Early voting has started, and Election Day will be here before you know it.
The Northeast Wisconsin News Lab (NEW News Lab) reported and published 10 issues-focused stories since early September.
Each member newsroom – Appleton Post-Crescent, Green Bay Press-Gazette, Green Bay Press Times, Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Watch – picked a topic readers said they cared a lot about but felt underinformed on. Then, we ran with them.
Several candidates did not reply to the NEW News Lab’s election questionnaires, but I found debate coverage or questionnaires through other news outlets:
Answers from incumbent Rep. Glenn Grothman and independent Elizabeth Fitzgibbon are included in this Q&A for the 6th Congressional District from the Oshkosh Northwestern.
Mark Becker, an independent who is running against Republican Nic Cravillion in state Senate District 1, replied to the Peninsula Pulse’s candidate Q&A, as did Cravillion.
Senate District 19 incumbent Rachael Cabral-Guevara replied to a Q&A from the Oshkosh Northwestern, as did her opponent Emily Tseffos.
Coverage from the Green Bay Press-Gazette of the 2nd Assembly District debate between incumbent Shae Sortwell and challenger Alicia Saunders.
Incumbent Rep. Elijah Behnke of the 6th Assembly District answered questions from the Shawano Leader, as did challenger Shirley Hinze.
Tim Paterson, who is challenging incumbent Rep. Lori Palmeri in the 54th Assembly District, replied to the Oshkosh Northwestern’s candidate Q&A, as did Palmeri.
Please note that we sent the questionnaire to all three candidates running for Assembly District 5 and none responded.
Marinette resident Andi Rich occasionally shows her anger over how elected officials don’t always seem to grasp the significance of PFAS-contaminated groundwater.
For years, Rich has kept up with the latest PFAS research and advocated for clean water in northeast Wisconsin.
“It is a complicated issue, but it’s frustrating that the people who were put in charge to figure it out … are failing to even understand the issue well enough to know how to do anything about it,” said Rich, a former candidate for the state Assembly.
Marinette clean water advocate Andi Rich. (Courtesy of Andi Rich)
Perfluoroalkyl- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or so-called “forever chemicals,” have been linked to health issues, such as certain types of cancer, liver damage, thyroid issues and developmental effects or delays in children. The chemicals are used in a variety of manufactured goods, such as firefighting foam, nonstick coatings, textiles, carpeting and personal care products.
In Marinette County, PFAS thought to stem from Johnson Controls’ and its subsidiary Tyco Fire Products’ Marinette Fire Training Facility have contaminated groundwater used for drinking water.
This election season, candidates in state and national races on both sides of the political aisle are confronting voters’ growing concerns about the quality of their drinking water – in part because people like Rich have kept the heat on.
Widespread contamination
Throughout Wisconsin, PFAS contaminations have caught the attention of elected officials who say clean, safe drinking water is a critically important issue. A Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources study found 71% of 450 shallow, private potable-water wells sampled in 2022 contained at least one detectable PFAS. However, the authors note that “low percentages of samples” surpassed state (1% of samples) or federal (4% of samples) health limits for PFAS.
All of the state candidates who responded to the Northeast Wisconsin News Lab’s general election questionnaire in September said PFAS is a serious issue in Wisconsin.
Bipartisan support for PFAS-free drinking water motivated state Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Gillett, to rewrite PFAS legislation in 2024 and 2025 to garner Democrats’ support. Assembly Rep. Jeff Mursau, R-Crivitz, co-authored the 2025 bill.
However, observers say it’s just the beginning of what’s needed.
The area highlighted in purple shows the geographic area where PFAS has been detected in groundwater in Marinette County. (Courtesy of the Wisconsin DNR)
Rich and other local clean water activists continue to push for state groundwater limits for PFAS and ways to prevent contamination, such as banning products containing the substances.
Marinette County’s contaminated area has expanded as biosolids containing PFAS were spread on lands, with the forever chemicals seeping into groundwater, Rich said. The contamination migrated with the groundwater’s flow into new areas, including into waterways that feed into the bay of Green Bay.
The DNR verified that the contaminated area has expanded, and agency experts discussed the size of the Expanded Site Investigation Area in Marinette County during a July listening session.
“The groundwater impacted by PFAS is extensive in this area and actions available to clean up PFAS will take a long time to achieve results,” said Alyssa Sellwood, DNR project manager for remediation and redevelopment.
While progress has occurred, including construction of new deep wells on private properties in a limited area, complaints about the new wells also are flowing as residents say water quality is an issue. The new wells are over 500 feet deep, Sellwood said.
“The water from that depth in this area can be very hard and contain naturally occurring contaminants like radium and strontium, which require treatment to lower the concentrations to levels that are safe to drink,” she said.
Johnson Controls Inc.’s Stanton Street facility in Marinette is located on the Menominee River near the bay of Green Bay. (Ann Meyer for the NEW News Lab)
Piping in Lake Michigan water
The threat of PFAS making its way into other communities in northeast Wisconsin has encouraged some to connect to larger water systems. Officials in the city of Green Bay and Central Brown County Water Authority are selling their treated water, pulled from Lake Michigan, to nearby communities that have been using deep wells.
Making the move to a new system is costly, as residents of Pulaski learned. The village of Pulaski Board agreed to purchase its drinking water from the city of Green Bay, after years of relying on deep wells that produced water heavy in iron and other minerals, said Board Chair Keith Chambers. Water rates in the village could rise by as much as 230%, according to the village’s website.
In need of more water capacity, the board considered constructing two new deep wells and adding treatment facilities to two other wells to filter PFAS and other contaminants. Doing so would have been expensive and without a guarantee of high-quality water, Chambers said. Sediment from the minerals turned the water tan, and people complained about it, he said.
“We did not have any PFAS, but that can change in a heartbeat. Some could start leaching in. The DNR might change their threshold limits, or the EPA. You could have perfectly good water one day and the next day, they’re telling you it’s bad,” Chambers said.
The Wisconsin Natural Resources Board is expected to revisit groundwater standards for PFAS this year. The proposed limits for groundwater are similar to those in Illinois and lower than Michigan’s. (Courtesy of the Wisconsin DNR)
The board opted to purchase water from the city of Green Bay, pulled out of Lake Michigan near Kewaunee and piped to Pulaski. The major construction project took longer than expected.
“We had two buildings we had to build and 6.5 miles of 20-inch pipe that we put in the ground,” Chambers said. “Right after COVID, prices were going through the roof; supplies weren’t available.”
The result is a substantial water rate increase. While the quarterly bill for 10,000 gallons was about $151, it is expected to rise to about $351, Chambers said. Ratepayers are footing most of the project’s cost, he said.
“Now there are a lot of people who are angry that we didn’t put it to a referendum,” he said. “I’m a big man, so it’s hard to tar and feather me, but if they could, they would.”
The estimated cost of constructing a new deep well was $20 million, he said, while the Green Bay water project ended up just north of $16 million. Grants from the DNR and city of Green Bay helped offset some of the cost.
In Wisconsin, the Natural Resources Board passed PFAS limits for community drinking water at the same level as the federal limits passed in April 2024. The board is expected to take up groundwater standards for PFAS in the near future, with a proposal to impose the same limits used for community drinking water.
What candidates say
Several candidates who responded to the NEW News Lab’s general election survey suggested phasing out use of the substances where feasible. Furthermore, they said funding is only one aspect of the issue that affects many Wisconsin communities.
“We need continued testing, help for communities facing contamination they didn’t cause and stronger prevention. I support holding responsible companies accountable for remediation costs while using state and federal resources when a responsible party can’t be identified,” said Emily Tseffos, a Democrat running to represent state Senate District 19.
Rep. Joel Kitchens, a Republican incumbent running for reelection in Assembly District 1, said the federal government should set PFAS limits for emerging PFAS varieties.
“There will undoubtedly be more contaminants that are currently unknown to us that will emerge, and I hope that the federal government will take a stronger role in addressing them. We are not adequately equipped at the state level to determine safe levels,” he said.
To fully address the problem will take more than the PFAS trust fund, Rich said. She’s still waiting for Wisconsin to set PFAS limits for groundwater.
“Everybody wants to point fingers and say somebody else should do it,” she said. “Maybe it’s time for our local representatives to actually try to do something about it.”
The Door County Jail is operating under emergency staffing rules, effective Oct. 8, with 16 employees currently working in the jail when 22 are needed to cover shifts safely and effectively, Sheriff Tammy Sternard said.
Emergency staffing procedures will continue until enough staff are hired and trained to run the jail effectively, she said.
The jail staffing shortage has been an ongoing issue before reaching the most recent point, and it contributed to heavy overtime costs and declining morale among jail staff, according to the Door County Deputy Sheriff’s Association. The association cited those problems, among other concerns unrelated to the jail, in its June vote of no confidence in Sternard.
A vote of no confidence is a significant step for a union association, according to experts in labor relations. Such votes are often a last resort when efforts to address workplace concerns have failed, said Jim Palmer, president of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, which represents more than 300 law enforcement unions statewide.
Sternard disputed the association’s depiction of her leadership and said she and county administration have been trying to recruit more staff and reduce overtime and workload pressure in the jail.
The association’s resolution cited ongoing staffing shortages, a two-male minimum staffing policy, excessive overtime, and a general lack of support as conditions contributing to a general loss of trust in Sternard as sheriff.
How serious is the jail problem?
While 22 employees is the minimum number of filled positions needed for safe and effective jail operations, 24 employees in the jail are optimal for reducing overtime and workloads, Sternard stated in staffing reports from 2023 to 2025.
The county has authorized 26 positions in the jail, including a jail lieutenant, three sergeants, 19 full-time deputies, two court security deputies and one administrative assistant.
With the jail currently under emergency staffing rules, the sheriff is allowed to go outside the bargaining unit contract to make sure the jail is staffed adequately. This means she does not have to abide by specific rules in the contract regarding how overtime is assigned and other staffing procedures.
During the week of Oct. 8, Sternard met with union and jail division representatives to discuss actions related to the emergency staffing situation, she said.
The temporary plan is to allow non-security deputies to work overtime shifts in the jail under specific conditions and operational needs during the declared emergency schedule, she said.
Chief Deputy Kyle Veeser, Sternard’s current second-in-command in the Sheriff’s Office, was the jail lieutenant from 2019 until previous Chief Deputy Pat McCarty retired in 2025. Veeser has worked for the Sheriff’s Office for about 20 years. The jail has not been fully staffed since 2019, but this is the worst shape it has been in, Veeser said.
When there are staff or shift vacancies, existing jail deputies are given overtime. The highest overtime spending for all state employees is in corrections – 67% of all the overtime in the state was spent on the Department of Corrections in 2024.
County jails collect data separately from the state system, and Door County shows high numbers of overtime hours and spending over the last few years.
In Door County, from January 2023 to Sept. 30, 2026, there were 14,937.75 hours of jail staff overtime, totaling $737,192.35 in costs.
The Door County Jail requires a minimum of four deputies working at all times, and the jail uses an 8-hour overlapping shift schedule, according to sheriff staffing reports. Due to current staffing levels, any time one individual is off for any reason, it creates overtime.
Corrections jobs are hard to fill and to keep filled. Wisconsin state corrections facilities had an 11% turnover rate in 2024, according to Safe Inside, a national project focused on corrections research.
Twenty-nine security deputies either retired or resigned from the Door County Jail between January 2023 and Sept. 30, 2026, according to staffing reports. Of the 29, five retired. Of those who resigned, 12 cited overtime hours as the reason, and 13 cited working shift hours/time away from family. Resigning security deputies were allowed to choose more than one reason for leaving in exit surveys, according to the report.
Three of the resigning deputies cited a “negative work environment” as one of their reported reasons for leaving.
Not only have overtime needs increased, but changes in the jail environment have increased the workload, Sternard wrote in her 2025 report. Inmate mental health issues and alcohol and/or drug withdrawals are to blame, she said, as both scenarios require more one-on-one staff attention, leaving remaining staff to deal with a larger number of inmates than they should be.
The number of incarcerated people in Door County with mental health and/or substance use disorders has increased in the last decade, even as the number of incarcerated people overall has not significantly changed.
In consultant interviews with jail deputies in 2019, 100% said they frequently interact with people with mental health concerns and with substance abuse concerns.
By comparison, 85% of patrol deputies told consultants they frequently interact with people with mental health concerns, and 82% said the same for people with substance abuse concerns.
Another factor that contributes to high overtime and low morale, according to the vote of no-confidence resolution, is a two-male minimum policy in place at the Door County Jail. Male officers are required on every shift, regardless of overall staffing numbers, and vacancies or absences can lead to overtime just to reach the minimum.
Wisconsin statute requires at least one person on duty of the same sex as incarcerated people who is responsible for the “custody, cleanliness, food and care” of inmates.
Door County has enforced a stricter local policy that there must be two male officers on duty at any given time, a measure to ensure better safety for jail employees and inmates, according to Sternard. Male inmates almost always substantially outnumber female inmates, she added.
What has been tried, and what has not
The county has tried to solve its staffing shortage and excessive overtime with various approaches, according to County Corporation Counsel Sean Donohue. Some of them have been accepted by the association, while others have not.
According to staffing reports, Sternard and county administration have made attempts to reduce the overtime burden and workload, including by adding one more authorized full-time deputy position last year and eliminating part-time positions as they became more difficult to fill.
Most recently, county leadership and Sternard implemented a rotating overtime system so it was not all falling on the deputies with less seniority, Donohue said.
More senior deputies had the ability to refuse overtime, he said, and it kept falling on the more junior members of the jail staff.
“They were receiving so much overtime, they were burning out,” according to Donohue.
Recommendations to move jail staff to a 12-hour shift schedule have been made several times over the years, according to staffing reports. A $40,000 staffing and operations analysis by McGrath Consulting Group was conducted in 2020. The study also recommended the 12-hour shift schedule.
