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While digging out from the snow, we’ve also been marking Sunshine Week — an annual reminder that access to public records and meetings isn’t a luxury or abstract concept. It determines whether the public knows what the government is doing with tax dollars and public trust.

That’s why we published a pair of stories around those themes this week. One, from Tom Kertscher, shows how nondisclosure agreements tied to data center developments limit what communities can learn about projects in their own backyards. The other, from our partners at The Badger Project, examines a long-standing loophole that allows Wisconsin lawmakers to delete records that would otherwise belong to the public.

At the same time, we asked our team to look inward — reflecting on stories we could not have reported without the sunshine laws that quietly power our newsroom every day.

Here are a few recent examples.

‘They are squeezing everybody in this park to death’: Owners of manufactured homes get little protection as private equity moves in

Public records — including state licensing files, inspection records and regulatory complaints — allowed Addie Costello to document Wisconsin’s failure to enforce basic protections for manufactured home owners as private equity firms buy up parks to maximize profits. The story, part of our Forgotten homes series on the promises and perils of manufactured housing as an affordable path to ownership, amplified tenant concerns. It also preceded legislation to limit rent increases, require annual state inspections and make it easier for residents to purchase communities through cooperatives.

Wisconsin’s work-release program promises opportunity. Prisoners say jobs are scarce.

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections provided little meaningful data to Natalie Yahr about its work-release program — a gap that became part of the story. Officials said they do not tally counts of how many people participate. To provide context, Yahr obtained public records from other states, offering points of comparison. The reporting highlights how limited transparency makes it difficult to evaluate a program that can help incarcerated people build resumes, pay court costs and prepare for release — while helping employers fill jobs.

Pest or climate ally? DNR weighs new beaver management plan under mounting scrutiny

This story was strengthened due to persistence. Bennet Goldstein filed records requests across all 10 Mississippi River Basin “stem states,” plus Oklahoma and Michigan, to understand how agencies manage beavers. He also pressed the U.S. Department of Agriculture for documents it initially withheld — records released only after our attorney signaled a willingness to challenge the denial. The reporting produced a fuller picture of how policy decisions ripple across ecosystems and communities, and it is helping shape debate over flood mitigation and climate resilience. It also found Wisconsin stands out for the number of beavers and dams removed, the millions spent and how officials justify the approach.

Duty to Disclose: Milwaukee County’s flawed Brady list

Our collaboration with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and TMJ4 News relies on records many jurisdictions resist releasing, if they store them at all: “Brady lists” of officers with credibility issues who might need to testify in court. After pressure from news organizations, the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office released its list in late 2024, enabling a series of stories examining who is included — and who is not.

That reporting has revealed significant gaps, which TMJ4 and the Journal Sentinel are continuing to explore. Officers accused of falsifying reports, contradicting body camera footage or costing taxpayers millions in misconduct lawsuits are absent from the list, raising questions about how prosecutors define credibility. The disclosures have fueled public debate, prompted additions and removals from the list and spurred deeper scrutiny of best practices — and whether Milwaukee County meets them.

Let the sunshine in: How public records shape what Wisconsin knows is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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All public employees in Wisconsin must retain records, per the state’s open records law. Except one group. The ones who wrote that law.

State legislators have exempted themselves from the retention portion of the law. Some want to change that.

“The public should not have to worry about legislators having secret conversations or deleting emails,” said state Rep. Clinton Anderson, D-Beloit, who is introducing a bill that would close this loophole despite the fact that the state Assembly adjourned last month for the rest of the year.

Anderson released the bill Monday because it is the start of Sunshine Week, a nonpartisan collaboration among groups in the journalism, civic, education, government and private sectors that shines a light on the importance of public records and open government.

In Wisconsin, state legislators must comply with a records request, but if they have destroyed the record, they have nothing to send.

“Obviously, it’s troubling,” said Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council. “It allows legislators to make things go away that they would rather not see the light of day.”

State Rep. Rob Brooks, R-Saukville, told the Wisconsin Examiner in 2021 that his office “frequently deletes emails during the normal course of business each day.”

And he’s not the only one.

“My office does not delete records on principle, and we should make sure every elected official is held to that same standard,” Anderson said.

In 2025, Gov. Tony Evers stepped in to close this loophole – his 2025 budget proposal included a measure to “remove the Legislature’s exemption from open records law by requiring that records and correspondence of any member of the Legislature be included in a definition of a public record to provide greater transparency for the people of Wisconsin.” The proposal also would have allocated funds and opened a full-time position with the Legislative Technology Services Bureau to carry out this new requirement. But the Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee removed it from the final budget.

State Sen. Chris Larson, a Democrat from Milwaukee, has introduced bills to close that exemption for state legislators multiple times and is doing so again in the Senate this week in tandem with Anderson.

Before his election to the state Senate in 2010, Larson served on the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors. As a public official, he had to maintain all his records there and assumed the same when he arrived in the Legislature.

But as his email inbox filled up and ran low on space, Larson said he was told by IT staff to simply delete old messages.

