When Larry Jones arrived at the Wisconsin State Capitol on March 12, he didn’t know what he was getting into — let alone that he would be a viral internet sensation the next day. 

The 85-year-old self-described conservative had been invited by his grandson to a public hearing on a Republican-authored bill that would ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth in the state. He decided to make the short drive from his home in Milwaukee. 

“I thought, ‘OK, I’ll go up there and listen to a couple people moaning about some kind of problems and be there for a couple hours and be long gone,’” Jones told Wisconsin Watch. “I got into something that I really didn’t know a heck of a lot about.” 

The hearing was packed with speakers there to testify either for or against the bill. Most people were limited to two minutes, but the hearing lasted more than eight hours. Jones was there in support of the bill, but wasn’t intending to get up and speak. But after listening to nearly seven hours of testimony, he put his name down. 

“I have very little knowledge of gay people and things like that there, so when I came here, my eyes were opened,” he told the state Assembly’s Health, Aging and Long-Term Care Committee just after 9 p.m. “I was one of the critics that sat on the side and made the decision there was only two genders, so I got an education that was unbelievable. And I don’t know just exactly how to say this, but my perspective for people has changed. … I’d like to apologize for being here, and I learned a very lot about this group of people.”

After he spoke, several attendees applauded.

Shortly after, his grandkids told him about a video of his testimony going viral online — as of Sunday the video had nearly 1 million views on YouTube. They called him a hero.

“Thank you for the compliment, but what the heck are you talking about?” he recalled responding. 

Jones told Wisconsin Watch he doesn’t think he did anything out of the ordinary and spoke because he felt like he owed it to the people there protesting the bill. He never thought a few sentences would garner such attention. 

“After a day or two, my 15 minutes of fame were long gone, and I went back to who I am, just plain old Larry,” Jones told Wisconsin Watch. 

Others saw an act of courage.

“Listening to his testimony was incredible,” one user commented under the viral video of Jones on Instagram. “It is powerful and brave to admit that you were wrong and have learned. I wish many of our legislators had that same strength.”

The bill

Republican politicians in recent years have frequently targeted transgender rights. One of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders the day he took office disregarded biological nuance in declaring there are only two sexes, male and female, which can’t be changed, and that gender identity “does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.” A later order declared the country wouldn’t fund transition of youth from one sex to another or medical institutions that provide such health care.

Wisconsin Assembly Bill 104 would ban gender-affirming health care, including puberty-blocking drugs, hormone replacement therapy or surgery, for those under the age of 18. Under the bill, medical providers found to be providing this care could have their licenses revoked. The legislation faces a certain veto by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who has vetoed a similar bill before. 

The authors of the bill — Sen. Cory Tomczyk, R-Mosinee, and Rep. Scott Allen, R-Waukesha — say it would “protect minors from making life-altering, irreversible decisions that cause mental and bodily harm.”

“They’re not voting on this bill as a person, they’re voting Republican party lines,” Jones told Wisconsin Watch. “That shouldn’t be that way. … Party line is a bunch of garbage.” 

It was just one of four bills raised in the Legislature in recent weeks targeting transgender youth in Wisconsin. Two others are aimed at banning transgender girls and women from participating in high school and collegiate women’s sports. Another would prohibit school employees from using a student’s preferred name and pronouns without parental consent. 

For hours, Jones listened to the stories of kids who wanted to transition and said it seemed like “their brain was tearing them apart.” He now believes the decision to receive gender-affirming care should involve a child, a qualified doctor and a parent — not lawmakers. He likened the issue to lawmakers banning doctors from providing abortions.

Just the introduction of such bills can have negative effects on LGBTQ+ kids, research shows. The Trevor Project, a nonprofit that works to end LGBTQ+ youth suicide, found in a 2024 national survey that 90% of LGBTQ+ young people said their well-being was negatively impacted due to recent politics. Research also shows that transgender youth who are called by their preferred names and pronouns are happier and healthier.

Jones said a 14-year-old transgender teen — one of the youngest speakers who advocated for their right to go on hormones — helped to change his perspective at the hearing. In their testimony, they shared that they had recently contemplated suicide.

“I started to listen to this kid, and it wasn’t some kind of whim or something like that. This kid was actually suffering,” Jones said. “And I thought to myself, nobody has to do that. You’re only a kid.”

The GOP-controlled committee voted to advance the bill. Republican lawmakers in the Assembly passed it last week. 

“Children are not allowed to get tattoos, sign contracts, get married, or smoke — so why would we allow them to physically change their gender?” Rep. Tyler August, R-Walworth, said in a statement. 

Jones had a different take. 

“All of these kids, they deserve a chance to see where they belong,” he said. 

Who is Larry?

Jones grew up in a small, rural unincorporated town in northern Michigan before moving to Milwaukee when he was 19 years old. 

“When I moved to the city, it was like I was a kid in a candy store. I discovered books, and once I discovered books, I discovered the world,” he said. 

For most of his life, he worked in the maintenance department at the Milwaukee County Community Reintegration Center  — a prison formerly known as the House of Corrections. There, he encountered gay men and women, but said he had never met someone who was transgender. 

“If there’s something you don’t understand or don’t know anything about, it kind of frightens you a little bit,” Jones said. 

When he was younger, he said LGBTQ+ people were “hidden.” 

“In the area where I grew up … men were men,” Jones said. “I was taught by men who had their own visions of what gay people were like. They were called ‘queers’ and ‘fairies’ and off-the-wall, ungodly names back in the day. As I grew older … the whole world changed.” 

Jones calls himself conservative, but said he’s willing to look at both sides of an issue. He mostly tunes into Fox News and local TV stations. He said he still has a lot to learn about the transgender community, and he’s made that his mission for the next six months or so. 

Prior to the hearing, he said he believed that someone who was transgender was “play acting” and simply changed their name and clothes along with a few other cosmetic things. 

“It’s through no fault of their own. I don’t think there’s a medical problem. I think these kids were born this way,” Jones said. “I looked at it through a different perspective, from a different set of eyes, and I promised myself that I would look into this with a clearer sense of understanding.”

After his testimony, a young woman handed him a note that read, “Thank you for being open to hearing all this and being open to changing your mind. That’s brave.” Jones kept it. 

His advice to others? “Don’t wear a pair of blinders and walk down the road. Keep an open mind.”

Wisconsin Watch reporter Jack Kelly contributed to this report.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

‘Just plain old Larry’: A Wisconsin man’s testimony about gender-affirming care went viral. Here’s his story. 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.

For months, Republican lawmakers on the powerful Joint Finance Committee have cast doubt on the reauthorization of Wisconsin’s land stewardship program following a July state Supreme Court ruling that prohibited the legislative committee from blocking projects after the funds have been budgeted. 

A 2023 Wisconsin Watch investigation found that the GOP-controlled committee had increasingly used a secretive “pocket veto” power since Democratic Gov. Tony Evers was elected to block conservation projects under the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program. Lawmakers refused to take action on some projects, preventing them from moving forward.

The program has been funded at roughly $33 million annually since 2015 and is currently funded through 2026. But only $20.1 million of those funds were spent in fiscal year 2023-24, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

That $33 million allotment hardly stacks up to the amount the program used to be funded. In 2007, the program was reauthorized for another decade and allocated $86 million annually for land purchases, though that was reduced to $60 million a year in the 2011 budget, then $50 million in the 2013 budget before bottoming out at $33 million in the 2015 budget.

Since the 6-1 ruling — with two conservative justices joining the liberal majority — GOP lawmakers have seemed poised to let a popular, bipartisan program die because they don’t have final say over spending on the projects. 

“It’s unfortunate that Gov. Evers’ lawsuit (which resulted in the Supreme Court ruling) removed all accountability of the stewardship program, which helped ensure local voices were heard and that taxpayer resources were spent wisely,” Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, co-chair of the JFC, said in a statement. “The entire program is now in jeopardy.”

In an interview with the Cap Times, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said the odds that Republicans would renew the program were less than 50%. 

But JFC vice chair Rep. Tony Kurtz, R-Wonewoc, told Wisconsin Watch that he is hopeful the program can continue and that nobody in his caucus wants the program to end. 

“I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure the program is sustainable for the future,” Kurtz said in an interview.

Since 1989, when the program began, the state has spent more than $23 million in stewardship funds in Kurtz’s 41st Assembly District. The program has funded nearly 330 projects in the district ranging from trail developments and campground upgrades to habitat protection and boat launch construction. 

In his executive budget proposal last month, Evers proposed a 10-year renewal of the program with a $1 billion price tag. Kurtz said the budget committee isn’t going to adopt that proposal, but he’s committed to seeing the program reauthorized for “the next couple of years.” He said every lawmaker has a Knowles-Nelson project “in their backyard” that they might not even know about.

“It is a large price tag,” Kurtz said. “But we do need to make the investments. The investments are valuable for the long-term conservation of Wisconsin.” 

Following a series of listening sessions held in his district, state Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, said attendees spoke in support of the program. 

“I am supportive of the program and hope to see it continue, but many of my colleagues in the legislature have reservations,” Marklein, co-chair of the JFC, said in a statement. 

Kurtz said it’s unfortunate the program has become a partisan fight in the Capitol and that some lawmakers are “negative” toward the program, adding that Knowles-Nelson is “more than just one project.” 

Conservation advocacy groups like Gathering Waters have pushed back against the JFC’s threats to kill the program, which provides millions of dollars in grants to local governments and nonprofits.

“I think legislative leaders were certainly unhappy about losing that Supreme Court case in such an unambiguous way,” Charles Carlin, director of strategic initiatives for Gathering Waters, told Wisconsin Watch. “There is constantly a temptation for lawmakers to get pulled into partisan battles where politics becomes more about winning than it does about good policy.”

When asked if he would veto a state budget that eliminates funding for Knowles-Nelson, Evers said he would use his partial veto power to reject “that part of it.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Republican lawmakers diverge on future of conservation stewardship program 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.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers still wants certain powers restored to his office.

In his executive budget proposal, Evers last month proposed repealing a series of controversial laws that were approved in a 2018 “lame-duck” session after he defeated his Republican predecessor Gov. Scott Walker, but before he took office. The laws stripped the governor and attorney general of certain powers and instead gave them to the Legislature.

He’s called for repealing the laws in all four of his proposed budgets.

One law Evers targeted, for example, specifies that when the state Senate rejects the governor’s nominees for state government positions, the governor may not reappoint that person to the same position. The law clarifies what “with the advice and consent of the Senate” means in other parts of state law. Evers’ proposal to cut the statute prompted outrage from one Republican senator last week.

“What’s the point of advice and consent of the Senate if the person can serve after being rejected by the Senate?” Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, said in a statement. “Can you imagine the uproar from Gov. Evers and Democrats if President Trump or former Gov. Walker did this?”