“It (would have) allowed for better staffing and work-life balance,” Donohue said. “It was not a big cost savings to the county, rather it was an expense. But the union did not want it.”
With a 12-hour schedule, called a Pitman Schedule, employees work two or three days and then have two or three days off. The schedule proposed for Door County would allow employees to have an average of 15 days off each month, versus eight days in a typical schedule. Currently, most Sheriff’s Office employees work a regular eight-hour shift schedule with six days on and three days off.
A 12-hour schedule has become the norm in many jails, Veeser said.
The union has consistently rejected a 12-hour shift schedule, including during the most recent collective bargaining process. Union representatives did not respond to requests for comment on this issue.
The process for the 2025-27 contract between union members and the county went into mediation, conducted by James Daley, then-chairman of the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission. Each side had issues they wanted incorporated into the collective bargaining agreement that the other objected to, Donohue said.
One of those issues was the 12-hour shift schedule, but it did not trigger the back-and-forth negotiations leading to mediation, he added, and the major issue was wages.
Lack of support?
Part of the union’s criticism of Sternard was an allegation that her response was dismissive of staff concerns about excessive overtime and declining morale. The resolution stated Sternard had responded to concerns raised in meetings by saying that morale was “their problem.”
Sternard said she doesn’t recall ever saying it’s “their problem,” and conversations she has about morale are more complex than a single comment.
“We all get to choose what kind of attitude we want, and if we’re going to get stuck in other people’s drama,” she said during an Oct. 6 interview. “If coming here is bad everyday, then maybe it’s not for you, and that is part of a bigger discussion.”
“I believe morale is a shared responsibility,” she wrote in a follow-up email to Knock. “Each of us has to take responsibility for our own morale and attitude, as well as contribute to the morale of our team.”
Sternard said she checks in with division leaders every week during meetings to ask about morale and concerns. If there are situations affecting morale, Sternard said she addresses them and works with her staff to find solutions.
A last resort
Although the Wisconsin Professional Police Association does not work directly with the Door County Sheriff Deputies’ Association, Palmer said votes of no-confidence come up frequently with unions.
The organization has only actually endorsed a no-confidence effort on two occasions, Palmer said, because such a vote rarely achieves its goal — changing a leader’s conduct — unless it’s part of a broader strategy.
A vote of no-confidence is often a tool of last resort for a union, when other attempts to raise issues have not been successful, he said.
Votes of no-confidence are used to express a collective view that individual officers might not feel comfortable expressing, Palmer added.
“Retaliation is one of the reasons an organization like ours exists,” he said.
Don Taylor is a department chair and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers and said there is a difference between public and private sector labor unions.
“Police officers work in a very different environment and context than factory workers, nurses or teachers,” he said. “When faced with a group of workers who’s unhappy with a member of management, there are things that factory workers may do that are very different from what police may do. Police aren’t going to walk off the job or have a picket line.”
Local government employees are prohibited from striking by Wisconsin state law.
The Door County Justice Center sign by the roadway, as seen on Oct. 13, 2026. (Heidi Hodges / Door County Knock)
All regular full-time and part-time employees within the Sheriff’s Office are represented by the union, according to collective bargaining agreements. The sheriff, chief deputy, captains, lieutenants, confidential clerical, executive, managerial and supervisor employees, and general municipal employees do not receive union representation.
That does not mean every member participates regularly in union activities or took part in the vote of no-confidence. Sheriff candidate Curt Vandertie has said he has not been active in the association for several years.
Additionally there are no hard and fast rules governing how a union may take such a vote, according to Taylor and Palmer.
Knock reached out to the Deputies Association for information about how many members participated in the vote. The association’s legal counsel, Tom Sucevic, replied that the association is “not going to be speaking on the no confidence vote beyond what was published.”
Responding to speculation that vote timing was intended to influence the sheriff race, Taylor said using a vote of no-confidence that way makes sense to him and the focus should still be the union’s concerns.
“To dismiss it as electorally motivated leaves unanswered the question, ‘why?’” he said.
“Maybe they’re just so mad about the workplace relationship that they’re not even thinking about the election,” Taylor said. “But I would be very surprised if it’s not at least a significant factor because that’s what public sector employees do. It’s an incredibly obvious route of address for public sector workers.”
One way to ensure a vote of no-confidence is successful, Palmer said, is to document prior efforts to change leadership conduct or the work environment.
“Its not uncommon for a deputy to express a view to the chief or sheriff in passing, in the hallway,” Palmer said. “We try to remind groups, just like you have to build a record with your police work, you have to memorialize efforts to improve your work environment so you can point to it.”
According to the results of Knock’s open records request to the Sheriff’s Office, there are no formal complaints or documentation of the issues cited by the union in its no-confidence resolution.
Since the resolution was publicized, Sternard said, she and county administration have reached out to union leadership and offered communication and mediation, and the union rejected the overture. Association representatives did not respond to requests for comment on this issue.
“We responded to try to work on things, and now they want to put it to rest,” she said.
Sternard also said her immediate priority and responsibility is to staff the jail.
“I’m going to do what I can right now from within. I’ll do what I can to help,” she said, referring to those efforts. “I remain hopeful for anyone who sits in this chair after November 3rd.”
A version of this story was originally published by Door County Knock, an independent, nonprofit news organization covering Door County, Wisconsin. Subscribe to its newsletters here.
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The New Friends program at the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute has paired people with early-stage Alzheimer’s and dementia with UW-Madison students.
The students will go into careers as nurses, doctors, therapists or social workers.
Mentors, students and program leaders say the program is mutually beneficial: The semester-long program gives students firsthand experience being around someone who lives with mild cognitive issues, and the mentors get social connection during what can be a lonely time.
New Friends also helps dispel myths about people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and dementia, many of whom are able to live independently, hold jobs, socialize with friends and raise kids or grandkids.
The first sign seemed harmless.
Bill Ducett drove his carload of friends in the opposite direction of the Chicago conference where they were headed. His wife Diana — a nurse — watched out the car window, concerned, as they passed unfamiliar streets. When she corrected Bill, embarrassment washed over him as he quickly turned the car around.
It was a small slipup, unless you know Bill: a 78-year-old with a razor-sharp internal compass and an Illinois native who knows the city like the back of his hand.
Diana convinced Bill to go to the doctor. After five hours of testing, he emerged with a diagnosis: mild cognitive impairment, and a prescription: car GPS.
Now, for three years, Bill has met with medical students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to talk about what it’s like to live with an early-stage Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
The program, dubbed New Friends, has for 14 years connected people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and dementia with future medical professionals to learn from one another.
The goal is to teach future health care workers lessons they can’t gain from coursework alone: firsthand experience with people living with cognitive changes outside of a classroom and textbook. Many of the participating students go on to be nurses, doctors, therapists or social workers. Together, they help challenge misconceptions about dementia and work toward better care for patients experiencing it.
“I thought I could be, with my own journey, helping to be productive for somebody else to do something about this. So the motivation was to give back. But in giving back, I’m getting so many benefits,” Bill said.
As Wisconsin’s population ages, elder care workers are in short supply, and even rarer are those with prior experience with Alzheimer’s and dementia. The arrangement is mutually beneficial: Students get experience connecting with people living with cognitive changes, and mentors get social connection during a particularly lonely time.
“Oftentimes medical students are really good at the medicine side of things, but their bedside manner or their understanding of people living with dementia wasn’t the best,” said Sheryl Spensley, education coordinator at UW-Madison’s Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
How it works
The program started small in 2012. Since then, it’s grown exponentially, and more than 300 students have participated. Usually, each mentor takes on two students.
Spensley plays matchmaker, pairing students and mentors who have the most in common.
The meetups look different for every pair. Some gather at the mentor’s home to sit and talk. Others go to parks, coffee shops, restaurants or museums. Some opt for more activity, watching sports, going bowling or playing board games. Bill and Diana’s “friends” have chosen to paint pottery together or attend plays put on by Bill’s son, a teacher at their local school in Oregon, Wisconsin.
There are logistics to navigate that students usually don’t consider in their everyday lives: How will the mentor get to the meeting? Is there suitable parking and seating? Is the meeting place too loud or overstimulating?
“That’s a good learning experience about how differently abled people have to navigate the world, capacity to get in and out of places, and how much time that takes for people,” Spensley said.
“I was a school teacher. I was a professor in education. I mentored students in their 20s, so I meet with these future medical professionals because I can get back in teaching mode. For me, it’s all very comfortable,” said Bill Ducett, left, of participating in the New Friends program. His wife, Diana, right, attends sessions with Bill to explain her role as a caregiver. (Miranda Dunlap / Wisconsin Watch)
All mentors are squarely in the early stages of dementia. In the mid to late stages, communication becomes more challenging, people may live in an assisted living facility, and reflecting on what they’re experiencing can be difficult.
“For some it can be more emotionally distressing at that point,” said Molly Schroeder, outreach program manager at the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute who helps coordinate New Friends.
Much of the conversation can tend to revolve around the mentor, as students ask about things like the logistics of their medical care or their everyday hurdles, but former mentee Meghana Ram said they also often just talked as friends. She found the meetups felt less like an interview and more like a social hangout.
Some of the mentors have caregivers who join and talk about their responsibilities and careers. Technically, Diana joins the meetings as Bill’s mentor.
“She’s a caregiver, but you know, she’s more of a commentator,” Bill joked.
Throughout the semester-long process, students keep a journal where they reflect on what their mentors teach them. They also take surveys before and after the program measuring their attitudes toward people with cognitive decline — questions like, “how comfortable would you be sitting one on one with someone with dementia?” By the end, students’ perceptions grow more positive.
Dispelling myths, challenging stigma
When Bill started telling his neighbors and friends about his diagnosis, he felt their sympathy. But he also noticed that they became uncomfortable and started “pulling back” from him.
“They don’t know what to say,” Diana said of people who learn about Bill’s diagnosis. “They’re afraid of how they’ll be interpreted … They feel sorry for both of us. They’re a little too afraid to get involved.”
Nowadays, the symptoms Bill experiences are small and often harmless: forgetting that he made a cup of coffee for Diana until the cup is cooled. Temporarily losing his keen sense of direction. But he still drives, still attends his son’s plays, still lives his life mostly as normal.
Diana Ducett poses for a portrait in Oregon, Wis., on Oct. 7, 2026. Diana first noticed changes in Bill that led to his early-stage Alzheimer’s diagnosis. (Miranda Dunlap / Wisconsin Watch)
During dementia’s early stages, people often experience confusion or small memory lapses that don’t always impact their ability to live independently. Many with this early diagnosis still have jobs and social lives and are raising kids or grandkids, Schroeder said.
But many people don’t realize that, she said, “because unfortunately, a lot of what we see in the media is, we see people more at the later stages in a nursing home, sitting in a wheelchair in front of a TV. But there are years before that where it doesn’t look like that at all.”
Bill doesn’t feel that same judgment with the New Friends students. They meet him with pure curiosity. He’s mentored eight students over three years.
“I was a school teacher. I was a professor in education. I mentored students in their 20s,” Bill said. “So I meet with these future medical professionals because I can get back in teaching mode. For me, it’s all very comfortable.”
Students say the program dispels many of the myths about dementia they once held, mostly regarding what someone’s daily life must look like after diagnosis.
“Culturally, how we look at the elderly, it’s not good,” Spensley said. “This program shows students that even when you have early-stage dementia, you still have things to contribute to society and things you can learn. That’s why they’re called mentors.”
‘Different than just a textbook definition’
When Ram worked as a CNA at an assisted living facility throughout high school, she kept meeting dementia patients, and she didn’t feel she had the tools to fully connect with them.
After enrolling at UW-Madison, she joined the New Friends program to improve her communication with patients.
For a year, she set aside time to play at an arcade and go out to eat with her mentors. She asked questions like: “How did you react to the diagnosis? How did you tell your family? Has your social life changed?”
The answers showed her the importance of establishing a personal connection with patients.
“A lot of these patients don’t necessarily have someone to talk to or have someone to listen to them,” Ram said. “By doing that, you can learn so much of what each individual person needs … to make them feel better. Realizing that the experience of this illness looks so different from person to person, and that sometimes it needs a tailored approach, and that only comes with building that trust and having those conversations and listening.”
Ram loved the program so much that when she moved home to Green Bay, she started a mini version with local students.
The program ran for two years in partnership with Curative Connections, a support program for adults with dementia or other cognitive issues. It ended when Ram moved to Wausau to study to become a physician’s assistant. But she hopes to restart something similar someday.
“(I wanted to) go into those patient rooms with better communication methods, or remembering more of the experience, not only for me, but for the patient, too, and maybe for family members,” Ram said. “I think understanding the experience of a disease is so much more different than just a textbook definition of it. Getting to hear that from patients firsthand is really neat.”
Like Ram, not every student will go on to become a caregiver for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. But they’ll be prepared when coming across people with cognitive changes, whether they be patients, family members or perfect strangers.
“Whether that’s at a restaurant, a bank, the grocery store,” Schroeder said, “it’s important to know how to communicate and support those individuals.”
But it isn’t just about preparing students for the people they’ll meet in the future.
Many of the New Friends pairs end up forming a bond and keep in touch after their time in the program ends. Ram said she and her mentors kept in touch for a while by texting each other photos and updates about their lives. Bill and Diana follow where their students go after graduation and look forward to meeting more, semester after semester.
“We feel that those young people have enriched our lives so much,” Diana said. “They keep us looking forward to the next set of friends.”
“I was wondering if, in a future edition, you might offer some insight into some of the process behind some of these city and town board meetings. For example, I have always wondered why boards are allowed to meet in a closed session.” — reader Sophie B.
Great suggestion, Sophie. You’re not the first person to wonder about closed sessions.
Generally speaking, most boards follow the rules we’ll dive into below. However, some don’t, and it’s important to know the rules so that if something seems fishy, you can report it.
What is closed session?
