Fred Clark announced Wednesday he's running for Wisconsin's 7th Congressional District. (Screenshot)

Fred Clark, a former Democratic state legislator and executive director of Wisconsin Green Fire, announced Wednesday he’s running for Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District

The 7th District covers much of northern and central Wisconsin. It is currently held by Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany, who recently announced he is running for governor. Clark served in the Legislature from 2008 to 2015. After leaving the Legislature, he worked for Green Fire, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting Wisconsin’s environment. 

In a video announcing his run, Clark complained that Congress is allowing President Donald Trump to institute tariffs that are harming the northern Wisconsin economy while cutting federal benefits and failing to keep the government funded. 

“We’re all starting to pay more for the things we need because this Congress refused to stop an insane tariff war against our best trading partners,” Clark said.  “And unbelievably, they just voted for a massive handout to billionaires that will add $3.4 trillion to our national debt while taking health care away from 270,000 Wisconsinites who need it the most, leaving the rest of us to pay more for health care that’s just getting worse.” 

On his campaign website, Clark says his priorities are rebuilding rural economies, maintaining secure borders while providing a pathway for immigrants to live and work in the country, expanding health care coverage and responsibly managing the state’s farms and forests. 

Jessi Ebben, a Republican from Stanley had filed to run for the seat before Tiffany announced his gubernatorial campaign. Republican state lawmakers from the area, including Senate President Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk) could also get in the race.

In a video posted to X, Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar announced she's running for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. (headshot courtesy of Wisconsin Court System)

Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar announced she’s running for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court Wednesday morning.

Since her election to the District II Court of Appeals in 2022, Lazar has been a reliable vote for right-wing causes on the panel — which is controlled by a 3-1 conservative majority. 

Lazar joins fellow appellate Judge Chris Taylor in the race for an open seat on the Court, which is being vacated by Justice Rebecca Bradley. Bradley has been one of the Court’s most right-wing members and announced earlier this year she would not run for re-election. 

In a video posted to X, Lazar said she was running for the seat to reduce the “politicization” of the Court. 

“We need to draw a line in the sand and stop the destruction of our courts, especially our state Supreme Court,” Lazar said. “I am an independent, impartial judge who strives to follow the law and Constitution in every decision I make from the bench. It is time to restore that level of judicial dedication to the Court.”

Lazar, a former Waukesha County judge and assistant district attorney, also noted that she’s been elected to her seats on the circuit and appeals courts while Taylor, a former Democratic state lawmaker, was first appointed to a seat on the Dane County Circuit Court by Gov. Tony Evers. 

While her campaign announcement sought to establish her nonpartisan bonafides, Lazar has a history of fighting for Republican causes. In her last campaign for her seat on the court of appeals, Lazar touted endorsements from prominent election deniers. 

Those endorsements included former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who recently agreed to have his law license suspended for three years over his widely derided review of the 2020 presidential election, Jim Troupis, who is facing criminal charges for his role in the plot to cast false Electoral College votes on behalf of President Donald Trump, and Bob Spindell, a Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission who cast one of those fraudulent ballots and has regularly used his position to spread conspiracy theories about election administration. 

Lazar was also endorsed in that race by Pro-Life Wisconsin, an organization dedicated to banning all abortions in the state. That endorsement is a stark contrast with Taylor, who previously worked as policy director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. 

“Just like Rebecca Bradley, Maria Lazar has spent her career rolling back people’s rights, attacking reproductive health care and voting rights, and doing the bidding of powerful special interests and her billionaire friends,” Ashley Franz, Taylor’s campaign manager, said in a statement. “If elected, Maria Lazar would be the most extreme member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. It’s no surprise that she’s backed by the same right-wing billionaires who tried unsuccessfully to buy a seat on our supreme court this last April, which Wisconsinites overwhelmingly rejected.”

Photo by Gregory Conniff for Wisconsin Examiner

Wisconsin farms applied about 16 million pounds more nitrogen than necessary to their fields in 2022, according to a recently released report from Clean Wisconsin and Alliance for the Great Lakes. 

The excess application of fertilizer poses serious risks to public health, raises costs for people who get their water from public utilities or private wells and increases costs for farmers, the report found. 

Throughout the report, the environmental groups included input from residents who have had their health and wallets affected by nitrate pollution. 

“I own a daycare center, and the mental toll of just staying in business because I did not cause the contamination of my well and yet am expected to solve the problem is exhausting…” Kewaunee County resident Lisa Cochart says in the report. “This could put me out of business. I work hard to provide my community with a service that assures that each child is receiving the best care and it can be shut down because of a nitrate test that I cannot control.”

The report makes a number of recommendations to better track the amount of nitrogen spread on Wisconsin’s fields and in Wisconsin’s water systems while better enforcing regulations meant to protect drinking water. But agricultural industry representatives have said the report places too much burden on farmers — even though agriculture produces up to 90% of the nitrogen in the state’s groundwater. 

“Wisconsin cannot afford to delay. The cost of inaction — both financial and human — is rising,” the report states. “A coordinated, science-based policy response is essential to reduce nitrate pollution at its source, protect public health and ecosystems, and ensure clean, safe drinking water for future generations.”

The report recommends tougher state standards for nitrates, improved enforcement of nutrient management plans on individual farms, creating a statewide registration system for manure haulers and requiring regular groundwater monitoring for factory farms. It also proposes collecting data on the cost of nitrogen contamination to public water systems, expanding the state’s existing private well compensation program and increasing the state’s nitrogen fertilizer tonnage fees.

While the report’s recommendations are aimed at a wide range of policy areas and farming is the major source of nitrogen contamination, dairy industry representatives have pushed back on its findings. Tim Trotter, CEO of the Dairy Business Association, told Wisconsin Public Radio farmers are already doing enough voluntarily to address the problem. 

“Our work with solutions-minded environmental groups and other stakeholders through a statewide clean water initiative has resulted in tailored changes to programs and policies that open up more opportunities for on-farm innovation that addresses this important issue,” Trotter said. “Reports like this one do little to bring practical, achievable solutions to water quality challenges, and can be counterproductive to progress.”

In the past, the Dairy Business Association has sued state regulators to weaken the state’s ability to regulate pollution sources such as runoff. 

The report states that the state Legislature and the courts have limited the authorities of state agencies, including the Department of Natural Resources and Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, preventing them from doing all that is necessary to manage the contamination. 

“Because Wisconsin administrative agencies have been severely limited in their ability to establish new regulations, they have relied heavily on voluntary incentives, such as cost-sharing and price supports to incentivize farmers to implement conservation measures,” the report states. “However, it is clear that these voluntary incentives alone aren’t enough to solve Wisconsin’s nitrate problems.”

The report also found that in applying more nitrogen fertilizer than necessary, Wisconsin’s farmers are spending $8-$11 million more each year than they need to — “dollars that could be saved with more precise application.” 

More than one-third of the state’s residents get their drinking water from private wells, which are especially susceptible to nitrate contamination. The report recommends expanding the well compensation program, but adds that is just a band-aid solution. 

The program also limits participation to residents making less than $60,000 per year and includes a number of requirements that further restrict who is eligible, even if their wells exceed the state’s nitrate standard of 10 milligrams per liter, according to the report.  

Instead, the report argues, the state needs to better work to keep nitrates out of the groundwater in the first place. 

“Well compensation programs, while vital for near-term relief, are ultimately a stopgap,” the report states. “They do not address the root cause of nitrate pollution. Without stronger upstream controls on nitrate pollution, more families will face the high cost and growing scarcity of access to safe drinking water.”

Former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman in a 2021 video promoting the partisan review of the 2020 election. (Screenshot/Office of the Special Counsel YouTube channel)

Former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s license to practice law in Wisconsin should be suspended for three years, a third-party referee wrote, agreeing with the state Office of Lawyer Regulation’s allegations that he violated standards for professional conduct during his much-maligned review of the 2020 presidential election. 

The Wisconsin Supreme Court will have the final say in the matter, a Court spokesperson said Friday.

The suspension recommendation marks the conclusion of Gableman’s effort to fight attempts to hold him accountable for his conduct during the election investigation. The OLR found that while working on behalf of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to look into alleged wrongdoing during the election, Gableman lied to a Waukesha County judge about conversations he had with other attorneys, lied to an Assembly committee, deliberately violated state open records laws, used his agreement with Vos to pursue his own political interests, violated his duty of confidentiality to his client and lied in an affidavit to the OLR as it was investigating him. 

Gableman’s investigation ultimately cost the state more than $2.3 million without finding any evidence to confirm President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of fraud during the 2020 election. 