“This is a repeal of the 2018 lame-duck provisions Republicans passed because you were mad about losing to a Democrat,” Evers’ spokesperson Britt Cudaback fired back on social media. 

The statute is just one of many approved by GOP lawmakers over six years ago as they moved to swiftly strip powers from the incoming governor and attorney general, sending fast-tracked bills to Walker’s desk during his final weeks in office.

Among those last-minute changes was a move to block governors from re-nominating political appointees who are rejected by the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans. More than 180 of Evers’ appointees have yet to be confirmed by the Senate. Republicans have fired 21 of his picks since he took office in 2019, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau. Evers has tried to repeal the Senate advice and consent law in all four of his budget proposals.

Attorney General Josh Kaul, whose authority was also hampered by the laws, has challenged the lame-duck laws for years. In 2020, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s then-conservative majority upheld the GOP’s last-minute legislation. But now, with a 4-3 liberal majority, Kaul has asked the court to decide whether one of the laws — granting the GOP-controlled Joint Finance Committee the ability to reject settlements reached by the Department of Justice in certain civil lawsuits — is constitutional.

While these legal challenges have persisted for nearly six years, Evers has attempted to repeal lame-duck laws via another route: his state budget proposals.

“This is why you read the actual language of the budget,” Wanggaard said. “Trying to sneak this through is exactly why Republicans start from scratch in the budget.”

Evers has attempted in all four of his budget proposals to repeal a lame-duck law that gave the speaker of the Assembly, the Senate majority leader and the co-chairs of the Joint Committee on Legislative Organization — positions held by Republicans for more than a decade — the power to authorize legal representation for lawmakers, allowing them to hire counsel outside of the DOJ.

In all four budgets, Evers has also proposed striking down a lame-duck statute that requires at least 70% of the funding for certain highway projects to come from the federal government each year. If the Department of Transportation is unable to meet this, the law allows the department to propose an alternate funding plan that must be approved by the GOP-controlled JFC. 

The governor also proposed overturning a statute in all four budget proposals requiring the Department of Health Services to obtain legislative authorization before submitting requests for federal waivers or pilot programs. It also requires DHS to submit plans and progress reports to the JFC for approval, additionally granting the committee the power to reduce DHS funding or positions for noncompliance.

In each budget proposal, Evers has also tried to overturn other lame-duck statutes that grant Republican-controlled legislative committees greater power, such as approving Capitol security changes and new enterprise zones. 

Republican lawmakers have rejected the governor’s efforts in the previous three budget cycles. That will likely be the case again this year.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Gov. Tony Evers attempts to repeal Wisconsin lame-duck laws in budget again 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.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers unveiled his 2025-27 biennial budget proposal last week — a two-year plan totaling nearly $119 billion compared to the $100 billion budget currently on the books.

Republicans lawmakers who control the powerful budget writing committee immediately vowed to throw out the governor’s spending plan this spring. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said Evers’ proposals are “dead on arrival.”

Many of the governor’s recommendations have been reviewed and rejected by GOP lawmakers in previous budgets, like his plans to expand Medicaid or legalize marijuana.

But in this year’s budget address, he introduced several new items. Here are four examples from the governor’s fourth state budget proposal. 

No tax on cash tips 

“No tax on tips” quickly became a Republican mantra on the 2024 campaign trail after it was heavily touted by President Donald Trump. But Democrats have followed suit, coming out in support of the popular policy.

For the first time, Evers is seeking to eliminate income taxes on cash tips in the budget, a proposal that mirrors a Republican-authored bill in the Legislature. The plan would reduce state revenue by just under $7 million annually — a paltry amount compared to the roughly $11 billion in individual income tax the state expects to collect each year. 

“Interesting. @GovEvers wants to eliminate tax on tips (great idea, swear I heard it somewhere before) but not a single Democrat co-sponsored the bill that Sen. (Andre) Jacque and I authored to create tax exemption for tips. I’m glad we can count on Evers’ support,” state Sen. Julian Bradley, R-New Berlin, wrote on X.

Service industry workers might shrug when they discover that the tax exemption would only apply to tips left in cash and would not exempt the majority of tips, which are left on a credit card. But that’s not the only reason why Jason Stein, president of the Wisconsin Policy Forum, says the proposal would have little impact.

“Many of the lower wage workers who receive tips may not have to pay any state income taxes as it is,” Stein told Wisconsin Watch. “There are other policies like the earned income tax credit that would benefit low-wage workers…they’re more industry-neutral. They’re profession-neutral.” 

Free college tuition for Native American students

In another new proposal, Evers recommended providing full tuition waivers for any student who is a Wisconsin resident, a citizen of any of the state’s 11 federally recognized tribal nations and enrolled at a Universities of Wisconsin System or Wisconsin Technical College System school. The governor’s office could not confirm the cost of this specific proposal, but noted it is part of a $129 million effort to increase affordability in the UW System over the next two years. 

The proposal mirrors the Wisconsin Tribal Education Promise already in place at UW-Madison, which covers all educational costs for Native students who are citizens of a tribal nation. That program began last fall, is not tied to household income and is funded in part by philanthropy rather than state funds.

The program was announced in December 2023, shortly after Universities of Wisconsin regents struck a deal with Republican lawmakers to end diversity hires across their campuses in exchange for previously approved employee raises and project funding. Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said the program is a testament to the university’s commitment to diversity.

Universities in other states have launched similar initiatives in recent years, granting in-state tuition for Native students.

Auditing health insurance companies 

Evers wants Wisconsin to be the first state in the nation to audit insurance companies that frequently deny health care claims. But the details of this plan, such as how frequently an insurance company would have to deny claims to be audited, are slim. 

“If an insurance company is going to deny your health care claim, they should have a darn good reason for it. It’s frustrating when your claim gets denied and it doesn’t seem like anyone can give you a good reason why,” Evers said. “If an insurance company is denying Wisconsinites’ claims too often, we’re going to audit them. Pretty simple.” 

The plan would cost $500,000 in program revenue, potentially from new fines, for two full-time positions over the next two years “to establish a framework for auditing high rates of health insurance claim denials among insurers offering plans in the state over which the office has regulatory authority.”

The new office would set the percentage of claim denials that would warrant an audit. The office would then enforce “corrective action” through fines or forfeitures. 

New tax bracket for millionaires

Evers is also seeking new ways to increase state revenue. This includes his plan to “ensure millionaires and billionaires in Wisconsin pay their fair share” through a new individual tax bracket of 9.8% that would apply to income for single and married joint filers above $1 million. For married couples filing separately, income above $500,000 would also fall under this tax bracket.

The new tax is estimated to generate nearly $1.3 billion over the next two years. 

The current top income tax rate is 7.65%, covering married joint filers with an income above $420,420 and individuals with an income above $315,310.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Here are four items in Gov. Tony Evers’ $119 billion budget that he hasn’t previously proposed 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.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers unveiled his 2025-27 biennial state budget proposal. The nearly year-long process is now picking up speed, but the next two-year budget is still far from being finalized. 

Over the next few months, the Legislature’s powerful Joint Finance Committee, controlled by Republicans, will make significant changes to Evers’ proposals before approving a final budget bill. During this time, the politically divided executive and legislative branches will wrestle over funding for public schools, child care, higher education, Medicaid expansion and much more. 

Another budget surplus expected

Wisconsin ended its 2024 fiscal year with a more-than-expected $4.6 billion budget surplus and is on pace to end the current fiscal year with a $4.2 billion surplus. Republicans want to reduce the surplus by passing income tax cuts before the budget debate begins, while Democrats are urging more funding for things like K-12 education.

The Legislature must pass a budget signed by the governor every two years in order to use up state revenues for government operations. A budget period begins on July 1 of each odd-numbered year and concludes on June 30 of the next odd-numbered year. The last two-year budget totaled nearly $100 billion. 

Here’s what this hectic process will look like: 

The process involves three main entities that work to both create and pass the budget: the governor, the Legislature and state agencies. 

State agencies like the Department of Public Instruction and the Department of Natural Resources calculate their financial needs for the upcoming cycle and submit formal funding requests, which were due to the State Budget Office back in September. The Department of Administration then analyzes and compiles the requests for the governor. 

The governor then spends months crafting an executive budget proposal based on these requests, and community listening sessions are held across the state in December. On Tuesday he will give his budget address, which he is legally required to deliver to the new Legislature. Proposed funding for state agencies will be made available. 

Soon after that — likely in March — Evers will reveal his capital budget proposal, which includes spending plans for long-term projects like new UW System buildings. 

Then, the Joint Finance Committee will review and revise Evers’ budget. Under a divided government since 2019, the committee has scrapped the governor’s proposals and written its own. In 2023, GOP lawmakers began this process by stripping nearly 550 of his proposals.

Lawmakers on the Joint Finance Committee typically hold their own community listening sessions in April.  The committee typically completes its revisions by the end of May.

Then, lawmakers in both houses of the Legislature — the Republican-controlled Senate and Assembly — have until the end of the fiscal year on June 30 to pass the budget before it heads to Evers’ desk for signing. Here, he can use his controversial partial veto power to remove specific appropriations from the budget bill, also allowing him to delete large sections of language and manipulate words or numbers.

In 2023, Evers made national headlines after he manipulated punctuation in the Legislature’s budget to extend school funding for 402 years. A case challenging the partial veto is pending before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In the meantime, Republican lawmakers have introduced a constitutional amendment that would strip away the governor’s partial veto power.

If the budget is not signed into law by July 1, the state will continue to operate under the previous budget passed in 2023 until the new one is signed.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Here’s how Wisconsin’s state budget process works 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.

Gov. Tony Evers this week will propose a significant overhaul of Wisconsin’s corrections system, pushing a plan that would close one of the state’s two oldest prisons, renovate the other and convert the state’s youth prison into a facility for adult men. 

The proposal, which totals just shy of $500 million, will be included in the governor’s budget proposal, which he will unveil on Tuesday night. The governor shared details of the plan with reporters Friday morning.

The “domino series of facility changes, improvements and modernization efforts,” as Evers described them, would take place between approval of the budget and 2031. The proposal is the solution to the state’s skyrocketing prison population, Evers said, adding there is “not an alternative to my plan that is safer, faster and cheaper.”

The first step would be building a facility for youth offenders in Dane County, allowing the state to close its current beleaguered juvenile prison complex in Irma, home to Lincoln Hills School for boys and Copper Lake School for girls. The cost would be $130.7 million.

Completing the juvenile Dane County facility would be the latest step in a years-long effort to shutter Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake. A similar facility opened in Racine County earlier this month, with another juvenile facility in Milwaukee poised to open next year. With the addition of the Dane County facility, the state would be able to move youth offenders out of Lincoln Hills in early 2029, according to the Evers administration.

The Lincoln County complex would then undergo $9 million in renovations to be converted into a 500-bed, medium-security institution for men.

