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• The trend of older adults staying in the workforce is reshaping what retirement looks like in Door County. 
• Many retirees seek jobs in the county’s booming tourism industry, offering the chance for them to interact with people, as well as earn extra cash. 
• A local nonprofit organization matches older adults seeking work in Door County with employers. 
• Wisconsin Watch and Door County Knock spoke to several people over age 65 who continue to work for various reasons.

When James Carson, 72, retired to Washington Island a decade ago, he envisioned the next stage of his life as many do: leaving the workforce, volunteering, traveling, caring for his family. 

Instead, unexpected medical expenses and the rising cost of living soon forced him to pick up two service industry jobs to make ends meet. Today, he regularly clocks in seven days a week, logging 45 to 50 hours. 

Door County is home to one of Wisconsin’s oldest populations, largely thanks to its status as a serene retirement destination. But like Carson, more of those older adults and retirees are returning to work. Unwilling or unable to quit for good, they’re picking up jobs to afford the rising cost of living, to stay social and to become involved in the community. 

The trend is reshaping what retirement in Door County looks like today as people live longer and life becomes more expensive.

Carson wishes he would have saved more aggressively – he “was kind of naive” about retirement. He also thinks people have false ideas about what it looks like. 

“You cannot live on Social Security, and unless people have a very good retirement plan, they’re going to be hurting,” Carson said. 

Given Door County’s booming tourism industry, many retirees like Carson seek out hospitality and customer service jobs. Even for those not driven by finances, these gigs offer the chance to interact with others. But others simply continue their careers past retirement age or pivot fields.

To meet the demand from job-seeking older adults, local employment services nonprofit We Are Hope runs a program to match them with employers. Executive Director Kim Carley said the organization served more people in the first half of 2026 than it expected for the whole year.

“The need is definitely, definitely there. The majority of it is that social connection, but you do have that small population that financially they need to work still,” Carley said. “Not everybody in Door County is rich. The cost of living has really affected things right now, too.”

Wisconsin Watch and Door County Knock spoke with several workers over the age of 65. Together, their stories create a changing image of what retirement and aging look like today. Keep reading to learn more about their jobs.

James Carson

Age: 72

Job: Bartender

Former career: Amtrak conductor

Town: Washington Island

Why: Money

“Everyone wants to talk to the bartender,” Carson said. “I’m well-suited for the job.” 

Carson was not always a confident speaker. When he was younger, he stuttered badly. A fifth grade teacher helped correct it, he said, “and I haven’t shut up since.” 

Being well-suited for his job may be a good thing, but Carson did not think he’d still be working at 72 years old, especially not in Washington Island’s demanding summer service industry.

Carson and his wife, Stacey, bought a house there about 10 years ago, after he retired from a 20-year career with Amtrak. Stacey spent summers on the island growing up, and her parents live there now. 

He envisioned volunteering and traveling, and the couple would care for Stacey’s aging in-laws, he said. For the first year or so, that was what he did. Jim served on their church council, worked with a developmentally disabled young adult, volunteered for the island’s nonprofit Art & Nature Center, and gave back to a community he said welcomed them with open arms. 

“Until reality kicked in,” he said. The cost of living, including utilities, groceries and ferry travel, ate away at the couple’s savings faster than they anticipated. Jim needed eye surgery, then knee surgery. 

He quit volunteering and returned to the workforce, where he has remained for the last eight years. Between shifts as a prep and line cook at Nelsen’s Hall & Bitters Club and as a bartender at the Albatross Drive-In tiki bar, he works seven days a week during the busy tourist season.

“I’m working more aggressively this summer to bank against having to continue to work this much next year,” Carson said. But with the fluctuating economy, higher grocery bills and gas prices, that might change. Ideally, he would like to only work for another two years, he said. 

Mentally, Carson enjoys talking to people and has formed good relationships with the island’s youth — the Albatross is a popular hangout spot — but physically, the work takes its toll. The knee surgery made it harder to be on his feet all day and he falls into bed exhausted every night, he said. 

“I’m doing better than most. I hear about folks splitting or foregoing their medications and going to food pantries,” Carson said. “I’m not there yet.” 

Cindy Good 

Age: 71

Job: Retailer

Former career: Software and business consulting

Town: Sturgeon Bay

Why: Keeps her busy

Cindy Good plopped down on the chartreuse furniture clustered at the front of her store, The Naked Sheep Yarn Shop & Gift Boutique. At 2 p.m., it was her first time sitting that day. 

Good, nearly 72, is exhausted. But she said she’ll continue working “as long as my body will hold out.”

She retired at 70 after a career in software and business consulting. She once thought that she’d work part time at most at her age and take advantage of having more time to read books or catch up on knitting. But before she could do that, she and her sister opened a second venture: a yarn store on the west side of Sturgeon Bay. 

The store sells yarn, knitting tools and other tchotchkes. They also host classes, social knitting groups and crafting events. Good regularly bounces between handling orders for inventory, checking what’s in stock and helping customers with their knitting projects.

“There are days when I wake up and I think, ‘Oh God, why didn’t I just fully retire?’” she joked.

But in reality, she knows why: She feels the need to keep busy. 

If she quit working, her Social Security payments would provide enough money for her to live on. But she recognizes the rising cost of living that influences other working retirees in the area. For instance, no houses in the area are for sale at the price she and her sister bought theirs for. 

“We have friends that have money and they travel and do all that kind of stuff,” Good said. “That was sort of my goal, but I don’t have that kind of money. I was thinking I would do a trip a year or something, but now I’m here.”

Good loves Sturgeon Bay’s tight-knit feel and the downtown location of her business. In mid-June, business had just started picking up as tourism season began. By July, the street will bustle for their busiest month.

Maybe, she considered, once business is where she wants it to be, she might take those yearly trips.

Charlene Keith

Age: 68

Job: Door County Maritime Museum associate

Former career: Grocery distribution

Town: Sturgeon Bay

Why: Social interaction

Charlene Keith never envisioned herself retiring. 

Five years ago, she technically did. But she went right back to work. After two and a half years, she decided to finally slow down — but not fully. 

“If I sat home, I would just drive myself crazy,” Keith said. “I have to be doing something.” 

She reached out to We Are Hope, where MatchUp program leaders recommended a part-time opening at Door County Maritime Museum in Sturgeon Bay. 

Here, she works the front desk, welcomes visitors, sells tickets, stocks the gift shop, keeps tours running on schedule and closes the museum at night. 

It’s a far cry from her grocery distribution career, where she navigated difficult roles and recalled everyone around her being unhappy. Nowadays at work, “everybody’s happy to be where they’re at,” she said. Most of Keith’s co-workers are retirees, too.

“It’s just fun. It makes me believe that it can be done. I thought everybody was unhappy in (their job),” Keith said. “You hear people say if you have a job you love, then it’s not really working, and I thought, ‘Yeah, that doesn’t happen.’”

Keeping busy brings her joy. She enjoys seeing guests’ excitement over the museum’s exhibits.

Keith lives and shares expenses with her sister, so she doesn’t necessarily need the part-time wages to get by. But she sees why finances motivate other people her age. 

“It’s expensive to live, but people are living so much longer,” Keith said. “Unless you’re a millionaire and can travel, what would you do with yourself? I mean, I guess there’s people that sit around and fish for hours every day, but I’m not that kind of person.” 

Lee Engstrom

Age: 87

Job: First responder

Former career: Factory quality control

Town: Washington Island

Why: Keeps him busy

At 87 years old, Lee Engstrom is almost certainly among the oldest in Door County, according to county Emergency Services Director Aaron LeClair. He may be the oldest first responder in Wisconsin. 

Engstrom is a fourth-generation member of the family that owns and operates Sunset Resort on Washington Island. He grew up in Michigan and spent summers helping his grandparents at the resort. He always dreamed he would end up there full time.

That dream came true when he and his wife, Janet, moved to the island in the late 1980s after he retired from a 30-year career in a factory’s quality control department. 

Engstrom was not ready to stop working completely. He got a job with the local hardware store and did some plumbing work on the island. When he turned 62, he started getting Social Security and quit those jobs, but still needed something to keep busy. 

He became an emergency medical responder, then got certified as an emergency medical technician and joined the island’s volunteer fire department. Today, he spends 80 to 100 hours every two weeks on call as a first responder because he enjoys it. He also does maintenance and odd jobs around the resort.

At 87, he did not think he would still be working, he said. 

“I didn’t think I’d be alive,” Engstrom said. “When is it going to stop? As long as I feel good like this, I’ll just keep going. I have slowed down some, though … I’ve got fake ears, fake eyes and fake teeth. Everything else is original.” 

Unless there’s a rescue call, being on standby doesn’t take much time. Engstrom just needs to be dressed near the emergency services facilities in case a call comes in — easy enough on an island. He’s happy to be one of the responders on call during the day because many of the younger volunteers are working their regular jobs during that time. 

Engstrom focuses on patient care when he goes on calls. His primary objective is to make them feel comfortable and cared for once their medical condition is stable, he said. 

When there is a fire, Engstrom’s primary job is to fill the tender truck — a mobile reservoir that supplies water to hose trucks when fire hydrants aren’t available. Rural departments often use them. 

“I’m too old, and not as agile, to be going around dragging hoses and that kind of stuff,” he said. 

For a while, fewer and fewer new recruits became island first responders as agencies statewide saw dire staffing shortages. But a recent influx of younger people has changed that, he said. 

Financially, he and Janet are doing fine, and they have family who support and help them. But he enjoys his work — especially interaction with patients and knowing he provides a valuable service to his beloved island community. 

When he does stop for good, Engstrom said he might golf more, keep working in his shop and do what he can to help at the resort. He would also continue his daily cruise around the island with Janet, he added. 

“Whatever I’m doing, I enjoy taking the ride with my wife for a cup of coffee,” he said. 

Jeff Gildersleeves

Age: 65

Job: Door County Parks Department maintenance staff

Former career: Manufacturing plant management

Town: Gardner

Why: Money

Jeff Gildersleeves is no stranger to physical labor. The 65-year-old works for the Door County Parks Department’s “mow crew.” The part-time gig lasts from May to October, and he spends his days hauling equipment, mowing, trimming trees, planting grass seed, picking up trash and tackling other tasks to maintain the county’s parks. 

Gildersleeves’ first job as a teenager growing up in Door County was picking cherries and strawberries during summer. He loves the outdoors, and the work suited him well, he said. He went on to obtain a degree in biology and wildlife management, which he used to work for the Department of Natural Resources.

When Gildersleeves and his wife were expecting their first child, he switched careers and took a job at a chemical production and manufacturing plant in Milwaukee. He retired in 2021 and returned to Door County with his retirement benefits and a plan. 

According to Gildersleeves, a local company was offering an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. If he worked there for at least three years, he would receive his full investment and returns, enough to supplement his retirement savings from the Milwaukee job. 

Three months before his three-year anniversary, Gildersleeves got injured on the job. He needed surgery to repair a torn left rotator cuff, and that was it, he said. “I only got 20% of my investment back.” 

Today, the mowing job is replacing that lost income.

“We thought at 66, 67 we’d be able to sit back and enjoy life, but with the economy the way it is, and health insurance costs?” Gildersleeves said. “My wife has some hefty prescriptions. Social Security is not enough to live on.” 

The physical part of the job can be hard, he said. “You think you are physically fit until you’re out there doing it.” 

Beyond the manual labor, Gildersleeves guides younger employees. His supervisors value his experience, and he has a good rapport with the teenagers on his crew, who listen to him, he said. 

Doing something valued and worthwhile is good for his mental health, he said, but he is not sure how long he’ll continue. 

 “Until I’m unable to work anymore,” he said. 

He has a small IRA put away and a pending lawsuit against the Door County company where he was injured, but he said he doubts he will see any settlement money. He knows one thing for certain: He would like to remain in his own home for as long as possible. 

“I don’t want to sell off and go to a nursing home,” he said. “I watched my in-laws do that, and it’s not a good way to live.” 

Kathy Bandstra

Age: 76 

Job: Therapist

Town: Sturgeon Bay

Why: Is fulfilled by her career.

Kathy Bandstra returned to school in her 40s to become a licensed clinical social worker. Her sixth decade began before she paid off her student loans. At 68, she started considering retirement. 

“I retired in June of 2018 because my financial person said, ‘Don’t ever retire in the winter, because that’s too depressing,’” she said. “I followed his advice.” 

By the next month, though, she already returned to work part time for a private practice. A year later, she shifted to volunteer as a hospice worker during the COVID-19 pandemic. Then she moved from Racine to Door County and began volunteering at the area’s Aging and Disability Resource Center.

“I still felt like something was missing … It just felt like I could do more with the skills I had,” Bandstra said. “And I still had the energy to do it. And volunteering doesn’t pay you anything. I like making some money.”

People had told her that it was hard to find affordable mental health services in her new home county. She rented an office in Sturgeon Bay, opened her own business and offered services on a sliding scale to help people afford care. She couldn’t offer her services for so cheap if she wasn’t retired and receiving Social Security, she said. 

Now, at 76, Bandstra regularly sees several clients a day in person and through telehealth. She helps people through distress and trauma with cognitive behavioral therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy.

Continuing to work gives her the freedom to go out to eat, get a new car if needed and cover expenses that pop up outside of bills. If she stopped working, she might have more time for her hobbies — making clay pots, writing her memoir, doing open mic readings. But she would miss feeling helpful to others. She also feels her physical and mental health has improved because she keeps going. 

Bandstra believes people largely have false ideas about what retirement looks like. She thinks “it’s unrealistic to look to retire,” period. If clients continue to see her, she’d like to work into her 80s.

“I don’t know if some people would want someone that’s old enough to be their great-grandma,” Bandstra said. “But the people that stopped coming to me didn’t say that they thought I was too old or anything.”

Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus. Find her on Instagram and Twitter, or send her an email at mdunlap@wisconsinwatch.org.

Emily Small is a reporter for Door County Knock and a Report for America corps member. Contact her at esmall@doorcountyknock.org.

Door County is a retirement destination. So why are more older adults still working? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Milwaukee’s Public Transportation, Utilities and Waterways Review Board waded into the statewide fight over utility regulation on Wednesday with a three-hour hearing discussing forming a publicly-owned electric utility. 

The proposed starting point: assuming control over We Energies’ infrastructure within city limits.

“Energy networks are best delivered by monopolies,” said Jim Carpenter, a board member. “The problem is that We Energies is a profit-driven monopoly, and sometimes profits get in the way of providing the best solution to a problem.”

The board has no power to recommend action by Milwaukee’s Common Council; Wednesday’s meeting was the board’s first since 2023. Instead, Aldermen Alex Brower and Robert Bauman used the hearing to open a discussion about the viability, risks and potential benefits of a possible city-owned electric utility. Backers and critics alike packed the board room, some eager to weigh in on the proposal.

“Everyone deserves to have savings. Everyone deserves to have the option to have control over their power,” said Cleopatra White, a working-class single mother in Milwaukee’s Southgate neighborhood. 

She said she wanted to show support for creating a publicly-owned utility because it’s an issue that affects everyone in Milwaukee, regardless of political party. 

What is a public utility? 

Wisconsin’s publicly-owned utilities — Manitowoc Public Utilities, for instance — generate roughly 11% of the electricity produced in the state, often with lower electric rates than their investor-owned counterparts. 

Wisconsin law allows municipalities to acquire utilities’ property, but that option is largely untested.

Brower pitched the takeover as a means to shield residents from electrical rate increases. We Energies filed its most recent rate case in April, projecting a roughly 9.3% increase in customers’ electricity rates over the next two years. 

But the plan faces pushback from We Energies and the union representing its workers. They argue that residents benefit from the economies of scale that a large, well-established utility provides.

“Reliability is not created by changing who owns the utility,” said James Meyer, business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 2150. “It comes from trained workers, proven emergency response systems and the ability to move crews, equipment and materials quickly when customers need help. Milwaukee has that today, and this proposal puts it at risk.”

We Energies spokesperson Brendan Conway said his company is responsive to ratepayers’ concerns about costs and service. 

“We know many families in Milwaukee are feeling pressure from rising energy costs, and we’re focused on keeping bills low while delivering the reliable energy customers count on every day,” Conway wrote in an email. 

How would a municipal utility be created? 

State law offers two routes for municipalities to assume control of utility infrastructure within their territory: seizing the facilities through eminent domain or negotiating a purchase agreement. 

The eminent domain route would likely require legal action by the city to prove the “necessity of the taking,” attorneys working with the Milwaukee Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) wrote ahead of Wednesday’s hearing. 

Brower won his seat representing District 3 in a special election last April with the backing of Milwaukee’s DSA chapter, which helps organize the “Power to the People” campaign drumming up support for a municipal electric utility. Many of its members attended the hearing. 

Both options would require a referendum and a hearing before Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission to determine a fair price for We Energies’ property. But Milwaukee’s suburbs rely  on much of the same infrastructure as the city, which could block Milwaukee from acquiring shared infrastructure. 

Shorewood Village Manager Rebecca Ewald, whose community shares a substation with Milwaukee, told Wisconsin Watch that she hasn’t discussed the idea with its sponsors. Oak Creek City Administrator Andrew Vickers declined to comment on the plan; his city, which borders Milwaukee’s southern edge, hosts several We Energies power plants. 

