Reading Time: 4 minutes

Since launching their campaigns for Wisconsin governor, both Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and Democratic Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley have touted the concept of local control.

Each argues that communities deserve “a seat at the table” in matters of commercial and industrial land use, but their records as public servants illustrate contrasts about when competing local and state interests should carry the day.

The issue is worth considering in this year’s midterm election as Wisconsinites face mounting energy costs and a queue of construction proposals for new transmission lines, power plants and data centers.

“I want to get Madison out of the way where it makes sense,” Tiffany told attendees of the annual Wisconsin Counties Association conference in September. “Local officials understand their communities, and state government should be working with them rather than creating additional obstacles.”

Yet Tiffany is an architect of some of the most consequential environmental regulatory rewriting of the past 15 years, stripping municipalities of several powers to regulate shoreland development and mining in their own backyards.

Crowley has worked with the state to address Milwaukee County’s budget issues. Just a few years ago, Milwaukee County was heading for a “fiscal cliff,” the culmination of a decades-long pension scandal. 

Without state intervention and the “tools to raise additional revenue and fund local priorities,” the county would face “tough decisions,” Crowley wrote in 2022. The following year, the Legislature authorized Milwaukee County to increase its local sales tax rate by almost half a percentage point.

Neither candidate has offered many specifics in their campaign pitches, and neither campaign responded to requests for comment.

But their policymaking records offer some clues.

During Tiffany’s time in the Wisconsin Legislature and Congress, he has conveyed a general desire to get the state and federal government “out of the way” of local decision-making. Crowley’s time as a county executive and state Assembly member highlights his support for public spending on property development and the creation of minimum environmental standards to protect public health.

Local control and mining operations

Crowley has argued for “a case-by-case” treatment of mining projects without staking a claim over the industry’s merits.

Still, he continues to push for amassing consensus and would not rule out allowing new mining permits before consulting with local communities. 

In January, when a PBS reporter asked him to explain how he would respond to new mining permit requests, Crowley said he would convene a work group of experts to obtain the best information possible.

“It’s about working with the local municipalities, working with the groups and the stakeholders that are on the ground,” he said.

Comparatively, Tiffany’s time in the Wisconsin Senate from 2013 through 2020 saw him take up the mantle of getting the miner, emblazoned on the Great Seal of the State of Wisconsin, back to work. He ushered in several bills intended to loosen restrictions that businesses said stymied economic growth.

The first of several successful proposals started with the 2013 reworking of the state’s iron mining law, which instructed regulators to start the mining permitting process on the presumption that some environmental damage to wetlands is a necessary operating condition of the industry. 

Supporters maintained the reforms assured developers they could expect regulatory certainty and expeditious review of new projects.

A few years later, prompted by a bill Tiffany co-authored, the Legislature lifted the state’s moratorium on sulfide mining, which can release toxins, and stopped requiring companies to prove they could successfully operate and close sulfide mines elsewhere in the United States or Canada without polluting the environment.

Tiffany also sought to curb local authority too when regulations posed risks to obstructing economic development.

Two 2013 bills proposed restricting local governments’ ability to regulate nonmetallic mining, including frac sand operations, and would have prohibited them from creating water quality and air quality standards, permits, restrictions and monitoring requirements.

Tiffany told Wisconsin Watch at the time that some local units of government are “trying to establish mini-DNRs,” by conducting their own air and water testing. “That’s the purview of the state,” he said. 

The contentious proposal didn’t make it to the chamber floor for a vote.

Local control and land acquisition

In 2015, Tiffany co-sponsored legislation that took the opposite view on local control in the context of land acquisition.

Republicans and Democrats have long clashed on how to finance the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program. The fund enables the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to purchase private land and easements for habitat preservation and recreation or issue grants to organizations or municipalities to do the same. 

Both Tiffany and Crowley say they support allocating money for the program, but Tiffany has long expressed reservations about its focus on purchasing new property.

In 2015, Tiffany sought to curb state authority by requiring the Wisconsin DNR to obtain approval from every municipality and the county in which the property is located before acquiring new properties. The bill didn’t advance to a vote. Tiffany now says he would fund the program so long as the dollars maintain existing public lands.

Crowley has said repeatedly he supports strengthening the program, drawing parallels to his support for county lands. 

In the last five Milwaukee County budget cycles, he recommended county leaders spend tens of millions of dollars on parks and trails, drainage infrastructure and waterfront protection.

In other environmental areas, Crowley also has reined in local control by creating baseline standards. As a state legislator, he backed bills that would have imposed statewide requirements for mandatory lead testing and inspections and restricted the ability of municipalities to privatize their public water or sewer utilities.

Wisconsin governor candidates talk about supporting local control, but their records are mixed depending on the issue 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: 6 minutes

Milwaukee faces a big challenge: replacing tens of thousands of lead water pipes that pose a potential health risk to residents — all by a 2037 deadline imposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

At the end of 2025, Milwaukee Water Works still had over 55,000 residential homes or properties with lead water lines on the utility-owned side, customer-owned side or both. The utility had yet to identify the makeup of pipelines serving another 27,000 properties. 

But Milwaukee can’t replace all the pipelines at once — and some neighborhoods face greater risks from lead exposure than others.

So which areas should officials prioritize? 

Part of the answer lies in a surprising place: a tool University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers originally developed to study the connection between neighborhood disadvantage and human health.

Lead does not impact neighborhoods equally

Milwaukee’s pipeline problem dates back to 1872, when the city mandated the use of lead in service lines. Although the city abolished the mandate in 1962, older lead pipelines remained in many older residential buildings.

Downtown Milwaukee includes a scattering of homes with non-lead service lines — many due to having already been replaced by the city.

Milwaukee has replaced nearly 15,000 pipelines since beginning its broader efforts in 2017, said Milwaukee Water Works Superintendent Patrick Pauly. When federal funding became available under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the utility expanded its effort, increasing the pace from about 1,000 lines a year to 5,000. 

The expansion included a priority program launched in 2024, which focuses on equity and offers free replacements to eligible residents. 

But scaling up the effort required more than funds and construction crews. The city also needed a systematic way to decide where to work — one that recognizes disproportionate risks across the city.

“We needed to expand the lead service line replacement program, and we needed to develop a, for lack of a better word, defensible method to expand that program,” Pauly said.

What Milwaukee’s priority system looks like

The resulting system assigned each property a score based on three factors: 

• 70% comes from the Area Deprivation Index (ADI), a measure of relative socioeconomic disadvantage developed by UW-Madison researchers. 
• 25% comes from the percentage of local children who tested positive for lead poisoning. 
• 5% comes from lead service line density in the area.

Together, these measures help the utility determine where replacement will yield the highest benefits. 

The city updates each property’s score every other year as new information becomes available, Pauly said. 

The scoring weights heavily toward neighborhood disadvantage as broader challenges residents face can compound risks posed by lead exposure. 

Nationwide, communities burdened by economic disadvantages and racial inequalities can face greater risks of lead exposure, according to a Montclair State University study of New Jersey. Such neighborhoods often contain older housing and sit near former industrial sites.

The ADI relies on attempts to quantify disadvantages in Milwaukee, and its origins have little to do with water infrastructure.

A tool developed to understand health disparities

The ADI measures neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage or adverse social exposure using 17 U.S. Census American Community Survey measures. They include factors related to income, education, housing, and employment.

The index assigns scores to census block groups — small geographic areas that generally contain several hundred to a few thousand people.

Block groups receive a national percentile ranking from 1 to 100 or a statewide decile ranking from 1 to 10. Higher rankings indicate greater socioeconomic disadvantage relative to other areas.

Researchers have long recognized that people’s health depends on far more than the medical care they receive. But measuring the influence of social and economic conditions on health isn’t easy.

Dr. Amy Kind has spent much of her career trying to figure that out.

Kind, a professor of geriatrics and gerontology at UW-Madison and founding director of its Center for Health Disparities Research, grew up in Niagara, Wisconsin, before training as a physician. 

During her residency in Boston, she saw that the medicine she prescribed could do only so much when patients returned to homes without healthy food, stable housing or access to other basic resources. Those experiences helped shape her interest in finding ways to measure such disadvantages. 

Researchers have used indexes like ADI since the 1980s. In 2014, Kind led a group of University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health researchers in updating ADI using modern census data, refined it to the census block level and validated its usefulness across several scientific studies. 

“(Like any marker), it may not be the thing that ultimately drives the risk,” Kind said. “But it has been an extremely strong marker that something going on in that area is increasing risk, whatever it might be.”

An unexpected use for health research

“When we first developed the metric, we thought that perhaps it would be used primarily by health systems, primarily in the research community,” Kind said. 

Instead, Kind and her colleagues heard from many community groups and local governments that were interested in using index data to guide their public health work.

Since 2014, the University of Wisconsin has tracked over 3,500 academic papers citing the index and more than 400 examples of its use across different fields. That includes a recent Kind study linking environmental factors to the likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Meanwhile, the index helped officials in Puerto Rico decide where to send nurses to combat dengue fever and the mosquitoes that carry it.

That wide interest prompted Kind to develop the Neighborhood Atlas in 2018, making the data more accessible. 

Kind said she enjoys seeing the index be used in sometimes unexpected ways to address local challenges. That includes Milwaukee’s effort to protect children from lead exposure, where officials are using it as one component of their model. 

Thousands of pipelines replaced, thousands more to go 

Milwaukee Water Works has replaced lead pipes at more than 6,000 properties under its priority program, which launched less than three years ago.

The work has been largely concentrated on the city’s North Side but has also expanded into near South Side neighborhoods. 

Pauly expects the utility to reach a milestone next year of 20,000 lead lines replaced.

But officials will soon face a difficult question: how to pay for replacements after  Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding runs out in 2028.  

One possibility is returning to a funding system that required homeowners to pay part of the cost of replacing the privately owned portion of their service lines. 

“I don’t believe the city has the financial capacity to take on fully funding the private side replacement costs,” Pauly said.

That could present another challenge for a program designed to prioritize neighborhoods where residents already face financial disadvantages.

For now, residents living in homes with lead service lines that are not yet scheduled for replacement can take steps to better understand their own risk. 

Julie LaRose, lead and nutrition program coordinator at the MacCanon Brown Homeless Sanctuary, runs one of the many programs in the city where residents can submit samples of their tap water for free lead testing.

LaRose recognizes residents’ concerns about their tap water. But she also emphasizes that Milwaukee water is highly regulated, and she has not seen any samples tested through her program exceed one part per billion (ppb) of lead. 

That’s far below the FDA limit for lead in bottled water (5 ppb) and the EPA’s threshold for utility action (15 ppb). 

“If you’re nervous about this, let’s test it,” LaRose said.

How a UW tool helps Milwaukee decide which lead pipes to replace first 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

Marinette resident Andi Rich occasionally shows her anger over how elected officials don’t always seem to grasp the significance of PFAS-contaminated groundwater.

For years, Rich has kept up with the latest PFAS research and advocated for clean water in northeast Wisconsin. 

“It is a complicated issue, but it’s frustrating that the people who were put in charge to figure it out … are failing to even understand the issue well enough to know how to do anything about it,” said Rich, a former candidate for the state Assembly.

Perfluoroalkyl- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or so-called “forever chemicals,” have been linked to health issues, such as certain types of cancer, liver damage, thyroid issues and developmental effects or delays in children. The chemicals are used in a variety of manufactured goods, such as firefighting foam, nonstick coatings, textiles, carpeting and personal care products. 

Sign up for Northeast News, our free email newsletter focused on northeast Wisconsin.

In Marinette County, PFAS thought to stem from Johnson Controls’ and its subsidiary Tyco Fire Products’ Marinette Fire Training Facility have contaminated groundwater used for drinking water.

This election season, candidates in state and national races on both sides of the political aisle are confronting voters’ growing concerns about the quality of their drinking water – in part because people like Rich have kept the heat on.

Widespread contamination

Throughout Wisconsin, PFAS contaminations have caught the attention of elected officials who say clean, safe drinking water is a critically important issue. A Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources study found 71% of 450 shallow, private potable-water wells sampled in 2022 contained at least one detectable PFAS. However, the authors note that “low percentages of samples” surpassed state (1% of samples) or federal (4% of samples) health limits for PFAS.

All of the state candidates who responded to the Northeast Wisconsin News Lab’s general election questionnaire in September said PFAS is a serious issue in Wisconsin. 

Bipartisan support for PFAS-free drinking water motivated state Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Gillett, to rewrite PFAS legislation in 2024 and 2025 to garner Democrats’ support. Assembly Rep. Jeff Mursau, R-Crivitz, co-authored the 2025 bill. 

