Seventy-two Wisconsin school districts are going to referendum in April seeking just over $1 billion from taxpayers at a time when voters indicate they are less likely to support increased funding for schools.
A record high 60% of registered voters said reducing property taxes was more important than increasing spending on public schools, according to the recent Marquette University Law School poll conducted in February. Fifty-seven percent of voters in the same poll said they would vote against a school referendum, same as October, but a reversal from six years ago when 57% said they would support one.
The public concern about property taxes creates an especially difficult environment this year for the school districts seeking financial approvals from voters. Sixty-two districts are pursuing operational referendums this spring, according to data from the Department of Public Instruction. Operational questions ask voters to approve whether school districts can increase taxes to pay for things such as educational programs, technology and transportation services.
The rest of the referendums in April would allow districts to borrow money for capital construction projects. Two districts, Howard-Suamico and Sauk Prairie, are asking voters to approve both capital and operational referendums.
Approval rates for districts have declined since 2018, according to research from the Wisconsin Policy Forum. A record number of school districts proposed referendum questions to voters in 2024, but the 70% approval rate was the lowest passage rate for referendums in a midterm or presidential election year since 2014. More than 20% of the districts going to referendum this April are returning to voters after failed referendums in 2025.
In the meantime, debates continue at the Capitol over state funding for public schools. Gov. Tony Evers and Republican legislative leaders are expected to continue negotiating over how to use the state’s $2.4 billion surplus and what amount should be used to lower property taxes and support public schools. Just last week, a group of Wisconsin parents, four teacher unions and five school districts sued the Legislature arguing it’s failing to fund public schools. The Necedah Area School District, one of the plaintiffs in the case, is asking voters in April to approve a $5.8 million operational referendum across the next four school years.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin school districts continue to battle with the financial impacts of declining enrollments and rising costs as district leaders say state funding they receive has not kept up with inflation. The Appleton Area School District is seeking a $60 million operating referendum spread out over the next four years, which would fund efforts to help students struggling with poverty and mental health issues and plug a $13 million operating deficit that formed over three years of high inflation rates that outpaced available funding, Superintendent Greg Hartjes said.
“Certainly the timing is not good,” Hartjes said of Appleton’s operating referendum. “But it is because of that three years of high inflation that we can’t sustain another year. If we don’t pass a referendum, we are going to cut $13 million from our budget next year. And that’s a lot of services for kids.”
Why a school district goes to referendum
The two main sources of revenue for Wisconsin school districts are state funding and property taxes. In 1993, Wisconsin lawmakers put limits on how much school districts can increase funding from those two revenue sources. State law allows districts to go to referendum to ask voters to exceed the revenue limits with additional property taxes.
“It sometimes gets talked about as if it’s a fluke, or if it necessarily means that something bad is happening. That isn’t always the case,” said Sara Shaw, the deputy research director at the Wisconsin Policy Forum. “You might have an instance where a local community says, ‘Actually we’re fine with this. You tax us more. We have the means to be taxed more and we have the desire to fund education more.’”
School district revenue limits were connected to inflation until 2009, during the Great Recession, when a Democratic-controlled Legislature and Democratic governor chose to decouple them. Since then, as Republicans took control of state government in 2011, state education spending has not kept pace with inflation or the national average, according to the Policy Forum.
In recent years, the lack of inflationary increases to revenue limits and declining school district enrollment are among the main reasons why districts have gone to referendum, said Dan Rossmiller, the executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
“At the same time, your fixed costs, such as transportation, heating, lighting, insurance, health insurance for your employees and the salaries of your employees and the portion you pay toward their retirement are all coming up generally,” Rossmiller said. “So that puts school districts in a bit of a vice.”
The Wisconsin Rapids School District, which is asking voters to support a $19 million operating referendum over the next five years, is one of those examples. The district has an existing five-year operating referendum approved in 2021 that expires this school year, but was boosted by pandemic-related funds that are no longer available. Inflation, rising insurance costs and declining enrollment have put the district in a difficult position, said Wisconsin Rapids Superintendent Ronald Rasmussen.
“The district is in a situation now where our expenses exceed our revenue,” Rasmussen said.
But referendums are about compromise, Sen. Romaine Quinn, R-Birchwood, said at a February meeting of the Legislature’s budget-writing committee. It’s also not just schools that are feeling the impacts of inflation, Quinn said.
“There isn’t anybody in their family budget, a local entity unit of government or state government that can afford to keep up with the inflation that we’ve had to endure over the last four to six years,” Quinn said.
What about the 400-year veto?
During the 2023-25 state budget process, Evers used the governor’s veto powers to provide an annual $325 per pupil increase to school district revenue limits for 400 years.
Republicans have repeatedly slammed the veto and advanced proposals seeking to limit the governor’s partial veto powers in the future. In February, the Legislature added to the November ballot a constitutional amendment to prevent the governor from using veto powers to increase taxes or fees. It’s unclear if the proposed language would have affected the 400-year veto because the veto didn’t directly increase taxes or fees. Instead, it gave school districts more discretion to increase property taxes.
School leaders say they’re appreciative of the revenue authority coming from the 400-year veto, but it doesn’t make up for the lack of consistent inflationary increases since 2009. Districts are also still dependent on how the Legislature acts on revenue limits or general state aid.
“The more state aid we get means we get less property taxes,” Rasmussen said. “And this year, the revenue limit changed by $325, but the aid we got from the state that line stayed the same, so the difference was made up by local property taxes.”
Hartjes and Rasmussen said they are approaching frustration about property taxes by trying to inform residents about the basics of school funding, being transparent with potential voters about district finances and breaking down the cost of the referendum on a typical home in their community.
Districts across the state that are going to referendum this spring are holding similar information sessions to answer questions from potential voters and creating webpages for people seeking more information.
It’s not an easy task, especially as the cost of living remains the top issue for Wisconsin voters this year.
“Your price of everything else that you have to buy as a consumer is difficult,” Hartjes said. “And then to ask to have your property taxes raised? We understand the challenge for families.”
The election is April 7. Early voting starts March 24.
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Members of an ad hoc Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources committee are urging wildlife regulators to work with a national expert as they finalize recommendations to guide state beaver management policy for the next decade.
Researchers and conservationists serving on the advisory body — which is largely composed of DNR staff and government and tribal representatives — hope that including additional scientific expertise, and even a potential computer-guided aerial beaver dam mapping survey, could assist regulators at a time when climate change is beginning to significantly alter Wisconsin weather patterns and pose widespread ecological risks.
“We’re taking our species out faster than they can recover, and when we are overexploiting our trout, when we’re overexploiting animals, plants, habitats, that’s going to make us lose these species faster,” said University of Minnesota ecohydrology professor Emily Fairfax, who has helped review and fact-check several beaver management plans and recently spoke to the committee. “I don’t think we have time to wait — full stop.”
A shift would transform long-standing beaver policy that frames the critters as a nuisance species.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s wildlife services program has removed beavers and their dams in Wisconsin since 1988 under contract with the state, along with local governments, railroad companies and Indigenous tribes.
At least five states across the Mississippi River basin and Great Lakes region contract with the federal wildlife services program for beaver removal, but Wisconsin stands out among states for the quantity of beavers and dams USDA employees clear, the millions of dollars Wisconsin has invested to do so and the state’s justification.
Current trout policy includes killing beavers
USDA killed roughly 23,500 beavers across 42 states in 2024, about 2,700 of which were in Wisconsin, ranking the state among the top five in the nation.
In Wisconsin, the agency focuses on abating transportation hazards, such as flooded roadways. But, perhaps most controversially, about a third of sites where USDA traps beavers are coldwater streams.
Wisconsin currently prioritizes maintaining free-flowing conditions on the state’s prized coldwater streams, partly to appeal to its “customers” and their fishing preferences.
Henry Nehls-Lowe, Southern Wisconsin Trout Unlimited board secretary, casts his fly-fishing line in Sixmile Branch, a Class 2 trout stream, Oct. 7, 2024, in Grant County, Wis. Federal trappers killed about 2,700 beavers in Wisconsin in 2024. About a third of those were in coldwater streams. Wisconsin prioritizes free-flowing conditions to benefit anglers. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
But the strategy has faced increasing scrutiny, even among anglers, who are divided over the issue. Some beaver advocates say the state agency charged with protecting and enhancing natural resources shouldn’t let commercial interests unduly guide its decisions.
In 2025, the agency trapped and cleared dams in more than 1,550 miles of coldwater streams — roughly the driving distance from Milwaukee to Salt Lake City, Utah. The DNR uses proceeds from annual trout fishing stamp sales to finance the annual undertaking.
At least two other states, Minnesota and Michigan, have employed the USDA for trout stream clearing, but at a significantly reduced scale.
The DNR doesn’t know the impacts of these policies on Wisconsin’s beaver population, as it ceased conducting aerial surveys in 2014. Agency staff, instead, estimate beaver numbers and harvest impacts using trapper surveys and voluntary reporting of annual take. Staff believe the population remains stable statewide or is even growing.
Conservationists are calling on the DNR to systematically survey the state’s beaver population. Without obtaining a reliable count, they say, it’s impossible to devise a science-based management plan. Even if beaver removal continued on trout streams, critics say the state could better estimate the population by having trappers register their beaver take, as the DNR requires for turkey, deer, bobcat and bear harvests.
Meanwhile, an expanding body of research is showcasing beavers’ ecosystem and economic benefits and the drawbacks of removal.
Beaver dams help limit flooding
When beavers remain on the landscape, they create wetlands, which mitigate climate change impacts like drought, wildfires and flooding. Problemsthought to be endemic to the American West are now creeping eastward.
Thunderstorms wreaked havoc in southeastern Wisconsin last summer, bringing more than 14 inches of rain to some parts of Milwaukee within 24 hours on Aug. 9-10. Roughly 2,000 homes sustained major damage or were destroyed in the ensuing floods, and the county now faces more than $22 million in public infrastructure repairs after being twice denied federal disaster assistance.
Beaver dams can dissipate torrents of water when the sky opens — even to the city’s benefit.
Using computer models, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers estimated that the Milwaukee River watershed could accommodate enough beaver colonies to reduce flood water volumes by 14% to 48%.
Wisconsin beaver policy understudied
But scientists face decades of institutional consensus in Wisconsin that beavers degrade stream habitat and threaten wild coldwater fisheries.
DNR fish biologists say that beavers warm water temperatures and plug coldwater streams with silt. When unobstructed, the water bodies, which tend to contain few fish species, flow fast and hard.
“Past studies have identified some positive but mostly negative effects of beavers on trout, and my research builds upon this,” DNR fisheries scientist Matthew Mitro told the beaver management committee. “The option for lethal removal (of) beavers is an important tool that should remain available for resource managers.”
Yet critics charge DNR biologists with managing streams for the primary benefit of one species by trapping out another, justifying the practice using research that hasn’t undergone scientific peer review.
Henry Nehls-Lowe, Southern Wisconsin Trout Unlimited board secretary, nets a brown trout he caught while fly-fishing in Big Spring Branch, a Class 1 trout stream, Oct. 7, 2024, in Grant County, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
A 2011 academic review of beaver-related research conducted in the Great Lakes region, which predated Mitro’s recent research, found that 72% of claims concerning beavers’ negative impacts are speculative and not backed by data, while the same held true for 49% of positive claims. The negative claims included the idea that beaver dams warm stream temperatures and block trout passage.
DNR biologists often note that academic literature largely has been conducted in the western United States and can’t be directly transplanted to Wisconsin’s comparatively flat landscape.
That is all the more reason to get off our haunches and wade into beaver ponds, Fairfax said.
“We have to follow that up by collecting our own data sets,” she said. “We have to publish them in peer-reviewed journals and get that scientific stamp of approval.”
Beaver trapping and natural predation are distinct from targeted eradication, Fairfax noted. The former can be sustainable, while stream-wide depopulation and dam removal can damage entire ecosystems.