Milwaukee itself has only one We Energies power plant: the Valley Power Plant along the Menomonee River near the city’s central business district. It generates enough electricity to meet roughly 10% of Milwaukee’s annual needs, Conway said. 

Brower argues the current lack of generation within city limits wouldn’t hinder his goals. “We have the power to purchase (electricity) on the wholesale markets,” he told Wisconsin Watch.

State law allows municipal utilities to construct generators outside of their boundaries. In Brower’s view, Milwaukee could expand rooftop solar and battery storage to meet some energy needs — possibly sited on the city’s abundant vacant land.

Municipal control of We Energies’ substations and transmission assets could also mean shrinking the pool of customers paying for that infrastructure, including We Energies’ new mixed-use Juneautown substation in the city’s Historic Third Ward.

Act 10, a 2011 state law stripping most public-sector employees of collective bargaining rights,  also complicates the picture. 

Brower believes a Milwaukee public electrical utility should aim to hire the We Energies workers who currently operate infrastructure within the city, but doing so would make them public-sector employees. “We don’t want that,” he said.

“We are seriously considering a legal option of outsourcing the day-to-day management to a third-party entity once we acquire the utility infrastructure,” he added — a possible workaround to ensure that  employees under a municipal utility would retain their current rights. 

His pitch has yet to sway the IBEW, which generally supports We Energies in cases before the PSC and Legislature. 

“If the workers are forced into uncertainty over pensions, healthcare, seniority, contracts and union protections, many may not move to the city from the utility,” said Sam Rozenberg, an IBEW member and We Energies dispatcher who spoke at the hearing. “They have options. And if they leave, Milwaukee loses more than employees. It loses the people who know this system and know how to restore service safely.”

While there is no guarantee current We Energies workers would join a new municipal electric utility, Ursula Schryver, senior vice president of education, training and events for the American Public Power Association, told the board that Milwaukee could tap into a national network of public utilities to respond to natural disasters.

Other cities explore municipal utilities

Milwaukee isn’t the only city exploring this option. 

St. Petersburg, Florida’s city council approved a feasibility study earlier this year. Ann Arbor, Michigan’s city council voted down a proposal to study a municipal takeover of electric infrastructure last spring, though the plan’s backers now plan to take the matter to voters as a ballot petition.

A similar study commissioned by the San Diego, California city council produced an $8 billion cost estimate,  prompting some city leaders to balk at the idea. The same study also suggested that San Diego residents could recoup the costs in the long run. 

Brower said  San Diego’s deliberations offer a chance to pressure an investor-owned utility to make concessions. Even if the possibility of a municipal takeover in Milwaukee acts as a bargaining chip during an upcoming rate case, he said, “there’s power in winning concessions. But we are fighting for the entire thing.”

Samuel Mendoza, who recently moved with his wife to Milwaukee near the Harambee neighborhood, discussed his experience working in public works for the City of Los Angeles. While he didn’t work under the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, he said the municipal utility paid its nearly 12,000 workers well.

“I’m surprised coming here that there wasn’t already something municipal,” Mendoza said. “Especially things that are really specific to the city, you’d want to have a utility company that could handle those issues instead of just being so widespread.” 

What happens next?

We Energies was absent from the hearing. Brower invited the company to join a meeting with the board or the city’s representatives to make its case. 

As for next steps, Bauman suggested exploring the public utility concept through a task force made up of members of the Common Council, mayoral administration and Department of Public Works and then requesting that the council fund a feasibility study.

Could Milwaukee create its own electric utility? Officials explore taking over We Energies infrastructure within city limits  is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Tech firm Oracle is suing Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission (PSC) in Ozaukee County Circuit Court, opening a new front in a fight over financial protections for Wisconsin ratepayers. 

The June 19 lawsuit comes as Oracle and We Energies — the utility set to power the company’s planned data center in Port Washington — are asking the PSC to reconsider credit rating requirements for data center developers that could cost the company millions of dollars a year.

Oracle’s lawsuit seeks to accomplish the same ends through the courts.

The PSC approved We Energies’ “very large customer” rate structure in April, requiring the utility to exclusively bill data center customers for new energy generation infrastructure needed to serve them, among other protections for existing ratepayers. The agreement also requires data center developers with credit ratings below A- to post financial guarantees to reduce the risk of shifting costs to other customers if a developer runs into financial trouble.

Oracle currently holds a BBB credit rating — a tier below the PSC standard, but still considered investment-grade by ratings agencies — largely because of aggressive borrowing to finance new artificial intelligence infrastructure. Under the current rate structure, the Oracle subsidiary involved in the Port Washington project would need to provide cash deposits or letters of credit exceeding $100 million per year to receive service from We Energies.

“If the Commission does not reopen its decision on this issue, the implications for Wisconsin would be significant and limit the ability of numerous investment-grade companies to invest in Wisconsin,” the utility’s attorneys wrote in a June 10 request to reopen the case.

We Energies also contended that Oracle runs little risk of defaulting on its obligations.

“Tens of billions of dollars in Oracle’s value would need to be destroyed before creditors and counterparties, such as Wisconsin Electric and its other customers, could experience losses,” the utility’s attorneys wrote. Even in a bankruptcy, they added, generators built to serve data centers “will still have value and will be able to provide electricity to other customers.” 

We Energies and Oracle asked the PSC to consider a stepped approach to security requirements that eases the burden on companies with “investment-grade” credit ratings, including BBB ratings, and to waive the Oracle subsidiary’s financial backing obligations. 

In its lawsuit, Oracle asked the court to “set aside, reverse and remand” the credit rating limits in the PSC-approved agreement, arguing that the commission acted outside of its authority and without sufficient evidence to justify the rule. The company maintains that the A- bar isn’t “needed to prevent harm” to We Energies’ other customers or shareholders, and that the commission “failed to consider the significant, adverse impacts” of the requirement on Oracle.

Ratepayer advocates and clean energy groups support the PSC credit rating requirements, and some of the same groups are pushing back against Oracle’s efforts to reopen the issue. 

“We believe that PSC did its job,” Clean Wisconsin spokesperson Amy Barrilleaux said. “It cannot leave all these other thousands of customers vulnerable.”

The company hired attorneys from the Madison office of law firm Husch Blackwell. One of those attorneys, David Zoppo, has previously represented investor-owned utilities before the PSC. Oracle’s attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

The credit rating dispute could shape future electrical service contracts between data center developers and utilities. 

Northern States Power Company, a subsidiary of utility giant Xcel Energy that provides electrical service to parts of northwestern Wisconsin, asked the PSC on Monday for its own “very large” customer rate structure. 

That proposal would set the credit rating bar at BBB-,  the lowest investment-grade category. Potential data center customers below that threshold would need to provide additional financial guarantees.

Oracle sues Wisconsin regulators as it seeks relief from data center credit requirements is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

It isn’t easy running a child care center. 

But for business owners like Daniel Balderas, who owns two centers, a monthly stabilization payment from the federal government called Child Care Counts was a major help to bring the children on field trips and take care of his employees. 

“I’m giving teachers bonuses based on performance, or sometimes it’s random or I see teachers working hard,” Balderas said. “Gifts for teachers’ birthdays, I buy the teachers’ lunches often.”

When those funds dried up last year, the state stepped in to offer one more year of stabilization payments through a Child Care Bridge Payment Program.

Now, Balderas’ daycares are among almost 1,400 child care centers in Milwaukee that will lose state funding at the end of June.

Without the support, about one in five Milwaukee County child care providers predict they’ll have to close, 39% will have to raise tuition and another 44% will have longer waitlists, according to a 2025 study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty.

‘Don’t got the funding anymore’

Balderas’ biggest challenge has been finding and retaining staff. 

Balderas, who is also certified as a lead teacher, said he’s lost some great teachers to schools or franchises that offer higher pay he can’t afford to match. As a result, he covers shifts, and employees sometimes work between his two child care centers when they are short-staffed. 

The number of children a child care center can legally serve is limited by the number of staff working at that business, even if a facility has the physical space and materials to accommodate more, said Paula Drew, director of Early Care and Education Policy and Research at the Wisconsin Early Childcare Association. 

Balderas has not struggled with retention alone. Research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2024 found that about 33,000 potential child care spots across the state could be filled if staffing barriers were addressed.

Child care stabilization funding made it easier for providers like Balderas to offer more competitive benefits to retain staff. 

But when the federal government cut Child Care Counts funding in half in 2023, Balderas said there were times that the business was merely breaking even as he continued supporting the staff with the reduced funds. 

Ninety percent of providers who received Child Care Counts funding before payments were cut in 2023 said the funding cuts changed their ability to offer competitive compensation, and 81% said the payment cuts contributed to changes in their ability to hire new staff, according to the 2024 study.

Balderas said he can keep his business afloat once the state’s child care stabilization payments end this month, but it will cut into his bottom line and he will have to absorb the losses.

“I can’t tell a teacher that deserves a raise that ‘well, we don’t got the funding anymore, I can’t give you the raise I promised,’” Balderas said.

Subsidy payments may not adjust for tuition increases

With 39% of Milwaukee County child care providers reporting they will have to raise tuition after child care stabilization payments end, one of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association’s biggest concerns for Milwaukee is how the tuition increases will impact families on subsidy. 

The Wisconsin Shares Child Care Subsidy Program subsidizes a portion of monthly child care costs for low-income families, at or above the price of 75% of child care slots.

Ruth Schmidt, executive director at the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, said child care tuition in Milwaukee is already one of the highest in the state, and Wisconsin does not have the ongoing funding to support increased subsidy payments for growing tuition. 

Schmidt said she’s concerned that the state subsidy payments will not keep up with rising tuition. 

“It will be underfunded as it exists right now,” Schmidt said.

Almost all of Balderas’ families at his two child care centers receive child care subsidies.

The state is also paying more toward child care subsidies than it ever has in the last 24 months. As of March 2026, the state paid $28.4 million in Wisconsin Shares child care subsidy payments to Milwaukee County families, supporting almost 25,000 children in the county.

Wisconsin did invest in education for 4-year-olds in last year’s budget, Drew said. She anticipates that more providers will turn to serve these ages due to the expenses of providing care for infants and toddlers.

State lags behind with solutions

State Sen. LaTonya Johnson, who represents District 6 on Milwaukee’s North Side, can relate to the challenges of Milwaukee child care providers. 

A former early childhood educator, Johnson transitioned her daycare, open 24 hours, seven days a week, to entirely serve families on subsidies. 

“For my kids, that was one of the best things that ever happened to them,” Johnson said. “But for me, by the time I ran for the seat, my house was in foreclosure. I almost lost my house.” 

Since the state bridge payments were temporary, Johnson and her colleagues introduced a bill last year to allocate $220 million in child care stabilization payments for 2025-26 and 2026-27 using federal Child Care Development Funds and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grants. 

The bill also would have provided additional subsidies for child care providers to cover the costs to care that family subsidies don’t cover.

Johnson said those bills died because Republican colleagues did not give the bills public hearings before the legislative sessions ended.

The Wisconsin Early Childcare Association is watching states like New Mexico, Louisiana and Alaska that are finding new ways to fund child care on a long-term scale, but the state is falling behind. 

“Wisconsin is one of the very few states that does not put state revenue directly into child care, or didn’t until last year,” Schmidt said. “They now do through the 4-year-old program.”

Balderas said there isn’t much other funding for child care owners like him who take care of toddlers and infants. He said there’s a food program, but “it’s super tedious,” requiring providers to serve certain food with specific portions.  

“I try to apply for grants for improving our flooring, painting on the outside, stuff like that,” he said. “There’s really no help.”

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Alex Klaus is the education solutions 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.

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Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.

One in five Milwaukee County child care providers expect to close without stabilization aid is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 9 minutes

Even for a guy like Ron Brisbois, whose job is to cultivate prosperity, a data center proposed for Wisconsin’s Driftless Area was too big to imagine.

Nothing like this had come along in Brisbois’ quarter-century as economic development director in rural Grant County. An up to $2 billion project spanning 500 acres would be at least three times larger — in dollars and space — than any development in the county.

The construction contracts. Dozens of new permanent jobs. Millions of extra tax revenue for schools and local government. This is what economic development is all about.

For months, the out-of-state developers pitching the data center spoke repeatedly with Brisbois. They toured the county in Wisconsin’s southwest corner. They visited Madison to discuss details with state officials. 

Their talk was big. 

But Brisbois never dug into the developers’ backgrounds.

Then, as if someone flipped a switch, they stopped returning his calls.

Now, a project that would have been historically transformational — and was already highly controversial — is all but dead.

Drawing on two months of behind-the-scenes interviews Wisconsin Watch conducted with Brisbois, here’s the behind-the-scenes story of the rise and fall of a data center proposal. 

Out for a drive

Brisbois first heard about the data center last fall. A colleague told him the developers were scouting northern Illinois for a cryptocurrency project when they drove across the border into Grant County and looked up to see the Cardinal-Hickory Creek transmission line. It delivers electricity along a 100-mile corridor from Dubuque County, Iowa, through Cassville in Grant County, to Dane County. 

The developers quickly surmised that with access to the kind of power that artificial intelligence data centers desperately need, the town of Cassville (population 400) could be ideal.

“There’s a chunk of power there, Ron, and we need to grab it before someone else does,” Brisbois recalled the developers saying. “If we don’t, someone else will.”

Brisbois’ reaction: “Well, why shouldn’t we?” 

The median $67,000 household income among Grant County’s 52,000 residents is $10,000 below the state median; 12% live in poverty.

Brisbois said he initially felt curiosity, not excitement, “because I never would have thought a project like that would look at this area.”

The two-man team included a businessman from the Northeast and a technical expert from the South. 

Even now, citing a custom of confidentiality common to economic development proposals, Brisbois won’t identify them. 

The man for the job?

Early in his career, not long after working in economic development for the former state Department of Commerce, Brisbois yearned to bring jobs and industry to his home area.

Married with two grown daughters, Brisbois, 60, grew up on a southwest Wisconsin dairy farm and still does a little farming of his own. After six years in the state job, he became executive director of the Grant County Economic Development Corp. in 1999. A resident of Ithaca in Richland County, which borders Grant, he’s a former Ithaca School Board member and currently serves on the town board.

“I’ve had multiple staff, people from multiple governors tell me, ‘Ron, we love what you do, but we like to see these projects done in Milwaukee, Madison or the Fox Valley,’” he said. 

“And that’s because of votes. And I get it. I’m not naive. I mean, people want to get reelected. They want to have their impact. And I appreciate it. But things like that really motivated me. It’s like, what could I do out there (in the Driftless)?”

First meeting, excitement builds

Brisbois began work in earnest on the project Nov. 6. He gave the developers a book of maps, noting where the transmission line runs. He emailed Grant County Board chair Bob Keeney, saying he would meet the next week with a “data center prospect who is flying in from Rhode Island.” 

Keeney called the news exciting.

“My meeting is the first of the day for them,” Brisbois told Keeney. “Then they meet with the energy reps. Land is my primary assignment, plus they want to know about the political feel for such a project.”

The meeting, requested by the developers, was at Scenic Rivers Energy Cooperative in Lancaster, the county seat. Because of a storm on the East Coast, they drove instead of flying. 

“It was about a less than a half-hour meeting,” Brisbois recalled. “And I just said, ‘What are you guys thinking?’ And that’s where they started talking about a hyperscale project.”

“It was more of just feeling them out,” he added. “OK, what scale? And that’s where they talked about $1 billion to $2 billion. And they started to talk in the 500-acre range.”

They understood there would be a lot of work to confirm that enough power would be available.

The developers were also considering sites in Indiana and North Dakota. They didn’t ask about financial incentives, but wondered what the public might think about a data center. Brisbois told them residents would want to know about jobs, but he emphasized more local tax revenue. The developers had seen a headline in the Grant County Herald Independent about local schools and municipalities struggling with budgets.

Momentum built after more conversations with the developers.

Brisbois began to let himself feel excited.

“I was (thinking): OK, there’s potential here.”

Going public, progress continues

Brisbois went public a month after the first meeting. He announced Dec. 3 at the annual meeting of the Grant County Economic Development Corp. that a $1 billion data center had been proposed for the county. The Herald Independent reported on it a week later. 

It would be three times or more larger than the largest development in the county, A.Y. McDonald’s $350 million, 100-acre foundry. 

Brisbois said the developers later asked, “How did this get out?” He told them he wanted to be transparent. 

“I’m sure my (economic development) colleagues would have said, ‘You were a fool to do it. I would never have released that information.’” 

But progress continued.

Brisbois met again in early February at Scenic Rivers with the developers. 

“It was more of, you start getting into the brass tacks of the project. The formality kind of is done. You’ve met them, now you’re on a first-name basis, that type of thing.”

Brisbois was also encouraged by a virtual meeting he had in February, the same month that officials two hours away in Beaver Dam announced they were working to land a $1 billion data center, which is now under construction. The meeting was with Prescott Balch, who has been sought out by data center opponents around Wisconsin for his expertise. Balch confirmed that he agreed that Brisbois’ estimate of 50 permanent jobs seemed solid.

“If I start talking 50 jobs, that’s a big deal in Grant County,” Brisbois said.