Another key piece of Evers’ plan would be converting Stanley Correctional Institution into a maximum-security facility for $8.8 million. That would allow the state to renovate Waupun Correctional Institution, the state’s oldest facility, where at times inmates were confined to their cells for months and denied medical care, according to an investigation by Wisconsin Watch and The New York Times. Waupun staff also have faced criminal charges following the deaths of five inmates. 

The estimated $245 million renovation would involve demolishing the prison’s existing cell halls and replacing them with new, medium-security facilities known as a “vocational village” — the first in Wisconsin based on a model used in other states. The facility would be “designed to expand job and workforce training to help make sure folks can be stable, gainfully employed and can positively contribute to our communities when they are released,” Evers said.

Under the plan, the John Burke Correctional Center in Waupun would also be converted to a 300-bed facility for women “with little to no capital cost,” said Jared Hoy, secretary of the Department of Corrections.

Green Bay Correctional Institution, constructed in 1898, would close under the proposal sometime in spring 2029 at a cost of $6.3 million. Many have pushed for the closure of the prison due to overcrowding, poor conditions and staffing issues.

To compensate for the lost beds, the last project in the “domino” series would add 200 beds to Sanger B. Powers Correctional Center in Brown County.

The governor’s budget will guarantee Green Bay staffers a role at another DOC facility to account for the prison’s closure, the Evers administration said. The facility would likely then be sold, the governor told reporters.

In totality, the plan aims to avoid building a new prison in Wisconsin, which the governor’s administration estimates would cost $1.2 billion and take a decade to construct. Evers said Friday that he had not discussed the plan with Republican lawmakers, but implied he was slated to meet with them over the weekend.

The state’s adult institutions were locking up more than 23,000 people as of Feb. 7. That’s more than 5,000 above the design capacity of Wisconsin’s prisons and more than 3,000 above levels four years ago when COVID-19 actions shrunk prisoner ranks.

Justice reform advocates have argued that Wisconsin can’t substantially improve conditions without decarceration, including releasing more inmates and diverting others to programs rather than prisons. 

Other states — some led by Republicans and some by Democrats — have managed to close prisons by adopting rehabilitation-focused reforms that cut thousands from the population. 

The governor is also seeking some policy changes that could trim the population. For example, he wants to expand the capacity of the state’s existing earned release program for nonviolent offenders with less than 48 months remaining on their sentences, allowing more inmates to access vocational training and treatment for substance use disorders.

Evers noted there are 12,000 inmates on a waiting list to access vocational programming, and expanding the earned release program would likely make another 1,000 inmates eligible for the program.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Tony Evers to propose $500 million prison overhaul, closing Green Bay facility by 2029 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.

On Jan. 22, Wisconsin Watch reporter Hallie Claflin and photojournalist Joe Timmerman joined a group of volunteers in Jefferson County overnight to observe the annual “point in time” count of the homeless population. These counts are conducted on the same night in January across the country to provide a one-night snapshot of homelessness. 

But this count has multiple pitfalls, as noted in our recent investigation. 

What did they find? A pair of dedicated volunteers and a count that, while increasing, still struggles to capture the true homeless population, especially in rural areas.

What made us interested in observing the PIT count?

In December, we traveled four hours to the small town of Shell Lake where a homeless father and daughter who had been living in their car for over a year gave us a glimpse into their everyday lives. After extensively investigating the rural homelessness crisis across the state, we realized this family wouldn’t have shown up in the January PIT count because they were temporarily staying in a friend’s basement.

We wanted to understand who actually gets counted, and who doesn’t. The unhoused population is increasing, but who is missing from the data? 

What we saw

After attending Gov. Tony Evers’ State of the State address at the State Capitol in the evening, we hopped in the car and headed to Jefferson County for the late night count. We rode along with the volunteers as they surveyed the county. A fresh layer of snow added even more bite to the single-digit temperature, and we couldn’t stand outside for much longer than a few minutes before retreating to the heated car. 

In Johnson Creek, we found cars lined up in the back of a local restaurant and truck stop. Here, several people were found sleeping in their vehicles, one with a child in the back. The volunteers, Sandy Hahn and Britanie Peaslee, were quick to give them an extra blanket. The woman and child inside had been living in the van for six months, and she was working at the restaurant.     

On the drive, the pair shared stories about past PIT counts they had participated in. We followed along as they drove through parking lots, checked around corners, went into public bathrooms, searched rest stops, and asked gas station workers if they had seen anyone who was unhoused.

Another person sleeping in a car wouldn’t engage with them. Because of this, they couldn’t verbally verify that they were homeless, which means they weren’t included in the official count. The car was running — likely for warmth — and the windows were covered with blankets for privacy. 

We quickly realized many unhoused people aren’t included in the count based on this rule alone, among the many other restrictions on who they can count. 

The volunteers left a blanket on the windshield and continued on, acknowledging that if in their position, they would also be hesitant to talk to two strangers at 2 a.m. in the snow. 

Peaslee and Hahn were thorough in their search and were one of four groups covering the county. 

It was clear the volunteers could search all day and all night and still never find a fraction of the total population, but they do their best with the guidelines they are given.

We parted ways around 4 a.m. — barely staying awake — and made it back to our warm apartments by 4:30.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

We observed the annual homeless count in a rural county. Here’s what we saw. 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.

Just before midnight, with a fresh layer of snow sticking to the ground, volunteers Sandy Hahn and Britanie Peaslee slowly drive through Jefferson County’s local parking lots, gas stations, truck stops, parks, trails and laundromats, keeping their eyes peeled.

They’re grateful for the snowfall, which makes it easier to see footprints, fogged windows and occupied vehicles. They have a long night ahead of them, and being in a rural area makes their job — finding those without shelter — even more challenging. 

“It’s a little bit easier when it is colder because you can see, OK this windshield is frosted from the inside, somebody’s been breathing in there for quite a while,” Peaslee said. 

In Johnson Creek, they find most of the homeless living in cars parked behind the Pine Cone Travel Plaza — a local restaurant, gas station and truck stop. The duo carefully approach each vehicle — one with a sleeping child in the back — with blankets and a four-page questionnaire. 

But that’s assuming the unhoused are willing to engage with the strangers at all, let alone at 3 a.m. while it’s 7 degrees and snowing outside. 

Jan. 22 marked Hahn and Peaslee’s fifth time participating in the annual “point in time” (PIT) count — a one-night snapshot of the number of people experiencing homelessness across the United States, including Wisconsin. The pair were among the eight volunteers conducting the counts in Jefferson County, a number Hahn considered to be low. Being in a small, rural area, they struggle to recruit volunteers. 

This one-night snapshot — first conducted in 2005 — is the only required count of all people experiencing homelessness each year in the United States. The volunteers must follow strict guidelines set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Peaslee said locating people is the biggest challenge in rural areas. Many are sleeping in abandoned buildings or other private property they can’t access. The volunteers do their best not to miss anyone, while also keeping their own safety in mind. 

“Depending on how treacherous it is outside, sometimes we’ll go into the woods,” Hahn said.

In addition to gas station parking lots, they’ve seen several third-shift workers parked at local factories who are living in their cars.

Each January count isn’t released until December, even though lawmakers will soon set housing and emergency shelter funding for the next two years in the upcoming state budget.

Last year there was an 18% increase in the homeless count nationwide based on the count taken in January 2024. In rural Wisconsin the increase was 9%. In Jefferson County the volunteers recorded three homeless people a year ago. This year the final tally was 13 — a number that likely still doesn’t come close to capturing the true population.

Why does the PIT count happen during the coldest month of the year? 

HUD determines that the yearly PIT count must be conducted on the same night in January in every state across the country. Each Continuum of Care — regional organizations operating under HUD that carry out the counts — may conduct a July count in addition to the mandated one in January.

“They want us to go out in the middle of the night because they feel that’s when people would be sleeping, and they would be hunkered down in their standard spots,” said Diane Sennholz, who leads the count in Lincoln, Marathon and Wood counties. “If we were to go out during the day, they might be at the library or the grocery store or walking around.” 

Wisconsin’s Balance of State CoC, which covers all 69 counties in Wisconsin besides Milwaukee, Dane and Racine, requires each county in its jurisdiction to carry out a summer count. Others, like Dane County, typically conduct only the required January count. 

Frigid temperatures tend to drive more people into emergency homeless shelters, making the count easier. That model might work in cities, but in rural areas like Jefferson County, there are no homeless shelters.

Out of necessity, those experiencing homelessness in a county with no shelters will do everything they can to stay on a friend’s couch or find somewhere warm, making them harder to find and impossible to include in the count. Those temporarily staying with a friend or family member don’t count.

Jefferson County’s summer PIT count has increased each year since 2021 — a trend that can be seen statewide. In 2022, the county’s January count was zero compared to seven recorded in the summer count.

“We definitely don’t find as many in January as we would in summer,” Hahn said. “People are more willing to open up their barns, their garages, their extra bedroom, especially on weeks like this when it’s negative 40.”

Peaslee and Hahn, who are both involved in the community’s poverty-fighting coalition, know the problem is worse than what the count portrays. 

“We’re not finding an eighth of how many are truly out there,” Peaslee said. 

The PIT count’s pitfalls 

On the night of the count, Hahn and Peaslee headed to a truck stop in Johnson Creek where people are known to sleep in their cars. The vehicles were lined up on the farthest end of the lot. One person refused to roll down the window and speak to them.  

It happens often, but Peaslee and Hahn can’t blame them. After all, it’s the middle of the night, and they are two strangers who come bearing a four-page survey. HUD requires the volunteers to gather as much information about the individual as possible. 

The pair spoke to someone in another car who knew the individual and confirmed they were unhoused, leading Hahn to fill out an observation form. Volunteers have seven days following the count to attempt to make contact with those individuals again to confirm whether they were homeless on the night of the count. Without that confirmation, they can’t be counted. 

The following week, Hahn had no luck tracking down the individual. The person was placed on an observation sheet, but not included in the official count.

Volunteers are not allowed to assume that someone is “literally homeless” in accordance with HUD definitions. But Hahn noted that the car was running in the middle of the night for warmth and there were blankets covering the windows for privacy. Unhoused people who could otherwise be counted are being missed in these instances.

“If somebody has all these personal belongings in their car, you can kind of tell at that point that they’re experiencing homelessness,” said Lyric Glynn, who leads the count in Kewaunee, Door, Manitowoc and Sheboygan counties. “But we can’t count them all the time because they’re sleeping and we haven’t been able to do a survey with them.”

This year, two individuals in Jefferson County ended up on the observation form instead of being recorded in the official count. In July, that number was 10. 

The day after the count, Hahn makes calls to determine how many hotel vouchers were distributed that night. Those who are unhoused and temporarily staying in a hotel are counted in the count, but only if they’ve received a voucher for their stay. HUD specifies that if they’re paying for the room themselves, or if someone else is paying for them, they cannot be included, excluding even more of the population from the count. 