It’s also possible that stream clearing prevents beavers from moving to parts of Wisconsin where they are wanted or where they could thrive with fewer conflicts.
Federal government assesses Wisconsin’s beaver dealings
The DNR beaver management plan’s update coincides with a new USDA environmental assessment of the potential impacts of its beaver and dam removal in Wisconsin.
A conservation organization founded by beaver management committee member Bob Boucher announced its intent to sue the federal agency to compel it to update its previous assessment, published more than a decade ago. Then Boucher threatened to sue the DNR after it wouldn’t release a draft of the new one, currently under review.
The 2013 assessment determined that USDA’s involvement in clearing streams and conflict areas did not significantly impact the beaver population. It estimated wildlife managers would only trap about 2,000 beavers annually, but the agency exceeded that figure within a few years.
The USDA recommends staying the course, using lethal and nonlethal methods. When analyzing alternatives, the agency concluded that other wildlife managers would continue trapping with or without federal involvement.
The USDA allocates some funding for the installation of flow control devices that can reduce the footprint of beaver ponds by lowering water levels. But nearly all beaver conflict sites the USDA handles in Wisconsin are managed through trapping. Levelers do have limited effectiveness in settings like high-flow streams or infrastructure-heavy floodplains.
A tree impacted by beaver activity, Oct. 25, 2024, in Alma Center, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Wildlife managers say that they need flexibility because no two beaver sites are identical.
“We’re not against beaver complexes,” DNR fisheries biologist Bradd Sims told committee members. “We’re not against ecosystem diversity, and I don’t know why people try to paint us that way. We’re an open-minded bureau that’s open to different management styles.”
Trout and beaver proponents do agree that climate change poses an existential threat to biodiversity. While the former group might view beavers as harmful to coldwater streams, the latter see their potential as a partner in creating resilient landscapes that accommodate not only fish, but also frogs, turtles, bugs, bats, birds and humans.
The committee’s next meeting is March 18 in Rothschild, Wisconsin. Ultimately, DNR staff will rewrite the current plan, release a draft for public comment and discussion at open houses, and present a revised document to the state’s natural resources board for ratification.
This story was produced in partnership with the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network, of which Wisconsin Watch is a member. Sign up for Wisconsin Watch’s newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.
The city of Madison on Monday appealed a ruling that allows it to be sued for monetary damages for disenfranchising nearly 200 voters in the 2024 election, arguing the decision would unrealistically require “error-free elections” and expose municipalities across the state to liability for mistakes.
The appeal comes after Dane County Circuit Court Judge David Conway’s Feb. 9 ruling that Madison could face potential financial liability for disenfranchising 193 voters whose absentee ballots were unintentionally left uncounted. Notably, the city did not specifically contest the judge’s rejection in that ruling of its earlier argument that absentee voting is merely a “privilege” under state law — a claim that would have shielded it from damages.
Instead, the appeal centers on who has the authority to enforce election laws and whether voters can sue for negligence. The city argues that such complaints must go first to the Wisconsin Elections Commission and asks higher courts to revisit a landmark 1866 case that allowed damages against election officials who deprive citizens of the right to vote.
“It is not difficult to imagine how the circuit court’s ruling may be perceived as an opportunity by partisan actors to influence the election,” attorneys for the city, former Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl and Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick wrote in the filing.
A permanent path to sue for damages over accidental election errors without going first through the commission could “chill the willingness of individuals to volunteer to assist with elections, and the willingness of voters to participate in the political process,” they wrote.
Madison asks court to revisit landmark voting case
Much of Madison’s appeal asks the court to revisit a key finding in the landmark 1866 case that secured the extension of the franchise to Black Wisconsinites, Gillespie v. Palmer. In that case, the court held that state law allows plaintiffs to sue election officials for damages if they “negligently deprive citizens of the right to vote.”
The case arose after Ezekiel Gillespie, a Black man, was turned away from the polls in 1865. While voters had ratified a measure extending the franchise to Black residents 16 years earlier, it went largely unenforced, as state officials still disputed whether the change was valid. Gillespie sued, and courts ultimately ruled in his favor, concluding in 1866 that Black Wisconsinites had been wrongfully disenfranchised for 17 years.
Although Gillespie was intentionally barred from voting, the court’s ruling established negligence — not just intentional misconduct — as a basis for disenfranchised voters to seek damages. The Dane County Circuit Court relied on that broader standard in allowing the Madison lawsuit to proceed.
Madison officials in their latest appeal argue the lower court misapplied the precedent. In their view, Gillespie was about protecting the right to cast a ballot — a right that they say isn’t disputed in this case. No election official in Madison denied that the 193 Madison voters had a right to vote, they wrote. Rather, they contend, the voters’ ballots were unintentionally left uncounted after being cast.
If Gillespie is extended under these circumstances, the defendants argue, Wisconsin would be the first state to allow “any voter whose ballot is accidentally uncounted a right to sue for monetary damages,” a premise that they say requires immediate review by higher courts given the impending 2026 midterms.
They also contend the 1866 ruling predates Wisconsin’s modern election system, and relying on “such an archaic interpretation of Constitutional rights in Wisconsin is grossly in error and requires intervention before the case proceeds further.”
Madison’s filing “seeks to erode the protections” guaranteed in Gillespie, said Scott Thompson, staff attorney for Law Forward, which filed the case. “This argument follows the city’s failed attempt to throw out this case by arguing that the right to vote does not protect absentee voters from disenfranchisement. The right to vote has value, and the voters the city of Madison disenfranchised look forward to having their day in court.”
Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative, clarified that a court wouldn’t need to overturn the historic Black voting rights case entirely to rule that it doesn’t apply in the lawsuit against Madison.
“You could potentially read that case in a more narrow way, as applying only to intentional deprivation of the right to vote, as opposed to negligence and deprivation,” she said, adding that it’s likely that only a higher court could reinterpret Gillespie in such a way.
Law Forward’s response to Madison’s appeal is due on March 9. Then the Madison-based District 4 Court of Appeals is expected to determine whether the appeal may move forward.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
In Wisconsin, unlike in nearly every other state, first-offense drunken driving is not a crime.
Wisconsin treats a standard first-offense operating while intoxicated as a civil violation.
Punishment includes a fine of $150-$300 and driver’s license revocation for six to nine months.
Subsequent OWI offenses generally are crimes, but there is an exception.
If a second offense occurs more than 10 years after the first, first-offense penalties apply.
Otherwise, second and third offenses are misdemeanors. Jail time is five days to six months for a second offense and 45 days to one year for a third offense.
Fourth and subsequent offenses are felonies punishable by jail or prison time.
New Jersey treats first-offense OWI as a traffic violation, but up to 30 days in jail can be imposed.
In New Hampshire, first-offense is a misdemeanor, but no jail time can be imposed.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
A federal lawsuit filed Feb. 23 by the legal nonprofit group Protect Democracy alleges the Department of Homeland Security used facial recognition technology unlawfully to track legal observers and label them domestic terrorists.
In Milwaukee County, law enforcement representatives are addressing facial recognition technology-related fears from residents. They’re concerned about a potential collaboration with a company called Biometrica, which provides access to facial recognition search results.
In August, Milwaukee County Sheriff Denita Ball signed an “agreement of intent” to enter into a contract with Biometrica, said James Burnett, director of public affairs and community engagement and acting chief of staff at the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office.
“But the contract is still considered to be in draft form – not fully signed, executed or valid – and has to proceed, like any other proposed contract, through the county’s statutory signing process,” Burnett said.
There currently are no services or technology being provided by Biometrica, and Biometrica does not have access to any sheriff’s office data, Burnett said.
County Supervisor Sky Capriolo, member of the county’s Judiciary, Law Enforcement and General Services Committee, said she and residents have serious concerns.
“It warrants more consideration, education and discussion,” Capriolo said. “I certainly am not ready to green-light a contract.”
Capriolo said she’s waiting to hear whether the contract will go to her committee again.
Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman took a different step and banned the use of facial technology by his department in early February.
On Feb. 24, Norman announced the suspension of MPD officer Josue Ayala for the improper use of a different tracking tool, the Flock camera system, to track a dating partner and a former partner.
“I am extremely disappointed to learn about the incident and expect all members, sworn and civilian, to demonstrate the highest ethical standards in the performance of their duties,” said Norman in a statement.
Ayala was charged by the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office with one count of attempted misconduct in public office. Norman said he immediately directed MPD to create additional auditing mechanisms.
Concerns remain high
Social justice and civil rights advocates have expressed grave concerns about the use of the technology by both agencies, citing evidence of inaccuracies, racial bias and privacy violations.
Facial recognition technology uses artificial intelligence to identify someone by comparing a photo of an unknown face to some database of images of known faces, said Katie Kinsey at the Feb. 5 Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission meeting during a presentation by the NYU Policing Project.
The image databases can include mug shot collections, driver’s license records or images found on the internet, Kinsey said.
Facial recognition technology and local law enforcement
In spring, MPD acknowledged it used outside agencies’ licenses for facial recognition search results for two to three years without a written department policy.
The department also announced it was considering an agreement with Biometrica – an agreement that would have provided access to facial recognition technology to the department in exchange for approximately 2.5 million Milwaukee County Jail booking photos.
This proposal prompted months of public pushback before the announcement by Norman in February that the department would no longer pursue the technology.
ACLU preaches vigilance
The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin welcomed Norman’s announcement but also expressed concerns about MPD’s past decision making.
It is “extremely concerning that MPD secretly used FRT (facial recognition technology) searches for years without any standard operating procedure – or any written guidelines – in place,” an ACLU spokesperson said in an email to NNS.
The organization is urging Milwaukee residents to remain vigilant.
“Countless Milwaukee residents and community leaders have engaged in thoughtful community education, spent hours upon hours in public meetings and contacted their local elected officials to voice their unequivocal opposition to the use of (facial recognition technology), and they will still be watching,” the spokesperson said.
The MPD spokesperson told NNS the department could revisit the issue in the future when a policy is in place that aligns with both public safety benefit and public concerns.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
In other words, Wisconsin voters won’t see Hong on the ballot until late summer.
A Marquette University Law School poll – published the same day as the misleading post – found 11% of Wisconsin voters said they plan to vote for Hong in the primary, compared to 10% for Mandela Barnes. A majority of voters, 65%, were undecided.
Polls do not determine election outcomes, and there is no guarantee that Hong will maintain that lead over the next six months.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
I have visited many after-school and summer programs across Wisconsin, from large urban sites to small rural schools, and what I’ve seen has stayed with me. I’ve watched students immersed in creative writing, acting and robotics. I’ve observed staff working one-on-one with kids navigating intense emotional challenges. And I’ve seen the smiles on middle schoolers’ faces as they reconnect with trusted mentors at the end of the school day. These programs are not “extras”; they provide crucial support to kids, families and entire communities.
The access gap
And yet, for far too many Wisconsin families, these opportunities remain out of reach. According to the latest America After 3PMreport, nearly 275,000 Wisconsin children who would participate in after-school programs are not enrolled because none are available. Four in five children who could benefit from these supports are missing out. Parents cite cost, lack of transportation and a simple lack of local programming as the biggest barriers.
The benefits are clear
The impact of these programs is undeniable. Parents overwhelmingly rate their children’s after-school programs as excellent or very good, reporting that they keep kids safe, build social skills and support mental wellness. Research in Wisconsin shows that students who participate in extracurricular activities are less likely to report anxiety or depression and more likely to feel a sense of belonging.
Out-of-school-time programs often provide the space for deep, long-term mentoring, a powerful protective factor in a young person’s life. While teachers are often stretched thin during the academic day, out-of-school-time staff can focus on the relational side of development.
The cost of instability
When funding is unstable, it undermines the very connections that make these programs transformative. Recently, a Boys & Girls Club director shared the human cost of budget constraints: They were forced to reduce a veteran staff member to part-time. This didn’t just trim a budget; it severed a multi-year mentorship. When that bond was broken, several youths stopped attending entirely.