And yet, the developers never told Brisbois where exactly in the county they wanted to locate.

Opposition takes hold

People in Grant County have particular affection for being part of the Driftless Area, with its rugged hills and steep valleys, the result of being missed by the last glacier that covered most of Wisconsin. They worry about too much development.

Data center opponents began mobilizing early in 2026, but interest peaked March 8, when hundreds attended a rally featuring comedian Charlie Berens. The efforts of Pete Moris and Melodie Betts were beginning to pay off.

Moris, a public relations executive and Grant County native, has a son Grant, named after the county. He believes the data center would be too large for the Driftless Area and fears it would harm water wells.

Moris recalled the December newspaper story about Brisbois announcing the proposal. 

“That set off alarm bells because if Ron’s talking about it in the paper, then this had to be in the works for a while,” Moris said. “And the fact that we weren’t being told who the developer was and who the end user is, that’s scary.” 

Betts, a restaurant owner who drinks only reverse osmosis-purified water, also worries a data center would harm the water supply and attract more development.

“If we don’t stop this now, we’re going to lose everything that’s precious in the Driftless Area,” she said. “You let one in, you open up the door.”

Progress and optimism rise

As opponents claimed the spotlight, the developers seemed to back off. 

About a week after the Berens rally, the developers called Brisbois out of the blue. “That was unusual,” Brisbois recalled.

They said a potential operator of the data center had asked about incentives, including a tax increment district (TID).

A TID is a common tax break that commits future property taxes from a land parcel’s anticipated increase in value to finance a proposed development.

Brisbois said he told the developers he didn’t think a TID would be legally possible for a town. He said he thought that not offering the tax break would appeal to residents, but sensed the developers disagreed.

“I don’t think they saw it as that,” he said. “After that, dead quiet.” 

Brisbois followed up with two calls, leaving messages — but, for the first time, got no response. 

They had always been “very prompt,” he said.

Then the developers reengaged.

They flew to Chicago and drove to Madison to meet with Brisbois and the Department of Natural Resources on March 19. They discussed state regulatory issues such as permits for air, water, wetlands and other issues. The developers emerged “feeling very good,” even as they began to hear the approval process would be time consuming, Brisbois said. In later phone calls, the developers were enthused that the data center might qualify for a state sales tax exemption.

That exemption is expected to be worth billions of dollars to data centers around the state.

By early April, Brisbois was confident enough to release more details, including an estimate that the data center would produce $5.5 million per year in property tax revenue to municipalities and school districts in Grant County. He said he had received fewer than five phone calls or emails opposing the data center, which had been “demonized” through social media, and dozens of supportive contacts, particularly from the local school district.

Keeney called local data center supporters “a silent majority.”

Brisbois also was optimistic because he felt he provided the developers what they needed. It was up to them to proceed with financing and acquiring land.

“From my perspective, they should have all that they need to put their ducks in a row,” he recalled. “I don’t know then why they wouldn’t proceed in Grant County.” 

Brisbois had rated the chances of getting the data center as 1-in-12 after his first meeting with the developers, then 1-in-6 after the second meeting.

On April 6, he said it was better than a coinflip. “I would say right now, it’s leaning towards.”

‘Dead quiet’ and a town residents uprising

It didn’t take long for that optimism to fade.

Data center opponents had been contacting Brisbois’ board members, so he emailed them April 14. He tried to rebut claims about water and electricity use and emphasized the jobs and property tax revenue. “This data center project is going to be located somewhere,” he wrote. “If it’s going to be somewhere, it should be here.”

But asked the next day if there had been more progress with the developers, Brisbois said: “It’s gone dead quiet.” He adjusted the chances of landing the data center back to less than 50-50. 

“I don’t know that I’ve ever had one (developer), after they were hot to trot, and then they went cold, and then they come back and they’re hot to trot,” he said, admitting that despite his optimistic nature, he was a bit deflated. “I don’t think I’ve ever had one of those yet. But we’ll see.”

Meanwhile, the opposition was doing more than rallying.

In Cassville, home to Nelson Dewey State Park, named after Wisconsin’s first governor and a longtime Grant County resident, the town board approved a data center moratorium. That was significant for a town that previously had no zoning regulation.

Following Cassville’s lead, several Grant County towns and the County Board adopted data center moratoriums. Lawmakers proposed legislation for statewide regulation. The state Public Service Commission moved to require data centers to pay the cost of generating and transmitting the electricity they would need. And gubernatorial candidates from both parties were vowing to protect communities from data centers.

Meanwhile, Brisbois continued to call the developers, with no luck. His daughters told Brisbois they were “ghosting” him — like a person who doesn’t want to go on a second date.

“When people go quiet like this, it’s an indicator to me that the project is not moving forward, or at least their interest is waning,” Brisbois said in late-April. 

“Historically, that has been a very common practice in my industry. They just fade away.”

Brisbois admitted he was turning more attention to other projects and feeling disappointed.

“I put a lot of time into this and lost a lot of sleep over it,” he said at the time. “It stings a bit. I don’t know that it’s done-done. But I’m pretty calloused over by now.”

‘Very little due diligence’

Brisbois acknowledged he did “very little due diligence” into the developers, saying he had limited ability to background check out-of-state residents.

He said that left him feeling vulnerable.

“I’m making a leap of faith,” he said. “But I do that all the time. I’m assuming that a business has the financial means to pull this off.”

“It’s not my job to really scrutinize — OK, you’re a good candidate versus … you’re not qualified,” he continued. “I don’t necessarily have the resources to do that, I’m a one-person show.”

By late May, the proposal seemed like only a memory. No return phone calls. Nothing scheduled, even as opponents continued public protests.

It’s possible the developers will never announce whether or where they’re building a data center. But Brisbois expressed no regrets.

“I felt that the project certainly has its merits,” he said, “and certainly was worth pursuing.”

A $2 billion proposal, then silence: How a Driftless Area data center deal fell apart is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Wisconsin dairy farmers may have a new avenue to hire workers under new seasonal labor visa rules the Trump administration announced Wednesday.

The U.S. Department of Labor and Department of Homeland Security will give dairy farmers broader access to the federal H-2A program, through which farmers can secure temporary visas for seasonal agricultural workers. 

The dairy industry has lobbied for years to ease program rules barring visas for ostensibly year-round farm roles like milking; those rules also exclude many livestock and mushroom farms from the program. 

“This is a welcomed policy change for our dairy members, and we are hopeful it is just the beginning of continued H-2A program expansion,” John Hollay, president of the National Council of Agricultural Employers, wrote in a press release. “By opening the door for the dairy industry to take advantage of the only legal program for foreign agricultural workers, President Trump continues to move us in a direction of needed reform.”

The administration’s initial announcement was light on details about which dairy farm roles now qualify for H-2A visas.

The updates to the H-2A program are dairy-specific, and the USDA made no indication of changes to the visa’s one-year duration, or a maximum of three years with extensions.

Wisconsin’s agricultural sector increasingly relies on the H-2A program to meet its labor needs. Wisconsin farmers’ annual H-2A hiring increased at least six-fold over the past decade, and the White House’s ongoing immigration crackdown has amplified the program’s importance as a source of workers with legal status. 

Some dairy farms already hire H-2A workers for non-milking jobs; at least 14% of Wisconsin farms approved for visas this year have dairy herds, U.S. Department of Labor and Wisconsin milk producer license data shows. 

Calumet County dairy farmer Amy Woldt hired three H-2A workers from South Africa this year as heavy equipment operators. “We don’t really need them for working with the cattle,” she told Wisconsin Watch, but they do need a crew to run the farm’s skid steers and other farm machinery.

So far, nearly all H-2A workers on Wisconsin dairy farms are heavy equipment operators, at least according to farmers’ applications to the Department of Labor. Many, including the workers on Woldt’s farm, are from South Africa.

Fellow Calumet County farmer Kurt Schneider also hires South African H-2A workers to harvest his feed crops. “It’s because they speak English,” he said, and the ease of communication justifies the cost of flying in a crew from across the Atlantic. South Africans make up the second-largest cohort of H-2A workers after workers from Mexico, outnumbering the third-largest nationality — workers from Jamaica — more than 3-to-1 in 2024.

Schneider added that he would be thrilled to hire for his milking operations through the H-2A program. His current 35-person milking crew is mostly Spanish-speaking, so Schneider would favor H-2A workers from Mexico to supplement his dairy workforce. “That’s our culture,” he said. “We don’t want to change our culture.”

For Schneider, the H-2A program could offer a more stable workforce than the current cutthroat competition between farms allows. The pool of often-undocumented immigrant dairy workers is shrinking, in part because some workers are opting to return to their home countries amid the immigration enforcement push, and remaining workers can now hop between farms to earn higher wages. “I’m getting really sick of (it),” he said. “Somebody’s paying 50 cents an hour more and they jump ship.” 

The Trump administration cut the program’s minimum wage last year; workers on Wisconsin farms classified as “less-skilled” now receive a minimum $12 per hour this year, down more than a third from their 2025 minimum wage. Woldt says she hasn’t cut her crew’s wages, hoping “to keep the guys we have” rather than competing with other farmers for new workers next season.

The USDA’s announcement didn’t specify where dairy workers will fall on the wage scale.

While a seasonal H-2A crew would also require regular turnover, Schneider said his farm’s current attrition rate justifies the switch. “We’re having bottom 10% turnover anyway,” he said, as new dairy hands move along in search of higher wages. “They’re only there two weeks or a month, and they leave, and you’re constantly training.”

But he isn’t inclined to let go of his current crew. If the new rules allow him to hire dairy hands through the H-2A program, Schneider said he would apply for enough visas to backfill openings as they arise, even if that means some visas go unused. 

That strategy could also limit the risks of relying entirely on the H-2A program. A backlog at an American consulate in South Africa delayed the arrival of Schneider’s harvest crew this spring. Farmers pay steep overhead to secure H-2A visas, and when delays force workers to book last-minute flights, costs often skyrocket. Program rules require farmers to cover workers’ plane tickets and lodging, so delays can inflate the up-front costs of participating in the program — or, if a farm relied entirely on H-2A workers, possibly leave cows unmilked. 

Processing delays also hit Woldt’s team this year, forcing one of her workers to return to South Africa while awaiting approval of his visa extension. She has no immediate plans to hire dairy hands through the program. “We’re good in that department,” she said. 

National agricultural groups also tempered their praise of the new rule change with acknowledgement of the H-2A program’s capacity problems. 

“For this expansion to succeed and the H-2A program to work as intended, our federal agencies must have the resources and regulatory structures necessary to handle the increased volume efficiently,” Hollay wrote. 

Wisconsin Farmers Union President Darin Von Ruden noted that the policy shift may not benefit all Wisconsin farmers equally.

“I don’t think it’s going to help the small to medium-sized farmers very much,” he told Wisconsin Watch. The visa program can be cost-prohibitive for smaller farms that have survived decades of consolidation in the dairy industry, he said, but the new rules do give farms that can afford H-2A workers more room to maneuver.

Republican U.S Rep. Derrick Van Orden, who represents western Wisconsin, introduced legislation last fall to create an alternative to the H-2A program by allowing some undocumented agricultural workers to self-deport, pay a fine and return to the U.S. through a legal port of entry to resume working in agriculture. “The H-2A program is broken and it sucks,” he quipped during a presentation on immigrant labor at the World Dairy Expo in Madison last fall. Van Orden’s bill did not advance out of committee.

The Trump administration suspended Biden-era rules intended to crack down on abuses of H-2A workers last June. Wisconsin’s migrant labor law preserves some protections the Department of Labor no longer guarantees, including workers’ rights to invite legal aid providers and clergy into their employer-provided housing. 

Editor’s note: This story was updated June 19 to add comment from Wisconsin Farmers Union President Darin Von Ruden.

Wisconsin dairy farms could gain new hiring option under visa changes is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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• Employers must get your permission before they use a third-party company to run a background check. 
• Employers can use your credit history to make employment decisions, but experts say it’s important to know your rights. 
• If there’s false or inaccurate information on your credit report, notify the consumer reporting agency that generated the report. 
• Experts say you can protect yourself by checking your credit report annually and placing a freeze on your credit report to reduce the risk of identity theft.

When you apply for a job, you probably know that your potential employer will check your criminal record. But what about your credit history?

Employers in most states, including Wisconsin, are allowed to run background checks that show your debts, available credit and payment history. Wisconsin Watch asked experts what job seekers and employees should know about this process and their rights. 

We spoke to:

• Nick Raef, employment attorney at law firm Hawks Quindel. 
• Jeff Palkowski, state director of the Wisconsin State Council of the Society for Human Resources Management.
• Adriana Peguero, assistant city attorney for the city of Madison.

What kind of credit information can employers see?

Not all types of background reports show financial information. Those that do typically show your credit accounts, payment history, available credit, bankruptcies, liens and self-reported work history, NerdWallet reports.

The reports do not show your credit score, the three-digit number that lenders, landlords and insurers use to assess how creditworthy you are. They also don’t show your income, birth date, marital status or medical debts. 

Unlike when you apply for a credit card or a loan, this is a “soft inquiry,” meaning it won’t affect your credit score and it won’t be visible to other employers or lenders. 

Can an employer run a background check without my permission?

No. If employers want to use a third-party company to run a background check, they need written permission. That’s because of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a 1970 federal law created to protect consumers from false information being included in their credit reports. The law requires that an employer provide “clear and conspicuous” notice in a stand-alone document. 

“That means that if they throw the language into the boilerplate of an application, or scribble it in the margins of the position description, or fail to get your consent before pulling the report, then they are in violation of the law,” Raef, the employment attorney, said in an email. The employer can run the background check only if the employee or job applicant signs the document.

If employers want to run a background check later, like if they’re considering you for a promotion, they have to get permission again.

“It’s not the case that if you’re hired by a company that five years later they can go back and use the same acceptance of disclosure from when you were hired,” Raef said.

Notably, the protections of the Fair Credit Reporting Act apply only when employers use another company to run the background check, not when employers use the Wisconsin Circuit Court Access Program (CCAP) or other tools to check a person’s history themselves.

Can an employer use my credit history to make employment decisions?

Yes, though additional restrictions apply in the city of Madison.

If employers see something in the report that makes them choose to take an “adverse action” about your employment (for example, fire, demote or simply not hire), they must give you a “pre-adverse action notice,” along with a copy of your background report, details about the Fair Credit Reporting Act and an explanation of your rights, including the right to dispute the accuracy of the report and get another free report within 60 days. 

“The notice must inform an individual that their decision was influenced by the report, but does not have to clarify what exactly within the report has led to the employer’s adverse decision,” Raef said. That, he said, can “leave individuals with little clarity as to the employer’s reasoning.” 

The employer must allow time for the employee or applicant to respond before sending a final notice indicating the action the employer took. 

Still, Raef said, employers might say they had other reasons for choosing a different candidate. 

“Employers have the leeway to base their decision on a multitude of factors,” Raef said. “Oftentimes it can be really hard to sort of draw out what exactly happened here, and that’s where an employment attorney can be really helpful.” 

In Madison, employers face stricter limits on how they can use credit history. That’s because credit history is one of the 30 characteristics denoted in the city’s equal opportunity ordinance, alongside homelessness, citizenship status, source of income and physical appearance. 

“We have a very large, expansive number of protected classes,” said Peguero, the assistant city attorney. 

Employers in Madison can make employment decisions based on credit history only if one of the following is true: 

• They can demonstrate that the person’s credit history is “substantially related” to the job.
• The job requires that the person be bonded and the person’s credit history makes them ineligible. Some jobs, especially ones that involve handling money, valuables or proprietary information, require that employees be covered by a fidelity bond that will reimburse the employer if the employee steals or commits fraud. (Note: The federal government operates a little-known alternative bonding program for people who might otherwise struggle to find work, including those with poor credit. You can learn more about that program here.)

The ordinance applies within the city, so it covers Madison employers. It’s less clear whether it would apply to the growing number of Madison residents who work remotely for employers based elsewhere, Peguero said.

“That analysis would have to be done by the hearing examiner, but it is possible it could extend to an employer that is outside of the city of Madison,” Peguero said.

Why do employers check credit? 

Employers may use credit history to assess how trustworthy or responsible a person is, Raef said. An employer may assume that an employee or applicant who has lots of debt, for example, may be more likely to commit fraud, embezzle funds or accept a bribe, especially if the person is in charge of company funds. 

But Raef questions whether credit reports are useful in most employment decisions. “There’s not clear evidence that credit history is an indicator of an employee’s capacity to perform well in their job,” Raef said, pointing to a 2012 study that found no correlation.

“Someone might have poor credit on paper because of a domestic abuse situation in their home, or because they were born into really unfortunate circumstances that don’t reflect on their ability to be a great employee,” Raef said.

He worries that credit checks will create a “toxic loop” where the people who most need jobs can’t get them, which only makes their financial situation worse.  

“I can see the employer’s side where there are limited and specific circumstances where these checks make sense, but as a broad application, I think that it leads to a lot of unfair employment practices and probably exacerbates existing biases that are systemic within our society,” Raef said. 

A 2023 report by the Urban Institute, a national think tank focused on economic and social policy, echoes those concerns. 