The review also helped further fan the flames of election conspiracy theories in the state. Those beliefs have remained prominent among segments of the state Republican Party’s base nearly five years after the election. 

After fighting the allegations against him, Gableman ultimately reached an agreement with the OLR and stipulated that the allegations in the complaint against him were true. 

In his report the referee, James Winiarski, wrote that the consequences for Gableman’s actions must be severe. 

“A high level of discipline is needed to protect the public, the courts and the legal system from repetition of Attorney Gableman’s misconduct by Attorney Gableman or any other attorneys,” Winiarski wrote. “His misconduct was very public in nature and involved many members of the public and employees of several municipalities.”

This report has been updated to clarify that the Wisconsin Supreme Court will make the final decision on the referee’s recommendation. 

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer's badge is seen as federal agents patrol the halls of immigration court in New York City on June 10, 2025. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

ICE arrests in Wisconsin from January to the end of July this year increased 22% compared to the same time period last year and most of that increase has come from federal authorities arresting people who have been charged with but not yet convicted of a crime, according to federal data compiled by the Deportation Data Project. 

Advocacy groups say the increase in arrests has sown fear and confusion among the state’s immigrant communities, and the intensity of ICE’s tactics have drawn attention and controversy across the country. But Wisconsin has thus far avoided the full brunt of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown compared to the state’s four midwestern neighbors. 

Iowa, which of the five states had the lowest number of ICE arrests last year under President Joe Biden, has seen arrests increase 293% this year under Trump. 

Illinois, where Chicago has become a focus of federal law enforcement and ICE activity, has seen ICE arrests increase 46% this year. 

Minnesota, despite its similarities to Wisconsin in  total population and number of Hispanic residents, has seen ICE arrests increase 95% this year. 

Last year, Michigan and Wisconsin had nearly equal amounts of ICE arrests. But under Trump, Michigan ICE arrests increased 152%. 

Luis Velasquez, statewide organizing director for Voces de la Frontera, told the Wisconsin Examiner that the administration’s tactics have caused fear to spread through immigrant communities across the state — even if the total number of arrests hasn’t increased as much as in other places. And while the numbers haven’t increased substantially, local law enforcement across the state has shown an increased willingness to devote resources to the federal immigration crackdown. The number of county sheriff’s offices participating in a federal collaboration program with ICE has jumped from nine to 14 this year. 

“In many ways it is like a psychological warfare that this administration has launched,” Velasquez said. 

Tim Muth, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Wisconsin, said the data can’t be used to predict future ICE activity in the state, but in the first eight months of the Trump administration, ICE is working with local law enforcement in ways that have terrified immigrants. 

“We don’t want to speculate on individual statistics or on what the future plans of the Trump regime may be, but we can say that increased collaboration between local law enforcement and ICE is instilling a sense of fear and instability in Wisconsin’s immigrant communities,” Muth said in an email. “We know they are ramping up their deportation agenda, and they are relying on local authorities to make it happen.”

Trump was elected after running on a platform of “mass deportations” and taking advantage of a backlash against a spike in the number of people making claims for asylum at the U.S./Mexico border under President Joe Biden. But Velasquez said it feels like ICE’s increased role is doing nothing to address the real challenges of immigration policy.

“There isn’t this thoughtful, strategic conversation, to really solve these issues,” he said. “It has been very radical, the way that it’s been enforced. So on the ground people have lost that kind of sense of let’s talk about solutions. It feels very reactive. People are not shopping, with school started again, there’s fear about ICE going into schools. It’s charged with anxiety and fear. It’s unnecessary suffering that is being caused statewide.” 

He points to instances in which people living in the country without legal authorization  have been arrested after showing up for court dates or been accused of bizarre crimes by the federal government. 

“What people are sensing in one way is this is a system that doesn’t make sense. It’s not working for us,” he said. “And then, on the other hand there’s people who are saying, ‘Well, I can be accused of any crime, and then I could just be detained.’”

The Trump administration and Department of Homeland Security officials have regularly claimed ICE is targeting “the worst of the worst,” rooting out violent criminals and gang members. But NBC5, a Chicago TV station, reported this week it could find no criminal record for people the department arrested on immigration charges, claiming they were violent offenders. 

Across the Midwest the increase in ICE arrests has been driven by targeting people who have been charged but not  convicted of crimes — a tactic that experts say violates due process and makes communities less safe. 

In Wisconsin, under Biden, 56% of those arrested by ICE were convicted of a crime and 9% had pending criminal charges. This year under Trump, 60% of those arrested have been convicted of a crime and 24% have pending criminal charges.

That data includes cases such as Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, the Mexican immigrant who had appeared for a court date in Milwaukee County in a misdemeanor battery case when federal agents from ICE, the FBI and DEA arrived at the courthouse to arrest him. That arrest led to federal authorities charging Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan with a felony for allegedly obstructing the arrest. 

Nationally, 70.8% of people in ICE custody have no criminal convictions, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. 

“ICE will continue to prioritize the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens who have committed violent crimes, ensuring our children are protected and justice is served,” the agency, which did not respond to a request for comment, said in a news release on Wednesday about its arrests of six individuals without legal documentation convicted of sex crimes in six different states. 

While the administration emphasizes justice when it says it is targeting dangerous criminals, Muth said arrests of people not yet convicted damages the criminal justice system. 

“Picking up persons on ICE detainers while charges are still pending subverts the criminal justice system and deprives persons of their right to trial,” he said. “We also remain deeply concerned about the ongoing erosion of due process, as immigrants across the country have been abruptly rounded up by masked agents, detained and arrested without explanation, all while their families are kept in the dark about what’s happening to them. These horrifying scenes point to the federal government’s willingness to ignore the rights of immigrants and betray fundamental principles of our immigration system.”

Luca Fagundes, a Green Bay-area immigration attorney, says ICE operating in courthouses is the “easy road” for rounding up immigrants because people have little choice to avoid a court date — even if the crime is as simple as driving without a license, which immigrants without legal authorization to live in the country are unable to obtain in Wisconsin. 

“People are showing up to traffic court, and when their case is called their identity is confirmed, which makes it very easy for an ICE officer to detain them after leaving the courtroom,” Fagundes said in an email. “That person, who showed up for court (again, for perhaps something as simple as driving without a license) is now being arrested and detained by ICE. They will then be transferred to an ICE facility where they wait weeks or months for a bond hearing with an immigration judge. While in ICE custody waiting to see the immigration judge, they typically then miss the next court appearance they may have on their traffic court matter, and that results in a warrant for their arrest on that simple traffic matter.”

“It’s a domino effect of catastrophe for that individual,” she added, “and, if applicable, their family.” 

Velasquez said the modest increase in arrests here in Wisconsin has triggered fear. But he said successful organizing efforts to protect migrant farm workers and prevent more law enforcement from signing agreements with ICE may have helped stave off raids on farms and, for now, helped keep Wisconsin’s immigrant workforce safer than workers in other states. 

“There’s people who are being detained, so people are feeling it, regardless of the data,” he said. “But I do agree [about] the power of local communities being able to reject and say that we know  what’s best for our local communities. We’re not going to be seduced by money, by this administration. … We know our local communities better, and we don’t want our workers to suffer.”

“I think that there are powerful alliances that are being built across Wisconsin,” he continued. “That may be the reason why we haven’t gotten hit. But who knows — that could dramatically change tomorrow, right? So we do recognize the small victories, and this is good news, right? But at the same time, I think we need more dialogue. We need more common sense policies. We need more conversations of what we agree on.”

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Microsoft’s $3.3 billion data center project in Mount Pleasant will require up to 8.4 million gallons of water per year, according to data released Wednesday by the city of Racine.

Racine officials on Wednesday released the records related to the projected usage of water at Microsoft’s planned artificial intelligence data center seven months after they’d been initially requested by a Milwaukee-based water quality advocacy group and days after a lawsuit was filed to force their publication. 

The data center is currently under construction at the site initially planned to hold the Foxconn manufacturing plant in Mount Pleasant and expected to begin operation next year. 

Data centers require a huge amount of energy to keep running and use a significant amount of water to keep the servers inside cool. The water for the data center is being provided by the Racine Water Utility under an agreement with the village of Mount Pleasant. The Foxconn site has already been subject to water-based controversy after concerns were raised that water would be diverted from Lake Michigan to the area. 

The Great Lakes watershed around the southwest tip of Lake Michigan does not extend very far off the shoreline, meaning any water taken to Mount Pleasant is taking water away from the Great Lakes — threatening the agreements in the Great Lakes compact and risking the creation of a precedent across the eight U.S. states and two Canadian provinces along the Great Lakes shoreline. 