Wisconsin lags behind national trends
Across the country, after-school and summer programs are increasingly viewed as essential to youth development. Twenty-seven states provide dedicated state funding for these programs; Wisconsin provides none. States as different as Alabama and Texas recognize that federal funding alone is not enough. So do our Midwestern neighbors.
Public support for these programs is strong and bipartisan. Families across Wisconsin want safe, enriching opportunities for their children. With a significant budget surplus, Wisconsin is uniquely positioned to invest in its future.
State leaders should view out-of-school programming as a foundation for safety, mental health and long-term economic opportunity. We have the resources; now we need the will. By committing to consistent state funding, we can ensure that every young person in Wisconsin has a place to belong when the school bell rings.
Daniel Gage is a consultant with the Afterschool Alliance and Wisconsin Out of School Time Alliance, focusing on advocacy and outreach. He co-founded the Wisconsin Partnership for Children and Youth, a coalition that promotes after-school and summer programs as vital for healthy youth development and future citizenship.
Guest commentaries reflect the views of their authors and are independent of the nonpartisan, in-depth reporting produced by Wisconsin Watch’s newsroom staff. Want to join the Wisconversion? See our guidelines for submissions.
This story was originally published on Investigate Midwest.
Lisa Lawler wasn’t surprised when diagnosed with breast cancer in 2025. Her mother had breast cancer and died in 2016. It seemed like cancer had become a common diagnosis for many of her neighbors and friends.
“With how many people seem to get cancer in our community, you just assume you will get it,” said Lawler, who lives in rural Hardin County, Iowa. “But no one really talks about what’s causing it.”
After 10 rounds of radiation and a surgery to remove the tumor, Lawler’s cancer was in remission. Last year, she took a test to determine if her cancer was likely genetic, meaning a high chance of recurrence, which could lead her to have her entire breast removed.
She was surprised by the results.
“The genetic test they ran for me was one that covered 81 genes that are typically related to breast cancer,” Lawler said. “After the test, they told me my cancer is likely not genetic, but likely environmental, based on these 81 genes.
“Your next thought is, then what’s in the environment that caused my cancer?”
Increasingly, pesticides are being blamed for rising cancer rates across America’s agricultural communities.
Hardin County, home to around 800 farms, has a pesticide use rate more than four times the national average and a cancer rate among the highest in the state.
Most of the 500 counties with the highest pesticide use per square mile are located in the Midwest. Sixty percent of those counties also had cancer rates higher than the national average of 460 cases per 100,000 people, according to an analysis of data from both the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Cancer Institute.
This story was produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship.
Last year, Investigate Midwest, in partnership with the University of Missouri, investigated the link between agrichemicals and cancer in Missouri, finding that many were rural communities that already lacked access to health care.
Investigate Midwest expanded on that coverage by analyzing data across the country, along with interviewing more than 100 farmers, environmentalists, lawmakers and scientists as part of a partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship. The result was the picture of a nation at a crossroads in dealing with this public health crisis that has not just been ignored by state and federal health officials, but aided.
This story was also supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
“Cancer is everywhere and it’s an experience that is unfortunately all too common,” said Kerri Johannsen, senior director of policy and programs at the Iowa Environmental Council, a Des Moines-based nonprofit that has been studying the state’s growing cancer rate.
Agrichemicals have helped America become a crop-producing power, increasing yields of commodity crops — such as corn and soybeans — used for food, fuel and animal feed.
Sprayed from airplanes, drones, tractors and handheld devices, these chemicals can drift through the air or run off into nearby rivers and streams.
And for decades, some farmers and pesticide users have developed neurological and respiratory issues. Thousands of lawsuits have alleged that pesticides and the companies that make them were to blame.
Pesticide manufacturers often rejected those claims while sometimes concealing research by their own employees that raised similar concerns. These companies — such as Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and BASF — have also spent millions to lobby federal and state lawmakers for laws that would limit their legal liability and continue to allow them to sell agrichemicals.
“This is one of the most transparently reviewed products ever,” said Jessica Christiansen, the head of crop science communications for Bayer, speaking about her company’s production of Roundup, a glyphosate-based pesticide. “This product is so well studied … been on the market for over 50 years with thousands and thousands of studies. There is no linkage to cancer, there just isn’t.”
Under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture have also hired dozens of former pesticide executives and lobbyists, some of whom have already pushed for deregulation of their industry. The Department of Health and Human Services has also altered its own reports to downplay the harm of pesticides.
Two states — North Dakota and Georgia — recently passed laws limiting their residents’ ability to sue pesticide companies, and at least a dozen other states will consider similar laws in the coming months.
“We’ve gotten to a point in the U.S. … where we’ve stopped treating pesticides as if they are dangerous tools,” said Rob Faux, who manages a small Iowa farm and has advocated against pesticide liability shield laws. “Instead, these companies tell these stories that these pesticides are completely safe and we are encouraged to use them anytime. We’ve been convinced that we must use them or we are not going to have enough food to eat.”
In Iowa, a state with heavy pesticide use — 53 million pounds last year — and the nation’s second-highest cancer rate, doctors and health officials have been sounding an alarm for years.
The state has become ground zero in the fight to limit the impact of pesticides on health and the environment. Farmers have gathered at the state Capitol to advocate for increased laws and funding to address the rising cancer rate. That advocacy likely helped defeat a bill last year that would have protected pesticide makers from some lawsuits.
I call myself a Republican, but this is not about politics; this is about money, about the almighty dollar.”
— Bill Billings, a resident of Red Oak, Iowa, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2024
“I believe the groups wanting this (bill) to go through didn’t expect any substantial resistance, but there was enough resistance,” said Faux, who also works for the Pesticide Action and Agroecology Network, a nonprofit advocating for less agrichemical use.
The Iowa bill was strongly opposed by environmental and health organizations, which have traditionally been left-leaning. But there was also strong opposition from many conservative residents and farmers.
“I call myself a Republican, but this is not about politics; this is about money, about the almighty dollar,” said Bill Billings, a resident of Red Oak, Iowa, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2024.
Initially, doctors told Billings, then 61, he would likely be dead in a matter of months after discovering lymphoma in his lungs. A health enthusiast and hospital administrator, Billings had been a regular user of Roundup, the popular Bayer pesticide used on farms and residential properties.
“The cancer specialist said, very directly, (my) cancer is a result of being exposed to chemicals,” Billings said. “In my records, it literally says that I have cancer as a result of exposure to Roundup and agrochemicals.”
Billings was prescribed a five-drug regimen, along with chemotherapy. In September, he was declared cancer-free.
Last year, he hired a lawyer to file a lawsuit against Bayer.
“The irony is … Bayer Pharmaceuticals makes one of the drugs that treated my cancer,” Billings said. “It’s disturbing to find out you are in this financial circle — not only as a consumer, but as a patient.”
Bill Billings in Red Oak, Iowa, on Jan. 21, 2026. (Geoff Johnson for Investigate Midwest)
The home of Bill Billings in Red Oak, Iowa, on Jan. 21, 2026. (Geoff Johnson for Investigate Midwest)
Surrounding neighborhood in Red Oak, Iowa, photographed Jan. 21, 2026. (Photos by Geoff Johnson for Investigate Midwest)
Research increasingly links pesticides to growing cancer risk
Cancer is a complex disease and can be caused by numerous environmental and genetic factors. Some links have been clear — such as smoking and lung cancer — while other forms can be impossible to trace back to an original cause.
But scientific research linking pesticides with certain types of cancers has been growing.
“Our findings show that the impact of pesticide use on cancer incidence may rival that of smoking,” scientists wrote in a 2024 study, which was published in Frontiers in Cancer Control and Society.
The study linked pesticides to prostate, lung, pancreas and colon cancers. Pesticides have also been associated with lymphoma and Parkinson’s disease, the study claimed.
Many doctors in agricultural communities say the link with pesticides is hard to deny.
“Iowa has a super high rate (of cancer) and when you look at all of our modifiable risk factors … tobacco, obesity, too many calories, highly processed foods, lack of physical activity, alcohol consumption, getting vaccinated for HPV, sun exposure, and so on, Iowa doesn’t really stand out dramatically at any of those,” said Dr. Richard Deming, medical director at MercyOne Cancer Center in Des Moines. “But one thing that distinguishes Iowa from other states is our environmental exposure to agricultural chemicals.”
Deming and other health experts also point to Iowa’s high radon levels, a naturally occurring radioactive gas produced by uranium and radium.
The state also has high levels of fertilizer-derived nitrate in its water, which has been associated with increased cancer risk.
“But we use tons of ag chemicals that make it quite likely that the volume of these chemicals is contributing to what we’re seeing in Iowa in terms of the increased incidence of cancer,” Deming said.
A direct correlation can be difficult to determine, as cancer development times can range from months to decades. Overlaying cancer rates onto a map, however, highlights the nation’s top crop and vegetable growing regions, where pesticide use is highest.
The Midwestern states of Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Missouri — leading corn-growing states — had the highest rates, while rates were also high in California and Florida, high fruit-growing states.
Lawler, who developed breast cancer in Hardin County, grew up on her family’s 400-acre farm, where her father grew corn and used 2,4-D, a pesticide made by Dow Chemicals. She and her siblings moved out of state after high school, but Lawler returned in 2010.
Pesticides have become indispensable in farming, Lawler acknowledged, but she wishes more people would ask questions about the risks.
“We change products all the time when we learn about the health impacts,” Lawler said.
These family photos show Lisa Lawler with her mother and siblings over the years. Lawler was recently diagnosed with breast cancer; her mother later died after a cancer diagnosis. The family believes years of farm pesticide and herbicide exposure may have contributed. (All photos courtesy of Lisa Lawler)
As lawsuits mount, Bayer pushes state laws to limit liability
In early 2022, Rodrigo Santos had just been promoted to the head of Bayer’s crop sciences division, a prestigious position within the German-based chemical company. But a global pandemic, climate change and a pending war in Ukraine were disrupting the global production and sale of crops — a direct hit to the company’s pesticide sales.
“The global food system is in crisis,” Santos wrote in a column for the World Economic Forum, going on to say that the world needed to grow more food without a significant increase in the amount of land devoted to crops.
But beyond the pandemic and war, another crisis presented an existential threat to one of the company’s top-selling products. Roundup, the glyphosate-based weed killer produced by Monsanto, which Bayer bought in 2018, had been blamed for causing cancer in thousands of lawsuits.
Since purchasing Missouri-based Monsanto, Bayer’s stock price has dropped more than 90% over five years.
In recent years, Bayer executives, including Santos, openly discussed discontinuing glyphosate production. We are “evaluating all the alternatives that we have for the business,” Santos told investors last year when asked about a possible sale of its Roundup division.
But while Bayer publicly said it was reconsidering its glyphosate business, a review of lobbying disclosure statements, campaign finance records, state legislative records and other documents reveals the world’s largest pesticide company remains committed to expanding its sales.
Under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, the EPA regulates the warning labels on pesticide products. While state-level lawsuits have claimed that federal labeling is insufficient, pesticide companies, including Bayer, have argued that federal regulations should trump state laws.
Bayer, along with other corporate agriculture groups, has pushed for bills in more than a dozen states that would codify the view that federal labeling regulations are sufficient warning, effectively voiding state-level lawsuits.
Christiansen, the head of crop science communications for Bayer, disputed that these laws will stop lawsuits and said courts have yet to begin interpreting those that have passed.
“Folks can still sue a company, and they should if there’s a problem,” Christiansen said. “But the litigation industry has a lot to lose with these (bills) that are out there.”
Founded by Bayer, the Modern Ag Alliance has lobbied for these bills and promoted opinion articles downplaying the health impacts of pesticides.
“If farmers lose access to crop protection products because of misguided ideological agendas, U.S. agriculture would be upended, potentially forcing many family farms to shut down and driving up food costs for every American,” said Elizabeth Burns-Thompson, executive director of the Modern Ag Alliance.