“Research suggests that workers with low wages are among those harmed by preemployment credit checks, in part because workers with low incomes are the most likely to have imperfect credit records,” the authors write, though they note there’s limited data on low-wage workers specifically.

How common is it for employers to run credit checks?

About half of U.S. employers conduct credit checks when hiring for at least some of their positions, according to a 2021 survey by the Professional Background Screening Association.   

Jeff Palkowski leads the Wisconsin State Council of the Society for Human Resources Management. He has worked in human resources in Wisconsin for more than 20 years, mostly in the public sector in Madison. The closest he’s come to an employment credit check was when a friend applied to work at the FBI. 

“Anecdotally, I have heard of instances where a credit check may be part of the pre-employment process, but only in rare cases … Personally, I have never filled a role that had a pre-employment credit check as part of the recruitment process,” he said. 

Do all states allow employers to do credit checks?

No. As of 2023, 11 states had restricted the practice, according to the Urban Institute. Wisconsin has no state law restricting these checks.

What can I do if I think my credit report is wrong or if I think an employer used my credit history illegally?

If you believe there is a mistake on your credit report, you can dispute it by contacting the consumer reporting agency whose report showed the mistake. The agency must investigate. 

“If they can’t verify the accuracy of the information, then they have to remove it,” Raef said.

If you believe an employer used your credit history inappropriately, Raef recommends contacting an employment lawyer. 

“If they fail to notify you of a negative decision based on a report, or if they refuse to identify the source of the information that they obtained about you, or if they fail to get your permission at all, then you might be entitled to recover damages,” Raef said. 

If you or the employer is located in Madison, you can also file a complaint with the city of Madison’s Department of Civil Rights, which investigates alleged violations of the city’s equal opportunity ordinance. You must file the complaint within 300 days of the incident. 

Complaints are far less common than allegations of other kinds of employment discrimination, Peguero said. Of the 805 employment complaints submitted to the office between 2020 and 2025, just eight mentioned credit history.

How can I protect myself?

There are proactive steps you can take now to reduce the chance that a credit check will cause you unnecessary trouble.

 “You shouldn’t wait until you have signed something allowing your employer to look into this,” Raef said. 

He recommends the following actions:

• Request your own credit report to check for errors. You can do this for free once a year at www.annualcreditreport.com. If you find a mistake, report it. 

• Place a freeze on your credit report to reduce the risk of identity theft, which can damage your credit. A credit freeze blocks anyone from opening a new credit account in your name. You can place a freeze for free online, but you’ll need to do it separately for each of the three nationwide credit reporting agencies: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. You’ll need to lift the freeze any time you want to apply for credit. “It’s kind of a pain … but it’s worthwhile to do with the amount of pain that it could cause if not done,” Raef said.

Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus. Email her at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org. 

Can Wisconsin employers check your credit? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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We Energies this week asked Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission to revisit its recent ruling on electrical rates for the utility’s data center customers, arguing new credit rating requirements create an undue burden for data center operators. 

The PSC approved We Energies’ “very large customer” rate structure in April, requiring the utility to exclusively bill data center customers for new energy generation infrastructure needed to serve them, among other protections for existing ratepayers. The agreement also requires data center developers with credit ratings below A- to post financial guarantees, either in cash or lines of credit, to reduce the risk of shifting costs to other customers if a developer runs into financial trouble. 

That requirement poses a problem for Oracle, which is partnering with OpenAI and Vantage to develop a vast data center campus in Port Washington.

The cloud computing giant currently holds a BBB credit rating — a tier below the A- bar set by the PSC, but still considered investment-grade by ratings agencies — largely due to aggressive borrowing to finance new artificial intelligence infrastructure. Under the current rate structure, the Oracle subsidiary involved in the Port Washington project would need to provide cash deposits or letters of credit exceeding $100 million per year to receive We Energies service.

“If the Commission does not reopen its decision on this issue, the implications for Wisconsin would be significant and limit the ability of numerous investment-grade companies to invest in Wisconsin,” the utility’s attorneys wrote in a June 10 filing. 

Several other major technology companies — including Intel, Tesla and Micron — hold BBB credit ratings, the attorneys noted. 

Ratepayer advocates backed credit limits for data center developers during the PSC’s deliberations on the case. In written testimony to the PSC in January, Wisconsin Citizens Utility Board chief economist Steve Kihm pointed to energy trading giant Enron, which held a BBB credit rating just a year before its 2001 bankruptcy, as a reason to be cautious with financial commitments from high-dollar investors. 

In its request to reopen the case, We Energies argued that the risks of Oracle or other tech giants defaulting on obligations are extremely low. 

“Tens of billions of dollars in Oracle’s value would need to be destroyed before creditors and counterparties, such as Wisconsin Electric and its other customers, could experience losses,” the utility’s attorneys wrote. Even in a bankruptcy, they added, generators built to serve data centers “will still have value and will be able to provide electricity to other customers” — as opposed to a scenario in which the generators sit idle while solvent ratepayers cover the debts We Energies incurred to build them.

We Energies and Oracle asked the PSC to consider a stepped approach to security requirements that eases the burden on companies with “investment-grade” credit ratings, including BBB ratings, and to waive the Oracle subsidiary’s financial backing obligations. The utility argued that its proposed waiver would still offer greater protections than those required from Meta in its recent agreement with Wisconsin Power and Light, a subsidiary of Alliant Energy.

But Union of Concerned Scientists energy analyst Maria Chavez pointed out that We Energies’ arrangements with new hyperscale data center customers differ from Meta’s one-off service agreement with Alliant. Meta isn’t “specifically asking for extra generation capacity assets to be added,” she said, whereas the Port Washington data center campus — and Microsoft’s data center in Mount Pleasant — will require new, dedicated energy sources. 

“The greater risk to ratepayers,” she added, “the more reason to have a high standard for financial security requirements.”

We Energies and Oracle urged the commission to “move quickly” on the issue to “provide certainty for generational investments that are currently moving forward in this state.”

Meanwhile, Oracle’s share value tumbled this week amid uncertainty about its data center investments. The company’s debt-to-equity ratio exceeded 400% as of May, whereas other hyperscale data operators maintain ratios of 80% or lower.

We Energies asks Wisconsin regulators to ease data center credit standards is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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New federal dollars could extend the life of one of Wisconsin’s remaining coal power plants.

The Trump administration plans to spend $425 million to support operations at 13 coal plants in 10 states, arguing the move will help meet rising electricity demand and preserve thousands of jobs tied to the ailing coal industry. The White House will do so by invoking the Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era law that gives the president broad authority to accelerate American industrial output at times of crisis.

Some of that funding could go to Madison-based utility Alliant Energy, which told Wisconsin Watch that it applied for a $19 million grant to extend the life of coal-powered units it owns at the Columbia Energy Center near Portage in central Wisconsin. The utility previously planned to retire the plant’s coal units before the end of the decade. 

President Donald Trump announced the action from the Oval Office Thursday, highlighting  that the coal plants set to benefit are all in states he won during the 2024 election.

 “Wisconsin put you over the edge,” U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., interjected, standing among the gaggle of Republican lawmakers and Cabinet officials behind the president. 

“Our action will allow these facilities to invest in upgrades that will extend their operational lives for decades into the future, reinforce the reliability of our electrical grid … and keep electricity prices low for the American people,” Trump said, adding that the move may also bolster the nation’s artificial intelligence boom.  

The administration will also distribute $200 million in Department of Energy grants to reopen a coal plant in Maryland and build the first new coal plants in the U.S. in over a decade: one in Alaska and another in West Virginia.

The Trump administration has already intervened to block the retirement of coal plants in Michigan, Indiana and elsewhere. But the White House did not pair those earlier orders with funding to support ongoing operations, so ratepayers across most of the Midwest — including in Wisconsin — will pick up the bill for those extensions.

Wisconsin’s Citizens Utility Board (CUB) and other Midwestern ratepayer advocacy groups have since filed an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit challenging federal orders blocking the closure of the Michigan and Indiana plants. The costs of extending aging coal plants’ operations “are adding to an affordability challenge customers are already experiencing in Wisconsin and nearby states,” said CUB Wisconsin Executive Director Tom Content.

Alliant has already pushed back the retirement dates for its coal-powered generators at the Columbia Energy Center and Edgewater Energy Center in Sheboygan. The company initially pledged to shut down the last coal generator at the Columbia plant by 2024; Alliant did not clarify the new expected life span of the plant. 

The Edgewater plant is slated to transition to natural gas generation by 2029.

Coal generation accounts for a declining share of Wisconsin’s and the Midwest’s overall energy mix. Natural gas surpassed coal as the state’s primary fuel for generating electricity in 2022.

Wisconsin ratepayers owe at least $1 billion to pay off debts tied to retired coal plants, including We Energies’ now-shuttered Pleasant Prairie Power Plant in Kenosha County.

Extending operations at Alliant’s remaining coal plants could reduce the amount ratepayers will still owe when those facilities eventually close. 

Wisconsin clean energy advocates reacted with alarm to the White House’s doubling down on coal generation. 

“Burning coal in Wisconsin releases a long list of toxic chemicals and heavy metals, both into the air and water,” said Clean Wisconsin spokesperson Amy Barrilleaux. “No one in Wisconsin is asking for more mercury, arsenic, lead or soot. But we will be getting all of it, especially as the Trump administration dismantles pollution safeguards at coal plants, insisting more power is needed for the ‘AI data center revolution.’”

“It’s also important to note that burning coal is one of the most expensive ways to produce energy in Wisconsin — far more expensive than wind and solar farms, which are the cheapest,” she added. “So Wisconsinites will have higher energy costs and will be paying for the health costs, the longer we burn coal in this state.”

Alliant has scaled up investments in renewable energy generation in recent years, buoyed in part by clean energy tax credits extended by the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. The U.S. Department of Energy also agreed to back $3 billion in loans supporting Alliant’s wind generation and battery storage buildouts in the final days of the Biden administration.

The Trump administration has since largely reversed Biden-era tax incentives for renewable energy development. In its 2025 annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Alliant noted that the termination of clean energy tax credits could “adversely impact” the company’s finances. 

The company did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the status of Department of Energy financing for its wind and battery storage projects.

U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued Thursday that clean energy tax incentives created a false impression of the viability of renewable energy sources. Wind energy developers, he said, “weren’t trying to generate electricity. They’re just trying to generate tax credits.”

“Energy shouldn’t need subsidy,” Trump responded.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on June 5, 2026 to include information from Citizens Utility Board of Wisconsin

Wisconsin power plant could benefit from Trump’s $425 million coal push is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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A dozen Wisconsin state lawmakers are urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reject a utility coalition’s request to pause competition for major electrical transmission projects in the Midwest.

The lawmakers — eight Assembly Republicans and four Senate Republicans — argued in a letter to the commission that competition for electrical transmission is a net positive for ratepayers, who stand to benefit from lower costs and increased innovation. That outcome, lawmakers wrote, “is even more urgent today given the rising issue of customer affordability.”

The utilities requesting a pause dispute whether competition truly lowers final costs for customers, but that argument is secondary to their primary concern: Powering the Midwest’s data center boom will require vast electrical transmission upgrades, and major regional utilities argue that competition only slows down projects needed to bring data centers online before international competitors overtake the U.S. in the artificial intelligence race.

Among the utilities behind the request are Xcel Energy, owner of Northern States Power Company-Wisconsin, and American Transmission Company (ATC), Wisconsin’s largest electrical transmission operator. 

The state lawmakers cast the utilities’ request as the latest stage of a long-standing fight over transmission market competition — one that has unfolded in the Assembly over the last five years.

Data center boom intensifies transmission competition

Ratepayer advocacy groups successfully lobbied FERC, which oversees utilities nationwide, to introduce competitive bidding for regional transmission projects in 2011, arguing that the previous model — allowing local monopolies to build all projects planned within their territories — all but guaranteed inflated costs. 

The shift triggered a nationwide gold rush for transmission projects. Regulators pre-approve developers’ “return on equity,” or profit on each dollar invested, for transmission construction, so winning a project means picking up a reliable revenue stream. 

Dozens of developers have since bid on transmission projects planned by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), the nonprofit that manages the wholesale electricity market for much of the Midwest. MISO has approved more than $32 billion in new transmission projects since 2022 — projects largely planned before the region’s data center boom reached full swing.

The rush to win projects has placed well-established local utilities like ATC in competition with powerful national utilities venturing outside of their traditional territory, international developers venturing into the U.S. market, and startups backed by private equity firms. 

As data center developers rapidly scale up Midwest operations, the pace of transmission upgrades could become a choke point.

In March, MISO reversed its decision to award substations in Fond du Lac, Ozaukee and Sheboygan counties to private-equity-backed startup Viridon, instead handing the projects to ATC. 

ATC’s initial bid was more expensive than Viridon’s, but the company successfully argued it alone could build the substations in time to serve the nearby Vantage data center campus in Port Washington. Viridon had not yet secured Public Service Commission permission to  operate in Wisconsin — a hurdle ATC does not face.

MISO initially aimed to complete the substations by 2033; the Port Washington data center plans to come online in early 2028. Though ATC emerged victorious, it told FERC that the 15-month delay between MISO’s initial approval of the substations and the reversal was “completely unnecessary.”

Utilities say competition slows projects needed for AI growth

In the utility coalition’s initial request to FERC, it cast competition-related delays as a national security threat. 

“These projects — expressways for power — are as critical to meeting today’s challenges as the Eisenhower interstate highway system was to prevailing in the Cold War,” the utilities argued in their initial filing. “China has devoted itself to overtaking America as the world’s AI leader and is just months behind.”

The utility coalition proposed two options: Allow MISO, along with the grid operator for parts of the Great Plains and Southwest, to exempt transmission projects from competitive bidding on a case-by-case basis or suspend competition entirely for the next five years — “when our country must begin building the infrastructure that will decide which nation wins the AI race,” the utilities wrote.

Ratepayer advocacy groups immediately pushed back. Paul Cicio, chair of the nationwide Electricity Transmission Competition Coalition, called the request “tone deaf.”

“Suspending competition for five years,” he wrote in a press release, “would expose consumers in these regions to unchecked cost escalation for years, guaranteeing higher utility bills.” 

In a protest filed with FERC in late May, Wisconsin’s Citizens Utility Board pointed to the Cardinal-Hickory Creek transmission line in southern Wisconsin as an example: The 102-mile project was not subject to competitive bidding, and construction costs came in roughly 40% over budget by the time ATC, Dairyland Power Cooperative and ITC Midwest completed the line in fall 2024. 

Opponents of the utilities’ request recognize that the data center boom complicates the playing field for transmission competition. 

“Timelines are looking different than the industry is used to,” said Caitlin Marquis, managing director of Advanced Energy United, a trade group representing an array of clean energy and energy efficiency industries. “Transmission competition has been facing curveballs and challenges since it was introduced,” she added. Many challenges result from lobbying by incumbent utilities, and data centers’ speedy construction cycles are only the latest addition.

Her organization opposes the utilities’ request, arguing that incumbent utilities have a long track record of delaying non-competitive transmission projects — and that regulators should streamline the bidding process rather than forego competition entirely. 

But utilities argue competitive bidding has yet to prove its worth. While MISO generally favors lower-cost bids, an ATC spokesperson wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch, “evidence of a low bid is not evidence of cost savings.” 

Bid prices often do not match the final project cost, they added, and substantial overruns are common, even on projects with competitive bidding.

Federal fight echoes years of debate in Wisconsin

As regional grid operators introduced competitive bidding for transmission projects a decade ago, utilities turned to state legislatures for right-of-first-refusal, or ROFR, laws.

Those laws give local utilities first dibs on transmission projects within their territories, including those planned by regional grid operators like MISO. 

Michigan and Minnesota adopted such policies; Iowa’s Supreme Court struck down a ROFR law in 2023.

Utilities have backed similar proposals in Wisconsin each year since 2021, including a 2025 bill introduced by outgoing Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester.

Those proposals would have “insulat(ed) incumbents from market discipline” and left ratepayers holding the bag, the Wisconsin lawmakers argued to FERC. 

“Having failed repeatedly to persuade the Wisconsin Legislature,” they continued, “the same incumbent entities are now pursuing an end-run at FERC.”

ATC maintains that options before FERC would “not operate as a substitute” for a ROFR law, “even temporarily.”

The utilities don’t stand alone before FERC. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, a union representing the tradespeople who build and maintain transmission lines, also backs the request to pause competition.

Editor’s note: This story was updated June 4, 2026 to include comments from Caitlin Marquis, managing director of Advanced Energy United.

Wisconsin lawmakers oppose utility push to pause competition for power line projects is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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• Wisconsin officials launched a teacher apprenticeship program in 2024, offering students an alternative route to the profession. 
• But the program’s future is unclear. 
• Leaders are struggling to find students who are interested in joining the program and public school districts to sponsor them.

Matthew Jacobson found his calling in middle school history class.

As a sixth grader at St. John Vianney Catholic School in Brookfield, he voluntarily completed additional research projects and jumped at the chance to present to his classmates. He never saw the extra assignments as work — he was having fun. When Jacobson’s teacher told him he’d make a great educator himself, he set his sights on the profession. In high school, he participated in Elmbrook School District’s future teachers program and planned to enroll in university for his teaching degree. 

