A Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge has ruled that the Social Development Commission’s property corporation defaulted on mortgage payments for its North Avenue buildings and faces foreclosure in the coming months.
This judgment, which was issued Monday, Oct. 6, is the latest development for the Social Development Commission as the anti-poverty agency attempts to reconcile its budget and secure funding amid lawsuits, board tensions and government reviews.
The properties will now enter a redemption period for three months before the court can take further action, including selling the properties at auction.
“I can tell you that (SDC) is working tirelessly to be able to secure and redeem the properties,”said Evan P. Schmit,an attorney with Kerkman & Dunn representing SDC and SD Properties.
Millions owed
Forward Community Investments, a community development financial institution, filed a foreclosure lawsuit in March against SD Properties Inc., the tax-exempt corporation that owns SDC’s buildings. The lawsuit claimed SD Properties defaulted on mortgage payments in 2024 and lists SDC as a guarantor.
On Monday, Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge J.D. Watts granted a summary judgment for Forward Community Investments, which included a judgment of foreclosure against SD Properties and SDC and declared that Forward Community Investments is entitled to a money judgment.
This judgment allows the foreclosure process to advance, according to Ryan Zerwer, the president and CEO of Forward Community Investments.
The total judgment amount owed by SD Properties was just over $3.1 million, as of June 16, according to court records.
The lender’s complaint outlines that this includes $2.42 million in principal, interest and other costs for a construction mortgage SD Properties entered into in 2020 and $687,000 for an additional mortgage started in 2023.
Additional accrued interest and other costs may be added to the tally before the properties are redeemed or sold.
SDC moves out
The warehouse located at 1810 W. North Ave. is one of the Social Development Commission’s buildings facing a judgment of foreclosure. (Jonathan Aguilar / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service / CatchLight Local)
SDC voluntarily vacated the 1730 W. North Ave. office and removed personal property, said Laura Callan, an attorney with Stafford Rosenbaum LLP, which is representing Forward Community Investments. William Sulton, SDC’s attorney, confirmed the agency moved out of both the office and the warehouse building at 1810 W.North Ave.
SD Properties still owns a property on Teutonia Avenue that is not included in the lawsuit.
Watts said that both parties have been cooperative.
“This is, of course, a major event in the community, so I’m aware of the importance of this case,” Watts said.
What’s next?
Wisconsin foreclosure laws require a redemption period, which will be for three months in this case.
During this period, SD Properties has the chance to redeem themortgaged premises by paying the total amount of the judgment and other attorney fees, costs and interest.
“The board is gonna have to decide whether they want to try and redeem the building or not,” Sulton said.
SDC is awaiting responses from the federal government on its status as a community action agency and Wisconsin departments on their audits. This is preventing the board from making decisions on the agency’s future direction and services, Sulton said.
If the properties are not redeemed after three months, the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office will arrange a public auction or sale.
Schmit said a hearing to confirm the sale will be held after the redemption period, which would be the final opportunity for SD Properties to maintain the buildings.
“We will wait for the procedure for the confirmation of the sheriff’s sale, just to be clear,” Watts said.
Meredith Melland is the neighborhoods reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and a corps member of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. Report for America plays no role in editorial decisions in the NNS newsroom.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
Although President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” offers new tax deductions and credits across different income levels, low-income households – the bottom 20% of income earners – are largely excluded from any significant tax benefits.
“It’s particularly shocking because the law is so big,” said Elaine Maag, a senior fellow at The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “Typically, when trillions of dollars are spent, you see it really spread across the income distribution.”
The bill was signed into law over the summer.
Benefits that people with low incomes do receive may be outweighed when considered alongside other provisions in the bill, said Andrew Reschovsky, professor emeritus of public affairs and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“This is the dilemma – if you count those things in with the tax side, the net will be that a lot of people are going to be worse off.”
Credits and deductions
A credit is an amount subtracted directly from the tax you owe while a deduction reduces the amount of income that can be taxed. Both can help keep more money in taxpayers’ pockets.
The bill establishes new credits and deductions.
The bill increases the:
Child Tax Credit from $2,000 per qualifying child to $2,200.
Child and Dependent Care Credit, which allows taxpayers to subtract certain costs associated with caring for children under 13 or dependents incapable of self-care.
The bill introduces new deductions for:
Workers in jobs where tips are common, allowing them to deduct up to $25,000 of tip income.
Individuals who work overtime, allowing them to deduct up to $12,500 of overtime pay.
People 65 and older, allowing them to deduct $6,000.
Limitations
These changes may appear to help people who are financially struggling. But the bill affects federal taxes, so its new deductions and credits apply only to income taxable by the federal government.
People with low income generally owe little or no federal income tax.
Older low-income adults, for example, often rely primarily or entirely on Social Security benefits and are generally not subject to federal taxes. This means that a new $6,000 deduction would not benefit them, Rechovsky said.
Rechovsky noted other reasons the new deductions are misleading or extremely narrow.
“Yes, you’re a waiter and you benefit from not paying taxes on your tips,” he said. “But take someone in the same income range who works as a home health care worker – they don’t benefit at all.”
Reschovsky also questions how those with low incomes would benefit from reducing the amount owed on overtime pay.
“One of the reasons some people are low-income is that they’re lucky to get a 40-hour workweek,” he said.
The same limitation applies to the new credits.
An analysis by Maag estimates that in 2025 about 17 million children under 17 – or one in four – will receive less than the full value of the Child Tax Credit because their parents earn too little.
The bill also changes which families qualify based on citizenship status.
The Child Tax Credit will be limited to children who are U.S. citizens and have at least one parent with a valid Social Security number.
About 2 million U.S. citizen children will lose their Child Tax Credit because of this new requirement, Maag wrote, citing an analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Safety nets
One benefit to people with low incomes from the bill is that it makes permanent many provisions from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, including lower income tax rates and larger standard deductions.
“It’s true across the board that if taxes go down, your income after taxes goes up,” Reschovsky said.
But for those with low incomes, the increase is minimal and will likely be outweighed by changes to Medicaid, premium subsidies provided by the Affordable Care Act and changes to SNAP.
“It’s just that classic view … that, ‘Well, these people are just sucking on the teat of the federal government, so we’re going to just make it as hard as possible for them to do that, because they’re just freeloaders,’” said Anthony Myers, program director of the Riverworks Financial Clinic.
Where to get help
For people with incomes under $67,000, free tax assistance is available through programs such as the IRS’ Volunteer Income Tax Assistance, or VITA.
The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, opened for new and returning college and university students on Oct. 1. Students typically have until June 1 to apply for the best chance of receiving aid.
The form connects students with loans, grants and scholarships through the U.S. Department of Education and your higher education institution.
Students considering attending a two- or four-year college or university should fill out the FAFSA form, even if they haven’t committed to a school or are unsure whether they will pursue higher education.
Getting started
Carole Trone serves on the board for College Goal Wisconsin, an organization that hosts FAFSA completion events around the state. She said the FAFSA process usually runs smoother when parents let their student take the lead.
“It works best if the student starts their part of the application and then hands it over to the parent,” Trone said.
Students should first make an account, called a Federal Student Aid (FSA) ID. If a student is a dependent, at least one parent or guardian will need to make a Federal Student Aid ID and contribute to the form.
The Department of Education requires students to provide a Social Security number to fill out the FAFSA form. Contributing parents without a Social Security number can make an account but will need to check a box certifying they don’t have a Social Security number.
When creating a Federal Student Aid ID, Trone said, it’s important to double check that all information, including names and dates of birth, are correct. The Department of Education won’t be able to verify your information if these details are incorrect, which Trone said complicates the process.
If students or parents already have a Federal Student Aid ID, Trone said the ID stays with them forever and they should use the same account.
Filling out FAFSA
What do I need to fill out the form
Students considering attending a two- or four-year college or university should fill out the FAFSA form, even if they haven’t committed to a school or are unsure whether they will pursue higher education. (Jonathan Aguilar / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service / CatchLight Local)
FAFSA requires certain information from students and parents to verify income, assets and financial need.
The Department of Education will use applicants’ Social Security numbers to access their income with the Internal Revenue Service. Parents and students must give consent for the IRS to access information on their tax returns, even if an applicant doesn’t have tax returns to supply.
The Department of Education recommends still having the most recent tax returns for information that isn’t imported from the IRS.
Students will also need to provide a list of schools they’re interested in attending. Students should list all schools even if they aren’t committed.
“The options that FASFA gives you is not just for four-year college, it’s for two-year college, it’s for a number of certification programs,” Trone said. “It doesn’t obligate you to anything.”
Types of aid
The types of federal aid you receive can be split into two main groups: loans and grants. The biggest difference is you need to pay back loans but not grants. Filling out your FAFSA form also helps you become eligible for need-based scholarships through your higher education institution.
Loans
You can make payments while enrolled at least part time (six credit hours, usually about two classes) in school but are not required to until after you graduate or go below six credit hours. After you do either of these, it triggers a six-month grace period before you’re required to make payments.
The federal government offers several types of loans in two categories: Direct and Direct PLUS.
The amount of interest on these loans depends on the year you take them out. The interest rate changes each year on July 1.
Direct loans
Students can receive two kinds of Direct loans: subsidized and unsubsidized.
Subsidized loans mean no interest accumulates on the loan while in school or during your grace period, saving the student money in the long run.
Unsubsidized loans accumulate interest beginning when the student takes out the loan.
Direct PLUS
The Department of Education also offers Direct PLUS loans, which are federal loans that parents of dependent undergraduate students, graduate or professional students can use to help pay for school.
Parents of dependent students can take a Parent PLUS loan to support additional education costs that aren’t covered by other financial aid.
This loan originally did not have a cap, but as a result of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” Parent PLUS loans are now capped at $20,000 per year or $65,000 over the course of an undergraduate school career.
Graduate PLUS loans, which were used to support graduate school education, will be eliminated starting in the 2026-27 school year.
A new unsubsidized loan program is replacing Graduate PLUS. Students can borrow up to $20,500 annually, up to $100,000 over the course of graduate school. Students attending professional schools like medicine or law will be eligible to take out higher loans.
Grants
Pell grants: Students in need of a lot of financial aid might qualify for a Pell grant. Unlike loans, these do not have to be repaid.
The amount of aid you receive depends on your financial need.
After a person submits a FAFSA form, the Department of Education considers several factors like income and other assets and generates a Student Aid Index that determines your financial need. The lower your Student Aid Index, the greater chance of receiving more aid.
Colleges and universities look at factors like a student’s Student Aid Index, how many credits are being taken and tuition costs to decide how much aid a student will receive.
Private loans?
Universities and advocates alike caution against using private loans whenever possible because of concerns about predatory lending, potentially high interest rates and a lack of repayment options and forgiveness.
Interest rates and other conditions of the loan often vary on factors like credit scores. If you need to take out a private loan, try to look at offers from several lenders to pick the best one.
Where can I go for help?
College Goal Wisconsin is hosting events virtually and in several Milwaukee high schools to help students and parents complete the FAFSA form. Any students looking for help with a FAFSA form can attend, even if they don’t attend MPS.
Trone said each student who attends is eligible to win one of 15 $1,000 scholarships.
Families who can’t make it to a help session can use resources on the College Goal Wisconsin website or the FAFSA YouTube page, Trone said.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
We found no documentation confirming a Sept. 29 statement by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., that 6 million people unknowingly received health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.
Johnson cited a report by Paragon Health Institute, a think tank alignedwith the Trump administration.
The report produced an estimate, not a count, claiming 6.4 million people were fraudulently enrolled in Obamacare. It said they were not income-eligible, including millions who “appear to be enrolled without their knowledge.”
Fraud is much more common among brokers misappropriating patients’ identities than by patients, said KFF Obamacare program director Cynthia Cox and Justin Giovannelli of Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms.
Consumers are cautioned about offers to enroll them in Obamacare.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Editor’s note: This column is from a speech Stanley gave at a Sept. 17 Constitution Day event organized by Viterbo University in La Crosse and LeaderEthics, a group dedicated to encouraging integrity among elected representatives.
Recently we’ve seen Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota and a young Republican influencer targeted for assassination; troops corralling protesters on American streets; a U.S. senator handcuffed and hauled away from a public event; news outlets being threatened and sued; lies, propaganda and doctored videos raging across social networks.
Across our state and nation, more and more of the information people receive is bitter and dividing. New technologies have changed how people shop, advertise and search for information. Mobile feeds are driven by algorithms that grab attention by fueling passions, especially anger and lust. These same changes have undermined the business model that long financed local news outlets — the sources that inform communities, connect neighbors and nurture civic life.
This all contributes to the fracturing of our communities, to folks not getting the information they need to navigate everyday challenges and to declining trust that our democracy still works at finding solutions.
You can see it in annual Gallup polls measuring trust in our institutions. Since the late 1970s, folks who say they trust the news media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” have dropped from 72% to 31%. Likewise, trust in the medical system has plunged from 74% to 36%, in church and organized religion from 64% to 32%, in public schools from 53% to 29%, in banks from 60% to 27%, in Congress from 40% to 9%.
More and more of us feel overwhelmed by dramatic headlines from social networks, text feeds, national outlets and national chains posing as local news channels. Yet we’re seeing less and less about what’s happening in our neighborhoods, cities and counties.
We’re seeing plenty about the worst things happening in the world at the moment.
But in many local communities, we’re not seeing nearly enough fair, honest reporting about what’s happening where we live, where most of our tax dollars are spent and where decisions that shape our everyday lives are made: in school board meetings, in city halls, in statehouses, in gatherings of people of good will trying to make things better.
At the core of all this lies a market disruption in a society that relies on the marketplace to fill its needs — until it can’t. The local commerce advertising model that long supported local news has been overturned.
And the consequences are alarming. When communities lose their local news, civic engagement drops, corruption goes unchecked, government waste increases, polarization deepens, people begin to lose faith in democracy and its institutions.
Our democratic republic, more than other forms of government, relies on trust and truth.
The founders of our republic overcame an entitled king and the world’s strongest military. They knew that tyrants grasp and retain power by controlling the stories told to the people they rule. They understood how critical a well-informed citizenry would be to the success of self-government.
They gave us the First Amendment to the Constitution so that citizens without political power would be free to tell one another what was really going on.
They worried, in those early years, how people in small towns and rural areas — outside of Boston, Philadelphia and New York — would receive enough news and information to make sound decisions and keep control over their government. So the first Postal Act, signed into law by President George Washington, provided free delivery of newspapers — a government subsidy of local news as a public service.