Gov. Tony Evers signed into law two new PFAS statutes in April. The measures, which aim to hold polluters accountable, created a state PFAS trust fund with about $133 million in grants for PFAS remediation. 

However, observers say it’s just the beginning of what’s needed.

Rich and other local clean water activists continue to push for state groundwater limits for PFAS and ways to prevent contamination, such as banning products containing the substances.

Marinette County’s contaminated area has expanded as biosolids containing PFAS were spread on lands, with the forever chemicals seeping into groundwater, Rich said. The contamination migrated with the groundwater’s flow into new areas, including into waterways that feed into the bay of Green Bay. 

The DNR verified that the contaminated area has expanded, and agency experts discussed the size of the Expanded Site Investigation Area in Marinette County during a July listening session. 

“The groundwater impacted by PFAS is extensive in this area and actions available to clean up PFAS will take a long time to achieve results,” said Alyssa Sellwood, DNR project manager for remediation and redevelopment.

While progress has occurred, including construction of new deep wells on private properties in a limited area, complaints about the new wells also are flowing as residents say water quality is an issue. The new wells are over 500 feet deep, Sellwood said. 

“The water from that depth in this area can be very hard and contain naturally occurring contaminants like radium and strontium, which require treatment to lower the concentrations to levels that are safe to drink,” she said.

Piping in Lake Michigan water

The threat of PFAS making its way into other communities in northeast Wisconsin has encouraged some to connect to larger water systems. Officials in the city of Green Bay and Central Brown County Water Authority are selling their treated water, pulled from Lake Michigan, to nearby communities that have been using deep wells.

Making the move to a new system is costly, as residents of Pulaski learned. The village of Pulaski Board agreed to purchase its drinking water from the city of Green Bay, after years of relying on deep wells that produced water heavy in iron and other minerals, said Board Chair Keith Chambers. Water rates in the village could rise by as much as 230%, according to the village’s website.

In need of more water capacity, the board considered constructing two new deep wells and adding treatment facilities to two other wells to filter PFAS and other contaminants. Doing so would have been expensive and without a guarantee of high-quality water, Chambers said. Sediment from the minerals turned the water tan, and people complained about it, he said. 

“We did not have any PFAS, but that can change in a heartbeat. Some could start leaching in. The DNR might change their threshold limits, or the EPA. You could have perfectly good water one day and the next day, they’re telling you it’s bad,” Chambers said.

The board opted to purchase water from the city of Green Bay, pulled out of Lake Michigan near Kewaunee and piped to Pulaski. The major construction project took longer than expected.

“We had two buildings we had to build and 6.5 miles of 20-inch pipe that we put in the ground,” Chambers said. “Right after COVID, prices were going through the roof; supplies weren’t available.”

The result is a substantial water rate increase. While the quarterly bill for 10,000 gallons was about $151, it is expected to rise to about $351, Chambers said. Ratepayers are footing most of the project’s cost, he said.

“Now there are a lot of people who are angry that we didn’t put it to a referendum,” he said. “I’m a big man, so it’s hard to tar and feather me, but if they could, they would.” 

The estimated cost of constructing a new deep well was $20 million, he said, while the Green Bay water project ended up just north of $16 million. Grants from the DNR and city of Green Bay helped offset some of the cost. 

In Wisconsin, the Natural Resources Board passed PFAS limits for community drinking water at the same level as the federal limits passed in April 2024. The board is expected to take up groundwater standards for PFAS in the near future, with a proposal to impose the same limits used for community drinking water.

What candidates say

Several candidates who responded to the NEW News Lab’s general election survey suggested phasing out use of the substances where feasible. Furthermore, they said funding is only one aspect of the issue that affects many Wisconsin communities. 

“We need continued testing, help for communities facing contamination they didn’t cause and stronger prevention. I support holding responsible companies accountable for remediation costs while using state and federal resources when a responsible party can’t be identified,” said Emily Tseffos, a Democrat running to represent state Senate District 19.

Rep. Joel Kitchens, a Republican incumbent running for reelection in Assembly District 1, said the federal government should set PFAS limits for emerging PFAS varieties. 

“There will undoubtedly be more contaminants that are currently unknown to us that will emerge, and I hope that the federal government will take a stronger role in addressing them. We are not adequately equipped at the state level to determine safe levels,” he said.

To fully address the problem will take more than the PFAS trust fund, Rich said. She’s still waiting for Wisconsin to set PFAS limits for groundwater.

“Everybody wants to point fingers and say somebody else should do it,” she said. “Maybe it’s time for our local representatives to actually try to do something about it.”

This story was produced as part of the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab, a consortium of five news outlets.

Concerned Wisconsinites push candidates on PFAS regulations 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: 3 minutes

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to shift authority to regulate coal ash landfills in Wisconsin from the federal government to state environmental regulators.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources sought approval in February of its program to oversee disposal of coal combustion residuals, or coal ash, from the state’s electric utilities. Wisconsin has six coal ash landfills that are owned by Dairyland Power Cooperative, Alliant Energy, Wisconsin Public Service and We Energies.

Coal ash is what’s left behind from burning coal at power plants to produce electricity. Metals or pollutants within that waste, including arsenic, lead and mercury, can contaminate groundwater without proper storage.

Anne Vogel, EPA’s regional administrator for its Chicago-based office, said the agency wants to eliminate duplicate regulation.

“It’s really about having to go to two different regulators and eliminating that barrier makes things more efficient, more cost effective for the management of these landfills in a protective way,” Vogel told WPR.

The state’s regulations must be at least as stringent as federal requirements, but they could be even more protective.

Wisconsin moved to streamline regulations under an update to rules for coal ash landfills in 2022, said Kate Strom Hiorns, director of DNR’s Waste Materials Management Program. Those changes incorporated 2015 regulations imposed by the Obama administration that addressed landfill design, groundwater monitoring and closure requirements.

“By submitting this and getting this program approval, it’s that recognition that our regulations are as protective as the federal regulations, and that the sites that are being regulated can be regulated for the most part solely under state regulators and inspections,” Strom Hiorns said.

Wisconsin utilities support a shift to one set of regulations for their coal ash landfills.

“Utilities in Wisconsin have been regulated by the state for many years; transferring this particular permitting authority from the federal to state government is a positive step for Wisconsin,” said Dairyland spokesperson Katie Thomson.

However, Cheryl Nenn with the environmental group Milwaukee Riverkeeper said she’s in favor of dual regulation.

“Given the changes in politics at the state level and the federal level, there’s some benefit to having that dual oversight,” Nenn said, highlighting the state’s adoption of federal regulations.

The Obama and Biden administrations strengthened coal ash regulations, including a 2024 rule that required oversight of inactive landfills. Under the Trump administration, the EPA has proposed rolling back and revising those requirements.

“They’d essentially remove or exempt a lot of these coal ash dump sites from regulation entirely, even though many of them are already showing evidence of groundwater contamination,” Nenn said.

Nenn said there has been groundwater contamination at the closed, unlined Cedar Sauk Ash Landfill in Ozaukee County that received coal ash from We Energies’ Port Washington power plant from 1969 to 1977.

The DNR has ordered the utility to address contamination and conduct sampling for boron and sulfate, which found levels of boron exceeded groundwater standards. We Energies has said the utility has seen “declining trends” for both in monitoring wells, and sampling indicates no effects to nearby private wells. 

Strom Hiorns said the state requires utilities to conduct groundwater sampling and has long monitored groundwater at closed coal ash landfills, which wouldn’t change under the federal proposal.

She said other landfills owned by We Energies and Alliant Energy have also exceeded preventive action limits or enforcement standards for groundwater. Those detections are tied to older parts of those sites or naturally occurring substances, such as boron or molybdenum.

Brendan Conway, a spokesperson for WPS and We Energies, said their landfills are actively monitored for groundwater impacts and managed in line with state and federal requirements. An Alliant spokesperson said it’s committed to full compliance.

Under the EPA’s proposal, Wisconsin would assume authority only for coal ash landfills. The EPA would continue to oversee coal ash ponds. The EPA is currently accepting public comments on its proposal to shift regulation to Wisconsin’s program. A virtual public hearing will be held Nov. 9.

This story was originally published by WPR.

EPA proposes shifting oversight of coal ash landfills in Wisconsin to state regulators 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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Enbridge said an early morning fire destroyed a drill rig and support equipment on a $1 billion project to reroute its Line 5 oil and gas pipeline in northern Wisconsin.

In a statement, Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner called the fire that damaged a horizontal directional drill rig and related equipment an act of vandalism. She said there was also graffiti found at the site. No details were provided on where the fire took place, but Kellner said no injuries were reported.

Iron County Sheriff Paul Samardich confirmed the blaze occurred in Ashland County. The Ashland County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to requests for additional details on the fire.

The incident follows two other fires targeting Enbridge that occurred last month, including a blaze in Ashland County that destroyed a drill rig on the Line 5 reroute.

“This is the second major vandalism involving construction equipment on the project,” Kellner said. “These incidents put the local community, landowners, first responders and our workers at risk and result in environmental impacts.”

The FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, are investigating the cause of the two previous fires that occurred in the town of Gingles and the city of Superior. Representatives of the FBI and ATF did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Kellner said Enbridge supports people’s rights to express their views “legally and peacefully.”

“Acts that damage property and put people or the environment at risk are neither legal nor peaceful,” Kellner said. “We take these incidents very seriously and will cooperate fully with authorities as they investigate and seek to hold those responsible accountable.”

Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline carries up to 23 million gallons of oil and natural gas liquids daily from Superior to Sarnia, Ontario, serving 10 refineries and propane facilities in the Great Lakes region.

The fires come after an Aug. 25 gas leak on Line 5 in the town of Saxon released more than 1.3 million gallons of natural gas liquids into the atmosphere. Preliminary findings suggest a subcontractor’s truck was in neutral when it rolled into an open construction trench, striking the pipeline. No one was injured in the incident, and response to the spill is still ongoing.

Following the leak, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources asked Enbridge to halt work on a temporary bypass around the site of the leak, saying the company lacked necessary approvals.

On Sept. 28, Enbridge also reported a release of groundwater at a site where crews were directly installing pipe underneath the Marengo River. It was initially reported as an aquifer breach, and the DNR has since said it’s still investigating the source of the release and determining any negative effects to groundwater.

This story was originally published by WPR.

Enbridge says another fire destroys drill rig on Line 5 project in northern Wisconsin 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: 7 minutes

Dan Kuebler is out on a hot August morning on what used to be his farm.

Kuebler grew fruits and vegetables on 30 acres in Ashland, Missouri, and for decades he sold his produce at the Columbia Farmers Market. 

“Ashland was a little, bitty, sleepy town in ’77 when we bought it,” Kuebler said. 

Then, small towns in southern Boone County started becoming homes to those working in nearby Columbia or Jefferson City. Kuebler watched farmland on his 2-mile dead end road get sold and broken up into parcels. As he neared retirement, he needed to come up with a plan for the future of his farmland. 

“I don’t want it split up into five-acre plots … and become a development. That is just like — that’s sacrilege,” he said. 

Kuebler began farming at the age of 40. For the next 33 years, he grew dozens of varieties of vegetables and eventually branched out into making fermented foods such as sauerkraut, pickles and kimchi. He balanced managing the farm along with his other job as an in-home physical therapist. 

Kuebler is passionate about local farmers providing food for their community. He was an active seller at the farmers market and advocated for the permanent shelter that now houses the market on the west side of Columbia. 

As new development encroached on his neighborhood, Kuebler wanted to protect his farm from being broken up.

“I don’t want to sell it to the highest bidder. I want it to stay in farmland. So how should I do that?” he said.

The demand for more housing often comes at the expense of farmland. Flat, cleared fields are ideal for development. 

Now some agriculture advocates are encouraging farmers and landowners to use a legal tool to ensure their land remains farmable. 

They believe the need is critical. At least 50 million acres of farmland in the Midwest are set to change hands by the end of the decade due in part to the average age of farmers and landowners.

Kuebler worked with a local land trust to attach what’s known as a conservation or agriculture easement to his property deed. It dictates that the farmland must remain farmland no matter who owns it — forever.

“You cannot subdivide it, you cannot sell it off for residential development or commercial development. That is the guiding principle,” said Nick Shapiro, executive director of the Greenbelt Land Trust of Mid-Missouri, the organization Kuebler worked with. 

Land trusts do the work of ensuring current and future property owners follow the stipulations laid out in agriculture easements. 

“The initial landowner who donates the easement knows, not only is there this legal document out there that binds future owners, there is also an organization out there that is required to look after that easement in perpetuity and to defend it and to make sure that it is upheld and respected,” Shapiro said.