In Jefferson County, Hahn said those motel vouchers are hard to come by due to minimal funding. People in hotels often pay through other means.

“There are so many barriers,” Peaslee said.

Counts tied to community’s level of need

While federal funding for housing and shelter programs isn’t directly tied to the results of the count, it is used in determining a community’s level of need, according to Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. The federal McKinney-Vento Act also requires HUD to determine whether a community is reducing homelessness, and the count is one of multiple criteria scored in the evaluation. 

Despite its flaws, Wisconsin’s PIT count shows that statewide homelessness has been increasing. In the “balance” of the state, the mostly rural homeless population increased from 2,938 individuals in 2023 to 3,201 in 2024, the highest number recorded since 2017. 

In 2020, a federal moratorium established a temporary pause on evictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the federal government lifted that measure in August 2021. 

Glynn said she has concerns about lawmakers, agencies and other officials relying on more than year-old PIT count data. 

“When they’re using outdated numbers from years ago, especially early pandemic numbers, they’re not gauging what happened after the pandemic when the eviction moratorium ended and when individuals started getting evicted from units,” Glynn said.

The delayed release of these yearly counts is also a problem when applying for local grants, Glynn said. Application reviewers often look at counts from the previous year. The CoCs have the most recent totals, which sometimes don’t match HUD’s latest figures.

In a state budget year, it would help if officials could have earlier access to the latest counts, Glynn said. 

​​In the state’s 2023-25 biennial budget, the Legislature rejected Gov. Tony Evers’ recommendations to spend some $24 million on emergency shelter and housing grants, as well as homeless case management services and rental assistance for unhoused veterans.

The Legislature also rejected the $250 million Evers proposed for affordable workforce housing and home rehabilitation grants.

Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez joined a group of volunteers in western Wisconsin on the night of the count this year, where she expressed concerns about rising housing costs and emergency shelter services. She said Evers’ budget “is going to have those types of investments.” 

Evers is set to announce his 2025-27 state budget proposal on Feb. 18.

Court ruling could affect counts

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that municipalities can enforce bans on homeless people sleeping in public places. Oliva predicts this ruling will impact the count results this year. 

“I wonder what will happen in places that have been ticketing and fining people. Those people are going to hide,” Oliva told Wisconsin Watch. “Why would you want to be found, especially if you know that it’s possible that you’ll get ticketed or put in jail for being homeless?” 

Volunteers like Peaslee and Hahn, who work with the homeless population in their community, still see value in conducting the count. For them, it is an opportunity for outreach and allows them to offer resources to those with whom they haven’t previously made contact. They remind people they are more than a number.

“Yes, you need the gritty details to report to HUD, but really making them feel like they are human and that their story matters,” Peaslee said. “And we’re not just putting down a data point to have a data point. We want to know, how can we help you?”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

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Forcing county sheriffs to cooperate with federal immigration officials or risk losing state funding. A tax cut for service industry worker cash tips. Banning “foreign adversaries” from owning Wisconsin farmland. The GOAT committee. 

The first few weeks of the Legislature’s new session have been dominated by ideas inspired, at least in part, by President Donald Trump, as Wisconsin Republicans bring ideas pushed in Washington to Madison.

The localization of Trump’s agenda — which helped the president secure a slim but significant victory in November — comes as Republican lawmakers continue to set the legislative agenda in Wisconsin.

But Democratic legislative leaders are pushing back on that agenda, unlike many of their counterparts at the national level.

“These are not serious proposals,” said Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine. “They are political; they are for the right-wing base. But they are simply not addressing the problems that the people of Wisconsin are facing.”

Immigration crackdown

Last week, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, and Sen. Julian Bradley, R-New Berlin, unveiled legislation to mandate cooperation between Wisconsin law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.

The bill would require “sheriffs to request proof of legal presence status from individuals held in a county jail for an offense punishable as a felony,” according to analysis from the Legislative Reference Bureau. It also compels sheriffs to “comply with detainers and administrative warrants received from the federal department of homeland security regarding individuals held in the county jail for a criminal offense.”

If a sheriff shrugs the law, the sheriff’s county would face a 15% cut in state aid in the following year, according to a draft of the bill. But the bill isn’t about targeting places like Dane and Milwaukee counties — where leaders have pledged not to cooperate with federal authorities — said Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August, R-Lake Geneva. “It’s about just ensuring that every county is operating the same and that there isn’t a refuge for these violent criminals.”

While introducing the bill, flanked by two dozen of his GOP colleagues, Bradley said the legislation should garner bipartisan support, pointing to the Laken Riley Act — a similar crackdown on theft and violent crime committed by unauthorized immigrants — that received some Democratic support in Congress. It was the first bill signed into law under the new Trump administration.

“Only far-left extremists in this country believe that someone here illegally that commits a felony should be allowed to stay,” Bradley said.

No tax on tips 

State Sen. Andre Jacque, R-De Pere, is one of four Republican lawmakers circulating a bill that would eliminate taxes on cash tips earned by service workers — a proposal Trump heavily touted on the campaign trail. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, later announced support for the policy as well. 

Jacque and a group of bipartisan lawmakers last introduced the bill in 2019, but it never became law. He said it’s heavily favored by those in the hospitality industry.

Trump’s push to enact a similar policy at the federal level made this the ideal time to reintroduce the bill in Wisconsin, Jacque said.

“Having a federal administration that is putting some political capital towards making that part of the equation happen certainly adds a lot of fire to being ready to be aligned at the state level,” Jacque said.

In 2019, the bill, which only would have exempted cash tips from taxation, was estimated to reduce the state’s revenue by nearly $4.7 million annually. A fiscal estimate of the current bill has not yet been released. It would not exempt the majority of tips, which are left on a credit card. 

Banning ‘foreign adversaries’ from owning land

Another state bill introduced by Republicans last month would prevent “foreign adversaries” from “countries of concern” from acquiring forestry and agricultural land in the state. 

The legislation mimics Trump’s campaign promises in January 2023 to ban Chinese nationals from buying farmland and owning other “vital infrastructure,” citing national security concerns. Jacque, an author of the bill, said he wasn’t aware of Trump’s previous support for a similar proposal. 

Jacque introduced similar legislation in 2023 that never became law. He pointed to bipartisan congressional support for similar “foreign adversary” bills introduced at the federal level. It’s a “common-sense concern” that “resonates with the public,” Jacque said. 

GOAT Committee

The Government Operations, Accountability and Transparency Committee is new to the Assembly this legislative session. Like DOGE, the federal Department of Government Efficiency led by Elon Musk, it’s named after a pop culture meme (GOAT is shorthand for greatest of all time; DOGE is named after a meme turned cryptocurrency).

The committee’s chair, Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, said the committee will work “to identify opportunities to increase state government efficiency and to decrease spending.” 

“The people of Wisconsin want to see their hard-earned tax dollars being spent on services that directly affect them, not on the expansion of programs that benefit only select groups of people,” she said in a written response to questions from Wisconsin Watch. “GOAT will investigate ways in which the state can reallocate revenues away from excessive wants and funnel them more into critical needs without increasing spending.”

One motivating factor for her 2022 Assembly run was “to bring my professional experience in process improvement to the public sector because so many glaring inefficiencies in state agencies were exposed during the pandemic,” Nedweski said, noting she wanted to improve “fiscal accountability” for the state long before DOGE was a concept.

The committee was created in response “to an outpouring of demand from the people,” Nedweski said, adding that “DOGE is making fiscal conservatism cool and accessible to more people.”

“The performance of state agencies under the current administration has often been subpar under this administration relative to the tax dollars invested,” she said. “If the (state) agencies are not going to take honest looks in the mirror as to how they can better serve Wisconsinites, GOAT will. Whether or not the Governor chooses to work with us is up to him.”

GOAT serves a different role than the Legislative Audit Bureau, Nedweski said, noting that a “top objective of GOAT is to be responsive to real people facing everyday challenges with state government.” 

While the committee may work with LAB and the Joint Audit Committee, “the function of GOAT will be less technical than Audit and more directly responsive to a wide range of stakeholder concerns,” she said.

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The fate of postpartum Medicaid expansion, a bipartisan effort in the state Legislature, yet again falls in the hands of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who said Tuesday that it’s “unlikely” his chamber will get to vote on it.

Congress previously gave states a permanent option to accept federal funds for 12-month extensions of postpartum Medicaid coverage. Wisconsin and Arkansas are now the only two states that have turned down the federal extension. Wisconsin’s coverage currently lasts 60 days after birth, far shorter than what health experts recommend. 

Extending the coverage has emerged as a way for states to fight maternal mortality rates. Though pregnancy-related deaths are rare,  a third of them in Wisconsin occur beyond the 60-day coverage window, according to the Department of Health Services. 

Rep. Patrick Snyder, R-Weston, on Tuesday reintroduced a bill that would expand coverage to 12 months. The legislation mirrors the extensions that have been introduced in previous sessions, yet have failed to pass the Legislature. That same day, Vos, R-Rochester, said a vote on the 12-month extension would be “unlikely.” 

“Our caucus has taken a position that expanding welfare is not a wise idea for anyone involved,” Vos told reporters. 

Republican lawmakers previously agreed to a three-month coverage period. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ 2021-23 state budget proposal asked for a 12-month extension, but Republican lawmakers on the powerful Joint Finance Committee amended it to instead require DHS to request federal approval to extend postpartum Medicaid eligibility to 90 days instead of the 60 mandated by federal law. 

Vos accused the Evers administration of not applying for the 90-day extension the Legislature already granted, which isn’t true — something Vos acknowledged in response to a follow-up question to his office. DHS submitted the application for the extension, but the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services last year said it would not approve a waiver request for coverage shorter than one year. 

“I’m glad that I was wrong and it has been submitted,” Vos responded. “The waiver request should be resubmitted to the Trump administration.”

“Going from the 60 to 90 days is pretty negligible,” said Rep. Clint Moses, R-Menomonie, chair of the Assembly Committee on Health, Aging and Long-Term Care.  

During the last legislative session, the Republican-controlled Senate passed a bipartisan bill in a 32-1 vote that would have extended postpartum coverage to 12 months. The lone opponent was Duey Stroebel, who lost his re-election bid in November. In total, 73 lawmakers cosponsored the bill — over half of the state Legislature. The bill authored by Snyder this session is currently circulating for cosponsors. 

Interest groups from both sides of the aisle came out in support of the previous legislation, including Pro-Life Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and Kids Forward.

“It made sense to me because if I am pro-life and I don’t want people to abort their babies, why would I not do everything I could to support those mothers to have the babies,” former Republican Rep. Donna Rozar, who authored the bill last session, told Wisconsin Watch. 