According to the Racine projections, the first phase of operations on the data center campus would use a peak of 234,000 gallons per day or 2.8 million gallons per year. In later phases, as more substations go online, the campus would use 702,000 gallons per day or 8.4 million gallons per year.

An Olympic-sized swimming pool holds about 660,000 gallons of water. Lake Michigan holds 1.3 quadrillion gallons of water. 

On Monday, Madison-based Midwest Environmental Advocates filed a lawsuit on behalf of Milwaukee Riverkeepers to release the requested water use projections, which the water organization had initially asked for in a February open records request. 

“Data centers will have major implications for Wisconsin’s environment. Our ability to understand the impacts and protect our water resources depends on open and transparent government,” Milwaukee Riverkeeper’s Cheryl Nenn said. 

Across the country and Wisconsin, data centers such as the site in Mount Pleasant have been proliferating as tech companies race to develop AI tools and chatbots. In some cases, the tech companies have required local governments to sign non-disclosure agreements that cover information beyond proprietary secrets and include potential community impacts. 

City officials said Wednesday the request took so long to complete because the city was making sure that providing the information did not violate a contractual agreement. 

“Open and transparent government is not optional; it is essential to public trust,” Racine Mayor Cory Mason said in a statement. “While we needed time to ensure that we handled this request responsibly and in compliance with legal agreements, we believe transparency is paramount. The information has been released, and we remain committed to making all relevant government records accessible so our community can see how decisions are made and resources are used.”

As power-hungry data centers proliferate, states are searching for ways to protect utility customers from the steep costs of upgrading the electrical grid, trying instead to shift the cost to AI-driven tech companies. (Dana DiFilippo/New Jersey Monitor)

Two environmental groups are warning state residents about the amount of energy and water that is set to be used following the construction of AI data centers in southern Wisconsin. 

In an analysis released Tuesday, Clean Wisconsin found that two data centers approved for construction in Ozaukee and Racine counties will consume enough energy to power 4.3 million homes — nearly double the 2.8 million housing units in the state. 

The first AI data warehouse, operated by Microsoft, is set to open next year in Mount Pleasant. The company has promised it will support 500 jobs. The $3.3 billion project is located at the site initially planned for Foxconn’s massive manufacturing plant. 

Further north in Ozaukee County, Denver-based Vantage Data Systems has acquired 700 acres of land in rural Port Washington. The company has planned a campus that will hold 11 data center buildings and five substations, according to concepts approved by the local government. 

Clean Wisconsin’s analysis found that these two projects will require a combined 3.9 gigawatts of power and hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to keep the buildings cooled. 

“To put this in perspective, that is more than three times the power production capacity of Wisconsin’s Point Beach nuclear plant,” Paul Mathewson, Clean Wisconsin science program director, who conducted the analysis, said in a statement. “And because only two of the data center projects have disclosed their power needs, we know this is really just a fraction of what the energy use would be if all those data centers are ultimately built.”

The power needs of the two sites are just the tip of the iceberg for the energy and water needs of data centers, which house the servers used to host chatbots such as Chat GPT, stream video and use social media. Microsoft has plans for a smaller data center in Kenosha County. Work is also underway on a data center on 830 acres in Beaver Dam reportedly for Facebook owner Meta. In addition, a Virginia-based company has eyed a site in Dane County, Wisconsin Rapids has plans for a $200 million data center and Janesville is seeking to build a center in a former General Motors assembly plant. 

A proposed project in Caledonia has been delayed following  local resistance to the project’s proposed rezoning of 240 acres of farmland. The community’s plan commission postponed a July vote on the proposal until later this month. 

Environmental advocates say local officials and the state’s power companies are rushing to attract data centers to Wisconsin based on the ambiguous promise of jobs without accounting for the effect they could have on a community’s water sources and energy needs. Increases in the amount of power used by the state could result in the state relying more heavily and for longer periods on non-renewable sources of energy and raise energy rates for households. 

‘More questions than answers’

“If data centers come to Wisconsin, they must benefit  — not harm — our communities. But right now, we have far more questions than answers about their impacts. How much energy and water will a project use? How will those demands be met? Will there be backup diesel generators on site and how often will they be fired up for testing? Our communities don’t have the transparency they need and deserve,” Chelsea Chandler, Clean Wisconsin’s climate, energy and air director said. 

Data centers also often emit a constant humming sound as the servers work inside, creating an irritating noise pollutant for neighbors.

Both the Mount Pleasant and Port Washington projects are close to Lake Michigan, raising further complications about the centers’ use of water and the protection of the Great Lakes. The Foxconn site in Mount Pleasant was already at the center of a controversial plan to divert 7 million gallons of water per day from Lake Michigan. 

“There has been very little transparency about the amount of water that will be used on site at these proposed data center campuses. Add to that a lack of transparency about energy use, and it’s impossible to know what the impact on Wisconsin’s water resources will be,” Sarah Walling, Clean Wisconsin’s water and agriculture program director said. “Communities need to know what the on-site demand will be on the hottest, driest days of the year when our water systems are most stressed. And we need to understand how much water will be needed off site to meet a data center’s enormous energy demands.”

Demanding water-use information from Racine

Earlier this week, Midwest Environmental Advocates filed a lawsuit against the city of Racine for records about the Mount Pleasant center’s projected water usage. Water for the center will be provided by the Racine Water Utility under an agreement with the village of Mount Pleasant. 

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Milwaukee Riverkeeper, is seeking to force Racine to hand over information about projected water usage requested through an open records request in February. In a news release, MEA noted that many companies constructing data centers across the country require that local governments sign non-disclosure agreements. 

The legal advocacy group noted that data centers can use as much water as a small to medium sized city and the public has a right to know the scale of water use. 

“Wisconsin law requires public officials to respond to public records requests ‘as soon as practicable and without delay.’ Yet more than six months after making their request, our clients are still waiting,” MEA legal fellow Michael Greif said. “This blatant disregard for the Public Records Law violates their rights and deprives them of the transparency they deserve. Community members have a right to know how much water a data center will use before it is built.”

A petroleum refinery in Louisiana. Last week, a federal appeals court ruled that Wisconsin doesn't need to comply with stricter air quality rules to decrease smog in three southeastern Wisconsin counties. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

A federal appeals court has ruled that the state of Wisconsin and businesses operating in certain parts of southeastern Wisconsin will not be required to meet more stringent air quality standards for ozone pollution — giving state regulators and industry a reprieve from what they say were “costly and burdensome requirements.”

On Friday, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state’s request to temporarily postpone a rule issued by the Environmental Protection Agency. Late last year, the EPA reclassified areas of Milwaukee, Kenosha and Sheboygan counties as being in “serious nonattainment” of the agency’s 2015 ozone standards. In February, the state filed a lawsuit for the review of the EPA finding. 

The enforcement of the EPA standard would have forced the state to revise its plan for complying with national air quality standards under the Clean Air Act, and hundreds of businesses would have had to assess if their existing permits need to be renewed or revised. The state complained that these measures would have cost the Department of Natural Resources and the state’s businesses millions of dollars when most of the ozone pollution over the areas is caused elsewhere and settles over southeast Wisconsin after drifting across Lake Michigan. 

Environmental groups have said that even if Wisconsin’s industries aren’t creating most of the ozone pollution, the businesses have a duty to work to protect the health and well-being of the state’s residents. In 2018, Clean Wisconsin sued the EPA to force the agency to declare the three southeastern Wisconsin counties aren’t complying with federal air quality rules. 

Ozone pollution, also known as smog, occurs most often in the summer when air pollution from vehicle exhaust and industrial processes reacts with sunlight. The pollution can be harmful to people’s respiratory systems. 

“The fact that southeastern Wisconsin has been reclassified as in serious nonattainment for ozone means that residents of those counties are at higher risk of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, and Wisconsin should be implementing all possible policies and strategies to reduce ozone pollution to protect public health,” Clean Wisconsin attorney Katie Nekola said in a statement to Wisconsin Public Radio. 

But business groups and the state have argued the costs are too high for a problem that doesn’t start in Wisconsin. DNR analysis has found that less than 10% of the ozone pollution in the state is caused by Wisconsin industry. 

The state Department of Justice said in its lawsuit that the “change triggers costly permit requirements, complex regulations, and stringent emissions offset mandates,” which could create $4 million in added costs for the state and cost an estimated 382 businesses between $1 million and $6.9 million.

Scott Manley, a lobbyist for Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, said the court’s Friday order grants relief from the “crushing and job-killing ozone regulations.” 

“Data from both the DNR and EPA indicate that the vast majority of ozone pollution in eastern Wisconsin is caused by emissions originating from outside our state borders,” Manley said in a statement. “It’s unfair to punish Wisconsin businesses for pollution they didn’t create, and [the] order is the first step toward righting this wrong.”

