Leaders in Wisconsin communities say they hope new federal grants aimed at cleaning up contamination can pave the way for redevelopment.
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A sweeping bipartisan housing bill passed through Congress earlier this week, with provisions aimed at making it easier to build new houses and rezone communities.
The post Sweeping federal housing bill won’t be a magic bullet for Wisconsin affordability, experts say appeared first on WPR.
Stars glow above a cabin in Catron County, New Mexico. The county, known for scenery and a dark sky for stargazers, has attracted retirees and now has one of the largest ratios of older adults to children in the country. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Forest Service by Belinda Mollard)
Catron County, New Mexico, may be seeing the future of an aging population today. It has beautiful landscapes that draw retirees who fall in love with the area and want to stay among soaring rock formations and bright stars in dark skies.
But it’s a tough place to get even minimal medical care. And employees are hard to find, with few young people to hire and support the tax base. It’s a microcosm of the national trend: By 2034 the whole country may have more older adults than children; Social Security’s retirement fund could be exhausted by 2032, and the nation will depend on an ever-shrinking workforce of young people.
“For quality healthcare, if you need even an X-ray, you are driving an hour and a half,” said Catron County Manager Deborah Mahler. “We have 900 miles of dirt roads that are not passable when it rains, so you have to have a four-wheel-drive vehicle with a high profile.”
Some hospital systems send shuttle buses, but it’s not enough and the county would like to offer more medical transportation and attract a local medical practice. But there is little tax base to support either, Mahler said.
Local parks and ranches in the county, which abuts the state line with Arizona, provide world-class elk hunting and beautiful scenery such as the Cosmic Campground’s dark sky sanctuary for stargazers and the Catwalk National Recreation Trail through desert rock formations.
But with parks taking up so much land, there’s not much space for industry that might provide jobs for young families or provide a tax base to help older people, she said.
There are now 17 states with more people over 65 than children under 18 as of last year. That’s up from 13 states in 2024 and just five in 2020, according to new U.S. Census Bureau estimates to be released Thursday.
Michigan, New Mexico, South Carolina and Wisconsin are new to the list, which reflects ages as of mid-2025.
Others may soon see some of the challenges already familiar to places like Sumter County, Florida, where there are almost 8 older adults per 1 child. In McCormick County, South Carolina; Catron County, New Mexico, and Jefferson County, Washington, the ratio is more than 4 to 1.
Many states are enacting or considering legislation to support older residents: Wisconsin passed laws this year aimed at elder scams and easing the transition from hospital care to rehabilitation, and last year enacted a support program for dementia caregivers.
New Mexico enacted a Medigap law in March allowing Medicare users to switch plans without insurers denying coverage or charging higher rates based on health status.
South Carolina’s state Senate passed a bill to give larger property tax breaks in February, and the proposal has been caught up in budget negotiations between that chamber and the House.
Michigan is working on a state plan to help older residents and their families starting next year with a report due July 1 and taking effect in October.
In 2020, the only states where older adults outnumbered children were Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and West Virginia. Since then, besides the four states added in 2025, these states are also on the list: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Montana, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
When James Carson, 72, retired to Washington Island a decade ago, he envisioned the next stage of his life as many do: leaving the workforce, volunteering, traveling, caring for his family.
Instead, unexpected medical expenses and the rising cost of living soon forced him to pick up two service industry jobs to make ends meet. Today, he regularly clocks in seven days a week, logging 45 to 50 hours.
Door County is home to one of Wisconsin’s oldest populations, largely thanks to its status as a serene retirement destination. But like Carson, more of those older adults and retirees are returning to work. Unwilling or unable to quit for good, they’re picking up jobs to afford the rising cost of living, to stay social and to become involved in the community.
The trend is reshaping what retirement in Door County looks like today as people live longer and life becomes more expensive.
Carson wishes he would have saved more aggressively – he “was kind of naive” about retirement. He also thinks people have false ideas about what it looks like.
“You cannot live on Social Security, and unless people have a very good retirement plan, they’re going to be hurting,” Carson said.
Given Door County’s booming tourism industry, many retirees like Carson seek out hospitality and customer service jobs. Even for those not driven by finances, these gigs offer the chance to interact with others. But others simply continue their careers past retirement age or pivot fields.
To meet the demand from job-seeking older adults, local employment services nonprofit We Are Hope runs a program to match them with employers. Executive Director Kim Carley said the organization served more people in the first half of 2026 than it expected for the whole year.
“The need is definitely, definitely there. The majority of it is that social connection, but you do have that small population that financially they need to work still,” Carley said. “Not everybody in Door County is rich. The cost of living has really affected things right now, too.”
Wisconsin Watch and Door County Knock spoke with several workers over the age of 65. Together, their stories create a changing image of what retirement and aging look like today. Keep reading to learn more about their jobs.
Age: 72
Job: Bartender
Former career: Amtrak conductor
Town: Washington Island
Why: Money
“Everyone wants to talk to the bartender,” Carson said. “I’m well-suited for the job.”
Carson was not always a confident speaker. When he was younger, he stuttered badly. A fifth grade teacher helped correct it, he said, “and I haven’t shut up since.”
Being well-suited for his job may be a good thing, but Carson did not think he’d still be working at 72 years old, especially not in Washington Island’s demanding summer service industry.
Carson and his wife, Stacey, bought a house there about 10 years ago, after he retired from a 20-year career with Amtrak. Stacey spent summers on the island growing up, and her parents live there now.
He envisioned volunteering and traveling, and the couple would care for Stacey’s aging in-laws, he said. For the first year or so, that was what he did. Jim served on their church council, worked with a developmentally disabled young adult, volunteered for the island’s nonprofit Art & Nature Center, and gave back to a community he said welcomed them with open arms.
“Until reality kicked in,” he said. The cost of living, including utilities, groceries and ferry travel, ate away at the couple’s savings faster than they anticipated. Jim needed eye surgery, then knee surgery.
He quit volunteering and returned to the workforce, where he has remained for the last eight years. Between shifts as a prep and line cook at Nelsen’s Hall & Bitters Club and as a bartender at the Albatross Drive-In tiki bar, he works seven days a week during the busy tourist season.
“I’m working more aggressively this summer to bank against having to continue to work this much next year,” Carson said. But with the fluctuating economy, higher grocery bills and gas prices, that might change. Ideally, he would like to only work for another two years, he said.
Mentally, Carson enjoys talking to people and has formed good relationships with the island’s youth — the Albatross is a popular hangout spot — but physically, the work takes its toll. The knee surgery made it harder to be on his feet all day and he falls into bed exhausted every night, he said.
“I’m doing better than most. I hear about folks splitting or foregoing their medications and going to food pantries,” Carson said. “I’m not there yet.”
Age: 71
Job: Retailer
Former career: Software and business consulting
Town: Sturgeon Bay
Why: Keeps her busy
Cindy Good plopped down on the chartreuse furniture clustered at the front of her store, The Naked Sheep Yarn Shop & Gift Boutique. At 2 p.m., it was her first time sitting that day.
Good, nearly 72, is exhausted. But she said she’ll continue working “as long as my body will hold out.”
She retired at 70 after a career in software and business consulting. She once thought that she’d work part time at most at her age and take advantage of having more time to read books or catch up on knitting. But before she could do that, she and her sister opened a second venture: a yarn store on the west side of Sturgeon Bay.
The store sells yarn, knitting tools and other tchotchkes. They also host classes, social knitting groups and crafting events. Good regularly bounces between handling orders for inventory, checking what’s in stock and helping customers with their knitting projects.
“There are days when I wake up and I think, ‘Oh God, why didn’t I just fully retire?’” she joked.
But in reality, she knows why: She feels the need to keep busy.
If she quit working, her Social Security payments would provide enough money for her to live on. But she recognizes the rising cost of living that influences other working retirees in the area. For instance, no houses in the area are for sale at the price she and her sister bought theirs for.
“We have friends that have money and they travel and do all that kind of stuff,” Good said. “That was sort of my goal, but I don’t have that kind of money. I was thinking I would do a trip a year or something, but now I’m here.”
Good loves Sturgeon Bay’s tight-knit feel and the downtown location of her business. In mid-June, business had just started picking up as tourism season began. By July, the street will bustle for their busiest month.
Maybe, she considered, once business is where she wants it to be, she might take those yearly trips.
Age: 68
Job: Door County Maritime Museum associate
Former career: Grocery distribution
Town: Sturgeon Bay
Why: Social interaction
Charlene Keith never envisioned herself retiring.
Five years ago, she technically did. But she went right back to work. After two and a half years, she decided to finally slow down — but not fully.
“If I sat home, I would just drive myself crazy,” Keith said. “I have to be doing something.”
She reached out to We Are Hope, where MatchUp program leaders recommended a part-time opening at Door County Maritime Museum in Sturgeon Bay.