The Modern Ag Alliance has spent more than a quarter of a million dollars on state lobbying since 2024.
Most of the bills came up short in 2025, but Georgia and North Dakota passed liability shields that will complicate local lawsuits.
Georgia’s Senate Bill 144, which took effect Jan. 1, received some bipartisan support but was mostly approved by the Republican majority and opposed by Democrats.
Similar bills have been filed in at least 10 states for this year’s legislative sessions.
In 2024, the Iowa bill was passed by the state Senate with a 30-to-19 vote. Ahead of a vote in the House last year, farmer and environmental groups lobbied against the bill.
The session ended without the House taking up a vote. The bill could return in 2026, but Faux, the Iowa farmer, said he also worries about it being “snuck into” another bill or budget agreement.
“I don’t think we can just assume this fight is over,” Faux said.
In other states, backlash seemed to stop liability shield bills before they got started.
In Oklahoma, Rep. Dell Kerbs, a Shawnee Republican, authored a pesticide liability shield bill he said was meant to end “frivolous” lawsuits against pesticide makers.
“What’s happened in our country is we have … judges that have decided they need to be in the labeling business,” Kerbs said when introducing his bill at a Feb. 11, 2025, hearing of the House agriculture committee.
State Rep. Ty Burns, another Republican, asked Kerbs why he chose to author the bill.
“I was first approached by Bayer,” Kerbs responded.
“But this is a labeling bill; it is not an immunity bill. It is just clarifying on EPA labeling regulations,” Kerbs added. “There is nothing that prevents a lawsuit from any single person. This is not giving a free pass to kill people. This simply is saying that a frivolous lawsuit to potentially pad the pocket of somebody who was not reading the label is not a justification to add that to a label through a state district court.”
But when Burns asked Kerbs about opposition to the bill, especially from many farmers, Kerbs denied receiving any complaints.
“That is hard to believe,” Burns told Kerbs, “because I have been bombarded.”
The bill was never presented to the House for a vote.
After early promises, MAHA walks back pesticide oversight
While liability shield laws have been largely advanced by Republican lawmakers, the push to further regulate pesticides has transcended partisan lines.
Both left-leaning environmental groups and conservative health movements, which have targeted agrichemicals and some vaccines, have called for reducing or eliminating the use of pesticides.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been a longtime critic of pesticides. In a May 2025 report, his Make America Healthy Again commission linked pesticide overuse to children’s health issues, which drew praise from both political camps.
George Kimbrell, co-executive director of the Center for Food Safety, which has advocated for stronger pesticide regulations, called the initial report a “baby step” forward and said he was encouraged after decades of inaction by the federal government.
“Going back my entire career, 20-plus years now of doing this work, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Democratic administration or a Republican administration, they have been beholden to and done the wishes of the pesticide industry,” Kimbrell told Investigate Midwest last year. “So, this is a unique moment where … there’s a chance that there could be some positive change in terms of responsible oversight for these toxins.”
Corporate agriculture groups heavily criticized the report, including the American Farm Bureau Federation and CropLife America, a national organization representing many large agrichemical companies, including Bayer, Corteva Agriscience and Syngenta.
Many of those groups and companies had been large financial backers of Trump. But Kennedy downplayed any concerns that the president would avoid taking a hard position against pesticide companies because of that support.
“I’ve met every president since my uncle was president, and I’ve never seen a president (like Trump), Democrat or Republican, that is willing to stand up to industry when it’s the right thing to do,” Kennedy said at a May 22, 2025, MAHA commission meeting as the president sat smiling to his right.
Three months later, Kennedy’s MAHA commission published its final report, which contained no calls to further regulate pesticides. In fact, it called for the federal government to work with large agrichemical companies to ensure public “awareness and confidence” in the EPA’s current pesticide regulations.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment from Kennedy.
Many of the groups that expressed optimism over the initial report were outraged over the change.
“This report is … a clear sign that Big Ag, Bayer, and the pesticide industry are firmly embedded in the White House,” said David Murphy, the founder of United We Eat and a former finance director for Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
The Trump administration has employed several pesticide executives, researchers and lobbyists at the EPA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Kyle Kunker, who was a registered lobbyist for the American Soybean Association, an organization that has advocated for the legal liability shield laws at the state level, was hired last year to oversee pesticide policy at the EPA.
Three weeks later, the EPA recommended expanded use of dicamba-based herbicides, which federal courts had previously restricted. The EPA proposal was closely aligned with the position of the American Soybean Association.
In 2025, the EPA also hired Nancy Beck and Lynn Ann Dekleva, both of whom worked with the American Chemistry Council.
Last month, a coalition of MAHA supporters called for the removal of Lee Zeldin, administrator of the EPA.
Recent EPA decisions around pesticides “will inevitably lead to higher rates of chronic disease, greater medical costs, and tremendous strain on our healthcare system,” the group stated in a petition circulating online.
Several prominent MAHA influencers have joined the petition, posting anti-pesticide messages on social media under handles such as The Glyphosate Girl and the Food Babe. “The EPA is acting like the Everyone Poisoned Agency,” wrote Kelly Ryerson, on her Glyphosate Girl Instagram feed.
As the EPA advances pesticide use, the Trump administration has also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that federal labeling laws invalidate state-level lawsuits.
“After careful scientific review and an assessment of hundreds of thousands of public comments, EPA has repeatedly determined that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic in humans, and the agency has repeatedly approved Roundup labels that did not contain cancer warnings,” Trump’s solicitor general wrote in an amicus brief with the Supreme Court.
However, one of the studies the EPA has often cited in claiming pesticides are safe was recently retracted due to concerns about its authorship and potential conflicts of interest.
The report, published in 2000 by the scientific journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, claimed Roundup “does not pose a health risk to humans.” The report has been the foundation for numerous other studies, court cases and policy decisions.
The journal retracted the study last year, noting that court cases had revealed that Monsanto employees had contributed to the study. “This lack of transparency raises serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability of the authors of this article and the academic integrity of the carcinogenicity studies presented,” the retraction stated.
“This is just one example of how the current process of certifying these chemicals is broken in the U.S.,” said Colleen Fowle, water program director at the Iowa Environmental Council. “At the very least, we’re hoping that this (retraction) eliminates this specific research article from being cited in the future and concentrates more on independent peer-reviewed research as our basis to determine the safety of glyphosate.”
Investigate Midwest is an independent, nonprofit newsroom whose mission is to serve the public interest by exposing dangerous and costly practices of influential agricultural corporations and institutions through in-depth and data-driven investigative journalism. Visit online at www.investigatemidwest.org
Rep. Derrick Van Orden stands out among vulnerable House Republicans: He has not softened his rhetoric on President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics, despite public outcry over the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota.
The Wisconsin Republican, whose seat is one of Democrats’ targets in the 2026 midterms, supported an investigation into Alex Pretti’s killing, but said his “support for federal law enforcement” would remain “unwavering.”
Van Orden told NOTUS he is holding firm in his support for the Trump administration’s deportation efforts because of the crime committed by unauthorized immigrants.
He cited a video posted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week alongside the caption, “American citizens raped and murdered by those who have no right to be in our country.”
“That’s why I back ICE,” Van Orden said. “Watch that video, and then you would never ask me that question again.”
“If you can look at that thing and see all these people that have been brutally murdered and the families that have been destroyed because of these criminal, illegal aliens, and you’re willing to turn your back to it, that means you have an alternative purpose or an alternative objective,” Van Orden said.
Van Orden’s hard-line position in support of the president’s mass deportation agenda in one of this year’s most competitive races will test the Trump agenda in the very part of the country that helped secure the president a second term in the White House.
His district includes the farmland and exurbs of Minnesota’s Twin Cities, spanning Wisconsin’s border with Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. Van Orden won by a margin of 2.8 percentage points in 2024. Trump won the district by more than 7 percentage points. In a midterm cycle that favors Democrats, and at a time voters are losing trust in Republicans’ immigration agenda, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the race as a “toss up.”
“We’re not a border state. It’s not something that was on the agenda prior to Trump. And obviously, people like Derrick Van Orden have taken the most extreme possible positions on an issue that I’m not sure was top of mind for most Wisconsin voters,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative political commentator and Wisconsin resident.
Van Orden has shown his MAGA bona fides through issues like immigration and trade, where he has defended the president’s actions.
He followed the administration’s lead, expressing support for body cameras on immigration officers, a reform that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she would implement after Pretti was killed. Democrats want to standardize that policy in a DHS funding bill.
“It allows good cops to be good cops, and it holds police officers that may not be doing what they should do accountable publicly,” Van Orden said. “And that makes the force better, that makes the American population trust law enforcement more.”
He said he will await the results of a full investigation into Pretti’s death, but has laid the blame for the rise of political violence squarely with Democrats, as many in the administration and Trump’s circle have done.
“This is unfortunately true for many Democrats. They’re willing to put those American lives, throw them into the garbage can for political power, which means they have no business being in power,” Van Orden said.
There are issues where Van Orden has broken with the conservative mainstream. In January, he voted to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies to prevent coverage loss, though he is opposed to the program. He has advocated for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which he used as a child, though he voted for cuts to the program in the budget reconciliation bill.
Faced with a frustrated agricultural industry, Van Orden introduced a bill to create a path to temporary worker status for immigrant agricultural workers who self-deport and pay a fine. Wisconsin farms employ a large immigrant labor force.
“He has this interesting dichotomy of picking some of those softer issues that might appeal to independents and some others, versus his very strong pro-Trump issues where, obviously that’s going to settle well with the MAGA voters and the pro-Trump Republicans,” said independent political strategist Brandon Scholz, who formerly ran the Wisconsin Republican Party.
In contrast, other House Republicans facing heated reelection bids this year have moderated their positions on immigration enforcement, calling for a reassessment of the country’s immigration policy.
“Congress and the president need to embrace a new comprehensive national immigration policy that acknowledges Americans’ many legitimate concerns about how the government has conducted immigration policy,” Rep. Mike Lawler wrote for The New York Times.
Van Orden declined to comment on other Democratic demands for DHS reforms, which include a ban on masks and identification requirements for immigration agents, until the party funds the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service and the U.S. Coast Guard.
It is these nonimmigration agencies within DHS that Van Orden’s constituents are affected by during the partial government shutdown, which has left some without paychecks and blocked others from receiving their boating licenses to go out on the district’s many lakes, he said.
That message may work with his constituents, Scholz said. While Republican voters in Wisconsin may be concerned about immigration, the issue has not historically been top of mind for them.
“There are other issues for them that may be more critical to making a decision on what they’re going to do, i.e. economic issues,” Scholz said.
This story was produced andoriginally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.
Inside the mostly empty town hall in the town of Wausau on County Road Z last week, a handful of voters cast ballots in wooden booths for a school board race. The biggest question on the minds of local election officials wasn’t who would win — it was who would run elections next year.
After two clerks left within a year, longtime town supervisor Sharon Hunter stepped in because no one else would. Hunter’s term ends in April 2027. Nomination papers for a potential successor are due in January 2027, but local officials still don’t know who comes next.
“Sharon’s not going to do 29 years,” Deputy Clerk Amy Meyer said, referring to the long tenure of the clerk who resigned in late 2024, setting off the cascade of brief replacements.
Hunter, 72, laughed. “I’d be over 100 years old,” she said. “I don’t think you want me here with my walker.”
Hunter’s decision to step up in a town of 2,200 may seem insignificant. But Wisconsin’s election system — one of the most decentralized in the country — depends on people like her. The state requires each of its 1,850 municipalities to run its own elections. That means hundreds of local clerks are needed to keep the system running. By contrast, Texas, a state with nearly five times Wisconsin’s population, relies on county-level election offices and has about one-sixth as many local election officials.