This helped sow the seeds of a local news industry that would expand to serve a growing population of people arriving from across the globe in search of liberty. Local commerce did the rest — from people selling to their neighbors through classified ads, to retailers advertising their wares to everyone within driving distance of their stores. This business model supported news reporters who covered floods and fires, zoning and planning commissions, school boards, village councils, county boards, state agencies, elections and community events — from our smallest towns to our biggest cities — until the 21st century.
The collapse of that business model happened so quickly that we haven’t had time to adjust or even to understand what it means.
Wisconsin Watch CEO George Stanley (Brad Horn for Wisconsin Watch)
In 1999, I was managing editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel when its sales and profits hit heights they would never see again. Classified ads of neighbors selling to neighbors filled multiple print sections. The three largest retail advertisers were Boston Store, American TV and Circuit City.
Craigslist was a startup in the San Francisco Bay area offering free online ads for folks selling cars, boats, jobs and services. They supported their small staff with revenue from display advertising appearing next to the free classifieds.
Amazon sold one product: printed books, with ink on paper.
Over the next decade, Craigslist and imitators spread like windswept wildfires to every city and then town, sucking the classified ads out of every local newspaper in America.
On the retail side, Circuit City closed in the Great Recession.
When American TV shut down a few years later, its family owner said their stores had “become showrooms for Amazon.” Folks would come in, see a product they liked, google their cellphones to find it on sale at a lower price elsewhere in the world, and order it right then and there to be delivered to their homes.
Boston Store, a fixture in Milwaukee since the 1890s, strived to stay alive by buying other department store chains to find economies of scale but succumbed in 2018.
By that time, the Journal Sentinel, which traced its roots to before Milwaukee was a city and before Wisconsin was a state, had been sold first to a national media chain based in Cincinnati, then spun off to a newspaper chain based in Washington, D.C., which itself was swallowed by a hedge-fund-controlled chain rising from the depths of bankruptcy.
The same thing was happening to local advertisers and local newsrooms almost everywhere. Green Bay, for example, was home to Prange’s and Shopko. Gone.
Every major daily newspaper in Wisconsin is now owned by a distant cost-cutting chain, as are most commercial broadcast outlets and many community weeklies.
We’ve lost more than six out of 10 journalists in Wisconsin and nationwide, but it’s worse than that. Because most of the journalists left are clustered in our biggest cities. There, many continue to do outstanding work despite shrinking budgets, often with the help of grants, fellowships and partnerships. But as parent corporations seek to maximize digital audiences and subscriptions, they devote a lion’s share of resources toward the same attention-grabbing national stories, highlighting the most tragic events and most polarizing political conflicts, while spewing nonstop coverage of celebrities, sports stars and social network gossip.
An average of two local newspapers in America have been closing each week for the past 20 years. About half our nation’s counties have only one news outlet left, and hundreds have none. The smaller and less wealthy the community, the bigger the losses.
“Ghost” newspapers are proliferating, featuring legacy mastheads with stories from elsewhere because no local journalists remain in town.
At the same time, Wisconsin has become one of just seven swing election states that determine which party and their backers win control over branches of the federal government. As a result we attract huge volumes of attack ads and misleading propaganda from those seeking national power and influence. Political websites disguised as nonpartisan news outlets have proliferated. Our state and local elections and public discussions increasingly reflect the bitter “us against them” dysfunction we see at the national level.
Take, for example, the circus of a “nonpartisan” state Supreme Court race we witnessed this past spring. Misleading attack ads dominated TV and radio; campaign text alerts buzzed over our phones; faraway billionaires with personal agendas spent tens of millions to elect one judge in a place they might have flown over; the world’s richest man, born and raised in South Africa and now residing in Texas, donned a Cheesehead while passing out million-dollar checks to Wisconsin voters.
As The Constitution was being ratified in 1787, Ben Franklin was asked: “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
“A republic,” he famously responded. “IF you can keep it.”
To keep our republic, we must revive our local news ecosystem.
Given the huge loss of reporters covering local government and community life, we need to begin by nurturing collaborative efforts, where newsrooms work together to tell the local and state stories that matter most. As a Wisconsin-based nonprofit with a mission of providing impactful reporting — and sharing it freely — Wisconsin Watch is the news outlet in the best position to support this revival across our state.
We’ll need help from all who can provide it.
Here’s a quick sampling of what we hope to do with support from members, donors and everyone who cares about rejuvenating democracy and civic life in Wisconsin:
We’re investing in a statehouse bureau that is providing evidence-based reporting and fact-checking to more than 200 news outlets across the state. We’re not duplicating what others are doing but providing key accountability and campaign stories that otherwise wouldn’t be reported.
We’re building our in-depth investigative team to offer our services to all newsrooms in the state that no longer have the resources to dig deep. If a local news outlet or citizen suspects incompetence, wrongdoing, misspending of taxpayer dollars, abuse of power, bring it to Wisconsin Watch. In addition to shining a light on the problem, we are searching for examples of places doing a better job tackling similar challenges.
We’re serving accurate, fact-based state and local news to folks wherever they get their information. That includes sharing video summaries of key news stories on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. It includes video and audio fact checks shared freely with commercial and public radio stations reaching rural areas with low broadband usage.
We’re adding local journalists to fill news deserts. In Milwaukee, we’ve merged with Neighborhood News Service. In northeast Wisconsin, we’re collaborating with commercial and nonprofit newsrooms and the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation. We’re listening to learn folks’ most pressing local news needs, then we’ll find ways to fill them — and get that information to the people who need it most, through the channels they’re using.
We’re raising money to fill key reporting gaps. This will include training citizen observers to objectively take notes and ask questions at public meetings and hearings where there aren’t enough journalists to cover the ground. It will include reporting beats focused on public service — major challenges people are facing; solutions folks are bringing to the table; key issues such as the challenge of today’s housing market; affordable child and senior care; the skills and education needed for family-supporting jobs and how to get them.
We’re aspiring to replicate our regional news bureaus across the state as the impact of this work proves its value.
Wisconsin Watch audio/video producer Trisha Young, left, and Wisconsin Watch investigative reporter Bennet Goldstein conduct an interview during a visit of natural beaver dams in Elk Mound, Wis., Oct. 24, 2024, in Elk Mound, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Alexis de Tocqueville came to America from France 200 years ago to explain to his peers in Europe how this new experiment in democracy was working. He saw firsthand how messy things can get — how hard it can be to build consensus with so many points of view and competing interests in play.
So when a European gentleman asked him how America had become so enlightened, Tocqueville shook his head. He said: “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”
How do we repair those faults? I’ve seen long-standing and seemingly insurmountable challenges overcome when three things are present:
Enough people see and understand the problem to get the attention of responsible parties.
Enough people care about the problem to demand better.
People can see a road map to success — examples where folks have tackled similar problems more effectively, with evidence to back it up.
When these three things are present, political partisanship tends to dissipate and people of goodwill come together to build better ways.
When all three elements are absent, the inertia of doing things the way they’ve always been done remains in charge.
So no matter what problem you aim to address in our democracy, you’ll need honest reporters to inform the public, to show how the problem is affecting real people and to highlight better ways. Otherwise, you’re likely to grow frustrated you’ve spent so much time, money and energy while things never seem to get better.
As Alberto Ibargüen, longtime head of the Knight Foundation, puts it: “Whatever your first priority, journalism needs to be your second” priority if you want to make a difference and make improvements in our democratic republic.
It’s time to support public service journalism in the same way we support our libraries, the arts and other civic treasures essential to quality of life. Let’s nurture community and ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people does not perish from the earth.
Sarabeth Berman, head of the American Journalism Project, one of our supporters, puts it this way:
“This is not the story of a dying industry. It is the story of a country choosing to rebuild its civic life — one newsroom, one community at a time.”
I love her emphasis on the key elements of choice and action, which many folks don’t think about until it’s pointed out in a powerful way.
We are a democracy. The government, at all levels, works for us when we do our part. We can act to change things. We don’t have to be resigned and accept the way things are as inevitable. We’re in charge — if we choose to be.
America struggled through similar challenges more than a century ago when the industrial revolution dramatically shifted massive wealth into the hands of a few. The two political parties, and the wealthy and powerful forces supporting them, fostered polarization, disinformation and benefited from “us against them” tactics. The highly partisan “yellow press” of the Gilded Age behaved much like the angry partisans in our feeds today.
But then responsible grown-ups of goodwill took back control — one community, one state at a time. Along with Theodore Roosevelt at the national level, our state was a leader in this movement, with people like Fighting Bob La Follette, Charles Van Hise, Daniel Hoan and Charles McCarthy. The fruits of their efforts include The Wisconsin Idea and one of the nation’s first journalism schools in Madison — to teach and spread nonpartisan, fact-based, honest reporting that informs the good people of Wisconsin.
It is time for us all to do our part again. We welcome your contributions and support.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
No matter what kind of home you live in, challenges will pop up.
If you own your home and a pipe starts leaking, you might call a plumber. If you rent, you call your landlord. But what if you own your home and rent the land underneath it?
Thousands of Wisconsin residents own manufactured homes and pay to anchor their homes in communities, often called mobile home or trailer parks. Owners of manufactured homes are responsible for repairs to their homes but rely on park owners to maintain things like roads, water drainage and sewage.
And if landlords don’t respond and conditions deteriorate? A patchwork of laws and regulations governing manufactured housing leaves residents unsure of where to turn.
Here’s a list of options:
Those with issues surrounding park maintenance should file a complaint with the Department of Safety and Professional Services using its online form. DSPS licenses manufactured home communities and determines if complaints warrant inspection and potential discipline. The agency accepts anonymous complaints. Find more information here. In 16 counties, the DSPS has delegated inspection authority to local health departments. Find a list of delegated counties here.
If the issue involves eviction, lease agreements or other landlord-tenant issues, contact the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. Residents can submit an online complaint here. Complainants can leave identifying information off of the form, but it may limit DATCP’s ability to help address the issue. The agency contacts businesses on behalf of tenants to try to mediate problems, although the agency lacks the power to force mediation. Complaints — resolved or not — help the agency track potentially unfair business practices.
County health officials have jurisdiction over complaints related to health and safety. Find contact information for your local agency here.
City, town and village officials can also adopt their own regulations on manufactured housing communities. Consider asking local officials about requirements in your community and who enforces them.
Need help paying for repairs?
Tomorrow’s Home Foundation, partially funded by the state, grants low-income manufactured home owners up to $3,000 for repairs or modifications or up to $1,500 to dispose of uninhabitable homes. Learn more about eligibility here, and download an application here.
Have a question or know of a resource we should add to this list? Contact Addie Costello at acostello@wisconsinwatch.org.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Wisconsin’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul announced Tuesday that he will not run for governor, opting instead to seek a third term as the state’s top law enforcement official.
The governor’s race is wide open after Democratic incumbent Tony Evers, 73, announced this summer that he won’t seek reelection. The race will be the highest-profile contest on the ballot, but it has even greater significance this cycle as Democrats look to hold the office and take control of the Legislature for the first time since 2010.
More than half a dozen Democrats have announced plans to run in the August primary. Kaul would have been the de facto front-runner had he joined, given his large base of support and two statewide election victories.
The most prominent candidates in the Democratic primary scramble include Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, state Sen. Kelda Roys, state Rep. Francesca Hong and former Wisconsin Economic Development Commission leader Missy Hughes. Former lieutenant governor and 2022 U.S. Senate candidate Mandela Barnes said Tuesday in the wake of Kaul’s decision that he’s “strongly considering” entering the race.
The most notable Republicans running are U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann.
Kaul said in an interview Tuesday that he seriously considered running for governor but was worried the job would take him away from his two sons, ages 8 and 11. The state also needs leaders willing to push back against President Donald Trump’s administration, he said.
“It’s vitally important that we have folks who are going to stand up and protect our freedoms and rule of law,” he said.
Kaul is nearly three-quarters of the way through his second term. He defeated incumbent Republican Brad Schimel in 2018 and held off a challenge from Republican Eric Toney, Fond du Lac County’s district attorney, to win a second term in 2022.
Toney is expected to run for attorney general again in 2026. Asked for comment on the race Tuesday following Kaul’s announcement, he said only that he was focused on a homicide trial.
Kaul has been an advocate for liberal causes as attorney general. He has repeatedly called on Republican legislators to enact gun safety measures, to no avail. He successfully persuaded the liberal-controlled state Supreme Court to strike down the state’s abortion ban this year. Kaul has launched an investigation into clergy sex abuse in Wisconsin and has worked to expedite testing of sexual assault evidence kits.
Kaul also has worked to create multiple legal obstacles for Trump.
Last year, he filed felony charges against two attorneys and an aide who helped submit false papers to Congress claiming that Trump had won Wisconsin in 2020. Democrat Joe Biden won the state by less than a percentage point. The case Kaul brought against the fake electors is still pending.
Kaul has also joined more than two dozen multistate lawsuits challenging edicts from the current Trump administration. The filings challenge an array of proposals, including dismantling the federal volunteer agency AmeriCorps, withholding federal education funding from the states and capping research grant funding.
Republicans tried to curtail Kaul’s powers ahead of his first term, passing legislation in a lame duck session before he took office that required the Legislature’s GOP-controlled finance committee to approve any court settlements his office might broker. Kaul fought the statutes all the way to the state Supreme Court and ultimately won a ruling in June that the legislation was unconstitutional.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
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The state’s prison population keeps growing — as does the share of older prisoners who have increasingly complex health care needs.
Increased use of compassionate release could help ease costs and crowding with minimal risks to public safety, prisoner advocates and legal experts say.
Wisconsin courts approved just 53, or 11%, of 489 compassionate release petitions received between January 2019 and June 2025.
California offers a different model for sick and dying prisoners, including by processing compassionate release applications more quickly, the result of a legislative overhaul.
It’s hard to find hope in a terminal illness. But for Darnell Price, the spread of a cancerous tumor opened the door for a new life. It was a chance to spend his remaining days outside of prison.
Two Wisconsin Department of Corrections doctors in 2023 projected Price would die within a year — one of several criteria by which prisoners may seek a shortened sentence due to an “extraordinary health condition,” a form of compassionate release.
That was only the first step. A Corrections committee next had to vet his application. Its approval would send Price’s application to the court that convicted him for charges related to a 2015 bank robbery.