Here, she works the front desk, welcomes visitors, sells tickets, stocks the gift shop, keeps tours running on schedule and closes the museum at night.
It’s a far cry from her grocery distribution career, where she navigated difficult roles and recalled everyone around her being unhappy. Nowadays at work, “everybody’s happy to be where they’re at,” she said. Most of Keith’s co-workers are retirees, too.
“It’s just fun. It makes me believe that it can be done. I thought everybody was unhappy in (their job),” Keith said. “You hear people say if you have a job you love, then it’s not really working, and I thought, ‘Yeah, that doesn’t happen.’”
Keeping busy brings her joy. She enjoys seeing guests’ excitement over the museum’s exhibits.
Keith lives and shares expenses with her sister, so she doesn’t necessarily need the part-time wages to get by. But she sees why finances motivate other people her age.
“It’s expensive to live, but people are living so much longer,” Keith said. “Unless you’re a millionaire and can travel, what would you do with yourself? I mean, I guess there’s people that sit around and fish for hours every day, but I’m not that kind of person.”
Age: 87
Job: First responder
Former career: Factory quality control
Town: Washington Island
Why: Keeps him busy
At 87 years old, Lee Engstrom is almost certainly among the oldest in Door County, according to county Emergency Services Director Aaron LeClair. He may be the oldest first responder in Wisconsin.
Engstrom is a fourth-generation member of the family that owns and operates Sunset Resort on Washington Island. He grew up in Michigan and spent summers helping his grandparents at the resort. He always dreamed he would end up there full time.
That dream came true when he and his wife, Janet, moved to the island in the late 1980s after he retired from a 30-year career in a factory’s quality control department.
Engstrom was not ready to stop working completely. He got a job with the local hardware store and did some plumbing work on the island. When he turned 62, he started getting Social Security and quit those jobs, but still needed something to keep busy.
He became an emergency medical responder, then got certified as an emergency medical technician and joined the island’s volunteer fire department. Today, he spends 80 to 100 hours every two weeks on call as a first responder because he enjoys it. He also does maintenance and odd jobs around the resort.
At 87, he did not think he would still be working, he said.
“I didn’t think I’d be alive,” Engstrom said. “When is it going to stop? As long as I feel good like this, I’ll just keep going. I have slowed down some, though … I’ve got fake ears, fake eyes and fake teeth. Everything else is original.”
Unless there’s a rescue call, being on standby doesn’t take much time. Engstrom just needs to be dressed near the emergency services facilities in case a call comes in — easy enough on an island. He’s happy to be one of the responders on call during the day because many of the younger volunteers are working their regular jobs during that time.
Engstrom focuses on patient care when he goes on calls. His primary objective is to make them feel comfortable and cared for once their medical condition is stable, he said.
When there is a fire, Engstrom’s primary job is to fill the tender truck — a mobile reservoir that supplies water to hose trucks when fire hydrants aren’t available. Rural departments often use them.
“I’m too old, and not as agile, to be going around dragging hoses and that kind of stuff,” he said.
For a while, fewer and fewer new recruits became island first responders as agencies statewide saw dire staffing shortages. But a recent influx of younger people has changed that, he said.
Financially, he and Janet are doing fine, and they have family who support and help them. But he enjoys his work — especially interaction with patients and knowing he provides a valuable service to his beloved island community.
When he does stop for good, Engstrom said he might golf more, keep working in his shop and do what he can to help at the resort. He would also continue his daily cruise around the island with Janet, he added.
“Whatever I’m doing, I enjoy taking the ride with my wife for a cup of coffee,” he said.
Age: 65
Job: Door County Parks Department maintenance staff
Former career: Manufacturing plant management
Town: Gardner
Why: Money
Jeff Gildersleeves is no stranger to physical labor. The 65-year-old works for the Door County Parks Department’s “mow crew.” The part-time gig lasts from May to October, and he spends his days hauling equipment, mowing, trimming trees, planting grass seed, picking up trash and tackling other tasks to maintain the county’s parks.
Gildersleeves’ first job as a teenager growing up in Door County was picking cherries and strawberries during summer. He loves the outdoors, and the work suited him well, he said. He went on to obtain a degree in biology and wildlife management, which he used to work for the Department of Natural Resources.
When Gildersleeves and his wife were expecting their first child, he switched careers and took a job at a chemical production and manufacturing plant in Milwaukee. He retired in 2021 and returned to Door County with his retirement benefits and a plan.
According to Gildersleeves, a local company was offering an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. If he worked there for at least three years, he would receive his full investment and returns, enough to supplement his retirement savings from the Milwaukee job.
Three months before his three-year anniversary, Gildersleeves got injured on the job. He needed surgery to repair a torn left rotator cuff, and that was it, he said. “I only got 20% of my investment back.”
Today, the mowing job is replacing that lost income.
“We thought at 66, 67 we’d be able to sit back and enjoy life, but with the economy the way it is, and health insurance costs?” Gildersleeves said. “My wife has some hefty prescriptions. Social Security is not enough to live on.”
The physical part of the job can be hard, he said. “You think you are physically fit until you’re out there doing it.”
Beyond the manual labor, Gildersleeves guides younger employees. His supervisors value his experience, and he has a good rapport with the teenagers on his crew, who listen to him, he said.
Doing something valued and worthwhile is good for his mental health, he said, but he is not sure how long he’ll continue.
“Until I’m unable to work anymore,” he said.
He has a small IRA put away and a pending lawsuit against the Door County company where he was injured, but he said he doubts he will see any settlement money. He knows one thing for certain: He would like to remain in his own home for as long as possible.
“I don’t want to sell off and go to a nursing home,” he said. “I watched my in-laws do that, and it’s not a good way to live.”
Age: 76
Job: Therapist
Town: Sturgeon Bay
Why: Is fulfilled by her career.
Kathy Bandstra returned to school in her 40s to become a licensed clinical social worker. Her sixth decade began before she paid off her student loans. At 68, she started considering retirement.
“I retired in June of 2018 because my financial person said, ‘Don’t ever retire in the winter, because that’s too depressing,’” she said. “I followed his advice.”
By the next month, though, she already returned to work part time for a private practice. A year later, she shifted to volunteer as a hospice worker during the COVID-19 pandemic. Then she moved from Racine to Door County and began volunteering at the area’s Aging and Disability Resource Center.
“I still felt like something was missing … It just felt like I could do more with the skills I had,” Bandstra said. “And I still had the energy to do it. And volunteering doesn’t pay you anything. I like making some money.”
People had told her that it was hard to find affordable mental health services in her new home county. She rented an office in Sturgeon Bay, opened her own business and offered services on a sliding scale to help people afford care. She couldn’t offer her services for so cheap if she wasn’t retired and receiving Social Security, she said.
Now, at 76, Bandstra regularly sees several clients a day in person and through telehealth. She helps people through distress and trauma with cognitive behavioral therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy.
Continuing to work gives her the freedom to go out to eat, get a new car if needed and cover expenses that pop up outside of bills. If she stopped working, she might have more time for her hobbies — making clay pots, writing her memoir, doing open mic readings. But she would miss feeling helpful to others. She also feels her physical and mental health has improved because she keeps going.
Bandstra believes people largely have false ideas about what retirement looks like. She thinks “it’s unrealistic to look to retire,” period. If clients continue to see her, she’d like to work into her 80s.
“I don’t know if some people would want someone that’s old enough to be their great-grandma,” Bandstra said. “But the people that stopped coming to me didn’t say that they thought I was too old or anything.”
Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus. Find her on Instagram and Twitter, or send her an email at mdunlap@wisconsinwatch.org.
Emily Small is a reporter for Door County Knock and a Report for America corps member. Contact her at esmall@doorcountyknock.org.
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Door County is a retirement destination. So why are more older adults still working? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
A new report from a progressive think tank argues that hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin workers would benefit from raising the state's minimum wage to $20 an hour by 2030.
The post $20 by 2030? Progressive think tank explores raising Wisconsin’s minimum wage appeared first on WPR.
A number of small communities in the Midwest are part of the program. Fond du Lac is offering a $5,500 stipend and the rest in potential perks for childcare, community events and more.
The post Fond du Lac promises $9k in incentives for relocating workers in new program appeared first on WPR.
Some Group Health members have been outspoken in their criticism of the healthcare cooperative for its response to employees seeking to join a union. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
A delayed union organizing campaign at a Madison-based nonprofit healthcare cooperative has sparked dissent in the co-op about how the organization is governed.
When Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin holds its annual meeting for members Thursday evening, a group of patients who are co-op members will seek a vote to undo a recent change in the co-op’s bylaws.
The conflict at Group Health follows a stalled union organizing drive at the co-op — GHC for short — that began in 2024.
After Group Health employees filed their petition for a union, Group Health’s board and management distributed messages criticizing the union. GHC lawyers also told federal officials they would not accept the union’s proposal that specified which groups of employees would be represented by the union.