But despite bipartisan support, the Assembly never scheduled it for a hearing before adjourning for the rest of the session in February last year. 

Rozar said she and other lawmakers couldn’t get Vos on board. “He dug his heel in, there was no doubt about it,” she said.

Moses put the bill on the agenda for a hearing. But in addition to Vos blocking it, the committee was jammed near the end of the session and didn’t have time to schedule it, he said. 

“There’s 132 people in this building. I don’t think we should legislate by one,” Sen. Mary Felzkowski, R-Tomahawk, said of Vos. “It’s up to his caucus to elect a different speaker or change his mind. So his members have to put enough pressure on him to get it done.” 

Without Vos’ approval, Moses said it’s not likely that lawmakers will secure a 12-month extension, but he’s hopeful that an extension of at least six or nine months can be agreed to in this year’s state budget, despite the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ indication that anything less than 12 months would not be approved. Moses is willing to schedule a hearing for the upcoming bill, but if Vos remains opposed, it may not get referred to him, he said. 

“When it comes to the budget, if there’s something that we want that would be attractive to negotiate this out with, I think that’s a possibility,” Moses said. 

A fiscal estimate last session estimated the bill expansion would cost $21.4 million per year, including $8.4 million in state taxpayer funds with the rest coming from federal taxpayers. It would increase monthly Medicaid enrollment by 5,290 members. Felzkowski, who sponsored the Senate version, said it’s an extension for those who are already covered rather than an expansion that puts more people on Medicaid. She also said it’s good for taxpayers. 

“The reason states have done this — blue states, red states, purple states — is it’s a return on investment for the taxpayers and it makes sense to do it,” Felzkowski told Wisconsin Watch. “We see the number of complications that happen in that first year, and those complications, by not being covered, cost money — cost a lot of money.” 

Wisconsin’s 306% Medicaid income eligibility limit for the 60 days of postpartum coverage is one of the highest in the country — something Vos has pointed to. 

“When you make a choice to have a child, which I’m glad that people do, it’s not the taxpayers’ responsibility to pay for the delivery of that child,” Vos said in 2023. “We do it for people who are in poverty. We’ve made the decision to go to 300%, that’s the law. But to now say beyond 60 days, we’re going to give you free coverage, no copayment, no deductible, until a year out, absolutely not.”

A 2021 version of the bill failed to get a floor vote in both the Senate and the Assembly, yet had only one lobbying group registered against it.

That group was Opportunity Solutions Project, the lobbying arm of the Florida-based Foundation for Government Accountability. The conservative advocacy group did not respond to Wisconsin Watch’s requests for comment. FGA has a track record of lobbying against Medicaid expansion and other bills in Wisconsin. 

“I think it’s a little premature to have any discussions about the Medicaid budget right now. We have a brand new administration coming into D.C.,” Rep. Tyler August, R-Walworth, said in a Tuesday press conference with Vos. “I think the Trump administration is actually going to put some common sense into some of these programs federally.”

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Republicans and Democrats agree on postpartum Medicaid expansion — Robin Vos says it’s unlikely 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.

In Wisconsin, undocumented immigrant workers contribute significantly to the workforce, performing labor that often goes unseen. But the exact number has proven difficult to determine. 

From outdated and cautious estimates to a lack of monitoring by state agencies, it is difficult to say for certain how many immigrants without legal status work in each industry. Quantifying the undocumented population through surveys and studies is also a challenging task. The U.S. Census doesn’t ask about or estimate the number of undocumented immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security estimates the U.S. total at 11 million as of 2022.

An estimated 70,000 undocumented immigrants live in Wisconsin, about 47,000 of whom are employed, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.  About two-thirds of those had lived in the U.S. for 10 years or more. But that information is now over five years old.

The top industries that employ undocumented workers in the state are: 

Manufacturing — estimated 11,000 workers. 

Professional, scientific, management, administrative and waste management services — estimated 8,000 workers.

Accommodation and food services, arts, entertainment and recreation — estimated 5,000 workers.

Construction — estimated 5,000 workers. 

Agriculture — estimated 5,000 workers.

A 2023 UW-Madison School for Workers survey found that over 10,000 undocumented workers perform around 70% of the labor on Wisconsin’s dairy farms. “Without them, the whole dairy industry would collapse overnight,” the researchers concluded.

This finding sparked a public debate in the wake of stricter immigration policies over the unseen, yet essential work that immigrants without legal status provide to the state’s major dairy and farming industries. 

“Obtaining accurate counts of undocumented populations is inherently challenging due to their non-legal status and potential reluctance to participate in official surveys,” said Alexandra Guevara, spokesperson for Voces de la Frontera, a Wisconsin-based immigrant rights organization. 

To complicate matters, state agencies like the Department of Administration and the Department of Public Instruction don’t keep records of the number of undocumented immigrants and workers in the state. DPI lacks this data because public schools do not ask about immigration status. 

In 2018, undocumented immigrants in Wisconsin paid an estimated $157 million in federal taxes and $101 million in state and local taxes, totaling nearly $258 million, according to the American Immigration Council. That estimate dropped slightly to a total of $240 million in federal, state and local taxes as of 2022. 

Undocumented workers make up a large percentage of the workforce in child care and domestic housework. They tend to make up a smaller portion of health care employees and are mainly employed in roles like housekeeping or janitorial and food service in both nursing homes and hospitals, according to Guevara. 

National estimates suggest that undocumented workers make up between 30% and 50% of the meatpacking workforce, according to the University of Michigan. Guevara said it is probable that Wisconsin, a major hub for meat and cheese production, follows this trend.

Wisconsin Watch readers have submitted questions to our statehouse team, and we’ll answer them in our series, Ask Wisconsin Watch. Have a question about state government? Ask it here.

How many undocumented people live and work in Wisconsin? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

While 2024 may have stolen the show as a pivotal election year, the excitement doesn’t end in 2025. That’s right, it’s a state budget year!

Major funding decisions for health care, public schools and universities, the environment, roads and more will be made in the 2025-27 biennial budget. Not only that — a politically divided Legislature and governor must reach an agreement on spending, which totaled nearly $100 billion in the last two-year budget.

Wisconsin Watch will break it down here in our new series: Budget Bites.

This series will regularly appear in Forward, our Monday morning newsletter. We are excited to provide updates on what’s happening with the state budget as it makes its way through the Legislature. Our reporters will also cover key budget items like public education, child care and housing, and we will be looking to hear from those most affected by these issues. 

State agencies have already submitted their funding requests, and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has finished hosting budget listening sessions across the state. His executive budget proposal will make its debut on Feb. 18. The Republican-controlled Legislature will then review it and make significant changes before Evers signs a final budget bill into law, typically within a few days of the start of the new fiscal year on July 1.

Wisconsin ended its 2024 fiscal year with a more-than-expected $4.6 billion budget surplus. Republicans want to reduce the surplus by passing income tax cuts before the budget debate begins, while Democrats are urging more funding for things like K-12 education. 

We will be watching the battle over public education funding, which constitutes a third of the state’s general fund budget. Wisconsin held a record number of school referendums this year. Districts, public officials, local taxpayers and public school advocates are speaking out, calling for increases in state aid after approving $4.4 billion in property tax hikes so their local schools can continue to cover operating costs, as well as large projects. 

Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have told Wisconsin Watch that voters aren’t happy about having to increase their own property taxes. But Republican lawmakers have stood their ground in support of private school vouchers and have criticized state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly’s $4 billion ask for public school funding in the upcoming budget. The state Supreme Court will decide whether an Evers veto in the previous budget that guaranteed $325 per pupil annual revenue limit increases for 400 years will stand, which could influence the debate. 

Another topic we’re monitoring is child care. A Wisconsin Department of Children and Families child care survey found last year that almost 60% of providers in Wisconsin have unused classroom capacity due to staff shortages. Providers report that if they were able to operate at full capacity, they could accept up to 33,000 more children. The state is losing hundreds of child care providers every year, according to DCF. 

In 2023, the powerful Joint Finance Committee, which will review and likely rewrite most of Evers’ budget proposal, voted to end funding for the Child Care Counts program — a pandemic-era subsidy program. 

Homelessness is also a growing problem all across Wisconsin, especially in rural areas. It can be largely attributed to rising housing costs following the pandemic and a lack of affordable housing units. Annual homeless counts conducted in January show that the state’s homeless population has increased every year since 2021.

Evers’ previous attempts to fund emergency shelter and housing grants, case management services and workforce housing grants in the state budget have been nixed by Republican lawmakers.

There are likely more battles coming over higher education funding after last year’s restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion hiring. Wisconsin remains an outlier on Medicaid expansion, particularly postpartum coverage. Transportation funding continues to be a challenge as more fuel-efficient vehicles use a system built around the gas tax. Republicans have signaled opposition to the land stewardship program after the Supreme Court limited the finance committee’s power to block purchases. And the state prison system has been plagued by understaffing, inmate deaths, alleged corruption and a problematic juvenile facility.

That’s just a small taste of what’s coming in the budget this year.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Here’s what we’re watching for in this year’s Wisconsin budget debate is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Last winter, Eric Zieroth dressed in as many layers as he could and stayed beneath a down blanket each night. He learned it was the best way to keep warm while living in his car in far northwestern Wisconsin. 

During those cold months, he and his then-20-year-old daughter Christina Hubbell had to wake, start the vehicle and blast the heat a few times a night before shutting it off again. 

For over a year, the pair regularly parked their PT Cruiser — a car older than Hubbell that Zieroth, 47, called “a shoebox on wheels” — in a corner spot at a public boat landing on Long Lake. The lot is less than a mile from the rural city of Shell Lake, with a population of less than 1,400.

Down a dirt road and tucked into the woods, they slept at the secluded launch to stay out of the way in the town where they spent most of their lives. Now, because they are homeless, they have been ostracized for showering, parking and sleeping in public places.

Washburn County has no homeless shelters, and they don’t have family to stay with. Hubbell’s mom and Zieroth divorced in 2022. The following year, when Hubbell was 19, her mom told her to start paying rent or leave. 

Hubbell’s job at a Dollar General in Shell Lake — their only source of income — keeps them from relocating to a shelter in another county. They are on a waitlist for a low-income housing unit. 

Zieroth is awaiting a surgery that will allow him to get back to work. With no way to heal or keep the wound clean, he said he couldn’t get the operation while living in his car. If it weren’t for his daughter, the former mechanic said he might have considered committing a crime and getting booked into jail instead of spending another winter in the vehicle. 

“There’s no way I could do it again,” Zieroth said. “I had to figure out something else this year.”

In rural Wisconsin, homelessness is often hidden behind a veil of individuals and families who are couch surfing and sleeping in their vehicles instead of sleeping on city streets or camping out in parks. Resources are few and far between, shelters are always full, and funding can be a significant challenge at the local, state and federal level.

