of details? No. I thought it was an appropriate time that we were being evaluated, at least initially. Did I need to do that? No. But it’s how I do my job.”
Doug Schauff, the town chair in Cassville, in southwest Grant County, told Wisconsin Watch he attended a meeting about the data center about a week ago. He wouldn’t reveal other details, other than the company involved is seeking 400 or 500 acres in the town.
“Everything is so vague right now,” Schauff said. “They had not contacted land owners. … They wouldn’t give us any definite figures (on power usage), which would be Greek to us anyway.”
The seven major data center projects detailed in the Jan. 26 Wisconsin Watch report were valued at more than $57 billion, including one in the Madison suburb of DeForest. DeForest city officials did not sign an NDA, but kept details of a $12 billion data center proposal quiet for months before announcing it to the public. Amid opposition from residents, the city dropped the project Jan. 27.
Sheri Stach hands out stickers in opposition to the QTS data center development prior to a village board meeting at DeForest Village Hall in DeForest, Wis., on Jan. 20, 2026. Facing opposition from residents, the city dropped the project Jan. 27. (Kayla Wolf for Wisconsin Watch)
Data center proposals are pending in Kenosha, Menomonie and Janesville, all of which signed NDAs.
The Janesville City Council has scheduled five informational sessions on an $8 billion data center proposed there. The first is Feb. 9, when the council is also scheduled to consider a proposal from data center opponents that would require a referendum on such large-scale projects.
Republican state lawmakers on Feb. 6 introduced a bill that would prohibit local governments from signing data center NDAs.
Meanwhile, attention is turning to how the state will determine who will pay to provide the massive amounts of electricity that data centers need to operate.
On Feb. 10, the Public Service Commission is scheduled to hold a hearing, which will be livestreamed, on establishing a payment structure for the generation and distribution of electricity needed by “very large customers,” such as data centers.
A key question is whether data centers will be required to pay entirely, or whether some of those costs will be spread among other residential and other general ratepayers.
Electrical power lines near Trempealeau, Wis., Aug. 11, 2017. (Tony Webster / Wikimedia Commons)
Bert Garvin, an executive vice president of We Energies, has said the rate structure proposed by the utility to the PSC will protect general ratepayers. “While your bills may go up for other cost-of-service reasons, we can assure all our customers your bills aren’t going up because of” data centers, he said at a public forum last week.
At the same forum, Tom Content, executive director of the consumer advocate Citizens Utility Board, said “the devil’s in the details” on how the PSC protects ratepayers.
“I think it’s really important that these wealthy tech companies have to put up the money and not have to achieve compliance with that some other way,” he said.
Content also alluded to stranded assets — power plants that are shut down while ratepayers are still paying off their debt. He said the PSC must impose “exit fees” stringent enough so that data centers remain financially responsible for new multibillion-dollar power plants, should the AI phenomenon become a “bubble” and data centers shut down early.
Wisconsin Watch reported in December that residential and business utility customers in Wisconsin owe $1 billion for stranded assets — the debt taken on to build and upgrade power plants that have been shut down or are scheduled to be shut down soon.
One challenge in trying to protect ratepayers for the costs of electricity needed for data centers is that the PSC has never faced a surge in electricity demand of this scale. We Energies alone plans to spend $19 billion over five years to meet what is expected to be a doubling of its demand for electricity, largely from the two Milwaukee-area data centers, in Port Washington and Mount Pleasant.
Nationally, the procedures that regulators use are “not designed for the current level and pace of load growth,” one energy consultant wrote in a December report.
“As a result, the estimated cost to serve new customers can quickly become outdated and inaccurate,” potentially leading to costs being shifted to other customers, the report said.
The Republican-controlled Assembly on Jan. 20 passed a bill to require that the PSC ensure “that no costs associated with the construction or extension of electric infrastructure that primarily serves a data center are allocated to or recovered from any other customer.”
No action has been scheduled in the GOP-controlled state Senate.
Opponents have criticized a “poison pill” provision in the bill they say would severely limit the ability to use renewable energy to power data centers.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has said he likely would not sign the bill.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
A Dane County judge on Monday rejected the city of Madison’s claim that absentee voting’s characterization in state law as a “privilege” precludes damages against the city for disenfranchising 193 voters and ruled that Madison can face potential financial liability for the error.
In rejecting motions by the city and other defendants to dismiss the case, Dane County Circuit Court Judge David Conway said that a state law describing absentee voting as a privilege does not mean absentee ballots receive less constitutional protection than votes cast in person.
“That right to vote,” Conway wrote, “would be a hollow protection if it did not also include the right to have one’s vote counted.”
Conway also rejected former Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl’s legal argument that there is a meaningful legal difference between intentionally not counting votes and mistakenly failing to count them due to human error. He held that state law allows for people to seek damages against election officials who “negligently deprive citizens of the right to vote.”
“When an election official fails to count a valid absentee ballot, whether by negligence, recklessness, or malice, he or she deprives the absentee voter of that constitutional right,” he wrote.
Conway dismissed the Madison clerk’s office from the case after arguments that it could not be sued separately from the city, but allowed the case to proceed against the city, Witzel-Behl and Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick. The voters are represented by a liberal election law firm, Law Forward.
“At the dawn of another election season, the message is clear: The right to vote protects Wisconsinites whether they vote in-person or absentee,” Law Forward staff attorney Scott Thompson told Votebeat. “We are pleased the court agreed with our arguments and that this case will proceed.”
Matt O’Neill, the lawyer representing Witzel-Behl, declined to comment.
Madison spokesperson Dylan Brogan said the city is reviewing the decision and considering its next steps. Brogan stressed that the city “has a long history of promoting and protecting absentee voting and that policy has not changed,” but said monetary damages for unintentional errors would mean money and resources “would be diverted to pay for this human error.”
Madison mayor says ‘nonsensical’ lawsuit could weaken elections
In an interview with Votebeat last week, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said she didn’t like the state law calling absentee voting a privilege, not a right. But she said that critics should direct their concerns at the Legislature, rather than at the city.
Rhodes-Conway said the city’s argument “literally repeat(s) what’s in state law.” Legal experts have disputed that characterization, saying the city advanced a novel interpretation of a long-standing statute. Rhodes-Conway said she wasn’t sure those critiques were relevant.
“It shouldn’t be in the law,” she said. “And the state Legislature should take action to correct that and better protect voting in this state.”
The 1985 state law describes absentee voting as a privilege exercised outside the safeguards of the polling place. Another provision requires absentee voters to comply with laws regulating the practice for their votes to count. The law has been cited in lawsuits seeking to restrict absentee voting, but it had never before been used to shield election officials from liability for failing to count valid ballots.
In his Monday ruling, Conway dismissed the city’s interpretation of the law without questioning the statute itself.
“Just because the absentee voting process is a privilege does not mean that those who legally utilize it do not exercise their constitutional right to vote,” he said.
Rhodes-Conway said that, despite using that legal argument in court, the city has consistently promoted absentee voting and will continue to do so.
Rhodes-Conway criticized the lawsuit as a whole, saying that the solution for the city disenfranchising 193 voters in the 2024 presidential election “is not to charge the city of Madison millions of dollars because our clerk’s office made a mistake.”
“That’s not achieving anything. It’s not making elections better,” she continued. “It’s simply taking money that could be invested in basic services and in election protection and election services, and paying it to the plaintiffs. It’s just nonsensical to me.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Wisconsin Watch, one of the nation’s most successful nonprofit news organizations, will come under new leadership March 2 when Andy Pennington succeeds retiring CEO George Stanley.
Pennington has been regional president for Adams Multimedia, overseeing 10 Wisconsin news outlets and 150 employees. Prior to this, he was president and director of strategy for the Anchorage Daily News. In 2018, a new owner bought the bankrupt Daily News and recruited Pennington to build a thriving, sustainable digital-first news enterprise.
In 2020, the Anchorage Daily News won the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service for its investigation into lawlessness ravaging Alaskan communities. Its longtime editor, David Hulen, said Pennington was a huge supporter of the newsroom’s mission, which was all about public service to the people of Alaska.
Andy Pennington will become Wisconsin Watch CEO on March 2
Wisconsin Watch Board Chair, Kathy Bissen, says “Andy has exceptional expertise on the business side of journalism, combined with a passion for the critical value of local public service journalism. The Board is enthusiastic about Andy’s ability to continue growing Wisconsin Watch’s impact statewide.”
A native of Wisconsin, Pennington decided after seven years in Anchorage to return home, where he has overseen print and digital publications for the Janesville Gazette, Beloit Daily News, Watertown Daily Times, Daily Jefferson County Union, the Hometown Group, Antigo Daily Journal and Marinette Eagle Herald.
In all, he has spent more than 20 years leading local news organizations and building revenue models that support strong independent journalism.
“I am excited about leading Wisconsin Watch,” Pennington said. “The work aligns closely with my experience and what I care about most: expanding access to trusted information, strengthening local journalism across Wisconsin communities, building sustainable financial models, and supporting talented journalists and staff.”
Pennington has a passion, Stanley said, for collaboration, community engagement and serving the most important needs of readers, all of which make him a great fit for leading a statewide news organization with the public service mission of “using journalism to make the communities of Wisconsin strong, informed and connected.”
“Andy has the right blend of knowledge, creativity, enthusiasm and appreciation for our mission that’s needed in the next leader of Wisconsin Watch,” Stanley said. “We’re building on a strong record of partnering with others and sharing important, impactful reporting, work begun by Dee and Andy Hall.”
The Halls launched Wisconsin Watch in 2009 as the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism to produce important, labor-intensive investigative reports that had declined in Wisconsin and nationwide as the business model that long supported local news collapsed and newsrooms shrank. Wisconsin Watch continues to produce impactful special reports while expanding in recent years to fill growing local news voids across the state.
George Stanley joined Wisconsin Watch in 2023 after the founders retired. Under Stanley, Wisconsin Watch made great strides in its mission to use journalism to make Wisconsin communities strong, informed and connected.
Outgoing Wisconsin Watch CEO George Stanley. (Brad Horn for Wisconsin Watch)
Prior to coming to Wisconsin Watch, Stanley led the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newsroom as managing editor and editor from 1997 until his retirement from that position in January 2023. Over that time, the Journal Sentinel received virtually every major national journalism honor, including 10 Pulitzer Prize finalists.
“George is nationally recognized for his journalism and leadership expertise,” says Bissen. “I can’t imagine anyone who could have stepped in and built upon the founding work of Andy and Dee as successfully as George. To retire knowing that you made such an important impact statewide is amazing.”
Wisconsin Watch, a 501(c)(3) organization, is supported by its members and Wisconsin philanthropies including the Joseph and Vera Zilber Family Foundation, the Ascendium Education Group, the Kingsbury Family Fund, the Greater Milwaukee and Greater Green Bay Community Foundations, the Journal Foundation, The Brico Fund and Bader Philanthropies. It is also supported nationally by the American Journalism Project, Emerson Collective, the Joyce Foundation, Arnold Ventures, the Ford Foundation, the Reva and David Logan Foundation and the Jampart Charitable Trust, among others.
Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission typically operates far from the spotlight, quietly regulating the utilities most residents only notice when the lights go out. But a wave of proposed energy-intensive data centers in Wisconsin is fueling wider public interest in the agency’s work.
“These are the three most important people in state government that nobody has ever heard of,” said Tom Content, executive director of the state Citizens Utility Board. “They are setting the state’s policy for its energy future.”