‘Best use’ of land

In recent years, about 2,000 acres of American farmland a day have been lost or compromised by development, according to American Farmland Trust, a national land preservation organization. The group estimates another 18.4 million acres — an area almost the size of South Carolina — will be converted by 2040.

Development pressures come from urban sprawl, when metropolitan areas continue to creep outward, paving over once-rural places. But what’s known as “low-density residential” development is also a threat. 

Housing built in the country on large plots of former farmland repurposed nearly 7 million acres of agricultural land between 2001 and 2016. 

American Farmland Trust’s analysis shows rural housing development is especially high in Missouri, elsewhere in the Midwest and in the South. 

Josh Wright is with American Farmland Trust, where he helps landowners through the often yearslong legal and financial process of securing an easement to protect land from development.

“People who have spent their entire lives working their land, whether it be in their family for many generations or not, you become so attached to it and all of your effort could be snatched up and paved over as soon as you sell the property,” he said. 

But placing development restrictions on a piece of land could reduce its value by up to 65%. Exactly how much depends on a number of factors, including location, nearby development pressures and how restrictive the easement is.

“Whenever you go to sell your property, it’s going to be appraised, and that’s going to be judged at best, highest dollar — and they call it best use in the industry,” Wright said. 

In other words, the most profitable use, which farming generally isn’t.

“Unfortunately, it’s probably considered the worst use,” he said.

 Twelve years ago, Congress expanded federal easement initiatives, setting aside about $450 million a year to compensate farm owners for a portion of reduced value of their land through a program known as ACEP-ALE, which stands for Agricultural Conservation Easement Program – Agricultural Land Easements.

That funding, which has since been increased to $650 million annually, filters through nonprofit organizations, such as land trusts, state and local agencies, or tribal governments, to essentially buy a property’s development rights from the farm owner.

Eric Gramlich works with Ozark Land Trust, a conservation organization focused on preserving land in Arkansas and Missouri. 

Although the government can provide a financial cushion to soften the blow of the drop in value a piece of property under easement will experience, Gramlich said it’s unlikely to be the landowner’s most lucrative option. 

“Even those payments would struggle to keep up with the demand and the price of land for commercial development or large scale subdivision development,” Gramlich said. “So I think the financial means, even for willing land owners, that’s a big challenge for them, and also a big challenge for us to rise up and … be on some sort of a playing field with the other competing interests for that land.”

More than 1 million acres of farmland have been preserved through easements since the federal program began in 2014. But more than half of that land is in just three states: Montana, Wyoming and Colorado. 

Currently, no farmland in Missouri has been restricted from development under the federal program. Illinois has 445 acres of farmland under permanent easements, and Iowa has 2,320 acres.

Gramlich said that’s because there still aren’t that many land trust organizations in Missouri, and the agricultural community is still learning about the option. 

“I’d like to think that we’ll be gaining more efficiencies in the program now that it’s been established, but it is generally a multiyear process to get the application in, the contracting paperwork, and then to actually do the boots-on-the-ground work of getting the easement in place,” he said. 

President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill increased the federal easement program funding to $650 million annually, to be used to preserve both farmland and wetlands. 

But preserving farmland through easements is time-consuming, while losing farmland to development can happen rapidly. 

A few years ago the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the agency that administers the easement program, made an effort to “streamline” multiple parts of the process including land appraisals, surveys and certifying organizations such as land trusts. 

In mid-Missouri, Shapiro hopes the land owners out there who value their farm’s legacy will consider preserving it with an easement.

“The older farmers who are looking to get out might be willing to take less than top dollar if they know that there is someone who really wants to take their land and run it and manage it in a way that is consistent with their shared values,” Shapiro said.

His organization, Green Belt Land Trust, was formed to preserve natural areas such as forests and wetlands. It expanded its work to farmland as development pressures increased.

“So much of mid-Missouri’s not just economy, but culture and heritage is based in farming,” Shapiro said. “There is an important role for us to play in helping to preserve that heritage as well.” 

Giving up the farm

On the north side of Kansas City, Kansas, Rick Mareske has been growing berries and forest farming on 40 acres of land for the past 20 years. His food gets to local customers through a community supported agriculture, or CSA, subscription program. 

Mareske and his wife are weighing options for the future of their business and farmland. They considered an easement for their property.

“The cons are, it’s expensive,” he said. “It’s like 20, 25 thousand dollars just to do it, and then you lose money.”

Mareske’s land is a financial asset he’s counting on for retirement income. He said he doesn’t want the years he spent caring for his land to be erased, but he can’t afford to sell for less.

“We’re trying to make it as beautiful as possible and as enticing as possible for someone to buy it and keep it going the way we have it,” he said.

With or without an easement, Mareske hopes the future of his land includes farming.

Meanwhile, in Boone County, after 33 years Dan Kuebler has stopped selling produce and preserves at the farmers market. He still goes each Saturday to buy his food for the week and catch up with his former customers as he shops. 

“I see them and we talk, and it’s like I really didn’t lose my community,” he said. 

Kuebler estimates that it cost him about $20,000 to place an easement on his land, most of that cost coming from the land survey and appraisal. He didn’t take advantage of the federal ACEP-ALE program and its compensation offer, even though his 30 acres of fields, forest and pastures dropped about $90,000 in value once development rights were stripped. 

He sold the land to another local farmer last year. The easement requires the land remain in agriculture and that the methods used to grow crops are sustainable or regenerative. 

There’s a small, old cabin on the property, and one of the more unique stipulations of the easement is that Kuebler gets to spend time there, and on the land, until he dies. 

“I really couldn’t give up the farm totally because I (am) so attached to it,” he said.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent environmental reporting network covering America’s largest watershed. Sign up for the desk’s newsletter here. Read the story on the desk partner’s site.

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Aging farmers and the government want to save farms, but for many the cost is too high 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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Lake sturgeon have been around for more than 130 million years, long before the Great Lakes formed. Commercial fishing in the 19th century, followed by damming rivers, nearly wiped out the species in the Milwaukee River basin.

A breeding and release program led by Riveredge Nature Center, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and Wisconsin’s tribal communities aims to reverse the damage. This year marks the project’s 20th anniversary.

Staff collect sturgeon eggs, then hatch and raise them in a trailer at Riveredge Nature Center using water from the Milwaukee River. Over the past 20 years, the program has released more than 23,000 sturgeon.

Each fall, that work culminates in Sturgeon Fest, where people release young lake sturgeon into Lake Michigan at the mouth of the Milwaukee River. Wisconsin Watch attended the festival on Sept. 27 in Milwaukee’s Harbor District. Watch the video for the sights and sounds of the event — and to see us release a sturgeon of our own.

Males mature slightly faster than females and have been spotted in the Milwaukee River. The Wisconsin DNR hopes females will soon reach the age — about 20 years — when they typically begin spawning.

If they do, Milwaukee could see sturgeon spawn in the basin for the first time in more than a century.

Watch: How Wisconsin’s lake sturgeon are making a comeback in the Milwaukee River basin 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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Editor’s note: This story was updated Oct. 5, 2026 to add comment from the Wisconsin Citizens Utility Board.

Oracle is looking to Wisconsin’s only operating nuclear plant to power its Ozaukee County data center.

We Energies announced an agreement with the cloud computing giant on Friday that would allow Oracle to “subscribe” to between 10% and 20% of the Point Beach Nuclear Plant’s electricity generation. That electricity would help meet the energy needs of Project Lighthouse, the data center campus in Port Washington that Oracle is co-developing with artificial intelligence firm OpenAI. 

The agreement still requires approval by Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission. If it is approved, We Energies spokesman Brendan Conway said it could spare the utility’s other customers roughly $300 million in fuel costs over the next five years.

The 60-year-old Point Beach plant in Manitowoc County is the state’s largest generator, but the electricity it produces is more expensive than alternatives. We Energies spends about twice as much on fuel as its sibling utility, Wisconsin Public Service Company (PSC). The cost of nuclear fuel for Point Beach accounts for much of the difference. 

We Energies owned the facility until 2007, when it sold Point Beach to independent energy infrastructure giant NextEra Energy but continued purchasing most of the plant’s electricity output. The utility’s current purchase agreement expires in 2033, but We Energies recently signed on to continue buying roughly 86% of the plant’s electricity for another 20-year term. 

“The announcement by Oracle is certainly a step forward, as we have been seeking relief on this for years,” Wisconsin Citizens Utility Board Executive Director Tom Content said. “Whether that is a baby step or a leap forward for affordability remains to be seen.”

Meanwhile, We Energies filed a separate application with the PSC on Friday seeking approval  to build a new natural gas power plant on the site of the Fox Energy Center in Outagamie County. The proposed plant would more than double the site’s electricity output.

Disclosure: The OpenAI Foundation recently awarded a grant to Wisconsin Watch but has no control over its editorial decisions. We will update our funding page to reflect the grant. A list of donors and funders through 2025, as well as our donation acceptance policies, can be found here.

We Energies strikes deal to power Oracle data center with nuclear energy 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 report filed with federal regulators estimates an August gas leak on Enbridge’s Line 5 oil and gas pipeline in northern Wisconsin will cost at least $15.1 million.

An accident report filed by Enbridge Energy Limited Partnership Thursday with the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration shows emergency response makes up the bulk of the costs, estimated at nearly $9.9 million.

The company estimated public and private property damage and repairs at about $5 million. Environmental remediation and lost product account for the remainder of the estimated expenses.

Enbridge has said the leak occurred after a subcontractor’s unoccupied flatbed truck rolled into an open excavation site for a Line 5 valve project in Iron County, striking and puncturing the pipeline.

“The affected pipeline section was immediately isolated, and Line 5 was shut down. No injuries occurred, and one nearby rural residence was evacuated as a precaution,” wrote Stacy Soine, Enbridge’s regulatory compliance advisor.

The company told regulators about 33,000 barrels, or more than 1.3 million gallons, of natural gas liquids escaped during the incident. Most has not been recovered because propane and butane vaporized upon release. The company recovered 165 barrels from the trench with a vacuum truck.

The report sheds no new light on how the truck rolled into the trench, saying the cause remains under investigation. But WPR obtained a corrective action order issued by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, that states preliminary findings indicate “the tractor trailer was left temporarily unattended and placed in neutral transmission on a gradient slope prior to the failure.”

Enbridge told PHMSA it shut down the pipeline within three minutes of the leak. Line 5 resumed service Sept. 13. The report states that systems monitoring the pipeline were operating when the incident occurred. However, Soine wrote the company’s leak detection system did not trigger because of the immediate shutdown of Line 5.

The company reported the incident to the National Response Center an hour later at 11:02 a.m. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has said its spills hotline received notification at 11:15 a.m.

Enbridge said wildlife and water have not been affected.

“Community air monitoring is ongoing and has consistently shown safe air quality outside of the incident site. Monitoring wells continue to show no contamination, and soil and water monitoring remains ongoing,” Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner said.

The company plans to test, remove and properly dispose of soil from the excavation area.

A PHMSA spokesperson said the agency’s investigation remains ongoing. Texas-based Stress Engineering Services will conduct a mechanical and metallurgical analysis of the failed section of pipe. The agency’s accident investigation team will also inspect the truck. Inspectors are in the region overseeing construction of the Line 5 reroute.

“PHMSA may pursue additional enforcement action if its investigation identifies any violations of federal pipeline safety regulations or if additional corrective actions are necessary,” a PHMSA spokesperson said.

WPR previously reported that federal accident data shows the leak is the company’s and state’s largest oil and gas pipeline spill in Wisconsin in more than 50 years.

Environmental advocates and the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa have called on Gov. Tony Evers and the DNR to do more in response to the leak, including calling for a disaster declaration and revocation of permits for Enbridge’s Line 5 reroute. They pointed to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s call for removal of Line 5 in the Straits of Mackinac, as well as a new regulatory review of Michigan permits issued for Enbridge’s tunnel project.

Neither the governor’s office nor the DNR has responded to those calls.

Line 5 carries up to 23 million gallons of crude oil and natural gas liquids daily from Superior to Sarnia, Ontario. The pipeline serves 10 refineries and propane facilities in the Midwest and Great Lakes region.

Enbridge built a temporary bypass to bring the pipeline back online amid objections from the Wisconsin DNR, which said the company lacked state approvals. Enbridge contends the construction complied with existing permits and an application for changes to its stormwater permit. A DNR spokesperson has said the agency continues to review options in response to the unpermitted construction.

Last week, fires damaged two company sites — an office building in Superior and drilling equipment at a Line 5 reroute site in Ashland County. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is leading a probe into both fires.