That structure leaves Wisconsin unusually dependent on small-town clerks. Between 2020 and 2024, more than 700 municipal clerks here left their posts, the highest turnover by raw numbers in the nation. As rural communities age and fewer residents are willing or able to take on an increasingly complex job, replacing them has become harder — raising questions about how long the state’s hyper-local model can hold.
The system can absorb one vacancy. It strains under dozens. Elections get stitched together, paperwork piles up, and the quiet machinery of local government — licenses, payroll, meeting notices — shifts its weight onto whoever is left.
The town of Wausau municipal building is pictured Feb. 17, 2026. The town has had three clerks in the past year and struggled to keep the position filled until Sharon Hunter stepped in, giving up her vote as town supervisor. (Alexander Shur / Votebeat)
Meyer, 55, understands why people don’t want the job — she doesn’t want it either. Like her mother, she has worked elections in town for much of her adult life. She considered becoming clerk, but it wasn’t the right time. She doesn’t want residents coming to her house with ballots or questions, as they once did under the longtime clerk.
“There comes a point in the day where I want to turn my phone off,” Meyer said from the town hall, situated at the center of loosely stitched county roads dotted with ranch homes and small farms, some of them no longer in operation. “I don’t want to hear that your garbage didn’t get picked up, or your neighbor’s dog is barking,” she said. “I just don’t.”
In a small town, the clerk is often the first call for everything from election deadlines to everyday complaints — and the learning curve is steep.
“It’s going to take you practically the first year to learn everything,” Meyer said. “Now, we have somebody new in it, and we have spent half the term relearning.”
Older residents have long filled these roles, but clerks say the job has grown more demanding, with little added support. It is often thankless work for modest pay. In Wausau, the clerk earns about $27,000 a year with no benefits.
Even so, many residents remain committed to keeping elections at the town level. Hunter said preserving local control was her biggest reason for stepping in, though she has not decided whether to seek another term.
“But we do need to have someone coming after me,” she said. “Because I am old.”
In an aging town, succession is unclear
The rural town of Wausau sits just east of the city of Wausau, a community of about 40,000 that began as a logging town in the 1830s and now centers on manufacturing and a burgeoning ginseng farming industry. As the city has grown, the town has increasingly become a bedroom community, as its lower property taxes attract commuters. A handful of farms remain, but the town is less agricultural than it once was.
Its population is slowly growing — and steadily aging. That’s because retirees also make up a large and growing share of the town’s residents. Its median age has climbed by roughly a decade since 2000 and now hovers around 50 — a decade older than the statewide average. The town still must run elections, issue licenses and post meeting notices. What’s less certain is who will do it.
Here, as in many communities nationwide, the responsibility will likely fall to older residents. Nationally, nearly 70% of chief election officials are 50 or older, according to the Elections & Voting Information Center. In Wisconsin, that share climbs to almost 80%, with the oldest officials concentrated in the smallest jurisdictions.
One poll worker, knitting pink yarn during a lull between voters, said at 71 she was too old to take on the clerk’s job. She had encouraged a younger neighbor to consider it, she said, but the woman had just given birth.
Wausau’s shift reflects a broader reality in rural Wisconsin: The state built a system that depends on hundreds of small-town clerks and their deputies — a structure rooted in an era when farms were multigenerational, churches were full, and civic roles widely shared. That foundation is thinning. About a quarter of Wisconsin’s farms closed between 2002 and 2022, and churches are aging and shrinking. Volunteer fire departments and other local services report persistent staffing shortages.
There is no sweeping rural exodus. Rural counties are mostly growing, largely because retirees are staying or moving in. Wisconsin’s population is projected to age most rapidly in its rural communities, according to UW-Madison’s Applied Population Lab.
Voter check-in materials sit on a table during a school board election that affected only part of the town of Wausau. Turnout remained slow throughout the day. (Alexander Shur / Votebeat)
Originally from nearby Birnamwood, Hunter moved to the town of Wausau in the 1970s and has worked in public service ever since. For four decades, she wrote federal grants and helped low-income youth map out their futures through the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Her entry into town government came by accident. Upset over a town decision to pave the ends of some residents’ driveways, but not hers or her neighbors’, she ran for town treasurer. What began as frustration became a career: She spent 10 years as treasurer and two decades as a supervisor.
Her path shifted again after the former town clerk, Cindy Worden, retired after 30 years on the job. Supervisors appointed a replacement, but she left after two weeks because of a terminal cancer diagnosis. The next clerk resigned within months, overwhelmed by balancing the duties with a full-time job and raising a family.
As the town searched for a clerk, Hunter and fellow supervisor Steve Buntin, a retired auto mechanic, filled in. Supervisors listed the job on Facebook and the town website. Potential candidates declined. Some didn’t want the scrutiny of elections, and others resisted the administrative grind.
At one point, county officials offered to step in to run elections and charge about $1,000 per election. That was Hunter’s turning point, though stepping into the role meant giving up her vote on the town board — a sacrifice she did not take lightly.
“After you start, you kind of get hooked,” Hunter said. The residents might be “ornery most of the time,” but helping them navigate difficult choices is public service. “It’s in your blood.”
She can return to being a supervisor if someone else steps up as clerk, but, as Buntin put it, “nobody seems to be knocking down the door.”
Last April, the town asked voters to allow clerks to be appointed rather than elected, which would have permitted hiring someone from outside town limits. The referendum failed narrowly. A new state law has since made it easier for small municipalities to switch to appointments, but the town has yet to make the jump.
“You still have to have somebody come forward who wants to be a clerk,” Meyer said. “Just because the state law changed doesn’t make it all that easy.”
Clerks are hard to recruit, and harder to retain
Wausau sits in Marathon County, home to about 130,000 people. To run elections for that population, the county depends on roughly 60 municipal clerks — one in each city, village and town — layered beneath its elected county clerk. In most similarly sized counties elsewhere, such as St. Joseph County, Indiana, or Frederick County, Maryland, a single county office oversees elections for everyone.
There’s little appetite to abandon Wisconsin’s structure. Local clerks argue decentralization limits errors and keeps elections in familiar hands. But filling dozens of posts — and keeping them filled — is no easy task. Of the 13 new municipal clerks who have taken office in Marathon County since the April 2025 election, including Hunter, four resigned within months, County Clerk Kim Trueblood said. Since then, a fifth clerk — in the city of Wausau — has also stepped down.
Trueblood attributes part of the churn to recruitment practices that understate the job. Town and village chairs often approach potential clerks by describing the work as little more than taking meeting minutes.
“Then they get into a job, and it’s the elections, it’s all of the financial reporting, the liquor licenses, everything that they have to do — it’s just overwhelming,” she said. “And people who work a full-time job and have families, I don’t know how they do it.”
The pay rarely offsets the demands. In the town of Wausau, the clerk makes $27,628 per year plus a $1,000 mileage stipend, with no benefits. The job can require 10 to 20 hours a week — and far more around elections — covering everything from meeting notices and licenses to payroll and ballot administration.
Other municipalities in Marathon County pay far less. Kelley Blume, the clerk in the town of Marathon who’s also a deputy clerk for the county, earned just over $10,000 for her town role in 2025. During election seasons, she said, the hours stretch late into the night.
When she was first approached for the job about 10 years ago, she said town officials told her it would only be a couple of hours per week.
“It’s not a couple hours,” she said. “I feel bad for all of these new clerks that think it’s going to be easy.”
She is considering stepping down. The added responsibilities have grown heavier each year, she said, and she wants to spend more time with her children and grandchildren.
Waiting for the next name on the ballot
Hunter says she stepped in to preserve something she believes is worth protecting: the idea that elections should be run by people who know the roads and the names on the ballot, who know which farm sits beyond the bend and which houses were built last year. To her, local government isn’t an abstraction. It’s a neighbor answering the phone.
“I do feel local government is critical, and I would hate to see that be taken away from the residents,” Hunter said. “It’s important they have a voice, and it starts at their local government.”
She knows the structure is imperfect, but pride in local control runs deep here, even as the pool of residents willing to shoulder the work grows thinner. Ultimately, she said, the town may have to bend. Communities could share clerks or other services, even if that means loosening borders that have long felt fixed.
She’ll decide later this year whether to run again. If she doesn’t, she said, the town may take another vote on hiring clerks outside of town limits. In the meantime, she has no regrets about stepping up — even if nobody in town seems ready to follow her lead.
“It’s my civic duty,” she said.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Wisconsin Watch has a new partner in the fight for facts.
Ahead of another pivotal election year, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Wisconsin Watch are teaming up to produce more Fact Briefs, 150-word answers to yes/no questions based on claims made in the infosphere.
Wisconsin Watch has partnered with Gigafact since 2022 to produce more than 600 bite-sized fact checks. We’re part of a network of 18 nonprofit newsrooms across the country working to equip the public with accurate information to inform civic discussion.
The Journal Sentinel, part of the USA Today Network and the largest newsroom in Wisconsin, was an early adopter of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking nonprofit founded in 2007.
As Journal Sentinel Editor Greg Borowski writes in a column today at jsonline.com, the switch to Fact Briefs will appeal to readers seeking accurate information quickly and with a clearer true-or-false format, rather than PolitiFact’s six-tiered “score card” for assessing whether a claimant is telling the truth. Fact Briefs focus less on the claimant, and more on the claim itself.
“This partnership will increase the number of Wisconsin-focused items and allow us to present them more quickly and in ways we think readers most want to get them,” Borowski writes.
The facts matter, even more so in a world where politicians and media influencers seem to habitually get away with bending, breaking or simply disregarding the truth. Fighting for the facts isn’t about picking a political side or committing to a particular worldview, it’s about nurturing a shared reality that forms the basis of a free and civilized society.
That’s why the courts, teachers, scientists, the folks managing your investment accounts and even the refs checking the instant replay cameras take the facts so seriously. Why should our political discourse be any different?
We’re excited to grow our capacity to keep the public informed, but we continue to need the public’s support. Whether this new partnership will continue after the November election will depend on support from Wisconsin Watch donors. Click here to find out more about how you can support the fight for facts.
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Wisconsin doesn’t have more registered voters than the adult population.
The claim, recently recirculated by President Donald Trump, combines two voter lists to misrepresent the number of active, eligible voters in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin’s adult population is around 4.8 million, according to Jan. 1 estimates from the state Demographic Services Center.
The state has 4.6 million inactive voters on a separate list. Voters move to the inactive list if they die, move to a new state or are convicted of a felony, for example.
Adding those two numbers produces a total of 8.2 million, more than the state’s total population.
State law requires an inactive list for record-keeping purposes. Plus, it helps clerks prevent fraud by catching someone registering under a dead person’s name, for example.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
When the Social Development Commission stopped running its anti-poverty programs and services in 2024, it left many employees and contractors unpaid for completed work.
Nearly two years later, some have received a partial payment, while others are still waiting.
Deja Allen, a former housing intake specialist for SDC, is owed $2,518.09 in gross wages, according to her wage claim.
She said she was out of work for eight months and the unpaid wages affected her tremendously as she figured out how to pay her rent and bills.
“I am thankful for my family being able to assist me while I looked for other employment,” Allen said.
The Wisconsin Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on behalf of the state’s Department of Workforce Development that claims SDC owed nearly $360,000 in back wages and benefits to former employees.
Sarah Woods, former youth and family services staff, was laid off when the agency paused services in April 2024. She filed a wage claim with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, which informed her that she is owed $4,756.
Woods said she last received an update from the state in May 2025, when a representative said SDC would not have more information until the legal process is completed.
Department of Justice attorney Michael D. Morris said at a status conference last month that William Sulton, SDC’s former legal counsel, is still working behind the scenes with him on reaching a resolution and requested additional time. The next status conference is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. on March 26.
A spokesperson for the Department of Workforce Development said the department isn’t able to provide additional details on the lawsuit’s status or outcomes while litigation continues.
Jorge Franco, interim CEO of SDC and chair of the SDC board, said that paying employees and contractors what they’re owed remains a major priority for SDC. He advised former employees to follow the legal process closely.