With six new data centers planned or under construction in Wisconsin, the commission must now decide how — or whether — Wisconsinites should pay to keep them running.
Balancing utility and ratepayer interests
The agency — more than a century old and among the first of its kind in the country — oversees Wisconsin’s utilities, both public and investor-owned. It balances two sometimes conflicting goals: the financial stability of utilities, without which the state’s grid could fall into disrepair, and fair treatment of utility customers. The commission’s roughly $39 million budget for the 2027 fiscal year primarily comes from fees paid by utilities, which pass those costs on to their customers.
The PSC isn’t always the decision maker on energy policy. State lawmakers can write rules for utilities for the PSC to enforce. But when state law leaves room for interpretation, the PSC is left to decide.
Most utilities under the PSC’s authority are municipal water and sewer services — the Milwaukee Water Works, for instance.
But many of the PSC’s highest-stakes decisions center on investor-owned utilities. Private gas and electrical utilities don’t compete for customers. As “regulated monopolies,” each is the sole provider in its portion of the state. The PSC acts as the regulator, approving rate hikes, bond issues and major construction projects.
The PSC also approves utilities’ “return on equity” — a profit margin factored into ratepayers’ bills. In Wisconsin, that rate typically runs around 10%.
Powering the data center boom
The PSC lacks a direct say in data center construction. But because data centers demand vast amounts of electricity, it decides how to distribute the costs of new infrastructure needed to power data centers.
The commission approved the construction of We Energies natural gas plants in Oak Creek in Milwaukee County and the town of Paris in Kenosha County in May 2025.
Both plants are part of We Energies’ more than $2 billion plan to expand its natural gas generation capacity to meet surging electricity demand largely driven by data centers. Planned data centers in Mount Pleasant and Port Washington alone are projected to expand service area electricity demand by 40% between 2026 and 2030.
Wisconsin has no precedent for handling such a surge in demand for electricity.
Now the commission is considering a We Energies proposal for a new payment structure for “very large customers” that could set the standard for allocating the costs of building and operating power plants needed to meet data center demands.
“Our proposed data center rate is considered by many people to be the gold standard, and one that could be a model for what others across the country use,” We Energies spokesperson Brendan Conway wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch.
Barbed wire fence surrounds the former site of the We Energies Power Plant on Nov. 13, 2025, in Pleasant Prairie, Wis. It’s among several obsolete power plants Wisconsin ratepayers are still paying for, making some skeptical about a planned generation build out to meet expect energy demands of a data center boom. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
The Sierra Club is among several advocacy groups involved in the We Energies case as an “intervenor,” meaning it can question the utility and provide expert witnesses.
“What the PSC requires them to do will likely influence future decisions on large customer rates, which is why it’s so important that we get this right this time around,” said Cassie Steiner, a senior campaign coordinator with the Sierra Club’s Wisconsin chapter.
The PSC is also weighing an Alliant Energy proposal to establish a payment structure for Meta’s planned data center in Beaver Dam. Some critics argue Alliant Energy should propose a framework covering all data center customers rather than a one-off agreement.
At the heart of the debate: Should Wisconsin’s residential and industrial customers cover any of the costs of powering new data centers?
To answer that question, the PSC holds proceedings in which utilities and intervenors trade questions and answers about the risks and rewards of a utility’s proposal. The commission collects up to $542,000 from utilities to help intervenors pay attorneys and expert witnesses; utilities cover their own expenses. Utility customers ultimately pay for both sides through their electricity bills.
Not all intervenors are critics. Microsoft and data center developer Vantage have intervened in the We Energies case. The proposed payment structure reflects negotiations between the three companies that took place before We Energies filed its case before the PSC.
Utilities generally work closely with data center developers. Four of Wisconsin’s investor-owned utilities, including We Energies’ parent company, are founding members of the state’s Data Center Coalition, which says it aims “to ensure our state’s significant growth in data center development translates into sustainable economic benefits.” A data center boom is good business for utilities because they earn a return on any new infrastructure they build.
High-demand customers like Microsoft can also intervene and provide key data to inform PSC decisions.
In the We Energies case, details about Microsoft’s projected energy use for its southeast Wisconsin facilities are protected by an order that limits access to the PSC and other parties in the case.
The PSC needs the data to judge whether proposed arrangements — like granting data centers 100 megawatts of free electricity if they exceed the supply agreed to in their contracts — properly balance the interests of utilities and the public. Microsoft successfully moved to shield that information from public disclosure on the grounds that it could give competitors a window into their operations.
“Load forecasts are sensitive because they give competitors information about our business outlook and investment decisions,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Wisconsin Watch.
The sun sets as construction continues at Microsoft’s data center project on Nov. 13, 2025, in Mount Pleasant, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Alliant’s one-off payment structure case is subject to even greater access restrictions: Entire pages of the proposed contract between Alliant subsidiary Wisconsin Power and Light and Meta are redacted.
As the PSC considers the two cases, customers are still being billed in the same manner as large industrial customers — a payment structure not built for such high electricity demands. Critics of the We Energies proposal agree some alternative is needed.
“They would be better off recognizing that there are some potential harms to other customers even with the proposal they have out there,” said Brett Korte, a staff attorney with the advocacy group Clean Wisconsin.
In written testimony, We Energies Vice President and Treasurer Tony Reese wrote that the new payment structure must leave non-data center customers “no worse off” than under the status quo.
Parties that disagree with a PSC outcome can appeal in court. One such challenge reached the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2005, when the justices upheld the commission’s approval of a coal plant expansion in Oak Creek.
The commissioners
Unlike state Supreme Court justices, PSC commissioners are not elected. Governors appoint them to staggered six-year terms, subject to Senate confirmation. Gov. Tony Evers appointed all three current commissioners. Chairwoman Summer Strand has served on the commission since 2023; commissioners Kristy Nieto and Marcus Hawkins took their seats in 2024.
The commissioners are supported by a full-time staff of researchers, auditors, attorneys, accountants and a range of other specialists to inform their decisions. Nieto and Hawkins previously worked on the PSC’s staff.
Former commissioners occasionally land jobs with the utilities they once regulated. Six months after stepping down from the PSC in February 2024, commissioner Rebecca Valcq took a job with Alliant Energy — the parent company of Wisconsin Power and Light, which provides electricity for much of central and southern Wisconsin. She became the company’s president in 2025.
Moves like Valcq’s have drawn concerns from watchdogs about utilities’ influence over the agency built to regulate them. Wisconsin law bars ex-commissioners from testifying before the PSC for a year after leaving. State Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, wants to extend that window, proposing a three-year “cooling off period” before ex-commissioners can take executive roles with utilities, enforced by the Wisconsin Ethics Commission.
“Historically, good-government reforms that rein in the influence of special interests tend to draw bipartisan support,” Nedweski wrote in an email — though she said she hasn’t yet secured any Democratic co-sponsors.
What’s next?
The PSC is set to hold its next hearing in the We Energies case on Tuesday, with room for residents and interest groups to weigh in.
Hanging over the finer details of the proposal is a larger question: What risks will ratepayers bear if the data center boom later goes bust?
“Of course no company is too big to fail,” Reese wrote last month. “But in the very unlikely event that a customer as massive and financially stable as Microsoft becomes unable to meet its financial obligations,” his company’s proposal promises “adequate protection” to the utility and customers.
“Making sure our customers aren’t stuck paying data centers’ costs is at the foundation of our customer protection plan,” We Energies spokesman Conway told Wisconsin Watch.
Considering that Wisconsin ratepayers still owe nearly $1 billion on “stranded assets” — power plants that have been shut down due to obsolescence — critics of the data center proposals are skeptical.
Will the utility’s proposed guardrails hold up in a worst case scenario? That’s now up to the PSC.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
SUPREME COSTS: This is a follow-up to a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges. Read the rest of the series here.
Click here to read highlights from the story
There have been two Appeals Court races since 2020 that cost more than $1 million, both in District 2, which covers counties in southeast Wisconsin outside of Milwaukee.
This year was shaping up to be another costly race, but one of the candidates filed improper paperwork and was kicked off the ballot.
The increased spending by outside groups and political parties is part of the same trend that has fueled record spending on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The Wisconsin Court of Appeals may be the least visible layer of the state judiciary.
Almost all of its work is behind the scenes. It doesn’t conduct the dramatic trials that can grab headlines in circuit courts. Its rulings in high-stakes cases are usually appealed to the state Supreme Court — if those cases don’t bypass the appellate court altogether.
But Wisconsin’s intermediate court does have one thing in common with the high court: increasingly expensive campaigns.
In recent years, spending on two Court of Appeals campaigns in the Waukesha-based District 2 exceeded the million-dollar mark — far short of the national record $144.5 million spent on the 2025 Supreme Court race, yet almost certainly unprecedented for Wisconsin appellate elections.
Now another seat is open in that same district, with the upcoming retirement of Presiding Judge Lisa Neubauer, the lone liberal among the district’s four jurists.
The race to replace Neubauer effectively ended Jan. 13, when the Wisconsin Elections Commission disqualified candidate Christine Hansen, an administrative law judge for the state Department of Corrections. Barring a write-in campaign, attorney Anthony LoCoco — known for his work with the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and Institute for Reforming Government — will be unopposed in the officially nonpartisan April 7 election.
Hansen’s husband notarized her declaration of candidacy, which is against state law. On the recommendation of its staff, the bipartisan commission voted 5-1 to block her from the ballot.
A screenshot from Christine Hansen’s website for her candidacy for the Wisconsin Court of Appeals. She announced that she is formally ending her campaign because of an issue with her candidate filing. (hansenforjudge.com/)
Before Hansen was knocked out of the race, LoCoco was gearing up for a contest that could have reached the previous spending heights of 2021 and 2022. He raised $209,603 by Dec. 31, his campaign finance report shows.
Anthony LoCoco, a candidate for District 2 Appeals Court (Courtesy of LoCoco for Judge)
That’s four times as much as fellow conservative Maria Lazar raised by this point in her successful 2022 bid for another seat in the same district — and even more than Lazar raised last year in her current campaign for Supreme Court.
Of the 10 candidates in five contested Court of Appeals elections in the last decade, only Neubauer posted a bigger total on a January report: $231,264 for a 2020 reelection race that followed her narrow loss for Supreme Court in 2019.
In comparison, Hansen raised $50,000, all from her own pocket.
Lazar is facing liberal District 4 Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor in the Supreme Court race to succeed conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, who is not seeking reelection. If Lazar wins, conservatives would retain their three-justice minority on the seven-member high court — but Democratic Gov. Tony Evers could name a liberal to replace Lazar in District 2, maintaining its current 3-1 conservative-liberal split.
That district has become Wisconsin’s top appellate court battleground. Statewide, 44 of 53 appellate races were uncontested from 2008 through 2025, along with all three this spring. But five of the nine contested races were in District 2, and total spending in four of those contests topped half a million dollars each, including the two million-dollar campaigns. Spending was under $300,000 in the other five races, including one in which the two candidates spent less than $25,000 total.
Like the Supreme Court, the rising cost of some appellate court campaigns appears to be part of a nationwide trend, and for some of the same reasons: growing involvement of political parties and special interests, driven by hot-button issues and national polarization and fueled by Wisconsin’s narrow ideological divide and lax campaign finance laws.
But it also reflects a dynamic in which each of the four Court of Appeals districts has evolved into liberal or conservative turf, triggering a challenge whenever a governor fills a vacancy with a judge from the other side.