Roughly two-thirds of the $1 billion Line 5 reroute has been built. The project employs 700 workers. As many as a dozen other spills have occurred during the project, according to a court filing by the Bad River band.

In 2020, Enbridge proposed the reroute after the Bad River band sued the company in 2019 to shut down and remove the pipeline from tribal lands where easements had expired.

Three years ago, a federal judge found the company was trespassing and ordered Enbridge to pay roughly $5 million and shut down or reroute Line 5. The band and Enbridge appealed the decision. In August, a federal appeals panel ruled that Enbridge has been trespassing and must remove the pipeline from the Bad River reservation. However, the panel gave the company more time to complete the Line 5 reroute.

This story was originally published by WPR.

Enbridge estimates northern Wisconsin Line 5 gas leak will cost $15M 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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In a year of extreme weather fluctuations, from a record 26 inches of rain in the first six months in northeast Wisconsin to drought conditions and poor air quality from distant wildfires, climate change is happening before our very eyes, experts say. 

“Climate change is going to affect everybody. It is important to bring it back to the forefront,” said Bart De Stasio, professor emeritus of biology at Lawrence University in Appleton. “It’s fallen off the radar unfortunately because of the political climate we’re in right now.” 

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Climate change costs 

Leading up to the November election, affordability has garnered more political attention than the environment, but some Wisconsin residents and scientists say candidates should be diving into climate change in a larger way.

Insurance premiums and taxes often rise after property owners face stormwater damage, said Steve Vavrus, director, Wisconsin State Climatology Office, and co-director, Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI). 

“It’s in everybody’s interest, regardless of how people vote, to make sure our environment is in good shape,” Vavrus said. Seasons are becoming warmer, causing more heat stress and extreme weather, such as flooding. Wisconsin’s stormwater management infrastructure often is a century old, Vavrus said, and it can’t keep up with torrential downpours.

Warmer temperatures stem from fossil fuel and methane emissions, De Stasio said. 

“The only way we’re going to be able to really change our path here is by continuing to look for other sources of energy” and by mitigating the impacts of manmade pollution, he said. “We’re going to have to adapt. Otherwise, we’re not going to survive this.” 

Town of Peshtigo homeowner Jeff Budish couldn’t agree more. “The weather is talking to us. Mother Nature is telling us, ‘Hey, wake up,’” said Budish, a clean water advocate and avid angler. 

While Budish blames gas-powered vehicles for much of the pollution causing the greenhouse gas effect, rivers so contaminated the fish aren’t considered safe for human consumption also frustrate him. He lives near the Peshtigo River, just outside of a designated area local residents call “the plume.” The plume is an area where “forever chemicals” stemming from Johnson Controls Inc.’s Tyco fire technology center in Marinette contaminated the groundwater some residents used for drinking water. 

Tyco has taken responsibility for the contamination in this limited area, offering to provide new deep wells for some residents, but a recently settled lawsuit could limit its contributions in the future. In the meantime, many residents outside Marinette worry PFAS chemicals found in biosolids are also in runoff headed for waterways. 

Warmer rivers 

Charles Frisk, a retired Green Bay science teacher, has observed the worsening effects of climate change for several decades. Warmer rivers and lakes mean walleye and trout could become scarce, while bass become more prominent. It also could bring fewer days of cross-country skiing and ice fishing for winter tourism and poorer air quality in the summer from wildfire smoke, he said. 

“The rate at which the climate is warming up is just occurring so much more rapidly than what was ever thought,” he said. 

In many parts of the country, extreme weather events involve lightning strikes igniting wildfires that burn for days or weeks. Prescribed burns, used for forest and land management, also contribute to the smog that crosses state and national borders. 

Envisioning what his granddaughters, ages 3 and 11, are likely to experience in their lifetimes because of climate change worries Frisk. “By the time they are my age, there are going to be major highly populated areas where it’s unlivable” because of the heat, he said. 

Wildfire smog 

Summer wildfires in Canada and Minnesota sent dangerous particulate material to Wisconsin, impacting air quality, De Stasio said. The particulate matter of less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter can get into people’s lungs and cause breathing problems, he said. When the air quality index hits 200, it becomes unhealthy to be outside, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Wildfires and prescribed burns were linked to 20,000 premature deaths and $200 billion in damages, with a disproportionate number of older adults, Native Americans and African Americans affected, according to a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. 

“The frequency and intensity of these fires has increased,” said Nicholas Muller, professor of economics, engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, who co-authored a 2025 study on the cost of smoke from wildfires and prescribed burns in 2017. 

In Green Bay, city officials closed Bay Beach Amusement Park for two days in July due to wildfire smoke. 

While some people compared the smog to a campfire’s smoke, Muller said wildfire haze is far more dangerous. 

“Around a bonfire, you may get a blast of smoke in the face, but you’re not exposed to the sustained smoke,” Muller said. “When I was walking around (in July), I was aware I was inhaling something. The particles were so abundant, you’re inhaling a high concentration of them.” 

Being prepared is one way to lessen the impact of climate change, whether it be wearing a face mask, helping to prevent flooding or contaminated waterways, or cutting back on driving a gas-powered vehicle, experts said. 

Flood control 

Officials in the village of Allouez plan to construct the municipality’s eighth retention pond in Riverside Park in 2027. The ponds are designed to protect waterways from polluted runoff when stormwater surges. The newest pond is expected to cost taxpayers about $800,000, said Sean Gehin, public works director for the village.

Still, some residents confronted damp or flooded basements in April and July when streets flooded, Gehin said. 

The problem isn’t limited to the Green Bay area, said Jean Marsch, a village of Allouez trustee and 50-year resident. “It’s something all municipalities are dealing with.” 

“You can tell flooding is happening all over. You see it and hear about it and know people who have experienced this kind of flooding,” Marsch said. 

The city of Green Bay’s Fire Station No. 3 sustained over $50,000 in damage from June 24 flooding that affected the boiler, water heaters and electrical service in the basement.

Other areas of the city also were affected by the deluge, said Valerie Joosten, director of public works. A dollar amount for the damage wasn’t available. 

Shared responsibility 

While some are skeptical climate change will be addressed on the federal level, Wisconsin has had bipartisan support for flood laws, Marsch said, pointing to Wisconsin Act 265 signed into law in 2024. It created a pre-disaster flood resilience grant program. 

Marsch would like to see more government funding to help communities deal with flooding and runoff. Allouez officials also encourage residents to do their part by using rain barrels for their gardens, keeping leaves and grass clippings out of the street and avoiding fertilizers with phosphorus. 

“Everybody has a role to play in maintaining the safety and health of our community,” Marsch said. “We all have a role to play in doing what we can.” 

This story was produced as part of the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab, a consortium of five news outlets.

Voters, scientists say candidates should dig into environmental issues 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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Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect uncertainty about when Consumers Energy will close the J.H. Campbell plant. 

Wisconsin ratepayers may no longer be on the hook to keep a Michigan coal plant running past its retirement date. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Friday overturned a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) order keeping the 60-year-old J.H. Campbell power plant online. The plant’s operator, Consumers Energy, approached the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2025 for permission to bill ratepayers across the Midwest for the plant’s operating costs.

The Energy Department intervened to block the western Michigan plant’s scheduled retirement last spring, arguing the closure could exacerbate an “emergency” electricity shortfall in the region. Its operator, Consumers Energy, has since spent at least $295 million to operate the plant as the department repeatedly extended its life.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers urged Energy Secretary Chris Wright in July to allow the plant to close, citing a projection that Wisconsinites alone could spend $117 million on the facility over “the next few years.” 

Wisconsin’s Citizens Utility Board joined a coalition of ratepayer advocacy groups in a December amicus brief supporting Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s lawsuit challenging the extension orders.

The court ruled unanimously for Michigan Friday, questioning the federal agency’s authority to invoke emergency powers to keep the plant open. 

“The Department’s position would empower it to pick its preferred power sources in Michigan — or, presumably, any other state — and order them to operate without regard to the multiple procedural and substantive constraints built into state reliability planning processes,” Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote. 

Nessel applauded the ruling in a Friday press release. 

“By forcing its continued operation, DOE tried a never-before-used tactic to illegally prop up the aging J.H. Campbell coal plant that nobody asked to keep, sticking ratepayers with a bill for a facility that should have been retired more than a year ago,” Nessel said. “I am relieved that the Court saw through this facade.”

Consumers Energy told reporters on Friday it is reviewing the ruling but does not plan to immediately close the plant.

The Energy Department has not made similar efforts to block the retirement of Wisconsin coal plants, though the agency plans to spend $425 million to shore up 13 coal plants in 10 states, at least $19 million of which may be used to extend operations at Alliant Energy’s coal-powered units at the Columbia Energy Center near Portage. 

Meanwhile, Wisconsin ratepayers still owe more than $1 billion in costs tied to retired coal plants. The Citizens Utility Board estimates that We Energies would collect more than $100 million in returns from those retired assets over the next two years under a rate proposal pending before Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission.

Court ruling could spare Wisconsin ratepayers costs of keeping Michigan coal plant open 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 judge in Milwaukee County has tossed out a trespassing citation a Shorewood man received last year for walking past a public beach along Lake Michigan’s shoreline, saying the action was protected by the public trust doctrine. 

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge J.D. Watts on Thursday reversed the decision of a  municipal judge, who found Paul Florsheim guilty of trespassing. Florsheim, with the help of the nonprofit Midwest Environmental Advocates, appealed that decision, saying he hoped the case would make its way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court so the court could weigh in on public beach access in the state.

“It was very gratifying to read the decision,” Florsheim, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, said in an interview with WPR. “I did feel vindicated.”

Florsheim received a $313 trespassing ticket from the Shorewood Police Department after he walked along the shoreline past Atwater Beach last summer. He represented himself during a municipal court hearing, arguing the part of the beach where he was walking was public land, and he was allowed to be there. 

The state’s public trust doctrine protects the public’s rights on navigable waterways in Wisconsin. Florsheim argued the doctrine protects his right to walk along the shoreline up to the ordinary high water mark. 

But Shorewood Municipal Judge Margo Kirchner ruled against Florsheim, citing a 1923 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling, Doemel v. Jantz, that found the public cannot walk on the area of the shoreline between the ordinary high water mark and the edge of the water. It said private property owners have exclusive rights to that area.

On its website, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources says the ordinary high water mark is defined as, “the point on the bank or shore of a waterway up to which the presence and action of the water is so continuous as to leave a distinct mark either by erosion, destruction of terrestrial vegetation or other easily recognized characteristic.”

Watts, in his decision, wrote, “the strip of land below the (ordinary high water mark) is lakebed owned by the state of Wisconsin,” and that the state’s property extends to that point along Lake Michigan. 

Watts said Florsheim walking along the shoreline of Lake Michigan, below the ordinary high water mark, was a “recreational activity.” 

The 1923 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision related to a dispute along Lake Winnebago, an inland lake. In his decision, Watts said Doemel v. Jantz, “may guide decisions in cases involving tort actions for trespass on inland lakes but provides little guidance for this case.” 

The judge found the walk was protected under the public trust doctrine and “did not infringe on any riparian landowner’s rights.”

A Thursday press release from Midwest Environmental Advocates said the decision from Watts, “did not overrule Doemel.”

In a statement, Michael Greif, an attorney with Midwest Environmental Advocates, said, “The dismissal affirms that the shore of Lake Michigan is public land, and, while the direct impact of the decision is limited to the dismissal of Paul’s ticket, we believe the principles affirmed in this case should be broadly applied.”

This story was originally published by WPR.

Milwaukee County judge overturns trespassing citation in Lake Michigan beach access case 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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This story was produced in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Investigative Journalism class taught in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Click here to read highlights from the story

• Recent wildfires in Canada and northern Minnesota brought a wave of smoke to Wisconsin in July, raising concerns in Rock County similar to those in 2023, when Beloit was ranked the city with the worst air quality in the nation.
• Rock County faces above average asthma rates, and air pollution from wildfire smoke combined with emissions from existing polluters can worsen these health risks. 
• The county relies on a particulate matter monitor in Rockford, Illinois, to track PM2.5 levels. Local advocates and community members are pushing for a regulatory monitor in Rock County, especially as industrial emissions increase.

Pablo Toral expected another successful summer field program at the Boundary Waters, continuing a tradition that has lasted close to 70 years. Instead, he found himself evacuating by canoe after wildfires forced his team to abandon the trip. 