“It’ll be upon the attorneys for the claimant to determine what and how they proceed through next steps,” he said.
Contractors still owed
In his more than 40 years providing weatherization services in the Milwaukee area, Jaime Hurtado said SDC had one of the best and most robust weatherization divisions.
Hurtado is the owner and president of Insulation Technologies Inc., or Intec, and worked with SDC for more than 20 years.
Jaime Hurtado, owner and president of Insulation Technologies Inc., said his company is still owed $112,500 for work completed for SDC. Hurtado poses for a photograph in front of an apartment complex that his company is helping to complete on Feb. 5, 2026. (Jonathan Aguilar / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service / CatchLight Local)
SDC received funding for the work through Wisconsin’s Weatherization Assistance Program. The Wisconsin Department of Administration suspended SDC’s participation in the program in March 2024 and began a forensic accounting after it reported a misallocation of funds.
“They had built a professional, top-tier delivery service, a program to deliver these services in weatherization for people who need it the most,” Hurtado said. “It’s a heartbreak to see that go out of existence.”
Franco has said the department refused to reimburse SDC for nearly $490,000 in weatherization work and let it continue accumulating expenses before shutting down the program.
Intec and two other contractors, Affordable Heating and Air Conditioning Inc. and DMJ Services LLC, otherwise known as Action Heating & Cooling, sued SDC on claims that it failed to pay for weatherization work completed under contract in 2023 and 2024.
A judge granted the contractors a money judgment of $186,517.03 plus statutory costs and interest in October. About $112,500 of that would go to Intec, but it hasn’t been collected yet.
Jon Yakish, owner of Micro Analytical Inc., said his asbestos-testing laboratory has not been paid for 90% of the contracts it had with SDC before it closed.
“It wasn’t that big of a deal,” he said, estimating the remaining unpaid work cost around $2,300. “And I know there’s other people out there where it was a much bigger deal, so it’s hard for me to complain.”
Loss of work
More than the missing payments, Yakish and Hurtado’s businesses have felt the sustained impact of losing a loyal customer.
Intec continues to perform work in the state’s weatherization program, Hurtado said, but at a reduced level. He said other providers have brought in a smaller volume of business than SDC.
“We just move our attention to other parts of the market,” Hurtado said.
Yakish said Micro Analytical also hasn’t received the same amount of business it had from SDC from the other organizations that have taken over the weatherization program services in Milwaukee.
“We don’t want to rely on the government, but it is a baseline of work that’s always going on, that kind of, in a way, helps us be recession-proof,” Yakish said.
Moving on
Hurtado said the lawsuit was the only way to secure Intec’s rights to collect the money that it’s owed, though he acknowledged that SDC owes other lenders and suppliers.
“Who knows if they’ll have enough money to pay our balance, but at least we’ll be in the list,” he said.
The $112,500 amount is about 25% of the total amount Intec was owed from SDC, Hurtado said. He said the state worked with other weatherization service agencies to pay Intec the other 75%, which helped the company.
“Thank God we’re diversified enough, and we’re a strong company,” he said.
Yakish said he submitted invoices and data on work performed at the state’s request in order to get paid, and a few contracts were paid. He became frustrated after the companies that had taken over SDC’s weatherization contracts kept asking for the same information.
“I kind of told them, ‘Look, I’m throwing my hands up. This is the last time I’m doing this,’” he said. “So I don’t know if they took that as I was unwilling to work with them or whatever, but it just seemed really clear that nothing was actually going to happen.”
Meredith Melland is the neighborhoods 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.
Solar panels still generate electricity on cloudy days and in cold weather, albeit less.
Clouds cut output as less sunlight reaches the panels, but they continue producing power from indirect light. Snow cover can temporarily block light, though it is typically not obstructed by thin layers of snow. Additionally, most solar panels in the U.S. run more efficiently in cooler weather, as heat lowers performance.
Winter generation can be lower due to shorter days, notably at middle latitudes; cities like Denver receive nearly three times more solar energy in June than December. This mainly affects what share of a home’s electricity solar covers, especially where heating raises demand. Average winter electricity use of U.S. homes is estimated to be six times that of summer use.
Despite seasonal dips, solar still displaces fossil fuel electricity over the year, delivering large net emissions reductions across a panel’s multi-decade lifespan.
This fact brief was originally published by Skeptical Science on February 19, 2026, and was authored by Sue Bin Park. Skeptical Science is a member of the Gigafact network.
Republican lawmakers have heard farmers’ concerns about President Donald Trump’s tariff agenda. Their response? Short-term pain, long-term gain.
Farmers faced a shrunken export market and operating costs after Trump enforced steep tariffs on key trading partners and farm materials last year. In response, the Trump administration will begin disbursing a $12 billion bailout to farmers due to “unfair market disruptions” at the end of this month.
Republican lawmakers from Wisconsin, a major agricultural producer, acknowledge the 2025 to 2026 crop season challenges, which resulted in an estimated $34.6 billion in losses for the industry, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. But they’re arguing that the success of specialty crops and rosier-than-expected economic indicators are evidence farmers can withstand any turmoil the tariffs have caused.
“Our farmers understand that we have to level the playing field. And how do you do that? You do that with these tariffs,” U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden said. “In order to get to the long term, you have to get through the short term, and that’s the reason that this money’s going back to people in the agriculture industry.”
A bipartisan group of agricultural experts said the Trump administration’s policies have “significantly damaged” the American farm economy in a letter to Senate Agriculture Committee leadership this month, as first reported by The New York Times.
“It is clear that the current Administration’s actions, along with Congressional inaction, have increased costs for farm inputs, disrupted overseas and domestic markets, denied agriculture its reliable labor pool, and defunded critical ag research and staffing,” they wrote.
Wisconsin agriculture experts told NOTUS the administration’s bailout is undesirable and insufficient to cover many farmers’ lost revenue this year.
“They don’t solve the long-run problem of higher input costs and low prices; they are a Band-Aid to get us through this short-term problem,” said Paul Mitchell, the director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Agriculture professor and economist Steven Deller, also of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had a similar view.
“We’re hemorrhaging thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, and they’re giving us pennies,” Deller said, adding that farmers want “fair markets” and a “level playing field.”
Republicans in the state, however, are standing behind the president’s agenda, pointing to the administration’s stated goal to boost the manufacturing industry through baseline tariff rates for all countries, reciprocal tariffs and tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico.
“Wisconsin, at the end of the day, is going to benefit as we bring manufacturing back to the state,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the likely GOP nominee for governor.
He blamed the North American Free Trade Agreement for sending manufacturing companies packing for cheaper operations in China. Trump replaced NAFTA during his first term in office with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement — a deal Tiffany applauded.
Trump administration officials have defended tariffs in cable television appearances and in congressional hearings as key to transforming the American economy, even as some agricultural industries languish. At a Senate Banking Committee hearing earlier this month, Democratic Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota pressed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on whether instability in the agricultural markets is a result of Trump’s tariff policies.
“It has nothing to do with the tariffs,” Bessent said.
Still, there are some signs the administration could be responsive to the backlash. The Trump administration is planning to roll back tariffs on some steel and aluminum goods due to concerns the tariffs are hurting consumers, the Financial Times reported.
The soybean industry is one of the hardest hit by tariffs, which temporarily cost farmers the U.S.’ largest soybean trading partner, China. Although China fulfilled its initial purchase agreement last month and has agreed to purchase tens of millions more metric tons over the next few years, American soybean producers withstood an unprecedented five consecutive months without purchases by China.
This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.
The final days of the Wisconsin Legislature’s 2025-26 legislative session are near.
The Assembly gaveled out for what could be the chamber’s final session day Friday preceded by a dramatic 24 hours that included longtime Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, announcing his retirement and a concession from Vos to allow votes on bills to extend Medicaid funding for low-income mothers and require insurance companies to cover screenings for women at increased risk of breast cancer. The bills have stalled in the chamber for months.
Lawmakers could still return for a special session on tax cuts as negotiations continue with Republican leaders and Gov. Tony Evers. Democratic lawmakers and Evers have called on Republicans to continue work at the Capitol in Madison instead of turning to the campaign trail ahead of elections later this year. Evers this week also said he plans to call a special session in the coming months for lawmakers to act on a constitutional amendment to ban partisan gerrymandering.
The Senate will continue to meet in March.
Here’s a rundown of what is still being debated, what is heading to the governor and some of the key items to get signed into law this session.
What is still being discussed?
Tax cuts
The context: State leaders learned in January that Wisconsin has a projected $2.4 billion surplus. Evers at the start of the year called for bipartisan action on property tax cuts for Wisconsinites. Republicans have agreed with the idea that those funds should be returned to taxpayers. But both sides have yet to officially agree on how.
Republican arguments: In a letter to Evers on Feb. 16, Vos and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, said they would agree to Evers’ request for $200 million to boost the special education reimbursement rate and provide an additional $500 million to schools through the school levy tax credit. In return, Republican leaders wanted to see an income tax rebate in the form of $500 for individuals and $1,000 for married couples who filed their taxes in 2024, reducing state revenues by $1.5 billion. “We are trying to be bipartisan,” Vos told reporters after Evers said the proposal doesn’t balance what he wants to see for schools. “We accepted his number and actually went higher than he requested.”
Democratic arguments: Evers told WISN-12 that he would not sign the Republican plan Vos and LeMahieu sent him. He wants to see more money for schools, specifically general equalization aid, which are dollars that schools can use without as many constraints. The 2025-27 budget Evers signed last summer kept that aid flat from the previous year, which coupled with fixed revenue limit increases under Evers’ previous 400-year veto gives school districts more latitude to raise property taxes.
Latest action: Assembly Majority Leader Rep. Tyler August, R-Walworth, said Republicans are still intent that Evers should take the deal that was offered. “It checks a lot of boxes, if not all the boxes on the things he had previously asked for,” he said.
Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, takes questions from the press after Gov. Tony Evers’ State of the State address at the Wisconsin State Capitol on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Knowles-Nelson Stewardship
The context: In 2024, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled the Legislature’s top financial committee could not block the Department of Natural Resources spending for the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund that was created in 1989 for land preservation. Republicans did not reauthorize funds to keep the program going in the 2025-27 budget, which puts the fund on track to expire this summer. Bills led by Rep. Tony Kurtz, R-Wonewoc, and Sen. Patrick Testin, R-Stevens Point, would extend the program until 2028, but also pause the majority of land conservation projects for two years and require the DNR to study and inventory government-owned land for nature activities.
Republican arguments: Republicans blame the court’s decision for limiting legislative authority over how the dollars are spent. During a public hearing earlier this month, Testin said he understood the bills were imperfect but action was necessary. “If we do nothing, Knowles-Nelson Stewardship is dead,” Testin said.
Democratic arguments: Senate Democrats on Wednesday said stopping money for land conservation projects would essentially kill the program. Democrats had been participating in negotiations on the future of the fund, but the Republican proposal had only gotten “significantly worse.” “We cannot and will not support a bill this bad,” said Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton. In September, Democrats introduced a proposal to reauthorize the program until 2032.
Latest action: The Senate was scheduled to vote on the bills during a floor session on Feb. 18, but removed the bills from its calendar. The bills already passed the Assembly in January. After Senate Democrats said they would not support the current proposal, Testin told WisPolitics he would have to drum up support from Senate Republicans to determine the fate of the fund.
Toxic forever chemicals (aka PFAS)
The context: Republican lawmakers and Evers in January announced they were optimistic about a deal on legislation about the cleanup of toxic forever chemicals referred to as PFAS. The 2023-25 state budget included $125 million for addressing PFAS contamination, but the Legislature’s finance committee has yet to release those funds to the Department of Natural Resources. In January, Evers and Republicans said bipartisan agreements so far included the release of the prior funds, protections for property owners who are not responsible for PFAS contamination and a grant program to help local governments with remediation projects.