Patients who sign up with Group Health for their healthcare become members of the cooperative. Some long-time members contend the co-op management’s response to the union campaign is at odds with the co-op’s founding principles and its progressive heritage.
“It just seems like the cooperative seems to be drifting away from wellness and more and more into making money and growing,” said Ruth Brill, a Group Health member since 1979 who supports the unionizing campaign. Healthcare providers “wanted to serve us better” by seeking a union, she said. “I don’t see what the problem is.”
Co-op members have formed the GHC Members Union Support Team — GHC-MUST for short.
At Thursday’s meeting the group is recommending that members vote against accepting the minutes from the co-op’s 2025 membership meeting — usually a formality — to demonstrate their opposition to how the meeting was conducted, said Amihan Huesmann, one of the co-op patients and members.
The group has also endorsed three non-incumbents for the co-op board, in an election that was held partly online through Tuesday, June 23, and will also take votes in person at the meeting.
In October 2025 at a special meeting, co-op members proposed and voted for a series of resolutions directed at the co-op board.
One resolution called for the co-op to voluntarily recognize the Service Employees International Union in the departments and jobs where employees had originally asked for union representation.
Other resolutions directed the board, co-op management or both to report how much money co-op management had spent on legal or consulting fees in response to the union campaign and to issue a report on all emails, communications, meeting minutes and other documents relating to the co-op’s handling of the union drive.
Another resolution demanded the board and co-op management “faithfully follow the democratically expressed will” of co-op members, who, the resolution charged, have “been denied an opportunity to duly and fully exercise [their] role” in leading the co-op. A fifth resolution called for the board to hold a meeting by mid-January 2026 “on the democratization of GHC governance.”
In December 2025, the board declined all five resolutions as written.
By the end of 2025, SEIU Wisconsin and Group Health were at an impasse in a tangled legal dispute over who would be included in the union.
SEIU filed a long list of unfair labor practice charges stating that Group Health had illegally retaliated against union supporters. The union obtained a National Labor Relations Board order to block a planned representation election until the charges were resolved.
GHC and the union negotiated a confidential settlement to resolve the unfair labor practice charges that put the union organizing drive on hold.
Since January, the GHC-MUST group has been pursuing changes to the organization’s bylaws that they contend would restore a stronger role for members in the co-op’s governance. The group also circulated a petition to recall the chair of the co-op board.
Under the bylaws in place when the group was circulating their proposals, bylaws proposals and recall petitions required 100 signatures. When the group delivered their bylaws proposals and the recall petition, however, their submission was rejected, with GHC’s board citing a change to the bylaws that the board had just enacted.
The board in March made “some wholesale changes without member input, without an explanation of why they were needed, without talking about the serious ramifications for members,” said Steve Rankin, a Group Health member who has been active in GHC-MUST.
The board increased the threshold for nominating people to the board who weren’t selected by the co-op’s nominating committee. Previously 100 members could nominate a board member that way. Those nominees now must garner 3% of Group Health’s 54,693 Class A voting members, according to GHC — about 1,640 people.
Another key change involved bylaws amendments. The co-op’s previous bylaws allowed members to approve amendments by a majority vote at the annual meeting or a special meeting with a quorum present, so long as a statement about the proposed changes is included with the original meeting notice.
Under the revised bylaws, members proposing a change must first garner a 75% majority vote at a co-op members meeting. The proposal would then go to a follow-up referendum of all co-op members, where the change would pass with a simple majority, but only if at least 10% of the members take part in that vote. That same two-step procedure would also be required to remove a board member.
“They changed the bylaws without informing members that it was happening and without including members,” said Huesmann, a Group Health member for two decades who had worked on the members’ proposals.
Marty Anderson, chief strategy and business development officer for GHC, said that “the bylaws do not require an announcement to the membership prior to the bylaws change being considered by the board of directors.”
Group Health increased the bylaws change threshold “such that a small minority of people can’t change how the cooperative operates for the other 69,900 people who are part of the cooperative,” Anderson said.
While Huesmann and Rankin contend the board’s changes were aimed at thwarting their petitions, Anderson said the board’s changes “were happening outside of the knowledge of those petitions happening.”
Huesmann said the petitions were widely circulated and publicized in the weeks before they were submitted, however. The campaign “wasn’t secret,” Huesmann said. “It’s not like we were hiding that we were circulating petitions.”
Rankin said the changes amount to a power grab.
“It doesn’t ensure broader member participation, it ensures members are no longer able to do that,” Rankin said. “They just made it an inaccessible framework instead of one that would be accessible.”
Correction: This report has been updated to correct the procedure in the new GHC bylaws for bylaws amendments.
Milwaukee’s Public Transportation, Utilities and Waterways Review Board waded into the statewide fight over utility regulation on Wednesday with a three-hour hearing discussing forming a publicly-owned electric utility.
The proposed starting point: assuming control over We Energies’ infrastructure within city limits.
“Energy networks are best delivered by monopolies,” said Jim Carpenter, a board member. “The problem is that We Energies is a profit-driven monopoly, and sometimes profits get in the way of providing the best solution to a problem.”
The board has no power to recommend action by Milwaukee’s Common Council; Wednesday’s meeting was the board’s first since 2023. Instead, Aldermen Alex Brower and Robert Bauman used the hearing to open a discussion about the viability, risks and potential benefits of a possible city-owned electric utility. Backers and critics alike packed the board room, some eager to weigh in on the proposal.
“Everyone deserves to have savings. Everyone deserves to have the option to have control over their power,” said Cleopatra White, a working-class single mother in Milwaukee’s Southgate neighborhood.
She said she wanted to show support for creating a publicly-owned utility because it’s an issue that affects everyone in Milwaukee, regardless of political party.
Wisconsin’s publicly-owned utilities — Manitowoc Public Utilities, for instance — generate roughly 11% of the electricity produced in the state, often with lower electric rates than their investor-owned counterparts.
Wisconsin law allows municipalities to acquire utilities’ property, but that option is largely untested.
Brower pitched the takeover as a means to shield residents from electrical rate increases. We Energies filed its most recent rate case in April, projecting a roughly 9.3% increase in customers’ electricity rates over the next two years.
But the plan faces pushback from We Energies and the union representing its workers. They argue that residents benefit from the economies of scale that a large, well-established utility provides.
“Reliability is not created by changing who owns the utility,” said James Meyer, business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 2150. “It comes from trained workers, proven emergency response systems and the ability to move crews, equipment and materials quickly when customers need help. Milwaukee has that today, and this proposal puts it at risk.”
We Energies spokesperson Brendan Conway said his company is responsive to ratepayers’ concerns about costs and service.
“We know many families in Milwaukee are feeling pressure from rising energy costs, and we’re focused on keeping bills low while delivering the reliable energy customers count on every day,” Conway wrote in an email.
State law offers two routes for municipalities to assume control of utility infrastructure within their territory: seizing the facilities through eminent domain or negotiating a purchase agreement.
The eminent domain route would likely require legal action by the city to prove the “necessity of the taking,” attorneys working with the Milwaukee Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) wrote ahead of Wednesday’s hearing.
Brower won his seat representing District 3 in a special election last April with the backing of Milwaukee’s DSA chapter, which helps organize the “Power to the People” campaign drumming up support for a municipal electric utility. Many of its members attended the hearing.
Both options would require a referendum and a hearing before Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission to determine a fair price for We Energies’ property. But Milwaukee’s suburbs rely on much of the same infrastructure as the city, which could block Milwaukee from acquiring shared infrastructure.
Shorewood Village Manager Rebecca Ewald, whose community shares a substation with Milwaukee, told Wisconsin Watch that she hasn’t discussed the idea with its sponsors. Oak Creek City Administrator Andrew Vickers declined to comment on the plan; his city, which borders Milwaukee’s southern edge, hosts several We Energies power plants.
Milwaukee itself has only one We Energies power plant: the Valley Power Plant along the Menomonee River near the city’s central business district. It generates enough electricity to meet roughly 10% of Milwaukee’s annual needs, Conway said.
Brower argues the current lack of generation within city limits wouldn’t hinder his goals. “We have the power to purchase (electricity) on the wholesale markets,” he told Wisconsin Watch.
State law allows municipal utilities to construct generators outside of their boundaries. In Brower’s view, Milwaukee could expand rooftop solar and battery storage to meet some energy needs — possibly sited on the city’s abundant vacant land.
Municipal control of We Energies’ substations and transmission assets could also mean shrinking the pool of customers paying for that infrastructure, including We Energies’ new mixed-use Juneautown substation in the city’s Historic Third Ward.
Act 10, a 2011 state law stripping most public-sector employees of collective bargaining rights, also complicates the picture.
Brower believes a Milwaukee public electrical utility should aim to hire the We Energies workers who currently operate infrastructure within the city, but doing so would make them public-sector employees. “We don’t want that,” he said.