Students had already started arriving at the research station for the program’s mid-summer session. They were supposed to spend the next month doing hands-on field research, canoeing and camping. Then came the evacuation alert giving everyone 20 minutes to pack up and leave. Toral, the chair of environmental studies and political science at Beloit College, said it was clear conditions were unlikely to improve, leading organizers to cancel the rest of the program.

After driving through the night, Toral returned to Beloit, only to find that the wildfires had followed him in the form of thick smoke and unhealthy air quality. 

Poor air quality is a serious concern for Beloit residents who worry about the emissions from nearby power plants and now wildfire smoke. Just three years ago, under similar wildfire concerns as this summer, the city was named the worst for air pollution in the United States.

Rock County also has above average asthma rates, making the poor air quality even more troubling for residents. 

Cristine Rameker, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services’ asthma program manager, told Wisconsin Watch that the most recent estimate of asthma-related hospitalizations per 10,000 people in Rock County — between 2022 and 2024 — was 39% higher than the statewide average, with a rate of 3.2 per 10,000 people compared to 2.3.

During those years, asthma-related emergency department visits per capita in the county were 23% higher than the statewide average at 34.2 visits per 10,000 people compared with 27.8 statewide. For children ages zero through 17, the average asthma-related emergency department visit is about 9% higher than the state average. 

The county ranked sixth-highest in the state for asthma hospitalizations and eighth-highest for emergency department visit rates between 2022 and 2024. Rock County is the ninth-largest county in the state in terms of population. 

In 2024 alone, data shows there were 138 asthma-related emergency visits among children in Rock County, or one every two-and-a-half days. 

Beloit School District data shows about 11% of students — 436 children — have asthma. Of those students, 110 have inhalers at school, while 326 do not have ready access to medication. 

Brittany Keyes, clean air policy manager with Healthy Climate Wisconsin and former vice president of the Beloit City Council, recalled a moment last fall when she was riding on a bus in Waunakee with a group of third grade girls from Beloit, including her daughter, after the girls finished their first 5K for a “Girls on the Run” event.

She described how the third graders had been training for months together, and now they were laughing, exhausted and proud of their achievement on the ride home. Until one girl began struggling to breathe. 

Keyes said a teacher was frantically searching through a bag for the girl’s inhaler — pulling one out, and then another. 

“She takes out a bag — nope, it’s not hers. She takes another bag — nope, not hers, not hers, nope, not hers,” Keyes said. “There were six inhalers for a group of 22 girls. … That’s not normal, and it doesn’t have to be that way, right?”

No particulate sensors in Beloit

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5), a type of pollution that is a combination of solid and liquid particles in the air, is a key concern for residents worried about air quality and asthma rates. 

Nick Mailloux, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, said a major reason why PM2.5 raises so much concern is its extremely small size — about 1/30th of the width of a human hair. 

Particulate pollution comes from a range of different sources, including power plants, vehicle emissions and industrial facilities — which Keyes and Toral both noted can all be found in Beloit. Additionally, Mailloux noted that wildfires are increasingly becoming a source of PM2.5 across the United States.

“A particle of that size is small enough that it bypasses a lot of our natural defenses,” Mailloux said. “These are particles that are small enough where they can pass through your airways and into your lungs, where then they can get into your bloodstream and cause inflammation that leads to lots of different respiratory, cardiovascular and neurological health harms.”

PM2.5 can cause new or worsened heart and lung diseases, along with a list of health effects like coughing, shortness of breath, fatigue, asthma attacks and more. 

While Keyes was still vice president of the Beloit City Council, she had read a 2021 report from Toral that found Rock County’s CO2 emissions increased by 325% between 2010 and 2019. After discovering that the emissions in her county were much higher than in counties like Dane and Winnebago, she contacted the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. 

She learned the agency operated one monitor for ozone on the west side of Beloit, and only for six months out of the year. She said DNR officials recommended community sensors, such as PurpleAir monitors, if she wanted to start monitoring for herself. 

PurpleAir makes sensors that actively monitor PM2.5, temperature, humidity and pressure, collecting air quality data and making it publicly accessible. 

Keyes said different nonprofits across Beloit participated in a community project to install PurpleAir monitors in the city in late 2022, using a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency community sensor loan program. Early data raised concerns, but the DNR told her that only five months of data had been collected, which is far less than the three years needed to establish an annual standard, Keyes said. However, that’s all the EPA could lend them for their study.

The group had secured funding during their time with the EPA’s loan to install three monitors in Rock County, allowing for continuous monitoring with data collected every 10 minutes. Now, Keyes said they have been able to expand their monitoring network to more than 20 PurpleAir monitors in the county.

“Our effort has really built awareness, and even the Rock County Health Department went after a mini grant … and they were awarded it, and they got 10 sensors, and were able to put them up at schools around the county, so now it’s not just urban centers,” Keyes said. “It’s super cool if you look at PurpleAir now, how we have a better distributed geographical monitoring system.”

Then in early 2024, technology company and global leader in air quality monitoring IQAir contacted Healthy Climate Wisconsin with alarming news — Beloit was ranked the most polluted city in the United States in 2023. The company had pulled data from the PurpleAir monitors through 2023 to draw that conclusion. 

What makes Beloit ‘pollution central’

Toral pointed to numerous factors — including an unusual amount of wildfire smoke from Canada that year, regional pollution from nearby cities such as Madison, Chicago and Milwaukee, as well as transportation emissions, nearby power plants and industrial activity — that all make Beloit “pollution central.”

He said bigger cities surrounding Beloit like Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison reported very high rates of pollution that summer exacerbated by the smoke. Toral noted all of those cities closely track their air pollution data. He pointed to the sensors Beloit has compared to other surrounding areas, saying through the sensors, Beloit was able to document where the smoke from the 2023 wildfires converged. 

“Unusually, we got winds coming out of the northeast, and that brought back the smoke from the fires in Quebec,” Toral said. “Those are what led to the perfect storm — very active fire season, dry winter, slow snow precipitation in the winter, low precipitation in the spring, leading up to the fires lasting longer, being more aggressive.”

He said that while Beloit is small, its monitoring is on par with bigger cities like Chicago and Madison. So, while Beloit was ranked as most polluted, he said there’s also a lack of data from other cities in that area of the state and northern Illinois to officially confirm if it’s Beloit specifically. 

“You don’t know how polluted you are until you test, and Beloit is very unusual in the sense that it’s a very small town that actually has very good air pollution sensors,” Toral said.

Keyes said the organizations involved in Healthy Climate Wisconsin’s air monitoring effort recognized the need for more coordinated action, so they formed the Stateline Clean Air Coalition — a group of organizations and community members who meet monthly to advocate for cleaner air and healthier communities. 

She highlighted that for more than two years one of the coalition’s primary concerns had been to install a regulatory PM2.5 monitor in Rock County — specifically in Beloit. While Beloit has an ozone monitor, Keyes said it’s not ideally located and only operates for part of the year. 

“(Ozone) is a harmful air pollutant, but not the most toxic. And what we’re really concerned about is particulate matter,” Keyes said.

Community members, health care professionals and advocacy groups also have shared their concerns with the DNR, urging a regulatory PM2.5 monitor in the area. Some argued that Beloit may have some of the highest PM2.5 in the state, with some estimates from advocacy groups and community sensors exceeding standards.

The DNR relies on data from a regulatory monitor in Rockford, Illinois, rather than direct measurements from Beloit. An agency spokesperson emphasized that Wisconsin meets the current PM2.5 standard of 9.0 micrograms per cubic meter, based on 2022-24 regulatory monitor data. 

The DNR spokesperson cited the EPA, saying the three-year PM2.5 design value for Rockford from 2022 to 2024 was 8.3 micrograms per cubic meter, with an annual mean of 7.3 in 2024 — below the requirement for a regulatory-grade PM2.5 sensor.

Craig Czarnecki, the outreach coordinator of air management at the DNR, emphasized that regulatory monitors are used for official decision-making and produce the most reliable data, while community sensors like the PurpleAir monitors are better suited for general awareness.

“Data produced using low-cost sensors do not undergo the same rigorous quality assurance and are known to be biased high when compared with data produced by regulatory monitors. These limitations make low-cost sensors best suited for qualitative purposes such as making decisions on daily activities considering the current air quality,” Czarnecki said.

Despite ongoing requests from residents and advocates to install a regulatory-grade PM2.5 monitor in Beloit, particularly near known pollution sources and in heavily affected neighborhoods, the DNR has not committed to expanding its monitoring. The agency stated that the existing network meets federal requirements. 

Czarnecki also noted the department lacks funding to expand monitoring beyond federally mandated levels.

Residents also raised concerns about the estimated 2.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted in Rock County in 2022, with about 2.1 million coming from power plants. The DNR spokesperson noted that CO2 is not regulated in the same way as pollutants such as ozone or particulate matter. 

Keyes said concern over emissions increased as Beloit’s energy infrastructure began to expand. She pointed to Alliant Energy’s Riverside Energy Center and the additions of the West Riverside Energy Center, a 730 MW natural gas plant. 

Toral said emissions data showed the Riverside Energy Center produced about 2.8 million tons of CO2 emissions the last year it was required to report in 2023, surpassing plants in higher-populated areas, which Toral said shows a “disproportionate concentration of pollutants in one single point.” 

Although multiple coal plants used to be in the Rock County area, and burning coal was worse, Keyes noted that natural gas, primarily the burning of methane gas, is still very harmful for the environment and the health of communities. 

“The fossil fuel industry has marketed very hard to make us feel like natural gas isn’t harmful. But it is. It is still a fossil fuel,” she said. 

Alliant Energy has since proposed and been approved to build a liquified natural gas storage and processing facility in Rock County to meet growing demand. Taylor Adams, the senior communications specialist for Alliant Energy, said in a statement that the location was chosen for its proximity to infrastructure and customers and that the project will comply with environmental regulation. 

“Rock County serves our largest concentration of natural gas customers in Wisconsin and is located near established pipeline corridors, making it a logical location for this type of infrastructure,” Adams said. “The proposed facility would incorporate multiple design features intended to control and minimize emissions.”

Adams said air quality impacts are currently under review by the DNR and will be available for public comment. 

Who’s affected

Toral called the situation in Beloit, a low-income community of immigrants and people of color,  “a case of environmental injustice.”

Toral noted the effects of pollution often fall most heavily on vulnerable populations, including children, older adults and people with preexisting conditions. He added that noise pollution can worsen health outcomes by increasing stress, disrupting sleep and weakening the immune system. 

“If you basically are living close to traffic, a power plant, a factory, anything that generates noise — that really exacerbates people’s conditions,” Toral said. “That makes the body more vulnerable to then have to cope with the pollutants.”

Keyes highlighted that Beloit previously had lower emissions than Dane County, but as Madison was able to retire some of its natural gas and coal plants, the regional demand for electricity resulted in power plants — and emissions — expanding in Rock County. 

Keyes’ daughter was one of 15 youth plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit against the Public Service Commission and state Legislature last summer over laws that prohibit the PSC from considering air pollution when reviewing permits for new power plants, along with a failure to protect the youth from climate change.

“Dane County has made progress, but the celebration of progress is really greenwashing the fact that we are suffering,” Keyes said.

New record, new norm

Air quality records were broken across Wisconsin July 16 as wildfire smoke from northern Minnesota and Canada was carried into the Great Lakes region by winds. Much of the state experienced hazardous air conditions, with Air Quality Index levels reaching their highest points in at least 16 years. 

The smoke brought back memories of the 2023 wildfire season, when similar conditions covered much of the Midwest. 

Toral said this year’s fires are following a similar pattern to 2023. He said because the Great Lakes form a basin, smoke tends to converge there, making Wisconsin “ground zero” for this contamination. He added that the current fire season is already very active, and while the fires were more severe three years ago, this year’s fires are closer to Wisconsin. However, he said it’s still too early to know whether this year’s fire season is going to be worse than 2023. 

“We thought that the fire season we saw two years ago was one of a kind — was very unusual — and here it is again, two years later,” Toral said. “This is a very unusual pattern.”

Wildfire smoke raises air pollution concerns in Rock County, where asthma rates are among the highest in Wisconsin 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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In Wisconsin, utility Alliant Energy has called off a project meant to reduce power outages in disadvantaged and tribal communities after the Trump administration terminated a federal grant that would have supported it.

In California, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which has deployed and upgraded hundreds of thousands of advanced smart meters, has not received any reimbursement from the U.S. Department of Energy for the work since October, when the Trump administration declared it was killing grants that it described as fueling ​“the Left’s climate agenda.”

And in the upper Midwest, a consortium of regional grid operators, utilities and state agencies is still waiting for $464 million in DOE funds meant to help build high-voltage transmission lines to reduce grid congestion — although the agency in charge of the project says the funding will soon be restored.