Republican arguments: Republican Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Gillett, has sought protections from the state’s spills law and financial penalties for “innocent landowners” who did not cause PFAS contaminations and seek help from the Department of Natural Resources.
Democratic arguments: The Environmental Protection Agency has previously issued health advisories on PFAS in drinking water. Evers in January argued that the state has a responsibility to provide safe and clean drinking water across Wisconsin.
Latest action: The Assembly passed the legislation, Assembly Bills 130 and 131, on 93-0 votes Friday evening. The Senate has yet to consider the bills, but Wimberger in a statement Thursday night said amendments in the Assembly “will help us get this vital legislation across the finish line in the Senate and signed into law by the Governor.”
Lawmakers listen as Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers delivers his final State of the State address at the Wisconsin State Capitol on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Online gambling
The context: Legal gambling in Wisconsin can only occur in-person on tribal properties, which means individuals who place online bets on mobile devices are technically violating the law. A proposal from August and Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, would legalize online gambling if the server or device that a wager is placed on is located on tribal lands.
Supportive arguments: The bills from August and Marklein have bipartisan support. Lawmakers argue it provides clarity on what is legal in Wisconsin and protects consumers from unregulated websites.
Opposing arguments: The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty in a November memo argued that the bills would violate the Wisconsin Constitution and the federal Indian Gaming Act and provide a “race-based monopoly to Tribal gaming operations.”
Latest action: The Assembly passed the bill Thursday on a voice vote, meaning lawmakers didn’t record individual votes. It now heads to the Senate.
Funding for a public affairs network
The context: WisconsinEye, the nonprofit public affairs network that has filmed legislative proceedings since 2007, went dark in mid-December due to not raising the funds to operate this year. The Legislature previously approved a $10 million endowment that could only be accessed if WisconsinEye raised matching dollars equal to its request of state lawmakers. Legislative leaders approved $50,000 to bring WisconsinEye back in February, but the Assembly and Senate had opposing views of how to provide transparent viewing of legislative processes going forward.
Senate arguments: Senate Republicans specifically have been wary of providing funds to WisconsinEye and expressed frustrations at how the nonprofit spends its dollars. Senate Republicans proposed a bill that would seek bids for a potential public affairs network, which could go to WisconsinEye or another organization. “Maybe we are getting the best value currently with WisconsinEye, but we greatly don’t know,” LeMahieu told reporters this month.
Assembly arguments: Assembly Democrats and Republicans proposed a bill that would place the previously allocated matching dollars in a trust and direct earned interest to WisconsinEye. That could generate half a million dollars or more each year for an organization with a $900,000 annual budget. Assembly leaders said they wanted to ensure continued transparency at the Capitol.
Latest action: The Assembly earlier this month passed its bill 96-0 that would provide long-term funding support to WisconsinEye, but the Senate has yet to consider the bill. The Senate passed its bill on requesting bids for a public affairs network on Wednesday. The Assembly did not take up the Senate proposal before gaveling out for the year.
What is heading to Evers?
Postpartum Medicaid
Lead authors: Sen. Jesse James, R-Thorp/Rep. Patrick Snyder, R-Weston
What it does: The bill extends postpartum Medicaid coverage in Wisconsin for new moms from current law at 60 days to a full 12 months after childbirth.
The context: Wisconsin is just one of two states that have yet to extend postpartum Medicaid for new mothers for up to one year. The proposal has been brought up in the Legislature for years, but Vos has long been the roadblock for getting the bill across the finish line, often objecting to the idea as “expanding welfare.” “Anybody who’s in poverty in Wisconsin today already gets basically free health care through BadgerCare. If you are slightly above poverty level, you get basically free health care from the federal government through Obamacare,” Vos told reporters earlier this month. “So the idea of saying that we’re going to put more people onto the funding that the state pays for, as opposed to allowing them to stay on the funding that the federal government pays for, it doesn’t make any sense to me.”
How they voted: The Senate passed the bill on a 32-1 vote in April, with Sen. Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, voting against. The Assembly voted 95-1 Thursday to send the bill to Evers’ desk, with Rep. Shae Sortwell, R-Two Rivers, as the lone vote against. Vos voted to pass the bill.
Dense breast cancer screenings
Lead authors: Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Fox Crossing/Rep. Cindi Duchow, R-town of Delafield
What it does: The bill requires health insurance policies to cover supplemental screenings for women who have dense breast tissue and are at an increased risk of breast cancer, eliminating out-of-pocket costs for things like MRIs and ultrasounds. The proposal has been referred to as “Gail’s Law,” after Gail Zeamer, a Wisconsin woman who regularly sought annual mammograms but was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer at age 47.
The context: The proposal has been stuck in the Assembly for months after near-unanimous passage in the Senate last year. Some Republicans had concerns about the bill being an insurance mandate. Vos told Isthmus in January that federal regulations might not make the bill necessary in Wisconsin, but ultimately allowed a vote on the Assembly floor.
How they voted: The Senate passed the bill in October on a 32-1 vote. The Assembly passed the bill Thursday on a 96-0 vote.
Key bills signed into law (outside the state budget)
Wisconsin Act 42 – Cellphone bans during school instructional time
Lead authors: Rep. Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay/Cabral-Guevara
What it does: The law requires Wisconsin school boards to adopt policies that prohibit cellphone use during instructional time by July 1. By October districts must submit their policies to the Department of Public Instruction.
How they voted: The bill passed the Assembly along party lines in February 2025 and passed the Senate on a 29-4 vote in October.
When Evers signed the bill: October 2025.
Wisconsin Acts 11, 12 – Nuclear power summit and siting study
Lead authors: Sen. Julian Bradley, R-New Berlin/Rep. David Steffen, R-Howard
What it does: The laws created a board tasked with organizing a nuclear power summit in Madison and directed the Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, to study new and existing locations for nuclear power and fusion generation in the state. In January, the Public Service Commission signed an agreement with UW-Madison’s Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics to complete the siting study.
How they voted: The Senate passed and the Assembly passed the bill in June 2025 on a voice vote.
When Evers signed the bills: July 2025
Wisconsin Act 43 – Candidacy withdrawals for elections
Lead authors: Steffen/Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine
What it does: The law gives Wisconsin candidates a path other than death to withdraw their name from election ballots. The bill was proposed in the wake of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s effort to withdraw his name from the ballot in Wisconsin after he exited the presidential race in 2024 and endorsed President Donald Trump.
How they voted: The Assembly passed the bill in June. The Senate approved the bill on a 19-14 vote in October.
When Evers signed the bill: October 2025
Wisconsin Act 48 – Making sextortion a crime
Lead authors: Snyder/James
What it does: The law makes sexual extortion a crime that bans threatening to injure another person’s property or reputation or threatening violence against someone to get them to participate in sexual conduct or share an intimate image of themselves. Lawmakers named the bill “Bradyn’s Law” after a 15-year-old in the D.C. Everest School District who became a victim of sextortion and died by suicide.
How they voted: The Senate passed and the Assembly passed the bill on a voice vote.
When Evers signed the bill: December 2025
Wisconsin Act 22 – Informed consent for pelvic exams for unconscious patients
Lead authors: Sen. Andre Jacque, R-New Franken/Rep. Joy Goeben, R-Hobart
What it does: The bill requires that written consent is obtained from a patient before medical professionals at a hospital perform a pelvic exam while that person is unconscious or under general anesthesia.
How they voted: The Senate and the Assembly passed the bill on a voice vote.
When Evers signed the bill: August 2025
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
But the company’s troubles didn’t entirely ground its fleet. Flight tracking data indicate that Air Wisconsin continued to provide regional air service through the end of 2025, primarily connecting its Wisconsin hubs to mid-sized Midwestern airports as it had for decades.
Air Wisconsin sent recall notices to the company’s furloughed flight attendants after the sale to CSI Aviation, and the Association of Flight Attendants — the union representing the furloughed workers — negotiated an immediate raise for returning members. In a January press release announcing the recall notices, the union noted that only a third of the furloughed flight attendants opted to return.
Neither CSI nor Harbor Diversified responded to requests for comment.
CSI is central to the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown.
It has provided charter services for ICE since 2024, transporting detainees and deportees both directly and through subcontractors.
The company entered its current $1.5 billion contract with the Department of Homeland Security in November of last year.
Demand for private charters surged after 2010, when the Obama administration moved away from relying solely on the U.S. Marshals Service.
Air Wisconsin isn’t alone. Avelo Airlines began deportation flights last spring, but backed out last month following intense public backlash.
A transformed network
CSI’s acquisition of Air Wisconsin transformed the airline’s flight patterns within a matter of weeks. The airline’s website no longer lists passenger routes, but flight data collected between Jan. 9 and mid-February indicates that the airline has largely ceded its role as a Midwestern regional carrier.
Instead, the airline increasingly looks south: Destinations in Louisiana and Texas replaced the mid-sized Midwestern airports that were, until recently, the airline’s most frequent destinations.
Flight data indicates Air Wisconsin planes made at least 125 trips in January 2026, up from roughly 60 in December 2025. Thicker lines on the map indicate more frequent routes.
Part 2: Air ICE
Many of Air Wisconsin’s new destinations are within easy reach of ICE detention facilities in Texas and Louisiana, including some of the agency’s largest.
The Minnesota operation
Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is among the busiest in the country, but Air Wisconsin rarely provided service to the Twin Cities in the final months of 2025.
That changed in January, just weeks after the Trump administration dispatched thousands of federal agents to Minnesota for an immigration enforcement offensive dubbed Operation Metro Surge.
The modest airport in Alexandria, Louisiana, is now the epicenter of ICE’s deportation flight operations. Air Wisconsin has flown to or from Alexandria at least 30 times since the airline’s acquisition by CSI, on par with the airline’s service to Madison and outpacing service to Appleton, home to the airline’s corporate headquarters.
The GEO Group, an international private prison operator, runs an ICE detention facility on the airport’s tarmac. A dozen other ICE facilities sit within easy reach. Among them is the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Mississippi, where Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, a 39-year-old Nicaraguan national, died in custody on Dec. 14, 2025. ICE acknowledged the incident in a press release four days later, though the agency did not specify the cause of Rodriguez’s death.
El Paso
Camp East Montana, ICE’s largest detention facility, sits just east of El Paso International Airport. Air Wisconsin flights took off from or landed in El Paso at least 32 times in January and early February, second only to Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport.
Lunas Campos’ death came a month after Francisco Gaspar-Andres, a 48-year-old from Guatemala and detained at Camp East Montana, died in an El Paso hospital; ICE attributed Gaspar-Andres’ death to liver and kidney failure.
Another detainee, 36-year-old Victor Manuel Diaz of Nicaragua, died at the camp on Jan. 14 in what ICE described as a “presumed suicide” — an explanation his family questions. ICE agents detained Diaz in Minneapolis only days before his death.
Back at home
Air Wisconsin hasn’t entirely withdrawn from its home state hubs. Many of the airline’s remaining pilots, flight attendants and ground crew are still Wisconsin-based, and Milwaukee remains the airline’s primary hub.
The airline is now hiring for more than a dozen Wisconsin-based positions — including legal counsel.
About the data
Wisconsin Watch used FlightAware AeroAPI data (Sept 2025 – Feb 2026) to reconstruct patterns before and after the Jan. 9 sale to CSI Aviation.
Hubs on these maps represent the 10 airports most frequently used. While the routes align with ICE operations, the data does not confirm if specific flights carried detainees.
Air Wisconsin turns to ICE is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Reading Time: 6minutesClick here to read highlights from the event
911 centers across the country are experiencing a shortage of dispatchers. It’s affecting many Wisconsin communities, regardless of size or location.
These shortages make a difficult job harder and shifts even longer. The work is mentally taxing, and that’s amplified when there are fewer people on staff.
Who is a good fit for the job? People who can multi-task, stay calm under pressure, talk to strangers easily and handle high emotions.
Some counties have eased their shortages by boosting pay, focusing on mental health and opening up part-time positions.
AI is helping tackle some problems, but it’s not replacing dispatchers.