Closed session is when a board meets without members of the general public present.
When can a board go into closed session?
Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law is pretty clear on reasons why a board can go into closed session and on how to notify the public about closed session.
First things first: Every governmental body “shall give at least 24 hours” notice that a meeting ofany kindwill take place.
In the case of an emergency meeting, the public must be notified at least two hours before the meeting starts. That’s for any meeting, regardless of whether it includes a closed session.
Do boards have to give notice of closed session?
You betcha! A board that plans to convene in closed session has to say so on its agenda and list the reason why.
Furthermore, a board has to start a meeting in open session and a motion must be made, seconded and approved before closed session starts.
To deliberate after any quasi-judicial trial or hearing.
To consider specific personnel matters.
To consider specific applications of probation or parole.
To consider a strategy for crime detection or prevention.
To deliberate or negotiate the purchase of public property, the investing of public money, or to conduct specific public business when competitive or bargaining reasons require a closed section.
To deliberate unemployment insurance or worker’s compensation.
To deliberate the location of a burial site if discussing it in public would likely result in disturbance of the burial site.
To consider financial, medical, social or personal histories or disciplinary data of specific people, which if discussed in public would be likely to have a substantial adverse effect upon the reputation of any such person.
To confer with legal counsel for a governmental body that is rendering oral or written advice concerning strategy with respect to litigation.
To consider requests for confidential written advice from the Government Accountability Board, which used to be called the State Ethics Board.
To consider some matters related to acts by businesses, which if discussed in public could adversely affect the business, its employees or former employees, under the State Economic Adjustment Program.
To consider financial information relating to the support of certain nonprofit corporations.
Personnel issues and getting legal advice from attorneys are the common reasons I see on agendas.
Can the board talk about anything in closed session?
No. The law is clear on this, too. The discussion can only focus on the reason why the board goes into closed session. This is why you might see a board list multiple reasons for closed session on its agenda – officials don’t want to go back and forth from open to closed session multiple times.
Are minutes taken during closed session?
Yes: “The open meetings law requires a governmental body to create and preserve a record of all motions and roll-call votes at its meetings. This requirement applies to both open and closed sessions,” according to the DOJ’s Open Meetings Guide.
The DOJ’s Open Meetings Guide has a ton more information about open meetings generally, including what to do if you think a local government board violated open meetings law.
Adam Paul, who owns Vintage Rose Bakery & Sandwich Shop in west De Pere with his wife, says health care is the biggest financial stress he faces.
He struggles with mental health, and his wife has a thyroid condition. For the last three months, Paul said they’ve been negotiating with their insurance provider to try to get an MRI covered for his wife’s condition.
“Fighting with the insurance company, and owning a business at the same time, to get things covered is a nightmare,” Paul said. “It’s a constant fight of, ‘OK what is my health worth?’”
As a business owner, he said he “would love” to offer his employees insurance, but his company is just “way too small” for him to make it work financially.
Paul and other Brown County community members spoke at an affordability roundtable in De Pere last month, moderated by former Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair Ben Wikler.
Paul wasn’t the only one at the roundtable who spoke about health care costs being a major source of financial stress.
Inflation and cost of living rank as the top issue among Wisconsin voters, according to a September Marquette Law School Poll. Health insurance was the third highest ranking issue among voters and outranked data centers, abortion, schools or crime.
Candidates running for Wisconsin governor, Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and Democratic Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, both say they want to lower health care costs and make care more accessible. But they’re offering different views on how to do that.
Wisconsin hospital prices among highest in nation as ACA coverage declines
The biggest increase among essential costs came from hospital services, which increased by 274%, the report found. Median household incomes in Wisconsin increased by an estimated 90% over the same period.
Dan Sacks, a professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, said health care, in general, is expensive — accounting for around 18% of the nation’s gross domestic product.
He said Wisconsin’s hospital prices are among the highest in the nation, as the health care sector has become “dominated by a relatively small number of very important health systems.”
He said those who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace are seeing higher costs after pandemic-era subsidies ended at the start of the year. He said the subsidies helped keep ACA premiums down.
Sacks said tens of thousands fewer Wisconsinites enrolled in ACA coverage this year than last year, and people are generally “paying more out of pocket for their health care.”
Beyond the ACA marketplace, Medicaid work requirements included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act are set to begin at the start of 2027, which would affect those enrolled in BadgerCare, Sacks said.
“In Wisconsin, the work requirements will apply only to childless adult BadgerCare members,” Sacks said.
Crowley, Tiffany differ on the role government should play
While both candidates say they want to lower health care costs and expand access to care, Tiffany and Crowley differ on the role government should play in achieving those goals.
Crowley’s health care proposal calls for opening up BadgerCare enrollment to any household that wants it, making premiums based on income and giving targeted subsidies to small businesses, single parents, college students, farmers and gig workers.
The plan also proposes making BadgerCare comprehensive to include medical, dental, vision and mental health care.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, left, and U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany. The Wisconsin gubernatorial candidates have opposing plans for tackling rising health care costs. (Andy Manis for Wisconsin Watch and Zoey Elwood / Wisconsin Watch)
“It’s about creating BadgerCare as an alternative to for-profit insurance, giving our veterans, our entrepreneurs, our students, our child care workers, anybody, the ability to pay into a system that’s going to be cheaper and is going to work well for them, so they don’t fall through the cracks,” Crowley told WPR.
Meanwhile, Tiffany’s health care proposal calls for requiring hospitals and insurance companies to provide upfront prices to patients, allowing primary care patients to pay their doctor directly through a subscription model and allowing the Wisconsin Farm Bureau to offer health plans to members.
The plan also calls for increased oversight of pharmacy benefit managers, which he says contribute to higher prescription drug costs.
“We’re going to create a system that makes health care more affordable in Wisconsin and brings greater resources to the table to make sure that we have top-notch health care,” Tiffany said. “We are going to make sure that all health care providers provide maximum transparency.”
Crowley has been critical of Tiffany for his vote in favor of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and its Medicaid spending cuts. Tiffany has defended the bill for providing funding for rural health care and said he supported a federal rule that could bring additional Medicaid funding to the state.
With an education background, Appleton parent and education advocate James Bacon knows what his kids’ teachers face.
He has two sons in elementary school. They’re thriving, largely because of their teachers, he said. But, should he need to advocate for more support, he worries about the additional strain that could place on the already overburdened teachers and systems.
Bacon’s concern has driven his advocacy work. When the Appleton School District voted to go to an operational referendum for $15 million in the spring 2026 election to balance its budget and add student supports, Bacon helped organize a group of volunteers to get the word out. Many in the group were parents who had to rearrange busy schedules, he said.
In the weeks leading up to the election, the group’s Facebook page posted multiple times a day. They set up presentations, printed yard signs and connected with residents, urging them to vote and to invite a friend along.
While he was talking to voters, Bacon said two concerns stood out to him. On one side, people were worried about increasing the strain on their own pocketbooks through property taxes, especially in Grand Chute, where homeowners just had their property reassessed. On the other, some thought the district wasn’t asking for enough help for their students; some supported going as high as $17 million instead.
Ultimately, the referendum in Appleton was successful, passing with about two-thirds of the vote from over 26,000 people. But across the state, more than a third of all school referendums failed during the same election, according to data from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
The conflict between higher property taxes and increased school funding has been over three decades in the making, according to researchers, administrators and advocates. Any potential solution may mean rethinking a school funding situation that has been in place for that long.
The November elections for state Assembly and Senate will influence who is part of that solution, as the new Legislature will begin work on the next biennial state budget in January.
How does Wisconsin fund its public schools?
Wisconsin has 421 public school districts, each with taxing authority. Districts receive money from four sources: state aid, property taxes, federal aid and other local non-property tax revenues (such as fees and interest earnings).
The state-provided aid generally falls into two buckets:
Equalization aid, distributed through a formula based on a district’s equalized property value per pupil.
Categorical aid, meant to partially fund programs like special education and student transportation services.
Wisconsin school districts are capped when it comes to the total funding they can spend, called the revenue limit. It is the amount districts can collect from equalization aid and property taxes. Categorical aid and federal funding don’t count against the limit. The revenue limit for each district is calculated using a school district’s total enrollment and the revenues it collected in previous years.
The state Department of Public Instruction calculates the total revenue limit using a formula, but revenue limits are often expressed as a per-pupil dollar amount.
The revenue limits have been in place since the 1993-94 school year. Until the 2008-09 school year, districts’ revenue limits were indexed to inflation. From that time until the 2023-24 state budget, changes to revenue limits had to be approved year over year by the state Legislature. In six of those school years, districts received no increase at all, and in 2011-12, the revenue limits actually decreased by an average of $554 per student. Gov. Tony Evers’ partial veto of the 2023-25 biennial budget set revenue limits’ annual increase to $325 per student per year.
Wisconsin’s approach to school funding differs from many other states, said Sara Shaw, a researcher from the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
Illinois, for example, uses “evidence-based funding,” where the state aims to fund its districts at an “adequacy target.” That level is determined by the estimated cost to educate students and the local resources on hand.
Many other states, like Minnesota, use a weighted system; each enrolled student is funded at a basic per-pupil amount, but the state increases funding based on the number of students who might need additional support, like English language learners, students in smaller school districts and students who qualify for free and reduced lunch.
Wisconsin’s equalization aid formula, Shaw said, isn’t based on need but local property wealth. While local property values and student need can align, she said that’s not always the case. She gave vacation and tourism communities as an example: While local property values in those communities might be high, residents’ socioeconomic status might be lower. In the Sturgeon Bay School District, for example, property taxes will support over 60% of its general fund in 2025-26, partly due to rising property values. But nearly half of the district’s students were considered economically disadvantaged in the 2025-26 school year, according to data from DPI.
How do school districts manage their budgets?
For the first quarter of the fiscal year, from July 1 to Oct. 15, school administrators and financial professionals are working off of an estimate for how many students they’ll have.
Holly Burr, finance director for Appleton’s public schools, said that budgeting is “an ongoing project,” but that twice a year her department examines every single class and building in the district to see where staff are most needed. The department does this in the winter and summer in order to set staffing levels for the beginning of the next school year.
It’s “kind of backwards from how you think of budgeting,” she said, because the district must hire staff before it knows the exact amount of funding it’ll have for the school year. Districts count their students on the third Friday of every September, and their revenue limit information is released in the middle of October. Budgets are typically set by the end of October.
Districts also look for ways to increase revenue and decrease costs. For example, enrollment in summer school increases student counts for the revenue limit. If a district finds ways to attract more students through open enrollment than it loses, that increases the head count as well.
For lowering costs, Burr said the Appleton School District bids annually for property and liability insurance and tries to keep employee health care costs down without burdening staff. Three years ago, the district moved to self-funded health insurance and is part of an in-house clinic co-op with another district and the city of Appleton, Burr said.
Students head to class on Sept. 23, 2026, at Little Chute High School. (Dan Powers / Appleton Post-Crescent)
District spending bound by student needs and the law
Student needs are one of the main drivers of school budget decisions.
For the 2026-27 school year, Burr said the district hired more counselors, psychologists and social workers with the money from the referendum because it saw students needed more mental health support after the COVID-19 pandemic. It also added three positions to assist with about 1,500 English language learners, one of which doubles as a social worker.
School budgets are also bound by mandates from the state and federal government — and help covering the costs of those mandates is limited. Special education students are entitled to a free and appropriate public education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires schools and districts to help English language learners overcome language barriers in their education.
Giving these students support usually means hiring more staff, like paraprofessionals, physical and occupational therapists, interventionists and interpreters. But districts get limited help paying back the extra costs.
During the 2025-26 school year, the state reimbursed 35% of the money used for special education, despite 42% being promised in the 2023-25 state budget. According to DPI, the reimbursement is paid from a fixed pot of money determined by the Legislature; if more claims come in, then the rate drops.
In 58 districts that qualified for aid for English language learners, the state reimbursed only about 8% of the costs in 2024-25.
Any money that the state doesn’t reimburse for those costs must be taken from districts’ general fund. In the 2025-26 school year:
Milwaukee Public Schools transferred about $163.6 million from its operating budget to its special education fund.
Madison schools transferred $61.9 million.
Green Bay schools transferred $32.4 million.
Appleton schools transferred $28.7 million.
And while overall student population declines, the number of students needing special education services has been increasing.
The student population declines are largely driven by an overall decline in the birth rate. However, more families are also choosing other educational options for their students, like homeschooling or using one of Wisconsin’s voucher programs, which pay qualified students’ private school tuition using state funds.
School districts turning to operational referendums to balance budgets
As Burr looked ahead to the task of balancing Appleton’s budget for 2026-27, she said the cost of employee health insurance has been increasing by double-digit percentages every year. For the 2026-27 school year, she also anticipates increased student transportation costs partly because of the rising cost of diesel.
Due to budgetary pressures, school districts are increasingly turning to their main mechanism to increase their budget: asking their communities to increase their taxing authority by going to referendum.
School districts typically go to either capital or operational referendum:
Capital referendums are meant to address building needs in a district.
Operational referendums are meant to help districts balance their budgets.
The capital referendum would authorize the district to collect more money for building maintenance and repairs, including fixing the roof, which would extend its warranty for 20 years. Its operational referendum is meant to supplement the district’s technology budget, which would allow it to keep offering one-to-one devices for most students and provide cybersecurity upgrades.
District Superintendent Heidi Schmidt said that while Little Chute has saved money where it could, these costs are beyond the district’s ability to pay within its revenue limits.
With only about 1,600 students enrolled, the Little Chute district is the smallest in the Fox Cities. Schmidt said she wants to ensure her students have the same opportunities as students in bigger districts.
At the same time, the cost of that technology keeps rising, which is part of the reason Little Chute is going to an operational referendum for the third time since 2007.