After falling for years, the state’s estimated homeless population has been rising since 2021. This past year it rose again from 4,861 in 2023 to 5,037. In the “balance” of the state — all 69 counties outside Milwaukee, Racine and Dane — the homeless population increased from 2,938 individuals in 2023 to 3,201 in 2024, according to data Wisconsin Watch obtained from the region’s continuum of care organization, which conducts homeless counts each year.

Despite accounting for over 60% of the state’s homeless population in 2023, these mostly rural counties collectively contain just 23% of the state’s supportive housing units — long-term housing models with on-site supportive services, which experts say is the best way to address chronic homelessness. But providing long-term housing and services on top of shelter is an expensive, labor-intensive task for small, rural providers with limited funding.

According to the Department of Public Instruction’s latest data, 18,455 students experienced homelessness during the 2022-23 school year — a number that has increased each year since 2020. Some 11,000 of these students reside in districts outside of Milwaukee, Madison, Racine and Green Bay.

The annual data collected on homelessness are an undercount, especially in rural areas, said Mary Frances Kenion, vice president of training and technical assistance at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. That means less funding for already disadvantaged smaller communities. 

“Where there’s more concentration of people, that’s always going to drive funding, because we have block grant funding that is directly tied to the census,” Kenion told Wisconsin Watch. 

Despite rural communities having fewer nonprofits than urban ones, shelters and housing assistance programs are leading the way to address the expanse of homelessness in rural Wisconsin. 

“Funding and access to resources is a challenge … but there are some really bright spots in rural communities, because they are doing more with less,” Kenion said. “We’re seeing a ton of innovation and resilience just by virtue of them being positioned to do more with less.” 

But shelter directors and anti-poverty advocates face many hurdles when it comes to funding, resources and support.

Rural shelter providers across the state identified several solutions to the problem: Cutting out county governments as the middleman for state reimbursements, increasing the availability of new rental units, consolidating multiple definitions of homelessness, more consistent and proportional state funding, and assistance with case management are just a few.

Point-in-time counts, federal funding and HUD 

The annual “point-in-time” (PIT) homeless counts are collected by continuum of care organizations across the country on a single night during the last week of January. Wisconsin has four designated organizations with three covering Milwaukee, Dane and Racine counties and one for the other 69 counties. 

The counts are submitted to Congress and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for consideration and funding determinations. They are meant to include those living in temporary shelters, as well as unsheltered people living on the street, but do not include people in other sheltered situations. Those living in cars are often missed. 

“They’re typically either in their car or they’re on somebody’s couch,” said Jenny Fasula, executive director of Wisconsin’s Foundation for Rural Housing. “People on the couches don’t count in your PIT counts because they’re ‘housed.’ People in cars in rural areas — I don’t even know where you’d find them, except maybe a Walmart parking lot.”

Since 2009, HUD — the main federal agency that handles homelessness — has targeted permanent supportive housing programs with long-term, sustainable services like case management for federal funding. The national shift from temporary housing programs reflects a widely adopted “housing first” approach — that the security of a permanent shelter is the first, necessary step before people can address the root causes of their homelessness. 

“Temporary housing programs shifted their gears towards that other type of service so they could continue to operate and get funding to operate,” Wisconsin Policy Forum researcher Donald Cramer told Wisconsin Watch. 

While permanent housing programs effectively lowered Wisconsin’s homeless population in both rural and urban areas before the pandemic, the shift hasn’t been easy for rural shelters that are strapped for cash and resources.

“As a shelter, when you have 50 people, it’s impossible to have the funding to hire case managers that are really involved and able to really assist people,” said Michael Hall, a former Waupaca County shelter worker and director of Impact Wisconsin — a nonprofit providing housing and recovery services in a six-county rural region. 

“We’re small,” said Adam Schnabel, vice president of a homeless shelter in Taylor County, adding that without more staff, the shelter can’t have someone in charge of post-departure case management to make sure people stay in housing.

“We’re trying to find volunteer case managers,” said Kimberly Fitzgerald, interim director of the Rusk County Lighthouse shelter. “People to volunteer their time, to work for free, to do case management. Good luck with that.” 

Restrictions on federal funding and multiple definitions of homelessness are another barrier for rural homeless providers, said Millie Rounsville, CEO of Northwest Wisconsin Community Services Agency. 

The federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act defines homelessness specifically for youth as minor children who “lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.” But HUD defines homelessness in multiple categories: 1) an individual or family who is immediately homeless and without shelter and 2) those at imminent risk of homelessness. Consolidating these definitions is key, according to Rounsville. 

Homeless children and families in the rural region surrounding Superior tend to be doubled up in some kind of housing, Rounsville said. While they often meet the McKinney-Vento definition of homeless, they are considered category two homeless under HUD’s definitions. 

But in order to qualify for HUD-funded Rapid Rehousing programs, individuals must fall under category one.

“The funding needs to be flexible,” Rounsville said. “We can’t assume that every community across the country has the same need.”

To provide permanent supportive housing and receive funding, shelters and nonprofits also have to serve and document chronically homeless populations. According to HUD, that means a member of the household has to have a documented disability. Providers like Rounsville are additionally required to provide third-party verification that someone has been category one homeless for a year or more.

“If you were in a larger city where you have a lot of shelters or street outreach, that third-party verification would be a lot easier than when you’re in a rural community,” Rounsville said.

It’s a housing issue

Rural Wisconsin is lacking affordable, habitable homes.

“When you layer the limited footprint of service providers in a rural community, packed with a housing supply that is already insufficient and continuing to shrink, that creates a perfect storm for rising numbers of people experiencing homelessness,” Kenion said. 

Providers in Rusk County, Taylor County, Bayfield County and Waupaca County said that without low-income options and available rental units, they often can’t get people into permanent housing.

“As fast as units open up, they get filled,” Fitzgerald said. “In Ladysmith specifically, there are next to no rental units. So even if somebody did get approved for the housing program, where are we going to put them?”

Among affordability and shortage issues, rural areas are also home to the state’s aging housing stock. 

“The housing stock is very old,” Fasula said. “So now you have higher energy bills. And the rent may be lower, but your energy bill is twice as much.” 

Her work at the Foundation for Rural Housing provides one-time emergency rental assistance to prevent evictions and homelessness across the state. 

“People stereotype them to think ‘Oh, we have these programs because people don’t know how to manage their money.’ It’s not that,” Fasula said. “These are folks that come in that just have a crisis. … They don’t have anything to fall back on. Any little hiccup is a big impact for them financially.”

The foundation is partially funded by the state’s critical assistance grant program, which is awarded to just one eligible agency in Wisconsin. Fasula said the foundation still relies on many private funding sources.

While working to eventually afford an apartment in Shell Lake, Hubbell is making $13.50 an hour at the Dollar General, but only scheduled to work 20 hours a week. The living wage calculation for one adult in Washburn County is $19.45 an hour working 40 hours a week, according to the MIT living wage calculator.

“Homelessness is a housing issue. It’s a symptom of an economy and policies that aren’t working,” Kenion said. “Yes, housing costs tend to be lower in rural communities, but so do wages.”

State funding 

In the state’s 2023-25 biennial budget, the Republican-controlled Legislature rejected Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ recommendations to spend some $24 million on emergency shelter and housing grants, as well as homeless case management services and rental assistance for unhoused veterans.

The Legislature also nixed $250 million Evers proposed for affordable workforce housing and home rehabilitation grants.

The state funds two main grants for homeless shelters and housing annually. The State Shelter Subsidy Grant (SSSG) receives around $1.6 million per year, and the Housing Assistance Program receives $900,000.

But for small shelters like Taylor House — the only homeless shelter in rural Taylor County — Schnabel says the funding is “pennies.” The facility has a continuous waitlist. 

“We are a lost people up north, here in the rural areas,” Schnabel said. “I feel like there’s so much focus and so many monetary resources provided to Dane and Milwaukee counties.” 

The north central Wisconsin shelter with a 17-person capacity received $10,000 from SSSG this year, Schnabel said. That’s around $588 per person. But four emergency shelters in Milwaukee with a combined capacity of around 392 received $400,000 from the $1.6 million grant total — $1,020 per person.

“It’s not just local individuals we’re serving,” Schnabel said. “We’re serving individuals from Milwaukee County, Dane County, Fox River Valley, Chippewa. They’re coming from all over because those homeless shelters are either at capacity or their waitlist is too long.”

The state’s Recovery Voucher Grant Program awarded $760,000 to grantees in 2024 to provide housing to those experiencing homelessness and struggling with opioid use disorders. Half of these funds went to three providers in Dane, Milwaukee and Waukesha counties. 

Another state resource is the Homeless Case Management Services (HCMS) grant program, which distributes up to 10 $50,000 grants per year to shelters and programs that meet eligibility requirements.

Shelter directors like Fitzgerald said the state’s reliance on grant funding to address homelessness and housing needs isn’t sustainable for small providers. While helpful, these pots of money quickly run out, and many of them don’t cover operating costs or wages. 

“A lot of these funding sources, it’s like a first come first serve basis, so there isn’t money necessarily allocated to cover our expenses,” Fitzgerald said. “When the funding runs out, we’re SOL.” 

The Lighthouse is the only homeless shelter in Rusk County. Many surrounding shelters are also full, and some counties don’t have shelters at all, leaving people with limited options. 

“As fast as we empty out, we fill up. So it’s kind of a revolving door,” Fitzgerald said. “Our first priority is to serve Rusk County residents, but we’re in the business of helping, so I don’t turn people away.” 

Small shelters face county-level hurdles 

Some shelter workers and advocates say in rural Wisconsin, homelessness is addressed only to the extent that their local governments and administrations are willing to acknowledge the issue and get involved.

“A lot of these people go unnoticed, unchecked in the system, and there just aren’t any county services, especially in our community, that are there to help individuals that are struggling,” Hall said. “We, with a lot of duct tape and a shoestring, hold it down.” 

Providers in several rural counties noted that there aren’t any shelters that are owned or operated in any capacity by local governments. In most cases, Washburn County Social Services can only direct homeless residents like Zieroth and Hubbell to the Lakeland Family Resource Center, which provided them with a list of shelters too far out of their reach.

“We don’t have the extra gas or a decent enough vehicle to go too far from Shell Lake,” Zieroth said.

The Ashland Community Shelter is the only shelter in a four-county rural area. The city applied for the federal grant funds that allowed Rounsville’s agency to acquire the shelter, but she noted that if it hadn’t taken that step, there wouldn’t be a shelter in Ashland today. 

“You still need that county government saying, ‘Hey, we have a program, we need funding,’” Cramer said. “If your county is not looking to deal with homelessness, then they’re probably not asking for that funding either.”

Hall and Schnabel said local governments need to be more involved in their work, whether that be providing a county employee to serve as a shelter director, or simply making better use of the few resources they have.