Across the country, hundreds of such projects to improve grid reliability and make electricity more affordable face a highly uncertain future — the result of Trump administration actions that have slowed the outflow of billions of dollars of DOE funds to a trickle.

Some of those projects in ​“blue states” were targeted as political retribution, as recent reporting from The New York Times has made clear. A handful of grant awardees in this category have won favorable court rulings, and more are seeking legal redress.

But many others are suffering from the DOE’s broader failure to carry out work that Congress has tasked it to do, according to groups that have been monitoring the agency since the start of last year. In red and blue states alike, the DOE is forcing thousands of grantees to undergo a laborious review process, so even projects that have not been officially terminated are stuck, unable to determine when or if they’ll start getting the money they’re owed.

According to an April report from the DOE Alumni Network, a group of former agency employees, the DOE has announced the termination of 356 awards totaling $12.5 billion since January 2025 and has threatened to terminate 303 additional awards worth $12.2 billion.

But the DOE has also stalled projects for ​“a large number of awardees who have never appeared on any list,” the report found. ​“This means the agency is not moving forward to resolve disputes, finalize conditional awards, or respond to continuation applications, leaving projects in administrative limbo and functionally freezing promised funds.”

“DOE both overtly canceled a set of projects, then had this pattern of behavior where for 15 months they stopped actively managing projects,” said one former DOE official. ​“Projects can’t proceed to the next stages and get their next tranche of funding.”

The former official, who asked not to be named, described a pattern of stalling, stonewalling and ​“ghosting” utilities, state governments, energy companies, and nonprofit groups awarded grants under the Biden administration.

Many of those projects have been caught up in a process the DOE announced in May 2025 to review all financial assistance ​“on a case-by-case basis to identity (sic) waste of taxpayer dollars, protect America’s national security and advance President Trump’s commitment to unleash affordable, reliable and secure energy for the American people.”

Then, in October, the DOE announced the ​“termination of 321 financial awards supporting 223 projects” — all of them tied to states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The DOE’s termination announcement came right after Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, declared in a social media post that the administration would cancel ​“nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding.”

Canary Media reached out to a subset of DOE grantees that had won funding from the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program created by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The DOE issued a total of more than 100 GRIP grants — in October 2023, August 2024 and October 2024 — for projects to enlarge the grid, harden it against extreme weather, build microgrids to protect vulnerable communities, and deploy technologies to integrate solar, wind, EVs, and batteries.

Some of the GRIP projects involve expanding clean energy and serving disadvantaged communities, two bugbears of the Trump administration. But many more are straightforward grid improvement projects that need federal dollars to reduce the costs borne by utilities and regional or state agencies.

The largest of these is in California. In 2024, the DOE awarded a $630.6 million grant aimed at upgrading more than 100 miles of high-voltage power lines in the state with advanced power cables capable of carrying more electricity along existing transmission corridors, a project estimated to be capable of delivering about $200 million in savings from improved energy efficiency. That project appeared on the termination list in October, and the DOE has not disbursed money for it, according to federal records, though negotiations for resuming funding are underway.

This uncertainty appears to apply to the majority of GRIP projects, according to Emlyn Bottomley, founder of the consultancy High Road Analytics, which focuses on workforce development, and a former Department of Labor deputy policy director in the Biden administration.

According to his tracking of federal spending, of the roughly $11.4 billion in DOE funds obligated to grid infrastructure and resilience — a category that includes GRIP program funds — $9.1 billion remains ​“at risk,” with funding stalled or timelines for completion shortened. That’s compared with $400 million in grants that have been canceled outright and $1.3 billion not yet disbursed but showing no signs of being stalled.

“It’s a shame these projects are being held up or canceled, especially since the case for them is fairly bipartisan — spanning national security, economic competitiveness, and cost and affordability,” Bottomley said.

All of the GRIP projects required partners to provide matching funds at an amount at least equal to the money DOE is providing, the former DOE official added. ​“You’re talking about folks putting hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. People have skin in the game for these awards.”

The costs of losing federal funding

Many of the GRIP grantees contacted by Canary Media declined to comment, citing ongoing discussions with DOE. Others reported that they are no longer pursuing the projects as described in their grant applications, at least not with the help of DOE money.

The latter is the case for Alliant Energy’s Smart Power Automation in Rural Communities (SPARC) project, which won a $50 million grant in late 2024 to add grid visibility and control devices to 140 grid circuits in disadvantaged and tribal communities served by subsidiary Wisconsin Power & Light — a utility in a blue state.

Those devices could allow the utility to quickly find and isolate faults on its grid, cutting power outages in targeted communities by up to 50%. They could also support grid-management software to help integrate more renewable and distributed energy and potentially expand wireless communications access to these remote areas.

Alliant ​“voluntarily withdrew” from the grant award process in April, six months after its grant was terminated by the DOE, Alliant spokesperson Melissa McCarville told Canary Media. The agency has disbursed no funds to the project, according to federal records.

Alliant is ​“actively pursuing many of the goals that were outlined in the SPARC project,” McCarville wrote in a May email, but as part of a 10-year strategic plan with no set timeline. ​“While the grant did provide valuable funding, it also required a significant investment, and we want to ensure our contributions are properly prioritized,” she wrote.

Still, at least one grant-funded project in a blue state is proceeding despite the absence of DOE funds. 

That’s the case for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which serves the state’s capital and environs. In 2023, SMUD won a $50 million grant to support a project to deploy 200,000 smart meters and grid devices and underlying software controls to ​“improve grid reliability, resilience, visibility and efficiency,” utility spokesperson Gamaliel Ortiz told Canary Media in an email. 

SMUD has carried out much of that work, which includes close to $100 million in utility spending, and has received almost $33 million in reimbursements from DOE, according to federal records. However, SMUD ​“has not received reimbursement for any costs incurred after the grant was cancelled on October 10, 2025,” Ortiz wrote. ​“We remain committed to this critical work and stay flexible as we evaluate how the loss of grant funding may impact the project timeline.”

In other blue states, some grants have been canceled and others are still under negotiation. In Oregon, utility Portland General Electric has recently learned that the DOE may reinstate a previously terminated $50 million grant to support next-generation ​“grid edge computing” devices, utility spokesperson John Farmer told Canary Media in an August email. That project had received only $1.2 million in DOE funding, according to federal records.

The purpose of the project was to integrate batteries, EVs, and community solar into its grid to ​“improve resilience, enable the integration of distributed energy resources, and maximize customer investments in home energy solutions.”

“PGE is evaluating the benefits and risks of reinstating the grant,” Farmer told Canary Media. The utility ​“recognizes that there are inherent risks of additional and changing demands by the DOE as the administration’s priorities change.”

At the same time, PGE remains in discussion with the DOE on a $250 million grant to build a high-voltage transmission line with the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Farmer wrote. ​“Without this funding, we would lose the opportunity to offset those costs with external dollars, which could limit how efficiently we can advance needed grid improvements.”

Red state projects are also being held up because the grantee is located in a blue state. Such is the case of the aforementioned $464 million DOE grant for the Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue project to build new transmission lines between the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and Southwest Power Pool, two grid operators spanning nearly a dozen Midwestern states.

The $464 million GRIP grant was meant to bolster $1.3 billion in matching funds from utilities in the region to enable nearly 30 gigawatts of new generation to be built in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. All but one of those states voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election — but the Minnesota Department of Commerce, the entity awarded the grant, is in a blue state.

In May, the Minnesota Department of Commerce announced that the DOE ​“will honor its $464 million grant,” which will ​“unlock more than $1 billion in additional private investment and provide communities across the region with economic and infrastructure benefits.”

A DOE spokesperson told Canary Media in a July email that the DOE has conducted its review of GRIP projects based on a ​“number of criteria,” including whether it has ​“achieved the milestones set forth in the terms of the award,” whether it ​“remains technically and economically feasible,” and whether it ​“continues to effectuate the purpose of the program or the Department’s priorities.”

The spokesperson added that ​“none of the termination decisions were based on political considerations.” That statement is belied by court testimony reported by The New York Times last month, in which a DOE lawyer stated that none of the October grant terminations were ​“based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor,” and that all but one of them ​“had a recipient location and/​or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.”

During a series of congressional hearings in April, Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated that the DOE’s review of more than 20,000 grants was almost complete and that more than 80% of grantees had received notice that their awards could proceed as is or with modifications.

But an Alumni Network analysis of DOE data shared with Congress showed that the DOE’s review both failed to restore the vast majority of projects caught up in the ​“blue state” termination action in October and failed to address the hundreds of projects that have never been officially terminated but remain unable to secure funds.

The revelation of the DOE’s explicit targeting of blue states for grant termination spurred 39 Senate Democrats to sign a letter to Wright and Vought demanding the immediate restoration of funding for DOE projects terminated in October.

“Once an Administration begins punishing Americans for how they vote,” the senators wrote, ​“the threat extends far beyond these projects: no state, community, business, or worker can trust that the federal government will apply the law fairly.”

A version of this article was first published by Canary Media.

Trump is blocking billions of dollars of grants that would fix the grid 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 year ago, most Wisconsin residents thought little about data centers.

But today, the computing facilities — and where they get their energy — are a key issue in the hotly contested Aug. 11 Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor.

At a lively town hall last week in Milwaukee, five Democratic candidates vied to outdo their peers in tough talk about data centers and their developers, described as ​“Big Tech oligarchs” by state Rep. Francesca Hong, the leading contender according to recent polling.

Whoever wins the nomination will likely run against Tom Tiffany, a Republican candidate and a current U.S. representative for north and central Wisconsin. He too has focused part of his campaign on curbing data centers, promising to prevent the use of farmland for the facilities and repeal tax breaks for them. But unlike the Democratic hopefuls arguing that AI facilities should be powered largely by clean energy, Tiffany is pushing state regulators to keep decades-old coal plants online past their retirement dates to help meet ballooning power demand.

While data centers are an increasingly hot-button topic nationwide in the run-up to the November elections, the tension is particularly pronounced in Wisconsin as developers have recently flocked to the state, drawn by its cool climate, access to water, robust transmission and generation infrastructure, and generous tax incentives passed by the Republican-dominated Legislature and signed by current Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in 2023.

That’s spiked public fears about the facilities’ impacts, including that the boom in energy demand will drive a buildout of polluting power plants and increase household utility bills. A July 22 Marquette University Law School poll found that over three-quarters of Wisconsin voters say the costs of data centers outweigh the benefits, up from 55% in October 2025. Almost nine out of 10 Democrats and two-thirds of Republicans who answered the poll held this viewpoint.

We Energies, the utility serving over a million customers primarily in southeast Wisconsin, is planning to meet data centers’ power demand with two new gas plants, one of which would be the state’s second largest. Meanwhile, Wisconsin’s first hyperscale data center went online this summer near Milwaukee. That and another data center under construction not far away in Port Washington are expected to need 3.9 gigawatts of power — far more than is used by all the homes in the state combined.

“This story isn’t going away. It will only grow in importance to people,” said Elizabeth Ward, director of the Sierra Club’s Wisconsin chapter. ​“People are worried about air pollution, water pollution, land impacts, especially when gas plants are being built just to serve data centers. We hope to have a strong governor who passes safeguards against them.”

How the candidates want to curb data centers

All the Democratic candidates at the data center–focused town hall vowed to keep the industry on a tight leash and ensure that community protections are enforced by the Legislature, governor’s office, utility regulators, and state agencies.

Hong, the choice of 38% of respondents in a July 29 poll by Marquette University Law School, is calling for a moratorium on data center development to give the state time to develop a robust regulatory framework. New York’s Democratic governor instated a similar policy last month, the first of its kind in the U.S.

While none of the other candidates support a moratorium, each says they would aggressively pursue ratepayer protections and clean energy investments from data centers and utilities that serve them.

Hong calls her data center plan ​“Control-Alt-Delete,” and her website says that ​“if a community decides it wants to proceed with data center construction, it needs to be powered by clean energy.” She says taxes paid by data center developers should be invested in a green bank to fund energy and climate solutions, and utilities should be forced to report how much energy large customers use, to ensure regular customers aren’t footing the bill. Hong also advocates for the expansion of public utilities, which her campaign says currently provide 11% of the state’s power and charge significantly lower prices than We Energies does.

Joel Brennan, a civic leader and former official in Evers’ administration, wants to make data centers invest in larger transmission upgrades and clean energy. At the town hall, he said the Legislature needs to pass a law codifying the commitment to 100% carbon-free energy by 2050 that Evers set with a 2019 executive order. He also said data centers should use battery storage instead of diesel generators for backup power.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said he’d order data centers to bring their own 100% clean energy to the grid. Crowley had dropped out of the race July 8, then reentered 10 days later, and won Evers’ endorsement when another candidate — Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez — withdrew.