The commons area at Little Chute High School on Sept. 23, 2026. (Dan Powers / Appleton Post-Crescent)
Besides the stakes of going to referendum, the process also takes time and work from school district leaders. Schmidt said a top priority for her was showing the community that the district is using taxpayer money wisely. She’s leading three information sessions in October and expects to spend up to 10 hours before Election Day getting information out to the public.
Burr said going to referendum is a last resort for most districts looking to balance budgets, and districts typically will consider referendums when they believe further budget cuts will impact student learning.
“It is a significant amount of work,” Burr said. “Nobody likes to go to their taxpayers and say, ‘We can’t live on the money that the state is giving us.’”
Schools face consequences for budget shortfalls
In schools, a lack of funding can mean closing school buildings, laying off staff, increasing class sizes, shutting down programs and even dissolving the school district altogether.
Several northeastern Wisconsin districts will go to their communities to balance their budgets this fall:
Seymour schools are going to referendum in November to maintain their programs and facilities.
Gillett school leaders warned a failed operational referendum in November could lead to stopping courses not required by the state, like tech ed, band and choir.
Other districts have had to deal with the consequences of failed referendums throughout 2026:
More schools are going to referendum as fewer voters indicate they want to support them. According to a Marquette University Law School poll from February, a record number of voters, 60% to 40%, said that lowering property taxes was more important than increasing funding K-12 for education. At the same time, the Wisconsin Policy Forum also found that 2025’s 94 referendum questions were the most in an odd-numbered year since 2007 and that almost 40% of these questions were “retries” — where voters rejected a referendum question, and a district goes back to the voters to try to pass the measure again.
Shaw said that while school referendums were originally meant as a way for communities to exercise local control, it seems to be contributing to funding gaps between districts. According to another report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the gap in per-pupil funding between the top 90% and the bottom 10% of districts has grown in the past 20 years from 24.6% in 2005 to 37.6% in 2025.
Efforts made to explore potential funding solutions
The Legislature has examined school funding before, and in 2017, the bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission on School Funding began examining ways to adjust school funding in Wisconsin.
The commission, which included lawmakers, district administrators and other stakeholders, published its report in 2019, along with 20 policy recommendations. Among other potential actions, it recommended:
Increasing per-pupil aid and matching those increases to inflation.
Gradually increasing special education reimbursement to 60%.
Changing how English language learners and students from lower-income households are counted for the revenue limit.
Adding support to low-enrolling rural districts.
Providing additional funding for Head Start and school-based mental health services.
In May, Evers and a group of Republican lawmakers tried using the budget surplus to give schools more than $617 million by increasing the special education reimbursement and general school aid. While the plan had broad support from voters, it failed when Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany and Democratic lawmakers opposed it.
A group of superintendents from the top five school districts in Wisconsin, as well as the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, expressed disappointment the deal failed in separate statements. However, the Wisconsin Public Education Network said that the deal didn’t do enough because the general school aid would have fallen under revenue limits — meaning it would have delivered property tax relief but not actually given districts any extra funding.
‘This is not sustainable, point blank’
Meanwhile, groups of education professionals and advocates believe the current state of Wisconsin school funding is inequitable enough to violate the state Constitution — and they’ve taken the state Assembly to court to force a solution.
The lawsuit was filed in April by Law Forward and the Wisconsin Education Association Council. The plaintiffs are the Wisconsin Public Education Network; the Wisconsin PTA; the Necedah, Adams-Friendship, Beloit, Green Bay and Eau Claire school districts; and other education associations and individuals. They are asking the court to rule the current school funding formula unconstitutional.
“We’ve exhausted every opportunity that democracy affords us in this work, and it seems to fall on deaf ears,” said Heather DuBois Bourenane, a Sun Prairie-based parent and director of Wisconsin Public Education Network. “If our lawmakers aren’t going to do their job, it’s time for the courts to hold them accountable for doing it.”
The group’s position is that the state needs to “align its spending priorities with the priority needs of our children,” DuBois Bourenane said
She called the current funding system “antiquated and deeply broken” and “picking winners and losers” among students.
“We have a school funding system that’s based more on property tax relief than it is on meeting the needs of kids,” she added, saying that Wisconsin has fallen short with students with disabilities, English language learners and students from lower-income households.
In response to the initial suit in April, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in a statement, “This complaint is another meritless attempt by liberal activists to defund the state’s highly successful school-voucher program and interfere with the Legislature’s authority to fund public schools. We will vigorously defend against this suit and are confident that the courts will soundly reject it.”
Lawsuits related to school funding have had mixed success in court across the country. In 2000, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the state’s funding formula was constitutional, but left the door open for the current case to be brought.
As the lawsuit plays out, Shaw sees the next election as an opportunity for voters and their representatives to consider their priorities — and to envision “what equitable planning and adequate funding looks like” for their schools.
But until a solution is found, school administrators’ warnings have become increasingly dire. Burr said school districts across Wisconsin find “their backs against the wall.”
“This is not sustainable, point blank,” she said.
Kevin Dittman, Kayla Huynh, Nadia Scharf, and Alec Johnson contributed to this report.
Rebecca Loroff is a K-12 education reporter for the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. She welcomes story tips and feedback. Contact her atrloroff@usatodayco.com.
Brown County Judge Tammy Jo Hock said she doesn’t give her staff breaks, works them through lunch, makes them stay late. This was the only way cases could keep moving through court, Hock told the county’s Public Safety Committee on Sept. 9.
“It’s unreasonable what I do to my staff,” Hock said.
She pointed to the judicial system getting less than 2% of the 2025-27 state budget. “When you limit your resources like that, you’re not providing what the state needs,” Hock said. “And at some point, I hope they start addressing that.”
Warnings that underinvestment may be causing Wisconsin’s judiciary to fall short in delivering justice have mounted ahead of the Nov. 3 elections to decide the state Legislature, vested with budgetary powers, and the governor’s office. The politics in the budgeting process has left many in the judiciary frustrated at years of being under-resourced despite studies showing what’s needed. It has angered some county boards faced with the choice to locally fund gaps in the judicial system or not.
Those within the system are burdened with the consequences.
Brown County has the largest deficit of judges and court commissioners of any Wisconsin county, short nearly six officials, according to the Wisconsin Judicial Needs Assessment Survey issued in April.
Prosecutors face backlogs of cases in the thousands, slowing convictions. About half of all criminal cases needed more than six months to resolve in 2025. Some defendants have gone for months without an attorney, straining jails. Many judges feel pressure to move cases quickly, even when more time would improve their decision-making, according to the judicial needs assessment. Interest in law careers has dwindled, compounding staff shortages.
Outagamie County District Attorney Mindy Tempelis on Aug. 25, during the state’s first study committee into district attorney funding, said Wisconsin “was not meeting its obligation” and argued the state Legislature should invest in making a Wisconsin-specific judicial system that would not break down.
“People’s lives are on the line,” Tempelis said.
Outagamie County District Attorney Melinda Tempelis. (Wm. Glasheen / Appleton Post-Crescent)
‘The entire system is broken’ with possible paths forward
In addition to the number of cases before them, judges face more time-consuming work than in the past, according to the 2025 Wisconsin Judicial Needs Assessment Study.
Digital evidence has mounted, become routine and taken much time to review, the assessment said. More litigants are self-representing and using artificial intelligence to create filings, which have made judges take more time to interpret “often lengthy, unclear, or legally inconsistent” files, according to the assessment. And judges are spending more time on cases before trial as evidence suppression and other pretrial motions have grown more popular.
For those making cases before judges, the workload has also grown more burdensome.
Tempelis told the state’s study committee that the current formula to calculate how many prosecutors each district attorney office needs has become outdated.
The formula assumes attorney work still revolves around paper files, faxed police reports, physical photos and evidence that could fit into a folder, Templis said in her presentation. There are now hours of footage from body cameras, which each county may use different versions of, and thousands of text messages to extract, she said.
Tempelis also said the mental health system is broken, with jail being the always-open alternative. She emphasized the attorney shortage in the state, the lack of lawyers interested in going to rural counties and inconsistency with which the Legislature decides to fund pay progression for prosecutors, leaving it entirely unfunded at times.
She pointed to the 1,400 cases that make up the backlog in her office.
“There are no prosecutor bodies, court bodies, or defense bodies to pick up that backlog anywhere in this state,” Tempelis said. “And that is a horrible realization for defendants and for victims and for our communities.”
Tempelis argued the Legislature could invest in finding data that would show the true workload of prosecutors, saying the studies should reflect work as close to real time as possible. She pushed for fully funding attorney pay progression and creating a prosecutor council, an agency that, in other states, advocates for and supports the work of attorneys.
She said she had no doubt the Wisconsin Legislature was not going to give the judiciary everything it wished for. She argued, though, that a sustainable system supported by data would prevent politically motivated decision-making.
Under the current system, Tempelis said that counties picking up the tab for the state’s responsibility was unfair. District attorneys, their assistants and public defenders are state employees.
She said she was lucky that the Outagamie County Board made it a priority to fund a prosecutor position in her office. However, “They are frustrated. They are angry and they don’t want to. But they’re trying to make a good decision for the people of Outagamie County; that’s their job. But funding us is not their job, because the state asked for it.”
Jennifer Bias, the state public defender, said, “The point has been made that the entire system is broken.”
The Brown County Courthouse in Green Bay. (Tork Mason / Green Bay Press-Gazette)
Adding judges requires added support personnel
Judge Hock pressed the Brown County Public Safety Committee on Sept. 9 to endorse a resolution for the County Board to call on the state for two more circuit court judges.
Court dates were being pushed further out from a growing caseload. There were 3,755 pending criminal cases in the county in 2025, according to the resolution. Hock asks attorneys in the hallways if they will take cases as public defenders.
While she recognized the court assessment called for about six more judges, Hock said the director of state courts believes the Legislature will only have the stomach to fund two.
Plus, it’s not just as simple as electing two judges.
To accommodate two more judges, the county would need to provide enough support personnel to the tune of an additional $222,814, including two sheriff deputies, judicial assistants, court coordinators and a one-time staff setup charge. Accommodation for space has already been budgeted in the Brown County capital improvement plan, according to the resolution.
Brown County Board Chairman Patrick Buckley pointed to the county needing to shell out for support staff and court infrastructure as the state adds more judges, saying he didn’t think the county should have to pay for more prosecutors and wished to see more consolidated staffing “because throughout the county, as budgets get tighter, who do we cut? The sheriff’s office? 911?”
“I can’t address how the county and state share those expenses,” Hock replied. “All I can tell you is what the need is.”
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Federal funding cuts forced Literacy Green Bay leaders to reduce the number of classes they offer from 15 to eight and to stop offering child care.
But the need for services has only increased: The organization has a 300-person waitlist.
To offer students more casual ways to practice English, Literacy Green Bay hosts a monthly informal gathering at a downtown Green Bay coffee shop.
Community members and students speak for an hour in English about their families, their work and more.
Halfway through her English language class on an early September morning, teacher Sierra Susa asked each of her adult students to write down a positive affirmation on a sticky note.
One by one, the students, hailing from roughly 10 countries, stuck the light green papers to a hallway wall:
“I help and encourage others.”
“I like learning new things and my family is my whole world.”
“A veces pensar mucho no es buena idea (Sometimes thinking too much is not a good idea).”
“I am studying hard! I will be a nursing assistant!”
“English is really difficult. … When you are having a bad day, you can walk by and say, ‘OK. I’ve got motivation. I feel better,’” Susa said.
That day, roughly two dozen students gathered in a basement classroom at Literacy Green Bay, the city’s largest resource for helping immigrants, refugees and other adults learn English as a second language.
Demand is only growing for the organization’s services, which help residents learn to use a computer, study for a citizenship test or speak English well enough to attend school or find work.
But the nonprofit took a major blow recently, when the Trump administration slashed billions in federal funding and gutted refugee resettlement programs. That’s trickled down to funding losses for Literacy Green Bay, leading it to cut its services nearly in half: It has reduced from 15 ESL classes to eight, stopped offering child care and has a 300-person waitlist.
English language students listen as Sierra Susa, instructional support and resource specialist, gives directions at Literacy Green Bay. (Miranda Dunlap / Wisconsin Watch)
In the aftermath, the staff has turned to the surrounding community for help — with funding and with helping students sharpen their skills. As immigration enforcement and anti-immigrant rhetoric draw more attention nationwide, they’re making an even stronger effort to be visible in the community and squash the stigma around being an adult English learner.
“It’s very hard for most of our students to break out of their bubble. A lot of them will just work and go home. … Some of them don’t have anybody else,” Development and Communications Coordinator Grace Hageman said. “And so this is where they come to get community, this is where they make friends and this is people coming from all across the world that get to hang out together.”
Hub for immigrants, refugees
In 1981, Literacy Green Bay launched as an initiative of volunteers helping integrate Hmong refugees who recently settled in the area by providing English language education.
Four decades and thousands of students from nearly 100 countries later, Hageman said Literacy Green Bay is well-known among local immigrant and refugee communities.
“We can be one of the first stops for people as they’re getting settled and they’re looking for opportunities to grow, but that’s definitely not all of our students,” she said. “For some, it could be years of living in Green Bay speaking limited to no English until they sign up for classes.”
Flags from countries around the world decorate the hallway at Literacy Green Bay on Sept. 2, 2026. The organization has worked with immigrants and refugees from nearly 100 countries since it started in 1981. (Miranda Dunlap / Wisconsin Watch)
The largest share of students at the school are Hispanic, followed by Somali, Afghan, Syrian and Ukrainian refugees. All are adults.
All of Literacy Green Bay’s services are low-cost to students — they pay a $65 fee to begin and are also asked to purchase books for $35. But if a student can’t afford that, the school will find a way to cover the cost.
The school’s classes begin at a level considered “pre-literate,” for people who don’t know how to read, write or use a computer in their native language — often women from Pakistan and Somalia who never went to school.
“We start at that level of people just learning how to hold a pencil,” Hageman said.