Schnabel added that small shelters often cannot pay their directors a decent wage, resulting in frequent staff turnover. Taylor House has had four directors in the last 18 months, he said. The inconsistency leaves “a bad taste” in the mouth of those reviewing their grant applications.

According to Hall, some counties are much more willing than others to utilize Comprehensive Community Services (CCS) — a state program aimed at addressing substance abuse and mental health needs. The program allows counties to contract employees and case managers at local shelters who provide services such as skills development and peer support. If the notes are done properly, the county can bill those expenses back to the state through BadgerCare. 

But despite those being reimbursable expenses, some county officials either don’t know how or are unwilling to engage in the program, Hall said. 

“The tool is there, it just needs to be utilized,” he said. “Because of their unwillingness to try something, it oftentimes ends up having to tell people ‘no,’ and we’re moving them to another county.”

He added that allowing local shelters that serve those covered under BadgerCare to bill the state directly for these services instead of relying on the county to initiate it “would solve the problem tomorrow.”

Hall also noted that county governments can use their opioid settlement funds to provide housing and shelter to those with eligible needs, yet some have instead spent it on other things. 

Waupaca County, for example, told Wisconsin Watch it has spent nearly $100,000 in opioid settlement funds on awareness campaigns, training, a counselor position and equipment that helps local police quickly identify narcotics in the field.

Grant funding is often allocated to regional “parent” organizations, like a Salvation Army, which then distribute the money to local nonprofits and shelters. But Schnabel said the state must force the hand of counties that “choose not to see homelessness.” 

“By requiring that these funds go through the county to be disbursed to the homeless shelter, it forces the county to have a relationship and have skin in the game with the shelters,” he said. 

Another challenge is that some small communities like Ashland reject homeless shelters, assuming they will bring negative footprints.

“There’s going to be needles, the neighborhood houses are going to be robbed, children are going to be ran over on the highway,” Rounsville said. “There’s all kinds of things that came up when we were doing the change of use for this hotel to become a shelter. It was something that not everybody wanted to see in the community.” 

The small city of Clintonville approved an ordinance last winter enforcing a 60-day limit on local hotel stays in a six-month period, citing drug concerns, disorderly conduct and disturbances. Many homeless individuals in the area are put up in those hotels. 

“We’re trying to figure out, what are we going to do with those 50 people this winter when the police departments come through and say they have to get out,” Hall said. 

Studies estimate that every year, someone experiencing chronic homelessness costs a community $30,000 to $50,000, according to the Interagency Council on Homelessness. Yet for each person who is homeless, permanent supportive housing costs communities $20,000 per year.

“These are our neighbors in any community, and when they are no longer homeless and they are thriving, they reinvest that into the economy, into the community, into the neighborhood,” Kenion said.

While often doing more with less, local nonprofits are still the ones that are built to do this work, Hall said.

“There is no solution. There is no algorithm to get us to an answer,” Schnabel said. “But what we know is that there needs to be a place that they can go to be safe, and have warm, secure housing until they can get back on their feet.”

Shunned by their community

In June, Zieroth and Hubbell pulled their car into a Shell Lake gas station parking lot to sleep, shortly before a police officer was called and arrived to tell them they were trespassing and had to leave. 

In August, the father and daughter stopped at the Shell Lake ATV Campground to use the public showers, when a campground employee entered and demanded that Zieroth get his daughter and leave. The employee called Shell Lake police, who escorted him off the property. 

A resident living next to the boat launch where they stayed eventually took issue with them parking their car at the public lot. In October, Hubbell said the homeowner stormed into the Dollar General while she was working and told her they couldn’t sleep there anymore, threatening to call the police.

And one night after finding a group fishing at the boat launch, the pair decided to drive to another public landing in Burnett County where they parked and slept. Still under their blankets, they woke the next morning to a DNR officer and county sheriff’s deputy approaching, asking about Zieroth’s “drug of choice.” According to Wisconsin Court System records, Zieroth served time in prison for burglary as a 21-year-old, but has never faced drug-related charges.

They were told to leave. 

“They just did not want us in this area. We’re less than a mile from where we grew up, and from where she went to school and graduated,” Zieroth said, pointing to his daughter. “I’ve made my life here … everything points to ‘get out.’”

While still homeless, the pair were fortunate enough to find a temporary place to stay as the weather gets colder — a small room in the unfinished basement of an acquaintance who didn’t want to see them living out of their car. They are joined by their dog Bella, who Zieroth won’t abandon after she woke him the night his camper caught fire in 2022, allowing him to escape and likely saving his life. 

Zieroth and Hubbell have an old bed, a recliner and a bathroom for now. But their most cherished comfort is that the room is heated — something they don’t take for granted after a winter spent in their car. 

With a roof over their heads, Zieroth hopes to finally get the surgery he needs, but he’s unsure of how long they can stay. 

They insist on paying the homeowners $50 a week — all they can afford — for letting them stay in the basement. Zieroth uses his skills as a mechanic to fix things around the property, and Hubbell picks items up for them at the Dollar General whenever she can.

Once healed, he wants to get back to work and acquire a property of his own, but his first priority is his daughter. After getting on her feet, Hubbell hopes to go to cosmetology school in Rice Lake.

“She has her whole life ahead of her and experience has taught me that some real bad beginnings get really good endings, and she deserves a good one,” Zieroth said.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Wisconsin’s rural homelessness crisis and the fight to do ‘more with less’ 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.

The future may not have been written yet, but as it unfolds in 2025, Wisconsin Watch’s statehouse team will be on the lookout for stories that expose societal problems, explore solutions, explain the decisions that affect your daily life and hold the powerful to account.

Here are four storylines we predict we’ll be following in the new year:

1. The Wisconsin Supreme Court will expand abortion rights.

There are two abortion-related cases at the Wisconsin Supreme Court right now. One questions whether or not an 1849 law has been “impliedly repealed” by subsequent abortion laws and whether it even applies to consensual abortions. The other asks the justices to declare that access to abortion is a right protected by the state constitution. I’m guessing they will.

In another recent but unrelated case, Justice Rebecca Dallet suggested the court should broadly interpret the Wisconsin Constitution. “There are several compelling reasons why we should read Article I, Section 1 (of the state constitution) as providing broader protections for individual liberties than the Fourteenth Amendment (of the U.S. constitution),” she wrote. Article I, Section 1 of the state constitution states, in part, that all “people are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

That’s the exact provision Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin relies on in arguing abortion access is protected by the constitution. Seems noteworthy.

— Jack Kelly

2. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the Republican-controlled Legislature will again strike a deal to increase funding for public education and private voucher schools, similar to the compromise they made in 2023. 

Wisconsin held a record number of public school referendums this year. School districts, public officials, local taxpayers and public education advocates are speaking out, calling for increases in state aid after approving $4.4 billion in property tax hikes so their local schools can continue to cover operating costs, as well as large projects. After speaking with both Republican and Democratic lawmakers about this issue during the 2024 election cycle, many of them agreed that voters aren’t happy when they have to increase their own property taxes. Assuming Republicans are feeling the pressure to increase funding for public schools, K-12 spending could be on track to become one of the most significant budget items in 2025. 

But Republican lawmakers have also stood their ground in support of school choice and have criticized state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly’s $4 billion ask for public school funding in the upcoming budget. If Republicans do agree to per-pupil funding increases, it likely won’t match the amount Evers asks for. In turn, Republicans will likely demand an increase for the voucher system as well.

— Hallie Claflin

3. The state Supreme Court election will set another spending record.

The last time Donald Trump won the presidency, Democrats were so shell-shocked they didn’t field a candidate to challenge conservative Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler’s re-election bid. Then in January 2018 Democrat Patty Schachtner won a special state Senate election in rural northwestern Wisconsin, signaling a Democratic wave was building. Rebecca Dallet’s Supreme Court win in April of that year affirmed the wave. It also heralded a leftward swing of the state Supreme Court culminating with Janet Protasiewicz’s win in April 2023, an election that shattered national spending records for a state Supreme Court election.

Whether Dane County Judge Susan Crawford can continue the liberal winning streak or former Attorney General Brad Schimel can channel Trump’s winning vibes is far from certain. But April’s high court contest is a must-win for Republicans, so expect the $51 million record from 2023 to fall. A Crawford win would guarantee liberal control through 2028. A Schimel win would set up another pivotal election in 2026.

— Matthew DeFour

4. Ben Wikler will be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Democrats have been doing a lot of soul searching since their setbacks in November. While they haven’t reached a consensus on how to move their party forward — and they likely won’t anytime soon — they will need an effective communicator as their leader while they regroup. Wikler, who is a powerhouse fundraiser, is about as media-savvy as it comes. Whether it’s catering to a national audience on cable news, firing up the base on liberal podcasts like “Pod Save America” or speaking about local issues with local reporters like me, Wikler always stays on message. In a time when Democrats need to convince voters that they are looking out for their best interests, staying on message would be a valuable quality in a leader. That, combined with a track record of building strong party infrastructure at the state level and, most importantly, winning, makes him a standout among the declared candidates. We’ll find out his fate Feb. 1.

— Jack Kelly

Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.

State budget, Supreme Court race top next year’s political calendar 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.

Every year Wisconsin Watch produces some of the best investigative journalism in Wisconsin, and this year was no exception. We exposed a judge abusing his power to benefit a coworker, revealed how AI is helping the state catch illegal manure spreading, catalogued every book ban request in all 421 school districts and found state prisons hiring doctors with disciplinary histories.

But what made this year particularly special was the introduction of the Forward newsletter. Each week the Wisconsin Watch state team produces shorter stories about what we expect to be the big news and trends in the days, weeks and months ahead. It’s something our local media partners asked for and our state team reporters delivered.

As the year winds down, we gave each state team reporter the assignment of picking a favorite story written by another member of the team (Secret Santa style!). Here were their picks:

Conservative talk radio continues to be a powerful political tool in Wisconsin

To some, radio is a source of entertainment and information from a bygone era. They’re mistaken. Hallie Claflin’s deeply reported, authoritative story illustrates the immense and continuing influence of talk radio — especially conservative talk radio — in Wisconsin politics. The rise of former Gov. Scott Walker, the toppling of a Democratic mayor in Wausau and the deaths of certain bills in the Legislature can all be tied, at least in part, to advocacy or opposition from conservative talk radio hosts. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the state’s most powerful Republican, makes regular appearances on broadcasts and described talk radio as being “as powerful as it’s ever been.” This story is worth your time as you look ahead to 2025.

— Jack Kelly

Why we investigated Wisconsin Pastor Matthew Trewhella

Phoebe Petrovic’s profile of militant, anti-abortion Pastor Matthew Trewhella, her first investigation as Wisconsin’s first ProPublica local reporting network fellow, was an engaging read. But I especially liked the companion piece she wrote. It’s a reader service to do this kind of story when we do a large takeout on a person or subject unfamiliar to most readers. It also might drive readers to the main story when they learn more about why we did it. It puts the readers behind the scenes a bit and has the potential to make readers feel more connected to Wisconsin Watch.