“We are seriously considering a legal option of outsourcing the day-to-day management to a third-party entity once we acquire the utility infrastructure,” he added — a possible workaround to ensure that employees under a municipal utility would retain their current rights.
His pitch has yet to sway the IBEW, which generally supports We Energies in cases before the PSC and Legislature.
“If the workers are forced into uncertainty over pensions, healthcare, seniority, contracts and union protections, many may not move to the city from the utility,” said Sam Rozenberg, an IBEW member and We Energies dispatcher who spoke at the hearing. “They have options. And if they leave, Milwaukee loses more than employees. It loses the people who know this system and know how to restore service safely.”
While there is no guarantee current We Energies workers would join a new municipal electric utility, Ursula Schryver, senior vice president of education, training and events for the American Public Power Association, told the board that Milwaukee could tap into a national network of public utilities to respond to natural disasters.
Milwaukee isn’t the only city exploring this option.
St. Petersburg, Florida’s city council approved a feasibility study earlier this year. Ann Arbor, Michigan’s city council voted down a proposal to study a municipal takeover of electric infrastructure last spring, though the plan’s backers now plan to take the matter to voters as a ballot petition.
A similar study commissioned by the San Diego, California city council produced an $8 billion cost estimate, prompting some city leaders to balk at the idea. The same study also suggested that San Diego residents could recoup the costs in the long run.
Brower said San Diego’s deliberations offer a chance to pressure an investor-owned utility to make concessions. Even if the possibility of a municipal takeover in Milwaukee acts as a bargaining chip during an upcoming rate case, he said, “there’s power in winning concessions. But we are fighting for the entire thing.”
Samuel Mendoza, who recently moved with his wife to Milwaukee near the Harambee neighborhood, discussed his experience working in public works for the City of Los Angeles. While he didn’t work under the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, he said the municipal utility paid its nearly 12,000 workers well.
“I’m surprised coming here that there wasn’t already something municipal,” Mendoza said. “Especially things that are really specific to the city, you’d want to have a utility company that could handle those issues instead of just being so widespread.”
We Energies was absent from the hearing. Brower invited the company to join a meeting with the board or the city’s representatives to make its case.
As for next steps, Bauman suggested exploring the public utility concept through a task force made up of members of the Common Council, mayoral administration and Department of Public Works and then requesting that the council fund a feasibility study.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Could Milwaukee create its own electric utility? Officials explore taking over We Energies infrastructure within city limits is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Microsoft has completed construction of a massive data center in Mount Pleasant. The facility is now fully operational and employing hundreds of people, the company says.
The post Microsoft finishes construction of Mount Pleasant data center, plans for more appeared first on WPR.
Tech firm Oracle is suing Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission (PSC) in Ozaukee County Circuit Court, opening a new front in a fight over financial protections for Wisconsin ratepayers.
The June 19 lawsuit comes as Oracle and We Energies — the utility set to power the company’s planned data center in Port Washington — are asking the PSC to reconsider credit rating requirements for data center developers that could cost the company millions of dollars a year.
Oracle’s lawsuit seeks to accomplish the same ends through the courts.
The PSC approved We Energies’ “very large customer” rate structure in April, requiring the utility to exclusively bill data center customers for new energy generation infrastructure needed to serve them, among other protections for existing ratepayers. The agreement also requires data center developers with credit ratings below A- to post financial guarantees to reduce the risk of shifting costs to other customers if a developer runs into financial trouble.
Oracle currently holds a BBB credit rating — a tier below the PSC standard, but still considered investment-grade by ratings agencies — largely because of aggressive borrowing to finance new artificial intelligence infrastructure. Under the current rate structure, the Oracle subsidiary involved in the Port Washington project would need to provide cash deposits or letters of credit exceeding $100 million per year to receive service from We Energies.
“If the Commission does not reopen its decision on this issue, the implications for Wisconsin would be significant and limit the ability of numerous investment-grade companies to invest in Wisconsin,” the utility’s attorneys wrote in a June 10 request to reopen the case.
We Energies also contended that Oracle runs little risk of defaulting on its obligations.
“Tens of billions of dollars in Oracle’s value would need to be destroyed before creditors and counterparties, such as Wisconsin Electric and its other customers, could experience losses,” the utility’s attorneys wrote. Even in a bankruptcy, they added, generators built to serve data centers “will still have value and will be able to provide electricity to other customers.”
We Energies and Oracle asked the PSC to consider a stepped approach to security requirements that eases the burden on companies with “investment-grade” credit ratings, including BBB ratings, and to waive the Oracle subsidiary’s financial backing obligations.
In its lawsuit, Oracle asked the court to “set aside, reverse and remand” the credit rating limits in the PSC-approved agreement, arguing that the commission acted outside of its authority and without sufficient evidence to justify the rule. The company maintains that the A- bar isn’t “needed to prevent harm” to We Energies’ other customers or shareholders, and that the commission “failed to consider the significant, adverse impacts” of the requirement on Oracle.
Ratepayer advocates and clean energy groups support the PSC credit rating requirements, and some of the same groups are pushing back against Oracle’s efforts to reopen the issue.
“We believe that PSC did its job,” Clean Wisconsin spokesperson Amy Barrilleaux said. “It cannot leave all these other thousands of customers vulnerable.”
The company hired attorneys from the Madison office of law firm Husch Blackwell. One of those attorneys, David Zoppo, has previously represented investor-owned utilities before the PSC. Oracle’s attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The credit rating dispute could shape future electrical service contracts between data center developers and utilities.
Northern States Power Company, a subsidiary of utility giant Xcel Energy that provides electrical service to parts of northwestern Wisconsin, asked the PSC on Monday for its own “very large” customer rate structure.
That proposal would set the credit rating bar at BBB-, the lowest investment-grade category. Potential data center customers below that threshold would need to provide additional financial guarantees.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Oracle sues Wisconsin regulators as it seeks relief from data center credit requirements is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
It isn’t easy running a child care center.
But for business owners like Daniel Balderas, who owns two centers, a monthly stabilization payment from the federal government called Child Care Counts was a major help to bring the children on field trips and take care of his employees.
“I’m giving teachers bonuses based on performance, or sometimes it’s random or I see teachers working hard,” Balderas said. “Gifts for teachers’ birthdays, I buy the teachers’ lunches often.”
When those funds dried up last year, the state stepped in to offer one more year of stabilization payments through a Child Care Bridge Payment Program.
Now, Balderas’ daycares are among almost 1,400 child care centers in Milwaukee that will lose state funding at the end of June.
Without the support, about one in five Milwaukee County child care providers predict they’ll have to close, 39% will have to raise tuition and another 44% will have longer waitlists, according to a 2025 study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty.
Balderas’ biggest challenge has been finding and retaining staff.
Balderas, who is also certified as a lead teacher, said he’s lost some great teachers to schools or franchises that offer higher pay he can’t afford to match. As a result, he covers shifts, and employees sometimes work between his two child care centers when they are short-staffed.
The number of children a child care center can legally serve is limited by the number of staff working at that business, even if a facility has the physical space and materials to accommodate more, said Paula Drew, director of Early Care and Education Policy and Research at the Wisconsin Early Childcare Association.
Balderas has not struggled with retention alone. Research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2024 found that about 33,000 potential child care spots across the state could be filled if staffing barriers were addressed.
Child care stabilization funding made it easier for providers like Balderas to offer more competitive benefits to retain staff.
But when the federal government cut Child Care Counts funding in half in 2023, Balderas said there were times that the business was merely breaking even as he continued supporting the staff with the reduced funds.
Ninety percent of providers who received Child Care Counts funding before payments were cut in 2023 said the funding cuts changed their ability to offer competitive compensation, and 81% said the payment cuts contributed to changes in their ability to hire new staff, according to the 2024 study.
Balderas said he can keep his business afloat once the state’s child care stabilization payments end this month, but it will cut into his bottom line and he will have to absorb the losses.
“I can’t tell a teacher that deserves a raise that ‘well, we don’t got the funding anymore, I can’t give you the raise I promised,’” Balderas said.
With 39% of Milwaukee County child care providers reporting they will have to raise tuition after child care stabilization payments end, one of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association’s biggest concerns for Milwaukee is how the tuition increases will impact families on subsidy.
The Wisconsin Shares Child Care Subsidy Program subsidizes a portion of monthly child care costs for low-income families, at or above the price of 75% of child care slots.
Ruth Schmidt, executive director at the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, said child care tuition in Milwaukee is already one of the highest in the state, and Wisconsin does not have the ongoing funding to support increased subsidy payments for growing tuition.
Schmidt said she’s concerned that the state subsidy payments will not keep up with rising tuition.
“It will be underfunded as it exists right now,” Schmidt said.
Almost all of Balderas’ families at his two child care centers receive child care subsidies.
The state is also paying more toward child care subsidies than it ever has in the last 24 months. As of March 2026, the state paid $28.4 million in Wisconsin Shares child care subsidy payments to Milwaukee County families, supporting almost 25,000 children in the county.