Quiet but powerful
The Court of Appeals didn’t exist for Wisconsin’s first 130 years. Until 1978, all appeals from trial courts went directly to the state Supreme Court, unlike the three-level federal system. Eight sparsely populated states still don’t have appellate courts.
Now, after a 1977 state constitutional amendment created the Court of Appeals, 16 appeals judges are elected for six-year terms, on a staggered schedule. Five judges sit in Madison-based District 4 — which covers 24 central and western counties and originally heard virtually all challenges to state laws — with four each in District 1 (consisting of Milwaukee County only) and District 2 (covering the other 12 counties in southeastern and east-central Wisconsin) and just three in the 35-county northern District 3, based in Wausau.
Those judges work in three-member panels for about three-quarters of their cases. Single judges handle the least complex appeals, such as small claims, misdemeanors and violations of traffic laws or municipal ordinances.
Contributing to the court’s low profile, appellate judges hear oral arguments in only about 1% of cases. More often, the judges focus on attorneys’ written briefs and lower court trial transcripts.
But in its quiet way, the Court of Appeals holds the final word on nearly all everyday cases. In 2024, civil litigants and criminal defendants filed 2,529 appeals in the appellate courts. They appealed 561 of the appellate judges’ decisions to the Supreme Court. However, the high court agreed to hear just 17 appeals, typically only those posing significant constitutional questions. In another six cases, the justices allowed the parties to bypass the appellate court altogether. That means more than 99% of cases appealed from circuit courts ended at the Court of Appeals.
With so few cases going to the high court, the stakes are rising in appellate court elections, former Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske said.
A bench divided
Running in nonpartisan elections, many Court of Appeals candidates were traditionally not viewed as liberal or conservative. But that has changed in recent years, mirroring the highly public divisions on the Supreme Court.
Of the 16 current Court of Appeals judges, eight were appointed to the appellate or circuit bench by Democratic governors, ran for the Supreme Court as liberals or ran for or won partisan office as Democrats. Another six were either former GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s appointees, ran for the appeals court as conservatives or held partisan office as Republicans.
Retiring Chief Judge Maxine White and Deputy Chief Judge Joe Donald were appointed to Milwaukee County Circuit Court by former GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson and to the District 2 bench by Evers, while District 4 Judge Jennifer Nashold held appointed offices under both Walker and former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle. However, all are considered liberals. That means all judges in Districts 1 and 4 are liberals, while conservatives hold all District 3 seats. Only District 2 is ideologically split.
A pair of million-dollar Appeals Court races waged in suburban district
Total money spent for each competitive election by district, 2008 – 2026
District 1
District 2
District 3
District 4
$1.5 (million)
Total Spending (million dollars)
1
0.5
$0
2023
2008
2010
2020
2021
2022
2015
2021
2010
Source: Wisconsin Ethics Commission and OpenSecrets
Graphic by Hongyu Liu/Wisconsin Watch
A pair of million-dollar Appeals Court races waged in suburban district
Total money spent for each competitive election by district, 2008 – 2026
District
1
2
3
4
$1.5 (million)
Total Spending (million dollars)
1
0.5
$0
2008
2010
2021
2022
2015
2021
2010
2023
2020
Source: Wisconsin Ethics Commission and OpenSecrets
Graphic by Hongyu Liu/Wisconsin Watch
That distribution reflects the political composition of the districts, former Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly said. All District 2 counties voted for Republicans in the 2024 presidential and 2022 gubernatorial elections, but liberals carried Kenosha and Winnebago counties in the last two Supreme Court races, plus Racine County in 2025.
While the divide among District 2 judges isn’t new, it didn’t initially draw political attention. After Doyle appointed Neubauer to fill a vacancy in 2008, ideology didn’t play a major role in her campaign for a full term later that year. She won that $641,259 contest against attorney William Gleisner, then was unopposed for reelection in 2014.
District 2 Presiding Judge Lisa Neubauer (Facebook.com)
It was only after Neubauer ran a liberal Supreme Court campaign against conservative District 2 colleague Brian Hagedorn in 2019 that she became a target of the right. She fended off a 2020 challenge from conservative Waukesha County Judge Paul Bugenhagen Jr. in a $589,037 campaign.
Challenges to another Democratic governor’s appointees soon followed. In 2021, Shelley Grogan, a Bradley aide and Muskego municipal judge, attacked her opponent, then-incumbent Jeff Davis, as a liberal appointed by Evers in 2019 — even though Davis had strong Republican ties and was endorsed by conservative Justice Annette Ziegler and former conservative justices Patience Roggensack and David Prosser.
Grogan — who was backed by Walker, Bradley, Kelly and Republican billionaires Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein and Diane Hendricks — defeated Davis in a $1.56 million campaign. Although the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign doesn’t track appellate court campaign spending the way it does Supreme Court races, the 2021 District 2 contest was likely the state’s most expensive.
In 2022, Lazar took down then-incumbent Lori Kornblum, who had been appointed by Evers earlier that year, in a $1.05 million contest.
Conversely, former Democratic Assembly candidate Sara Geenen scored a 2023 victory in a $299,717 District 1 campaign to unseat then-incumbent William Brash, a 2015 Walker appointee who had been unopposed for a full term in 2017. Geenen won by 37 percentage points, the widest margin of victory in the last nine contested races.
Originally positioning himself to challenge Neubauer, LoCoco’s campaign website leaves no doubt where he stands. On his homepage, he labels himself “a proven conservative fighter who will keep our communities safe and the bureaucracy out of our lives.” Elsewhere, he rails against “activist judges who have … given in to woke ideology,” and he blames “progressive politics” for “putting our kids and families in danger.”
LoCoco is endorsed by an array of Republican politicians — including Walker and Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney, now running for attorney general — and conservative jurists, including Bradley, Ziegler, Kelly, Lazar, Grogan and District 2 Judge Mark Gundrum. LoCoco’s top donors include former GOP Senate candidate Eric Hovde and the Uihleins.
LoCoco’s approach differs from that of most judicial candidates, who traditionally have tried to play down their ideological leanings, regardless of who has endorsed or donated to them, particularly in the lower courts. Only in recent years have Supreme Court candidates publicly stated their views on controversial issues like abortion, public employee collective bargaining rights and legislative redistricting. Campaign websites for Lazar and Taylor portray them as independent and impartial.
Following the money
However, state and local arms of the two major parties have been increasingly involved in recent Court of Appeals races, although their spending started years later and at a much lower level than in Supreme Court races.
District 2 accounted for all three of the races with Republican cash: $34,054 to Grogan, $19,140 to Bugenhagen and $10,856 to Lazar. It was also home to three of the five contests with Democratic money: $189,272 to Davis, $66,777 to Kornblum and $14,146 to Neubauer. Democrats gave another $14,126 combined to Geenen and losing 2021 District 3 candidate Rick Cveykus.
All told, the parties have spent $348,372 on appellate races since 2020, with Democrats outspending Republicans more than 4 to 1. The combined $223,326 of party spending in the 2021 Grogan-Davis race was the most for any Court of Appeals campaign.
District 2 was also the focus of another relatively new development in appellate elections: independent spending by special interests that advertise separately from candidates’ campaigns, though at much lower levels than in Supreme Court races. Lazar was backed by $250,000 in outside spending by Fair Courts America — funded by Richard Uihlein to back conservative judicial candidates — and Grogan benefited from $56,173 spent by the Republican State Leadership Committee, a national organization.
The Uihlein group spent more than Lazar’s own campaign, the only time that has happened in a Court of Appeals race. Together, the $306,173 in independent expenditures by conservative groups was more than 27 times the combined total of $11,134 that liberal groups spent in support of Davis, Neubauer and former Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard, who won a District 4 seat in 2010.
Nationally, million-dollar campaigns for intermediate appellate courts remain uncommon, according to Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. The Brennan Center compiles campaign spending figures for state Supreme Court races but not lower court contests.
However, Wisconsin’s top two Court of Appeals campaigns weren’t the country’s most expensive. In 2004, a Georgia candidate reportedly spent more than $3 million of his own money on a losing bid for an appellate judgeship. And 2023 spending by four candidates seeking two Pennsylvania appellate court seats totaled more than $2.6 million.
As with Supreme Court campaigns, wealthy individuals can donate heavily to influence lower court contests, Keith noted. Before billionaire Elon Musk spent $55.9 million on Wisconsin’s 2025 high court election, he gave a total of $3 million to two political action committees active in multiple 2024 Texas judicial races.
For now, most appellate court campaigns are “still very much under the radar,” Keith said. But that could change “as we’re seeing greater recognition of just how important these courts are,” he added.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Wearing orange high-visibility vests as they mount TVs, conduct basic car care, assemble furniture and complete other tasks, participants of Handyman Academy are busy at work on Milwaukee’s North Side.
Program founders Daniel McHenry and AJ Batchelor say learning these skills helps provide structure and mentorship for students with limited support at home.
Handyman Academy, launched in July 2025, is a youth program that equips students with handyman skills to help them build confidence and independence.
“Everything that I’m teaching them are things that I know,” McHenry said. “I wanted to create more resources for single mothers so they could keep their children out of trouble and focused.”
Inspiration for the program
McHenry is a self-taught handyman and owner of the moving company Lift N Go Express. He said after a decade of hands-on work, he wanted to shift from physical labor and pass his skills to inner-city teens, especially those in single-parent households.
Daniel McHenry, left, and AJ Batchelor enrolled 38 students for Handyman Academy’s summer course and 20 during the fall. (Courtesy of Daniel McHenry)
“So many mothers poured their heart out to me about the struggles in helping their boys,” he said.
Nearly half of Milwaukee County children are estimated to live in single-parent households as of 2023, according to Federal Reserve Economic Data.
McHenry was a troubled teen who grew up in Chicago and the North Side of Milwaukee with a single mother. Although she taught him basic skills like how to change a tire, he learned other things on his own after losing his biological father. His stepfather was incarcerated.
“The skills I teach in this program are skills that a lot of women can’t really teach their boys,” he said.
McHenry later partnered with Batchelor, owner of AJB Handyman Construction Service LLC and a resident of the Garfield neighborhood. Batchelor was already teaching youths and others handyman skills.
“I typically find people off the street who are in need of money and instead of me giving them money, I show them how they can make it through my business,” Batchelor said.
Becoming a handyman
Handyman Academy offers winter and summer sessions, with students meeting two to three hours weekly.
During summer sessions, participants learn outdoor skills like how to change oil or tires on a car. Winter sessions focus on learning how to use different tools, reading instructions to assemble different items and safety.
To ensure each student is familiar with the tools, McHenry designs worksheets and quizzes for them after each lesson.
“To teach someone how to fix and build something, they need to know what proper tools to use first,” McHenry said.
Once they complete the program, students are celebrated with a graduation and handed a personal toolkit.
Daniel McHenry, front right, and teens work together to build a jungle gym for a day care center. (Courtesy of Daniel McHenry)
Recent graduates of the program include 15-year-old Naiem Bell and 13-year-old Leiyah McHenry, the daughter of Daniel McHenry.
Bell said he appreciated all the skills he learned, but valued teamwork the most.
“A lot of the stuff I’ve been taught, I can’t do all of this alone,” Bell said.
Leiyah McHenry enjoyed the practical activities of the program like learning how to change a tire, an experience she never had before.
“I do think that when I’m older and have my own car, I’ll be able to change my own tire now,” she said.