But life had other plans. Several weeks before his high school graduation, Jacobson was forced to move out on his own. He picked up a cooking job to “pay the bills and survive.” The gig didn’t leave extra money or time for college. 

“I didn’t really know how to get back into college and go meet my dream,” Jacobson said. 

Two years later, he heard about a novel apprenticeship program, where future teachers earn money working in schools as they obtain their education and certifications. 

“I was like, ‘That’s my way back in,’” he said. 

State officials launched the program in 2024 to ease the educator shortage by offering students an alternative route to the profession — one where they don’t have to put their careers on pause while racking up student debt. Jacobson is one of the first eight teacher apprentices. 

Today, Jacobson has returned to Elmbrook to serve as a classroom aide. In two years, he’ll have the proper training for the district to hire him as an elementary or middle school teacher.

But as participants reach the program’s halfway point, its future beyond this initial “pilot” phase is unclear — raising questions about whether apprenticeships will become a viable solution to Wisconsin’s struggle to find and keep educators. 

While the route has been life-changing for students like Jacobson, program leaders are having trouble enticing school districts to take on more apprentices. Enrollment has ground to a halt; the two technical colleges involved don’t have any new students signed up to begin in the fall. 

Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development officials say whether the program continues or grows depends on if districts get on board and sponsor trainees to join up. But district leaders say a major hurdle is the cost — a key appeal of an apprenticeship is the employer paying them for the time they spend learning, but many public schools are already strapped for cash. Some want more funding tied to the program. 

“(It’s) stalling a little bit,” said Trent Sorensen, a Fox Valley Technical College dean. “We don’t have any (students) coming in for the fall. … There’s plenty of time, but it’s not taking off like it did in other states, and it’s simply because of the funding.”

A new way to train teachers

Wisconsin schools struggle to find enough teachers needed to lead classrooms — a problem largely fueled by poor retention and new workers moving to other states after graduating.

In 2024, Congress came through with some assistance: $570,000 in federal funds earmarked for establishing a teacher apprenticeship program in Wisconsin. 

Officials from DWD, the Department of Public Instruction, the Wisconsin Technical College System, and two universities teamed up to debut the pilot in January 2024. They praised the “earn-while-you-learn” approach to establishing a pipeline of workers: Districts could guarantee they’d have future teachers, while also filling lower-skilled jobs in the meantime. 

Typically, aspiring teachers work a shorter classroom internship while studying for their bachelor’s degree and then complete a semester of student teaching after graduating. The apprenticeship is “taking that entire approach and flipping it on its head,” said Nick Abbott, senior program and policy analyst at the Bureau of Apprenticeship Standards — creating a potentially more accessible path to the profession. 

“Traditional educator preparation programs can be expensive, as they often require unpaid student teaching, which might not be feasible for low-income students, nontraditional students, or individuals looking to change careers,” Gov. Tony Evers said when the program launched. “The new teacher apprenticeship pilot program will help address issues in turnover and retention, reduce barriers, and encourage young people to enter the field.”

Apprenticeships are becoming more common in Wisconsin in fields ranging from plumbing to nursing. Participation has hit record highs for the last four years. These gigs are far more common for hands-on jobs in the skilled trades than fields like education and health care, but that’s changing with initiatives like the teacher apprenticeship program.

Here’s how it works: A school district hires an apprentice, who enrolls at Fox Valley Technical College or Waukesha County Technical College for two years to complete a Foundations of Teacher Education associate’s degree. When finished, the student transfers to Lakeland University or the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater at Rock County to finish a bachelor’s degree.

Throughout those roughly four years of schooling, the apprentice works inside the classroom as an assistant for 32 hours each week and spends eight hours a week learning at college. The school district the person works for pays an hourly wage for those 40 total hours. When apprentices finish the training, they’re qualified to work as a classroom teacher.

“Nothing prepares you for doing this job, other than doing the job,” Jacobson said. “Being at a school working with kids is easily 10 times more important than any of the classes I’ve taken, and I get way better experience and much more value out of just doing it and learning through failure.” 

As a way of incentivizing the program during its infancy, the eight students get half of their tuition costs reimbursed with federal grant funds. 

Four districts participate in the pilot: Wauwatosa, Greendale, Elmbrook and Appleton. The districts are not required to pay for the remainder of the apprentice’s tuition — Elmbrook, a relatively wealthy district, was the only one that did. 

State leaders also hope the apprenticeships might help with teacher retention. Teachers will start with four years of classroom management experience already under their belt, far more than usual. Plus, other teachers mentor them on the job. That essentially eliminates the difficult experience of being a first-year teacher, said Appleton Area School District Chief Human Resources Officer Julie King. 

“Managing a classroom and the curriculum and all the demands of the job is very overwhelming after having maybe 18 weeks of student teaching experience,” King said. “To learn alongside a professional that has been in the career, knows all the ins and outs, has skill sets and strategies to work with students – to have that benefit of working alongside somebody like that for four years, you’re much, much better prepared.”

Given these promises, teacher apprenticeships have recently exploded nationwide — 45 states have brought programs online in the last few years. They vary widely in their funding approaches and in the costs to districts and students. States have often looked to Tennessee, the country’s first program, as a standout model. The state’s program, launched in 2020, now helps fund 600 new teacher trainees annually at no cost to the apprentices.

Enticing schools a challenge

In his Foundations of Reading class last fall, Jacobson learned about phonological and phonemic awareness, or the ability to recognize distinct parts of a word — a key skill for learning how to read. Using what he learned, he started running his own reading support group for students needing extra help. 

“The second you learn something, I don’t have to wait two years before I actually apply that knowledge to my job,” Jacobson said. “No, I’m applying it that same day or the next day, which then makes it stick a lot more.”

The program gets high marks from trainees and schools. So why aren’t more signing up?

Money. Both school districts and apprentices are struggling to afford it. 

The four districts that already have apprentices are waiting until their current students graduate to decide whether to add more, Abbott said. 

“I want to stress that the apprenticeship model itself remains available to all school employers in the state who wish to adopt it,” Abbott said. “It comes down to finding partners.”

But getting more of Wisconsin’s 400-plus districts to bite has been difficult. 

Sorensen, the Fox Valley Tech dean, said the college isn’t seeing interest from districts because many are contending with too-tight budgets. School leaders have long argued the state’s funding system hasn’t kept up with rising costs, which, as Wisconsin Watch recently reported, has resulted in a recent wave of school closures, layoffs and budget cuts. 

That’s made it hard for districts to pay for the hours when trainees are in college, and not working in the classroom. 

“It’s challenging for school districts to be able to build in that release time. We did hear that, and that’s really understandable,” said Dena Constantineau, Waukesha County Tech’s associate dean of education and human services. “I mean, they really rely on their people, and so they need them in the classroom.”

Even with the discount from the federal grant, tuition can be costly. For example, the average annual tuition costs at least $5,900 for the technical college portion and about $6,000 for UW-Whitewater at Rock County. That means the leftover cost to apprentices could still be upwards of $12,000. 

Plus, the federal funds that helped launch the pilot run out next March, so there could be even less tuition assistance for future apprentices.  

The Appleton Area School District would love to put more students into the program, “if there was funding” to entice participants, King said. The district couldn’t afford to give students more tuition assistance, which hampered participation. 

“The unknown for us moving forward is there is no state funding. If there’s other opportunities for that tuition relief for the individual, that’s really what entices people to engage in that program,” King said.

“The question on the future really is, ‘Where is the funding and the structures going to be in the future to make sure that it’s a viable option moving forward?’” King said. “‘That it reduces the financial barrier? That it’s accessible?’” 

Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus. Find her on Instagram and Twitter, or send her an email at mdunlap@wisconsinwatch.org.

An apprenticeship aiming to ease Wisconsin’s teacher shortage is ‘stalling.’ Will it catch on? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Wisconsin regulators on Thursday approved a one-off contract between Alliant Energy and the Meta subsidiary building a data center campus in Beaver Dam, but with a major caveat: Alliant must return with a standardized plan to power future data centers — and shield other customers from resulting costs.

The agreement bears little resemblance to the model We Energies proposed for its hyperscale data center customers in Mount Pleasant and Port Washington. That model covers all future We Energies data center customers and was approved last month with major modifications by the three-member Wisconsin Public Service Commission (PSC).

Both the PSC and ratepayer advocates expressed reservations about allowing Alliant to proceed without a standardized payment structure for data center customers. Negotiating contracts one-by-one, Commission Chair Summer Strand argued, would undermine the public’s interest in transparency and consistency.

Strand and fellow commissioners Kristy Nieto and Marcus Hawkins approved a modified version of the agreement, acknowledging that the Beaver Dam campus will open in 2027 with or without a tailored contract with Alliant. Sending the utility back to the drawing board for another year, they reasoned, could expose other customers to greater financial risk. The commissioners directed Alliant to propose a standardized payment structure for large data center customers similar to the We Energies arrangement approved last month.

Wisconsin Power and Light, an Alliant subsidiary, filed its case with the PSC last spring, months before Meta joined state and local officials in announcig its Beaver Dam data center campus.

The Beaver Dam facility, the first of its kind in Alliant’s Wisconsin service territory, is smaller than the soon-to-open Microsoft and Vantage data centers. Meta projects the facility will use 220 megawatts at peak, less than half the projected use of the Mount Pleasant and Port Washington campuses. But even that comparatively modest demand would be six to eight times the current peak for all of Beaver Dam.

In testimony to the PSC in November, Rebecca Valcq, Alliant’s assistant vice president for regulatory affairs and data center services, said the Beaver Dam campus would benefit other customers by “making more efficient use of existing infrastructure” and “spreading fixed costs” across a larger base. She also urged commissioners to consider the data center’s projected $2.1 million in annual local, state and federal tax revenue, among other economic benefits.

Alliant is a founding member of the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition, which promotes the state as a destination for data center developers.

Unlike We Energies, Alliant says it does not expect to immediately build new power plants to serve the Beaver Dam campus. Instead, Meta would purchase electricity from the same generators as the rest of Alliant’s customers. Hawkins noted on Thursday that even if the new data center doesn’t immediately require new generators, it might change the retirement timelines for Alliant’s existing power plants.

Contract negotiated in secret

The utility negotiated its contract with Meta behind closed doors. When it approached the PSC, it asked for approval without changes and requested extensive redactions, hiding many contract terms from the public. Alliant argued that the contract’s specific terms, and the surrounding secrecy, were needed to “attract and accommodate” Meta — and to compete with other states or utility territories courting data center development.

The redactions spurred pushback from ratepayer advocates and the PSC itself, which made more details of the contract available as the case progressed. In Thursday’s hearing, Strand drew parallels with the nondisclosure agreements some data center developers seek from local governments in Wisconsin, including Meta in Beaver Dam, which Wisconsin Watch first reported on in January.

“For some of these new private sector, big tech data center customers that are used to operating confidentially, coming into our state or coming into this process might be a shock to the system,” Strand said. “There is still this black-box approach that includes nondisclosure agreements, heavily redacted filings, corporate pseudonyms and negotiations shrouded in secrecy… This lack of transparency is hurting, not helping.”

The nonprofit law center Midwest Environmental Advocates in December sued the PSC to obtain unredacted documents from the Alliant case. That lawsuit is ongoing.

PSC adds protections, warns of gaps

Alliant proposed some protections for itself and non-data center customers. It set a floor for Alliant’s revenues from Meta, protecting the utility in a scenario in which the data center uses less electricity than initially anticipated.

That minimum covers the cost of building transmission lines to serve the data center. The American Transmission Company, the largest transmission operator in Wisconsin, is currently building a $200 million line to plug in the Beaver Dam campus.

Alliant also proposed requiring Meta to reimburse the utility for the costs of transmission infrastructure if the tech giant backs out of the Beaver Dam project before the new line is complete — and requiring Meta to put up collateral in case its credit rating falls.

The PSC agreed with those terms and added further protections, including requiring Alliant to regularly report on the costs of serving the Beaver Dam campus and leaving the door open for the commission to adjust the cost-sharing to shield other customers from unanticipated expenses.

Commissioners identified some ratepayer protections beyond what it has authority to require. The transmission buildout needed to serve data centers is largely outside of PSC jurisdiction. Much of that authority instead rests with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which oversees transmission utilities nationwide, and the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO), a nonprofit that manages much of the Midwest’s electrical grid.

MISO awarded the transmission line project that will serve the Beaver Dam data center to ATC, which spreads construction costs across all its Wisconsin customers, most of whom are outside Alliant’s territory. While Alliant’s new contract requires Meta to pay a minimum transmission fee to shield other Alliant customers from unexpected costs, those protections don’t extend to customers of other utilities using ATC’s transmission lines.

Alliant’s customers will also pick up “tens of millions of dollars” in transmission costs tied to data centers in other Wisconsin electrical utility territories, Hawkins said. “Whether or not that is appropriate — or something that we are being open-eyed about — is a concern of mine,” he added.

Commissioners on Thursday urged Alliant to begin discussions with ATC on a fairer method for distributing costs — one of the few options within commission authority.

The commission directed Alliant to produce a standardized plan before making agreements with new data center customers.

The PSC is aware that more data centers could come to Alliant’s turf.

“Evidence indicates there are 12 other potential data centers in this utility’s territory that are potentially in the works,” Nieto said. Given that future, she added, Alliant must “establish clear rates, terms and protections and provide transparency, regulatory clarity and public accountability as required when serving loads capable of reshaping a utility’s entire system.”

Ratepayer groups say PSC sent clear message

Ratepayer advocates welcomed Thursday’s decision while emphasizing the importance of the directive to outline a standardized payment structure for future data centers.

“While the PSC approved Alliant’s contract, with modifications, for Meta’s Beaver Dam data
center, the Commissioners recognized that continued one-off, bilateral contract
negotiations are not sufficiently protective of Wisconsin families and small businesses,” Brett Korte, a staff attorney with Clean Wisconsin, said in a press release.

“Today’s PSC decision requiring Alliant to develop a tariff for future data centers will result in a consistent, transparent framework that helps protect the public interest.”

Wisconsin Citizens Utility Board Executive Director Tom Content echoed commissioners’ hopes that Alliant and other electrical utilities will reach an agreement with ATC to protect non-data center customers from transmission-related cost shifts.

“We’re calling on ATC to protect customers across Wisconsin and Michigan to make sure people who aren’t even (customers of) these utilities aren’t on the hook,” he told Wisconsin Watch.

Alliant raised no immediate objections to the PSC’s changes.

“Protecting our customers while allowing communities to grow is central to our commitment at Alliant Energy, and that’s exactly what this contract is designed to do,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement on Thursday afternoon. “It maintains reliability, supports meaningful local economic benefits, and delivers benefits that help keep rates stable for all customers.”

In a quarterly earnings call last week, the company announced plans for a 370-megawatt electric service agreement with a data center customer in Iowa. Unlike Wisconsin’s PSC, Iowa’s utility regulator has been more open to one-off contracts between utilities and data centers.

By removing that option for Alliant’s future arrangements with data center customers, Content said, the PSC’s latest ruling could set a new standard for other utilities in the state.

“They’re sending a message,” he added. “None of this individual contract stuff.”

PSC approves Alliant-Meta data center power deal while criticizing ‘black box’ approach is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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• Fidelity bonds protect businesses if an employee steals or commits fraud. 

• The state issues the bonds, and research shows they’re one of the most effective ways to persuade employers to hire people with criminal records.  

• But Wisconsin issues few fidelity bonds. 

• Experts are divided on the issue, with some saying the free insurance can’t hurt and might help. 

• Others say it doesn’t address all the concerns employers have or educate them about the benefits of giving people with criminal records a second chance.

For every 10 people released from Wisconsin’s prisons, just seven find jobs within two years — even as the state’s ongoing worker shortage leaves many employers scrambling to find the help they need. 

The struggle isn’t unique to Wisconsin. Formerly incarcerated people nationwide are far more likely to be unemployed than the general population. One reason: Though people with criminal records often outperform their colleagues, many employers worry they’ll be unreliable or even dangerous. 

That’s why, 60 years ago, the U.S. government began insuring employers against that risk, for free. 

The Federal Bonding Program, established in 1966, offers “fidelity bonds” to reimburse businesses for losses if the covered employee steals or commits fraud. 

Recent research suggests these bonds are one of the most effective ways the government can persuade employers to give jobs to people with criminal records. Those jobs have ripple effects.  Families become more financially stable, communities become safer — as people with jobs are less likely to commit new crimes — and taxpayers save money as fewer people return to prison.  

So why aren’t Wisconsin employers requesting these bonds? While some states issued hundreds last year, Wisconsin issued just three — even though an estimated 1.4 million Wisconsinites have a criminal record. 

Demand in the state is so low that when the federal government in 2019 offered Wisconsin $100,000 to spend on bonds, workforce officials used just $15,000.

To figure out what’s going on, Wisconsin Watch spoke to economists, insurance experts, criminologists and workforce development officials, who ranged from enthusiastic to cynical about bonding. 

Some said the coverage limits may be too low to address employers’ worries, or that bonds don’t help when employers are worried about safety or a bad work ethic. Some said employers overestimate the risk of hiring people with criminal records and that education — not insurance — is the solution. But most said offering this free insurance can’t hurt and might help. 