Wisconsin did invest in education for 4-year-olds in last year’s budget, Drew said. She anticipates that more providers will turn to serve these ages due to the expenses of providing care for infants and toddlers.
State Sen. LaTonya Johnson, who represents District 6 on Milwaukee’s North Side, can relate to the challenges of Milwaukee child care providers.
A former early childhood educator, Johnson transitioned her daycare, open 24 hours, seven days a week, to entirely serve families on subsidies.
“For my kids, that was one of the best things that ever happened to them,” Johnson said. “But for me, by the time I ran for the seat, my house was in foreclosure. I almost lost my house.”
Since the state bridge payments were temporary, Johnson and her colleagues introduced a bill last year to allocate $220 million in child care stabilization payments for 2025-26 and 2026-27 using federal Child Care Development Funds and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grants.
The bill also would have provided additional subsidies for child care providers to cover the costs to care that family subsidies don’t cover.
Johnson said those bills died because Republican colleagues did not give the bills public hearings before the legislative sessions ended.
The Wisconsin Early Childcare Association is watching states like New Mexico, Louisiana and Alaska that are finding new ways to fund child care on a long-term scale, but the state is falling behind.
“Wisconsin is one of the very few states that does not put state revenue directly into child care, or didn’t until last year,” Schmidt said. “They now do through the 4-year-old program.”
Balderas said there isn’t much other funding for child care owners like him who take care of toddlers and infants. He said there’s a food program, but “it’s super tedious,” requiring providers to serve certain food with specific portions.
“I try to apply for grants for improving our flooring, painting on the outside, stuff like that,” he said. “There’s really no help.”
Alex Klaus is the education solutions reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and a corps member of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. Report for America plays no role in editorial decisions in the NNS newsroom.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
One in five Milwaukee County child care providers expect to close without stabilization aid is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Superior Water, Light & Power is the only privately owned water utility in Wisconsin. The city's mayor would like to change that.
The post Superior mayor makes case for takeover of Wisconsin’s only private water utility appeared first on WPR.
A fast food restaurant advertises jobs on the first day of summer. The Economic Policy Institute found a handful of states that eased labor laws for teenagers during this year’s legislative sessions. (Photo by Robbie Sequeira/Stateline)
For some teenagers across the country, the summer is the first opportunity to gain work experience for their nascent resume.
In a handful of states, however, teens who find jobs will find fewer protections under child labor laws. Four states — Indiana, Nebraska, Washington and West Virginia — enacted laws this year that weaken child labor protections, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank. In all, 13 states had bills seeking to weaken those protections; some are still under consideration.
Another three states saw bills filed this year to increase child labor standards, with one state — Oregon — enacting a new law. Oregon now stipulates that state rules on the total hours a minor can work cannot be less restrictive than the federal Fair Labor Standards Act rules that were in effect on Jan. 1.
Among the states easing child labor laws this year, Nebraska established a lower minimum wage for 14- and 15-year-olds. West Virginia made changes that allow teens to work longer hours in youth apprenticeships and relaxed rules related to time working on hazardous work assignments.
Under a new Indiana law, the state’s Department of Labor will no longer be required to maintain the employer database for youth employment or require employers to participate in the database, meaning employers are not required to report that they employ workers younger than 18.
Washington state lawmakers made it easier for teens in approved work-based learning programs to work longer hours, doubling the daily limit from four hours a day for up to 20 hours a week, to eight hours a day for up to 48 hours a week for minors enrolled in those programs. West Virginia’s law also loosened guardrails for minors in youth apprenticeship programs and lowered the age for workers to sell alcohol in bars.
The Economic Policy Institute’s review, published this month, found that legislation seeking to roll back child labor protections follows four trends: lowering minimum wages for teen workers; making changes to youth apprenticeships, eliminating youth permits and weakening safeguards for teen child care workers.
A few other rollbacks remain pending in Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Bills in Florida, Massachusetts and Missouri proposed lowering youth wages but did not pass.
Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Even for a guy like Ron Brisbois, whose job is to cultivate prosperity, a data center proposed for Wisconsin’s Driftless Area was too big to imagine.
Nothing like this had come along in Brisbois’ quarter-century as economic development director in rural Grant County. An up to $2 billion project spanning 500 acres would be at least three times larger — in dollars and space — than any development in the county.
The construction contracts. Dozens of new permanent jobs. Millions of extra tax revenue for schools and local government. This is what economic development is all about.
For months, the out-of-state developers pitching the data center spoke repeatedly with Brisbois. They toured the county in Wisconsin’s southwest corner. They visited Madison to discuss details with state officials.
Their talk was big.
But Brisbois never dug into the developers’ backgrounds.
Then, as if someone flipped a switch, they stopped returning his calls.
Now, a project that would have been historically transformational — and was already highly controversial — is all but dead.
Drawing on two months of behind-the-scenes interviews Wisconsin Watch conducted with Brisbois, here’s the behind-the-scenes story of the rise and fall of a data center proposal.
Brisbois first heard about the data center last fall. A colleague told him the developers were scouting northern Illinois for a cryptocurrency project when they drove across the border into Grant County and looked up to see the Cardinal-Hickory Creek transmission line. It delivers electricity along a 100-mile corridor from Dubuque County, Iowa, through Cassville in Grant County, to Dane County.
The developers quickly surmised that with access to the kind of power that artificial intelligence data centers desperately need, the town of Cassville (population 400) could be ideal.
“There’s a chunk of power there, Ron, and we need to grab it before someone else does,” Brisbois recalled the developers saying. “If we don’t, someone else will.”
Brisbois’ reaction: “Well, why shouldn’t we?”
The median $67,000 household income among Grant County’s 52,000 residents is $10,000 below the state median; 12% live in poverty.
Brisbois said he initially felt curiosity, not excitement, “because I never would have thought a project like that would look at this area.”
The two-man team included a businessman from the Northeast and a technical expert from the South.
Even now, citing a custom of confidentiality common to economic development proposals, Brisbois won’t identify them.
Early in his career, not long after working in economic development for the former state Department of Commerce, Brisbois yearned to bring jobs and industry to his home area.
Married with two grown daughters, Brisbois, 60, grew up on a southwest Wisconsin dairy farm and still does a little farming of his own. After six years in the state job, he became executive director of the Grant County Economic Development Corp. in 1999. A resident of Ithaca in Richland County, which borders Grant, he’s a former Ithaca School Board member and currently serves on the town board.
“I’ve had multiple staff, people from multiple governors tell me, ‘Ron, we love what you do, but we like to see these projects done in Milwaukee, Madison or the Fox Valley,’” he said.
“And that’s because of votes. And I get it. I’m not naive. I mean, people want to get reelected. They want to have their impact. And I appreciate it. But things like that really motivated me. It’s like, what could I do out there (in the Driftless)?”
Brisbois began work in earnest on the project Nov. 6. He gave the developers a book of maps, noting where the transmission line runs. He emailed Grant County Board chair Bob Keeney, saying he would meet the next week with a “data center prospect who is flying in from Rhode Island.”
Keeney called the news exciting.
“My meeting is the first of the day for them,” Brisbois told Keeney. “Then they meet with the energy reps. Land is my primary assignment, plus they want to know about the political feel for such a project.”
The meeting, requested by the developers, was at Scenic Rivers Energy Cooperative in Lancaster, the county seat. Because of a storm on the East Coast, they drove instead of flying.
“It was about a less than a half-hour meeting,” Brisbois recalled. “And I just said, ‘What are you guys thinking?’ And that’s where they started talking about a hyperscale project.”
“It was more of just feeling them out,” he added. “OK, what scale? And that’s where they talked about $1 billion to $2 billion. And they started to talk in the 500-acre range.”
They understood there would be a lot of work to confirm that enough power would be available.
The developers were also considering sites in Indiana and North Dakota. They didn’t ask about financial incentives, but wondered what the public might think about a data center. Brisbois told them residents would want to know about jobs, but he emphasized more local tax revenue. The developers had seen a headline in the Grant County Herald Independent about local schools and municipalities struggling with budgets.
Momentum built after more conversations with the developers.
Brisbois began to let himself feel excited.
“I was (thinking): OK, there’s potential here.”
Brisbois went public a month after the first meeting. He announced Dec. 3 at the annual meeting of the Grant County Economic Development Corp. that a $1 billion data center had been proposed for the county. The Herald Independent reported on it a week later.
It would be three times or more larger than the largest development in the county, A.Y. McDonald’s $350 million, 100-acre foundry.
Brisbois said the developers later asked, “How did this get out?” He told them he wanted to be transparent.
“I’m sure my (economic development) colleagues would have said, ‘You were a fool to do it. I would never have released that information.’”
But progress continued.
Brisbois met again in early February at Scenic Rivers with the developers.