Protesters in Milwaukee take part in a 2019 march demanding action to address climate change. Fifteen young people are suing the state of Wisconsin for harming their future by allowing pollution that hastens climate change. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)(

Kaarina Dunn has grown up hearing stories of the Wisconsin winters her parents and grandparents got to enjoy. Winters with enough snow cover that the family of ski-enthusiasts could get on the slopes from Thanksgiving to Easter. 

But despite the state’s continued connection with ice and snow, winters like those of her family’s past are gone. Climate change has caused Wisconsin’s winters to warm more than any other season. A number of recent winters have seen drought conditions with little to no snow across the northern part of the state — severely damaging winter tourism and canceling or modifying events such as the American Birkebeiner. While data shows that the amount of snowfall on average is similar to decades past, the weather doesn’t stay as cold throughout the winter, meaning that the snow melts before it can accumulate to the truly deep levels of previous generations. 

“I hear all these great stories about how they got to ski over Thanksgiving, how they skied past Easter time, how they went on all these great trips around the state of Wisconsin to all these ski hills, mountains, all these amazing places,” Dunn, a 17-year-old Onalaska resident, tells the Wisconsin Examiner. “And I can’t help but feel incredibly saddened by this. I will never experience these things. These are family traditions, trips that my family would go on, with family members, with friends, and do all these amazing and fun things. And honestly, I do feel left out. I feel let down by my state. I can no longer enjoy these things due to the direct results of fossil fuels in the environment.” 

Dunn is one of 15 young people suing the state of Wisconsin, arguing that state laws violate their constitutional rights and worsen climate change. The lawsuit mirrors a similar lawsuit from children in Montana, who successfully argued that the state had to consider the greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impact of permits involving fossil fuels. 

The children are represented in the lawsuit by Madison-based Midwest Environmental Advocates and Oregon-based Our Children’s Trust. 

In Wisconsin, the suit argues that state lawmakers have made a number of declarations that the state’s energy production should be decarbonized and the greenhouse gas emissions of that production should be reduced, but state laws prevent that from happening. 

The state’s law for siting power plants requires that the state Public Service Commission determine that “[t]he proposed facility will not have undue adverse impact on other environmental values such as, but not limited to, ecological balance, public health and welfare, historic sites, geological formations, the aesthetics of land and water and recreational use.” However the law also prohibits the PSC from considering air pollution, including from greenhouse gas emissions, in that determination. 

Additionally, the state set a goal in 2005 that 10% of Wisconsin’s energy come from renewable sources by 2015. That goal was met in 2013. However, now that the goal has been met, state law treats it as a ceiling on renewable energy the PSC can require. 

“The Commission cannot require any electric provider to increase its percentage of renewable energy generation above the required level,” the lawsuit states, meaning that for more than a decade, Wisconsin’s energy regulators have been unable to push the state’s power companies to develop more renewable energy sources. 

Coal and natural gas make up 75% of the energy produced in Wisconsin and renewable sources make up 17%. 

Skylar Harris, an attorney for Midwest Environmental Advocates, says that children today are going to spend most of their lives dealing with the effects of climate change on their health and lifestyles yet don’t yet have the ability to vote and influence environmental policy. 

“I think people are really starting to acknowledge the direness of the situation that we’re in and the situation that climate change is causing, and how it impacts our inherent rights such as life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” Harris says. “And courts are really starting to see that without the right to a stable climate, which is what we’re arguing for in this case, the rights to life, the rights to liberty, the rights to the pursuit of happiness, they mean nothing, because people can’t pursue them to the fullest extent.” 

Harris says that if the lawsuit is successful, she believes that the PSC will use its new authority to deny permits for new or expanded fossil fuel burning power plants and push the state’s power companies to expand their renewable capacities. 

In the Montana lawsuit, officials argued that the state can’t be held responsible for the effects of climate change on the children in that lawsuit because climate change is caused by emissions from across the globe. Harris says that yes, climate change is a global problem, but it gets fixed by individual governments doing something about it. 

“Climate change is a global problem, but there is no such thing as a global government,” she says. “So if we are to address this global issue, that means every individual, every business and every government, including the state of Wisconsin, has to step forward and do its part. And that’s what we’re trying to make sure is happening with this lawsuit.”

The 15 children in the lawsuit represent a wide swathe of Wisconsin. They live in urban and rural parts of the state and include athletes who have had wildfire smoke affect their sports, farm kids who have had droughts and heavy rains affect their families’ livelihoods and members of the state’s Native American tribes who have seen their cultural traditions put at risk. 

Dunn has spent much of her childhood fighting for environmental causes as president of her local 4-H club and has won three grants for environmentally focused projects from the Bloomberg Philanthropies Climate Action Fund. She says she joined the lawsuit because it can help her community and kids like her across the state. 

“I began my environmental work because I always believed in doing the right thing,” she says. “I believe in fighting for my community, fighting for my family, fighting for my siblings, fighting for everyone, fighting for youth and fighting for families.”

She adds that the PSC “knows that what they are doing is wrong. The governor and the Wisconsin Legislature have indicated that they want renewable energy, and the Public Service Commission simply isn’t changing the laws, and the Legislature isn’t changing the laws.” 

Dunn’s family has lived western Wisconsin’s Driftless Region for generations and she spent most of her childhood in Vernon County. She says the Mississippi River is “almost a family member.”

But massive rain events causing flooding and erosion triggered a massive boulder to tumble down a bluff and into her backyard, making her family fear that it wasn’t safe in their home anymore. They moved north to La Crosse County. 

“We felt very unsafe in the childhood home that I planned to live my entire life in. We made the difficult decision to move cities, move counties, move school districts,” she says. 

A member of her school’s tennis team, Dunn says hotter summers and poor air quality caused by wildfires elsewhere on the continent have forced her to change how and when she practices. Flooding has prevented her and her family from swimming off the dock at her grandparents’ home and affected the work done at their walnut tree farm. 

Dunn says that for her, joining the lawsuit is about standing up and trying to force her state government to admit it has a role to play in mitigating climate change and responding to the ways in which climate change has harmed her life and the lives of the other kids in the suit. 

“Ultimately, our country knows the science that is creating climate change, the fossil fuel industry, and especially Wisconsin, they can no longer stand behind saying, ‘There’s nothing we can do. We don’t know about it. There’s nothing that we can do,’” she says. “But ultimately, we have the science and technology to make changes and to save my life and my future children’s life and have a safe and healthy environment.”

A courtroom and a judge's gavel. (Getty Images creative)

The Milwaukee County judge accused of helping a man evade arrest by federal immigration authorities this spring is set to go to trial in December. 

Judge Hannah Dugan, who has been charged with federal felony and misdemeanor counts, said on Wednesday she would not appeal a U.S. District Court judge’s decision not to dismiss the case against her — though she reserved the right to appeal later. On Wednesday, federal Judge Lynn Adelman scheduled Dugan’s trial to begin Dec. 15. 

Dugan’s case has become a national example of the Trump administration’s effort to crack down on officials in other branches of government at the local, state and federal levels who are perceived as working against Trump’s aggressive immigration policies. Her April arrest drew widespread condemnation as a threat to judicial independence and criticism of federal Department of Justice officials for publicizing the case before she was even indicted. 

The case stems from what federal prosecutors allege was a deliberate attempt to conceal Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant, from federal authorities. Flores-Ruiz was in Dugan’s courtroom for an appearance in a misdemeanor battery case against him when federal agents arrived with an administrative warrant — which only allowed the agents to operate in the public areas of the Milwaukee County courthouse, not within Dugan’s courtroom. 

Dugan directed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out a side door of the courtroom, which led them to the same hallway where the agents were standing but not directly past them. An agent rode down in the elevator with Flores-Ruiz and he was later arrested on the street.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley announced Friday she will not run for re-election next year. 

Bradley, the most right-wing of the Court’s three conservative justices, has been outspoken in her dislike of the Court’s current liberal majority, regularly complaining in written decisions and the press about the Court’s actions. Bradley is an active member of the right-wing Federalist Society and has been rumored to be interested in a federal judicial seat. 

“For years I have warned that under the control of judicial activists, the court will make itself more powerful than the Legislature, more powerful than the governor,” Bradley said in a statement. “That warning went unheeded, and Wisconsin has seen only the beginning of what is an alarming shift from thoughtful, principled judicial service toward bitter partisanship, personal attacks, and political gamesmanship that have no place in court. The conservative movement needs to take stock of its failures, identify the problem, and fix it.”