Her biggest challenge was learning how to mount a TV.
“It was hard to mount the TV at first because I’m so short, but my dad was there to help me,” she said.
After completing the program, Bell assembled a 55-inch TV he received on Christmas.
“I have more ambition to do things now,” Bell said.
Apart from building skills, McHenry and Batchelor also mentor the children by engaging in conversations about entertainment, business, leadership and other topics.
“I had a good mentor at the Boys & Girls Club when I was little and now my mentor has passed,” Batchelor said.
“Our community needs more Black men like us who will step up,” McHenry said.
Naiem Bell, bottom right in gray sweater, said he spent most of his time working with AJ Batchelor, top left, at Handyman Academy. (Courtesy of Farrah Bell)
Helping the kids stay on track
Early in the program, Batchelor and McHenry encountered challenges with the participants.
McHenry said some students were initially rebellious and felt forced to attend, but after creating a comfortable environment, many of them opened up more.
“There was a child who was used to playing video games all day and now he’s active and helps around the house,” McHenry said.
Batchelor said some mothers rely on him to help keep their children on track.
During his free time, he offers paid handyman opportunities to students who need additional support.
“I want these kids to do better because Milwaukee can be a terrible place at times,” Batchelor said.
McHenry said he spent approximately $5,000 out-of-pocket for each course, but he hopes to turn the program into a nonprofit so that parents won’t have to pay $150 for registration.
Plans to expand
McHenry and Batchelor are looking for a permanent space to hold sessions and expand the program. Previous sessions were held at the Midtown Shopping Center and at 8201 W. Brown Deer Road.
“We’ve been through two different locations already, but we’re looking for a place to really call home and somewhere to call our own,” McHenry said. “A place that’s convenient for our students, parents and doesn’t have restrictions.”
McHenry also hopes to collaborate with entrepreneurs, cosmetologists, painters and others to host a workshop highlighting different industries and skills that children can be involved in.
“Everybody isn’t going to be a handyman, so I have to expose them to different areas,” McHenry said. “I think we all have something to offer to the community that can help the youth out.”
Leiyah McHenry and Bell appreciate how the program has guided them in a positive direction.
“I think this program is important in Milwaukee because it keeps kids out of the streets and shows them how to be successful,” Leiyah McHenry said.
“This is really good for people who don’t have father figures around,” Bell said.
For more information
Youths ages 11 to 17 interested in joining the Handyman Academy can register in April and May for spring and summer sessions by emailing Dmchenry1989@gmail.com or messaging the program on Facebook or Instagram.
As children continue to enter foster care across Milwaukee, agencies working the front lines say the greatest need isn’t funding or policy promises, it’s people willing to open their homes. Especially to teenagers.
We spoke with Jakob Eisen, director of social services, and Karen Steinbach, treatment foster care supervisor, with La Causa’s Treatment Foster Care program, to understand what becoming and supporting foster parents can look like.
Shortage of foster families
Children placed in foster care range from newborns to young adults, sometimes remaining in care until age 21 or older if they are still in school.
Steinbach said what youths share is trauma because being removed from home, even for safety reasons, is itself traumatic.
“These kids come to us during the worst moments of their lives,” she said. “They need adults who are patient, empathetic and willing to stay even when things get hard.”
Data shows a desperate shortage in Milwaukee of people willing to take in adolescents.
In 2024, there was an average of 515 children aged 12 years or older in out-of-home care. Of these older children, 275 (53%) were placed in a family-like setting, 146 (28%) were placed in congregate care, and 94 (18%) were in other care.
Ninety percent of children aged 12 and under were placed in family-like care.
Steinbach said teenagers often cycle through dozens of placements, a history that can fuel mistrust, anger and difficult behaviors.
“There’s a myth that teens are harder or more dangerous,” she said. “But if you’ve been in 30 or 40 homes and every one of them asked you to leave, why would you believe the next one will be different?”
She said behaviors like running away, breaking property, withdrawing emotionally or acting out are often trauma responses, not defiance. And younger children show it, too.
Foster parents are asked to look past those behaviors.
“That’s the hardest part of the job,” Steinbach said. “And also the most important.”
What does it take to become a foster parent?
Becoming a foster parent is a serious commitment, and the licensing process reflects that.
Prospective families must pass background checks, provide references, complete home safety inspections, participate in interviews that explore everything from parenting experience to mental health history, and meet other state requirements.
“It’s personal,” Steinbach said. “We ask hard questions because we’re asking you to care for children who have experienced significant trauma.”
There are different levels of foster care. Treatment foster parents, who care for children with higher behavioral or emotional needs, receive additional training and support.
Eisen said most foster parents work full-time jobs. What helps them succeed as a foster parent is preparation and support from employers, family, friends and agencies themselves.
“We ask people upfront: Who’s your village?” Steinbach said. “Because no one does this alone.”
Removing stigmas of fostering
Some community members hesitate to engage with foster care because they believe the system “takes” children from families. Eisen said that perception misses critical context.
“No child is removed without legal authority,” he said. “Every case goes before a judge. There are statutory thresholds, multiple layers of review and ongoing court oversight.”
In most cases, he said, parents retain legal rights and decision-making authority. Foster care is intended to be temporary, with reunification as the primary goal whenever it can be done safely.
“We don’t want to keep kids,” Steinbach said. “The best outcome is getting them home.”
Their goal is to help foster parents work alongside birth families to support them as they complete court-ordered steps.
“When foster parents and birth parents can work together, kids do better,” she said. “And reunification happens faster.”
How you can help, without becoming a foster parent
Not everyone can foster, but Steinbach and Eisen stress that everyone can help.
Support can be as simple as providing respite care or babysitting, helping with school pickups or transportation, bringing meals or offering child care so foster parents can attend training.
“These small things are huge,” Steinbach said. “Sometimes a foster parent just needs an hour to grocery shop or take a shower.”
Community members can also help by challenging stigmas when they hear them, sharing accurate information and encouraging others to consider fostering.
“Even planting the seed matters. Most people think about fostering for years before they ever make the call,” Eisen said.
Prevention and support
While foster care agencies work daily to recruit and support families, leaders say long-term solutions lie in prevention. Investing in mental health care, addiction services, transportation, supervised visitation and family support can help keep children safely at home.
“If we could work ourselves out of a job, we would,” Eisen said. “But until then, we need people, not perfect people, just people willing to show up.”
For children in foster care, that willingness to “show up” can mean the difference between another disrupted placement and the first adult who truly stays in their lives. For more information on becoming a foster parent, you can look here and here.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
When President Donald Trump pressured state and local officials to intervene in his behalf in the 2020 election, it wasn’t a matter of abstract constitutional theory for the people running elections. It was armed protests outside offices, threats against their families, subpoenas for voter data, and months of uncertainty about whether doing their jobs would land them in legal jeopardy.
Now, Trump says he wants Republicans to “nationalize the voting” and “take over the voting in at least 15 places,” language that evokes the pressure campaigns he and allies mounted during that contentious 2020 period.
Trump’s 2020 effort ultimately stalled when even some Republicans refused to take steps they believed were unlawful. And his call to nationalize voting this week prompted pushback from some GOP members of Congress and other Republican figures.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Trump’s proposal raised constitutional concerns, and he warned that nationalizing elections could make them more susceptible to cybersecurity attacks. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska was more blunt, saying he has long opposed federal control of elections. “I’ll oppose this now as well,” he wrote on X.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump’s comments referred to his support for federal legislation commonly called the SAVE Act.
Election officials say the lesson of 2020 was not that the system is invulnerable, but that it can be strained in ways that cause lasting damage long before courts step in. While it’s unclear whether Trump’s latest demands — and possible future actions— would lead to the same level of disruption, legal experts say some of the backstops that ultimately stopped him last time are now weaker, leaving election officials to absorb even more pressure.
Memories of 2020 shape the response
Kathy Bernier, a Republican former Wisconsin lawmaker and Chippewa County clerk, was the chair of the state Senate’s election committee following the 2020 election and repeatedly pushed back on Trump’s claims of widespread fraud. As Republicans launched a prolonged review of the results, Bernier criticized the effort publicly, saying Wisconsin’s elections were secure and that “no one should falsely accuse election officials of cheating.”
She faced extensive backlash, including calls for her resignation, and Bernier said the dispute escalated to the point that she carried a gun for protection. She ultimately left the Legislature, a decision that she said wasn’t politically motivated.
Then-state Sen. Kathy Bernier, R-Chippewa Falls, speaks during a media briefing on growing threats to election professionals in Wisconsin, held at the Wisconsin State Capitol on Dec. 13, 2021. (Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch)
A key takeaway from the 2020 election for election officials, Bernier told Votebeat, was the importance of radical transparency — not just following the rules, but showing people, in real time, that the rules are being followed “to a T.”
“When there’s a paper jam,” she said, “announce it.”
Still, she said, officials also learned the limits of that approach. After she tried to boost election confidence across Wisconsin, she came to a blunt conclusion: “There’s nothing you can do with ‘I don’t believe you.’”
In the years that followed, Bernier said, a bigger danger than Trump himself were the “charlatans” who took his words and turned them into a business model, spreading conspiracy theories for profit. The misinformation and disinformation those people spread, Bernier said, continue to resonate among the conspiratorial segments of the GOP.
Stephen Richer, a Republican who became recorder in Maricopa County, Arizona, shortly after the 2020 election, had similar advice: Follow the law, tell the truth and consult attorneys, national associations and state associations before making key decisions because “the likelihood that they are dealing with your jurisdiction alone is limited.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is among the Republicans who prominently resisted Trump’s calls to overturn the 2020 election. He and his wife received death threats and were assigned a protective team by the state. He declined an interview with Votebeat, but in a statement this week, he urged lawmakers to improve state election administration “rather than rehashing the same outdated claims or worse — moving to federalize a core function of state government.”
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, another Republican who pushed back on Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread fraud following the 2020 election and faced similar retaliation, told Votebeat that the state’s elections are freer and fairer than ever before and that the Constitution stops Trump from unilaterally nationalizing elections.
The Michigan Department of State, similarly, said this was a settled constitutional matter.
On the other hand, Michigan Republicans have asked the U.S. Justice Department for increased federal involvement in elections in the state, calling for monitors — not atypical in American elections — as well as “oversight,” although GOP leaders didn’t elaborate on what that would mean.
Richer, who lost his reelection bid for recorder in 2024 to another Republican, said Trump’s comments, combined with similar calls for federal involvement, suggest the Republican Party is drifting from its traditional commitment to federalism and local control. He also pointed to increased legislation at the federal level seeking to standardize elections, which has received little pushback from the Republican Party. That’s despite Republicans criticizing an earlier Democratic legislative effort as federal overreach.
“Clearly the federal government is going to do things that it’s never done before,” he said. “The FBI going in and taking materials from an election that happened over five years ago is unprecedented, so maybe we’re destined for additional unprecedented actions.”
Election officials and courts the most significant ‘line of defense’
One of the key reasons that Trump failed in his efforts to delay and then overturn the 2020 election was the “men and women of principle” in his administration, said David Becker, an election lawyer who leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research. Becker, a former Justice Department official, said the experience offered an uncomfortable lesson: Those internal guardrails existed because individuals chose to enforce them — and there is less reason to assume they would be there again.
“That line of defense is largely gone,” Becker said, because “the primary and perhaps only qualification for being hired by this administration — particularly in those key roles in the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security — is loyalty to this man.”