— Tom Kertscher

Here are some claims you might hear during tonight’s presidential debate — and the facts

Tom Kertscher does an amazing job with all of his fact briefs, but my favorite has to be a compilation that fact-checked presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump right before their September debate. Over the past few races, presidential campaigns have been full of misinformation. Debates are a vital time to show the reality of candidates and their beliefs. Tom’s story made sure people could accurately judge the claims both candidates were making. I learned about many new and important topics across party lines like Trump’s for-profit college, Harris’ claim about tracking miscarriages and accurate deportation statistics.

— Khushboo Rathore

DataWatch: Wisconsin incarcerates more people than its prisons were designed to hold

Khushboo Rathore’s DataWatch report detailing that the state’s prison population was at nearly 130% capacity stood out as one of my favorite pieces this year. Not only did this short story shed light on severe deficiencies in Wisconsin’s prison system, it also presented the findings in a digestible format that helped readers understand overcrowding in prisons through striking data. It’s one thing to report that Wisconsin prisons are overwhelmed, and it’s another to have the numbers that show it. This piece has the power to reshape future conversations about statewide prison reform, which is what our work here at Wisconsin Watch is all about! 

— Hallie Claflin

Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear high-profile abortion rights case, draft order shows

Jack Kelly has some of the best sourcing this newsroom has ever seen. He’s such an affable people-person, and it enables him to get coffee with anyone and everyone and build legitimate relationships that result in wild scoops, like this one. It’s a testament to his brilliance as a reporter.

— Phoebe Petrovic

Forward: Our picks for favorite politics stories of the year 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.

Wisconsin politics were shaken up this year with the signing of new legislative maps that ended over a decade of extreme and effective Republican gerrymandering.

It was the first time in Wisconsin history a Legislature and a governor of different parties agreed on legislative redistricting, the Legislative Reference Bureau told Wisconsin Watch.

In a good Republican year across the country, Wisconsin Democrats flipped 14 seats in the Legislature — largely because of those new maps. It wasn’t enough to win a majority in the Assembly or the Senate, but the resulting 54-45 and 18-15 splits better reflect Wisconsin’s swing-state status.

Wisconsin’s congressional maps were not redrawn. Republicans kept six of the state’s eight congressional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The state’s current congressional maps were drawn by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and approved by the then-conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2022. The last time a governor of one party and a Legislature of another agreed on congressional maps was in 1991.

Evers’ maps were slightly more favorable to Democrats than the previous decade’s maps, but they didn’t change that much because the court established a “least change” rule when deciding which maps it would approve. That meant they would largely conform to the Republican maps that had been in place since 2011.

In March, the now-liberal high court denied a request to reconsider the state’s congressional maps before this year’s elections without stating a reason. Evers had asked for changes to the congressional maps soon after he signed the new legislative maps into law in February. Those maps were approved by the GOP-controlled Legislature.

Elias Law Group filed a motion in January asking the court to revise the congressional boundaries ahead of the 2024 election. The Democratic law firm argued that new maps were justified after the court abandoned the “least change” approach when deciding on the legislative map challenge last year. In that case, the state Supreme Court said it would no longer favor maps that present minimal changes to existing boundaries.

Democrats argued that Evers’ congressional boundaries drawn in 2022 were decided under the “least change” restrictions later thrown out by the court in the legislative redistricting case.

Republicans pushed back, arguing that newly elected liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz prejudged the case during her 2023 campaign. They requested she recuse herself from the case. But Protasiewicz said she decided not to vote on the motion to reconsider the congressional maps because she wasn’t on the court when the underlying case was decided.

Republican Party of Wisconsin chair Brian Schimming in a statement called the court’s decision “the demise of Governor Evers’ latest attempt to throw out his own hand-drawn congressional maps.”

Republicans have retained control of six of Wisconsin’s eight House seats, with Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan and Gwen Moore safely controlling the two districts that cover Madison and Milwaukee. In comparison, Democrats held five of the eight seats in 2010 — the year before Republicans redrew the maps.

The 1st and 3rd districts are currently the only competitive congressional districts in Wisconsin, represented by Republican Reps. Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden respectively. Steil won his race this month with 54% of the vote, and Van Orden won with 51.4% of the vote.

Conservative Chief Justice Annette Ziegler and Justice Rebecca Bradley in their concurrence wrote the new majority’s “reckless abandonment of settled legal precedent” in the legislative redistricting case “incentivizes litigants to bring politically divisive cases to this court regardless of their legal merit.”

Representatives of Elias Law Group did not respond to Wisconsin Watch when asked if they anticipate another legal challenge to the congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

“I remain very interested between now and 2030 in trying to find a way to get the court to … tell us whether partisan gerrymandering violates the Wisconsin Constitution. I believe it does,” Jeff Mandell, founder of the liberal legal group Law Forward, told Wisconsin Watch. “I believe the court will say it does when we present the right case.”

But Mandell said nothing has been drafted, and his group won’t bring a case to the Supreme Court unless it has “got the goods.”

Wisconsin Watch readers have submitted questions to our statehouse team, and we’ll answer them in our series, Ask Wisconsin Watch. Have a question about state government? Ask it here.

Why were state legislative districts redrawn for 2024, but congressional districts remain unchanged? 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.

On Nov. 5, Wisconsin voters approved nearly 78% of the 138 school district referendums across the state.

That’s higher than the 60% passage rate this past spring, but the percentage of K-12 referendums approved statewide has been declining since 2018, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

The 70% approval rate of all school referendums this year was a 10 percentage-point decrease from 2022 and was the lowest passage rate in a midterm or presidential election year in the last decade.

But more and more districts are going to referendum as state aid has fallen far behind inflation over the last 15 years. A total of 241 questions were posed in 2024, the most ever held in a single year, according to the Policy Forum.

Almost half of Wisconsin’s 421 school districts went to referendum this year, asking for a record total of nearly $6 billion from taxpayers — up from a previous record of $3.3 billion in 2022. Voters ultimately approved $4.4 billion in additional taxes.

School districts are increasingly holding operational referendums, asking residents to take on a recurring tax hike just to cover everyday costs like utilities, routine maintenance and staff salaries. Capital referendums are one-time asks for big projects like a new school.

This year, 66% of operational referendums passed statewide, while 76% of capital referendums passed. There were 148 operating referendums held, the most on record, according to the Policy Forum.

The reliance on school referendums comes amid a heavy debate over state-imposed revenue limits and funding for public education.

Revenue limits were created in the early 1990s to keep in check school property tax increases. In 2009, the state Legislature decoupled per-pupil revenue limits from inflation, and districts have had to manage tighter budgets ever since, especially as inflation in recent years has exceeded revenue limit increases.

Wisconsin’s per-pupil K-12 spending increased at a lower rate than every other state in the nation besides Indiana and Idaho between 2002 and 2020, according to the Policy Forum.

School districts across the state are also grappling with declining enrollment, mainly caused by a drop in birth rates.

“Schools are funded based on the number of students we have, so as we have fewer students, our budget shrinks,” Kenosha Unified School District Superintendent Jeffrey Weiss told Wisconsin Watch.

When costs exceed the per-pupil revenue available to the district, state law allows them to go to referendum to ask their voters to authorize their district to exceed their revenue caps at the expense of property taxpayers.

State revenue limits have fallen more than $2,300 behind inflation per student behind inflation  even in smaller school districts like Hudson, generating millions in lost revenue.

The 2023-25 state budget included a yearly increase of $325 per student to the state-imposed revenue limits. But that increase still lags behind inflation, Wauwatosa School District Superintendent Demond Means told Wisconsin Watch. 

“Are they providing more money to schools? Yes, but they’re still behind. They’ve dug a hole for themselves,” Means said. “They have to come to grips with the fact that they have created an obstacle and a gap that they have to fill.” 

Schools are still reeling from a freeze in revenue caps in the 2021-2023 budget, Means said, in which the Legislature provided zero increases to public school funding immediately following the pandemic. Wisconsin ended its 2024 fiscal year with a $4.6 billion budget surplus.

Republican lawmakers tout the $1 billion they added to the budget for public schools last year, emphasizing that education is the largest portion of the state budget. The increase was part of a deal struck between the GOP-controlled Legislature and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers to simultaneously increase funding for private school vouchers. 

Democrats argue the state has fallen so far behind, $1 billion isn’t nearly enough. 

“Those are just red herrings,” state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly told Wisconsin Watch. “They’re trying to distract because public education has always been one of the most expensive components of our state budget. It just is. It’s a labor-intensive operation, and labor costs money.”

Underly recently called for a $4 billion increase in public school funding in the Department of Public Instruction’s state budget request. It includes a proposal to tie revenue limits to inflation again.

“The fact that we’ve gone to referendum now three different times in the last six years is a sign that state funding is really becoming a challenge,” Means said. “A community like Wauwatosa does not take going to a referendum lightly.”

The district just passed operational and capital referendums totaling $124.4 million. That translates to a $630 annual tax increase on a $300,000 home, according to district calculations.

While passage rates are typically higher in a presidential or midterm election year due to voter turnout, some referendums still failed. School districts like Hudson, serving many rural, conservative townships, are now faced with a choice: cut programs and staff or push to referendum again in April. Its $5 million operational referendum was voted down on Nov. 5.

The referendum would have increased property taxes annually by $5 on a $500,000 home, according to district calculations. 

“These are recurring expenses. This is literally to make ends meet,” Hudson School District Superintendent Nick Ouellette told Wisconsin Watch.

State lawmakers like Rep. Shannon Zimmerman, a Republican who represents the city of Hudson, have suggested that schools need to close and consolidate in light of declining enrollment. Ouellette said it’s not that simple. 

The district is receiving less per-pupil funding from the state due to a steady drop in students. But enrollment is not declining at a fast enough rate to immediately close and consolidate schools and classrooms, Ouellette said. 

“You lose the revenue, but you don’t lose the expense,” Ouellette said. “You have to allow things to drop enough before you can cut.”

Ouellette said blame is often directed at the school districts with claims that they are mismanaging their budgets or not “living within their means.” 

“State lawmakers are well aware that if they continue to not fund schools, it will force local school districts to ask their property tax payers to pay more,” Ouellette said. “So they understand they are raising taxes.”

In Hudson, 54% of the school district’s budget is paid by local taxes, 39% is covered by state aid and 3% comes from federal aid, according to the Policy Forum. A decade ago more than half of the district’s operating revenue came from state aid.

“They’re placing school systems in a very precarious position,” Means said. “Local communities are, in essence, bailing out the Legislature, and that has to stop.”

Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.

Record-high number of school referendums held this year, but approval rates are declining 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.