From there, Literacy Green Bay’s classes span through level 3. To a native English speaker, this skill level looks like someone who can generally be able to participate in a basic conversation, while still being apparent that they are learning English. ESL programs at local technical colleges generally begin where Literacy Green Bay leaves off, meaning students must enroll to continue learning English.
Literacy Green Bay also offers a volunteer-based, one-on-one adult tutoring service, which about 100 people utilize. These sessions are tailored to each person’s goals and might include preparing for a citizenship test, learning computer skills, studying for a driver’s license, doing homework or conducting a job search.
Across the board, the school focuses on helping students navigate a community that isn’t designed for non-English speakers.
English language students work on computers at Literacy Green Bay. (Miranda Dunlap / Wisconsin Watch)
“That’s a big misconception of what happens in the classrooms here. It’s not like we’re just having them read and write,” Hageman said. “They’re learning how to go to the bank. They’re learning how to talk to a doctor.”
The classes also provide social connection for students, who spend two days a week together and often forge friendships.
Potlucks are common and a favorite way for students to connect and share their cultures with one another. On that Wednesday morning in September, student Ikuko Mader brought a meal of taco rice to share with everyone. Originally from Okinawa, Japan, Mader moved to Green Bay for love: Her husband is a former Marine from Wisconsin. She said the food is what she misses most about her home country — not just Japanese food, but the amount of choice she had in restaurants.
Today, Mader takes classes at Literacy Green Bay to better communicate with her family, who speaks English.
“I married and have kids that use English, but my English is basic level. … Talking in detail about stuff (is hard),” Mader said. “Of course, in Japanese, I can, but when it’s English, it’s hard.”
A sign on the wall encouraging students at Literacy Green Bay is seen on Sept. 2, 2026, in Green Bay, Wis. (Miranda Dunlap / Wisconsin Watch)
Demand soars, funding dips
President Donald Trump made budget cuts his priority when he took office and targeted refugee resettlement programs, including those that funded refugee literacy programs in Wisconsin.
For Literacy Green Bay, those measures cut deep.
The school’s roughly $800,000 budget has largely been funded by federal grants. According to the organization’s 2023 financial report — the most recent available online — 38% of its revenue came from the federal government.
In 2024, Literacy Green Bay received more than $150,000 in grant dollars from the Office of Refugee Resettlement. In 2025, that number dropped to $60,000. Funding ended altogether in July.
Statewide, funding to Wisconsin Literacy — which distributes grants to organizations like Literacy Green Bay — declined from $2,857,703 in 2025 to $737,890 in 2026 because of federal cuts to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Literacy Green Bay whittled its services from 15 English classes to eight. It opened a waitlist, which has stretched to 300 people waiting for basic English literacy education.
Staff rearranged class schedules so everyone who was already enrolled in a program could stay and finish. Small barriers add up, Hageman said, and it’s easy for students to fall behind or stop showing up when things change.
Affirmations from Literacy Green Bay English language students are seen on a wall at the nonprofit on Sept. 2, 2026, in Green Bay, Wis. (Miranda Dunlap / Wisconsin Watch)
“We want to keep things as consistent as possible for them,” Hageman said. ”These are folks who have at least been mildly inconvenienced for their entire life.”
The organization also had to eliminate free child care. Paid staff members used to watch children during morning and evening classes.
Bringing that resource back when they can afford it is a priority, staff said, because it’s a barrier that keeps students from attending class. Affordable child care is increasingly difficult to find — a search made more difficult when someone is still learning English.
Meanwhile, demand for English education at Literacy Green Bay has climbed higher than school leaders can keep up with.
“We will have three to four people a day come in, walk in off the street, and come sign up to be on the waitlist, or reach out online,” Hageman said.
From 2022 to 2024, people moving from outside of the country were the primary driver of Brown County’s population growth. That was no longer true last year, as immigration to the state plummeted under the Trump administration.
‘They have all these skills’
While every student’s journey at Literacy Green Bay is deeply personal, many share a common goal: finding good work.
“It’s like we have a community that exists here that nobody knows,” Hageman said. “People that most of the time are not out front and public-facing right now, especially at their jobs. They’re working their kitchens. They’re working back-of-house.”
For many, learning English is a step toward pursuing higher education — and, ultimately, the careers they want.
That’s true for Wedcia Jean, a student from Haiti, who told Wisconsin Watch she wants to study at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay before eventually opening her own public speaking business.
Others are simply trying to regain the socioeconomic standing they achieved in their home countries.
Student Carmen Hernandez holds a master’s degree in nursing from Mexico. Today, she’s learning English while working toward another nursing degree at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College so she can restart her career in the United States.
Sierra Susa, instructional support and resource specialist, poses in her classroom after an English language class at Literacy Green Bay. (Miranda Dunlap / Wisconsin Watch)
“There’s a lot of students that have master’s degrees, they’re doctors, they’re teachers, they’re very educated in their country, but then here they’re just working at JBS, cutting meat,” Susa said. “And it’s just very frustrating that English is really the only barrier. They have all these skills. That’s what I try to focus on is, trying to get them back to where they are, and so that English isn’t a barrier for their goal and their dream.”
For student Olver Corado, learning English is the key to being able to grow the career he already has.
Corado, from Guatemala, works as a general contractor and owns a construction company based in Appleton. The level 3 English student builds houses and repairs homes across northeast Wisconsin, but gets nervous talking to customers in English.
“I need to grow my business. It’s really important to learn English. I need to have good communication with customers … I don’t speak perfect English, but I’m smart,” Corado said.
Letting students ‘live out loud’
These days, Literacy Green Bay staff are trying to “rebuild.”
After having to cut the number of classes, staff started thinking about how students could practice English in more casual ways.
One tutor began meeting with his students at Kavarna, a staple coffee shop in downtown Green Bay. His students felt comfortable there, so he suggested inviting more students.
Now, once a month, Literacy Green Bay hosts “Coffee, Culture and Conversation” – an informal gathering where students are paired with community members who come to talk with them in English. The school provides questions to get the conversation started, but from there, it flows naturally.
English language students at Literacy Green Bay play a matching game on Sept. 2, 2026. (Miranda Dunlap / Wisconsin Watch)
At their mid-September event, there were about three eager attendees for every student. Students from Laos, Guatemala, Haiti and more practiced English by speaking with strangers for an hour about their families, their work and their paths to living in Green Bay, among other topics.
“When I saw the advertisement, I’ve always been interested in having conversations like this: ‘Where are you from? Where have you been? Why are you here?’ Underneath, we’re all the same,” said Gayle Frame, a retiree, former Literacy Green Bay tutor and self-described “people person.”
After, students have another place in Green Bay they feel comfortable visiting and ordering at, because they’ve been welcomed there before.
“Especially with what our community can look like towards someone who’s trying, that’s beautiful to have the opportunity (where) they can feel comfortable,” Hageman said.
The coffee events also offer a lower-barrier way for people to get involved. Previously, tutoring was one of the main ways community members could volunteer with the school, which requires a regular time commitment and preparation. Hageman said roughly 70% of the volunteers at the August event had never worked with Literacy Green Bay before.
That’s encouraging for Literacy Green Bay staff, especially as tensions around immigration flare nationwide. They’re wrestling with how visible the organization — and its students — should be. Should they advertise more? Should they post students on social media? How do they celebrate the people they serve without putting unwanted attention on them?
They don’t have the answers, Hageman said, but getting students out in the community with events like this is one way to help students “live out loud.”
“They’re proud to be here,” Hageman said. “If they’re living their life, we have to keep living too, which is daunting. … But we just adapt, we just keep moving forward every day, as all people do.”
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Wisconsin home health agencies and nursing homes have abandoned plans to hire overseas workers after federal authorities suspended nearly all refugee programs and terminated Temporary Protected Status for people from 13 countries.
Immigrants make up 30% of direct care workers nationwide, including nursing assistants, personal care aides and home health aides, according to KFF.
In-home and assisted living agencies, including one in the Fox Cities, had to stop plans years in the making to hire international workers. Some also lost staff who had Temporary Protected Status.
Organizations that don’t have enough caregivers have to turn people away, which means more people aren’t able to live in their homes or find care in their communities, industry leaders say.
A bipartisan group of Wisconsin lawmakers passed legislation in April to make it easier for immigrants, specifically DACA recipients, to work in long-term care or health care.
Americans are getting older. In 2025, nearly 19% of the U.S. population was over 65, and the majority of them will need long-term care.
Some home health agencies and nursing homes in Wisconsin have had to give up on plans started years ago to hire overseas workers after President Donald Trump’s administration suspended nearly all refugee programs. The administration also terminated Temporary Protected Status for people from 13 countries, which industry leaders say is weakening an already struggling workforce that helps care for the nation’s older adults and disabled population.
“We have basically cut off or severely limited every pipeline that we have for bringing in, for welcoming foreign-born workers, many of whom end up working in our sector in aging services. … We don’t have a sort of ready supply of U.S.-born individuals who are clamoring to work in aging services, and that’s not a new issue,” said LeadingAge CEO Katie Smith Sloan.
The workforce issue affects member agencies of LeadingAge, a national network of nonprofit nursing homes, home health and other organizations that serve older adults. Sloan said when long-term care facilities have to turn people away, that puts extra burdens on hospitals and family members to fill care gaps.
“We’re seeing home health agencies just not able to take new clients. We’ve seen nursing homes that have closed beds and closed wings,” Sloan said.
According to KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization, 30% of all direct care workers nationwide are immigrants. These workers include nursing assistants, personal care aides and home health aides who provide people with disabilities and older adults assistance with daily living or medical care.
Long-term care is important for people like Myranda Gereau, who lives in Sheboygan. She is quadriplegic, has a tracheostomy and needs 24/7 care. At 30 years old, she’s struggled for years to find nurses to provide in-home care, constantly worrying about her nurses’ schedule and whether she will be able to continue living independently.
“This is literally my life we’re talking about,” Gereau said. “This isn’t ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I can’t come in. I have to take off.’ That’s not how health care works. There are people’s lives that are needing care, and then when you take that caregiver out of the equation, those people suffer.”
Robin Wolzenburg is the current director of operations at Koru Health, which operates multiple senior living communities across Wisconsin. In her previous role at LeadingAge Wisconsin, she worked with resettlement agencies to place refugees in nursing home positions.
Wolzenburg’s efforts stopped in January 2025 when the Trump administration suspended refugee programs. Officials implemented the policy change because the U.S. was not able to support new refugees without “compromis(ing) the availability of resources for Americans,” according to a White House statement.
“We saw just a marked halt in refugees coming in. It didn’t seem like it was a trickle – it just seemed like it stopped,” Wolzenburg said.
Staffing issues for long-term care are so severe that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle want to make it easier for immigrants to get long-term care jobs. State Sen. Jesse James, R-Thorp; Rep. Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay; and Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez, D-Milwaukee, co-authored legislation that passed in April allowing DACA recipients to obtain professional licenses in nursing and other fields.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects home health aide jobs to grow by 847,000 over the next 10 years — the most of any job sector in the country. However, the median salary for home health and personal care aides was $35,800 in 2025, making it hard to attract workers.
“We don’t have domestic workers. I mean, we just don’t,” Wolzenburg said. “The market is so tight, and the competition is so tight, and caregiving is a tough job, it really is. You’re caring for the most vulnerable people in our population.”
For organizations that provide long-term care, not having enough workers means more people aren’t able to continue living at home or have to find care in a community even farther away. Wolzenburg said many assisted living facilities have had to limit admissions.
“You have a resident or an elderly person who is looking to come and reside in their own community, where they’ve maybe been in for the last 50, 60 years of their life, maybe longer,” Wolzenburg said. “That assisted living or nursing home in that community may or may not be able to meet their needs because they don’t have enough staff.”
Recruiting overseas workers is simply a smart business strategy, Wolzenburg said, and a necessary one.
“Obviously we want to support newcomers no matter what, but we also don’t have the domestic staff and the luxury of not engaging this population,” Wolzenburg said.
Multi-year hiring strategies overturned
Kate Battiato, vice president of media and community impact for LeadingAge Wisconsin, helps serve nonprofit long-term care providers across the state. Some members invested significantly in recruiting international staff, she said. One CEO of a nursing home in Sparta invested over $100,000 into building five apartments for new overseas workers. When immigration policy changed and visas became difficult to procure, he had to pivot. Instead, he used the housing for current workers.
“International recruitment is a multi-year strategy, and it doesn’t happen overnight,” Battiato said. “One election can change the strategy that has been built over years. … It makes their already difficult challenges recruiting and retaining workers more difficult.”
Still, leaders are able to use innovative strategies to retain current workers and attract more domestic employees. Battiato said her members are used to thinking on their feet and quickly developing new strategies to address staffing gaps.
“They’ve actually seen a lot of success in recruiting and retaining workers from their local community using that same workforce strategy of worker housing that was originally developed for international workers,” Battiato said.
Valley VNA Senior Care in Neenah, a nonprofit that provides both in-home and assisted living services, has not only lost out on international workers it planned to hire, but also staff who were under Temporary Protected Status. HR Coordinator Cheryl Ehlers said losing those employees fed into the turnover the organization was already experiencing.
“We did have some staff that unfortunately had to go back,” Ehlers said. “We lost them as staff members because they lost their protected status, and they are always welcome to come back to us if they’re able to return to the United States.”
Temporary Protected Status applies to immigrants from specifically designated countries that have been deemed unsafe due to a crisis, such as war or natural disaster. TPS allows them to live and work in the U.S. temporarily.
The Trump administration has terminated 14 TPS programs, affecting people from 13 countries. Nearly 350,000 Haitian immigrants lost TPS on Aug. 4. An estimated 53,000 TPS holders worked in health care in 2024, according to data from KFF.
In a press release, the Trump administration reaffirmed that the Temporary Protected Status program was always meant to be temporary and that Haitians could pursue legal status through other means. The Supreme Court backed the terminations of TPS for Haitians and Syrians in a June ruling.