With fewer internal checks, Becker said, the second and most important line of defense this election cycle is courts and state and local election officials. Courts have already stymied many of the election policies Trump has tried to carry out via executive order, and “election officials are holding firm.” But he cautioned that court challenges take time — time in which “untold damage” can be done to erode public trust and to the officials caught in the middle.
That gap between what Trump can say and what he can actually do is where the risk now lies, said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University who advised President Joe Biden’s administration on democracy and voting rights. Levitt said Trump does not have the legal or operational authority to unilaterally nationalize elections, even if he were inclined to cross legal boundaries.
He contrasted the president’s ability to control elections with ICE’s use of force in Democratic-run cities. In immigration enforcement, Levitt said, Congress has given the executive branch authority that can be exercised aggressively or improperly, even when courts later find those actions unlawful. In those cases, Levitt said, the president has “his finger on a switch” — the practical ability to act first and answer questions later. “No such switch exists” in elections, said Levitt.
But with fewer administration officials pushing back on Trump’s claims compared with his first term, Levitt said election officials can expect Trump’s messaging to get “much, much, much worse this year,” and for those claims to be given more oxygen by the rest of the federal government.
“It’s up to us to choose to believe him or not,” he added. Obedience in advance isn’t required, and treating Trump’s claims as commands would grant him authority he does not have, Levitt said, adding, “We have agency in this.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Votebeat staff contributed to this story. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
For Char Brandis, a hobbyist photographer in Appleton, the darkroom is her happy place.
But being outside of the professional photography industry, Brandis often found herself working on projects alone, without the support of an artistic community.
“I was doing a lot of art just on my own, in my basement,” Brandis told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.”
Then, she started volunteering with Photo Opp, a nonprofit organization founded in 2021 that opened up a visual workspace in downtown Appleton two years later.
“Coming into Photo Opp and meeting all of these new friends and people that share that passion has been a game changer,” said Brandis, who now serves on the organization’s board and helps to run events.
Char Brandis holds a camera in the Photo Opp workspace in Appleton, captured on black and white film by volunteer Brian Blazer. (Courtesy of Photo Opp)
Photo Opp is the brainchild of Graham Washatka, John Adams and Mark Ferrell, three local multimedia professionals who wanted to create a place for visual artists in the Fox Cities to come together.
After years spent renovating a century-old former synagogue, Photo Opp opened its brick-and-mortar home base to the public in late 2024. There is a gallery and event space on the upper floor, with small studios and a community darkroom on the lower level.
“It was really important for me to be able to create a space that was beautiful and interesting and unique and inspiring,” co-founder Adams told WPR. “That way people — no matter if they like photography or not — would come in and feel welcome and be like, ‘I want to hang out here.’”
That community ethos runs through Photo Opp’s programming, which welcomes professionals, amateurs and total newcomers to hone their craft side by side. Monthly film development nights, which launched last year, have been especially popular.
“Experience levels range anywhere from having never touched a camera before and interested in learning, all the way to professionals that have been in the industry for decades,” Brandis said. “It’s really about putting those people next to each other to learn and develop techniques and experiment — and fail — with their art form.”
Community members gather for an “after hours” gallery and fundraiser at Photo Opp in Appleton, Oct. 17, 2025. (Graham Washatka / courtesy of Photo Opp)
Developing community and connection, one film roll at a time
For the founders of Photo Opp, it was important to build the organization from the ground up in response to what the community was asking for.
One of those needs was for a local place to develop rolls of film. In late 2023, Appleton’s last local photo shop, Murray Photo and Video, permanently closed its doors after more than 30 years in business. Now, the leaders of Photo Opp hope the nonprofit model can help fill this gap.
“We were like, ‘OK, we see a need. We want to keep this art form inside of our community. We should do something,’” Adams said. “We decided to open up our film lab to be able to respond to that community need.”
At Photo Opp’s lab, community members can drop off rolls of film and get them developed, with prices starting at $12 for development only and $20 to include high-resolution digital files.
The service has already proven popular, with Photo Opp fulfilling dozens of orders each week. Adams believes that’s in part because people are returning to analog formats like film photography as a break from the digital world.
“I think we all want to disconnect right now a little bit from our phones, from our computers, and slow down and think about what we’re doing,” Adams said.
This trend is especially pronounced in the younger generation. Photo Opp has been visiting schools in surrounding cities like Green Bay and Neenah to host workshops with first graders through college-aged students.
The organization also welcomes classes to take field trips to the Photo Opp workspace. The idea is to get young people involved in learning about photography and videography beyond what they can shoot on their smartphone.
Students at Horizons Elementary in Appleton experiment with taking photos on a Nikon camera provided by Photo Opp. “For some students, it’s the first time they’ve ever held a camera that’s not a smartphone. That moment can be powerful,” said Char Brandis. (Graham Washatka / courtesy of Photo Opp)
“We’re taking more pictures than we have ever before because of smartphones, but we spend so much less time with them,” Brandis said. “But when you put a camera, whether it’s digital or film, in your hands, you’re really working with a photograph that you intentionally slowed down and took. And now you’re projecting it and then creating something tangible and genuine.”
“There’s just something about that first time in the darkroom when you slide your print into the developer and you watch your image come up,” she added. “That’s just magical.”
Photo Opp’s next film development night is on Feb. 8. See the full calendar of events on its website.
Photographers prepare chemicals in canisters and heat them to a precise temperature. It’s part of the development process for color film. (Graham Washatka / courtesy of Photo Opp)
The Wisconsin Elections Commission, filing its first ever friend-of-the-court brief, challenged Madison’s controversial legal argument that it should not be financially liable for 193 uncounted ballots in the 2024 presidential election because of a state law that calls absentee voting a privilege, not a right.
The argument presented by city officials misunderstands what “privilege” means in the context of absentee voting and “enjoys no support in the constitution or case law,” the commission wrote in its filing Tuesday, echoing a similar rebuke by Gov. Tony Evers last month.
“Once an elector has complied with the statutory process, whether absentee or in-person, she has a constitutional right to have her vote counted,” the commission said.
That both the commission and the governor felt it was necessary to intervene in the case should underscore “both the wrongness and the dangerousness of such a claim,” commission Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, told Votebeat.
The dispute over the city’s legal defense stems from a lawsuit filed in September by the liberal election law firm Law Forward in Dane County Circuit Court against the city of Madison and the clerk’s office, along with former clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl and Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick in their personal capacities. It seeks monetary damages on behalf of the voters whose absentee ballots were never counted in the 2024 presidential election, alleging that their constitutional rights were violated.
Attorneys for Witzel-Behl — and later the city — argued that by choosing to vote absentee, the disenfranchised voters “exercised a privilege,” citing a 1985 state law that describes absentee voting as a privilege exercised outside the safeguards of the polling place.
Law Forward called the argument a “shocking proposition,” and Evers filed his own friend-of-the-court brief last month, warning that the city’s position could lead to “absurd results.”
Some legal experts said the argument could run afoul of the federal Constitution.
Matthew W. O’Neill, an attorney representing Witzel-Behl, declined to comment.
No statute can override the constitutional right to vote, the commission stated, adding that the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided in 2024 that state law the defendants invoked does not allow for a “skeptical view” of absentee voting.
The argument has also drawn negative reactions from a range of political voices.
On Wednesday, six Wisconsin voting groups — Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, Common Cause Wisconsin, ACLU of Wisconsin, All in Wisconsin Fund, and All Voting is Local — released a scathing statement saying they were “deeply alarmed” by the city’s argument.
“We call on the City of Madison to immediately abandon this dangerous legal argument, take responsibility for disenfranchising voters, and work toward a remedy that respects voters’ constitutional rights,” the statement said.
Meanwhile, Rick Esenberg, the founder of the conservative group Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty — which cited the same 1985 law in its 2021 effort to ban ballot drop boxes — said on social media that Madison’s legal argument was likely going too far.
“Madison is correct in noting that absentee voting is a privilege and not a right in the sense that the legislature has no obligation to permit it at all,” Esenberg said. “BUT if it does and people choose to cast their ballot in the way specified by law, it doesn’t seem crazy to say that Madison has a constitutional obligation to count their legally cast vote.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.
Tamee Thom, emergency communications center director, Chippewa County.
Goodchild and her team went from 20 vacancies in 2023 to just two in July 2025, according to Miranda’s reporting. We’ll ask Goodchild to share what steps Waukesha County took to make that happen, the challenges officials faced along the way and how things are going now.
Baneck and Baus represent colleges where students train to become emergency telecommunicators. We’ll ask them what the training looks like, how they market their programs and more.
Thom spent 21 years as a 911 dispatcher and has been leading Chippewa County’s emergency communications center for six years. We’ll ask her about the pros and cons of being a dispatcher and how the job has changed over the past two decades.
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Jolene Wilkens, employment and training supervisor, spoke about the services Wisconsin’s job centers provide and how job seekers can take advantage of them.
The physical locations remain an important resource for those who lack internet access, need a quiet place to work or need face-to-face assistance.
Staff at the centers can help people write resumes and practice answering interview questions.
Job seekers can also take free skills assessments to see what other types of work might interest them.
Looking for a job can be grueling and frustrating.
Though Wisconsin’s job market generally favors job hunters, with more openings than unemployed people to fill them, it can be hard to know where you fit in — or simply where to start.
The state’s Department of Workforce Development runs dozens of job centers across Wisconsin, each staffed with people trained to help you in your quest for work. Wisconsin Watch talked to Jolene Wilkens, an employment and training supervisor at Sheboygan County’s job center, about the services Wisconsin’s job centers provide and how job seekers can take advantage of them.
“We want to meet the person where they’re at, but we do a lot of cheerleading and bringing that positive attitude,” Wilkens said. “We’re here to support you. We’re not here to make this process more complicated.”
Here’s what to know.
Find your job center
Wisconsin has job center locations across the state. Find the closest one to you using the map below.
This map doesn’t include all of the department’s affiliate or satellite locations, such as job centers in correctional facilities.
While the number of people visiting job centers varies widely among the different locations, more people have used their virtual services online in recent years, Wilkens said. The Sheboygan location where Wilkens works typically sees between 60 and 80 visitors each week.
While the department offers many of their resources online, the physical locations remain an important resource for those who lack internet access, need a quiet place to work or need face-to-face assistance for any reason. Getting to know people individually also helps staff make personalized recommendations or watch for jobs that are a good fit for someone, Wilkens said.
“There’s a lot of folks that prefer to come in person and have that personal touch, and some of that is just the support they receive. You build a community,” she said.
What to bring with you
Depending on the services you’re looking for, you might need to bring documentation or identification with you. Here’s a list of things visitors often need:
Driver’s license or ID.
Social Security card or number.
A list of your last 18 to 24 months of work history, if applicable.
Your cellphone, to set up two-factor authentications.
Paper to write down your login information or to take notes.
A resume, if you have one.
Direct deposit or checking information.
What to expect when you show up
When you walk into a job center for the first time, you should expect to answer a list of questions from the employees.
They’ll want to know:
What work experience do you have? (It’s OK if you don’t have any.)
Have you enjoyed that work? What kind of work do you want to be doing? (If you don’t know, they’ll help you figure it out.)
Do you like your resume? (If you don’t, they’ll help you change it.)
Are you having trouble securing job interviews after applying? (They might want to take a look at your resume.)
Are you securing interviews, but having trouble landing jobs? (They’ll probably want to work on interview skills with you.)