Victims of the crime did not oppose an early release, and a judge granted Price’s petition. That allowed him to walk free in August 2023 after an eight-year stint behind bars.
Price beat the odds in multiple ways. He’s still alive in his native Milwaukee and has authored a memoir about his journey. That his application succeeded is nearly as remarkable as his survival.
Darnell Price poses for a portrait outside of his apartment building, Oct. 1, 2025, in Milwaukee. Price was granted compassionate release from prison in August 2023 after eight years behind bars due to his stage four cancer diagnosis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Wisconsin grants few applicants compassionate release, leaving many severely ill inmates in short-staffed prisons that often struggle to meet health care needs.
Wisconsin courts approved just 53, or 11%, of 489 compassionate release petitions they received between January 2019 and June 2025 — about eight petitions a year, Corrections data show. Courts approved just five of 63 petitions filed in all of 2024.
That’s as the state’s adult prison population has swelled past 23,500, eclipsing the system’s built capacity. A growing share of those prisoners — 1 in 10 — are 60 or older with increasingly intense health care needs.
Increased use of compassionate release could help ease costs and crowding with minimal risks to public safety, prisoner advocates and legal experts say, but it remains off limits to a significant share of the prison population in Wisconsin and elsewhere, including those posing little threat to the public.
“The door is closed to so many people right at the very beginning,” said Mary Price, senior counsel for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a nonprofit advocate for criminal justice reform.
“There’s lots of good arguments why they ought to be released: They’re the most expensive people to incarcerate and the least likely to reoffend.”
Wisconsin’s aging prison population
Wisconsin’s struggle to care for its graying prison population has long drawn concern.
By 2014, Corrections counted more than 900 inmates over the age of 60, or about 4% of the overall population. Citing that number, then-department medical director James Greer wondered in a WPR interview:
“What’s that 900 (inmates) over 60 going to look like? It’s going to (be) 1,100? Is it going to be 1,200 in five years? And if so, how are (we) going to manage those in a correctional setting and keep them safe?”
Those projections undershot the trend. By the end of 2019, state prisons held more than 1,600 people older than 60. That number stood at 2,165 by the end of last year, nearly 10% of the population.
The state’s truth-in-sentencing law, which took effect in 2000, has helped drive that trend. It virtually eliminated parole for newly convicted offenders.
Darnell Price, right, pitches his memoir during a Home to Stay resource fair for people reentering society after incarceration, Oct. 1, 2025, at Community Warehouse in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
“Old law” prisoners sentenced before the change were eligible for release after serving 25% of their time. They were mandatorily released after serving two-thirds of their time.
Truth-in-sentencing required prisoners to serve 100% of their sentences plus post-release “extended supervision” of at least 25% of the original sentence. Parole remains available only to those sentenced before 2000.
The overhaul increased lockup time by nearly two years on average, said Michael O’Hear, a Marquette University Law School professor and expert on criminal punishment. That likely contributed to the aging trend. Lengthened post-release supervision played an even bigger role, if indirectly.
“The longer a person serves on supervision, the greater the likelihood of revocation and return to prison,” O’Hear said.
Separately, harsher sentencing for drunken driving also sent more people to prison.
Older prisoners need more health care
As prisoners age, they develop more complicated medical needs. Research is finding that the conditions of incarceration — overcrowding, lack of quality health care and psychological stress — accelerate those needs. Such conditions can shorten life expectancy by up to two years for every year behind bars, one study in New York state found.
“In Wisconsin overcrowding is a huge issue. Assigning more people to a room than they’re supposed to, which, of course, affects your sleep,” said Farah Kaiksow, associate professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, who has researched aging and care in prison.
The state has recognized the growing needs of older prisoners. In 2023, for instance, it opened a $7 million addition to the minimum-security Oakhill Correctional Institution that includes dozens of assisted living beds.
“Patients are helped with daily living tasks such as eating, dressing, hygiene, mobility, etc. Patients may be admitted for temporary rehab stays after injury or illness or longer-term stays due to age and frailty,” Corrections spokesperson Beth Hardtke said.
Hardtke also cited hospice programs at Dodge, Taycheedah and Oshkosh prisons.
But the department has struggled to recruit and retain competent medical staff. A Wisconsin Watch/New York Times investigation last year found nearly a third of the 60 prison staff physicians employed over a decade faced previous censure by a state medical board for an error or breach of ethics. Many faced lawsuits from inmates accusing them of serious errors that caused suffering or death.
That included a doctor whom Darnell Price sued for failing to order a biopsy on his growing tumor. She had surrendered her medical license in California after pleading guilty to a drug possession charge and no contest to a charge of prescription forgery.
Meanwhile, two Waupun Correctional Institution nurses are facing felony charges relating to deaths of two prisoners in their custody. One prisoner, 62-year-old Donald Maier, died in February 2024 from malnutrition and dehydration.
Compassionate release seen as cost saver
Advocates say boosting compassionate release could save taxpayer money in a state that spends more than its neighbors on incarceration. Health care tends to cost more for older prisoners.
Wisconsin lawmakers in the state’s most recent budget assumed that per prisoner health care costs will increase to $6,554 by 2026-27 — a fraction of the roughly $50,000 officials say it costs to incarcerate one person in Wisconsin.
The corrections department did not provide information breaking down health care costs by age. But a study of North Carolina’s prison system found that it spent about four times as much on health care for prisoners older than 50 compared to others. A 2012 ACLU report found it cost twice as much to incarcerate older prisoners nationally.
Most states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons have some version of compassionate release, though they vary wildly.
Wisconsin offers two main avenues: one based on medical condition and the other based on age and time served. Over the last seven years, Wisconsin has been more likely to grant petitions for early release based on medical reasons.
Darnell Price, right, is handed a token celebrating his eight months in recovery during a Home to Stay resource fair for people reentering society after incarceration, Oct. 1, 2025, at Community Warehouse in Milwaukee. “In treatment, I started feeling better and better until finally, the lights started coming back,” Price says. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
State law bars compassionate release for old law prisoners convicted before 2000 — about 1,600 people today. Parole is their only option for early release, and the state parole commission has been releasing fewer people on parole in recent years.
That leaves out people like Carmen Cooper, 80, a wheelchair-bound inmate at Fox Lake Correctional Institution who struggles to breathe. He lives with Parkinson’s disease, recurrent cancer and other ongoing pain and says he doesn’t always receive proper medication.
Convicted of murder and attempted murder in 1993, he is not eligible for parole for another 12 years. He has submitted two compassionate release applications with doctors’ affidavits, but the timing and nature of his convictions ban him from such relief; state law categorically excludes people convicted of Class A or Class B felonies, the most serious types of crime.
Cooper has little hope of dying outside of prison.
His daughters Qumine Hunter and Carmen Cooper say the incarceration has left a wide gap. He has missed deaths of close family members and births of grandchildren and great-grandchildren he has not met. The sisters never stop looking for ways to bring him home.
“If we got five years, 10 years, two years, whatever years we got left with him, we want all of them,” Hunter said.
Renagh O’Leary, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, represents people in compassionate release hearings. She said several elements of the state’s process limit access, including that petitions first go to a Department of Corrections committee, which must include a social worker and can include health care representatives.
Committee members might ask for a person’s plan for housing or to explain minor infractions from time in prison. The petition advances to a judge only if the committee unanimously approves.
Sending petitions directly to the sentencing court would be fairer, O’Leary said. Those and other major changes to the process would require legislative action.
“We’re talking about how long someone should serve in prison,” she added, “and I think those questions are best answered in a public courtroom, in a transparent process by a judge in the county that imposed the original prison sentence.”
The courtroom is where crime victims can weigh in. Their opinions depend on individual circumstances, said Amy Brown, the longtime director of victim services at the Dane County District Attorney’s Office.
“Victims don’t all fall into one category, just like offenders don’t all fall into one category,” she said.
Another wrinkle in Wisconsin’s compassionate release system: Doctors must attest to prisoners having less than six to 12 months to live. Some doctors feel uncomfortable making such a prediction.
“It’s really hard for a doctor to say, ‘Yeah, he’s going to be dead in six months,’” said Michele DiTomas, hospice medical director for the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, California. “You just don’t know. Some people will be dead in three months, some people will go on for 18 months.”
California a compassionate release model
California offers a different model for sick and dying prisoners.
The 17-bed hospice unit DiTomas runs, the first of its kind in the U.S., offers dying men as much comfort as can be found within a prison: medications that ease pain, visits from family members, time outdoors and attention from other incarcerated men who have been trained to provide hospice care. That hasn’t stopped DiTomas from working to get people approved for compassionate release so they can finish their lives at home.
California’s compassionate release process used to require a string of signatures — from the corrections secretary, the parole board, the governor and the original sentencing court — and often took longer than a person had left to live, she said. Similar barriers exist in many states.
The state a decade ago approved about 10 applications on average each year, DiTomas said, with approvals taking four to six months. A legislative overhaul streamlined the process. The state now approves about 100 compassionate release applications a year, taking as little as four weeks each, DiTomas said.
The changes resulted from leaders’ collaboration after recognizing that the previous system wasn’t working.
“We can give people their humanity and preserve public safety,” DiTomas said. “It’s not necessarily one or the other.”
Housing shortage complicates release
Price initially lacked a place to stay while applying for compassionate release in 2023. It was his job to fix that or risk dooming his application.
“They can deny you for not having a solid plan for housing, but it’s not something they help you with,” he said.
He found a room in a transitional housing unit in Milwaukee through a faith-based organization. Had he required more intensive care, a nursing home may be a better option. But many nursing homes don’t accept someone fresh out of prison — a challenge described in a 2020 Legislative Audit Bureau report.
That’s a problem nationwide, said Price, the Families Against Mandatory Minimums attorney. As more than 60,000 people aged 50 or older leave prison each year, housing demand continues to outpace supply. Her organization is creating a clearinghouse to help match prisoners who qualify for compassionate release with pro bono lawyers to help them find beds.
O’Leary said that illustrates how expanding compassionate release in Wisconsin would require more post-prison housing options.
Life on the outside
Price now lives in a modest efficiency apartment on Milwaukee’s north side. It doesn’t have much, he said, but it has everything he needs, including a laptop and smart TV to watch Packers highlights. On his wall hangs a framed version of the Wisconsin Watch/New York Times story that detailed his struggle to receive medical care in prison — a gift from his attorneys. The tumors still lurk in his body, though for now they do not seem to be growing.
Price has faced some of his toughest challenges since leaving prison.
The opioids doctors prescribed to ease his pain triggered a past cocaine addiction, Price said, and drug use cost him the first place he stayed.
But Price checked into a treatment facility in February 2024. He managed to stay sober in 24-hour increments. The days eventually turned into weeks.
“At that time I didn’t have a plan. But in treatment, I started feeling better and better until finally, the lights started coming back,” he said. “Then there came a point that I even wanted to go back to that life.”
Darnell Price closes the door of his apartment, Oct. 1, 2025, in Milwaukee. Finding and maintaining housing were among the challenges he faced upon being released from prison. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Kyesha Felts, with whom Price shares a daughter, is also taking life one day at a time, enjoying the time she gets to spend with the man she has loved for 30 years.
“I love it,” she said of Price being home. “I’m enjoying every minute of it. Because tomorrow’s promised to nobody.”
She said she admires his intelligence, the way he treats people and his strength and resilience.
Price is now eight months sober, and he’s proud of the memoir he published, “The Ultimate Betrayal,” a chronicle of addiction, incarceration and redemption. He tells his story around the community. He doesn’t hold anything back, he said, because it’s all part of his testimony.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
In a 2007 ruling known as Zellner v. Cedarburg School District, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared that because public school teachers “are entrusted with the responsibility of teaching children,” the public has a clear right to know about allegations of misconduct against educators.
I wonder what the justices would think of a school district trying to charge $5,600 for this information. Or $40,000. Or $245,000.
Those were among the actual cost estimates that Wisconsin school districts provided when my paper, the Cap Times, asked for public records about teachers accused of sexual misconduct.
Such misconduct is a more pervasive problem in schools than you might think. An estimated one in 10 students experiences sexual harassment or assault from an educator during their K-12 schooling, according to one comprehensive case study in 2004. In Wisconsin, that rate would amount to more than 93,000 school children based on last year’s private and public school statewide enrollment.
But there is no statewide comprehensive data tracking of such allegations, so the Cap Times set out to determine how often educators are investigated for sexual misconduct toward students, and how allegations to this effect are handled.
For a report to be published later this month, the Cap Times sought employee investigation records, reprimands and resignation agreements over the last eight years from districts across Wisconsin.
Mark Treinen (Provided photo)
The responses took the newspaper by surprise. I’m not referring to the actual records — which, when the Cap Times eventually received them, were shocking in other ways. What first stunned us were the amounts the districts demanded just to look for these documents.
The Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District outside of Madison put the upfront cost of locating these records at $40,000. Sheboygan wanted $18,000, Oshkosh wanted $6,600, Appleton wanted $5,600, and Madison wanted $4,500.
Leading the pack was the Janesville School District, which asked for $245,000. The district has 9,400 students and roughly 1,500 employees, making it the ninth largest district in the state. Milwaukee Public Schools, the largest school district in the state at 66,000 students, quoted the Cap Times about $1,100 for the exact same records request. MPS also has six times more employees, meaning more records to search.
After a Cap Times reporter spoke on the phone with Janesville assistant superintendent Scott Garner, this charge disappeared. For some of the districts, the newspaper had to identify names of specific teachers and narrow the scope of its requests to get a reasonable cost estimate. For others, including Madison, we still have not received records despite our attempts to make their searches easier.
The suspicion remains that the initial price tags from some of these districts were not based on the “actual, necessary and direct cost” of locating these records, as the Open Records Law allows, but on a desire to make these requests go away.
Then there were school districts, including Racine and Waukesha, where officials said they couldn’t fulfill the request at all because it would be too burdensome.
Refusing to provide this information, or charging prohibitive fees for such records, is antithetical to school districts’ legal duty — and moral obligation — of transparency.
Educators have unique access to children and an enormous amount of responsibility for their safety at school. By far the majority can be trusted with those responsibilities. But in some cases that trust is violated — as in the state Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling, involving an educator who was viewing adult websites on his school computer.
As the court said in its decision, “The public has an interest in knowing about such allegations of teacher misconduct and how they are handled.”
And, I would add, members of the public shouldn’t have to take out a loan to get this information.