In a worker-strapped state, is this insurance program a little-known lifeline or an irrelevant relic? 

Bonding basics

Imagine you’re a hiring manager who wants to offer a job to an applicant with a criminal record. If you’re in the same boat as many businesses, your commercial insurance may not cover any theft or other act of dishonesty if the employee in question has a criminal record. 

To fill that insurance gap, you contact your state’s bonding coordinator to apply for a six-month, no-deductible fidelity bond that will reimburse you for up to $5,000 in losses. In special circumstances, you can apply for additional coverage of up to $25,000. The state handles the paperwork and the $100 cost. 

The program boasts a claim rate of just 1%, meaning businesses in the program seldom report losses. At the end of the six months, you may now be satisfied that your new employee is trustworthy — or you can buy additional coverage. 

In Wisconsin, these bonds are the only incentive available to encourage what’s often called “second chance” or “fair chance” hiring.

“It is a unique tool to help a job applicant get and keep a job,” the state’s Department of Workforce Development says on its bonding webpage. “It is like a ‘guarantee’ to the employer that the person hired will be an honest worker.” 

The same bonds are also available to other job applicants whose background could make it hard to get or keep a job. That includes people in treatment or recovery for alcohol or drug addictions and people with little or no work history. 

In practice, the program is almost exclusively used for people with criminal records, according to program administrator Kevin Kulling. 

Wisconsin focuses much of its outreach effort on prisons, making sure people know how to take advantage of the program when they get out. The stakes are high: Of those released in 2023, nearly 1 in 3 were rearrested within a year and 1 in 8 ended up back behind bars. 

Recent research backs bonds 

Governments have tried a variety of ways to persuade employers to hire people with criminal records. 

Nationally, there’s the $2-billion-a-year federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit, which rewards employers for hiring people with felony convictions. But new research finds the tax credit doesn’t increase pay or hiring for the workers it’s designed to help. It expired in December but could be reinstated.

Meanwhile, a growing number of states have tried to boost job seekers by barring employers from asking about criminal records on job applications. In about a dozen states, public and private employers are subject to such “ban-the-box” measures. 

Evidence is mixed. Several studies find these laws reduce hiring for Black and Hispanic men, suggesting that when employers can’t check an applicant’s criminal record, they instead make assumptions based on demographics.

Enter the bond, a policy that predates the others by decades. In 1975, the U.S. Department of Labor commissioned a study of the then-new program. Participating workers reported major salary increases after joining the program, and a majority held on to their bonded job longer than one year. 

New evidence supports the program. In a 2023 article, researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research teamed up with an online hiring platform to survey businesses. The platform asked users about their willingness to hire people with criminal records and how that might change if the platform offered wage subsidies or insurance coverage. 

Researchers found employer willingness to hire someone with a criminal record rose 12% when offered up to $5,000 in crime and safety insurance. It would take an 80% wage subsidy to get the same result. 

Mitchell Hoffman, an economics professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara, co-authored that study. He said policymakers have often tried to solve these hiring challenges by trying to change the workers, like with training or therapy. This research suggests it’s possible to change employers’ behavior, too.

That matters, he said, because employers hold the cards. “If firms don’t want to employ people with a record, then it’s hard to move them to employment and to good jobs,” Hoffman said.

The findings are welcome news to Jen Doleac, executive vice president of criminal justice at the philanthropy Arnold Ventures and author of the book “The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice.” Doleac, who researches crime and discrimination, was surprised when she first learned about the Federal Bonding Program.

“It’s such a smart idea. Employers say they’re worried about the risk of hiring someone with a record. How do we deal with risk? We provide insurance,” Doleac said. A critic of the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, she said the new research shows why bonds are a better bet. 

“Insurance just moved the needle more, and much more dollar for dollar,” Doleac said.   

Experts divided

Even in states issuing hundreds of bonds a year, that’s just a fraction of those released from prison annually, and a smaller share of all people with criminal convictions. 

“The total number of firms nationally that were involved, it seemed like a very small number,” Hoffman said. “There's interesting variation across states, but overall, just not that much usage.”

Just 27 Wisconsin employers participated in the program in the last five years, according to federal records obtained by Wisconsin Watch. Those businesses range from national retailers like Dollar Tree to smaller agricultural businesses like Rine Ridge Farms. 

Why haven’t bonds proven more popular? Wisconsin Watch asked more than a dozen Wisconsin businesses and industry groups about their experience with the Federal Bonding Program. Just one responded, and none agreed to answer questions. 

Hoffman thinks maybe employers just aren’t that worried, or that the risk they’re worried about isn’t covered by the bonds. They may worry the applicant will be unreliable or even dangerous, despite evidence to the contrary. In a 2021 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, more than 80% of business leaders said second-chance hires perform the same as or better than other employees. 

“If someone does something bad to a customer,” Hoffman said, that customer might sue, or customers might take their business elsewhere. Bonds don’t cover that risk. “That is very difficult to quantify. What is the cost of that sort of event?”

Another possibility, Doleac said, is that employers don’t know about the bonds. Some states may be doing more to get the word out than others, but marketing costs money that state workforce departments may not have.

The more likely explanation, she said, is that the process is too cumbersome for employers who are used to buying insurance that covers all their employees. Although job applicants and employers do not have to complete any paperwork to get a bond, employers still need to keep track of the policies that were issued to a specific employee. 

“It’s just too inconvenient and too much paperwork to keep track of,” Doleac said. She and her colleagues are exploring whether standard policies could include riders covering these workers, without a separate process or schedule. 

Meanwhile, some advocates for formerly incarcerated people worry that the bonds can backfire, making employers worry even more. 

Craig Coleman, a case manager for Forward Service Corporation, helps formerly incarcerated Wisconsinites get trained and find work. He doubts bonds will help them. 

“You’re saying to your employer, ‘If I steal from you, then you'll be reimbursed,’” Coleman said. “I’m not an HR person, but if I had someone come in with an insurance policy saying, ‘If I steal from you,’ that’s the end of the conversation. I'm not hiring you.”

Genevieve Martin of Talent Nova agrees. Before starting a website designed to help formerly incarcerated people prepare for the workforce, she worked at Dave’s Killer Bread, which built its brand on hiring people with criminal records. 

There, she trained more than 50 other companies on “fair-chance hiring,” teaching them that hiring people with criminal records isn’t risky. Talking about extra insurance policies undermines that message, she said.

“Rather than hiring the person because they’re the best person for the job, but they happen to have a record. Now we’re trying to say, ‘Here’s an insurance policy. Please do it,’” Martin said. 

The fact that Wisconsin employers seldom use fidelity bonds might even be a good sign. The state has unusually strong organizations that prepare applicants for work and match them with employers, said Josh Morby, who represents such groups as spokesperson for the Wisconsin Workforce Hub. If those organizations are doing their jobs well, employers will trust their participants — no insurance policy necessary. 

“Wisconsin employers are looking for candidates who are screened, prepared and supported so hiring justice-impacted talent becomes a reliable workforce solution, not a risk,” Morby said in an email.

Wisconsin bond use lags 

The bonding program’s popularity varies among states, according to data Wisconsin Watch obtained from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration. In 2025, New Jersey issued 277 bonds, and Washington, D.C., issued 192. 

Meanwhile, 12 states didn’t issue any in 2025. 

Wisconsin Watch requested interviews with workforce officials in New Jersey, Tennessee, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia to learn why employers there are using more bonds. None responded. A U.S. Department of Labor spokesperson also declined an interview. 

One possible explanation for the higher numbers is that those states have higher unemployment rates. But Wisconsin’s unemployment rate was at a historic low in 2018, when the state issued 27 bonds, more than 12 times as many as it did in 2025. 

In 2019, Wisconsin workforce officials requested the maximum $100,000 federal grant to buy more bonds. They said they planned to buy 1,000 bonds over four years, plus more with other funds. They estimated more than 5,500 Wisconsinites with criminal records were eligible. The bonds, they said, would help break “the cycle of recidivism.”

But the COVID-19 pandemic — which shuttered businesses and locked down prisons — derailed the state’s plans. 

“With the unemployment rate at an increased rate in Wisconsin, many recruitment efforts for employers to use Fidelity Bonds (have) slowed,” officials wrote in each quarterly grant report from April 2020 to February 2021.

When the grant period ended in 2023, Wisconsin had issued just 59 bonds. Officials wrote that, despite their outreach efforts, their bond numbers were “extremely low.”

The bond’s popularity has since further waned. In each of the last two years, Wisconsin issued no more than three bonds. Department spokesperson Haley McCoy attributed that to the state’s tight labor market. 

“Given the strong demand to fill vacant positions, employers have not needed the added incentive of fidelity bonds to hire justice-involved employees during this historically strong economic period,” McCoy wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch.

Asked whether the Department of Workforce Development plans to make any changes to Wisconsin’s bonding program, McCoy said the bonds are “just one tool in the toolbox that can help a job seeker secure a job.” 

“We’ll continue to work with our partners to provide opportunities and prepare job seekers and workers for their next opportunity in Wisconsin,” McCoy wrote.

From a job market ‘hidden force’ to a lever against bias

Meanwhile, Arnold Ventures researchers are trying to figure out how to get more businesses across the country to use federal fidelity bonds or something similar. 

Criminal justice director Carson Whitelemons has been studying ways to improve the federal program. But she said just trying to understand how bonding works and how it fits with existing business policies can be “incredibly difficult.”

“Even for business owners who are trying to ask their insurers what is covered and what is not covered, it's not always clear, and often that realm of uncertainty, I think, is what makes employers cautious,” Whitelemons said.

But it’s not just about bonding. The work is part of a new effort she’s organizing with experts from a variety of fields, trying to understand the biases that can keep people from getting all kinds of coverage and how to fix them.  

“(Insurance) is such a powerful lever in terms of what people feel safe or empowered to do, what they feel protected from. This has come up again and again in terms of different issues in the United States, in home ownership and redlining — insurance is often this hidden force, especially in areas where there is stigma or discrimination.”

Hoffman, the HR economist, said if more employers use bonds, that could help dispel misconceptions about people with records. 

“Employers … think they’re less productive than they actually are,” Hoffman said. That’s not the problem bonds are designed to solve, but if bonding gets more employers to hire these applicants, the experience may change how they view similar applicants in the future, he said. 

Meanwhile, officials from Wisconsin’s Department of Corrections will continue teaching prisoners about these seldom-used bonds and encouraging them to pitch the opportunity to their potential future bosses — for better or worse.  

Hongyu Liu is a data investigative reporter for Wisconsin Watch. Email him at hliu@wisconsinwatch.org. 

Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus. Email her at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org.

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Strong winds whipped around Doug Bartek, a fifth-generation farmer, as he headed into a grain bin to shovel soybeans onto a conveyor chute. The 60-year-old was anxious at the onset of the spring planting season, rattling off the long list of issues affecting his family’s livelihood at their 2,000-acre farm near Wahoo, Nebraska.

The high cost of fuel, equipment and fertilizer — compounded by the Iran war — and also tariffs, perceived “price gouging” by suppliers, and low soybean prices driven by a global supply glut. All of it weighs on Bartek, who is chairman of the Nebraska Soybean Association.

“Our biggest struggles are our inputs, be it fertilizer, seed, chemical, parts,” Bartek said. “There has been so much drastic markup in all of these. And I just kind of feel like the farmer’s kind of painted in the corner.”

Bartek’s concerns are shared by many Midwest soybean producers. Costs, such as equipment, have crept up over time while soybean prices have stayed low. Tariffs levied by the Trump administration last year and the resulting monthslong trade war with China only made things worse, they say. Then the Iran war bottled up shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, restricting global fertilizer supplies and sending fertilizer prices sky high. A ceasefire deal announced April 7 raised hope that bottlenecks in the strait would abate, but the future of the agreement was uncertain.

“A lot of producers are pretty nervous going into this year,” said Justin Sherlock, a soybean farmer and president of the North Dakota Soybean Growers Association. “It looks like we’re going to have another year of negative returns.”

Years of rising costs, low soybean prices

Soybeans, which are used for livestock feed, food and biofuels, are among the top U.S. agricultural exports. That hasn’t always been the case. Before the 1960s soybeans weren’t a major crop in the U.S, according to Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. It wasn’t until the 1990s that soybean production accelerated due to international demand — primarily from China — and soybeans and corn are now dominant in U.S. agriculture.

But U.S. soybean farmers, who typically also grow corn, have been facing financial issues for years even before the onset of the Iran war. Soybean prices have been persistently low in recent years. The global market has been awash in soybeans, driven in part by Brazil, which surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest soybean producer years ago.

“If we look at global soybean production over the past several years, it continues to set record after record, after record,” Hart said. “There’s been just large supplies globally, and that has led to depressed prices.”

Meanwhile, Midwest soybean farmers’ costs have risen. Overall farm production expenses, including seed and pesticide, have increased over time, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Operating costs for soybean production have stayed elevated since 2020 and are projected to increase again in 2026, according to the agency.

The cost of land also is a major issue for farmers, experts say. Midwest crop land values have increased. And most regional farmers rent some of their land, according to Joana Colussi, research assistant professor in the department of agricultural economics at Purdue University.

Bartek, who rents three-quarters of his land, said landowners are increasing rents, causing further financial strain.

“There’s a lot of what I call absentee landowners that have absolutely no idea what goes on on the farm,” he said. “All they know is their taxes went up and you get to make up the difference, some way, somehow.”

“They’re very concerned about negative margins driven by low prices and high cost,” said Paul Mitchell, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, of farmers. “There’s just a liquidity cash crunch for a lot of them and they’re just trying to figure out how to deal with everything.”

The number of farms in the U.S. has shrunk over time, and consolidation in farming is a long-term trend, though farmers’ financial pressures wrought by high input costs and low commodity prices have contributed, Hart said. Larger farms tend to be more competitive and depend on large, expensive machinery.

“The financial reserves need(ed) on a farm are much greater than they used to be,” Hart said. “We’re a bit more sensitive to the financial conditions these days because so much capital is being utilized within the farm business.”

Tariffs, trade war have lasting impacts

Market forces aren’t the only issue weighing on farmers. Sweeping tariffs levied by President Donald Trump in April 2025 exacerbated a trade war with China, the top buyer of U.S. soybeans. China responded with retaliatory tariffs and effectively boycotted U.S. soybeans, cutting off a major export market for Midwest farmers and driving the price of soybeans even lower.

“When that was announced and soybean prices basically collapsed, if you could afford to hold on to your beans and wait for better times, you were OK,” said Mike Cerny, a soybean and winter wheat corn farmer in Sharon, Wisconsin. “If you had a mortgage due or payments due or cash flow needs and you had to sell at that point, you were taking it pretty rough.”

The U.S. and China eventually reached a deal in late 2025. Beijing committed to buying 12 million metric tons of soybeans by January and at least 25 million metric tons annually for the next three years. China has since met its initial soybean purchase goal, and the Trump administration also rolled out a $12 billion temporary aid package in December to boost farmers affected by the trade war.

But the damage is already done, experts and farmers say. While China’s renewed purchases and the federal payments are helping, it’s not enough to recover farmers’ losses. Even after federal assistance, farmers still lost almost $75 per harvested acre of soybeans in the 2025 crop, according to the American Soybean Association. And the trade war further pushed China toward competing soybean exporters, such as Brazil — accelerating a trend of declining U.S. soybean exports to China.

“When China decided to stop purchasing, we couldn’t find enough other markets to replace those sales,” Hart said. “We’re still feeling the impacts today. When you look at where soybean exports are today versus where we would normally expect them to be, we’re still running anywhere from 15% to 20% behind normal.”

Joseph Glauber, former chief economist at the Department of Agriculture between 2008 and 2014, said global competitors to U.S. soybean farmers gained from the trade war.

“When China has put on tariffs against the U.S. they’ve tended to buy them from Brazil or Argentina, largely Brazil,” Glauber added. “We’re not nearly as dominant in the world as we used to be in terms of the global export market for soybeans.”

Iran war drove up fuel, fertilizer costs

After the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, a severe slowdown in shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz sent the price of oil soaring. The shipping disruption also largely stopped the export of nitrogen fertilizers manufactured in the Persian Gulf and limited access to key fertilizer ingredients. The price of urea, the most widely traded nitrogen fertilizer, skyrocketed.

Soybeans don’t require nitrogen fertilizer, but it’s vital for corn, and most soybean farmers also grow corn. About half the global supply of urea comes from the Middle East, and Qatar and Saudi Arabia are two of the top sources of U.S. fertilizer imports, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

The U.S. and Iran last week agreed to a two-week ceasefire that included reopening the Strait of Hormuz, but traffic remained slowed amid disagreements over Israeli attacks in Lebanon, and the price of urea remains elevated.

Many Midwest farmers bought their fertilizer well in advance of the spring planting season. But some farmers who didn’t buy early face elevated prices. Dave Walton, a corn, soybean and hay farmer in Iowa and vice president of the American Soybean Association, said in March that some of his neighbors didn’t have cash on hand last fall to buy fertilizer and were struggling to budget for fertilizer due to high prices.