Bradley was appointed to the Court by Gov. Scott Walker in 2015 and elected to a 10-year term in 2016. She was part of the conservative majority that upheld the actions by Republican legislators to take power away from the governor and attorney general during the lame duck period after Democrats won those seats in the 2018 election. 

She also authored the Court’s 2021 decision creating the “least change” standard for drawing the state’s new legislative maps. That decision was widely seen as an effort by the Court’s conservatives to ensure that whatever maps were instituted largely kept the Republican’s 2011 partisan gerrymander intact. 

Bradley’s decision not to run comes just 221 days before the April 7 spring election, putting the state’s conservatives, who have lost the two most recent Supreme Court elections by double digits, at a disadvantage. 

State Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor announced her run for the Court in May. Taylor’s July campaign finance report shows she’s already raised more than $580,000.

Vice President J.D. Vance addresses a crowd at Mid-City Steel in La Crosse on Thursday. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Vice President J.D. Vance decried what he described as the crime-ridden streets of American cities and Democrats’ alleged efforts to take health care away from U.S. citizens and give it to undocumented immigrants at an event Thursday afternoon at a steel fabrication facility in La Crosse. 

At the event, which took place on the bank of the Mississippi River at Mid-City Steel, Vance and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum touted the benefits that Republicans’ budget reconciliation law, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will deliver for working class Wisconsinites. 

The night before Vance’s visit, Democratic elected officials and candidates for state and federal office mingled with voters at state Sen. Brad Pfaff’s (D-Onalaska) annual corn roast. State Dems came to meet voters at the La Crosse County Fairgrounds in West Salem and to search for a path back to power nationally, trifecta of control of  state government and an effective counter to the authoritarian impulses of President Donald Trump.

The back-to-back events highlighted how politically important western Wisconsin is set to become over the next year as attention focuses on the competitive 3rd Congressional District, represented by Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden, and the open race for governor. 

At the fairgrounds on Wednesday, Pfaff’s staff members handed out 350 brats, 150 hot dogs and 500 ears of corn slathered with 13 pounds of butter as a polka band played and candidates for statewide office made their way down long picnic tables with cups of Spotted Cow and Miller Lite, stopping to chat with voters. In attendance were Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who is running for governor, Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski, who is running for lieutenant governor, and Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, who is running for a seat on the state Supreme Court. Also in attendance were state Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) and Wisconsin Economic Development Coordinator Missy Hughes, both of whom have been testing the waters as possible gubernatorial candidates. 

Pfaff, who ran unsuccessfully against Van Orden for the 3rd District congressional seat in 2022, repeatedly touted the importance of Democrats listening to rural voters and speaking to issues that matter to their lives.

That message played well in front of the group of about 120 attendees who complained that Van Orden does not often face disgruntled constituents. Democrats have frequently highlighted the fact that Van Orden has not held any in-person town halls or debated his Democratic election opponents.

“It’s extremely frustrating. The thing is that we as Democrats, we’ve got a brand that we’ve got to rebuild,” Pfaff said. “And I’m a Democrat. I’m a proud rural Democrat. I was raised with the values of hard work, dedication and resilience. I was raised in the fact that, you know, you need to get up every morning and go to work, and you need to be able to provide for your family and put away for the future. But you need to be able to be part of a community and build a community that is inclusive and welcoming.” 

Pfaff added that Van Orden has not been accessible to his voters or answered for his votes on legislation such as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. 

“You need to be accessible to your constituents, and when you’re not accessible to your constituents, you’re not serving yourself, and definitely you’re not in touch with the people of the district,” he said. “So it’s very concerning. But …  we will have a very competitive congressional race in 2026 and Derek’s gonna have to explain his votes and his actions.” 

Rebecca Cooke, who lost to Van Orden in last year’s election and is running again to unseat him next year, said she’s trying to spend this time, about 14 months before the midterm elections, traveling the district and understanding voters’ concerns. 

“My campaign has always been really focused around working families and working class people, which I think Senator Pfaff too, we have a very similar thought and understanding, because we talk to people, right?” Cooke said. “Brad hosts open events like this so that he can hear from people directly. And I think that that’s the difference with Van Orden, who brings in J.D. Vance, the big guns, because he can’t deliver the message himself. I think we are of and from western Wisconsin, and so we know how to communicate with people in our community, and we listen to them.”

On Thursday, both Burgum and Vance celebrated Van Orden’s vote on the budget reconciliation bill, inspiring Van Orden  to stand from his front row seat and pump his fist. Prior to his vote on the legislation, Van Orden said he wouldn’t support a bill that cut funds from food assistance programs, but ultimately he cast a deciding vote for the legislation that, analysis shows, will boot 90,000 Wisconsinites off food assistance programs and cause 30,000 rural Wisconsinites to lose their health care. 

Burgum also said the Trump administration is working to bring steel manufacturing and shipbuilding back to America. But on Thursday, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin raised the alarm for shipbuilders in Marinette after Trump announced the purchase of ships built in South Korea. 

“I am deeply concerned by recent reports that indicate the Trump Administration is looking to have U.S. ships made overseas in South Korea,” Baldwin said in a statement. “We need to see the details of this agreement because at the end of the day, America cannot compromise here – we are already losing to China and we have no time to waste. We must be firm on our commitment to supporting our maritime workforce, keeping our country safe, and revitalizing America’s shipbuilding capacity. I have long fought to strengthen our shipbuilding industry, and it can’t be done with shortcuts or quick fixes. The President must prioritize American workers by investing in our shipbuilding industry here at home and buying American-made ships.”

Despite the massive cuts the reconciliation law is making to federal assistance programs, Vance said that the Democratic Party is lying about its effects, claiming Democrats voted against the bill because they wanted to raise taxes and give health care to people who are in the country without legal authorization. 

Vance touted the extension of tax cuts passed by Republicans in 2017 during the first Trump administration, saying they will put money back into the pockets of American workers like the ones at Mid-City Steel. He also celebrated Trump’s tariffs calling them a lever to protect American industry. 

“What the working families tax cuts did is very simple, ladies and gentlemen, it let you keep more money in your pocket, it rewarded you for building a business, for working at a business right here in the United States of America, it makes it easy for you to take home more of your hard earned pay and it makes it easier if you’re an American manufacturer, an American business, it makes it easier for you to build your facility or expand your facility,” Vance said. 

But the cost of the tariffs is being borne by American consumers in the form of higher prices, and the tax cuts have largely gone to benefit the wealthiest Americans. 

An analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that 69% of the benefits of the tax cuts will go to the richest 15% of Wisconsinites.

The vice president also painted American cities as crime-infested slums where everyday Americans cannot walk down the street without being accosted by a person “screaming on a street corner.” The Trump administration has deployed the National Guard and Marines in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles in a show  of force, and Trump has threatened to send soldiers to fight crime in other Democratic cities — even though the highest crime rates in the country are in Republican-controlled states. 

On Thursday Vance said that even though Milwaukee has what he said is a crime problem, the president doesn’t want to send troops in to address it unless he’s asked to by local officials. 

“Very simply, we want governors and mayors to ask for the help. The president of the United States is not going out there forcing this on anybody, though we do think we have the legal right to clean up America’s streets if we want to,” Vance said. “What the president of the United States has said is, “Why don’t you invite us in?’”

William Garcia, the chair of the 3rd Congressional District Democratic Party, said that Vance’s visit showed that Republicans are out of touch with western Wisconsin, noting that a speech at a steel fabricator isn’t representative of what actually drives the local economy and delivering that speech to a hand-selected crowd glosses over the pain the Trump administration’s policies are bringing to local communities.

“If you really wanted to talk to people out here, you would talk about agriculture, and you would try and justify why Canadian fertilizer has a massive tariff on it now, so we have to spend so much more money to just grow our own food,” Garcia said. “Then you have to talk about your immigration policies that are preventing our harvest from being picked after they’ve grown. And so that’s why he’s having to narrow the people he’s talking to, to this super small crowd, because by and large, conservative, liberal, whatever, are being hurt by these policies, and he doesn’t want to hear any pushback about that.”

Cows at a Dunn County dairy farm. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

A Wisconsin Court of Appeals on Wednesday ruled that the state Department of Natural Resources has the authority to require that factory farms obtain water pollution permits, affirming a previous Calumet County court decision. 

Two groups representing Wisconsin’s factory farms, known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, filed the lawsuit in 2023, arguing that the state did not have the authority to require permits under the DNR’s Wisconsin Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (WPDES) program. The program requires any entity that discharges pollution into the state’s waterways to obtain a permit. 

The lobbying groups, Venture Dairy Cooperative and the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance, are themselves led by factory farm operators who have been cited by the DNR for contaminating the state’s water through manure spills. Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby, has also been involved in the lawsuit. 