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. Council secretary Mark Treinen (mtreinen@captimes.com) is editor of the Cap Times in Madison.
U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican front-runner in the 2026 race for Wisconsin governor, has a mixed record on statements fact-checked by Wisconsin Watch.
The northern Wisconsin congressman has been on target on some claims, such as low Wisconsin business rankings, the link between marijuana and psychosis, and a drop in Wisconsin reading scores.
Other assertions, including claims about tariffs, aid for Ukraine and vetting evacuees from Afghanistan, have been off.
Peer-reviewed research has found links between marijuana use and psychosis — the loss of contact with reality, experienced as delusions or hallucinations.
The consensus is there is a clear association, but more research is needed to determine if there is causation.
In August, Tiffany called for more research on the link to inform legalization policy.
Canada has set tariffs exceeding 200% for U.S. dairy products.
But the tariffs are imposed only when the amount imported exceeds quotas, and the U.S. “has never gotten close to exceeding” quotas that would trigger Canada’s dairy tariffs, the International Dairy Foods Association said.
Tiffany claimed that Wisconsin had “fallen behind” Mississippi in reading.
In the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress assessment, issued every two years, Mississippi’s fourth grade public school students scored higher than Wisconsin’s in reading proficiency, though the ratings “were not significantly different.”
In 2022, 33% of Wisconsin fourth graders rated “at or above proficient” in reading, vs. 31% in Mississippi. In 2024, Wisconsin dropped to 31%; Mississippi rose to 32%.
A $95 billion U.S. aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, which President Joe Biden signed into law in April 2024, prohibits funds from being allocated to pensions in Ukraine.
Tiffany claimed that the law included “millions” for pensions in Ukraine. His office, pointing to a U.S. State Department news release, told Wisconsin Watch that Tiffany meant to say that previous U.S. aid packages funded Ukrainian pensions.
Following the Afghanistan evacuation that began in summer 2021, more than 76,000 Afghans came to the U.S. after being vetted, The Wall Street Journal reported.
All evacuees were brought to a military base in Europe or the Middle East, where U.S. officials collected fingerprints and biographical details and ran them through criminal and terrorism-related databases, the Journal reported.
In reviews, the Defense and Homeland Security departments found that not all evacuees were fully vetted.
Tiffany made the claim about changes the Biden administration made in 2024 to Title IX, a federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools receiving federal funding.
The new rules protect students and employees from sex-based harassment and discrimination. The rules say future changes will address sex-separate athletic teams.
As of late October 2023, when Tiffany made his claim, more than 200 non-U.S. citizens on the federal terrorist watchlist had tried to enter the U.S. between legal ports of entry and were stopped by Border Patrol during the Biden administration.
The watchlist contains known or suspected terrorists and individuals “who represent a potential threat.”
In making that claim, Tiffany cited a Wall Street Journal report on closed-door congressional testimony given by Devon Archer, a former Hunter Biden business associate, about Joe Biden participating with Hunter in about 20 phone calls when Biden was vice president.
The Journal quoted Republican Rep. James Comer as saying Archer testified that Joe Biden was put on the phone to help Hunter sell “the brand.” A transcript shows Archer testified that Joe and Hunter never discussed business on the calls.
Information cited by Tiffany when he made that claim in 2023 contained only unverified intelligence that the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Biden $5 million.
A Waukesha County judge on Friday ordered the Wisconsin Elections Commission to determine whether any noncitizens are registered to vote and to stop accepting voter registrations without verifying that the applicant is a U.S. citizen.
A Pewaukee resident, represented by conservative attorneys, filed a lawsuit last year seeking to require the election commission to verify citizenship of registered voters and applicants. The suit also sought to force the Wisconsin Department of Transportation to compare its citizenship information against voter rolls.
The election commission opposed the initial request, saying that no state law called for requiring documented proof of citizenship. It also argued that the DOT has no obligation to match citizenship data with voter records.
Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Michael Maxwell rejected the commission’s argument, saying that the agency is failing in its duty to ensure that only lawful voters make it to the voter rolls. He cited several statutes that he said made clear that only citizens could cast a ballot.
Maxwell didn’t specify how the election commission and local clerks should verify citizenship of new registrants, or how the commission should check for noncitizens on the voter rolls. He only called for the parties to figure out a plan, whether that be through matching the DOT’s citizenship data or using “other lawfully available means.” He called for that process to be substantially completed before the next statewide election, which is February.
Currently, applicants for voter registration in Wisconsin and most other states must attest, under penalty of perjury, that they are U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote, but they are not required to present proof of citizenship.
Republicans praised the decision, with state Rep. Amanda Nedweski calling it a “great win for election integrity.”
Democrats and the respondents in the case were largely mum.
Election commission spokesperson Emilee Miklas didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Riley Vetterkind, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Justice, which represents the commission and the Department of Transportation, declined to say whether the agencies would appeal the decision.
The current plaintiffs, Pewaukee resident Ardis Cerny and Waukesha resident Annette Kuglitsch, sued the election commission, the Department of Transportation and officials in both agencies. They have argued that the election commission is violating their voting rights by not checking for noncitizens already registered to vote and seeking to vote.
Maxwell agreed, saying they “have a clear legal right to not have their votes diluted by a non-citizen casting an unlawful ballot.”
It’s unclear how the commission would verify the citizenship of all of Wisconsin’s registered voters by February. Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative, said the decision will “definitely be appealed” and that the lower-court decision could be stayed while the appeal goes through the courts.
If the case reaches the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the liberal majority could overturn the order of the conservative-leaning Waukesha County Circuit Court.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
A bill with bipartisan support scheduled for a committee vote on Tuesday could restore funding for Wisconsin veterans homes in Green Bay and Chippewa Falls that closed in September due to funding cuts in the 2025-27 state budget.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers told Wisconsin Watch he would sign the Republican-sponsored bill, even though it includes additional items that are not part of a Democratic “clean” proposal that only funds the veterans homes. But it’s unclear if the bill will pass the Republican-controlled Assembly.
Senate Bill 411, from Sen. André Jacque, R-New Franken, would provide the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs $1.95 million over the biennium to increase funding for the costs of running the agency’s Veterans Housing and Recovery Program, which supports veterans at risk of homelessness. The dollars would also cover costs for leasing a new facility in Chippewa Falls. Klein Hall, which housed VHRP veterans there, was nearly 50 years old and needed repairs, staff told Wisconsin Watch this summer.
Veterans organizations, Republicans and Democrats spoke in favor of the bill at a public hearing in September, and no one spoke against it. The bill also requires the Universities of Wisconsin System Board of Regents to fund the Missing-in-Action Recovery and Identification Project and reduces the disability rating threshold for veterans or their surviving spouses to claim property tax credits.
But the bill’s path beyond Tuesday’s executive session vote in the Senate’s Committee on Natural Resources, Veteran and Military Affairs, which Jacque leads, remains unclear at this point.
Even if Jacque’s bill makes it to Evers’ desk for his signature, it would still take “a few months” to reopen the Green Bay facility and at least a year for a site to reopen in Chippewa Falls, said Colleen Flaherty, a spokesperson for the WDVA. The Chippewa Falls timeline is longer because the WDVA would have to apply for a new round of federal grants, Flaherty said.
Still, Jacque said in a statement to Wisconsin Watch that he was “heartened” by the support for SB 411 so far.
“I look forward to continuing discussions with the Department of Veterans Affairs and fellow committee members to get this legislation to the governor as quickly as possible,” he said.
How we got here
SB 411 is one of several legislative proposals brought forward after the state’s two-year budget passed without additional funds to cover the rising costs of running veterans homes across the state.
Evers originally proposed $1.9 million in new funding for the low-cost housing option, but the Legislature’s Republican-led budget writing committee removed those dollars during the legislative process.
Political finger-pointing followed as the state prepared to close the Green Bay and Chippewa Falls facilities. Evers placed the blame on the Republicans in the Legislature. Republican lawmakers, such as Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Oconto, argued Evers and the WDVA already had funding to keep the veterans homes open.
According to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the WDVA receives an appropriation for “general program administration,” which has been underspent its funding by $600,000 to $2 million in each of the last six fiscal years. The agency has broad enough stipulations that it could use extra funds to support the veterans housing program.
But it’s possible the WDVA believes the Legislature did not intend to continue to support the veterans homes when it did not approve the specific funding proposed during the budget process, the LFB said. Flaherty, with the WDVA, said the agency “needs legislative approval for the funding.”
Evers spokesperson Britt Cudaback said the governor is “hopeful” the Legislature will “work quickly” and pass SB 411 in its current form, which he would sign into law.
“While it’s great to see that Republicans have now decided they support Gov. Evers’ budget requests, it’s disappointing they chose not to approve these investments months ago when they had the chance, which could have prevented two facilities serving homeless veterans from closing,” Cudaback said.
Wimberger, in a statement to Wisconsin Watch, continued to place the blame on Evers.
“I’m not opposed to Senator Jacque’s bill,” Wimberger said. “However, Governor Evers is extorting the Legislature since the program already has funding. If paying twice makes Governor Evers stop sending veterans out on the streets, maybe we do that.”
What’s next for SB 411?
Should SB 411 move beyond the Senate’s committee, it would then go to the full Senate for consideration. The chamber has not met since early July.
In the meantime, the WDVA found new placements for all of the veterans who previously called the Green Bay and Chippewa Falls sites home. The last veteran left Chippewa Falls on Sept. 9 and Green Bay on Sept. 12, Flaherty said.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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A Manitowoc County dairy farmer can’t find an attorney and has no idea where her husband is after he was among 24 people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Manitowoc County on Sept. 25.
Wisconsin immigration attorneys said they were surprised to hear that, unlike during other recent federal government shutdowns, immigration court hearings for clients not in ICE detention would continue as planned.
Only about a third of immigrants in Wisconsin with upcoming hearings in federal immigration court have legal representation.
A Manitowoc County dairy worker arrived for her shift early on a Thursday morning in late September and waited for a message from her husband. It’s their routine, she said: rise early, commute to jobs at separate dairies and check in by phone.
“But when I called him, he didn’t answer,” she said in Spanish. “And so I was calling and calling and I said, ‘something happened, because he’s not answering – that’s not normal.’”
Her husband, Abraham Maldonado Almanza, was among the 24 people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Manitowoc County on Sept. 25. As far as she knows, officers picked Maldonado Almanza up in the Walmart parking lot where dairy workers gather to carpool hours before sunrise. Within a matter of days, he had — at least from her perspective — effectively vanished, carried away at breakneck speed by the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown.
The pace of enforcement operations, lack of transparency and sudden shifts in policy have disoriented both those targeted in the crackdown and immigration attorneys already managing overwhelming caseloads.
A Department of Homeland Security press release tied the arrests to a joint operation with the FBI, IRS and other federal law enforcement agencies targeting an alleged human and drug trafficking ring. Neither DHS nor the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Wisconsin responded to inquiries about whether the investigation has resulted in criminal charges against any of those arrested last month, nor did federal district court dockets point to criminal charges resulting from the investigation as of Friday.
Over the following days, the dairy worker says she made her way through a list of immigration attorneys’ phone numbers, none of whom agreed to take her husband’s case. She attributed the reluctance to a preexisting removal order on her husband’s record, which can speed the deportation process. But without a reliable source of information, she was left relying on hearsay to keep track of Abraham’s case.
Dairy workers were among those arrested during a Sept. 25, 2025, federal immigration raid in Manitowoc, Wis. Here, a worker is shown cleaning the milking barn at a farm in Wisconsin on June 11, 2024. (Ben Brewer for Wisconsin Watch)
As the federal government entered a shutdown on Wednesday, several Wisconsin immigration attorneys said they were surprised to hear that, unlike during other shutdowns in recent memory, immigration court hearings for clients not in ICE detention would continue as planned.
Attorneys had not expected the shutdown to slow down the cases of immigrants in detention, but the speed of operations has still caught some off guard. Some of those arrested in Manitowoc County last month were already out of the country days before Congress missed its funding deadline, according to Aissa Olivarez, an attorney with the Community Immigration Law Center in Madison.
“Historically, people are taken to (the Dodge County Jail) and we’re able to at least do an intake and speak with them before anything else happens,” Olivarez said. “But it seems like in this operation, they knew who they were looking for, or exactly what they were going to do. … They did this really, really fast.”
As of Friday, three of the six arrestees named in a DHS press release about the Manitowoc County operation were still in the Dodge County Jail, according to ICE’s detainee locator tool.
Maldonado Almanza was not among them, though his name and photograph appeared in the press release, which also claimed he had a prior conviction for identity theft.
Wisconsin circuit court records yield no matching criminal record, nor do trial court records in Iowa, where his wife says they lived after emigrating from Mexico and before moving to Wisconsin. Iowa court records do, however, reflect that Maldonado Almanza was fined for driving without insurance in 2009.
Some men arrested in Manitowoc County on Sept. 25, 2025, had already left country within days, says Aissa Olivarez, an attorney with the Community Immigration Law Center. She is shown on a commuter train on Oct. 24, 2018 — returning to Madison, Wis., from the Chicago Immigration Court, the designated court for people held in immigration detention in Wisconsin. (Natalie Yahr / Wisconsin Watch)
The dairy worker said her husband had previously received a deportation order in an immigration court case that began while the couple was living in Iowa. That detail matches Olivarez’s understanding of the Manitowoc operation. “It does seem like there were people who have been ordered deported before,” she said. In those cases, “without a quick stay of removal or motion to reopen, the government executes that removal order right away.”
“Because there is such a low capacity (of attorneys) in the state in general, when people already have removal orders, we can’t work fast enough to stop it,” she added.
Maldonado Almanza’s whereabouts remained unclear as of Friday.
Milwaukee immigration attorney John Sesini says his firm took the case of another man picked up in the Manitowoc operation only to discover he had been deported to Mexico within four days of his arrest. The man had no criminal record, Sesini said, and it remains unclear whether he had a prior deportation order. If not, it may still be possible to challenge the deportation in court.
Only about a third of immigrants in Wisconsin with upcoming hearings in federal immigration court have legal representation. Unlike courts operated by the federal judiciary, immigration courts – part of the U.S. Department of Justice – do not provide free representation. Instead, immigrants must pay out of pocket, rely on the few free and low-cost legal services organizations like Olivarez’s legal center or face the courts alone. Those able to find attorneys are vastly more likely to avoid deportation than those who attempt to represent themselves.