The war also caused gasoline and diesel prices to surge, causing further headaches for farmers. Oil prices dropped following the ceasefire announcement, but the war and the closure of the strait will have lasting impacts on farmers, said Seth Goldstein, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, an investment research company. Facilities in the Middle East that are critical for exporting chemicals, oil and other commodities were damaged or destroyed during the war, and it will take time for supply chains to recover, he said.

“Facilities have been hit, like liquid natural gas plants,” Goldstein added. “You are also looking at a big supply crunch in commodity chemicals, which are the inputs for crop chemicals.”

“We burn a lot of diesel fuel,” said Chris Gould, a corn and soybean farmer in Maple Park, Illinois. “It’s hard to say if I’m gonna come out ahead or behind on this whole deal. But I suspect I’m gonna come out behind.”

Concerns about the future

Farmers’ financial problems are showing up in some measures. Farm bankruptcies, while still relatively low, continued to climb in 2025, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. In a survey of 400 farmers conducted by researchers at the Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture in late March, almost half said their farm operation is financially worse off than it was a year ago.

Goldstein, the Morningstar analyst, said farmers’ high costs and low revenues contributed to the spike in bankruptcies between 2024 and 2025. If costs rise faster than crop prices going forward, he added, that “would strain farmers again and likely lead to more bankruptcies.”

After 43 years of farming, Bartek said the smell of fresh dirt still gets him excited for spring planting. But he’s also heard of farmer suicides, bankruptcies and “retirement sales” where farmers are forced to auction off their operations due to financial problems. Bartek compares farmers to gamblers who put “millions of dollars in the dirt” hoping for returns.

At times, Bartek doubts his own decision to go into farming. He’s also worried about his son, who purchased a farm a few years ago.

Bartek wonders: “Did I do the right thing helping him get into farming?”

This story is a collaboration between Lee Enterprises and The Associated Press.

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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A coalition of electrical utilities, including two major players in Wisconsin’s power supply, is seeking federal intervention to pause competitive bidding for transmission projects needed to meet the vast energy needs of the data center boom.

The coalition filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Tuesday asking the agency to exempt at least some major grid upgrades from bidding, arguing “bureaucratic red tape” can tack months onto project timelines and strain the country’s ability to “achieve dominance” in artificial intelligence. 

“This complaint is about whether our country will seize, or squander, a generational chance to own the next century,” the utilities wrote.

Among the companies behind the complaint are Xcel Energy, owner of Northern States Power Company-Wisconsin, and American Transmission Company (ATC), which owns and operates transmission lines across much of Wisconsin. 

National and statewide ratepayer advocacy groups reacted with alarm, casting the utilities’ request as a recipe for higher electricity bills. 

“Utilities rushing to catch a ride on the AI investment gold rush need to slow down and think about the impact their proposals are having,” wrote Wisconsin Citizens Utility Board Executive Director Tom Content, as customers “wake up like Groundhog Day to rate hikes well above the cost of living.”

The complaint and the pushback it prompted mark the latest phase in a long-standing fight over the benefits of opening the transmission market to competition.

Stiff competition

FERC first introduced competitive bidding for regional transmission projects in 2011 after ratepayer advocates lobbied for change, arguing that the earlier process — allowing local monopolies to control all projects within their territories — all but guaranteed inflated costs.

The shift set off a race between developers angling for a piece of the action. When a developer wins a transmission project, it also picks up a new revenue stream: Regulators pre-approve developers’ “return on equity,” or profit on each dollar invested.

Dozens of developers have lined up to bid since the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), a nonprofit that manages the wholesale electricity market and grid for much of the Midwest, approved more than $10 billion in new transmission projects in 2022. A new round of projects approved in December 2024 added about $22 billion to the total, and the list of prospective bidders grew once again.

Some are local utilities hoping to maintain control of their territory; others are powerful national utilities venturing outside of their turf, international developers wading into the U.S. market, and startup transmission developers backed by private equity firms.  

While the data center rush had already begun in the Midwest by the time MISO approved the latest set of transmission projects in 2024, the approved projects often couldn’t account for the scale and breakneck pace of the data center developments that emerged in the region soon after. With the boom now in full swing, the tenor of competition for transmission projects is changing.

Debate over bidding benefits 

MISO, which is also responsible for picking a developer for each project, has favored lower-cost bids with more substantial “cost containment” measures designed to shield customers from budget overruns. Ratepayer advocates say the lower bids are proof the bidding requirements are working, pushing even major national utilities to underbid competitors.

In their complaint to FERC, the coalition of utilities — which calls itself the “Grid Acceleration Coalition” — argued the benefits of competition are “unproven.” 

Projects planned by utilities themselves aren’t subject to competitive bidding; non-competitive projects around the country routinely exceed initial budgets by millions of dollars. While cheaper bids tend to win competitive projects, the utility group argued that even those projects aren’t immune to budget overruns.

But the core of the utilities’ case is about time, not money. They argue the bidding process adds months to project timelines without clear benefits.

In their view, those delays harm customers, in part by slowing the construction of transmission lines that could expand access to cheaper electricity and prevent blackouts, and pose national security risks. 

“These projects — expressways for power — are as critical to meeting today’s challenges as the Eisenhower interstate highway system was to prevailing in the Cold War,” the coalition argued in its complaint. “China has devoted itself to overtaking America as the world’s AI leader and is just months behind.”

The utilities pointed to a recent example in Wisconsin: Last month, MISO reversed its decision to award three substations in Fond du Lac, Ozaukee and Sheboygan counties to private-equity-backed startup Viridon, instead handing the projects to ATC. 

ATC’s initial bid was more expensive than Viridon’s, but the company successfully argued it alone could build the substations in time to serve the nearby Vantage data center campus in Port Washington. 

MISO’s initial plans set a goal to complete the substations by 2033; the Port Washington data center plans to come online in early 2028. Though ATC emerged victorious, it told FERC that the 15-month delay between MISO’s initial approval of the substations and the reversal was “completely unnecessary.”

Ratepayer advocates and other observers, however, quickly pointed out that even noncompetitive projects run into delays. ATC’s Cardinal-Hickory Creek transmission line in southwest Wisconsin, for instance, came online in 2024 — more than a decade after MISO approved it — following prolonged legal battles with conservation groups. 

“All developers can experience construction delays,” said Claire Wayner, a senior associate with the clean energy nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute. “It’s not like there’s a silver bullet.”

Opponents also underscored that two competitively bid projects in the Southwest met their in-service date goals last year. 

“Competitive transmission projects have been shown to have a better track record of adhering to cost containment and completion schedules than noncompetitive projects,” said Paul Cicio, chair of the national Electricity Transmission Competition Coalition. “A moratorium would move us backward at precisely the wrong time.”

The back-and-forth over the merits of competition is nothing new, Wayner noted. “The tricky thing with transmission competition is that there are stories of projects from both sides of the aisle that support their positions.” 

The push to pause competition

The utility group proposed two options to FERC: Allow MISO and a Southwestern regional grid operator to exempt projects from competitive bidding on a case-by-case basis or suspend competition entirely for the next five years — “a period pegged to when our country must begin building the infrastructure that will decide which nation wins the AI race.”

The utilities added that they don’t intend to “claw back” other projects already awarded or interrupt ongoing bidding processes.

During that five-year period, national forecasts estimate data center electricity demand could reach up to 25% of the country’s total energy use. MISO alone projects that it may need to double its current pace of generation growth to avoid shortfalls in the near future.

MISO’s territory, stretching from the Upper Midwest to Louisiana, has seen by far the most dramatic increase in data center capacity since 2020 relative to other regional grid networks.

The right of first refusal fight

After FERC introduced competitive bidding in 2011, utility groups turned to state legislatures. The result: right-of-first-refusal (ROFR) laws that give established local utilities first dibs on transmission projects in their territories, including those planned by regional grid operators like MISO.

Utilities prevailed in Minnesota and Michigan; Iowa’s Supreme Court struck down its ROFR law in 2023 after a national transmission developer challenged its constitutionality, and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker vetoed an ROFR bill the same year.

But similar efforts have failed in Wisconsin. State lawmakers have consistently rejected ROFR proposals, including a 2025 bill sponsored by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester.

Wisconsin ratepayer advocates see the FERC complaint as a work-around. “It is another effort by the utilities to defeat competition,” Todd Stuart, executive director of the Wisconsin Industrial Energy Group, wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch. “When they lose in state legislatures and then lose out on competitive bids,” he added, “they go back to FERC.”

In the utilities’ complaint, Xcel Energy cited Wisconsin’s lack of an ROFR law, and the resulting bidding process for projects in the state, as posing a risk of delaying upgrades needed to serve a data center across the border in Minnesota. 

The company wouldn’t comment about the parallels between the options utilities suggested in the FERC complaint and ROFR laws. Instead, spokesman Kevin Coss pointed to permitting reforms in Minnesota — a 2024 law streamlining permitting for clean energy projects — as another example of the company’s efforts to “speed the buildout of critical infrastructure across our systems.” Xcel did not bid on any of the competitive projects in Wisconsin.

In a statement to Wisconsin Watch, ATC argued the options its coalition suggested to FERC “would not operate as a substitute” for an ROFR law, “even temporarily or on a case-by-case basis.”

Buildout costs fall to ratepayers

Regardless of who builds a transmission line, ratepayers cover the construction and maintenance costs through their electricity bills. We Energies estimates that transmission-related costs account for about 10% of customers’ bills. 

Customers across the Upper Midwest share the costs of MISO-designed projects across multiple states, spreading costs among a larger number of ratepayers.

But billing practices vary. In some cases, utilities can only bill ratepayers for the costs of building a transmission project after it comes online. When ATC builds a transmission line, FERC allows the developer to begin billing customers while the line is still under construction.

ATC says this approach saves customers money in the long term by reducing interest on construction costs.
Ratepayer advocates see it differently. “Consumers are paying for projects without receiving the benefits,” Cicio said. Transmission projects take years to complete, and short-term increases in monthly electricity bills don’t square well with concerns about affordability and the risk of stranded assets if the AI boom goes bust.

Adding to the frustration: a planned 9.2% electricity rate increase for We Energies customers in eastern Wisconsin over the next two years. That rate hike in part reflects the addition of generators, including new natural gas plants in Milwaukee and Kenosha counties, needed to meet data center demands.

Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission will soon decide how to divvy up costs of powering We Energies-served data centers — a decision that could set a statewide precedent.

This story was updated to clarify which transmission projects are subject to competitive bidding.

Utilities seek federal pause on grid bidding amid AI-driven power demand is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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• St. Vincent de Paul-Madison started a microloan program in 2023 and has so far made nearly $100,000 in loans to 50 people.  

• Word spread about the program, and leaders at St. Vincent de Paul-St. Thomas More Conference in Appleton decided to implement a similar initiative. 

• People must meet several criteria to be eligible for a low-interest microloan. 

• The local St. Vincent de Paul chapter financially supports the loan, and borrowers work with a partner bank to establish a bank account, get the funds and go through financial education. 

• However, the effort is not without risk. The Madison organization has had people default on their microloans, though leaders declined to say how many.

Mary T. had a $2,500 balance on her credit card. It came with a 26.9% interest rate.

“I wanted to be responsible and pay off my loan … but it was so hard to get it paid off,” the Madison resident said. 

Then, she heard about St. Vincent de Paul-Madison’s microloan program. If she qualified, the organization would pay the credit card loan and Mary would then pay back St. Vincent de Paul on a loan with a 4.3% interest rate through a local bank.

“It’s July 2027 that I’ll have it paid off,” Mary said. “It was not hard to go through the paperwork, and they were so nice to me throughout the whole process.”

Mary is one of about 50 people helped by St. Vincent de Paul’s microloan program since it started in late 2023. The Madison organization launched its initiative to help people living in poverty manage a one-time bill or pay off high-interest payday loans.

“People get trapped in these loans,” said Julie Bennett, CEO and executive director of St. Vincent de Paul-Madison. “They take out a loan to help with a car repair, for example, and the interest just grows. They then need another loan or need to extend the loan because they can’t pay the interest, and it just spirals.”

Since St. Vincent de Paul-Madison started its microloan program, the organization has made nearly $100,000 in loans, and word has spread. The St. Vincent de Paul-St. Thomas More Conference in Appleton launched its microloan program in February. 

“The first microloan we made was for someone who had an auto title loan with a 305% effective interest rate. He had a $1,500 loan, and we were able to get him down to a 5% interest rate,” Bennett said.

Finding an alternative to payday loans

The Madison organization’s leaders learned about microloan programs offered by St. Vincent de Paul conferences in Columbus, Ohio, and Dallas, Texas, after attending national events. Members thought it was a great program they could bring back to Wisconsin, which has some of the highest average payday loan interest rates in the nation. A report from The Pew Charitable Trusts found state residents pay an average of $395 in fees and interest when repaying a $500 loan after four months, for an interest rate of 338%.

As the Madison organization’s leaders worked on the 2019-2022 strategic plan, Bennett said creating a microloan program was included on the to-do list. They looked at other microloan programs and struggled at first to understand the complexity of banking. St. Vincent de Paul-Madison created a task force that included financial representatives who helped them understand how the loan process would work. Representatives from local organizations that work with those living in poverty also joined the task force. 

While St. Vincent de Paul-Madison provides the money for the loans, its leaders must partner with financial institutions to process the loans and help create a positive lending experience for the borrower’s credit report. The Bank of Sun Prairie signed on as the organization’s first banking partner in 2023, with Lake Ridge Bank joining in 2025. 

“We needed a financial partner to take care of all the loan documentation and to make sure the loan was on (the borrower’s) record,” Bennett said. “If they pay off the loan successfully, it looks good on their credit record and gives them something to build on.”

Microloan recipients must meet several requirements to qualify, including being a Dane County resident, having a monthly household income at or below 300% of the federal poverty level, being willing to have a bank account and having a monthly debt-to-income ratio under 47%.

As part of the program, loans range from $400 to $2,500. Borrowers receive low-interest rates between 4% and 8% and set up flexible repayment plans over two years through local banks. 

“We see the microloans as an alternative to payday loans for people who need money but have no other source to go to,” Bennett said. “We also see the microloans as a way to pay off those payday loans, which cause immediate and long-term harm to borrowers since the interest rates keep going up.”

Borrowers also receive financial education and support to help them avoid similar situations in the future. Bennett said St. Vincent de Paul-Madison wanted to provide that education with a sensitive approach. The University of Wisconsin-Extension’s Financial Education program developed training for the microlending team so they could have sensitive, discreet conversations.

“No one likes talking to strangers about their money, and it’s even harder when their financial condition is precarious,” she said.

The microloan program carries some risk for St. Vincent de Paul-Madison. If borrowers default on their loans, the organization is on the hook for paying them off. Unfortunately, that has happened, though Bennett declined to share how many people have defaulted. 

To Mary, being able to get her interest rate to a predictable and manageable number was vital.

“I just know how much I need to pay without the total … going up all the time, with the interest … growing,” she said. “I felt I was never making any progress with the payments. Now, I can see when it’s all going to be paid off, and I know I’m going to get it done.”

An example to others

The Madison team paid their experience forward, and leaders from an Appleton organization took notice.

Karen Rickert, a member of St. Vincent de Paul-St. Thomas More Conference, heard Bennett speak about Madison’s microloan program at an event. In her years as a volunteer, Rickert saw many people caught living paycheck to paycheck. A woman who was hit with a car repair bill and turned to a payday lender stuck with Rickert.

“The repair costs were more than what we could help with. She couldn’t go to work because she didn’t have a working car. She couldn’t take her kids to school because she didn’t have a car. She eventually had to take out one of those terrible payday loans,” Rickert said. “I felt terrible about it, but it sprung me into action.” 

Members from the Appleton organization met with Bennett and learned as much as possible about the Madison group’s microloan program. They put their bylaws and plans together. 

The next step? Raising $20,000 to serve as security for the loans. Thanks to a grant and donations, they nearly doubled their goal.

Nicolet Bank signed on as the financial institution. Rickert said the organization has several volunteers who used to work in finance and banking. They “walk hand-in-hand with our borrowers through the process to help address any issues before they become a problem,” she said. 

For organizations looking to start their own microloan programs, Bennett and Rickert recommended talking to groups with their own initiatives and being prepared to ask a lot of questions. The St. Thomas More Conference learned a lot by talking with the Madison organization and others as they put their microloan program together, Rickert said.

“It was a lot of work and took us a while to get it going, but it was worth it,” she said.

With everything in place, the Appleton organization made its first microloan in February.

“It’s amazing to see this all come together and now we’re able to help people get loans at a reasonable rate and help steer them away from payday loans,” Rickert said. “We’re helping them get a step ahead.”

Learn more: Visit the St. Vincent de Paul-St. Thomas More Conference website at www.svdpappleton.org/other-ways-we-help to request assistance.

Madison microloan program inspires Appleton organization is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Microsoft announced last week it would stop signing nondisclosure agreements that keep its data center proposals secret, a move that received praise from open government advocates.

Less attention was paid to the other party to those NDAs: local governments.

“Hopefully, the industry follows,” said Wisconsin state Rep. Clint Moses, R-Menomonie, where the city signed an NDA, then put a proposed data center on hold. Microsoft “just realized that it’s not a successful formula when you come into a community under darkness.”