Staff at Wisconsin’s job centers can help job seekers write or update their resumes, apply for work and practice answering interview questions. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Free skills assessments are available online and in-person through the Job Center of Wisconsin. Staff can provide people with resources if they decide to switch careers, for example, including information about education. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Finding the right fit
If you’re not yet sure what kind of work you can or want to do, job center staff can help you figure it out.
Staff will recommend taking the Occupational Information Network’s (O*NET) quiz to help understand your interests and the things you enjoy doing. The quiz asks you to rate how much you’d like different activities — such as building kitchen cabinets or teaching a high school class — if they were a part of your job. Your answers help the application suggest careers you might enjoy.
If you know what kind of jobs you want to do, or you want to see different jobs you’re qualified for, staff will recommend using a tool called Skill Explorer. The program asks you to input your job, education or training experience and produces a list of occupations and industries that your skills may transfer to. Skill Explorer also contains information about wages, job openings and projected growth for each occupation.
“Sometimes it’s not recognizing all the transferable skills that you already possess and being able to move those industry sectors,” Wilkens said. “Other times, it’s identifying, ‘I like what I do, but it’s not my passion. I want to upskill and go to something else.’”
If you want to return to school or job training to pursue a different career or to move up in your industry, staff will connect you to the Department of Workforce Development’s training arm. From there, career counselors help you track down the right educational program — and assistance affording it.
After settling on what kind of work you’re after, job center staff will focus on helping you secure the job.
First: the resume. Most job applications ask for a document summarizing one’s education, work experience and skills. Building one shouldn’t be overwhelming, Wilkens said.
Job center staff are trained to help people put together resumes that help secure job interviews. They also use a tool that creates a resume after asking you to answer prompts. When users log a job title, it suggests additions based on the profession’s occupational outlook, a federal compilation of data, information and predictions about jobs.
Wilkens encourages people to be open to changing up their resume or being challenged.
“You ask 100 people how to do a resume, and you’re going to get 100 different answers,” Wilkens said. “Just because you worked in one industry for 10 years, and then you did a 180 and went into a different industry, and now you’re looking at yet another, doesn’t mean there aren’t skills in there that we can transfer and highlight.”
People can get connected to various resources through their nearest Job Center of Wisconsin location. For example, if they need help applying for unemployment, staff will ask what their housing and food situation is like and offer options if they need assistance. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
You can access the department’s resume building tool here. It plans to roll out a new and improved version of the tool in the next year.
Job center staff will help throughout the interview process by scheduling mock interviews and helping you answer practice questions. They can also create an account on InterviewPrep, a tool that allows you to see how you sound responding to interview questions and get feedback from staff.
Staff can also help you choose between job offers by comparing the wages or cost of living between different locations.
Other services job centers offer
Unemployment and job loss resources
Wisconsin’s job centers partner with employers across the state to hold job fairs and hiring events. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
People commonly visit job centers to get assistance filing for unemployment.
“You can’t walk into an unemployment office, so you come into a job center,” Wilkens said.
Staff also complete an “assessment of needs” when people visit for unemployment help. They ask questions to understand if a person is experiencing housing scarcity, food insecurity or other struggles, so they can direct them to free community resources.
“Somebody will come in feeling really defeated and disheartened about losing their job,” Wilkens said. “We have resources for that. Helping people realize all the things that they brought to the job and why they were able to retain that job for so long, really helps reframe and start thinking and looking at things glass half full.”
“There are a lot of positives,” she said. “You didn’t just go to work and make widgets … You showed up promptly every day. You worked as part of a team. You were dependable and reliable. You adhered to safety standards.”
Support for people with disabilities
The state’s job centers have a Division of Vocational Rehabilitation that helps people with disabilities obtain and keep work.
The division can connect people to diagnosis and treatment, transportation assistance, interpreter services and help with job search and placement, among other services.
Job fairs
Job centers often host or collaborate with local employers on job fairs and hiring events. You can view a list of upcoming hiring events coming up across the state here.
Wisconsin’s version of C-SPAN is back online after going dark for about seven weeks due to a lack of funding.
In a vote tallied Monday, a state Legislature committee unanimously approved funding to the nonprofit public affairs network.
WisconsinEye’s website was back up Monday morning, including its archive of old videos of hearings and legislative sessions. The nonprofit also livestreamed a press conference in the Capitol Monday and has plans to broadcast legislative activity Tuesday.
It comes after the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Legislative Organization voted 10-0 to approve $50,000 to WisconsinEye for operations costs to resume broadcasting for the Legislature for February.
Those costs will be divided equally between the Senate and Assembly. The full Legislature does not need to vote on the funding.
WisEye went offline on Dec. 15. At the time, the network said it needed “consistent annual funding” to ensure the public doesn’t “lose the only reliable and proven source of unfiltered State Capitol news and state government proceedings.” In November, the network said it needed $887,000 in donations to cover its operation budget for one year.
During WisconsinEye’s absence, Republican state lawmakers enforced rules banning members of the public who are not credentialed media from recording legislative hearings inside the State Capitol.
WisEye has created a GoFundMe with the goal of raising $250,000, or three months of its operating budget. As of Monday morning, the campaign had raised more than $56,000.
WisconsinEye CEO Jon Henkes did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday. He had previously asked the Legislature and governor to remove a matching provision for roughly $10 million in state funding for the network that was included in the most recent state budget.
While WisEye may still face long-term funding challenges, Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, said it’s good news for Wisconsinites that the network is broadcasting again.
In addition to providing live coverage of legislative meetings for residents who can’t make it to Madison, Lueders said WisEye’s archive of past meetings is important for historical purposes because it provides a record of the debates and discussions that took place in state government.
“WisconsinEye has long been a tremendously important resource for Wisconsin and advances the cause of transparency in government by letting people see the process of laws being made,” he said. “It was a very sad thing that it was forced to go offline for about six weeks or so. I’m glad that they found a way to bring it back.”
The headlines are full of stories about the Trump administration’s aggressive new approach to immigration enforcement. We hear about ICE raids and mass deportations. But there’s another, less publicized policy change that’s making it difficult for immigrants to defend themselves from deportation, even when they have a strong claim for immigration relief.
The Department of Homeland Security has changed how it responds to federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from immigrants facing deportation, in a way that deprives many immigrants of their only tool for obtaining information they need to prove they deserve to remain in the country.
Immigration court affords immigrants no formal right to discovery, the process by which the parties exchange information to ensure a fair, fact-based process. As a result, immigration attorneys must rely almost exclusively on FOIA requests to obtain a noncitizen’s Alien Registration File (“A-File”) from agencies within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
A-Files typically include prior immigration applications, enforcement records and notes from interviews. But these documents frequently contain falsehoods and inaccuracies, particularly where summaries replace verbatim transcripts and trauma affects the ability of immigrants to tell their stories. Immigration attorneys need access to their clients’ A-Files so they can identify and challenge inaccuracies in the records and hold the government to its burden of proof.
My friend and fellow attorney Gabriela Parra practices immigration law in Wisconsin. Many of her clients are asylum seekers now living in Wisconsin who fled to the United States because they feared persecution in their home countries. Since April 2025, she has observed a marked change in how immigration agencies respond to the FOIA requests she files on behalf of her clients.
Elisabeth Lambert (Provided photo)
The agencies are refusing to provide documents, or heavily redacting the documents they provide, thus denying Parra the information she needs to prepare her clients’ cases. In multiple cases, asylum seekers represented by her firm have asserted that they articulated a fear of return during border interviews, while DHS claims the opposite.
FOIA requests in these cases resulted in partial A-File disclosures, with interview notes withheld entirely. In other words, DHS has withheld the most important information that would help Parra prove her clients’ version of events.
Late last year, I joined Parra in filing a federal lawsuit asking the court to enforce FOIA. Our client in this case is a foreign national who filed an asylum application before he obtained legal assistance. He is now facing removal proceedings in immigration court.
In response to Parra’s FOIA request, DHS provided some documents, but they contained serious inaccuracies. Moreover, the agency produced only eight pages of unredacted records and 14 pages that were heavily redacted. It fully withheld 31 pages of our client’s file, including records necessary to identify and challenge errors.
Days after we filed our FOIA lawsuit, DHS provided us with some additional files. But others are still missing, and our client’s removal proceedings are looming. We are in a race against time to get our client’s records so he can make the strongest asylum case.
Immigration lawyers across the country are fighting similar battles against the administration’s FOIA practices. A December 2025 whistleblower report alleges that the government is intentionally blocking FOIA requests. It says this denies immigrants the information they need to avoid “life-altering impacts” including “family separation and prolonged detention.”
Our country’s current fight over immigration enforcement is also a fight over government transparency. Here in Wisconsin, we are doing our part.
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. Elisabeth Lambert is the founder and principal of the Wisconsin Education Law and Policy Hub (wisconsinelph.org). Thanks toGabriela Parra for her help on this column.
The limited availability of Black male mentors in Milwaukee is causing youth organizations to rethink their efforts and reveals a deeper challenge within families and communities.
The lack of mentors forced Andre Lee Ellis to postpone his annual “500 Black Tuxedos” event.
500 Black Tuxedos typically consists of 250 men stepping up to mentor 250 young men ages 12 to 17 throughout the day with workshops that bring attention to violence, anger management, artificial intelligence, men’s health, incarceration and other topics.
So far, Ellis has 200 boys but only 78 male mentors registered.
“It’s always been challenging to get the men to participate, and one of the things we lack in our community is the inclusion of Black men and fathers in the lives of our children,” Ellis said.
Committing to mentorship
Rather than calling it a “shortage of male mentors,” LaNelle Ramey, executive director of Mentor Greater Milwaukee, said it’s about capacity. He said many men are already mentors in informal ways like coaching or helping at a church.
LaNelle Ramey, executive director of Mentor Greater Milwaukee, encourages men to get involved in mentoring. (Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service)
“We aren’t getting people to sign up for mentoring the way that we want to, but we’re seeing different ways people are trying to tap in and be supportive,” Ramey said.
According to Christopher Smitherman ll, vice president of 100 Black Men of Milwaukee Inc., the organization recruits male mentors but can only accept a limited number of boys to maintain mentor-to-youth ratios and consistent presence.
Smitherman and Ramey said that men are backing down from mentoring because of their misconception of it being a huge time commitment.
“You have to change that narrative on how long it takes to make a difference,” Smitherman said.
Ramey said Mentor Greater Milwaukee reminds individuals that spending an hour and a half with a young person for six months still impacts a mentee’s life.
Inactive fathers affecting the recruitment process
Ellis said he believes recruiting men is harder due to a lack of active fathers to serve as mentors.
“Certain systems make it hard for men to be involved in the lives of children,” Ellis said. “But when you really want to be a dad, nothing can stop you.”
According to the Wisconsin Family Council, 85% of babies born in Milwaukee are raised by single mothers.
While men’s experiences with their own fathers can shape how they show up as dads or mentors, Ellis believes that youths can benefit from adults who use their lived experiences to guide them.
“Some of the men don’t want to be the dad they never had, but they want to be better,” Ellis said. “Our children need to see us fighting for them.”
Retaining male mentors
Ellis, Ramey and Smitherman agreed that better outreach and information about mentoring can help prevent men from overthinking and feel more confident about stepping into the role.
“We have to make sure that men and fathers have the resources they need,” Ellis said.
Smitherman said other ways to retain male mentors include offering consistent formal training.
At Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metro Milwaukee, mentors learn how to lead with empathy, being accessible for mentees, understanding a mentee’s situation and other topics, he said.
Feeling hopeful about mentorship
As organizations across Milwaukee continue to actively recruit mentors, the advocates hope that men can give as much as they can toward the youths.
“Mentorship is about experience, knowledge and what you have that can help elevate someone,” Smitherman said. “It also doesn’t have to be a huge age gap either.”
For men interested in serving as a mentor for the 500 Black Tuxedos event, it’s rescheduled to Saturday, Feb. 21, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 100 Gems Plaza, 6737 N. Teutonia Ave. A registration fee of $125 will cover the tuxedo for the young man you’ll mentor. Click here to register and for more information.
Click here or here to learn more about mentorship opportunities for men in Milwaukee.
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Federal immigration officials could gain access to sensitive Medicaid data — but not yet. A judge has temporarily limited what information the Department of Homeland Security can access in states, like Wisconsin, that are suing to block a data-sharing agreement.
Advocates warn the data-sharing risks chilling health care access — potentially even discouraging some from enrolling in programs for which they’re eligible.
Undocumented immigrants are categorically ineligible for full Medicaid, but two narrower options exist. In Wisconsin, emergency care and prenatal coverage are available regardless of immigration status, covering about 3,200 people as of late 2025.
State Republicans unsuccessfully sought to ban any public funding for health care for people without legal immigration status, citing rising Medicaid costs. Gov. Tony Evers vetoed the proposal, arguing it would create confusion and solve problems that don’t exist.
Can federal immigration officials access personal data on every Wisconsinite enrolled in Medicaid?
Not for now, but the question is winding its way through federal courts.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last summer signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to give immigration enforcement officers broad access to Medicaid data, which includes names, addresses, claim information and banking details. Trump administration officials claim the agreement is needed “to ensure that Medicaid benefits are reserved for individuals who are lawfully entitled to receive them.”
“Millions of individuals’ health information was transferred without their consent,” the lawsuit argues. “In doing so, the Trump administration silently destroyed longstanding guardrails that protected the public’s sensitive health data.”
In December, a federal judge in California ordered that, in states involved in the lawsuit, DHS can only access the names and contact information of undocumented immigrants in states involved in the lawsuit.
But patient advocates say it’s unclear how the agency could separate the records of undocumented immigrants from those of immigrants with legal status.
“The sharing of data is dangerous for all of us at the end of the day,” said Esther Reyes, movement-building director with the national advocacy group Protecting Immigrant Families.
How does immigration status affect eligibility for Medicaid and other health programs?
Federal law bars undocumented immigrants and many other recent immigrants from receiving full-benefits Medicaid coverage. Most legal permanent residents and new arrivals with legal status become eligible for full Medicaid coverage only after five years in the U.S. A list of exceptions to that rule shrank last year when President Trump signed his trademark “big beautiful bill” into law.
But the White House claims many undocumented immigrants still access Medicaid benefits, largely citing state-funded health care programs — including a now-shuttered program in Illinois — that provided coverage for undocumented adults. While those programs must operate without federal dollars to avoid running afoul of federal law, the Trump administration argues a tax “loophole”, which it moved to close last week, made them possible.
Medicaid rules make one exception for immigrants ineligible for full coverage: Under federal law, hospitals must provide emergency care for any uninsured patient. Emergency Medicaid coverage can reimburse hospitals for those costs, meaning people of any legal status can receive temporary coverage in dire circumstances — though receiving that emergency coverage is not guaranteed.
“Emergency Medicaid is exclusively available when you go to the emergency room if you don’t qualify for Medicaid because of your immigration status, and it covers services that states by law are required to cover — life or death situations,” Reyes said.
Absent that reimbursement, hospitals may distribute the costs of emergency care for people without insurance across other patients.
Some states also rely on the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program, which is separate from Medicaid, to cover prenatal care for pregnant patients regardless of immigration status.
How do those programs work in Wisconsin, and how much do they cost?
In Wisconsin, those two options are called Medicaid Emergency Services and BadgerCare Plus Prenatal, respectively. The prenatal program is open both to immigrants ineligible for other coverage and to pregnant inmates in Wisconsin’s prisons and jails.
Immigrant patients can receive emergency services coverage until their “condition is no longer considered an emergency,” according to state guidelines. Patients enrolled in the prenatal plan remain covered through their pregnancy, though many then become eligible for two months of emergency care coverage.
Roughly 3,200 people were enrolled in the two programs combined in October 2025, according to Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services’ data. That marked the programs’ lowest monthly enrollment since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The state paused reviews of Medicaid recipients’ eligibility during the pandemic, allowing some enrollees in the emergency services and prenatal programs to remain insured beyond the standard cutoff, but enrollment plummeted after Wisconsin DHS resumed reviews in June 2023 in a process often called the “unwinding.”
Not all patients enrolled in the programs are undocumented, and Wisconsin DHS records do not break down enrollment by legal status.
Spending on the two programs dipped from about $60 million in fiscal year 2024 to about $57 million in 2025 — less than 0.4% of the state’s overall medical assistance spending that year.
Why did Wisconsin Republicans try to block state-funded health care for undocumented immigrants last year?
The Republican-controlled Legislature voted last year to bar Wisconsin agencies and local governments from funding any form of health services for undocumented immigrants.
Rep. Alex Dallman, R-Markesan, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, pointed to Illinois’ expansion of health coverage to some undocumented adults as reason for Wisconsin to preemptively block any similar expansion; the Illinois program’s costs consistently exceeded projections, prompting the state to end the program last year.
“We’re in such a deficit on Medicaid already that it’s hard to keep up as it is,” he told Wisconsin Watch. Wisconsin is on track to overspend its Medicaid budget by $213 million by the end of the current budget cycle, state DHS Secretary-designee Kirsten Johnson wrote in a letter to state lawmakers at the end of December.
Dallman noted that the bill made an exception for health care spending required under federal law. “If they go to the emergency room, they are still going to get emergency care,” he said. As he understood it, Dallman said, that language in the bill would have shielded emergency Medicaid.
Rep. Alex Dallman, R-Markesan, is seen during a hearing of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee at the Wisconsin State Capitol on Feb. 15, 2023. He co-sponsored legislation to bar Wisconsin agencies and local governments from funding any form of health services for undocumented immigrants. (Amena Saleh / Wisconsin Watch)
But opponents say it isn’t clear that Wisconsin’s emergency services program would have been left untouched. Some also argue that the proposal could also require immigration status checks to access any form of subsidized health care, spanning far beyond hospitals alone.
“If a child is at school and they’re sick… does the school nurse need to figure out how to verify their status before they provide health care?” asked William Parke-Sutherland, government affairs director of Kids Forward, which advocates for low-income and minority families.
“It would have affected health care services for people if they are in need of emergency services like EMTs,” he added. “We have a primarily county-based crisis mental health system — I think that this would have applied to those as well.”
Could sharing Medicaid data deter patients from seeking health care?
Health outreach workers warn that giving federal immigration officials access to even some Medicaid patient data could discourage people from enrolling in programs for which they are eligible — including U.S. citizens.
The database shared with immigration authorities, called the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System, doesn’t clearly distinguish between undocumented immigrants and immigrants with legal status who are ineligible for full-coverage Medicaid for various reasons.
In December, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria of northern California ruled that immigration authorities may access data only on undocumented immigrants — and only if it can be separated from data on citizens and eligible immigrants.
It’s still unclear whether officials can do that.
Regardless, the data-sharing agreement alone is enough to make many immigrants — and some citizens with immigrant family members — “think twice about whether they actually access programs like Medicaid,” Reyes said.
But health care navigators say skipping coverage can be far riskier than the potential for their address to land in the hands of immigration enforcement officers.
“You’re protecting the life of your child — and yours” by enrolling in the prenatal program, said Francisco Guerrero, a health coverage navigator with the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service.
For now, advocates are urging people to be cautious when deciding whether to drop their coverage. If people are already enrolled in the emergency or prenatal programs and haven’t changed their address, leaving the program won’t wipe their information from the database, Reyes said. U.S. citizens don’t have to disclose the immigration status of anyone in their household, she added, and immigrant parents enrolling U.S.-born children do not need to share their own legal status.
“We want people to make informed decisions and understand the risks,” Reyes said. “We understand, though, that it’s really critical to get the care that you need for yourself and for your children.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Lemon and Fort were arrested after covering a January 18 protest at a church in Minneapolis. They were conducting the constitutionally protected activities of a working journalist: observing, recording and documenting a newsworthy event and attempting to obtain quotes from participants.
Their arrest on charges of allegedly obstructing a place of worship, and even worse, under federal conspiracy law, alarms all of us who believe in the First Amendment and seek to do our jobs without fear of obstruction by law enforcement or retaliation by agents of the government.
The principle of a free press animated the founding of the United States of America 250 years ago, and countless Americans have fought valiantly for it. We cannot allow colleagues to be subjected to spurious and unwarranted arrest for committing acts of journalism.
We call on federal authorities to drop all charges against Lemon and Fort and to publicly affirm their unqualified support for the work of professional journalists in this critical time.
In 2022, a student-led voting advocacy organization sued in Dane County to clarify which parts of a witness’ address must appear on an absentee ballot envelope. What was accepted differed from city to city.
The 4th District Court of Appeals, in an opinion written by Judge Chris Taylor, affirmed a lower court ruling that a witness only needs to provide an address where that person can “be communicated with.” The Legislature, which had appealed, argued a precise, multipart address is necessary to prevent election fraud.
“The legislature could have required such specificity for the absentee ballot witness address requirement when it initially adopted the witness address requirement in 1966 or in subsequent modifications of the absentee voting statutes,” wrote Taylor, a liberal candidate running for the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April.
Taylor’s campaign shared that decision as a prime example of the kind of justice she would be on the high court. The campaign for her opponent, conservative appeals court Judge Maria Lazar, shared that exact same decision as a prime example of why Taylor shouldn’t be on the high court.
As Wisconsinites head to the polls in just two months to elect another state Supreme Court justice, Wisconsin Watch asked the Lazar and Taylor campaigns separately to provide examples of rulings in past cases that show how they might serve as a justice and decisions from their opponents that warrant criticism.
That both campaigns shared the otherwise mundane witness address case speaks to the deep ideological divide that persists in the state judiciary. Campaigns can point to the outcomes of politically charged cases, such as those related to voting rights, gun rights or abortion, as a way to point voters to what their views are, legal experts said.
Court of Appeals Judge Chris Taylor. (Matt Roth)
Court of Appeals Judge Maria Lazar (Courtesy of Wisconsin Court of Appeals)
“To me, those are very subtle signals as to their constituency that the impact of this decision, one way or another, is consistent with your views,” said Janine Geske, who served on the Wisconsin Supreme Court from 1993 to 1998.
A spokesperson for Taylor’s campaign said the case demonstrates how Taylor protected Democratic rights and “fairly” and “impartially” applies the law.
“This decision balanced protecting each Wisconsinite’s right to vote with establishing a fair, uniform procedure for our local clerks,” Taylor campaign spokesman Sam Roecker said. “As indicative of the strength of this decision, no party involved in the case appealed Judge Taylor’s decision.”
Lazar’s campaign said Taylor failed to consider the intent of the Legislature.