State law requires an application for a WPDES permit must be made within 90 days of becoming a factory farm or expanding. The permits last for five years before they must be renewed. CAFOs — factory farms with more than 1,000 “animal units,” which is equivalent to about 700 milking cows — are also required to submit plans to the DNR for how they intend to manage the manure created on the farm. 

Over the last two decades, the number of CAFOs operating in Wisconsin has more than doubled, creating an increasing amount of manure that sits in lagoons, gets spread onto fields and potentially runs off into local waterways. 

If a manure spill occurs, the permit requires the owner to notify the agency and is responsible for the cleanup. The permits also need to be reapproved whenever an operation is planning to expand and every permit application is subject to a public comment period. 

A manure spill can cause harmful substances such as nitrates, E. coli and phosphorus to enter the state’s ground and surface waters — potentially making drinking water dangerous to consume and causing fish to die. 

Four years ago, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the DNR had the authority to use the WPDES permits to impose conditions on factory farms as a way to control their environmental effects. In recent years, WMC has filed several lawsuits seeking to weaken the DNR’s authority and undermine its ability to regulate water pollution across the state. 

The lawsuit argued that having to comply with the “time-consuming, costly process” of obtaining a permit that imposes “substantial costs and regulatory burdens” on the farms, is against the law because of two previous federal court decisions in 2005 and 2011 about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s own permit requirements for polluters.

On Wednesday, the District II Court of Appeals, which covers 12 counties in southeastern Wisconsin, found that the DNR does have the authority to create the rules the dairy groups challenged. 

“The challenged rules do not exceed the DNR’s statutory authority and do not conflict with state law,” the three judge panel, controlled by a conservative majority, wrote.

After the decision, advocates for the environment and smaller farms said it would help the state protect water quality. 

“This decision is a win for every rural community that depends on clean water,” Wisconsin Farmers Union President Darin Von Ruden said in a statement. “Family farmers understand that stewardship of the land and water is key to long-term success. Ensuring that large livestock operations follow commonsense permitting rules protects our shared resources and the future of farming in Wisconsin.”

“These large operations can produce as much waste as a small city, and the state must be able to monitor and control how, where, and in what quantities manure is stored and spread on the landscape,” said Clean Wisconsin attorney Evan Feinauer. “That’s why for nearly 40 years, the DNR has required large CAFOs to have permits to limit this dangerous pollution. Allowing large dairies to sidestep oversight would have been catastrophic for water protection in our state.”

A sign acknowledging Stewardship program support at Firemen's Park in Verona. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Democrats in the Wisconsin state Legislature released their proposal for saving the broadly popular Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program from lapsing next year. The bill marks the latest step in a legislative effort to save the conservation program — a goal for which members of both political parties have expressed optimism.  

The stewardship grant program through the Department of Natural Resources allows the state to fund the purchase and maintenance of public lands. Created 35 years ago, the program is supported by a large swathe of Wisconsin voters, but a subset of Republicans in the Legislature have grown increasingly hostile to its continuation. 

Those Republicans argue the burden of land conservation falls largely on their rural districts in northern Wisconsin, which has the most land available for recreational purposes but the state purchasing that land takes it off the property tax rolls.

Republicans have also complained that the program lacks legislative oversight since the state Supreme Court ruled in a 6-1 decision last year that the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee doesn’t have the authority to hold up projects through the program. 

Sen. Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk), one of the program’s strongest critics, has suggested she’d support re-authorizing the program if it included provisions that capped the amount of government-owned land in a county or allowed counties to sell off existing conservation land.

Without action, the program will end next summer. In his initial budget proposal, Gov. Tony Evers had asked for the program to be provided $100 million per year for 10 years. The version of the budget signed into law in July did not include the program’s re-authorization. 

Another bill authored by Republican Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) and Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point) would re-authorize the program for six years at $28 million per year. To gain the support of the Republicans who want more oversight of the program, the bill would require that any land acquisitions that cost more than $1 million be approved by the full Legislature. 

Tuesday’s proposal from Democrats would re-authorize the program for six years at $72 million per year. The bill would also create an independent board with oversight authority over the program. 

The 17-member board would include members of the majority and minority in both chambers of the Legislature; two representatives from environmental organizations; two representatives of hunting, fishing or trapping interests; two DNR representatives, including one member from the Natural Resources Board; one representative from the Department of Tourism; one representative of the outdoor recreation industry; one representative from the Ice Age Trail Alliance; a representative of a federally recognized Native American tribe in the state; one local government representative and two members of the public. Members of the board would serve staggered three-year terms. 

Under the bill, the board would meet at least quarterly and have the authority to advise the DNR on all projects through the program. On projects involving grants of more than $2.5 million, the board would have full approval authority. If the board doesn’t meet to vote on a project within 120 days, it would be automatically approved. 

The Democratic proposal has been co-sponsored by all 60 Democrats in the Assembly and Senate, signaling the broad support for the bill among the Democratic caucuses. 

Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay) tells the Wisconsin Examiner that the proposal involves a lot of thoughtful effort from Democrats trying to make a “good faith” effort to answer Republican concerns about oversight over the program while getting it re-authorized. 

“Our intent in introducing these companion bills in the Senate and the Assembly was premised on a great deal of thought and seriousness,” she says. “That we have the expectation that Republican legislators will take it seriously, because, like us, they have been hearing from their constituents and constituents from across the state. This is an issue that people in Wisconsin 90% approve and they want action, and they want legislators to demonstrate that they can work together and lead with our shared values to get something done.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Kurtz said his intention remains working to find a bipartisan solution to re-authorizing the program. 

“It’s always been our intention to find a bipartisan path forward to ensuring the Stewardship Program’s future,” the spokesperson said. “We haven’t reviewed their proposal yet, but look forward to continued discussions on this important issue this fall.”

Charles Carlin, the director of strategic initiatives at the non-profit land trust organization Gathering Waters, says the fate of the program is now up to Republican leaders and their ability to compromise. Carlin points out that it’s clear there aren’t 17 Republican votes in the Senate to support reauthorization. 

“As far as anybody can tell, there’s not 17 Republican senators that are going to vote to reauthorize Knowles-Nelson,” he says. “If they were to choose that strategy of trying to do this with only Republican votes, my fear and expectation is the bill would wind up becoming so weighed down with poison pills and anti-conservation measures, it would wind up not being a workable proposal. On the other hand if leaders in the Senate were willing to say ‘OK, this can be a bipartisan exercise, nobody’s going to get quite what they want,’ I think we’re going to see there are 15 Democratic senators eager to find a solution and we could get a decent bill passed with pretty overwhelming support from both parties.”

Carlin says he sees the Democrats’ oversight board idea as a good way to avoid the Joint Finance Committee “veto fiasco” that previously held up projects through the program while allowing the board to make “smart, educated and informed decisions” separate from the political games of the legislative process. 

However in recent years under Wisconsin’s divided government, legislative proposals have been met with hopes for bipartisan compromise only to end in partisan bickering. Last session, a proposal to get $125 million out the door to clean up PFAS contamination across the state died after initial optimism after Democrats and Republicans couldn’t agree on the bill’s language. 

“That’s a real concern. Where we had the most heartburn and worry coming out of the state budget, this Legislature does not have a good track record of getting things done,” Carlin says. “Even though there were promises made that legislators would come back to work and get Knowles-Nelson done, there’s not a lot of precedent for legislators working together. There are folks on the Republican Senate side who are simply not going to work in good faith to get this done.”

He says Felzkowski’s ideas on the subject are “not serious proposals” but that there are 10 or 12 Republicans in the Senate who value conservation and understand how important it is to the state’s voters. 

“If they really engage with the Democrats’ proposal and find middle ground, we can find that success without too much heartache,” he says. “We do know that everybody’s constituents want to see this get done.”

Protesters gather outside of the Milwaukee FBI office to speak out against the arrest of Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

A federal judge on Tuesday denied a motion to dismiss the criminal charges against Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan in the immigration enforcement-related case that has drawn national attention as an example of the Trump Administration’s effort to punish judges it sees as antagonistic to its increased deportation efforts. 

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman issued a 27-page order denying Dugan’s motion. Dugan’s attorneys had filed to dismiss the case earlier this summer, arguing that the prosecution violated judicial immunity and represented extreme federal overreach into the operations of the state court system. 

Dugan was arrested in April after federal prosecutors alleged she had acted to conceal a man without legal authorization to be in the U.S. from federal agents. The man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, was in Dugan’s courtroom to appear for a hearing on a misdemeanor battery charge against him when agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Drug Enforcement Agency and FBI came to the courtroom to arrest him. The agents were in possession of an administrative warrant signed by an ICE official, rather than a judicial warrant granted by a federal judge. 