State Sen. Kelda Roys pledged to work with the Legislature to ​“immediately pass” a bill introduced by Democrats in the last session that would — among other things — require data centers to get at least 70% of their energy from renewables in order to qualify for tax breaks. (Republicans backed a separate data center bill in the last session that likewise did not advance.)

Roys previously told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which sponsored the town hall, that she would require ​“significant upfront payments from large data center projects, hundreds of millions of dollars each, to capitalize a public clean energy infrastructure bank,” which would provide zero-interest revolving loans for clean energy upgrades to public buildings.

Longtime environmental justice advocate and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes was also at the town hall and pledged to demand a renewable energy commitment from data centers. But he withdrew from the increasingly chaotic primary contest the day after the event.

It appears the November election will be a close one. Polls show Hong and Tiffany evenly matched, with people largely voting along party lines. Wisconsin is a purple state, with Republicans modestly outnumbering Democrats, and independent voters making up about a third of the electorate.

Coal plant concerns mount

Wisconsin Rapids residents Aryana Khan and Cloey Hilliker drove nearly three hours to attend the town hall. A proposal for a data center on the site of a defunct paper mill has drawn controversy in their town. Khan has asthma and worries that fossil fuel generation that is built or continues to run to fuel data centers will have serious health impacts on Wisconsinites.

“Why should a Silicon Valley man that was born into wealth get to dictate whether or not I can open my windows because the air is so bad I can’t breathe?” Khan told Canary Media. ​“This is an industry that will not last long. Something new will come along that is shiny, and people will flock to it, and we will have overbuilt for an obsolete technology.”

During the town hall, Peg Sheaffer, spokesperson for the public interest law firm Midwest Environmental Advocates, lamented that utilities are rolling back their plans to retire coal plants because of data centers.

“What actions would your administration take to hold utilities accountable and to keep Wisconsin on track to retire coal-fired power plants?” she asked the candidates.

Hong suggested that a public health expert should be added to the state’s Public Service Commission, whose three members are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate, for staggered six-year terms.

Multiple candidates emphasized the role that the Public Service Commission plays in deciding where data centers get their energy, and who pays. Brennan called the commission a ​“black box for people outside state government” and ​“one of the most powerful entities inside state government.”

The commission has long been criticized for acquiescing to utilities’ requests to raise rates and invest in fossil fuels. Roys referred to the body under former Republican Gov. Scott Walker as ​“lapdogs for utilities.”

But the regulatory body has recently taken some steps to limit data centers’ impacts. In April, the commission instituted a special electricity rate for data centers in the Milwaukee-area service territory of We Energies to prevent regular customers from paying for the energy to serve data centers, a move praised by environmental and consumer advocates.

Tom Content, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, a consumer watchdog group, thinks the gubernatorial race helped influence the commission to reject We Energies’ original proposal and institute a standard that goes further to protect ratepayers.

“You had candidates on the right and the far left that said the Public Service Commission is not doing its job,” Content told Canary Media. ​“I think the commissioners themselves were like, ​‘We’re going to side with the consumer.’”

Content and other advocates said that data centers underscore Wisconsin’s need for integrated resource planning, a centralized process that many other states use to ensure demand is met with the most cost-effective and cleanest energy. Currently, Wisconsin regulators consider utility proposals piecemeal.

Roys is in favor of such a reform. At the town hall, she said, ​“The fastest, cheapest new sources of energy are wind and solar, and I’ll add geothermal in there, too.”

She noted that energy efficiency, grid improvements and virtual power plants can help utilities retire coal plants even as electricity demand grows.

“There’s so much that we can do, some of it enabled by modern technology and AI to actually make better use of what we’re already generating, and to waste less,” she said. ​“This is absolutely within our reach.”

A version of this article was first published by Canary Media.

Data centers take center stage in Wisconsin governor’s race 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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Tom Ritter and his son, Cory, had worked together with their families every harvest season for the past 20 years.

“My daughter loved to ride in the semi during harvest with my dad,” said Cory. “I remember seeing them leave the field together, and just the time that he took and the importance that he put on spending that quality time with family.”

But last year’s harvest was different; instead of Tom and Cory working together, tragedy hit the family on Aug. 20.

“Someone drove by and saw the semi was overflowing. The corn was still coming out, but it was overflowing, and thought this isn’t good and started knocking on doors,” Cory said. “My mother’s house is just a couple of doors in town, and they knocked on her door, and she called me and had a feeling we knew what happened.”

The area around the Ritter family farm in Blue Mound, Illinois, was surrounded by neighbors, police and firefighters trying to find Tom. 

It turned out that he had gone inside the grain bin to fix a piece of equipment. While he was working on it, the grain suddenly shifted and began to move, trapping him.

“I still have the mental image of all these neighbors that just showed up. It was a hot day, sweating and scooping as hard as they could, trying to see if we could save him,” said Cory.

Tom was found against one of the walls of the grain bin. Unfortunately, he didn’t make it. 

Half of grain bin accidents are still fatal

A recent report from Purdue University shows these types of accidents are up. In 2024, 34 grain bin entrapment cases occurred compared to 27 in 2023, representing a 25% increase.

Dr. Salah Issa, an assistant professor and extension specialist at the University of Illinois, said data on grain bin accidents is hard to come by. 

“The way we collect this data is mostly through news clippings. It’s hard to put a pin on where they’re occurring exactly, like if there is a type of grain bin where they occur more frequently than others,” he said.

According to Issa, grain storage in the 1960s was very different from today’s systems. Storage facilities were generally smaller and less mechanized before the widespread use of the large steel grain bins and grain-handling equipment common on many farms today. The earliest documented grain bin entrapment case occurred in 1964.

When a farmer is trapped in a grain bin, the odds of survival are poor. Historically, 70% of accidents were fatal, Issa said.

That fatality rate has come down, but it remains high.

”Strong efforts in training for rescue personnel have contributed to the reduction of the severity,” Issa said. But he adds that about 20 to 40 people die in grain bins annually, about half of all accidents.

 “Fifty percent is pretty bad.”

Issa said weather and spoiled grain play a role in most accidents. Grain can get too wet and clump at the bottom, or crust on top — creating a false sense of security for workers who walk on the surface.

“This happened a while ago, with a father and son,” he said. “A young boy went inside a grain bin that had a crust that had formed. The kid runs across the grain bin, and nothing happens, and the farmer runs after him, and when he reaches the middle, it breaks and he falls through it and ends up losing his life.”

Grain can also build up on one side of a bin and collapse like an avalanche, burying a worker.

Young and older workers are at the highest risk; about half of accidents involve people older than 60 and younger than 21.

“In 2010, we had a really bad case where three boys under the age of 20, I think one or two of them were 14 or 15, they ended up drowning,” Issa said.

Regulatory gaps leave many farms without oversight

Grain bin safety training is offered by universities, industry groups and safety organizations across the country. Still, reaching every farming operation remains a challenge.

Farms with fewer than 10 employees are exempt from federal safety standards, and the lack of oversight also extends to young family members who help on the farm.

“It’s a devastating issue, and it should never happen,” Issa said. “Because of the frequency rate, it’s very easy to run into the thought that this is not going happen to me until it ends up happening to you.”

Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union, said more regulation would help, but that added rules and costs would likely face pushback from farmers.

“Most farmers don’t appreciate a more regulatory framework, and it is difficult to implement and expensive to implement,” he said. “All the more reason before we get to that point that we expand on our efforts to educate farmers, to use voluntary incentives to put these things in place — and that really is important.”

As for Cory, he is unsure about regulation because every farm has its own unique situation.

“I don’t know if I’m for regulation because every farm is different, every situation is different,” Cory said.

For him, it’s more about slowing down and paying attention.

“Is it a dangerous job on the farm? Yes. Is it the most dangerous job on the farm? I don’t know. But it’s just, it’s all about people thinking twice, and that’s what it really takes,” he said.

New safety tools help, but prevention remains the best defense

Issa said that 95% of these incidents are preventable and that prevention starts by installing systems in or near grain bins that can safely break up clumps and address grain-flow problems from outside the bin.

An alternate solution that Issa and his team have researched is using compressed air to break up grain clumps from outside the bin, though the method can be time-consuming because it only breaks up clumps near the outlet, and the use of high-pressure compressed air requires strict safety precautions.

Issa said that as a last resort, if someone needs to enter a grain bin, all equipment should be shut off and disconnected from its power source. The equipment should also be locked and tagged so it cannot be turned on while someone is inside the bin. He added that workers should wear a harness and have a spotter outside the bin watching them.

“I have a story of three people who went into repair a grain bin, and a trucker came by not knowing they were in there and pulled out grain, and they ended up drowning,” said Issa.

California and Indiana have their own state workplace safety programs that enforce grain bin safety regulations. In California, if someone needs to enter a grain bin, written authorization from a supervisor is required, or a supervisor must be present during the entire operation. California’s regulations also require multiple safety procedures to be followed before entering the bin.

“They will have to install anchor points on the grain bin if the grain bin is older. If it’s newer, then there are anchor points there already,” said Issa. “When they’re installing the anchor points, they should work with a structural engineer so they can tell them how much weight this can support. They need an anchor point that supports at a minimum 1,000 pounds of force, but actually more is recommended.” 

In Nebraska, farmers can rent a robot called Grain Weevil that can be used while filling grain bins to help prevent fines — damaged kernels that tend to cluster in the center —  from building up and causing grain to spoil faster. The robot can also break up crusted grain while the bin is being emptied, reducing the need for farmers to enter the bin.

As for Cory Ritter, he continues honoring his dad’s legacy by prioritizing family while juggling everything else. In the middle of a day packed with work and interviews for this story, he still made time to watch his daughter compete in a high school track competition before leaving on a six-hour drive for work that stretched into the early morning hours.

“I remember what my dad told me: The job will get done. The important thing is to come home to your family every night,” said Cory. “It all starts with the personal responsibility of slowing down and thinking about what you’re doing, and that’s why I wanted to share this story, so that other people can think about that.”

And doing things even if they are hard. 

“It’s hard to drive past this (the grain bin) and still see these holes inside, but I looked at it in the fall, especially as all the harvest traffic goes by this road to our local co-op,” said Cory. “I told myself it’s a reminder for everybody how fast accidents can happen and that take time to slow down and be safe.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

Grain bin accidents remain deadly. One farmer hopes his family’s story can help. 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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Wisconsinites breathed record-breaking levels of air pollution Thursday as wildfire smoke from northern Minnesota and Canada wafted across much of the Great Lakes region and the Northeast. Many monitoring stations across the state recorded pollution considered hazardous for the first time in at least 16 years — the span covered by most monitoring stations’ records.

As of 8 a.m. on Friday, Air Quality Index, or AQI, levels in Madison had peaked above 450 — far above the AQI’s 301 threshold for “hazardous” air quality, where everyone — not just sensitive groups — should take precautions to avoid breathing dangerous air. 

Milwaukee’s AQI reached 644 earlier on Thursday — more than twice the hazardous threshold. Air quality deteriorated even further in northwestern Wisconsin, with the index reaching 967 along the Minnesota border earlier in the day. 

Many Wisconsin communities, including Milwaukee, Waukesha, Odanah and Appleton, were still observing AQI over the 301 threshold Friday morning.

The index categories typically run only from zero to 500.

Thursday’s pollution surpassed levels once considered unprecedented. Before Canadian wildfire smoke pushed the AQI to record highs across Wisconsin in July 2023, cities including Madison, Milwaukee and Waukesha had not recorded an AQI above 200 since at least 2010, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of historical AQI data.

But wildfire smoke has elevated air pollution in Wisconsin each summer since 2023. Major cities have periodically recorded higher AQI readings around July, though Thursday’s levels were the first to surpass those recorded in 2023.

“This is a hazardous air quality episode that we have not experienced before,” Craig Czarnecki, air management outreach coordinator for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, said in an email.

DataWatch: Wisconsin air pollution reaches record highs as wildfire smoke engulfs the state 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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Wildfires in northern Minnesota and Canada have caused some of the worst air quality on record for Wisconsin. The entire state remains under an Air Quality Advisory for fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke until noon on Friday, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. 

As of 2 p.m. Thursday, most of the state’s air quality was in the “very unhealthy” or “hazardous” Air Quality category. That means that everyone, not just sensitive groups, should avoid outdoor activities, the DNR said.