Ehlers, who has worked at Valley VNA for over two decades, said the organization had also been trying to hire 15-20 workers from overseas for at least the last five years, but ultimately stopped hearing from the partner agency it was working with.
Haitian caregivers in Wisconsin lose immigration status
Marc Christopher, an immigration attorney who represents some of the hundreds of Haitian immigrants in central Wisconsin, said many of them work in home health care and nursing. Haitians in Wisconsin are losing their work permits and immigration status and are facing deportation.
“It’s a lose-lose-lose for our community,” Christopher said. “Number one, the employers that are employing people to provide the care, they’re losing valuable labor, people who are helping. For the people that they’re taking care of … they’re getting good quality care. And then obviously, it’s a lose for my clients, who are in a desperate situation because they’re now being told that they have to go back.”
The country is still considered unsafe due to gang violence and humanitarian crises. The U.S. Department of State issued a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory in July. According to a 2025 press release, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem determined conditions had improved enough for Haitians to return.
Christopher is in the process of helping clients apply for asylum, which takes years. He stressed that most Haitians came to the U.S. legally under Temporary Protected Status. For the time being, many Haitians are weighing their options.
“So now they have to make that decision,” Christopher said. “Do they file for asylum, or do they simply go back, or do they live in this perilous state where they don’t have any status? … And that’s what affects our community. … Their kids go to school with my kids. They are working in our community.”
Zabi Sahibzada is the refugee resettlement director for Jewish Social Services of Madison. With no one new coming in, he’s trying to focus on supporting the refugees and immigrants who are already here. Three full-time and one part-time caseworker manage more than 500 individuals in addition to those who knock on their doors every day.
Out of his clients who are in the workforce, Sahibzada estimates 30% lost their jobs in the medical sector. They now need help with food, rental assistance, medical services and legal services, and JSS has limited funding.
“Some of our clients who used to work in those health care providers and the places like health care facilities, and some even providing transportation to the health care facilities, they have been losing their jobs,” Sahibzada said. “They have lost their driving licenses. They have lost their eligibility status.”
When a direct care worker loses their job, it can also mean a deeply personal relationship is “shattered,” Sloan of LeadingAge said.
“You’ve been there for four years and have had the same caregiver who knows everything about you, knows your birthday, knows what you like to eat for breakfast, knows what time you like to go to bed, knows what movies you watch … suddenly, that person is ripped away from you, which is what has happened recently with TPS,” Sloan said. “You’ve really lost an important part of your life.”
In a year of extreme weather fluctuations, from a record 26 inches of rain in the first six months in northeast Wisconsin to drought conditions and poor air quality from distant wildfires, climate change is happening before our very eyes, experts say.
“Climate change is going to affect everybody. It is important to bring it back to the forefront,” said Bart De Stasio, professor emeritus of biology at Lawrence University in Appleton. “It’s fallen off the radar unfortunately because of the political climate we’re in right now.”
Leading up to the November election, affordability has garnered more political attention than the environment, but some Wisconsin residents and scientists say candidates should be diving into climate change in a larger way.
Insurance premiums and taxes often rise after property owners face stormwater damage, said Steve Vavrus, director, Wisconsin State Climatology Office, and co-director, Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI).
Bart De Stasio, professor emeritus of biology at Lawrence University in Appleton. (Courtesy of Bart De Stasio)
“It’s in everybody’s interest, regardless of how people vote, to make sure our environment is in good shape,” Vavrus said. Seasons are becoming warmer, causing more heat stress and extreme weather, such as flooding. Wisconsin’s stormwater management infrastructure often is a century old, Vavrus said, and it can’t keep up with torrential downpours.
Warmer temperatures stem from fossil fuel and methane emissions, De Stasio said.
“The only way we’re going to be able to really change our path here is by continuing to look for other sources of energy” and by mitigating the impacts of manmade pollution, he said. “We’re going to have to adapt. Otherwise, we’re not going to survive this.”
Town of Peshtigo homeowner Jeff Budish couldn’t agree more. “The weather is talking to us. Mother Nature is telling us, ‘Hey, wake up,’” said Budish, a clean water advocate and avid angler.
Steve Vavrus, director, Wisconsin State Climatology Office, and co-director, Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts. (Courtesy of the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts)
While Budish blames gas-powered vehicles for much of the pollution causing the greenhouse gas effect, rivers so contaminated the fish aren’t considered safe for human consumption also frustrate him. He lives near the Peshtigo River, just outside of a designated area local residents call “the plume.” The plume is an area where “forever chemicals” stemming from Johnson Controls Inc.’s Tyco fire technology center in Marinette contaminated the groundwater some residents used for drinking water.
Tyco has taken responsibility for the contamination in this limited area, offering to provide new deep wells for some residents, but a recently settled lawsuit could limit its contributions in the future. In the meantime, many residents outside Marinette worry PFAS chemicals found in biosolids are also in runoff headed for waterways.
Warmer rivers
Charles Frisk, a retired Green Bay science teacher, has observed the worsening effects of climate change for several decades. Warmer rivers and lakes mean walleye and trout could become scarce, while bass become more prominent. It also could bring fewer days of cross-country skiing and ice fishing for winter tourism and poorer air quality in the summer from wildfire smoke, he said.
Charles Frisk leads a spring wildflower hike for the Baird Creek Preservation Foundation in Green Bay, Wis. (Courtesy of CJ Janus)
“The rate at which the climate is warming up is just occurring so much more rapidly than what was ever thought,” he said.
In many parts of the country, extreme weather events involve lightning strikes igniting wildfires that burn for days or weeks. Prescribed burns, used for forest and land management, also contribute to the smog that crosses state and national borders.
Envisioning what his granddaughters, ages 3 and 11, are likely to experience in their lifetimes because of climate change worries Frisk. “By the time they are my age, there are going to be major highly populated areas where it’s unlivable” because of the heat, he said.
Wildfire smog
Summer wildfires in Canada and Minnesota sent dangerous particulate material to Wisconsin, impacting air quality, De Stasio said. The particulate matter of less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter can get into people’s lungs and cause breathing problems, he said. When the air quality index hits 200, it becomes unhealthy to be outside, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Wildfires and prescribed burns were linked to 20,000 premature deaths and $200 billion in damages, with a disproportionate number of older adults, Native Americans and African Americans affected, according to a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.
Nicholas Muller, professor of economics, engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. (Courtesy of Nick Muller)
“The frequency and intensity of these fires has increased,” said Nicholas Muller, professor of economics, engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, who co-authored a 2025 study on the cost of smoke from wildfires and prescribed burns in 2017.
In Green Bay, city officials closed Bay Beach Amusement Park for two days in July due to wildfire smoke.
While some people compared the smog to a campfire’s smoke, Muller said wildfire haze is far more dangerous.
“Around a bonfire, you may get a blast of smoke in the face, but you’re not exposed to the sustained smoke,” Muller said. “When I was walking around (in July), I was aware I was inhaling something. The particles were so abundant, you’re inhaling a high concentration of them.”
Being prepared is one way to lessen the impact of climate change, whether it be wearing a face mask, helping to prevent flooding or contaminated waterways, or cutting back on driving a gas-powered vehicle, experts said.
Flood control
Officials in the village of Allouez plan to construct the municipality’s eighth retention pond in Riverside Park in 2027. The ponds are designed to protect waterways from polluted runoff when stormwater surges. The newest pond is expected to cost taxpayers about $800,000, said Sean Gehin, public works director for the village.
Jean Marsch, Allouez trustee (Courtesy of Jean Marsch)
Still, some residents confronted damp or flooded basements in April and July when streets flooded, Gehin said.
The problem isn’t limited to the Green Bay area, said Jean Marsch, a village of Allouez trustee and 50-year resident. “It’s something all municipalities are dealing with.”
“You can tell flooding is happening all over. You see it and hear about it and know people who have experienced this kind of flooding,” Marsch said.
The city of Green Bay’s Fire Station No. 3 sustained over $50,000 in damage from June 24 flooding that affected the boiler, water heaters and electrical service in the basement.
Other areas of the city also were affected by the deluge, said Valerie Joosten, director of public works. A dollar amount for the damage wasn’t available.
Rain on June 24, 2026, flooded the basement of Fire Station No. 3 in Green Bay, Wis. (Courtesy of the city of Green Bay)
Shared responsibility
While some are skeptical climate change will be addressed on the federal level, Wisconsin has had bipartisan support for flood laws, Marsch said, pointing to Wisconsin Act 265 signed into law in 2024. It created a pre-disaster flood resilience grant program.
Marsch would like to see more government funding to help communities deal with flooding and runoff. Allouez officials also encourage residents to do their part by using rain barrels for their gardens, keeping leaves and grass clippings out of the street and avoiding fertilizers with phosphorus.
“Everybody has a role to play in maintaining the safety and health of our community,” Marsch said. “We all have a role to play in doing what we can.”
This story was produced as part of theNEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab, a consortium of five news outlets.
The median home price in northeast Wisconsin has more than doubled over the last decade while fair market rents in the region’s two largest cities have also climbed sharply.
Local officials, housing advocates and economists say those cost increases — fueled by tight supply and high demand — have made it harder for young families to purchase their first home and for renters to make ends meet.
Northeast Wisconsin is home to Green Bay and the Fox Valley. It’s a mix of medium-sized cities and rural communities. Wisconsin Realtors Association data shows median home prices in the region climbed from $145,000 in July 2016 to $331,000 in July 2026.
David Clark, an economist for the Wisconsin Realtors Association, said home prices across the state didn’t rise very fast for much of the 2010s, and neither did housing supply.
He said a surge of millennials entered the housing market when mortgage rates fell below 3% in 2020 while many baby boomers remained in their existing homes, contributing to a supply and demand imbalance and rising prices. While homebuilding has picked up in recent years, he said supply remains limited.
“We’ve got tight inventory statewide, and that same statewide picture is pretty similar to the circumstances in the northeast region,” Clark said.
Local officials and advocates say tight inventory in the owner-occupied housing market has led some residents interested in purchasing a home to continue renting, putting upward pressure on those prices as well.
“There are bottlenecks everywhere,” said Mindy Howell, housing services lead case manager for The Salvation Army-Fox Cities. “Housing is more expensive, so more people are renting.”
She said that’s meant people with moderate incomes are competing with lower-income residents for available rental units, saying it’s “very hard to find affordable housing.”
Beyond supply and demand, property managers say rising costs from insurance, property taxes and repairs all factor into rent prices.
“We’ve tracked five years of financial data across more than 5,000 rental units: Operating costs rose 34.2% from 2019 to 2023,” said Rick Van Der Leest, president of the Apartment Association of Northeast Wisconsin and Fox Valley Apartment Association.
The fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Appleton increased from $718 in 2016 to $810 in 2020 and $1,236 in 2026, federal data shows. Those rents in Green Bay increased from $756 in 2016 to $822 in 2020 and $1,164 in 2026.
Amber Edwards is a community organizer for JOSHUA, a faith-based nonprofit in Green Bay that works on housing and other social issues. She said rising costs and tight supply have been hard on residents of all backgrounds.
“There are people that I know that have really good jobs, stable careers that are struggling to find housing in their 40s because it is so tight and difficult to obtain, and difficult to maintain,” she said.
Green Bay and Appleton each need to build thousands of housing units, a mix of single-family and rentals, in the coming years to keep pace with projected housing demand, according to recent housing reports.
A 2025 housing market study from the city found Green Bay needed to build 2,100 rental units and 2,159 owner-occupied units by 2040 under a conservative growth scenario and 4,575 rental units and 5,072 owner-occupied units under a high-growth scenario.
This graphic shows the city of Green Bay’s projected housing need. (Liz Dohms-Harter / WPR)
“We need everything, from low income to high income, small apartments to large,” said Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich. “That’s been our focus is just to do whatever we possibly can to partner with high-quality developers to make this happen for the residents here.”
Genrich said the number of units per year built within the city has increased from an average of 144 units per year from 2015 to 2019 to an average of 368 units from 2023 to 2025.
He said private developments, in which the city played no role, did contribute to that increase. But he also said the city has tried to use a variety of tools from crafting more flexible zoning codes to using tax increment financing to encourage development.
Meanwhile, the city of Appleton needed to build 3,981 single-family, 442 two-family and 158 multi-family units between 2019 and 2040 to accommodate population growth projections, according to a 2024 housing affordability report from the city.
Appleton Mayor Jake Woodford said the city was currently working its way through zoning code revisions aimed at promoting duplex development and other zoning designations. He said the city has also worked to “streamline” the development process itself, but he said there isn’t a silver bullet that will solve the issue.
“I think the underlying issue of the cost of building housing is a huge factor,” he said. “Land availability to some extent, but cost of construction is a big challenge.”
Due to high construction costs, he said, a newly built home that may be considered a “starter home” based on its size and number of bedrooms is likely to cost $400,000 or more, which is “unattainable” for many first-time buyers.
“Housing is becoming less affordable, and that presents a real challenge for our communities,” he said. “Because here in the city of Appleton, if people cannot afford to live in this community, how do we expect to have a thriving local economy?”
To address the issue, local leaders and housing advocates said they would like to see state leaders invest in expanding low-interest loan programs for affordable housing developers and first-time homebuyers and create more tools to help housing developments make financial sense for builders.
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James Gray, Estelle Moncada and their three children have been homeless for the past five years.
Federal data shows that 561 Wisconsin families with children were homeless in 2025, but because of the way homelessness is counted, the figure could be much higher.
They sleep in their vehicle at Safe Place Parking hosted by Wise Women Gathering Place in Green Bay.
Annette Rivera also uses Safe Place Parking and told Wisconsin Watch what it was like to park elsewhere when the safe parking lot was closed.
Despite the challenges they’ve faced, Gray, Moncada and Rivera maintain hope that their situations will turn around, and they’ll find stable housing.