For some immigrants facing court dates in the coming weeks, a typical government shutdown could have provided breathing room. In past shutdowns, the DOJ has typically deemed only the cases of immigrants in detention “essential” enough to move forward. The shutdown from late December 2018 to mid-January 2019, for instance, forced the cancellation of at least 80,000 hearings nationwide, according to immigration court records analyzed by the nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
Attorney Aissa Olivarez works on a commuter train on Oct. 24, 2018, while traveling between Madison, Wis., and the Chicago Immigration Court. (Natalie Yahr / Wisconsin Watch)
A Wisconsin Watch analysis of federal immigration court data suggests that as of August, almost 1,000 immigrants with Wisconsin addresses had hearings scheduled for October. So far, the DOJ has not called off those hearings en masse, though the agency has also not clarified whether immigration courts will continue holding hearings of immigrants who are not detained during a prolonged shutdown.
But in a press release issued on Wednesday, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin underscored that the shutdown will not slow ICE. “The deportations will continue,” she wrote.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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Twelve years after the Kewaunee Power Station shuttered, wounding the local economy, owner EnergySolutions is seeking government approval to build a new nuclear plant at the site — and is trying to buy hundreds of acres of farmland around it.
EnergySolutions and gas and electric utility WEC Energy Group say they’re eyeing the station for a new build because they expect data centers, artificial intelligence and industrial growth to increase electricity demand in the coming decades.
While local residents hope a new plant could bring economic growth, unanswered questions about use of the additional land are making some uneasy.
On a soupy September morning in northeast Wisconsin, a blue semi-truck arrives at Tisch Mills Farm Center in the tiny town of Carlton. Under the hopper of a massive grain bin, roughly 50,000 pounds of ground corn slide down a chute and into the truck’s open back. Within minutes, the driver pulls back onto the road to haul the feed to an Algoma dairy farm, where livestock will eat it.
This process repeats roughly a dozen times each day, with some trucks transporting grain or fertilizer to customers in Illinois and Minnesota. Business is booming, but President Chris Kohnle worries the 80-year-old,family-run establishment could soon take a blow.
The reason? The nuclear power plant a few miles up the road, which has sat lifeless for over a decade.
Twelve years after the Kewaunee Power Station shuttered, wounding the local economy, owner EnergySolutions is seeking government approval to build a new nuclear plant at the site — and is trying to buy hundreds of acres of farmland around it. While local residentshope a new plant could bring economic growth, unanswered questions about use of the additional land are making some uneasy.
“We’ll be losing land that people grow grain on, that people have fertilized, so that will be a detriment to us,” Kohnle said.
Grain bins overlook farmland surrounding Tisch Mills Farm Center on Sept. 16, 2025, in Tisch Mills, Wis. President Chris Kohnle worries the 80-year-old, family-run establishment could take a blow if companies buy up farmland around the Kewaunee Power Station. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
EnergySolutions and gas and electric utility WEC Energy Group say they’re eyeing the station in the small Kewaunee County town for a new build because they expect data centers, artificial intelligence and industrial growth to increase electricity demand in the coming decades. The plans are in the early stages, and construction likely wouldn’t start until the early 2030s if approved.
Though they’re attempting to purchase hundreds of acres from locals, the companies haven’t confirmed they intend to construct anything at the site beyond a nuclear plant. But residents are demanding reassurance that the land won’t be used for controversial projects dividing other communities, such as data centers. Officials haven’t ruled out the possibility.
Town of Carlton Chairman David Hardtke says town officials have heard from data center companies interested in the site, which is making people nervous.
“The people in Carlton don’t want anything to do with that,” he said.
Despite the nerves, many residents are eager for the economic boost a new nuclear plant could bring to the region. Nuclear energy experts in Wisconsin say communities often enjoy hosting a plant because it creates stable jobs and increases local tax revenues. The project would likely bring thousands of jobs across different sectors, according to WEC.
“The nuclear waste is sitting there anyway, so they can’t do anything else with the property,” Hardtke said. “I’d like to see it rebuilt. They never should have shut it down. … Just rebuild it and start producing power again and we can lower our taxes again.”
A bitter history
Though the industrial 900-acre facility clashes with its picturesque Lake Michigan backdrop and the surrounding farmland, it once lived in harmony with Kewaunee County and the 1,000-person town of Carlton.
Opened in 1974, the plant was Carlton’s economic engine. The roughly $400,000 it paid in utility taxes funded most of the town’s budget. The station provided hundreds of jobs and employed hundreds of visiting workers who regularly traveled to the area and fueled the local hospitality industry.
But that symbiotic relationship turned sour in 2012 when Dominion, the plant’s then-owner, abruptly announced it would close the facility for economic reasons.
David Hardtke, chairman of the town of Carlton and a third-generation farmer, shakes baby powder on his tractor while preparing to bale hay on Sept. 16, 2025, in Kewaunee, Wis. He feels EnergySolutions is “playing with a lot of people’s lives” by not being more transparent. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
“I was plowing my field over there on the corner, and channel two, channel five, channel 11, channel 26 — they’re all sitting down there at the end of the field waiting for me,” said Hardtke, gesturing to the land that stretches beyond his yellow house. “They wanted a sob story. That’s what they wanted. And, me, I said, ‘The sun’s gonna come up tomorrow morning, and life goes on.’”
Though the town official was nonchalant about the news, it wasn’t so easy. In the years that followed, the region’s economy took repeated hits.
Residents recall a mass exodus of plant workers, whose sizable salaries once circulated through the county. Scores of employees put their houses on the market at once, causing prices to drop and sales to slow. Absent the tax revenue from the plant, Carlton officials were forced to raise taxes to close the roughly $400,000 hole in their budget. Kewaunee County introduced a sales tax that continues today.
Finally, a legal battle between Carlton and Dominion ensnared several parties for years.
In 2015, Carlton officials hired appraisers who assessed the shuttered plant’s property at $457 million. Dominion sued the town, claiming it was worth about $1.3 million. After years of clashing, they settled outside of court in 2017, agreeing to set the property’s value at $15 million and for the county, the school district and the technical college to repay the nearly $12 million in property taxes Dominion paid during the battle.
Framed photos and a century ownership certificate chronicle the history of David Hardtke’s family farm. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
“They were big business. They didn’t care about Kewaunee, or the town of Carlton, or anything. All they wanted was dollar signs,” Hardtke said.
Dominion sold the plant to Utah-based EnergySolutions in 2022. Since then, a smaller number of workers have chipped away at decommissioning the plant — a decades-long process of cleaning up nuclear waste.
But absent the big industry, the area has become “stagnant,” observes Kewaunee resident Dan Giannotti. He said there’s a major lack of development and no real economic draw for people to stay in the area.
“A lot of people drive on (state Highway) 29 into Green Bay for decent-paying jobs. Every day, back and forth. That’s a 30-mile trip, basically. … These poor kids that graduate high school,” Giannotti said, “they’re gonna have to leave to find good-paying jobs.”
Data center rumors spook Carlton
Several months ago, Carlton resident Glenn Mueller received unexpected mail: an offer from EnergySolutions to buythe 60 acres of land he owns neighboring the nuclear plant at $20,000 per acre.
When several residents received such offers, rumors about the company’s intentions quickly swirled.
Farmland surrounds Tisch Mills Farm Center on Sept. 16, 2025, in Tisch Mills, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
The Kewaunee Power Station provided hundreds of jobs and employed hundreds of visiting workers who regularly traveled to the area and fueled the local hospitality industry. The relationship turned sour in 2012 when Dominion, the plant’s then-owner, abruptly announced it would close the facility. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Plans to build a new nuclear plant at the Kewaunee Power Station are in the early stages, and construction likely wouldn’t start until the early 2030s, if approved. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Frustrated by EnergySolutions “buying up land behind our backs” and eager for answers, Hardtke organized a town hall meeting. Over 100 residents attended and demanded transparency about what the land would be used for.
The next week, EnergySolutions announced it is seeking the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval to build a new nuclear facility at the site.
“We are excited to partner with WEC Energy Group to explore the next generation of nuclear power,” EnergySolutions CEO Ken Robuck said in a press release. “With rising energy demand driven by data centers, artificial intelligence and industrial growth, the need for reliable, carbon-free power has never been greater.”
“If you look around the country, different legislators and different legislative bodies and policymakers in general are trying to figure out how to position their states to benefit from that growth and not be left behind,” said Paul Wilson, chair of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Nuclear Engineering & Engineering Physics.
“I think our state policymakers are keen to make sure Wisconsin doesn’t miss out on this,” Wilson said.
Kewaunee is an attractive location because it has hosted a nuclear reactor before, Wilson said. Plus, some infrastructure like transmission lines is still in place. If the site was to be pursued for a data center, the location’s proximity to fresh water is also ideal — data centers need cooling methods to prevent overheating, and Lake Michigan is a good source if used responsibly, Wilson said.
At an August meeting, Hardtke said the town board heard from data center companies interested in the site.He feels EnergySolutions is “playing with a lot of people’s lives” by not being more transparent.
“I’m dead set against (building a data center). I was born a farmer, and I’m always proud to be one,” Hardtke said. “I don’t like to see land wasted for that.”
“I’d like to see it rebuilt,” David Hardtke said of the Kewaunee Power Station. “They never should have shut it down. … Just rebuild it and start producing power again and we can lower our taxes again.” (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
EnergySolutions did not respond to multiple calls and emails from Wisconsin Watch. Asked if there are hopes to build a data processing center at the site, Brendan Conway, the WEC spokesperson, said, “We work regularly with companies across all industries looking to expand their operations. I do not have any specific information about any new developments but we expect electricity demand in Wisconsin to grow significantly and steadily in the coming decades.”
The nonanswers have left Mueller torn about whether to sell his acreage, which borders the nuclear site. He currently leases some of the land to a local family business that uses it to grow hay, and Mueller lets people hunt in the wooded areas. He’s always figured he’d pass it on to his kids. Now, he’s not so sure.
To make an informed decision, Mueller wants to know what EnergySolutions would use the land for, but nobody has given him those answers. He’s spent hundreds of dollars to have a lawyer review the offer and has debated making a counteroffer.
“There’d be a lot of people pissed off if I do sell it,” Mueller said. But he’s “not that young anymore,” he said, and the sale could allow him to fully retire and help his children financially.
“I think everybody in the town is agreeable, happy that nuclear was here,” he said. “I don’t think anybody is upset that it would come back in, but we’re just all upset, as far as we don’t get any answers.”
Eager for an economic boost
While nuclear power’s potential return to the county has sparked many questions, locals arestill largely optimisticabout the economic boost it would bring.
“Jobs, economics, taxes — I think it’d be a great thing,” said Milt Swagel, a county board member who has lived on his Kewaunee farm since 1987. “We have lots of power. I don’t want to be like California or other places with brownouts or blackouts. No, I like my lights.”
The Kewaunee Power Station is visible in the distance about 3 miles from grain bins at Tisch Mills Farm Center on Sept. 16, 2025, in Tisch Mills, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Giannotti attends a weekly coffee group with eight other Kewaunee residents, and the nuclear plant has been a popular topic of discussion, including speculation about what will be built at the site. He’s eager to see if nuclear power’s return would help Kewaunee County grow.
“If you bring in an employer like that who is paying, you’re going to see development,” Giannotti said. “You’re going to see new homes being built and more businesses move in. Because right now, we’re just stagnant. Nothing’s happening to speak of.”
“If that power plant gets going, I think that could ignite.”
WEC Energy Group estimated the project would employ thousands of workers in the region. This includes electrical, civil, chemical and mechanical engineering workers to design and operate the new reactor, plus skilled trades workers such as electricians, welders, pipefitters and construction workers to build it.
“What you typically find is that communities that have hosted nuclear reactors quite like having them there, because it’s good jobs, it’s tax dollars,” said Ben Lindley, assistant professor at UW-Madison’s Department of Nuclear Engineering & Engineering Physics.
The addition could also keep more young nuclear engineers in Wisconsin. The state only has one plant, located in Two Rivers, so nuclear engineering graduates often have to look for jobs in other states to break into the field, Lindley said.
He added that the plant would likely require bringing in nonlocal workers for construction. Even then, the workers would spend several years in the region and “inject money into the local economy.”
“If you bring in an employer like that who is paying, you’re going to see development,” said Kewaunee resident Dan Giannotti of a new nuclear plant. “You’re going to see new homes being built and more businesses move in. Because right now, we’re just stagnant. Nothing’s happening to speak of.” (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Andy DiMezza, who lives in nearby Denmark, said he would be eager to work at the nuclear plant. DiMezza studied nuclear chemistry in college, and his wife, Sarah,interned at Kewaunee Power Station when it was operating. She also worked on the Two Rivers plant’s emergency response plan — government-mandated preparation for radiological emergencies — and would want to contribute to Kewaunee’s.
There are still “numerous steps to get through” to determine if the site is suitable for a new plant, Conway said, including the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s “rigorous” permitting process. It could take up to two years for the project to move forward.
If a permit is granted, Conway estimated construction on the plant could begin in the early 2030s, and the plant could come online in 2038 or 2039.
Before that day comes, residents hope they can make their voices and concerns heard.
“I’m trying to make as much noise as possible,” Hardtke said.
“People in Carlton want to be informed,” he said. “They, I think, have a love for the town, just like I do.”
Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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Wisconsin Watch asked two professors in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Nuclear Engineering & Engineering Physics how a new nuclear plant in Kewaunee County would impact the local workforce and economy.
They believe there is a ready pipeline of qualified workers in the state to keep up with that added demand.
Electrical, civil, chemical and mechanical engineering workers will be needed to design and operate the new reactor. The project will also require many people in the skilled trades, such as electricians, welders, pipefitters and other construction workers.
Many institutions could play a role in preparing workers for jobs at a nuclear power plant, including UW-Madison and Lakeshore Technical College.
In a small farming community off the shore of Lake Michigan, Kewaunee County’s nuclear power plant has sat lifeless for over a decade. But increased demand for power driven by artificial intelligence and data centers could change that.
Plant owner EnergySolutions and WEC Energy Group are asking the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for approval to build a new nuclear facility at the site. If it is granted, officials expect construction could begin in the early 2030s and the plant could come online by 2040. The process would likely require labor from thousands of workers, WEC spokesperson Brendan Conway said.
Wisconsin Watch asked two professors in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Nuclear Engineering & Engineering Physics how this might impact the local workforce and economy.
Here’s what to know.
Does Wisconsin have enough nuclear engineers for a new plant?