In areas near Superior, the Air Quality Index rose above 800, while parts of eastern Wisconsin including Milwaukee and Kenosha measured above 650. National Weather Service meteorologist Benjamin Sheppard told Wisconsin Watch these levels are some of the worst on record. 

“What we’ve heard from some of our partners is that the Air Quality Index values that we’re seeing are definitely either never before seen or up there,” Sheppard said. “I’ve been working here for three years, and I’ve seen nothing anywhere near that high.” 

Index values in Wisconsin have exceeded the records set by wildfires in June 2023, DNR spokesperson Craig Czarnecki said in an email, noting that the figures “will still need to be quality assured.” At that time, levels peaked at 273, which means concentrations in Superior and the Milwaukee area have more than doubled. 

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends setting up a portable air cleaner or filter in a room that can be closed off from outside air and setting your air conditioner  to recirculate mode if possible or close the outdoor intake damper. 

Fine particulate matter, also known as PM2.5, is a main pollutant released from wildfire smoke that can enter the bloodstream. Dr. Joan Schiller, a member of Healthy Climate Wisconsin and retired medical oncologist, told WPR this can exacerbate lung conditions.

“I don’t think people realize how far away you can be from the fire itself and still have health problems,” Schiller said. “These health problems typically manifest themselves as respiratory problems, such as exacerbation of COPD or asthma or emphysema.” 

How can I check the air quality in my area?

The Environmental Protection Agency monitors the air around the country and compiles an air quality index, or AQI.

Here’s what to know about the index and how to keep tabs on your area, especially in U.S. regions dealing with smoke from Canadian wildfires.

What does the air quality index measure? 

The index rates how clean or polluted the air is each day. The EPA uses this measure to keep tabs on five kinds of air pollutants. The main concern from the wildfire smoke is fine particle pollution. These particles are tiny enough to get deep into the lungs. They can cause short-term problems like coughing and itchy eyes and, in the long run, can affect the lungs and heart.

What do the numbers and colors mean? 

The index categories typically only run from zero to 500 – although levels have reached well above 500 in multiple parts of the state. The higher the number, the worse the air quality. That range is broken down into six color-coded categories. Green or yellow — in the zero to 100 range — the air is pretty clear. Once it gets up to orange, the air quality could be a concern for sensitive groups like children, older adults or those with health conditions.

In the red and purple zones, the air quality is considered unhealthy for everyone.

And if the index gets to maroon — at 301 or above — pollution levels are hazardous.

At these high levels, take precautions to avoid breathing in the dangerous air. That can mean reducing your outdoor activities, running air purifiers inside and wearing a well-fitting mask like an N95 when you’re outside.

What’s the air quality right now? 

Check AirNow.gov, which updates every hour. The site shows a real-time map of the air quality across the country and also includes a forecast for the day ahead. The map pulls in measurements from a network of air monitoring stations across the country. States and cities may also offer more local guidance.

How long will smoke last in Wisconsin? 

According to Sheppard and the National Weather Service (NWS), a southerly wind on Friday means smoke is anticipated to retreat from west to east  – likely bringing an end to the advisory for much of the state. 

“With those southwest winds, the air is going to get kind of clearer and healthier in a southwest to northeast manner,” Sheppard said. “Areas further north and east in Wisconsin are going to be most likely to hang on to that smoke.” 

Areas along Lake Superior may also need to have the advisory extended, NWS said. But Sheppard said winds could bring back a second wave of smoke to the rest of the state as soon as Saturday. 

“The weather models tentatively are telling us that the second batch of smoke could be as strong, or perhaps even worse,” he said. 

The Associated Press contributed reporting, as did Hongyu Liu of Wisconsin Watch.

Wildfire smoke brings hazardous air quality in Wisconsin. Here’s how to stay safe 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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On an idyllic evening at the Trempealeau Hotel, the Mississippi River is as much a draw as the musical act that graces its outdoor stage.

If concert-goers gathered on the hotel lawn are lucky — and they often are — they’ll get to see a sorbet sky before the sun tucks behind the bluffs and a train thundering through with a horn-blast hello. The hotel has watched over the river since 1888.

Amy Werner and Jörg Droll, who have owned the hotel since 2012, have seen a surge of interest in their part of the river since the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in outdoor recreation opportunities. The village of Trempealeau, Wisconsin, with a population of about 1,900, has leaned into the phenomenon.

Just as the river’s path has changed over time, so have communities along it changed and adapted.

The Mississippi has been a vital resource for Indigenous people, a source of employment for fishermen, trappers, boat captains and builders of the locks and dams, and more recently, the main attraction on the beloved Great River Road, a 3,000-mile drive from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico that draws millions of Americans every year.

Along this segment of the Mississippi, river communities are exploring different ways to bring people in, now that the days of commercial fishing, trapping and similar river industries have, for the most part, faded. Many are courting tourists, from those driving the length of the River Road to those simply day-tripping from the Twin Cities. Some are emphasizing the ease and nostalgia of small-town life.

They’re all doing so in the face of the headwinds hitting rural areas across the country — declining tax bases, workforce challenges and aging populations. That means it’s essential not just to attract visitors for a moment, but to get those who live there to stay — something that requires serious introspection and vision for the future.

Still, one thing hasn’t changed. The river is the centerpiece. It’s the reason these communities are here, even as they redefine what life on the river means. They’re counting on others to see that too.

“Without the river, the hotel could not exist,” Droll said. “(It’s) part of daily life for us. Every waking minute.”

Tourism drives success in Mississippi River towns

About halfway between Trempealeau and the Twin Cities is Stockholm, a Wisconsin village of less than 100 people that explodes with visitors on summer Saturdays.

The draw is Stockholm Pie, a charming bakery that started as a weekend gig and has now been named America’s best pie shop, twice. The shop’s head baker begins the day between 1 and 3 a.m., preparing up to 70 pies daily in addition to dozens of other sweet treats baked fresh. Owner Alan Nugent’s slice of choice is the sour cream raisin.

Stockholm “has always been the spot,” said Nugent, who first opened an art gallery in the village in 2004 and has since given over his career to pie. He believes its proximity to the Twin Cities is critical — 80% of customers who come through the shop’s door are from there.

More than a decade ago, Nugent decided it was time to share the wealth and formed the West Coast of Wisconsin, a marketing association for the five communities that sit on Lake Pepin — Bay City, Stockholm, Maiden Rock, Pepin and Nelson.

The goal, loosely based on what communities have done in Door County, the popular Midwest vacation destination on Lake Michigan, is for each village to have its own personality and to support the others at the same time. The association has invested significant energy into making the area a destination, Nugent said.

It’s paying off. The area has become a wedding hot spot that can pull hundreds of people on a single weekend. To serve that need, high-end properties have been converted into luxury vacation rentals, Nugent said.

Being a tourist town comes with its own challenges. So many homes have been turned into rentals, it’s hard for a person to actually move to the area, he said. But the change is inevitable.

“The world has changed dramatically,” Nugent said. “Tourism supports a lot of jobs and brings a whole lot of tax revenue.”

According to Travel Wisconsin’s latest economic impact report, seven of eight counties bordering the river saw an increase in direct visitor spending from 2024 to 2025.

In Cassville, less than an hour upriver from Wisconsin’s border with Illinois, tourism director Tracy Fishnick said the village is focusing on visitors “to help keep our community alive.”

Fishnick said village residents know they need tourists, and the river brings them in. Two summers ago, unexpected flooding brought that to a screeching halt — even the iconic Cassville ferry had to pause, and Fishnick said businesses felt it.

The village is also pitching visitors on becoming permanent residents. It received a grant this spring from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation to offer financial incentives for the next two years for out-of-state residents to move to the Cassville area.

“So many people think of small towns and they’re just like, ‘Oh, they don’t have much’ … once you come and spend a weekend or a day here, you grab some food, it’s cheaper,” she said. “You’re going to have a bartender or a waiter that will sit and get to know you.”

Fishnick said public spaces on the riverfront are part of the village’s appeal, in contrast to communities where that area is largely private property.

“We get so many people to just come walk, and sit there and watch the barges,” she said.

Communities lean into nostalgia, grapple with difficult history

In Fountain City, about an hour downriver from Stockholm, what’s old is new again.

Mike Adank moved back to his hometown from New York last fall to take over the Corner Store, an ice cream and soda pop shop with long-standing roots in the community. He whips up sweet concoctions using the building’s 1960s-era soda fountain, which he had painstakingly refurbished.

The shop is full of nostalgic nods: a candy table near the cash register, old newspaper clippings on the walls, Beach Boys over the speakers. Older people are eager to reminisce, Adank said, and young people are glad to have a place besides school to hang out.

“We’ve got all these really cool stories and buildings and history. That was important to me when I came back,” Adank said. “My parents were like, ‘What are you going to call it?’ I was like, ‘It’s the Corner Store.’ That’s what it always was to me, and that’s what it has to be.”

The community has welcomed his venture, he said, signaling another old habit that’s come around: shopping local.

In the 1980s, he recalled, Fountain City lost businesses like a grocer and hardware store as people began to make the 15-minute drive to Winona, Minnesota, for small conveniences.

Now, residents recognize the city flatlines if people don’t invest, Adank said. It’s given them – him included – new momentum to try.

History isn’t always sweet, though. Across the river, that’s something Nicky Buck knows well.

Buck, an enrolled member of the Prairie Island Indian Community, was born and raised on Prairie Island near what is now Red Wing, Minnesota, where her Bdewakantunwan Band of Eastern Dakota ancestors lived long before white settlers arrived. Other tribal nations once came to the Mississippi River valley for its lush abundance of plant medicines, Buck said.

For a long time, the relationship between the tribe and the city of Red Wing was strained due to intolerance of Indigenous people, she said. Her uncle, Art Owen, and his father, Amos, led early efforts to change that, which the community continues today. 

In 2022, the two governments signed a memorandum of understanding to share information and give tribal members a seat at the table. That year, Buck and others began the Honoring Dakota Project, which seeks to bridge cultures and create a unified world rooted in Dakota lifeways. A mural unveiled in 2023 depicts Chief Red Wing and the sacred nearby bluff site He Mni Can.

The Honoring Dakota Project has helped facilitate viewings of the tribe’s bison herd, an Indigenous art market and, in 2024, an inaugural wacipi, or powwow. It has also played a role in critical safety upgrades, like the construction of an overpass that opened in 2025 providing a safe way on and off Prairie Island over one of the state’s most dangerous rail intersections.

The work has been healing for Buck’s community.

“We’re making sure there is a place for the next seven generations,” she said, referencing an Indigenous principle about making decisions today that will benefit multiple generations to come.

The river makes everything work

The Mississippi River itself is always changing — in some ways, not for the better. Buck worries about high levels of PFAS, pesticides and plastics that could rob her community of their lifeways. Others are concerned that backwaters are disappearing as sediment fills in from upstream.

Still, the river remains a powerful reason for these communities’ existence.

A little over an hour down the road from Fountain City, Mark Clements and his son Conner run Clements Fishing Barge in Genoa.The river has been integral to the family business for 90 years.

Clements’ grandfather fashioned an early version of their raft using leftover construction materials from the creation of the nearby lock and dam in 1936. The aim of the business hasn’t changed — providing an affordable way for people without their own boats to fish the river.

It’s a fishing destination, Clements said, which is good for Genoa, which reaps the benefits of people spending money to stay. On a nice spring weekend, as many as 100 people might be out on the barge. Helping kids connect to the river through fishing is their priority, he said — so much so that he’s never increased the cost for a child to fish for the day.

Fishing outfits like Clements’ are a clear connection between the river’s past and present, one appreciated by longtime “river rats” like Max Bachhuber. Bachhuber ran the Great Alma Fishing Float in Alma, just north of Fountain City, from 1963 through much of the 1980s.

When businesses would close for the day, Bachhuber recalled, people would spill out onto the river to fish for their dinner. Now, it’s mostly for sport, he said, and the population of Alma is largely retirees. But he loves it despite its changes.

“My favorite thing is to be able to look out and see (the Mississippi River) every day,” Bachhuber said. “If you go away, you’re going to come back. You’re going to miss it.”

Whether river communities are shrinking or expanding, have momentum or are struggling to find a vision, are leaning on their history or learning to reconcile it, Bachhuber’s take is one shared by many: Life on the river is unlike anywhere else.

At the Trempealeau Hotel, Werner and Droll feel that singularity when they serve up river catfish at their restaurant, when they watch a sunset, or when a band plays to a sold-out crowd under a full moon.

Through the challenges that may come, they’ll always have this place.

“It’s just pure pleasure,” Werner said.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

The Mississippi River built these towns. Now tourism is helping sustain them. 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.