Moses said a bill he introduced to ban data center NDAs, which stalled in the Legislature, is still needed to prevent local governments from signing the agreements. If local officials sign them, “hopefully voters will remember it and hold them accountable,” he said.

Microsoft did not sign NDAs in the Racine County communities of Mount Pleasant, where a multibillion-dollar data center complex is under construction, or in Caledonia, where it withdrew a data center proposal amid community opposition. But its announcement comes at a time of public backlash against data centers proposed in Wisconsin.

The company said its new position on NDAs is an effort toward transparency “as we continue to build trust with the communities around the world in which we operate” and that it would work with local governments to terminate current NDAs. Microsoft has one in Kenosha, where a data center is proposed.

Microsoft did not respond to a request for further comment.

Its move won qualified praise from data center NDA critics, such as Midwest Environmental Advocates. “Companies typically don’t make announcements about building community trust unless those communities are already pushing back pretty hard,” the group said in a statement.

Sheboygan Falls Mayor Randy Meyer, board president of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities, said municipalities feel pressure to sign NDAs because they need new development to increase tax revenue. It can be difficult to know when in the planning process a development proposal should be disclosed to the public, he added.

But “if the companies that are building data centers say there’s nothing wrong with them, they don’t hurt the environment, all that stuff, well, then there’s no real reason to be secretive about it,” Meyer said.

Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, also praised Microsoft’s move, which happened during Sunshine Week, which promotes public access to government meetings and records. 

But Lueders encouraged local government officials to be more transparent.

“There’s nothing the public hates more than the idea that their public officials are doing things behind their back,” he said. “That’s like the most offensive thing that you could do as a public official is hide information that affects the people you represent.”

Wisconsin Watch has reported that at least five Wisconsin communities signed data center NDAs. In one of them, Beaver Dam — where an NDA was signed more than a year before the proposal was announced — a $1 billion Meta data center is under construction.

Meta declined to comment on Microsoft’s announcement.

Vantage Data Centers, which is building a $15 billion data center in Port Washington with Oracle and OpenAI, did not reply to a request for comment.

The push to build data centers nationwide has meant more than $1 billion in business for Wisconsin suppliers, even before any of the hyperscale data centers in Wisconsin begin operation.

The data centers proposed or under construction in Wisconsin typically cost billions of dollars and cover hundreds of acres. 

Some communities that have not signed NDAs have taken other steps to keep data center proposals quiet.

The Madison suburb of DeForest dropped a proposed $12 billion data center in January, the day after Wisconsin Watch reported that village staff worked for at least seven months with Virginia-based QTS Data Centers before the proposal was publicly announced in October. 

Wisconsin Watch also found that in Port Washington, when citizens requested emails about the data center, the city turned over emails but withheld documents that were attached to the emails — something a judge found did not follow the state open records law.

Blaine Halverson, a leading opponent of the proposed data center in Menomonie, said Microsoft’s announcement is a step, but he remains skeptical.

“I think that committing to not doing NDAs does not mean they’re not committed to still being secretive,” he said. 

“What the pledge needs to be (is) that we’re going to not just not use NDAs. We’re going to be up front. We’re going to encourage and allow free communication from the beginning with communities. And we’re going to insist on being available to answer the public’s questions from the front end. That’s what needs to happen.”

Local data center critics praise Microsoft’s pledge to stop using NDAs, but remain skeptical is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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• Jobs for data centers happen in three phases: development, construction and operations. 

• The largest numbers of workers are on site when a data center is being built, experts said. 

• The number of long-term jobs a data center brings depends on the size of the facility. 

• It’s difficult to measure the ripple effects data centers have on the economy; however, experts say local businesses can benefit from producing components and products for data centers. 

• Data center technicians will be in high demand as more facilities come online.

As data center developers stake out land in Wisconsin communities, much debate has surrounded whether the computer-packed warehouses will deliver economic benefits locally. 

Waves of opposition and concerns about land, water and electricity use routinely follow data center proposals, while supporters echo that the centers will create jobs and help the economy. 

But what jobs? How many of them? And will they last?

To answer those questions, Wisconsin Watch talked to three professors:

• Xiaofan Liang, who specializes in urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan.
• Scott Adams, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee labor economist. 
• Dijo Alexander, who specializes in information technology, digital transformation and artificial intelligence at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 

Here are some takeaways.

What kinds of jobs do data centers bring?

Data center jobs fall into three major categories that represent phases in their creation: 

• Development
• Construction
• Operations

A data center first needs people to plan for its existence. Developers, engineers, designers and planners lay that groundwork. 

“The data center industry as an ecosystem is pretty big … When they first introduce a data center to a place, they have to figure out the design standard, how to construct all kinds of facilities, how it connects to city systems,” Liang said.

Then, developers must hire heaps of hands-on laborers to construct the gigantic warehouses from the ground up — the largest portion of workers needed in creating and operating a data center. Among other professions, this includes electricians, plumbers and pipefitters, carpenters, structural steel and iron workers, concrete workers and earth drillers.

The job boom from early phases fizzles out once the building is complete, Liang said. 

“(During) construction time, you usually have a lot more jobs — maybe 10 times in magnitude more so than operations,” Liang said. 

Operations jobs, fewer in quantity, are largely “unglamorous,” Adams said. 

Some of these roles have relatively low barriers to entry, such as maintenance workers and security guards. Meanwhile, electricians and HVAC workers are needed, considering that power and cooling are data centers’ “two most important inputs,” Adams said. 

Adams echoed a popular analogy likening data centers to warehouses full of rotting bananas that need constant cooling and replacing.

“You need banana technicians, more or less, that take the rotted bananas out and replace them with new bananas,” Adams said. “Now, granted, they’re much more expensive bananas in there, and they’re doing a whole lot, and it requires a little more expertise. But again that expertise, by and large, can be developed pretty quickly.”

Those workers will be data center technicians — people who install servers, replace hardware and cables, monitor systems and notice when things break down.

How many jobs do data centers bring? 

The number of jobs created depends on a data center’s size, Liang said.  

That can initially mean thousands of jobs at gargantuan developments like in Mount Pleasant. Microsoft says it has employed 3,000 people to construct the location, compared to 500 full-time workers once the plant is operating. But these numbers are expected to climb as the company constructs a cluster of additional centers at the site. 

Not all of these workers will be local. Given the temporary high demand, the projects will likely need out-of-town construction laborers who travel to the area and don’t stay long term.

Smaller projects will employ far fewer people. For a typical data center, Microsoft estimates it hires about 50 full-time employees. What those numbers mean for the local area depends on the community’s size. 

“In a bigger city, like Atlanta, it’s like a drop in the ocean, right? It doesn’t really affect much,” Liang said. “In a rural area, in a smaller town, hundreds of jobs … are a big deal.”

What about the trickle-down economic benefits? 

A sizable new employer entering communities could ripple across other nearby industries, though Liang notes this is hard to measure. 

“(A data center) just has such a big infrastructure need that trickles down in many different ways,” Liang said. “Now we need expanded utility infrastructure, grid, fiber, water, all these things. Construction of these infrastructure, even though it’s not directly related to (a) data center, could increase local employment in those areas.”

Inside a data center are “cabinets after cabinets of steel frames holding computers” that need to be built, Alexander said. This can boost local manufacturing, especially the metal fabrication industry. 

Wisconsin manufacturers have already begun cashing in on the construction boom nationwide. As Wisconsin Watch previously reported, just three Wisconsin companies alone have amassed more than $1 billion in equipment sales — such as motors, generators and cooling systems —  to data centers.

Massive developments like Microsoft’s in Mount Pleasant can potentially lead to a “tech corridor,” a cluster of warehouses and manufacturers near the data center they serve, Alexander said. 

“If we take the initiative and if we bring a few big enough component manufacturers, we can create locally created components for these data centers to consume,” Alexander said. “It’s like if you have a big restaurant or food manufacturer here, you will have agriculture around there, because it is easy for you to bring your produce for their consumption. Just like that. ”

The trend could also activate industries like nuclear power, Adams said. Building data centers  in conjunction with nuclear reactors to generate their power would fuel even more construction and energy jobs, he added. In Kewaunee County, an energy company wants to rebuild Kewaunee Power Station, a defunct nuclear power plant, anticipating energy demand from AI and data centers.

In more rural communities or near smaller data centers, the trickle-down effects could prove more modest — perhaps a few new restaurants and housing units, Adams said. 

Alexander also noted the effects could also be less concentrated, with growth spilling into neighboring cities as employees work at the center but live elsewhere.

But will enough permanent jobs be created to sustain the growth sparked during the early labor-intensive development phase? That’s unclear, Adams said. 

“We don’t have a firm enough grasp about the indirect effects in the longer term,” Adams said. “Short run, that’ll be great. Longer run, can we sustain the new development that might happen around these? I don’t know the answer to that. I think if the power generation side of it comes in connection with them, there’s more of a chance that that will work.”

Who are data center technicians?

Data center technicians are perhaps the most novel job introduced by the data center boom. The roles are more specialized than others needed inside the warehouses.

Job postings for data center technicians at Microsoft’s Milwaukee location say the workers will be “preparing, installing, performing diagnostics, troubleshooting, replacing, and/or decommissioning equipment under the guidance of more experienced data center colleagues.” 

The posting states the job requires a high school diploma, knowledge of computer hardware and some experience with IT equipment. Pay for lower-level technicians ranges from $23 to $36 per hour, with more experienced workers making up to about $48 per hour.

Adams said likely candidates will include engineers and computer coders and people now entering college with their sights on data center work. Microsoft and Gateway Technical College in Kenosha launched a “Data Center Academy,” preparing students to work in data center operations. Adams believes partnerships like this will become more common.

Are these good jobs?

You can use the interactive table below to explore many of the jobs data centers are expected to create, including wages, employment totals and required education.

Here’s what the data center boom means for Wisconsin’s workforce is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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• At least five Wisconsin communities have signed nondisclosure agreements with data center developers, including the town of Beloit.

• Even in communities without an NDA, there has been pushback against transparency. For example, Port Washington was sued because it released emails referencing a project, but not the attached files.

• It’s unclear if the state Senate will take up a bill that would ban data center NDAs, but the Assembly has already adjourned without passing the bill.

At a Jan. 28 public forum on Wisconsin data centers, Port Washington Mayor Ted Neitzke boasted that his city did not sign a nondisclosure agreement that would have concealed plans for a $15 billion facility that is now under construction.

“If you’ve got the courage and you push back and say, ‘Listen, we’re just not going to do it,’ (the data center developers) will find a way to operate without having to sign an NDA,” Neitzke said. “So, we did not and we will not.”

On the same day Neitzke was touting his community’s openness, Port Washington was in court over its refusal to provide communications about its data center. The city had turned over emails, but not documents attached to the emails.

It’s one example, beyond NDAs, of local governments hiding details of proposed large-scale AI data centers, which are projected to span hundreds of acres, cost billions of dollars and transform communities.

Wisconsin Watch reported in January that NDAs were signed in at least four Wisconsin communities where artificial intelligence data centers are proposed or being built — Beaver Dam, Kenosha, Janesville and Menomonie. Since then, Wisconsin Watch has learned about a fifth project with an NDA, this one in the town of Beloit — showing that discussions there occurred more than a year before any public announcement was made.

Port Washington stymies public records requests 

Construction began in December on Lighthouse, the 672-acre Vantage-OpenAI-Oracle data center campus in Port Washington, north of Milwaukee.

Four months earlier, philanthropist Lynde Uihlein, a town of Port Washington resident, environmentalist and major Democratic donor, made a public records request of the city. She asked for any communications between the city and the data center developer dating back to Jan. 1, 2025.

The Wisconsin public records law declares that “all persons are entitled to the greatest possible information regarding the affairs of government” and that governmental bodies must respond to requests “as soon as practicable and without delay.”

After nearly three months, the city did not reply to Uihlein’s request, so she sued.

The city responded by turning over emails, but not the documents attached to those emails, such as a draft development agreement. The city’s attorney explained that Uihlein didn’t specifically ask for the attachments.

“When cities want to court large, community-changing development, they also should be prepared to act with maximum transparency,” said Madison lawyer Christa Westerberg, one of the lawyers representing Uihlein.

“The city of Port Washington has been too slow to respond to requests about the data center and even when it has, there are gaps, like providing emails without attachments. This was foreseeable and avoidable.”

Wisconsin Watch is one of Westerberg’s clients, but is not a party to this case. Westerberg did not participate in the writing or editing of this report.

City Attorney Matthew Nugent told Wisconsin Watch: “The assertion that the city refused to produce email attachments is inaccurate. The city reasonably interpreted the original request to seek the email communications themselves, that is, the body of the email message, not the separate documents attached to those communications.”

At a court hearing Jan. 28, Ozaukee County Circuit Court Judge Adam Gerol rejected the idea that documents attached to emails aren’t part of the emails themselves. “There has not been a complete response to the open records request,” he said.

In February, the city turned over emails along with attachments to Uihlein, and Gerol ruled that city officials must submit to depositions to answer questions from Uihlein’s lawyers.

Gerol will be asked to determine whether the city has fully complied with the public records law, whether its delay in replying violated the law and whether it should have to pay Uihlein’s legal fees.

Another denial

The city used the same rationale to partially deny another public records request.

Port Washington resident Michael Beaster, an opponent of the data center, asked the city Nov. 20 for emails and other communications between city officials and the data center developer. 

The city replied six weeks later, sending some emails but no attachments to the emails. An attorney for the city told Beaster he would need to submit another request if he wanted attachments because Beaster did not specifically request those.

“It feels like they’re being overly cautious in trying to protect the city,” Beaster said, “which certainly isn’t serving the public.”

Beaster is running unopposed April 7 for an open seat on the Port Washington city council. He helped lead a failed effort to recall Neitzke over the data center.

Neitzke said he could not comment on why the city has not turned over email attachments, other than to say he is not part of the process of releasing records.

NDA for possible Beloit data center

News surfaced this month of a possible data center an hour southeast of Madison in the town of Beloit. The town, saying it was responding to information “being disseminated” about a possible data center, announced it had begun “very preliminary discussions” and signed a predevelopment agreement with Delaware-based Cambrin LLC.

Wisconsin Watch has since learned that the town signed an NDA with Cambrin in February 2025 — more than a year before making its announcement.

The NDA and other documents provided to Wisconsin Watch in response to a public records request do not directly refer to a data center. 

The documents indicate that “Project Corn Maze” would initially include 700,000 square feet of buildings, employ 50 people and require tax incremental financing from the town.

The records also show that the town has exchanged emails about the project since April 2025. They indicate that Cambrin LLC was formed to make the development proposal and don’t identify what company would operate the data center.

Signs of openness 

Access to records also was at issue for the first phase of a data center complex south of Milwaukee in Mount Pleasant. The first center in that Microsoft complex is expected to open later this year.

This month the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council announced it is giving its annual citizen openness advocate award to Midwest Environmental Advocates. The public interest law firm successfully sued the city of Racine for records disclosing how much water it is projecting to provide for the Mount Pleasant data center.

The council also gave an award to Wisconsin Watch for its story on data center NDAs.

Amid reports of a possible data center in Grant County and as Meta seeks to add a data center to one it is building in Beaver Dam, there is movement toward more openness on several fronts.

The state Public Service Commission, which approves requests for new utility plants and utility rates, initially accepted a confidentiality request from Alliant Energy in its application to serve the Beaver Dam data center despite numerous redactions — including how much energy the center would use.

On Feb. 26, however, state administrative law judge Michael Newmark, who is overseeing the PSC hearings on the request, told Alliant to resubmit its request with fewer redactions. Alliant did the next day with less information blacked out. 

“It seemed like the redactions were not going to allow us to do sort of the basic functions of open government,” Newmark said at the hearing. Fewer redactions would enable the commission to rule on the application in a way that is “defensible in court and in the court of public opinion,” he said.

Last week the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for Water Policy released a model for state legislation to “promote transparency and environmental protections” for data centers.

The model, which recommends temporary statewide moratoriums on data centers, makes several recommendations to increase transparency, including a ban on local governments signing NDAs and requiring public disclosures on water and electricity use before any approvals are given.

The “continued absence of comprehensive and timely disclosure requirements,” the report said, “undermines public understanding and limits informed decision-making around siting, permitting and environmental impacts.”

And on Friday, a state Senate committee on a 4-1 vote approved Senate Bill 969, which would prohibit local governments from signing NDAs with data center developers. No further action has yet been scheduled.

The committee also advanced, 3-2, Assembly Bill 840, which would require the Public Service Commission to protect ratepayers from the costs of providing electricity to data centers. The bill contains a controversial requirement that renewable energy used for a data center be located on the site. The Assembly passed the bill 53-44 in January. 

Legislation banning NDAs is pending in several states, including two that took action last week.

A Minnesota House of Representatives committee approved a bill banning data center NDAs and sent it to the House floor.

In Florida, a provision banning NDAs that industry groups lobbied against was removed from a data center bill. 

A report released last week by the Alliance of Great Lakes urged governmental bodies to limit the use of NDAs so that the public can know how much water and energy a data center will use.

“When critical information is withheld, decision-making shifts risk from private developers to communities and public utilities,” the report said.

More than NDAs. Wisconsin communities face scrutiny over data center secrecy. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.