Bringing a new power station online means Wisconsin would need more nuclear engineers to design and operate the plant.
UW-Madison “pumps out” nuclear engineers, but Wisconsin has only one nuclear plant located in Two Rivers, Lindley said. This leaves some graduates to look for employment in other states.
“A lot of them want to stay in the state, and so having more job opportunities would certainly help,” Lindley said.
While there is increased interest in nuclear engineering professions today, Lindley said, the industry does have a gap that is harder to fill: workers in their 40s.
Many people who flocked to nuclear engineering in the 1970s and 1980s are now retiring, leaving a gap between aging workers and those entering the workforce. The profession has the challenge of training up these younger workers while trying to hang onto older employees for as long as possible.
“When we stopped doing nuclear in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, there’s that gap in skills of people who weren’t really trained up in the ’90s,” Lindley said. “That’s a trickier one to fill. And the whole sector has that problem.”
There were 78 nuclear engineers employed in Wisconsin in 2022, the most recently available state data shows, and the workforce was projected to shrink by seven jobs by 2032. Those in the occupation made a median salary of $106,740 in 2024. Nuclear engineers typically need a bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering or a related field at minimum.
What other workers will be needed?
In the grand scheme, nuclear engineers are likely the minority of workers who will be needed if a new plant opens, Lindley said. The construction and the operation of the plant are distinct phases that will require a healthy mix of blue- and white-collar workers.
While Kewaunee Power Station is still standing, EnergySolutions has been decommissioning it — cleaning up nuclear waste and radioactive materials to dismantle the plant — since 2022, meaning the old reactor will not be brought back online, Conway said. It would be a new facility, requiring the construction of a nuclear reactor.
“What you’ve seen in other plants like this is, it’s a blend of training local people, sourcing from firms that are already in the state, including construction firms, and then also they’d probably need people coming in from outside in the building phase, as well,” Lindley said. “That’s just because of the amount of people you need, and it’s also the skills that you need. Ideally, you want construction firms involved who have been involved in other nuclear construction projects.”
This is where Wisconsin’s skilled labor shortages may be felt the most. The state has struggled to meet the demand for labor in such professions.
“You need a lot of people in the skilled trades,” Wilson said. “This is a national concern – of whether we can keep up the pipeline of workers.”
That’s why employers have sought to push more prospective workers into apprenticeships, or programs that combine paid, on-the-job training with employer-sponsored classroom learning at a technical college. Apprenticeship participation hit an all-time high in 2024, with construction apprenticeships topping the list. However, Wisconsin still lags neighboring states in apprenticeship participation.
The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development includes construction workers, welders and electricians on its “hot jobs” list — which names well-paying, high-growth jobs. It estimates the occupations have a combined 6,000 jobs open annually.
Who trains people for this work?
Many institutions could play a role in preparing workers for the roles needed at a nuclear power plant.
Lakeshore Technical College in Cleveland has been training workers who have hands-on experience at the Kewaunee Power Station, despite it being nonoperational. The college partners with EnergySolutions to supply workers for the decommissioning process. Company officials have said the partnership allows people to work at the plant for several years and then take their skills to other nuclear facilities.
Beyond this, there’s been a “chicken and egg” problem when it comes to expanding nuclear energy job training, Wilson said. Without a growing industry in the state, it’s been difficult to justify having more programs at higher education institutions. But that could change once Kewaunee Power Station’s future becomes clear.
“If we were to have signals that these things would be growing, then I think we could do a lot of work,” Wilson said. “We would be eager to engage, from the University of Wisconsin here to some of those technical colleges to help them stand up and set up programs to make sure those people are prepared.”
Some skilled trades workers would also likely undergo further on-the-job training, Wilson said, because there are usually nuclear- and site-specific requirements beyond the typical union-based training to work at a power plant.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offers up to $100,000 for vehicle purchases to local law enforcement agencies that assist ICE in apprehending unauthorized immigrants.
ICE announced Sept. 2 that its 287(g)Program also offers other local incentives, including salary and benefits reimbursement for ICE-trained officers and quarterly payments of $500 to $1,000 per officer for finding unauthorized immigrants identified by ICE.
As of Oct. 2, 13 Wisconsin sheriff’s departments, including Brown and Waukesha counties, were working with ICE on unauthorized immigrants in their jails and/or serving immigration warrants on individuals.
The $100,000 is offered to “task force” members. One Wisconsin police department, Palmyra in Jefferson County, is participating. The chief has said his focus is pursuing “criminals.”
ICE says its program targets criminal unauthorized immigrants. Research shows unauthorized immigrants crossing the U.S. border are not more likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
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A year ago more than 80 people were sickened by pizza from Famous Yeti’s Pizza in Stoughton. Officials determined the pizza was contaminated with THC-infused oil. Since then one of them has filed a lawsuit against the pizzeria.
Wisconsin is one of six states that don’t regulate or have plans to regulate THC, the psychoactive chemical found in marijuana, which is why incidents like Famous Yeti’s haven’t resulted in fines or penalties against the company.
Efforts to regulate THC have been included in bills seeking to legalize marijuana, but while marijuana remains illegal, legal hemp-derived THC is being used in more and more products without additional consumer protections.
On Oct. 23, 2024, Samuel Hoffland stopped by Famous Yeti’s Pizza in Stoughton on his lunch break. What happened next is detailed in a previously unreported lawsuit he filed in May in Dane County claiming the restaurant was negligent when it contaminated his pizza with THC.
The lawsuit describes how Hoffland endured a multiple-hour ordeal to get home after feeling “abnormal symptoms associated with THC intoxication.” He crashed his car and ended up in the emergency room. His injuries led to lost work time and ongoing medical issues, according to the complaint.
Two tests a day apart confirmed Hoffland was experiencing THC intoxication. Over 80 people experienced similar symptoms, including 27 who went to the emergency room, some of whom reported concerns it was carbon monoxide poisoning, according to responses to Public Health Madison and Dane County’s final report obtained under the open records law.
In the weeks and months after the incident, the contamination created a stir online with a range of reactions. Some blamed Famous Yeti’s and expressed concern while other comments said “even more reason to eat them” and “who is complaining?” But for Hoffland, the experience was no joke, leading him to file a civil lawsuit against Famous Yeti’s and the owner of Turtle Crossing Cannabis, a company that shared kitchen space with the pizzeria.
Public Health Madison and Dane County investigated the incident and determined the food was mistakenly contaminated with THC oil from a bulk container (though the report doesn’t mention Turtle Crossing Cannabis). But the agency determined there was nothing it could do because Delta-9 THC, the chemical derived from hemp and used to make edible THC products, is not regulated in Wisconsin.
In other words, there are no laws or regulations prohibiting the preparation of THC and non-THC products in the same industrial kitchen.
Nearly a year later, that remains the case.
In Wisconsin, regulatory laws surrounding hemp-derived cannabis are lacking, creating gray areas that make it difficult to enforce any standards surrounding the production and distribution of THC-related products. Wisconsin is one of only six states, along with Alabama, Maine, New Mexico, North Carolina and West Virginia, that neither ban nor regulate or aren’t attempting to regulate Delta-8 THC.
The lack of regulation has put consumer safety at risk. The Famous Yeti’s Pizza incident is one example, but not the only incident. In June, two children in Milwaukee went to the hospital after their mother mistakenly purchased 600 mg of THC gummies from a convenience store. The shop owner received a warning letter, but didn’t receive a citation because the sale wasn’t illegal.
THC derived from hemp plant
Under the 2018 Farm Bill, the U.S. government authorized commercial hemp production and made it eligible for federal crop insurance. The intended purpose was to provide additional support for people in the agriculture industry.
Hemp under the Farm Bill was defined as cannabis with a tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) concentration of below 0.3% on a dry weight basis. THC is the psychoactive compound present in both hemp-derived and marijuana-derived cannabis. But marijuana-derived cannabis has a higher presence of THC and is federally illegal.
“Cannabis itself is actually the same product, whether it’s hemp-derived or marijuana,” Jason Hunt, CEO and general counsel of DynaVap, said. “Cannabis sativa is actually the product. It’s really the same plant, but it depends on when it’s harvested, as well as the concentration.”
Delta-8 and Delta-9 are similar variations of the same THC compound found in cannabis. Delta-9 is more commonly found in the marijuana plant, while Delta-8 is almost entirely found in hemp and is federally legal.
Delta-8 THC is found in low concentrations, so it is often chemically modified by concentrating Delta-8 from the hemp-derived cannabidiol, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“They take a portion of the plant and they chemically modify it to make sure it’s more intoxicating, so it’s a synthesized cannabis product,” Hunt said.
So, how is hemp regulated?
In 2022, Wisconsin’s regulatory hemp program fully transitioned to the federal level, so now the regulatory authority falls under the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Instead, Wisconsin regulates products with hemp derivatives at the state level through the same laws that govern retail food establishments and food processors. Like other products, hemp-derived products are subject to Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection requirements for labeling, weights and measures, consumer safety, misrepresentations, and deceptive advertising.
The state only allows hemp that has been certified by DATCP or another state’s hemp program to be in food products, but food items or ingredients containing hemp manufactured and packaged outside of Wisconsin cannot be sold in Wisconsin. Wisconsin also has “truth in labeling” laws requiring all hemp products to be properly labeled. Knowingly making an inaccurate or misleading claim regarding hemp products is illegal under a state statute.
Dane County Executive Melissa Agard, a Democrat who served in the Legislature for 12 years and authored bills to legalize recreational and medical marijuana, argues that legalization would lead to regulation.
“If we would pass a bill in regards to legalizing and regulating cannabis in Wisconsin, there would be a lot more consumer protections, whether you’re at a restaurant that might be serving cannabis-infused foods or a bar that’s selling cannabis-infused beverages, or at a corner store where you want to buy some edibles or some bud,” Agard said. “Right now, you’re just kind of taking people’s word for it. There’s no checks and balances, there’s no real accountability.”
A person walks into the Wisconsin Horticulture LLC Dispensary on July 29, 2025, in Milwaukee. Wisconsin is one of six states that do not regulate or have plans to regulate THC. (Jonathan Aguilar / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service / CatchLight Local)
Minnesota, where marijuana is now fully legal, also regulates hemp products including requiring all consumers to be at least 21 years of age.
In Michigan, only companies licensed through the Michigan Marijuana Regulatory Agency can sell, distribute and manufacture hemp-derived Delta-8 products, and all customers must be 21.
Wisconsin has no specific age requirements for purchasing and ingesting hemp products. Instead, age requirements are left up to localities.
Wood County was the first state locality to set an age restriction on purchasing hemp-related products in 2022. Milwaukee County set an age requirement in July after two children were left hospitalized after being sold THC gummies.
In February, Public Health Madison and Dane County expressed support for implementing an age restriction statewide.
Without a statewide age restriction, many localities have not passed specific requirements, leaving those markets widely unregulated.
In the Famous Yeti’s incident, eight people under 18 were reportedly intoxicated by cannabis oil, but without regulations, there were no citations.
“There are no regulation requirements for products derived from the hemp plant,” Public Health Madison and Dane County said in a blog following the incident. “Unlike commercial tobacco, Public Health cannot issue citations for the sale or distribution of hemp-derived products to minors.”
No compensation for THC victims
The Famous Yeti’s Pizza incident shows the consequences of a lack of regulation.
Jason Tarasek, a Minnesota attorney who specializes in cannabis law, explained that people harmed by the contamination would likely need to show monetary consequences to win a lawsuit against the establishment.
“One of those people who were harmed could easily bring a negligence action against that restaurant because it’s a breach of your duty to act as a reasonable restaurant if you’re accidentally slipping THC to people,” Tarasek said.
According to responses to the public health department’s questionnaire accessed via an open records request, respondents did raise concerns about the monetary consequences of the contamination.
“I don’t think I should have to pay for my ambulance ride or my tests that I needed as a result of being drugged,” a female respondent said.
Another female respondent said she was going to have over $1,000 in hospital bills even after her insurance claim.
“The closer you get to pointing at a bill for money, the easier it is to get a judge or jury to award you that,” Tarasek said.
The civil lawsuit against Famous Yeti’s pizza relates to negligence on behalf of the restaurant.
Samuel Hoffland, a Famous Yeti’s Pizza customer who was sickened by pizza contaminated with THC, filed a lawsuit against the pizzeria in May 2025.
Hoffland claims Famous Yeti’s breached its duty by “negligently preparing, handling, and serving food contaminated with THC” resulting in “physical illness, mental distress, and other injuries requiring medical attention and resulting in damages.” The civil lawsuit also claims Famous Yeti’s is strictly liable for Hoffland’s injuries and damages from consuming “THC-laced” food.
In response to the complaint, Famous Yeti’s said it was not negligent in preparing the food nor at fault for the contamination, but admits the product unintentionally “contained” THC. The restaurant also denied the food was laced, which would imply the food was deliberately infused with THC.
“The contamination of the subject product was the result of an intervening cause not due to any negligence or fault on the part of the defendant,” Famous Yeti’s said in its response.
Currently, the civil lawsuit is still pending. Famous Yeti’s, Hoffland and their attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.
Current status of regulation attempts
Wisconsin’s lack of cannabis regulations continues to leave consumers in the dark when they purchase hemp-derived THC products in Wisconsin.
Gov. Tony Evers has attempted to regulate cannabis in multiple budget cycles, the most recent being the 2025-27 biennium. The marijuana-related provisions would have legalized and set regulatory standards for marijuana.
Evers’ budget recommendations included a section that would have started a program within DATCP to regulate the cultivation, production and distribution of marijuana requiring all producers and processors to hold a permit from DATCP.
The provision would have also set more stringent requirements, such as requiring all purchasers of THC products be 21 or older and banning production or distribution of cannabis near schools, playgrounds, public parks or child care facilities. If passed, it would have also established a training program under DATCP for proper handling of cannabis.
But Republicans removed the provision from the budget bill early in the process.
In 2024, Republicans, who have been otherwise reluctant to support marijuana legalization, introduced a bill to legalize and regulate medical marijuana in Wisconsin, specifically through heavily regulated state dispensaries. The bill was sponsored by 19 Republicans, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, but failed to pass the Legislature. It would not have regulated THC products derived from hemp.
This story was produced in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Investigative Journalism class taught in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
A conservative Wisconsin appeals court judge announced Wednesday that she is running for an open seat on the battleground state’s Supreme Court, promising to stop the politicization of the courts after record-high spending in the last race, fueled by billionaires Elon Musk and George Soros.
Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar, formerly a prosecutor for the Wisconsin Department of Justice, is the first conservative to enter the race, which will be decided in April. Liberal Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, a former Democratic state lawmaker, also is running.
Court of Appeals Judge Maria Lazar (Courtesy of Wisconsin Court of Appeals)
Conservative candidates for the high court have lost each of the past two elections by double-digit margins. Both of those races broke national spending records, and a liberal won in April despite spending by Musk, who campaigned for the conservative and handed out $1 million checks to three supporters.
Lazar, 61, said she was disturbed by the massive spending and partisan politics of those races. Both the Republican and Democratic parties were heavily involved in the last campaign.
“We must stop the politicization of our courts,” Lazar said in a campaign launch video.
Lazar pitched herself as an “independent, impartial judge” who will “stop the destruction of our courts.” She also promised “never to be swayed by political decisions” when ruling.
Taylor’s campaign manager, Ashley Franz, said Lazar would be “the most extreme member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court,” if elected.
In her run for the appeals court, Lazar was endorsed by several Republicans who sought to overturn President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat in Wisconsin.
That includes former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who has agreed to have his law license suspended over wrongdoing related to his discredited investigation into the 2020 presidential election.
Lazar was also endorsed by former Trump attorney Jim Troupis, who faces felony charges for his role advising Republican electors who tried to cast Wisconsin’s ballots for Trump after he lost. One of those electors, Wisconsin Elections Commission member Bob Spindell, previously backed Lazar.
Pro-Life Wisconsin also endorsed Lazar, calling her “the only choice for pro-life voters.” Taylor formerly worked for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin and, as a lawmaker, was one of the Legislature’s most vocal supporters of abortion rights.
Liberal candidates have won four of the past five Supreme Court races, resulting in a 4-3 majority in 2023, ending a 15-year run of conservative control. If liberals lose the April election, they would still maintain their majority until at least 2028. If they win in April, it would increase to 5-2.
The race is open after incumbent conservative Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley announced in August that she would not seek another 10-year term.
Lazar, in her launch video, contrasted herself with Taylor by saying she “has always been a politician first.”
She noted that she was appointed as a Dane County circuit judge by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in 2020, without any prior experience on the bench. Taylor won election to the circuit court in 2021 and to the appeals court in 2023.
Lazar will start at a financial disadvantage. Taylor’s campaign said in August that she had already raised more than $1 million.
Lazar, who has been on the state court of appeals since 2022, worked in private practice for 20 years before joining the state Department of Justice as an assistant attorney general in 2011.
During her four years there, she was involved in several high-profile cases, including defending a law under then-Gov. Scott Walker that effectively ended collective bargaining for most public workers. Known as Act 10, the statute was upheld by the state Supreme Court in 2011 at a time when conservative justices controlled it.
A circuit court judge ruled in December that the law is unconstitutional but put that decision on hold pending appeal. It could end up before the state’s high court, raising questions about whether Lazar could hear it, given her previous involvement.
Lazar also defended laws passed by Republicans and signed by Walker implementing a voter ID requirement and restricting abortion access.
Lazar left the Justice Department after being elected circuit court judge in Waukesha in 2015. She held that post until being elected to the state appeals court.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
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Incoming undergraduates to UW-Madison will have to fill out the CSS Profile to apply for institutional financial aid.
The form is available starting Oct. 1.
The CSS Profile will not replace the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which means new freshmen and transfer students will have to fill out both forms.
Wisconsin Watch and the Cap Times spoke to UW officials about why they are adding the form, as well as nonprofit leaders who have concerns about the move.
Students applying to the University of Wisconsin-Madison will soon need to complete a second, longer financial aid application if they want a share of the millions of dollars in financial aid the university gives out each year.
Starting this fall, UW-Madison will require applicants to fill out the CSS Profile, an online application used by around 270 colleges, universities and scholarship programs to award institutional aid, separate from a different form used to apply for federal financial aid. Students can start working on their CSS Profile Oct. 1.
Many colleges that use the CSS Profile are private. Others are highly selective public universities, such as the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia. In Wisconsin, two private schools also use the application: Beloit College and Lawrence University.
UW-Madison says requiring the application will help direct funds to students who are most in need, but some student advocates worry the extra step could hinder the very students the university aims to help.
The CSS Profile is an online application used by roughly 270 institutions, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to award institutional aid. (Courtesy of College Board)
Wisconsin Watch and the Cap Times teamed up to find out what students and their families need to know about this new requirement.
Who needs to complete the CSS Profile?
Only incoming undergraduate students at UW-Madison who are U.S. citizens or eligible noncitizens must complete the CSS Profile to be considered for institutional financial aid. This group includes both new freshmen and transfer students.
Continuing students and new graduate students don’t need to complete the form. The university encourages them to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, which guides eligibility for federal assistance.
Does the CSS Profile replace the FAFSA?
The CSS Profile is separate from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, which guides eligibility for federal assistance. (Courtesy of the office of Federal Student Aid)
No. The FAFSA is used to apply for financial aid awarded by the U.S. government, including Pell grants and federal student loans. That form was simplified in recent years to make it easier for families to fill out, despite hiccups during the rollout process. Students who want to apply for federal aid still need to complete the FAFSA each year.
The CSS Profile is a supplement to the FAFSA, said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor who studies education policy at UW-Madison. The application is run by the College Board, the not-for-profit membership organization that makes the Advanced Placement exams and SAT college admissions test.
The CSS Profile helps colleges decide how to allocate their own financial aid and scholarship funds by gathering a more detailed picture of a student’s finances than the FAFSA offers. For instance, the application asks about medical debt and about businesses an applicant’s family may have.
“If you’re a low-income student, while completing the CSS Profile is an additional step for you, it is often potentially in your best interest because it paints the truest picture,” Odle said.
How much does it cost to complete the CSS Profile?
UW-Madison applicants will be required to pay a $25 fee to complete the form. But that fee is automatically waived for applicants with a household income below $100,000.
What’s the deadline for UW-Madison applicants to submit the CSS Profile?
UW-Madison recommends students applying for the 2026-27 school year submit the CSS Profile by Dec. 1, 2025. Students may submit the form after that date, but December is the deadline for priority consideration for funds.
Why is UW-Madison now requiring the CSS Profile?
UW-Madison previously used the FAFSA to allocate all types of financial aid, said Phil Asbury, executive director of the university’s student financial aid office. The CSS Profile will allow UW-Madison to more specifically target university resources toward certain students, especially after the FAFSA recently got shorter, he said.
“We’re really fortunate in that we have more students coming from low-income families or lower-income families each year. Those are really good things, and we want that to continue,” Asbury said. “But we also want to help as many families as we can, and so this will help us to better focus those funds on the families that need it the most.”
Asbury worked with the CSS Profile in his previous positions at Northwestern University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While he doesn’t expect the form will be a struggle for UW-Madison applicants, he recognizes it’s an additional step.
“If families know they will only qualify for a federal loan, or maybe they know they’re Pell Grant eligible and that’s all they need to go to school, then they can continue to only do the FAFSA,” Asbury said.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison awarded roughly $200 million in institutional support to undergraduate students last school year. Most of that funding was need-based financial aid. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
UW-Madison provided roughly $200 million in institutional support last school year to undergraduate students, Asbury said. About $150 million was need-based financial aid.
Students received on average about $17,000 in aid from the university last school year, Asbury said. Nonresident students may receive a bit more since their tuition rates are higher, he said.
UW-Madison is requiring more information from families amid efforts to game the country’s financial aid system. For example, a Forbes article in March advised parents to use investments or businesses to generate losses that would reduce their adjusted gross income and then qualify them for financial assistance.
People trying to hide assets on financial aid applications is “an open secret,” said Carole Trone, executive director of Fair Opportunity Project, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit that offers online counseling to help students across the country apply to and pay for college. She worries abuse of the financial aid system is increasing barriers for students who otherwise couldn’t afford to attend college.
Why are some concerned about the newly required form?
A 2021 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called the CSS Profile “The Most Onerous Form in College Admissions.” Since then, the application has been shortened and now uses “skip logic” to bypass parts based on students’ answers to previous questions.
UW-Madison is using a “lighter version” of the CSS Profile, which has fewer questions than the full version, Asbury said.
Wisconsin Watch and the Cap Times asked the College Board for the maximum number of questions on the form and for a copy of the application in advance of its Oct. 1 launch. The College Board declined these requests.
Unlike the FAFSA, the CSS Profile won’t pull financial information directly from an applicant’s tax returns, Trone said.
Trone remembers completing the CSS Profile years ago when her three kids applied to college. The form asked the value of her 401(k) retirement account and her home and the balance on her mortgage.
She is worried about students whose parents are unable to help sort through these kinds of questions. That’s why, when UW-Madison announced the new requirement, her team at Fair Opportunity Project started preparing to help students with the CSS Profile, too.
“I’ll admit, even when I was filling out, I was like, ‘I think that’s the right answer,’” Trone said.
“There’s no way a student’s going to know that. … Whereas with the FAFSA now you really don’t actually have to have a lot of stuff with you to be able to complete it anymore, with the CSS Profile, it’s going to be a work session.”
UW-Madison recommends students applying for the 2026-27 school year submit the CSS Profile by Dec. 1, 2025. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Another key difference: On the FAFSA, students whose parents are divorced or separated need to provide information about the parent who provided more financial support over the last year. The CSS Profile requires information from all living biological parents, step-parents and adoptive parents, with exceptions for a handful of special circumstances, including when a parent is incarcerated, abusive or unknown.
There are also differences for families who speak other languages. The FAFSA is available in English and Spanish, and families can read guides or request an interpreter in 10 other languages, including Korean, Arabic and French Creole. The CSS Profile is available only in English, with help available by chat, phone and email in Spanish.
Some who advocate for college access worry UW-Madison’s new requirement will be an additional barrier for students who already struggle to get on the college track.
“FAFSA itself has been a hurdle for some students applying to college,” said Chris Gomez Schmidt, executive director of Galin Scholars, a Madison nonprofit that coaches a handful of high school seniors through college admissions each year. “I think adding an extra, complicated financial application could potentially disproportionately affect students with fewer resources for applying to college, so students from urban or rural areas across the state of Wisconsin.”
Galin Scholars plans to teach its participants about the CSS Profile during an October financial aid workshop but many students won’t be so lucky, Gomez Schmidt said.
Trone at the Fair Opportunity Project isn’t convinced the new requirement will pay off for the university. She noted the vast majority of U.S. colleges don’t use the CSS Profile.
“I’m curious to see how long UW does this,” Trone said. “Maybe they’ll do it for a couple years and realize they’re not actually getting that much better results.”
What help will be available?
As students work through the CSS Profile, they can click on help bubbles for more information. The College Board’s website offers additional guidance, too.
As with other steps in applying for college, students can also seek help from their high school counselors. UW-Madison informed counselors across the state about the new application at a series of workshops in September, and its financial aid office is available to help applicants.
“We do workshops on a monthly basis, and traditionally we’ve called those FAFSA Frenzies,” Asbury said. “We might have to rethink that name now, but we tend to do those throughout the year.”
Applicants seeking more help can find a variety of videos and articles online about filling out the CSS Profile, made by government agencies, nonprofits and entrepreneurs across the country.
Fair Opportunity Project will offer help with the CSS Profile at its one-on-one virtual counseling sessions, which are free to low-income and first-generation college students. Other students may access these sessions for a fee.
The organization is hoping to make help even more accessible by launching a free chatbot that answers questions about the CSS Profile, but that task has proven more complicated than anticipated.
The nonprofit built its existing FAFSA chatbot by training it with the hefty guides and updates the federal government releases each year. The CSS Profile is created by a private entity that isn’t required to make its documentation public.
“We will need to spend more time converting available webinars and presentations into AI training materials. We need to raise more funds to get this extra work done,” Trone said. She hopes the chatbot will be available to the public by November.
Meanwhile, she’s also looking into the “potential risks” of creating a chatbot specific to a privately owned application.
“They are very proprietary about their products, like SAT and AP, so this is a real concern that we need to look further into,” Trone said.
Why do other Wisconsin schools use CSS Profile?
Beloit College is a private liberal arts school near the Illinois border that enrolls about 1,000 undergraduate students. The school started using the CSS Profile about six years ago, but only for international students, said Betsy Henkel, the college’s director of financial aid.
“We also have an internal application,” Henkel said. “But as you can imagine, if students are applying to 10 schools for admission, the thought of doing one application and sending it to 10 schools is much more appealing than doing multiple financial aid applications with each of them.”
When access to the federal government’s simplified FAFSA was delayed in recent school years, Beloit College temporarily used the CSS Profile to give domestic students a financial aid estimate while they waited, Henkel said.
In addition to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, two private schools in Wisconsin use the CSS Profile: Beloit College and Lawrence University. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Lawrence University — a private liberal arts school in Appleton with roughly 1,500 students — has used the CSS Profile for over a decade, Ryan Gebler, the university’s financial aid director, said in an email.
Similar to UW-Madison, Lawrence University uses a “lighter version” of the CSS Profile, with fewer questions, Gebler said. Overall, the application process has gone smoothly at Lawrence, he said.
“Simply put: Compared to the FAFSA, the CSS Profile provides a more accurate calculation of what a student and their family can pay for college,” Gebler said.
Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus. Email her at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org.
Becky Jacobs is an education reporter for the Cap Times. Becky writes about universities and colleges in the Madison region. Email story ideas and tips to Becky at bjacobs@captimes.com or call (608) 620-4064.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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Wisconsin’s government is failing to enforce basic protections for owners of manufactured homes at a time when private equity firms are buying up parks to maximize profits.
State regulators rarely inspect parks, allow many to go unlicensed and don’t even know which parks are operating.
A patchwork of laws and regulations governing manufactured housing leaves residents unsure of where to turn when conditions deteriorate.
Listen to Addie Costello’s story from WPR.
Priced out of traditional homes during an affordability crisis, many in Wisconsin have found another way to pursue an ownership dream.
Experts estimate that more than 100,000 Wisconsin residents live in manufactured homes, the more accurate name for what many call mobile homes or trailers — structures that make up the country’s largest portion of unsubsidized low-income housing. Many live in parks where they own their homes but rent the land beneath them.
But Wisconsin’s government is failing to enforce basic protections for residents at a time when private equity firms are buying up parks to maximize profits, a Wisconsin Watch/WPR investigation found.