The administrative warrant did not give the agents the authority to enter private spaces in the courthouse. 

Dugan directed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out a side door of the courtroom, which led them to the same hallway where the agents were standing but not directly past them. An agent rode down in the elevator with Flores-Ruiz and he was later arrested on the street. Dugan has been charged with a felony and a misdemeanor for allegedly trying to help Flores-Ruiz evade arrest.

Adelman’s decision Tuesday is an important step toward Dugan’s case moving to a trial. In his order, he cited the report of U.S. Magistrate Judge Nancy Joseph several times. Joseph had recommended that the motion to dismiss not be granted. 

“There is no basis for granting immunity simply because some of the allegations in the indictment describe conduct that could be considered ‘part of a judge’s job,’” Adelman wrote. “As the magistrate judge noted, the same is true in the bribery prosecutions, concededly valid, where the judges were prosecuted for performing official acts intertwined with bribery.” 

Adelman gave Dugan’s attorneys until Sept. 3 to appeal his order. If the order is appealed, Dugan’s trial likely wouldn’t occur until 2026. However if there isn’t an appeal, a trial could take place much sooner.

Former Dane County Judge James Troupis appears in court on Dec. 12. He faces felony forgery charges for his role in developing the 2020 false elector scheme to overturn the election results for Donald Trump. (Screenshot | WisEye)

A Dane County judge ruled last week that the criminal cases will be allowed to continue against two former attorneys and a campaign staff member of President Donald Trump for orchestrating the scheme to have Wisconsin Republicans cast false Electoral College votes for Trump in 2020. 

John D. Hyland denied the motion to dismiss in an Aug. 22 order. Last year, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed criminal charges against Kenneth Cheseboro, Jim Troupis and Mike Roman. 

Cheseboro, a Wisconsin native, was one of the main planners of the false elector scheme. The scheme led to Electoral College votes being cast for Trump in seven states and began the series of events that led to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Troupis, a former Dane County judge, worked as an attorney for the Trump campaign. Roman allegedly delivered the false paperwork from Wisconsin Republicans to the staff member of a Pennsylvania congressman in order to get them to Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6. 

The three men each face 11 criminal charges related to felony forgery. Each charge carries a maximum penalty of six years in prison and a $10,000 fine. 

“Troupis does not show that the First Amendment protects the right to commit forgery, does not show that the government violated his right to due process by entrapping him into that forgery, and does not show prosecutors must exercise discretion to charge an accused of his preferred offense,” Hyland wrote in his order denying the motion to dismiss.

The Fox River empties into Lake Michigan in Green Bay, where city officials have proposed a resolution acknowledging that local bodies of water have a right to be protected. (Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources)

Two Republican legislators have proposed legislation that would prevent local governments from enacting “rights of nature” ordinances — laws that grant natural entities legal rights — claiming that such ordinances are “incompatible with America’s founding principles.” 

The proposal from Rep. Joy Goeben (R-Hobart) and Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) was released after the Green Bay City Council voted 9-1 last month to direct the city’s sustainability council to begin drafting a “rights of nature” resolution. 

The concept of granting natural entities legal rights is relatively new in American government, but countries around the world have enshrined legal rights for nature into their constitutions. In Wisconsin, the Menominee and Ho-Chunk Nations have written rights of nature provisions into their tribal constitutions. Two years ago, the Milwaukee County Board enacted its own rights of nature resolution that promises to protect the health of the Menominee, Milwaukee and Fox rivers and Lake Michigan. 

The Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights has been working for years to track and support the passage of rights of nature laws around the world. The organization’s executive director Mari Margil says these laws are meant to help protect the environment.

“As environmental crises deepen, supporters of the bill are trying to make it harder to protect the environment,” Margil says of the Goeben and Nass proposal. 

While the Republican legislation, if it manages to pass the Legislature, is unlikely to be signed into law by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, critics say the proposal is an example of kneejerk Republican opposition to pro-environment ideas and another instance of Republicans from northeast Wisconsin attempting to meddle in Green Bay city politics. 

A co-sponsorship memo supporting the legislation states that these types of ordinances threaten the integrity of the legal system and property rights. 

“Allowing and promoting this ideology represents a dangerous shift in legal precedent,” the memo states. “It would allow nonhuman entities to sue in court, threatening property rights, stalling development, and burdening the judicial system.” 

Goeben did not respond to a request for comment. 

Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee), who helped write Milwaukee County’s resolution as a member of the county board in 2023, tells the Wisconsin Examiner the idea of granting bodies of water legal rights isn’t so different from corporations having legal “personhood.” In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its Citizens United decision that corporations have the right to free speech. 

“It is wholly disingenuous to say only real tangible people have rights and then fight explicitly for those rights for corporations,” Clancy says. “It’s frankly frustrating to see Republicans take these really popular measures, these are broadly popular things, and rather than engaging with us in dialog, just trying to block these things through process. It’s a disingenuous way to go about it. Let’s talk about the things that necessitate these pieces of legislation.” 

He adds that legislators have the power to do more than just write legislation. Goeben’s district is in the Green Bay suburbs but doesn’t include any of the city, but, Clancy argues that she could go to city council meetings and speak with people about these ideas instead of trying to blanket ban them without any dialog. 

“It would be a much more earnest process to show up in Green Bay and go to those meetings and voice your concerns there,” he says. “We have bully pulpits, I show up at the city council, county board, school board meetings, both in my capacity as a legislator and as a parent and community member. Make your case there rather than trying to ban it.” 

A number of Green Bay area officials expressed frustration at Republicans again involving themselves in Green Bay city politics. Earlier this year, Green Bay-area Republicans Rep. David Steffen (R-Howard) and Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Oconto) proposed a bill that would limit the types of flags allowed to be flown at government buildings. Many Green Bay residents saw the bill as an effort to weigh in on a local debate over the flying of LGBTQ Pride flags. 

“Given the challenges our communities are facing, from our housing crisis to fully funding our public schools, I am always surprised by elected officials who don’t represent this city wasting time on policies that don’t solve real problems or fund actual solutions,” Rep. Amaad Rivera-Wagner (D-Green Bay) says.

Joey Prestley, the Green Bay city council member who has led the local rights of nature effort, says the resolution — which hasn’t been drafted yet — is meant to serve as a non-binding advisory statement that city government will consider the environmental effects of its decisions throughout the development process. 

“Historically, the human actors have been the ones who have had the rights and the natural features have not been able to have people speaking for them,” he says. 

Prestley says the idea for the resolution started after a group of residents objected late in the process to a new housing development. The development would be near the Niagara escarpment, a geological feature residents want to protect, but didn’t hit the thresholds that would instigate involvement from the federal Environmental Protection Agency or state Department of Natural Resources. 

“My hope with a resolution would be maybe we consider these — all environmental features — but especially these ones that are important to our region, earlier in the process, and more thoroughly in the process, so we don’t have people coming up in the 11th Hour and saying, ‘wait a second, you can’t build this housing development,’” Prestley says. 

He adds that if that consideration and discussion of the environmental effects came earlier, it could have been a more constructive discussion rather than turning into a heated local debate that had the potential to kill a housing project in a city that, like much of Wisconsin, is in dire need of more housing. The Green Bay city council approved the 160-unit project in April 

“If it had been earlier in our process, it could have been more collaborative, and it could have been neighbors and environmental advocates working together with the developer and the city to make sure it’s a plan that benefits everybody, everybody who engages with the environment, everybody who relies on the environment, everybody who appreciates the environment,” he says.

In proposing a resolution, he adds, the objective is  “not trying to compel anyone, but really trying to adapt as a philosophy for the city that we want to consider nature as the original inhabitants of the land did before we were here.”

Prestley says it’s easy to spin the rights of nature discussion as “the work of a crazy person” who wants “to get trees to sue the city,” but actually he says he’s trying to make sure the city considers the potentially damaging environmental effects of its actions after decades of managing the harmful contamination of the Fox River. 

“There was not enough people speaking up for the damage that was happening to the river back then, and it created something that affected the whole community,” Prestley says. “People used to swim in the river. Nobody touches the river now. Maybe we should consider the environment. That’s not a radical idea, that is a sensible idea, considering what we’ve done in the past in this community, and thinking about how we want to move forward.” 

Prestley says the proposed legislation seems “silly” and notes a number of city actions, such as wetland reconstruction, that have benefited the environment. He says that if the Legislature isn’t going to help, it should get out of the way. 

“I think we’re trying to do good things in Green Bay for the environment,” he says. “And I think the state’s responsibility should be to help with the good things, or to do their own thing.”