“People often wonder why so many wildly popular policies go session after session without a vote or even a public hearing, while special interest slop rises to the top of the agenda,” said Justin Bielinski, Larson’s spokesman. “The Wisconsin Legislature’s exemption from record retention requirements creates a perverse incentive to do the people’s business in secret. If lawmakers aren’t going to be responsive to their constituents’ needs, the least we can do is allow people to find out who they are listening to, and whose voices they choose to ignore.”

Larson’s bills to close the loophole have been ignored by Republicans who control the Legislature, he said. The majority party generally pays little attention to bills from the minority.

But the fact the Wisconsin Legislature is even subject to the open records law, albeit with a caveat, makes it one of the more transparent states. Nearly a quarter of all states — 12 in total — do not even allow records from the Legislature to be accessed by the public, according to a study from The Journal of Civic Information. Congress has also excluded itself from open records requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

The exemption for legislators here “completely undermines Wisconsin’s public records law and the ability for citizens to trust their Legislature,” said David Cuillier, director of the University of Florida’s Brechner Freedom of Information Project. “It’s really quite bizarre and an outlier in the United States. The right thing to do is remove it and restore accountability and credibility to the institution.”

The Badger Project is an independent, reader-supported newsroom in Wisconsin.

This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

A loophole lets Wisconsin lawmakers delete public records is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Two attempts to peel back the veil of secrecy over the proliferation of data centers, including one by Wisconsin Watch reporter Tom Kertscher, are being honored in this year’s Openness in Government Awards, or Opees, bestowed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council.

In advance of national Sunshine Week (sunshineweek.org), March 15-21, the council has named the winners of its 20th annual Opees. These recognize outstanding efforts to protect the state’s tradition of open government, as well as highlight some threats to it. Winners have been invited to appear at a free public event in Madison on March 19. (See WFOIC website for details.)

The winners are:

Public Openness Advocate (Popee): Vilas County District Attorney Karl Hayes. District attorneys in Wisconsin are statutorily empowered to enforce the state’s open records and open meetings laws, but in practice rarely do so. Early this year, Hayes showed how it can be done, warning officials in the town of Presque Isle that they needed to comply with a nearly year-old request from the Lakeland Times newspaper for records regarding the town’s computers. His intervention succeeded, and the records were released. Other DAs might look for occasions where they can turn the lever in favor of openness.

Citizen Openness Advocate (Copee): Midwest Environmental Advocates. This nonprofit public interest law firm last year filed two pivotal lawsuits challenging the secrecy surrounding data center projects. The first, against the city of Racine, forced the prompt release of water usage projections for Microsoft’s Mount Pleasant campus. The second lawsuit, against the state Public Service Commission (PSC), contested the “trade secret” status of energy demand data for Meta’s proposed data center in Beaver Dam; that case is pending. Kudos to MEA for insisting on the public’s right to know.

Media Openness Advocate (Mopee): The Badger Project. In recent years, this nonprofit news outlet has been requesting records from police departments around the state about internal investigations of police officers and suing when they are not provided. In 2025, it filed three such lawsuits — against a police department in Racine County, the state Department of Transportation and St. Croix County. All led to the release of records. The Badger Project is now appealing St. Croix County’s refusal to pay attorney fees, which could lead to the overturning of a deeply problematic state Supreme Court decision. Fingers crossed. 

Open Records Scoop of the Year (Scoopee): Tie: Tom Kertscher of Wisconsin Watch; Danielle DuClos of The Cap Times. Among much other good reporting on openness issues, the work of these two journalists stands out. Kertscher pulled back the curtain on the secrecy surrounding data centers, including at least four projects in which local officials signed nondisclosure agreements with the companies. And DuClos reported on how the state Department of Public Instruction secretly investigated more than 200 Wisconsin K-12 educators accused of sexual misconduct or grooming behaviors toward students, prompting a statewide audit and legislative action.

No Friend of Openness (Nopee): Deborah Kerr, superintendent of the St. Francis School District. While there were other contenders for this award, there was also little question that Kerr would be the winner and new champion. Last June, she threatened to have a TMJ4 News reporter and camera operator arrested for wanting to film a school board meeting “because you did not give us any notice or tell us why you were here,” neither of which is required. The jaw-dropping video (see for yourself at https://tinyurl.com/zvam889a) went viral, and Kerr issued a weak apology, but her eruption is one for the ages. Credit reporter Megan Lee for her deft handling of the situation.

Whistleblower of the Year (Whoopee): John Sigwart. This former Port Washington city council member refused to keep the public in the dark about a clandestinely proposed microchip production facility, revealing that local officials had signed nondisclosure agreements. The city’s mayor retaliated by stripping Sigwart of his committee appointments, precipitating an end to his many years of public service, said an editorial in the Ozaukee Press. Sigwart died in August at age 80, but his example of courage will live on.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to open government. Bill Lueders is the group’s president.

Your Right to Know: Opees highlight good works, and bad is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.