Like any other family, James Gray and Estelle Moncada love to play with their kids at the park. Their twin girls, Maewahniw and Mataeqsak, are 5 years old and chase each other around, falling down in the grass laughing with their 3-year-old brother, Mahwaew.
But the park isn’t just a place they visit — it’s also their home.
The family spends most days hopping between parks, sleeping on a mattress in their van at night. Their five years of homelessness have taken them to hotels, shelters and parking lots around rural northeast Wisconsin, northern Michigan and finally Green Bay, where they hope to stay while their kids go to Starr Elementary School.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, in 2025 over 5,200 people in Wisconsin experienced homelessness, which has risen 16% over the past five years. Of those, nearly 1,900 were people in families with children – accounting for 561 families.
Because of the way homelessness is counted, that number could actually be much higher. Volunteers have to search for unsheltered people on a single night in January and confirm each person is homeless to add them to the point in time count. The process means it’s often hard to see the “hidden homeless” population living in their vehicles.
The count indirectly ties to the amount of federal funding each region receives for homeless support services — which means there simply aren’t enough resources for homelessness service organizations to provide for the entire homeless population. People like Gray and Moncada have spent years on the waitlist for housing programs meant to help homeless families.
Adding to funding uncertainty, the Trump administration announced major changes to federal homelessness grants and an overhaul of the Head Start early childhood education program for low-income families, where Gray and Moncada sent their twin daughters and enrolled their son this year.
Trying to find housing, work while raising children
The family became homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic, around the time when their twins were born. When the anti-poverty nonprofit Newcap opened a shelter in Shawano, they were one of the first families accepted and stayed there for almost two years. Gray and Moncada said a Newcap employee made false promises about securing them a rental apartment that never came through.
Navigating a system with limited resources while taking care of young children can force families to make hard decisions. They eventually ended up at Abundant Life Mission, a shelter in Menominee, Michigan, near the Wisconsin border, but Gray said he left because he didn’t want the kids to interact with people staying there who struggled with addiction.
That meant going back to living in their car and waiting to be pulled from the waitlist for housing programs. A system called Coordinated Entry prioritizes and matches people with housing resources based on their level of need.
“You feel hopeless, you know what I mean?” Gray said.
Estelle Moncada, left, and James Gray, right, pose for a photo with their children Maewahniw, Mataeqsak and Mahwaew in Green Bay, Wis., on Sept. 6, 2026. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
Newcap called once a month to ask where the family slept the previous night, part of the process of Coordinated Entry, which the organization led for 10 northeast Wisconsin counties before officials filed for bankruptcy this year. Newcap staff did not contact Gray to tell him the nonprofit closed, even though all of his mail had been going to the Newcap office in Green Bay.
Every weekday for a year, Gray and Moncada drove their daughters to and from the Oneida Nation’s Three Sisters location for Head Start, no matter where they had slept the previous night.
“I think it’s hard for people to understand that I’m over here taking care of three kids, you know what I mean?” he said. “If I had known I’d be taking care of three kids at this age, I would have done some things a little different in my past, too.”
Both Moncada and Gray have to balance the struggles of raising three children without stable housing and securing the employment needed to financially support them. Through the Oneida Nation and Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, Gray earned a traffic control certificate and began working for ANASA Traffic Control Services. But the job required him to drive long distances without reimbursement, knowing his kids needed the car to sleep at night.
“They would never assign me a job in Green Bay,” Gray said. “It was always Sheboygan, Manitowoc, Milwaukee or in Sturgeon Bay, and I’d say, ‘I can’t go to these places, I don’t have gas.’”
So Gray would get marked down for calling in to work, and the next day, he’d be asked to work again in a different city. He was eventually fired in April.
“It’s like, nothing has changed since yesterday. I still have no gas … But I didn’t tell them my situation, that my family needed my car, because I was embarrassed to tell them,” he said.
James Gray, right, stands alongside his kids while talking to homeless outreach case coordinators for the city of Green Bay. The family spent nearly two years living in Newcap’s Shawano shelter. They say a Newcap employee made false promises about securing them a rental apartment that never came through. Newcap filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Searching for a new job was hard since he couldn’t find people to look after the kids so he could go to a job interview. Moncada was working at Burger King at the time.
“I’m worried about them during the day: where they’re going, if they have gas, if they have food. It’s such a struggle, and it’s a lot of stress on him,” Moncada said.
After a few months of searching, Gray recently got a job as a forklift operator in Appleton. The family is trying to work out how they’ll balance Gray commuting to Appleton for third shift while still sending the kids to Starr Elementary School and Green Bay’s Head Start program.
“It’s so hard to have that stability with employment when you don’t have a stable place to live,” Moncada said. “You don’t have gas to go to work the next day because you’re out riding around because you got nowhere to go.”
Safe Place Parking offers ‘peace of mind’
Programs like Safe Place Parking, hosted by Wise Women Gathering Place, provide a potential solution — a reliable place for people living in their cars to park at night without fear of being woken up and asked to leave. Gray and Moncada park there almost every night.
Beverly Scow is the executive director of Wise Women Gathering Place, a nonprofit that provides Native American culturally specific services related to domestic violence and historical trauma. Even though they only account for 1.1% of the U.S. population, Native Americans make up 3.8% of the unsheltered homeless population.
“Part of our resilience is as Native Americans, there was a lot of harm done to our communities, our people, and we survived,” Scow said. “And some of the survival patterns were unhealthy, and some of them were beautiful, right? The culture helped us keep strong and healthy, and so we’ve got a mix of those that have echoed forward.”
Annette Rivera poses for a portrait next to her car. Rivera parked at the YMCA at night before she found Safe Place Parking. Police came to her car twice in the middle of the night at the YMCA. “Once you’re in that situation, you don’t sleep 100%,” she said. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
The organization originally created Safe Place Parking in response to unhoused people not being able to stay with friends or family during COVID-era social distancing.
“We knew about the hidden homeless who were couch surfing, and most landlord guest policies are up to two weeks,” Scow said. “People would stay under the radar and couch surf between friends and family (for) about two weeks, which totally collided with our understanding of COVID transmission at the time.”
Scow soon realized there was a legitimate need for Safe Place Parking to continue for the many people who live out of their cars. The organization now provides portable toilets, electrical outlets, Wi-Fi, heated blankets in the winter and fans in the summer for up to 46 cars each night.
“There’s a lot of people who are living in their cars and deal with the anxiety of being shooed off a residential street or shooed off a business parking lot, and at Safe Parking, they could have peace of mind to know I belong here, this is my place where I can get a restful night’s sleep,” Scow said.
Last year, Scow said she found out Wise Women’s insurance wouldn’t cover the Safe Place Parking program. The organization had to close the parking lot for four months while searching for an insurance company that would cover the scope of the parking lot for the homeless.
Eventually, Scow found one, but it was five times the price of what Wise Women had been paying. To make things worse, the organization lost two major grants while the parking lot was closed. So the community raised $60,000 in individual donations so the parking lot could reopen in December 2025.
“We saw how important it was to the parkers,” Scow said. “They were so appreciative … and it was such a gap. There’s no one else doing it, so it was important to us to keep it going.”
Glow in the dark stars and moons adorn the roof of Annette Rivera’s car. Rivera sleeps in her car and parks at Wise Women Gathering Place’s Safe Place Parking. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
Annette Rivera can attest to that. She lost her housing in 2024 while Safe Place Parking was temporarily closed. She worked out an arrangement to park at the YMCA at night, but said police came to her car twice in the middle of the night.
“Once you’re in that situation, you don’t sleep 100%,” she said. “You’ve got to sleep with one eye open and one closed, if anything.”
She stopped taking her nighttime medicine so she would be alert. Rivera still wakes up every hour or two at night to adjust her sleeping position in the cramped car.
“It’s uncomfortable,” she said. “You’re not sleeping stretched out. I sleep (in) like a fetus position or an L. Especially at a certain age, it hurts.”
She’s been using Safe Parking for two years now. At 57 years old, she doesn’t meet the age requirement for most subsidized housing for older adults.
Holding out hope
Still, Rivera is grateful for Safe Place Parking and sees her situation as temporary.
“God is good,” she said. “It could be worse.”
Rivera can also relate to Moncada and Gray’s challenges in raising young children while grappling with the daily realities of sleeping in a car. She spends her days watching her three grandchildren while her daughter works as a dental assistant. At Safe Place Parking, Rivera feels for the parents she sees and once spoke to Moncada.
Annette Rivera sits on the couch at her daughter’s apartment in Green Bay, Wis., on Sept. 3, 2026. Rivera watches her grandchildren while her daughter is at work. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
“I was wondering, hoping, praying,” Rivera said. “I told her, I said, ‘I really hope you find a place for the kids.’”
Moncada said she tries to give the kids the best life she can. They play with kites, go swimming, play baseball and forage for mushrooms. Along the way, she tries to teach them about the natural world.
“They’re really, really into bugs,” she said. “So, if we go somewhere, they’re over there lifting up rocks and stuff, trying to find whatever millipedes, centipedes, everything … they’re so fascinated by everything, and curious to learn about so many things.”
Moncada, a member of the Oneida Nation, dreams of one day owning land on the reservation and building a house. She thought about advocating for herself through the General Tribal Council, but she worries about speaking in front of thousands of others who might need help more than her.
Estelle Moncada said she dreams about the day when the family will have a house of their own. “I can almost feel the happiness in me when I think about it. That’s a good thing, and I don’t want anything to ever take that away,” she said. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
“That’s all I want, it’s all I dream about,” Moncada said. “I imagine what it would be like if we did have our house finally, and how that life would be, if our relationship would be better, or how happy our kids would be, what they would be doing, where they would put things, you know?”
She feels hopeful that one day, it’ll happen. In the meantime, she wants to be there for her kids while she and Gray work toward getting their own place and not having to rely on anyone.
“I can imagine us getting there. I have a whole vision of it, and I can almost feel the happiness in me when I think about it,” she said. “That’s a good thing, and I don’t want anything to ever take that away.”
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Wisconsin Watch spoke to three small business owners who put their businesses on hold to serve the community after the July 27 tornado.
Destiny Antuna of Fox Valley Meal Prep, Lora Glasel of the Recyclist Bicycle Co. and Shane Rosenow of Rosenow Customs talked about the support they found throughout the Fox Cities.
They also shared how they will continue to support relief efforts even as they turn their attention back to their businesses.
For a few weeks, countless donations piled up on Destiny Antuna’s shop floor.
Stacks of canned food, water bottles, Band-Aids, toilet paper, paper plates, work gloves, dog food and boxes of diapers made it almost impossible to walk through the store. Her business in Kaukauna, Fox Valley Meal Prep, usually sells handmade meal kits. But last month, it became a hub for delivering care packages to neighboring Appleton, Neenah and Menasha.
Ever since the July 27 tornado that damaged homes and businesses in the Fox Cities, community support has poured in. Classified as an EF3, the tornado caused an estimated $8.2 million in damages to over 2,300 structures. With 84 structures destroyed and 412 majorly damaged, many residents were left without shelter, transportation or basic needs.
Emersyn Banda, a 20-year-old Menasha resident, described the experience of the tornado as life-altering.
“I remember instantly just crying when I had seen it, because I mean, houses were completely down. All of our trees are down. All of the power lines, people looking lost,” she said. “It looked like a nuke had hit our town. It was just in shambles. Everyone was on the phone trying to contact people.”
In the chaos, community members’ overwhelming desire to help often came without knowing where to direct their efforts. That’s where small business leaders stepped in, putting their daily operations on hold and organizing large-scale efforts to direct volunteers and donation requests. Now, they’re navigating how to continue helping while keeping their businesses afloat.
Meeting the needs of tornado victims in real time
Antuna was in Menasha during the tornado, completing renovations on a new location she had planned a grand opening for in the next week. She had to shelter in place during the storm.
“Luckily, we’re kind of tucked into a corner, so there wasn’t any major damage,” Antuna said. “It was just a lot of debris hitting that corner, but renovations were, for the most part, done there Monday while we were there, and we were hoping to do a soft opening that Sunday.”
About an hour later, she immediately drove home to Kaukauna and made a post on Instagram letting people know she was accepting donations to distribute. A loyal customer in Menasha let Antuna turn his lawn into a hot food station and take requests for donations.
Homes and local businesses in Menasha, Wis., are seen on Aug. 10, 2026, two weeks after an EF3 tornado left widespread destruction. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
“It was very shell-shocking to walk around and see some houses be totally fine and some others where it’s just their personal belongings just everywhere,” Antuna said. “Like, I have a little kid, that could have easily been like all of my kids’ toys.”
Antuna and other business owners started going door to door with wagons, which she said was vital in getting the most up-to-date requests from affected residents.
“I felt like everybody on the outside, in terms of help, was almost a day or two behind,” she said. “So by the time you would get people water, the next day there’s businesses trying to drop off pallets of water, but everybody already has enough water.”
Lora Glasel, co-owner of Recyclist Bicycle Co. in Kaukauna, went door to door delivering food with Antuna. She soon realized that fixing up and donating used bikes would be helpful for people whose transportation had been destroyed.
“After the requests started rolling in for either people whose cars or bicycles or their kids’ bicycles were destroyed, we did not have enough bikes to accommodate the need,” Glasel said. “So we put a little bit of a call out to our community, and we’ve gotten a good amount of donations that over the next couple weeks we’ll be able to tune up and safety-check, and subsequently then deliver back to the affected area.”
Lora Glasel, co-owner of Recyclist Bicycle Co., in Kaukauna, Wis. Glasel organized a team of volunteers to fix and donate used bicycles to people affected by the tornado. (Courtesy of Lora Glasel)
She delivered over 70 bikes to residents who needed a reliable way to work or even just to relax after a stressful day. Glasel hopes to turn it into a long-term program to help families in need, regardless of whether they were affected by the tornado.