The lawmakers proposing the bill, “they’re not helping us,” Prestley says. “They’re not helping the people, they’re just opposing things, and I don’t know why.”

Correction: This report has been updated to correct the vote count when the Green Bay City Council passed a measure to draft a proposed resolution on the rights of nature. 

Community organizations such as DAIS in Dane County could see further cuts if the Trump Administration is allowed to withhold VOCA funds. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul has joined a multi-state lawsuit against the Trump Administration’s demand that states participate in federal immigration enforcement efforts or risk losing access to federal money available through the Victims of Crime Act. 

If the conditions are allowed to go through, Wisconsin could lose up to $24 million meant to help compensate victims of crime as well as fund local advocates, counselors and crisis response centers, according to a state Department of Justice news release

“VOCA funding is intended to be used to help victims of crime,” Kaul said in a statement. “It is appalling that the Trump administration is weaponizing this funding.”

Wisconsin is joined in the lawsuit, which was filed in a Rhode Island federal district court, by New Jersey, California, Delaware, Illinois, Rhode Island, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia.

VOCA takes fees, fines and penalties collected in federal court proceedings and disburses those funds to the states to use on victim services — which can include the operations of community-based organizations such as domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers and the work of victim-witness offices within county district attorneys’ offices. 

While individual law enforcement agencies have agreed to help immigration authorities in various capacities through efforts such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) program, the lawsuit argues that civil immigration enforcement is strictly a federal responsibility.  Requiring that states participate in such actions violates the constitution’s tenets of separation of powers and federalism, the suit argues. 

A handful of communities across the state have enacted policies to prevent local law enforcement from aiding ICE enforcement. Milwaukee Police Department policy states that immigration enforcement is the authority of the federal government and local cops getting involved in the enforcement of immigration law could harm the department’s relationship with immigrant communities. 

“With a policing philosophy that is community-based, problem-oriented, and data-driven, we are committed to ridding the city’s streets of violent offenders regardless of whether such offenders are in the United States legally or illegally,” the policy states. “We are also committed to facilitating safe, sustainable communities where individuals are encouraged to report crime and provide the police with useful information and intelligence. However, proactive immigration enforcement by local police can be detrimental to our mission and policing philosophy when doing so deters some individuals from participating in their civic obligation to assist the police.” 

The Trump Administration’s threat to withhold VOCA funds comes as the program has already seen massive cuts. Last year, Wisconsin’s portion of federal VOCA grants dropped from $40 million annually to $13 million. 

Because of those previous cuts, shelters across Wisconsin have been struggling to make ends meet and retain the services available for victims of crime. 

“Victim services is not just about one person gets hurt and experiences trauma, and then they’re helped and they go on with their lives,” Shira Phelps, executive director of DOJ’s Office of Crime Victim Services, told the Wisconsin Examiner last year. “This is really about sort of taking away a foundation for communities that help in every other aspect. Housing, education, all of those different fields are going to feel this really deep impact.”

Boxes of ballots wait to be counted at Milwaukee's central count on Election Day 2024. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

A bipartisan group of former elected officials from Wisconsin on Monday criticized President Donald Trump’s promise to end mail-in voting and the use of electronic voting machines. 

In a Monday morning post on his social media site Truth Social, Trump said that he’d issue an executive order to end the practices ahead of next year’s midterm elections. 

“I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES,” Trump wrote.

Neither the president nor the federal government has the authority to manage election administration in this way. The law gives individual states broad power to decide how to run their own elections. 

Wisconsin’s election system is the most decentralized in the country, giving much of the authority over how to conduct voting to the state’s 1,850 municipal clerks. The state allows mail-in absentee voting without requiring voters to provide a reason, and the electronic voting machines approved for use in the state are incapable of connecting to the internet. Electronic voting machines are more accurate at tallying votes than a human hand counting them. 

After Trump’s post, the Democracy Defense Project-Wisconsin board, which includes former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, former Attorney General JB Van Hollen, former U.S. Representative Scott Klug, and former Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Mike Tate, said in a statement that such an action would increase inaccuracy in the state’s elections. 

“The Constitution is clear: the federal government does not administer elections at the state level,” the group said. “In fact, improved access to voting methods, including the electronic machines Wisconsin uses that produce paper ballots and are unable to be connected to the internet, have benefitted Republicans just as much as Democrats. Wisconsin has displayed time and time again that our elections are safe and secure, and while we can always make them more efficient, there is no tolerance for inaccuracy in our results.”

An absentee ballot drop box in Madison, where officials lost and failed to count nearly 200 absentee ballots in the 2024 presidential election.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 5-1 on Friday to institute its order against the city of Madison requiring that city officials make a number of changes to absentee ballot processes after the city lost and failed to count nearly 200 ballots during the 2024 presidential election. 

The Madison city clerk’s office told the elections commission in a memo Dec. 20 about the lost ballots from two Madison wards. A bag containing 68 unprocessed absentee ballots from two wards was found Nov. 12 in a tabulator bin, the memo stated. During reconciliation of ballots on Dec. 3, clerk employees found two sealed envelopes containing a total of 125 unprocessed absentee ballots from another ward. The discovery of the missing ballots was announced to the public Dec. 26. 

The missing ballots were not enough to change the result of any local, state or federal elections.

WEC launched an investigation into the error. In a report released last month, WEC found that “confluence of errors” and a “complete lack of leadership” in the city clerk’s office led to the ballots going missing. 

The investigation report also proposed a number of requirements for the city to improve its systems for tracking and counting absentee ballots. Those requirements constituted the order the commission approved on Friday. 

Among other things, the order requires the city to develop an internal plan delineating which employee is responsible for statutorily required tasks, print poll books no earlier than the Thursday before elections, change the absentee ballot processing system so bags and envelopes aren’t lost, update instructional materials for poll workers and complete a full inspection of all materials before the scheduled board of canvassers meeting after an election.

Commissioners followed through with enacting the order after interim City Clerk Michael Haas had sent a letter to the commission, requesting that the provisions of the order be made more broad and suggesting that the commission does not have the authority to enforce such changes to local election practices against just one municipality. 

“Individually-tailored orders for jurisdictions across the state also runs the risk of increasing, rather than decreasing, inconsistency of local election practices,” Haas wrote in an Aug. 6 letter to the commission. “If the Commission truly wishes to dictate the staffing, workflow, and procedures of municipal clerks at such a granular level, a regulatory guidance or rule-making that applies to all jurisdictions and that allows for thoughtful input by local election officials makes far more sense and is likely required.” 

In the letter, Haas wrote that the requirements of the WEC order were drafted in a vacuum from the city’s already existing election processes; that they give no end date or flexibility to election law changes made by the courts, Legislature or WEC itself; don’t address the logistic specifics of running an election in the state’s second largest city and don’t provide statutory reasons for the required changes. 

At the meeting Friday, Democratic Commissioner Mark Thomsen was the only member to vote against enacting the order. Thomsen argued that the order seemed “spiteful.” He said the city administered the 2025 spring election with no issues and that it still doesn’t have a permanent city clerk, so whoever is hired will be hamstrung by an order made because of actions they had nothing to do with. 

“I don’t think it’s fair to burden the new clerk with a set of orders that all the other clerks recognize no one else has to follow,” Thomsen said. “It is absolutely tragic that 193 people’s votes weren’t counted. They have separate legal remedies now. We have done what we needed to do. We’ve done an investigation, we’ve laid it out, and I do not think we should do a power grab and create burdens on the new clerk, whether or not we can exercise it.” 

But the supporters of the order said that not imposing it would mean letting the city off without being held accountable. Commission chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, noted that even though former Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl resigned after the incident, many staff involved in losing the ballots remain in the clerk’s office. 

“I think we need to order it also so that clerks across the state understand the level of seriousness that this commission takes with this,” Jacobs said. “The city needs to straighten out what happened here. And I don’t think there’s been sort of that reckoning yet.” 

Administrative rules 

The commission on Friday also reinstituted the administrative rulemaking process on a number of proposed rules that had been held up by a legislative committee. 

The Legislature’s Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules (JCRAR) had previously suspended emergency rules written by WEC on a number of topics, including instructions for absentee voting and challenges to candidate ballot access. 

Last month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in Tony Evers v. Howard Marklein that JCRAR’s suspension of administrative rules amounted to an unconstitutional legislative veto. Under previous law, state agencies weren’t allowed to promulgate a permanent rule on a topic in which the committee had previously struck down an emergency rule. After the court’s ruling, WEC can once again start the rulemaking process. 

The commission voted to restart the process of establishing rules for challenging candidate nomination papers, challenging declarations of candidacy and mandating that local clerks use a uniform set of rules for absentee ballots.