Wisconsin law requires operators to keep parks “in a clean, safe, orderly and sanitary condition at all times.” The Department of Safety and Professional Services (DSPS) is supposed to enforce that law and licensing standards. But it rarely inspects parks, allows many to go unlicensed and doesn’t even know which parks are operating.
Separate state and local agencies handle issues related to leasing, water quality, and health and safety at parks. That patchwork leaves residents unsure of where to turn when conditions deteriorate.
“I don’t know what to do or if I have any rights,” a park resident in Wisconsin Rapids wrote to the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.
“Why is our government not looking into any of this?” a Hudson resident asked DATCP while facing septic tank failures and surging rent.
In Forest Junction: “I picked this location over a decade ago because of its affordability. I have nowhere to go.”
In Amery: “They know we do not have the resources to move the trailer out of the community.”
In Whitewater: “I don’t know who to reach out to. I’m so stuck.”
WPR and Wisconsin Watch spent six months speaking to manufactured home residents statewide. Some described tight-knit, peaceful and affordable communities. But others detailed sewage backups, dramatic rent hikes, hazardous dead trees and foul-smelling water — all while frustrations simmered with unresponsive landlords and regulators.
What many call mobile homes aren’t actually mobile. Moving them can cost more than $10,000, with risks of damaging older structures. That traps residents when park conditions worsen.
Predatory companies know this, said Paul Terranova, Midwest community organizer with the nonprofit MHAction, which advocates for park residents nationwide.
While tallying every U.S. manufactured home community is difficult, experts estimate Wisconsin has more than 900, with 80 tied to private equity, according to data from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit watchdog.
Wisconsin regulators are paying little attention, industry professionals, advocates and residents say. That’s as neighboring Michigan and Minnesota offer more resources for residents and stronger oversight.
WPR and Wisconsin Watch also found:
DSPS produced documentation of just 15 parks inspected between 2022 and February.
DSPS lacks an accurate count of manufactured homes statewide. The agency previously published comprehensive data on all licensed communities, but it now posts records for only some counties, with many parks lacking identifying information. At least 27 parks filed evictions in the last two years but do not appear in current DSPS data.
Of the roughly 700 parks DSPS lists in licensing data, roughly 30% have expired licenses. Some park owners say poor communication and a technology overhaul made applying for licenses more difficult.
A legislative task force as far back as 2002 flagged problems with “a scattered state regulatory approach” to the industry that leaves residents confused about who regulates what. It hasn’t been fixed.
Affordable option has roots in Wisconsin
Cindy Philby, 60, sold her traditional, fixer-upper home after realizing she couldn’t afford needed repairs.
She poured all of her money into a manufactured home she found from an Iowa seller on Craigslist. It cost $4,500 plus $10,000 to deliver it to a rented lot at the Woodland Park community in the town of Fond du Lac.
She slept at a homeless shelter in late 2023 while waiting for the home to arrive.
“My next best thing to keep a roof over my head was a trailer,” Philby said.
She was embracing a housing option pioneered in Wisconsin.
The morning sun shines on manufactured homes at the Woodland Park mobile home community, Sept. 17, 2025, in the town of Fond du Lac, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
A Marshfield man’s innovation in the 1950s set the stage for the manufactured homes we see today. Rollohome Corp. founder Elmer Frey’s “mobile homes” — wider than recreational trailers — could be lived in year-round, more affordably than traditional homes.
Manufactured homes can be made quicker, on a larger scale and with less waste than other homes. Today Wisconsin owners of manufactured homes pay a median of $553 per month for housing, compared to $1,118 for all homeowners and $917 for all renters, according to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Local zoning laws often exclude manufactured homes from residential neighborhoods. Parks allow owners to anchor their homes without requiring expensive modifications.
Philby, like many community residents, owns her home and pays a monthly fee for the land and additional costs for utilities. Her lot is owned by Florida-based COARE Communities, a subsidiary of the private equity-backed conglomerate COARE Companies, which touts a focus “on establishing platforms across niche investment strategies.”
Beneath an option to click on an “investor portal,” the COARE Communities website says it is “focused on solving the challenges of affordable housing through the acquisition and preservation of the most affordable type of housing in America – Manufactured Housing Communities.”
The company hiked Philby’s base rent this year from $425 to $500, six times the rate of inflation. It declined to comment on the record for this story.
Philby has struggled to absorb the hike while relying largely on disability payments to get by.
“They are squeezing everybody in this park to death,” she said.
Philby and her neighbors describe a host of additional problems, including poor water drainage and crumbling roads.
The community turns into a “mud puddle” or “lake” following heavy rains or snowmelts, they say.
Wisconsin law requires manufactured homes to sit in “a well-drained” and “properly graded” area to prevent flooding. It’s up to DSPS to enforce the law, but the agency could not locate any inspection records for the park. The park does not appear in DSPS’ licensing database, even though the town of Fond du Lac has separately licensed it.
Philby wants more action.
“Do something,” she said. “Make these people do their work.”
Calling for state regulators to ‘do their damn job’
Following months of door knocking in manufactured housing communities, Steve Carlson has little faith in Wisconsin regulators. He has seen dilapidated, abandoned homes and met residents who fear management will retaliate if they complain.
Carlson, a retired social worker and organizer from Washburn County, co-founded the Wisconsin Manufactured Home Owners Alliance late last year. It aims to keep manufactured home communities viable by pushing for stronger legal protections and helping residents organize.
Steve Carlson, a retired social worker and organizer from Washburn County, knocks on doors in the Birch Terrace Manufactured Home Community through his current role as president of the Wisconsin Manufactured Home Owners Alliance, June 21, 2025, in Menomonie, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Carlson hopes his work will inspire state regulators to “do their damn job.”
They could look to Michigan, which recently created an inspection team focused on improving conditions at manufactured home parks — visiting them each year.
DSPS inspects parks only when they are built, changed or draw a complaint that officials believe warrants one.
It’s possible parks built decades ago haven’t since been inspected. DSPS lacks records to show otherwise.
More regular inspections would likely require legislative action and more staff, DSPS spokesperson John Beard said in an email.
Local governments can help.
Wisconsin law allows them to monitor parks and enforce regulations on top of state requirements.
“Some municipalities are very good, they go through the property every year,” said Amy Bliss, executive director of the Wisconsin Housing Alliance, a manufactured housing trade association.
“Others just ignore the fact that they even exist.”
The town of Fond du Lac did not inspect Woodland Park while issuing its permit. It inspects parks only when complaints relate to town ordinances, said town Clerk Patti Supple.
DSPS can separately delegate its authority to local health departments. One municipality and 16 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties regulate parks in that way. DSPS holds them to a higher standard than itself, requiring annual inspections of each park.
“What’s going on in the other 56 counties in Wisconsin? Well, it’s anybody’s guess,” Carlson said. “Maybe there aren’t a lot of problems out there. The point is we don’t know, and somebody should find out.”
He hoped Dunn County would seek delegated authority over its housing parks.
Ed Werner, a resident of the Birch Terrace Manufactured Home Community, walks past a manufactured home that is for sale, June 21, 2025, in Menomonie, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
But learning the rules and carrying out inspections would require significant time and resources, Dunn County Health Director KT Gallagher said.
DSPS would allow the county to keep 63% of community licensing fees, nowhere close to covering extra costs, health department staff said at a meeting in August.
Parks are supposed to pay licensing fees every other year that haven’t increased since at least 2006. The minimum fee of $250 would need to rise to $400 just to account for inflation since that time.
While DSPS can raise some fees, Beard said, spending extra dollars would require legislative action.
Dunn County could also raise fees, but officials worry residents would bear those costs. They also fear a scenario in which an owner closes a park instead of fixing issues flagged by an inspection.
That happened in Eau Claire, Gallagher said. City and county inspectors closed a park, leaving some residents with nowhere to go.
That’s why DSPS avoids levying financial penalties even when inspectors find major problems.
“DSPS focus is on gaining compliance,” Beard said. “Forfeitures are a last resort, especially when action could leave residents looking for a new home.”
States like Minnesota help address this dilemma by setting aside licensing fees for grants to defray relocation costs following a closure. Minnesota has also allocated millions of dollars in recent years for manufactured home park owners to make repairs.
Cars are parked in driveways at the Birch Terrace Manufactured Home Community, June 21, 2025, in Menomonie, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Lawmakers reject help for homeowners
One program helps owners of manufactured homes in Wisconsin.
A portion of titling fees flows to the Tomorrow’s Home Foundation, which grants owners up to $3,000 for repairs or modifications or up to $1,500 to dispose of uninhabitable homes. The foundation received $120,000 from the state during the last budget cycle and raised additional funds on its own.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers this year proposed adding $40,000 to the program over two years. The Republican-led Joint Finance Committee rejected the proposal and a separate provision to add $1.68 million that could help owners repair failing septic systems.
Meanwhile, the state is missing out on uncollected fees from potentially hundreds of parks without active licenses.
Without extra funds, Dunn County declined to pursue state authority over inspections.
“This is a terrible situation without any easy answer,” said Dr. Alexandra Hall, a family physician on the county health committee. “But maybe we wouldn’t have gotten here if the state was actually enforcing its own laws.”
Licensing system causes headaches
DSPS records show Philby’s Woodland Park community had an active license in 2020, but the department lacks updated information. Beard said the agency is reaching out to the park about renewing.
Confusion has swirled around DSPS licensing dating back to 2020, Bliss said. Frustrations escalated last year — the first time park renewals were done using the LicensE, an online system for the 200-plus industries DSPS regulates.
Among criticisms aired at a February legislative hearing: Park owners weren’t told DSPS would no longer process paper renewals; an online application asked some owners to fill out unnecessary information; and the portal charged just an $8 renewal fee instead of the accurate minimum of $250.
Sun shines on the park office at the Woodland Park mobile home community, Sept. 17, 2025, in the town of Fond du Lac, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Addressing the rollout across all industries, Deputy Secretary Jennifer Garrett called LicensE “an overwhelming success, vastly expediting document handling and licensing decisions.”
“We knew that the transition to an all-digital environment would present challenges to parts of this industry,” she testified to lawmakers.
The agency reached out to park representatives ahead of the change, but it lacked some contact information, Garrett added. Communities with expired licenses may have closed, rebranded, changed owners or failed to transition to the online system.
DSPS is working with the Wisconsin Housing Alliance to update missing information on its list of licensed communities, Garrett testified in February.
Seven months later, the department’s licensing site still does not list each of the group’s members.
Bliss said DSPS struggles to make time to meet with her alliance, making it feel like the “red-headed stepchild of the regulated community.”
The former Wisconsin Department of Commerce, which regulated manufactured homes until 2011, communicated far better, she added.
That’s why she pushed DSPS to restart the state’s Manufactured Housing Code Council, an advisory body of representatives from across the industry and the public.
State law requires the council to meet at least twice a year. It met this summer for the first time in more than a decade.
To whom should residents complain?
DSPS received just 18 complaints related to manufactured housing between 2023 and early 2025, only some from park residents. The data understates industry-wide disputes, considering that multiple agencies regulate the parks and residents don’t know where to turn.
In Minnesota, the Office of Attorney General compiled all state laws related to manufactured home parks into an online handbook. Nothing that comprehensive exists in Wisconsin’s sprawling system.
Have a problem with roads? Try DSPS, which regulates community standards and licensing.
County and local health departments generally handle other health and safety concerns.
The Woodland Park mobile home community is shown Sept. 17, 2025, in the town of Fond du Lac, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Philby and other Woodland Park residents sent all of their complaints to DATCP, including ones related to conditions DSPS is supposed to regulate.
DATCP received more than 100 complaints related to manufactured homes between 2023 and this March. Dozens mentioned issues in DSPS’ domain, like flooding, sewage and roads.
DATCP must identify a pattern of violations before launching an investigation, said Michelle Reinen, an agency administrator. It cannot legally represent individual consumers.
The agency and the Wisconsin Department of Justice in 2023 reached a $75,000 settlement with a Colorado-based park operator doing business in Wisconsin. That was after fielding more than 50 complaints about “unfair and illegal” renting practices.
DATCP and DSPS say they sometimes get information from other agencies. They collaborated on a 2023 investigation — responding to the Boscobel Dial’s reporting — that found violations at Cozy Acres Mobile Home Park in Boscobel.
Lawmaker seeks more clarity
Rep. Scott Krug, R-Rome, wants to clear up confusion for homeowners and landlords.
His legislation, AB 424, specifies landlord-tenant laws for parks and expands on reasons residents may be evicted. It would also require park owners to issue a 90-day notice before closing. He hopes to hear more ideas from the operators and residents if the bill draws a hearing.
Krug calls manufactured homes “a forgotten segment of real estate” that won’t help solve the affordability crisis without state action.
Lawmakers might look backward for inspiration.
A 2002 government task force on manufactured housing suggested consolidating oversight of manufactured home communities to address the state’s “disparate and confusing array” of oversight efforts.
‘They can just do whatever they want’
Park residents also battle public perception.
Members of a North Fond du Lac Facebook group complain about the condition of Woodland Park, calling it a dangerous eyesore.
Responding to one post, Philby explained people’s struggles to afford rent and urged people to push for local solutions.
“Should just flaten it,” one commenter responded.
Residents have sought state help. Stacey Murillo complained to DATCP in 2024 about issues including roads and garbage.
DATCP sent her complaint, with her name, to the park’s manager for mediation. Woodland Park management provided the state with evidence that it was addressing some issues.
But Murillo said too little has changed.
Cindy Philby leans on the bed of her truck, Sept. 17, 2025, in the Woodland Park mobile home community in the town of Fond du Lac, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Philby complained to DATCP after management gave her a lease that pre-checked a box to opt out of a yearlong contract. Wisconsin law requires landlords to offer 12-month options, more protective against evictions and rent increases.
DATCP reached out to Woodland Park to mediate Philby’s complaint in April but received no response, it told Philby in a letter.
The agency cannot order businesses to participate in mediation, but it can issue notices of noncompliance, which it did in Philby’s case.
“Since your complaint was not resolved through mediation, you have the option to contact a private attorney to discuss your legal remedies,” the agency’s letter said.
“No one in this park can afford an attorney,” Philby said, still waiting for a longer lease.
“They can just do whatever they want,” she said. “The federal government’s allowing them to do it, the town’s allowing them to do it and the state’s allowing them to do it.”
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