“It was more of, you start getting into the brass tacks of the project. The formality kind of is done. You’ve met them, now you’re on a first-name basis, that type of thing.”
Brisbois was also encouraged by a virtual meeting he had in February, the same month that officials two hours away in Beaver Dam announced they were working to land a $1 billion data center, which is now under construction. The meeting was with Prescott Balch, who has been sought out by data center opponents around Wisconsin for his expertise. Balch confirmed that he agreed that Brisbois’ estimate of 50 permanent jobs seemed solid.
“If I start talking 50 jobs, that’s a big deal in Grant County,” Brisbois said.
And yet, the developers never told Brisbois where exactly in the county they wanted to locate.
People in Grant County have particular affection for being part of the Driftless Area, with its rugged hills and steep valleys, the result of being missed by the last glacier that covered most of Wisconsin. They worry about too much development.
Data center opponents began mobilizing early in 2026, but interest peaked March 8, when hundreds attended a rally featuring comedian Charlie Berens. The efforts of Pete Moris and Melodie Betts were beginning to pay off.
Moris, a public relations executive and Grant County native, has a son Grant, named after the county. He believes the data center would be too large for the Driftless Area and fears it would harm water wells.
Moris recalled the December newspaper story about Brisbois announcing the proposal.
“That set off alarm bells because if Ron’s talking about it in the paper, then this had to be in the works for a while,” Moris said. “And the fact that we weren’t being told who the developer was and who the end user is, that’s scary.”
Betts, a restaurant owner who drinks only reverse osmosis-purified water, also worries a data center would harm the water supply and attract more development.
“If we don’t stop this now, we’re going to lose everything that’s precious in the Driftless Area,” she said. “You let one in, you open up the door.”
As opponents claimed the spotlight, the developers seemed to back off.
About a week after the Berens rally, the developers called Brisbois out of the blue. “That was unusual,” Brisbois recalled.
They said a potential operator of the data center had asked about incentives, including a tax increment district (TID).
A TID is a common tax break that commits future property taxes from a land parcel’s anticipated increase in value to finance a proposed development.
Brisbois said he told the developers he didn’t think a TID would be legally possible for a town. He said he thought that not offering the tax break would appeal to residents, but sensed the developers disagreed.
“I don’t think they saw it as that,” he said. “After that, dead quiet.”
Brisbois followed up with two calls, leaving messages — but, for the first time, got no response.
They had always been “very prompt,” he said.
Then the developers reengaged.
They flew to Chicago and drove to Madison to meet with Brisbois and the Department of Natural Resources on March 19. They discussed state regulatory issues such as permits for air, water, wetlands and other issues. The developers emerged “feeling very good,” even as they began to hear the approval process would be time consuming, Brisbois said. In later phone calls, the developers were enthused that the data center might qualify for a state sales tax exemption.
That exemption is expected to be worth billions of dollars to data centers around the state.
By early April, Brisbois was confident enough to release more details, including an estimate that the data center would produce $5.5 million per year in property tax revenue to municipalities and school districts in Grant County. He said he had received fewer than five phone calls or emails opposing the data center, which had been “demonized” through social media, and dozens of supportive contacts, particularly from the local school district.
Keeney called local data center supporters “a silent majority.”
Brisbois also was optimistic because he felt he provided the developers what they needed. It was up to them to proceed with financing and acquiring land.
“From my perspective, they should have all that they need to put their ducks in a row,” he recalled. “I don’t know then why they wouldn’t proceed in Grant County.”
Brisbois had rated the chances of getting the data center as 1-in-12 after his first meeting with the developers, then 1-in-6 after the second meeting.
On April 6, he said it was better than a coinflip. “I would say right now, it’s leaning towards.”
It didn’t take long for that optimism to fade.
Data center opponents had been contacting Brisbois’ board members, so he emailed them April 14. He tried to rebut claims about water and electricity use and emphasized the jobs and property tax revenue. “This data center project is going to be located somewhere,” he wrote. “If it’s going to be somewhere, it should be here.”
But asked the next day if there had been more progress with the developers, Brisbois said: “It’s gone dead quiet.” He adjusted the chances of landing the data center back to less than 50-50.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever had one (developer), after they were hot to trot, and then they went cold, and then they come back and they’re hot to trot,” he said, admitting that despite his optimistic nature, he was a bit deflated. “I don’t think I’ve ever had one of those yet. But we’ll see.”
Meanwhile, the opposition was doing more than rallying.
In Cassville, home to Nelson Dewey State Park, named after Wisconsin’s first governor and a longtime Grant County resident, the town board approved a data center moratorium. That was significant for a town that previously had no zoning regulation.
Following Cassville’s lead, several Grant County towns and the County Board adopted data center moratoriums. Lawmakers proposed legislation for statewide regulation. The state Public Service Commission moved to require data centers to pay the cost of generating and transmitting the electricity they would need. And gubernatorial candidates from both parties were vowing to protect communities from data centers.
Meanwhile, Brisbois continued to call the developers, with no luck. His daughters told Brisbois they were “ghosting” him — like a person who doesn’t want to go on a second date.
“When people go quiet like this, it’s an indicator to me that the project is not moving forward, or at least their interest is waning,” Brisbois said in late-April.
“Historically, that has been a very common practice in my industry. They just fade away.”
Brisbois admitted he was turning more attention to other projects and feeling disappointed.
“I put a lot of time into this and lost a lot of sleep over it,” he said at the time. “It stings a bit. I don’t know that it’s done-done. But I’m pretty calloused over by now.”
Brisbois acknowledged he did “very little due diligence” into the developers, saying he had limited ability to background check out-of-state residents.
He said that left him feeling vulnerable.
“I’m making a leap of faith,” he said. “But I do that all the time. I’m assuming that a business has the financial means to pull this off.”
“It’s not my job to really scrutinize — OK, you’re a good candidate versus … you’re not qualified,” he continued. “I don’t necessarily have the resources to do that, I’m a one-person show.”
By late May, the proposal seemed like only a memory. No return phone calls. Nothing scheduled, even as opponents continued public protests.
It’s possible the developers will never announce whether or where they’re building a data center. But Brisbois expressed no regrets.
“I felt that the project certainly has its merits,” he said, “and certainly was worth pursuing.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
A $2 billion proposal, then silence: How a Driftless Area data center deal fell apart is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Businesses say they are facing staffing challenges because many of the foreign workers they rely on through the summer tourism season haven’t arrived.
The post Work visa issues leave Door County businesses short staffed for summer season appeared first on WPR.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that a state college grant program for minority students is unconstitutional. UW-Madison’s Taylor Odle said he hopes that program can be repurposed to address Wisconsin’s college affordability problem.
The post Wisconsin can still boost college affordability after Supreme Court ruling, researcher says appeared first on WPR.
Wisconsin dairy farmers may have a new avenue to hire workers under new seasonal labor visa rules the Trump administration announced Wednesday.
The U.S. Department of Labor and Department of Homeland Security will give dairy farmers broader access to the federal H-2A program, through which farmers can secure temporary visas for seasonal agricultural workers.
The dairy industry has lobbied for years to ease program rules barring visas for ostensibly year-round farm roles like milking; those rules also exclude many livestock and mushroom farms from the program.
“This is a welcomed policy change for our dairy members, and we are hopeful it is just the beginning of continued H-2A program expansion,” John Hollay, president of the National Council of Agricultural Employers, wrote in a press release. “By opening the door for the dairy industry to take advantage of the only legal program for foreign agricultural workers, President Trump continues to move us in a direction of needed reform.”
The administration’s initial announcement was light on details about which dairy farm roles now qualify for H-2A visas.
The updates to the H-2A program are dairy-specific, and the USDA made no indication of changes to the visa’s one-year duration, or a maximum of three years with extensions.
Wisconsin’s agricultural sector increasingly relies on the H-2A program to meet its labor needs. Wisconsin farmers’ annual H-2A hiring increased at least six-fold over the past decade, and the White House’s ongoing immigration crackdown has amplified the program’s importance as a source of workers with legal status.
Some dairy farms already hire H-2A workers for non-milking jobs; at least 14% of Wisconsin farms approved for visas this year have dairy herds, U.S. Department of Labor and Wisconsin milk producer license data shows.
Calumet County dairy farmer Amy Woldt hired three H-2A workers from South Africa this year as heavy equipment operators. “We don’t really need them for working with the cattle,” she told Wisconsin Watch, but they do need a crew to run the farm’s skid steers and other farm machinery.
So far, nearly all H-2A workers on Wisconsin dairy farms are heavy equipment operators, at least according to farmers’ applications to the Department of Labor. Many, including the workers on Woldt’s farm, are from South Africa.
Fellow Calumet County farmer Kurt Schneider also hires South African H-2A workers to harvest his feed crops. “It’s because they speak English,” he said, and the ease of communication justifies the cost of flying in a crew from across the Atlantic. South Africans make up the second-largest cohort of H-2A workers after workers from Mexico, outnumbering the third-largest nationality — workers from Jamaica — more than 3-to-1 in 2024.