A college education isn’t necessary for the job, but Wisconsin’s tech colleges are adding emergency dispatch programs that help people see if the job is for them.
Children love to dress up as firefighters and police officers. They imagine themselves rushing into danger, answering the call when people are in need.
But how many of them realize they could literally be the one to answer those calls — as a 911 dispatcher?
“Not many people know about this as a career field,” said Gail Goodchild, emergency preparedness director for Waukesha County, at a Wisconsin Watch virtual panel discussion on Wednesday. “I think about trick or treaters … Nobody walks around with a headset and says, ‘I’m going to be a dispatcher someday.’”
The panel of emergency telecommunications professionals and educators said the low profile of emergency dispatch is one of many reasons that 911 centers across the country struggle to fill openings.
In Wisconsin, rural and urban communities alike are regularly short of dispatchers. Wisconsin Watch reported last year on Brown County’s “relentless” shortage and what the city can learn from successful changes in Waukesha County. This panel, moderated by reporter Miranda Dunlap, continues that conversation by highlighting perspectives and solutions from experts across the state.
“We have a critical, nationwide shortage of 911 professionals,” said Chippewa County Emergency Communications Center Director and longtime dispatcher Tamee Thom, who is also president of WIPSCOM, a board representing 911 professionals across Wisconsin.
Solving the problem, panelists agreed, will require both attracting new dispatchers and supporting those already on the job. They recommend raising awareness about the career, improving pay and working conditions, providing mental health support and technology to reduce burnout, and officially designating these professionals as first responders, in the same category as paramedics, firefighters and police.
Lives on the line
Emergency dispatch work is mentally and emotionally taxing, panelists said. At any moment, a dispatcher must be prepared for everything from talking someone through delivering a baby to responding to an act of violence.
“It can go from zero to 90 in seconds,” Goodchild said. “One minute you’re talking with your podmate, and then the (phones) are ringing off the hook for … a car accident or, God forbid, an active shooter at the local school.”
Dispatchers must remain calm to gather necessary information, relay instructions — say, how to perform CPR or deliver a baby — and de-escalate tension if needed. Meanwhile, they’re doing multiple other tasks, including taking notes, using mapping tools to better locate the caller, and talking with law enforcement dispatchers.
When a call ends, the dispatcher might never find out what happened afterward. Sometimes, they finish a life-or-death call and then pick up a mundane call about trash pickup or parking tickets, sending them on an emotional rollercoaster.
The job only gets harder when 911 centers are shortstaffed. Staff who typically work 8- or 12-hour shifts could have to work 16, Goodchild said. In some cases, they leave work only to clock back in eight hours later.
“You might have time to go home, maybe tuck in your kids at night. You’re getting a couple hours of sleep … pack your lunch … then get back to work,” Goodchild said.
But despite the challenges, veteran dispatchers say there’s a reason they’ve stayed in the field for decades.
Billi Jo Baneck, communications coordinator at the Shawano County Sheriff’s Office, once quit dispatch work to direct events at a wedding venue.
“I tried to leave … and I came right back,” Baneck said. “It just consumes you.”
What’s working
Waukesha County offers some clues about how to fix the shortage. In 2023, the department had 20 vacancies. By July 2025, it had just two.
One of the most important changes was to start hiring candidates based on personality rather than specific skills, said Goodchild, who took over as director a year ago.
“We can teach customer service. We can teach them how to read a protocol, but if they’re coming in with a bad attitude, it really messes up the culture in that environment and adds to the stress.”
The department also conducted a compensation study, which led it to raise the starting wage for dispatchers from around $27 to almost $29.50 to compete with other employers.
“People were leaving for less stressful jobs … They were going into the private industry because they could get paid better to do less,” Goodchild said.
Waukesha’s success has caught the attention of emergency telecommunications leaders across the state. Still, Goodchild said, the county’s work isn’t done.
“While we’ve made changes and we’ve seen improvements,” Goodchild said, “we’re still not at full staffing … We have to continue to stay vigilant and identify those gaps and issues before they get to be bigger problems, and remain adaptable in meeting the needs of the center and certainly the communities that we serve.”
Thom agrees. In Chippewa County, her department has created part-time positions for dispatchers who wanted to cut back their schedules, and it’s passed some administrative and training duties to once-retired dispatchers who don’t want the stress of taking calls.
That kind of “innovative” scheduling is essential, she said.
“These days, people are really looking for that work-life balance … so I think any way that we can help add to that … I think we’re going to retain staff,” Thom said.
To support dispatchers’ mental health, some departments have created peer support programs for dispatchers and other first responders to supplement existing mental health services.
Meanwhile, Waukesha County has hired a specialized therapy contractor called First Responder Psychological Services to meet with new hires and check in once or twice a year with every employee. All the company’s staff have worked in public safety, so they understand the specific stresses of the job, Goodchild said.
A role for AI?
Another way departments are easing the burden on overworked dispatchers: artificial intelligence. Waukesha is among the Wisconsin departments that now use an AI agent to answer non-emergency calls. That could include questions about how to pay a parking ticket, or what time the local fireworks show starts.
“I just want to be clear, because I know everybody’s fear is that you’re going to get an AI agent (when you’re) calling 911: That’s not the case,” Goodchild said.
That change, Goodchild said, means dispatchers get a little more down time and don’t experience so much of an emotional rollercoaster.
“You’re not going to send a law enforcement tactical team to go get a kitten out of a tree, right?” Goodchild said. “We train our 911 dispatchers at such a high level to provide CPR instructions, childbirth instructions, the de-escalating skills, multitasking skills. Why are you having them focus on a caller that’s calling in about when the fireworks are?”
Some schools and 911 centers are also using AI to train new dispatchers, said Shawano County’s Baneck, who also teaches emergency telecommunications at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College.
Tech colleges step in
Wisconsin’s tech colleges can play an important role in fixing the shortage by raising awareness about the field and helping potential dispatchers figure out whether the job is right for them, panelists said.
Andrew Baus, associate dean of human services at Moraine Park Technical College, helped create the college’s new emergency dispatch certificate program. Baus worked for years as a paramedic, the third generation in his family to work as a first responder.
“Growing up, the options were always fire or criminal justice. It really never dawned that dispatching was right there with them,” Baus said. Now, he said, he’s trying to show students that dispatch is another “great option.”
To excel in dispatch, a person must multitask and be friendly with strangers, Baneck said. Those people can be hard to find.
“People with customer service experience that are used to angry customers, angry shoppers, (and) people that have been in the food service industry that are used to running back and forth, taking multiple orders … they do really well in this kind of job.”
You don’t typically need certifications to get a job as a dispatcher, Baneck said, noting that departments usually offer a 40-hour basic training in-house or send new hires for training elsewhere.
But taking those classes in advance can help a person figure out whether dispatch work is right for them, before they ever apply for a job. That, in turn, can reduce turnover.
“Your heart’s got to be all-in to be able to work nights, holidays, weekends, around the clock, serving your community,” said Baneck, who also urges students considering dispatch to contact a 911 center and ask to shadow a dispatcher at work. “This is a good way of knowing whether their heart’s going to be in it or not, or whether they’re going to be capable of doing it.”
Thom agrees. “They see what it’s really like, and not what it looks like on TV,” Thom said.
Meanwhile, Thom said WIPSCOM is still pushing Wisconsin lawmakers to include dispatchers in newly adopted legislation that lets first responders diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder apply for worker’s compensation benefits. Some states have officially reclassified dispatchers as first responders. Such a change can mean dispatchers qualify for higher pay, better benefits and even the chance to retire earlier.
“There’s a difference between what we do every day and being a clerical worker. We are part of the emergency services world and are, honestly, the first first responder there,” Thom said. “We will continue to be a thorn in their side … speaking on behalf of our 911 professionals across the state.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Robin Vos, who has led the Republican charge in Wisconsin during his record-long stint as state Assembly speaker and blocked much of the Democratic governor’s agenda, announced Thursday that he will retire at the end of the year.
Vos, who also drew President Donald Trump’s ire for not aggressively challenging Trump’s loss in the battleground state in 2020, made the announcement from the floor of the Assembly. Vos is in his 22nd year in the Assembly and 14th year as speaker.
To his political opponents, Vos has been a shadow governor who shrewdly used his legislative majority to create a dysfunctional state government focused on advancing the conservative agenda and denying Democrats any victories they could tout.
To his supporters, Vos has been a shrewd tactician who outmaneuvered his political foes, sometimes within his own party, to become one of the state’s most influential Republicans in a generation.
Vos told The Associated Press that he suspects Democrats will be “happy that I’m gone.” But he had a message for his conservative detractors: “You’re going to miss me.”
Vos worked to curb union power, fight Democrats
Vos was a close ally of former Republican Gov. Scott Walker and helped pass key parts of his agenda, including the 2011 law known as Act 10 that effectively ended collective bargaining for most public workers. Vos also led the fight to pass several tax cuts, a “ right to work ” law and a voter ID requirement — legislation strongly opposed by Democrats.
When Democrat Tony Evers defeated Walker in 2018, and after the top Republican in the Senate won election to Congress two years later, Vos emerged as the leader of Republicans in state government and the top target for those on the left.
Vos successfully thwarted much of Evers’ policy agenda the past seven years. He kneecapped Evers even before Evers took office in 2019 by passing a series of bills in a lame duck session that weakened the governor’s powers.
“I’ve been tenacious and I’ve fought for what our caucus wants,” Vos said.
Vos and fellow Republicans ignored special sessions Evers called and successfully fought to limit his powers during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Vos led the lawsuit to overturn Evers’ stay-at-home order, resulting in Wisconsin becoming the first state where a court invalidated a governor’s coronavirus restrictions.
Vos angered some fellow Republicans
Vos angered some within his own party, most notably Trump, who criticized him for not doing enough to investigate his 2020 loss in Wisconsin. Vos eventually hired a former conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justice to look into the election, but later fired him amid bipartisan criticism over his effort that put forward discounted conspiracy theories and found no evidence of widespread fraud or abuse.
The episode amounted to a rare misstep for Vos, who is now advocating for revoking the former justice’s law license. Vos has repeatedly said that hiring Gableman was the biggest mistake he ever made.
Trump endorsed Vos’ primary challenger in 2022, and his supporters mounted multiple unsuccessful efforts to recall Vos from office. Vos decried those targeting him as “whack jobs and morons,” and he held on to extend his run as Wisconsin’s longest-serving speaker, eclipsing Democrat Tom Loftus, who held the position from 1983 to 1991.
Democrats eyeing a majority
Vos grew the GOP majority under Republican-drawn legislative maps before the state Supreme Court ordered new ones in 2023, resulting in Democratic gains in the last election. The Republicans held as many as 64 seats under Vos, but that dropped to 54 in what will be Vos’s final year.
Democrats are optimistic they can take the majority this year, while Vos said he remains confident that Republicans will remain in control even without him as speaker.
Vos, 57, was first elected to the Assembly in 2004 and was chosen by his colleagues as speaker in 2013. He became Wisconsin’s longest-serving speaker in 2021.
Vos said he had a mild heart attack in November that he didn’t reveal publicly until Thursday, but that’s not why he’s leaving.
“It was the tap on the shoulder that I needed to make sure that my decision is right,” he said.
Vos said it was “unlikely” he would run for office again, but he didn’t rule it out.
Vos was college roommates with Reince Priebus, who was chair of the Republican National Committee in 2016 and served as Trump’s first White House chief of staff.
End of an era
The governor, who had a sometimes contentious relationship with Vos, said his retirement “marks the end of an era in Wisconsin politics.”
“Although we’ve disagreed more often than we didn’t, I respect his candor, his ability to navigate complex policies and conversations, and his unrivaled passion for politics,” Evers said.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, who served with Vos in the Legislature and remained friends with him even though they’re political opposites, called him a “formidable opponent” and “probably the most intelligent and strategic Assembly speaker I have seen.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
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