“Judge Taylor’s opinion, on the merits, indicates how far an activist judge who legislates from the bench will go to alter procedures for election integrity,” Lazar campaign spokesman Nathan Conrad said of the witness address case. “Every common sense citizen in Wisconsin knows that an address consists of a street name, number and municipality.”
Other significant cases from the judges
The other judicial rulings the candidates’ campaigns shared with Wisconsin Watch also showcase the candidates’ contrasting judicial philosophies.
In addition to the voting rights case, Taylor’s campaign highlighted rulings that favored utility consumers and reproductive health. In one decision the court determined the Public Service Commission did not follow proper rulemaking procedures when it prohibited activities companies use to incentivize lower energy use. In the other opinion Taylor wrote that a woman could continue seeking legal action against a physician she claimed did not inform her of a recommendation to another doctor to remove her ovaries during a colon surgery. The Wisconsin Supreme Court last May affirmed that decision with Justice Brian Hagedorn joining the liberal justices in the majority.
The different political focuses between the candidates is no surprise given their different professional and political paths prior to their time on the bench. Lazar, a conservative, was an assistant attorney general under Republican Attorney General JB Van Hollen before her election to the Waukesha County Circuit Court in 2015. Taylor worked as a policy director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin and served five terms as a Democrat in the Assembly before Gov. Tony Evers appointed her to the Dane County Circuit Court in 2020.
The judicial rulings they highlighted as reflecting poorly on their opponent are nothing like those featured in the multimillion-dollar Supreme Court campaigns of recent years, when both sides sought to paint the other as lax on crime and public safety.
While there are still two months to go, it’s possible the race will stay muted because the stakes are different with no Supreme Court majority on the line, said Howard Schweber, a professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Neither outcome will change liberal control of the court, though because the winner will replace retiring conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, it could extend guaranteed liberal control until at least 2030.
The quiet nature of the race is “bizarre” given the increasingly political direction Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have gone in the past, Schweber said.
“There is not invective. There is not screaming accusations,” Schweber said. “This may all change over the course of the election, but at least at the moment, we’re not seeing over-the-top ads making hysterical accusations, and it appears that at least part of the reason for that might be that neither campaign can find anything particularly embarrassing that the opposing candidate has done.”
Some criticisms from each campaign are still there and could grow stronger as Election Day nears. In a recent social media post seeking campaign contributions, Lazar’s campaign described Taylor not as a judge, but a “radical left-wing legislator.” Taylor’s campaign in a post following the release of January campaign finance reports described Lazar as “our extreme opponent.”
Lazar and Taylor will face each other in a March 25 debate hosted by WISN-TV at the Lubar Center at Marquette University’s Law School.
Which cases did the campaigns share?
Taylor’s campaign shared the following cases with Wisconsin Watch as examples of how Taylor would serve as a justice:
Midwest Renewable Energy Association v. Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (the utility case). (Read the opinion here.)
Rise Inc. v. Wisconsin Elections Commission (the absentee ballot case). (Read the opinion here.)
Melissa A. Hubbard v. Carol J. Neuman, M.D. (the ovary removal case). (Read the opinion here.)
The campaign criticized a 2024 appellate opinion written by Lazar that contradicted a ruling from another appeals court branch on whether a conservative group questioning the 2020 election results could access health information about individuals who were judged incapable of voting. Lazar and another judge on the 2nd District Court of Appeals released an opinion that said the group had a right to the information after the 4th District’s opposite ruling was published as precedent.
The opinion shows Lazar “is an extremist who uses our courts to protect special interests and push her right-wing agenda,” Roecker said.
“Lazar completely ignored recent precedent that private voter data could not be released to the public,” Roecker said. “That should alarm anyone who believes in protecting our democracy and fair elections.”
Lazar’s campaign in response to that criticism said the dual appeals court opinions were about “issues of procedure” when two districts disagree. The 2nd District revised the opinion at the request of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which then accepted the case, Conrad said. It is scheduled for oral arguments before the high court in April.
Lazar’s campaign shared the following cases as examples of how Lazar would serve as a justice:
Saybrook Tax Exemptors, LLC. v. Lac Du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, et. al.: Lazar concluded that certain agreements and documents between a financial company and the Lake Superior Chippewa tribe about plans for a casino were void. (Read the decision here.)
State v. Scherer: Lazar ruled that law enforcement’s seizure of a man’s cellphone that possessed child pornography was too broad and violated his privacy rights, despite the “egregious” potential crime. (Read the decision here.)
State v. Heinz: Lazar denied a request to modify the sentence of a woman who was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after she was charged with first-degree reckless homicide. (Read the decision here.)
Hartland Sportsman Club v. City of Delafield (the gun range case). (Read the decision here.)
Pewaukee Land County, LLC. v. Soo Line Railroad: Lazar ruled that a company could not claim ownership of property in Pewaukee that belonged to the Canadian Pacific railroad, but did not block the company’s current use of the property. (Read the decision here.)
Craig, et. al. v. Village of West Bend: Lazar dismissed a case about the transfer of cemetery property that already had been decided in an earlier case. (Read the decision here.)
Lazar’s campaign shared two cases as criticism of Taylor’s judicial opinions:
Rise Inc. v. Wisconsin Elections Commission (the absentee ballot case). (Read the opinion here.)
State v. Kruckenberg Anderson: In an opinion written by Taylor, the 4th District Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling that suppressed certain statements a teenager made to law enforcement prior to being charged with killing his newborn child. The Wisconsin Supreme Court denied a petition to review the case in 2024. (Read the Court of Appeals opinion here.)
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Minimum-wage workers in 19 states saw their paychecks increase this year. But Wisconsin hasn’t changed its minimum wage — just $7.25 per hour — for 17 years, shrinking the buying power of the lowest-earning workers.
Wisconsin ties its minimum wage to the federal level, which hasn’t budged for its longest stretch in history. Had Congress indexed the wage to inflation in 2009, it would have risen to $10.88 in 2025. That’s a difference of $145.20 over a 40-hour workweek.
Elsewhere, 34 states, territories and districts have set minimum wages above $7.25.
Neighboring Minnesota raised its minimum wage from $11.13 to $11.41 this year, while Michigan’s leaped from $12.48 to $13.73. Illinois kept its threshold at $15, the highest level among noncoastal states.
In 2024, about 1% of the Wisconsin workforce earned at or below the state’s minimum wage. Those people generally worked as salespeople, automotive service technicians or food preparation workers, U.S. Census data show.
Wisconsin’s tipped workers have an even lower minimum wage of $2.33 per hour, slightly higher than the $2.13 federal minimum, which has not changed since 1991.
Meanwhile, the average living wage for a single adult with no children in Wisconsin in 2025 is $20.96, according to MIT’s living wage calculator, with higher costs in metropolitan areas — including $22.18 in Madison and $21.07 in Milwaukee and Waukesha. The living wage is significantly higher for adults who raise children and lower for people living with a working partner.
New York campaign sparked ‘Fight for $15’
Campaigns to raise the minimum wage have regularly drawn national headlines. In 2012, fast-food workers and their supporters began calling for a $15-per-hour minimum wage in New York City. Their victory inspired a broader ‘Fight for $15’ movement, including in Wisconsin, as Wisconsin Watch previously reported.
This year, The Living Wage Coalition — a group of labor and progressive organizations — launched a campaign to raise Wisconsin’s minimum wage to $20 per hour, calling the status quo far below a reasonable standard of living for the lowest-wage workers.
An increase to $15 per hour would be politically popular and directly or indirectly raise the wages of 231,800 (18%) women workers, 36,200 (25.6%) Black workers and 50,200 (26.6%) Hispanic workers in Wisconsin — narrowing gender and racial wealth and income gaps that are some of the largest in the nation, according to a 2025 High Road Strategy Center report. The University of Wisconsin-Madison-based “think-and-do tank” focuses on solutions to social problems — including those related to the environment, opportunity and democratic institutions.
Still, multiple bills to raise Wisconsin’s minimum wage — largely proposed by Democrats — have stalled in the Legislature. Republican lawmakers have cited concerns about burdening small businesses.
Higher wage ‘has to come from somewhere’
Minimum-wage hikes — depending on the size — can bring a mix of positive and negative economic consequences, according to Callie Freitag, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Social Work.
“The good thing is that earnings would go up for workers. Employers would raise wages and be able to pay workers more,” Freitag said. “But the money to pay workers more has to come from somewhere.”
Economists worry that dramatic minimum-wage hikes could lead to higher consumer costs — or prompt businesses to cut worker hours or eliminate their jobs entirely, Freitag added.
The key would be an increase that benefits the lowest-paid workers without significantly affecting the broader economy. But it’s unclear what that sweet spot is.
Conditions of the labor market — the supply and demand for workers — shape wages across most of the economy. Wages typically increase when there are more openings than workers, and they decrease when there are few openings for available workers.
Setting the minimum wage close to or below an equilibrium wage — where the demand for labor matches the supply — only minimally affects wages across the market, economists suggest.
States that hiked minimum wages saw slightly higher gains across the lowest-tier wages (the bottom 10%) between 2019 and 2024, but not enough to claim a correlation, an analysis by the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found. A range of factors could have shaped the wage increases, which also played out in the Midwest.
Wisconsin has seen slightly faster growth in bottom-tier wages than its neighbors — even without increasing the minimum wage. The state’s bottom-tier wages increased from $10.92 hourly in 2009 to $14.58, Wisconsin Watch found by analyzing EPI’s data.
Bigger hikes strain employers
While basic economic principles suggest that a 10% increase in the minimum wage would decrease the hiring of unskilled workers by 1 to 2%, recent studies suggest an even smaller shift, or no effect at all.
Most minimum-wage studies published between 2004 and 2024 have shown little or no job loss, Ben Zipperer, an EPI senior economist, found.
Researchers tend to focus most on cities and states that have significantly increased their minimum wage. Seattle, Washington, which has hiked its threshold annually since 2015, has among the highest in the country at $21.30 this year.
A sign is seen during a Wisconsin State Capitol press conference about raising Wisconsin’s minimum wage, June 17, 2021. (Isaac Wasserman / Wisconsin Watch)
In a 2022 study, University of Washington researchers found that Seattle’s minimum wage increase to $11 hourly in 2015 “had an insignificant effect on employment,” but a spike to $13 in 2016 “resulted in a large drop in employment.”
But the findings might not directly apply to other places, the researchers found, because industries and the makeup of the labor force might look and act differently elsewhere.
A separate University of Washington study found that a minimum-wage increase to $15 hourly affected most child care businesses, which commonly responded by raising tuition and reducing staff hours or total number of staff — potentially harming staff and lower-wage customers.
What work is worth
“Minimum wage legislation commonly has two stated objectives: the reduction of employer control of wages; and the abolition of poverty,” George Stiegler, a leader of the Chicago school of economics, wrote in 1946 — an era when Congress was debating bigger increases to the minimum wage in the policy’s early years.
But Stiegler was pessimistic about the prospect that minimum-wage hikes were the best way to eliminate poverty. He instead called for lawmakers to grant lower-income families other forms of relief, including tax cuts and credits.
That spirit was reflected in the “no tax on tips” bill, which the Wisconsin Assembly passed this month to benefit tipped workers.
Still, Laura Dresser, associate director of the High Road Strategy Center, views the minimum wage as an important floor to benefit workers at the margins and signal “work is worth this.”
“People who are working full time should be able to afford life,” she said. “At $7.25 per hour, there’s almost nothing you can afford, and it feels far below what a wage floor really should function as.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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