Schneider added that he would be thrilled to hire for his milking operations through the H-2A program. His current 35-person milking crew is mostly Spanish-speaking, so Schneider would favor H-2A workers from Mexico to supplement his dairy workforce. “That’s our culture,” he said. “We don’t want to change our culture.”
For Schneider, the H-2A program could offer a more stable workforce than the current cutthroat competition between farms allows. The pool of often-undocumented immigrant dairy workers is shrinking, in part because some workers are opting to return to their home countries amid the immigration enforcement push, and remaining workers can now hop between farms to earn higher wages. “I’m getting really sick of (it),” he said. “Somebody’s paying 50 cents an hour more and they jump ship.”
The Trump administration cut the program’s minimum wage last year; workers on Wisconsin farms classified as “less-skilled” now receive a minimum $12 per hour this year, down more than a third from their 2025 minimum wage. Woldt says she hasn’t cut her crew’s wages, hoping “to keep the guys we have” rather than competing with other farmers for new workers next season.
The USDA’s announcement didn’t specify where dairy workers will fall on the wage scale.
While a seasonal H-2A crew would also require regular turnover, Schneider said his farm’s current attrition rate justifies the switch. “We’re having bottom 10% turnover anyway,” he said, as new dairy hands move along in search of higher wages. “They’re only there two weeks or a month, and they leave, and you’re constantly training.”
But he isn’t inclined to let go of his current crew. If the new rules allow him to hire dairy hands through the H-2A program, Schneider said he would apply for enough visas to backfill openings as they arise, even if that means some visas go unused.
That strategy could also limit the risks of relying entirely on the H-2A program. A backlog at an American consulate in South Africa delayed the arrival of Schneider’s harvest crew this spring. Farmers pay steep overhead to secure H-2A visas, and when delays force workers to book last-minute flights, costs often skyrocket. Program rules require farmers to cover workers’ plane tickets and lodging, so delays can inflate the up-front costs of participating in the program — or, if a farm relied entirely on H-2A workers, possibly leave cows unmilked.
Processing delays also hit Woldt’s team this year, forcing one of her workers to return to South Africa while awaiting approval of his visa extension. She has no immediate plans to hire dairy hands through the program. “We’re good in that department,” she said.
National agricultural groups also tempered their praise of the new rule change with acknowledgement of the H-2A program’s capacity problems.
“For this expansion to succeed and the H-2A program to work as intended, our federal agencies must have the resources and regulatory structures necessary to handle the increased volume efficiently,” Hollay wrote.
Wisconsin Farmers Union President Darin Von Ruden noted that the policy shift may not benefit all Wisconsin farmers equally.
“I don’t think it’s going to help the small to medium-sized farmers very much,” he told Wisconsin Watch. The visa program can be cost-prohibitive for smaller farms that have survived decades of consolidation in the dairy industry, he said, but the new rules do give farms that can afford H-2A workers more room to maneuver.
Republican U.S Rep. Derrick Van Orden, who represents western Wisconsin, introduced legislation last fall to create an alternative to the H-2A program by allowing some undocumented agricultural workers to self-deport, pay a fine and return to the U.S. through a legal port of entry to resume working in agriculture. “The H-2A program is broken and it sucks,” he quipped during a presentation on immigrant labor at the World Dairy Expo in Madison last fall. Van Orden’s bill did not advance out of committee.
The Trump administration suspended Biden-era rules intended to crack down on abuses of H-2A workers last June. Wisconsin’s migrant labor law preserves some protections the Department of Labor no longer guarantees, including workers’ rights to invite legal aid providers and clergy into their employer-provided housing.
Editor’s note: This story was updated June 19 to add comment from Wisconsin Farmers Union President Darin Von Ruden.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Wisconsin dairy farms could gain new hiring option under visa changes is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
When you apply for a job, you probably know that your potential employer will check your criminal record. But what about your credit history?
Employers in most states, including Wisconsin, are allowed to run background checks that show your debts, available credit and payment history. Wisconsin Watch asked experts what job seekers and employees should know about this process and their rights.
We spoke to:
What questions do you have about jobs and job training in Wisconsin?
Email reporter Natalie Yahr at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org. We’ll try to find an answer, and we might even write an article about it. But don’t worry: We won’t name you unless you give us permission.
Not all types of background reports show financial information. Those that do typically show your credit accounts, payment history, available credit, bankruptcies, liens and self-reported work history, NerdWallet reports.
The reports do not show your credit score, the three-digit number that lenders, landlords and insurers use to assess how creditworthy you are. They also don’t show your income, birth date, marital status or medical debts.
Unlike when you apply for a credit card or a loan, this is a “soft inquiry,” meaning it won’t affect your credit score and it won’t be visible to other employers or lenders.
No. If employers want to use a third-party company to run a background check, they need written permission. That’s because of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a 1970 federal law created to protect consumers from false information being included in their credit reports. The law requires that an employer provide “clear and conspicuous” notice in a stand-alone document.
“That means that if they throw the language into the boilerplate of an application, or scribble it in the margins of the position description, or fail to get your consent before pulling the report, then they are in violation of the law,” Raef, the employment attorney, said in an email. The employer can run the background check only if the employee or job applicant signs the document.
If employers want to run a background check later, like if they’re considering you for a promotion, they have to get permission again.
“It’s not the case that if you’re hired by a company that five years later they can go back and use the same acceptance of disclosure from when you were hired,” Raef said.
Notably, the protections of the Fair Credit Reporting Act apply only when employers use another company to run the background check, not when employers use the Wisconsin Circuit Court Access Program (CCAP) or other tools to check a person’s history themselves.
Yes, though additional restrictions apply in the city of Madison.
If employers see something in the report that makes them choose to take an “adverse action” about your employment (for example, fire, demote or simply not hire), they must give you a “pre-adverse action notice,” along with a copy of your background report, details about the Fair Credit Reporting Act and an explanation of your rights, including the right to dispute the accuracy of the report and get another free report within 60 days.
“The notice must inform an individual that their decision was influenced by the report, but does not have to clarify what exactly within the report has led to the employer’s adverse decision,” Raef said. That, he said, can “leave individuals with little clarity as to the employer’s reasoning.”
The employer must allow time for the employee or applicant to respond before sending a final notice indicating the action the employer took.
Still, Raef said, employers might say they had other reasons for choosing a different candidate.
“Employers have the leeway to base their decision on a multitude of factors,” Raef said. “Oftentimes it can be really hard to sort of draw out what exactly happened here, and that’s where an employment attorney can be really helpful.”
In Madison, employers face stricter limits on how they can use credit history. That’s because credit history is one of the 30 characteristics denoted in the city’s equal opportunity ordinance, alongside homelessness, citizenship status, source of income and physical appearance.
“We have a very large, expansive number of protected classes,” said Peguero, the assistant city attorney.
Employers in Madison can make employment decisions based on credit history only if one of the following is true:
The ordinance applies within the city, so it covers Madison employers. It’s less clear whether it would apply to the growing number of Madison residents who work remotely for employers based elsewhere, Peguero said.
“That analysis would have to be done by the hearing examiner, but it is possible it could extend to an employer that is outside of the city of Madison,” Peguero said.
Employers may use credit history to assess how trustworthy or responsible a person is, Raef said. An employer may assume that an employee or applicant who has lots of debt, for example, may be more likely to commit fraud, embezzle funds or accept a bribe, especially if the person is in charge of company funds.
But Raef questions whether credit reports are useful in most employment decisions. “There’s not clear evidence that credit history is an indicator of an employee’s capacity to perform well in their job,” Raef said, pointing to a 2012 study that found no correlation.
“Someone might have poor credit on paper because of a domestic abuse situation in their home, or because they were born into really unfortunate circumstances that don’t reflect on their ability to be a great employee,” Raef said.
He worries that credit checks will create a “toxic loop” where the people who most need jobs can’t get them, which only makes their financial situation worse.
“I can see the employer’s side where there are limited and specific circumstances where these checks make sense, but as a broad application, I think that it leads to a lot of unfair employment practices and probably exacerbates existing biases that are systemic within our society,” Raef said.
A 2023 report by the Urban Institute, a national think tank focused on economic and social policy, echoes those concerns.
“Research suggests that workers with low wages are among those harmed by preemployment credit checks, in part because workers with low incomes are the most likely to have imperfect credit records,” the authors write, though they note there’s limited data on low-wage workers specifically.
About half of U.S. employers conduct credit checks when hiring for at least some of their positions, according to a 2021 survey by the Professional Background Screening Association.
Jeff Palkowski leads the Wisconsin State Council of the Society for Human Resources Management. He has worked in human resources in Wisconsin for more than 20 years, mostly in the public sector in Madison. The closest he’s come to an employment credit check was when a friend applied to work at the FBI.
“Anecdotally, I have heard of instances where a credit check may be part of the pre-employment process, but only in rare cases … Personally, I have never filled a role that had a pre-employment credit check as part of the recruitment process,” he said.
No. As of 2023, 11 states had restricted the practice, according to the Urban Institute. Wisconsin has no state law restricting these checks.
If you believe there is a mistake on your credit report, you can dispute it by contacting the consumer reporting agency whose report showed the mistake. The agency must investigate.
“If they can’t verify the accuracy of the information, then they have to remove it,” Raef said.
If you believe an employer used your credit history inappropriately, Raef recommends contacting an employment lawyer.
“If they fail to notify you of a negative decision based on a report, or if they refuse to identify the source of the information that they obtained about you, or if they fail to get your permission at all, then you might be entitled to recover damages,” Raef said.
If you or the employer is located in Madison, you can also file a complaint with the city of Madison’s Department of Civil Rights, which investigates alleged violations of the city’s equal opportunity ordinance. You must file the complaint within 300 days of the incident.
Complaints are far less common than allegations of other kinds of employment discrimination, Peguero said. Of the 805 employment complaints submitted to the office between 2020 and 2025, just eight mentioned credit history.
There are proactive steps you can take now to reduce the chance that a credit check will cause you unnecessary trouble.
“You shouldn’t wait until you have signed something allowing your employer to look into this,” Raef said.
He recommends the following actions:
Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus. Email her at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Can Wisconsin employers check your credit? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Last month, seed seller Bayer and the U.S. Department of Justice reached an agreement to suspend parts of a seed loyalty program that regulators argued was anticompetitive and drove up prices. A researcher and independent seed company explain why they say the move was needed.
The post New agreement promises to boost seed variety for Wisconsin farmers appeared first on WPR.
CEO of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk speaks last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland. Last week’s SpaceX IPO, which made Musk the world’s first trillionaire, is a vivid illustration of wealth concentration in the United States, which has been accelerating since 2022. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
When SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company, began trading on the stock market last week, he became the world’s first trillionaire.
The SpaceX IPO made the world’s richest man even richer, grabbing headlines worldwide. But it is merely the most vivid illustration of a U.S. trend that has been accelerating since 2022.
The richest 1% of Americans held nearly a third of the country’s total wealth at the end of 2025, the largest percentage the Federal Reserve Board has recorded since it started monitoring the numbers in 1989. In 1990, the share was 22.5%.
The latest percentage, 31.9%, is likely the largest since the end of World War II, possibly heralding a return to the extreme wealth inequality of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it is likely to balloon further as a result of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and other pro-business policies.
Today’s top 1% consists of about 1.4 million households with at least $12 million in net worth, holding a total of $55.9 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% consists of 67.7 million households with less than $264,000 in net worth.
Using different methods than the Fed, French economist Thomas Piketty has asserted that the richest 1% of Americans held nearly half the nation’s wealth in 1928 and 1929, just before the Great Depression. Their share declined after that, during a period of high marginal income tax rates (the percentage of tax you pay on your last dollar of income) and widespread discomfort with astronomical pay for executives. Instead, corporations plowed their profits into expansion and higher wages for workers.
But the share of wealth held by the top 1% began rising again in the 1970s, according to the Piketty data.
Piketty, who theorizes that unfettered capitalism always leads to high concentration of wealth, told Stateline in an email that “there’s nothing natural about this — it’s all due to policies.”
“If the super-rich capture the state and pay little tax, then it’s easy to accumulate a lot, but history suggests that politics can revert quite quickly,” Piketty wrote.
Another prominent economist who recently studied the wealth of California billionaires, Emmanuel Saez, described the current spike in the share of wealth held by the top 1% as driven primarily by the stock market boom. Saez is director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at the University of California, Berkeley.
In at least a dozen states, including Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Virginia, lawmakers have proposed new taxes for the wealthiest taxpayers. Some of the proposals would tax annual incomes above a certain threshold while others would tax capital assets, including high-value stocks and real estate.
In California, advocates in April announced they had gathered enough signatures for a November ballot initiative that would impose a one-time tax on billionaires. The state’s billionaires held about $2.3 trillion in wealth as of June 10, assets that could generate almost $101 billion from the proposed tax.
This year, at least 12 billionaires left California. They include Lynsi Snider, who inherited the In-N-Out hamburger chain and moved to Tennessee, and car loan magnate Don Hankey, who moved to Nevada. However, moves into the state and new wealth created 23 new California billionaires this year. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has vowed to stay in California despite a potential $8 billion one-time tax bill.
There are no state-level statistics on the top 1%, though Census Bureau estimates from 2022 show the states with the highest shares of households with more than $500,000 in net worth are Hawaii (48%), the District of Columbia (47%) and Washington state (43%). Hawaii also has the highest average net worth at more than $1 million, mostly because homeowners in that state have an average of $600,000 of equity in their homes. The states with the next highest average net worth are California ($792,000), and Massachusetts ($751,000).
Conservative and liberal experts agree that a soaring stock market and business profits have made it a good time for the wealthy, while middle-class and lower-income people are doing less well, especially as inflation gobbles up wage increases. There’s also widespread agreement that Trump’s tariffs (since struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court) disproportionately harmed lower-income and middle-class people, and that the tax cuts in the broad tax and spending measure Trump signed last summer (commonly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) will disproportionately benefit the wealthy.
The combined effects of the tariffs and the tax and spending law will help households with the top 10% of incomes most and hurt 70% of households between now and 2034, according to a June 1 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank that drew on information from the Budget Lab at Yale University.
Chuck Marr, the center’s vice president for federal tax policy, pointed to the law’s extension of a deep corporate income tax cut that dates from Trump’s first administration.
“Trump’s whole policy has really leaned into increasing this disparity,” Marr said. “You’ve got AI coming and globalization has shifted income and wealth upward, and instead of pushing back against that, Trump and others have leaned into it.”
Nevertheless, Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the U.S. government’s tax and spending policy is “still highly progressive in that low-income households receive benefits from the high-income households paying taxes.”
“It’s a little less so than it was prior to the passage of the (Trump tax and spending law) and the tariffs, but it’s still the case. It hasn’t changed the story that much,” Pomerleau said.
Marr agreed that the federal tax system is basically progressive, in that it uses taxes on high income earners to pay for the needs of low-income residents. But tax collections are low in the United States compared with other wealthy countries: Of the 20 wealthiest nations, only Ireland collects less government revenue as a share of GDP.
“Compared to other countries, inequality is high because we redistribute so much less money,” Marr said. “It’s a progressive tax system but it doesn’t raise a lot of money.”
The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book, an accounting of national economic conditions released June 3, found a divide in how inflation, which has increased as a result of the war in Iran, has affected American spending.
“Higher-income households remained resilient and less sensitive to price increase, while middle-income households were described as ‘squeezing more life out of every dollar before deciding to spend it,’ and low-income consumers showed greater financial strain,” the report said.
The “squeezing” analogy for the middle class came from a roundtable discussion of hospitality executives in the Kansas City, Missouri, area in late May, said Jeremy Hill, a regional economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
Hill said there was a gasp in the room when one high-end restaurant chain executive said the chain could raise prices at will and keep expanding, hampered only by a shortage of high-end chefs to staff locations. Meanwhile, hotels, bars and restaurants serving the middle class are struggling to get people to come in and spend.
“It’s not that they (wealthy people) don’t care about inflation. They’re worried about what it might do to future demand or their own stocks,” Hill said. “But today, it’s not impacting the way they spend.”
The stock market’s recent run has contributed the most to the consolidation of wealth at the top. Rising real estate prices also have also added to wealth, especially for longtime homeowners.
“This has disproportionately helped those who already hold assets while the average American pays higher prices for everyday essentials,” said E.J. Antoni, chief economist for the conservative Heritage Foundation. “In other words, Wall Street got rich while Main Street got inflation.”
White Americans own outsized shares of assets such as stock and real estate, according to the federal statistics. White people are 57% of the population but own 82% of the assets, while Black and Hispanic people, who make up a combined 24% of the U.S. population, have less than 7% of assets. Asians are included in an “Other” category, which is about 9% of population and holds about 11.3% of the nation’s total assets.
By generation, Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1964 hold almost half of wealth, while Millennials and Gen X hold the lion’s share of liabilities, such as mortgages and consumer debt, that detract from net worth. Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) have about 42% of liabilities and Gen X (1965-1980) have 35%, compared with 22% for Baby Boomers.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing for young people to be in debt as they build careers and pay off student loans, said Pomerleau, the American Enterprise Institute economist.
“Doctors with $450,000 in medical school debt might be in the bottom 10%, yes, but that person is going to be in the top 1% of wealth at some point in their lives,” Pomerleau said.
“You enter the labor force with a net liability, but you save over time, that liability is paid down, you’re paying off your mortgage, and that’s when your wealth starts growing.”
Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
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