“To bring, maybe for some families, just a little semblance of normalcy of just being able to take their family on a bike ride in a time where their life is not normal at all is also pretty impactful,” she said.
In addition to fulfilling specific donation requests for families, Antuna began using the Kaukauna store as a home base to create general care packages with essential household items and food. She used social media to call out for drivers to fill up their cars with 20-plus bags and drop them off one by one on people’s porches in the hardest-hit areas.
“I will say, it definitely took over my life for the first week after (the tornado) … I do think the store got kind of neglected for the first week, so now we’re slowly trying to get back to a little bit of normalcy,” she said.
Antuna, who also runs Bad Batch Fitness in Little Chute, struggled to find a sustainable way to run her businesses long term while coordinating the influx of donations coming in, requests from affected residents and volunteer schedules.
“Once we started to gather a lot of volunteers and have people reach out, it made it a lot easier to delegate things and be able to give a little bit more focus to the businesses,” she said. “It’s definitely been a hard push and pull because if I could have everything run as normal and also be there, I absolutely would.”
As Antuna moves into the next phase, Fox Valley Meal Prep is no longer accepting donations other than gift cards for gas and groceries. Her plan for the remainder of the year is to have a “meal match week” every month, donating a meal to families in need for every one purchased in-store.
Donations for tornado victims pile up at Fox Valley Meal Prep in Kaukauna, Wis., on Aug. 10, 2026. Owner Destiny Antuna said she still plans to collect gas and grocery gift cards for people affected by the tornado, as well as donate meals. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
Contractors volunteer to clear tons of debris, protect houses
Cleaning up the widespread destruction from July’s tornado took a legion of volunteers working tirelessly to clear streets and repair homes. Shane Rosenow, owner of the exterior remodeling company Rosenow Customs in Neenah, became an unofficial leader of the cleanup efforts.
Rosenow said it all started with a post he made on Facebook with the office phone number and an offer to help with yard cleanup, tarping and assessing damage.
Shane Rosenow of Rosenow Customs in Neenah, Wis., takes a selfie while volunteering to clean up storm damage in Menasha, Wis. Rosenow organized relief efforts among local contractors. (Courtesy of Shane Rosenow)
“My phone just started ringing,” Rosenow said. “I had a band of I want to say 12 to 18 contractors that reached out and said, ‘Hey, let’s help. Let’s do this.’ And it was everything from people in the same trade that I do right now to people with heavy machinery, landscapers (and) home mold remediation people.”
For the next two weeks, he devoted all of his time to the efforts, sleeping only a few hours each night and putting normal business operations on the back burner. He estimates they protected up to 200 homes by clearing fallen trees and setting up tarps. His team of contractors loaded and dumped over 190 tons of debris.
“I’ve never seen anything like it before. Pictures don’t even do it justice,” he said. “I get emotional on this because Neenah’s my hometown, and Menasha’s like a sister town to us, and it’s going to take years, years (to rebuild).”
Restoring the St. Mary Catholic Cemetery sticks out to him as the biggest miracle. He started with a small group on the Friday after the tornado, but soon, a bus drove by with about 50 volunteers from the faith-based group Risen Men. After a few hours of careful work, the cemetery curator came by.
“He goes, ‘You guys, in three hours, have done more work here than five of us in the church have done all week. What made you come here?’” Rosenow said. “And I said, ‘God, you know, he just told us, go.’”
A look at St. Mary Catholic Cemetery in Menasha, Wis., which Shane Rosenow and a group of volunteers worked to clean up after the tornado. (Courtesy of Shane Rosenow)
He also had a colleague create two Facebook groups, one for volunteers and one for donations, so Rosenow wouldn’t have to keep fielding texts and emails himself. That way, people could make a post with what they needed — for example, two or three people to help clean up their yard — and other community members could message them directly to coordinate help.
“The goal behind that was to kind of divide and conquer and allow us to still go back to work, but still do some good in the community,” Rosenow said. “And it’s worked.”
Progress after such a large disaster isn’t always linear. Rosenow’s efforts were set back by a recent storm that blew the tarps off people’s roofs, meaning some homeowners had to start from scratch. The other contractors also needed to get back to work after the first two weeks, he said.
“Some of these guys, it’s just them,” Rosenow said. “And they’re like, ‘We don’t have any money, and we’re spending hundreds of dollars a day on fuel and maintenance on our vehicles and our equipment.’ So I said, ‘Get back to work. We will regroup.’”
Even though he’s started being recognized as a local celebrity, he rejects that label and says nothing would be possible without God and the other community members who devoted their time.
“It’s not me. If it wasn’t for the people that stepped up behind me, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now,” Rosenow said.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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Wisconsinites have called or texted the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline more than 345,000 times since it launched in July 2022.
States including Illinois and Minnesota have implemented telecommunications fees on phone bills that fund 988 in their states.
Other states have allocated long-term funding through budget appropriations or by introducing legislation to fine AI companies when their chatbots fail to refer people in crisis to mental health resources.
Wisconsin officials say the line’s growth surpassed all projections they had, and the organization that coordinates the service is continuously recruiting counselors.
Despite bipartisan support for the lifeline, lawmakers have failed to enact a permanent long-term funding mechanism for it.
Every year, millions of people in crisis dial three numbers — not 911, but 988, the national suicide and crisis lifeline. People like Cadence Van Beek, who used the lifeline as a sophomore at Melrose-Mindoro High School in Melrose.
During a mental health crisis, Van Beek worried she would be placed on a waitlist or hurried through the process. Instead, a counselor patiently helped her de-escalate her feelings. At the end, she informed Van Beek about local resources in Jackson County.
“It didn’t feel rushed … She took her time with me, and she was very kind – just a kind soul,” she said.
Van Beek’s conversation is one of over 345,000 texts or calls to the state lifeline since its launch in July 2022. A recent JAMA study found that in the first two and a half years, suicides among 15- to 34-year-olds were 11% lower than expected, corresponding to nearly 4,400 fewer deaths.
Yet despite the line’s proven success and increased demand, long-term funding remains uncertain. Unlike other states, Wisconsin has not passed legislation to permanently fund the service. And Wisconsin trails most states in the share of calls answered in-state.
In May, Van Beek visited the state Capitol and presented lawmakers with a solution: Fund 988 like 911.
Since 2009, Wisconsinites have paid a telecommunications fee on their phone bills for 911, currently 75 cents per month. Twelve states, including Illinois and Minnesota, have enacted a 988 fee to fund the service.
Illinois and Minnesota had in-state response rates of 90% in July — compared with Wisconsin’s 81%. The rest of the calls are routed to a national backup center, which can mean less knowledge of local resources and longer wait times.
Cadence Van Beek presents her 988 funding recommendation at the state Capitol in Madison with the Office of Children’s Mental Health in May 2026. (Courtesy of Cadence Van Beek)
When Van Beek visited Madison with the Wisconsin Office of Children’s Mental Health, she set up a posterboard with her research and told legislators her peers rely on 988.
“988 has always kind of been a given,” she told Wisconsin Watch. “We always kind of assume that it’ll be there … The possibility that there might not be enough counselors on the line because of funding for 988 and funding for those counselors just makes me a little worried.”
State struggles to keep up with increased demand
Family Services of Northeast Wisconsin operates Wisconsin’s 988 line. Senior Vice President Tana Koss said the crisis team planned for a moderate to high level of calls when the three-digit number was launched in 2022.
“Still, Wisconsin has blown all numbers out of the water and continues to … The demand from Wisconsinites for this service has surpassed every model of projection that was available to us,” Koss said.
Family Services is still recruiting counselors to keep up with the need. Koss attributes the increase to lingering mental health effects from the COVID-19 pandemic and the lifeline’s accessibility. She celebrates more people using the service, which she views as a reflection of reduced stigma.
Even though Family Services of Northeast Wisconsin is located in Green Bay, the state’s 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline counselors work remotely from home offices across the state. (Courtesy of Family Services)
Wisconsin received over 11,200 calls in July alone – and responded to just over 9,000 of them in-state. Only eight states had the same or worse in-state response than Wisconsin.
“The longer a person waits on the line, the more likely they are to disengage … When you’re in queue, our primary center gets an opportunity to answer. If we’re not able to, then our backup center gets an opportunity to answer. And then, if they’re not able to, it goes to national backup,” Koss said. “So the sooner in that process you can have the staff available, the more likely you are to engage that caller.”
Still, the state has improved its answer rate over the past few months — growing from 74% in January to 81% in July as demand increased.
“Purely from the administration of the service … we want (the answer rate) to get to 90%, and had the growth not gone up even a little bit more than anticipated, we would have been there.” Koss said.
So, should Wisconsin officials enact a 988 fee, a recurring appropriation or even consider legislation that Ohio and Illinois lawmakers have introduced to fine AI companies for failing to address suicidal ideation? Koss doesn’t care, as long as it means Wisconsin won’t have to depend on federal funding or the state’s biennial budget cycle.
“I’m not personally attached to any route,” she said. “I think the request that I would have and advocate for is sustainability over the long haul because what we’re projecting is this growth hasn’t stopped.”
The case for state funding
Every two years, the National Alliance on Mental Illness’s Wisconsin chapter pushes for 988 funding in the state budget, said Julia Polk, the group’s advocacy coordinator. Last year, Gov. Tony Evers’ budget recommended $12.2 million for the lifeline, but lawmakers approved $7 million.
“What we would love to see is that we can educate our legislators on why 988 is so important and why it’s important to fund it long term, and get them in the next state budget to say, ‘we’re going to permanently fund this,” Polk said.
Polk also said delays from the Trump administration in making grants available are part of why advocates want to secure reliable state funding for the lifeline.
“It’s a lot of us and other advocates, and the 988 Lifeline and the state government having to just trust and hope that those grants will become available,” she said.
Family Services of Northeast Wisconsin operates the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline for the entire state of Wisconsin. The organization is based in Green Bay but employs remote counselors throughout the state who respond to 988 calls, text messages and chats. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
Waiting for confirmation on an anticipated federal grant last year left officials fearing the funds had disappeared. In response, state Rep. Ben Franklin, R-De Pere, and state Sen. Jesse James, R-Thorp, authored a bill that would have required the state to provide grants to agencies that administer the 988 Lifeline.
“988 has proven to be highly effective and used frequently amongst Wisconsinites and is a vital service we should be funding,” Franklin said during a committee hearing on the bill in June 2025.
However, the bill included no funding attached. It failed to pass in the Senate and did not come up for a vote in the Assembly.
The federal government announced a grant funding opportunity in January and provided Family Services about $4.5 million per year for the next three years, according to Koss. But that still leaves a gap, since the state needs $12.2 million per year to fund the service.
Officials included $7 million for the lifeline in the 2025-27 biennial budget, but Koss said Family Services needs the next budget to match that. She knows a $6.195 million deficit is coming in 2028.
“We didn’t slow down with recruitment, but administratively, it’s stressful when you have these delays on giant parts of the funding,” Koss said.
Franklin’s Democratic opponent in the November election, Brandy Tollefson, is a De Pere School Board member. The issue is personal to her, and not just because she hears about the youth mental health crisis from school social workers, counselors and teachers.
“I myself went through the experience of having my stepbrother die by suicide years ago, so I know what happens to a family when this happens and the impact it has on families,” Tollefson said. “I fully support working with any Democrat or Republican who wants to get this permanently funded.”
Tollefson echoed other Democrats’ criticisms that Assembly Bill 303 lacked the critical funding needed to ensure 988 would get financial support. Franklin did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.
“There was a lot missing from it to make it a bipartisan bill that people could get behind, because the details just weren’t there,” Tollefson said.
Connecting with younger generations
Megan Zimmerman, NAMI Fox Valley’s outreach program director, educates local schools about mental health and promotes 988. She said many people hesitate to call 988 because they fear emergency services will get involved, but in reality, law enforcement or emergency services respond to only 0.4% of callers in Wisconsin. Counselors resolved the other 99.6% of calls by providing support, coping strategies and resources.
“Even outside of 988, I think when someone expresses that they have suicidal ideation – like they’re having thoughts about it – I think that scares people,” Zimmerman said. “They almost immediately triage to like, ‘OK, this person needs to be hospitalized.’”
Zimmerman noted the person who calls 988 doesn’t have to be the one who is in crisis, as she often calls 988 with her clients.
“If I can get an individual to agree to have that conversation on the phone with someone, and I’m there to support them in whatever way they need, that is just as good of an outcome as telling them to go home and call it themselves, which they may or may not follow through on,” she said.
Cards used to spread awareness about the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline are seen at the Family Services of Northeast Wisconsin’s office in Green Bay, Wis., on Sept. 3, 2026. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
Van Beek, who always considered herself the “therapist friend,” often recommends 988 to peers who confide in her. Once, when a friend shared distressing details about her home life, Van Beek quickly realized she wasn’t equipped to handle the conversation.
“I just realized I’m a high school kid, and I can’t take this on,” Van Beek said. “I don’t have the knowledge to help you get to where you need to be with the situation. So that’s an instance where I recommended calling or texting 988 and just going through with that. And she did.”
The 24/7 chat feature, introduced in 2024, particularly appeals to her generation and was helpful when she had to use it.
“Gen Z in general, we’ve always been behind a screen,” Van Beek said. “988 gives youth the option to text it, and I always have liked that, because talking or maybe even going in person can be overwhelming for youth, and I can personally relate to that.”
Amid increasing reports of generative AI enabling suicides, proposed legislation in Illinois would fine AI companies for not addressing suicidal ideation and deposit the money into a 988 trust fund. Companies under the legislation would face a penalty of up to $15,000 per day if they don’t refer users to crisis services like 988 when they express thoughts of self-harm.
Zimmerman said the chat feature of 988 has led her to encourage students to message the lifeline instead of an AI companion.
“Every suicide prevention presentation I give, especially in a school, I just always stress (that) I know it’s easy to bring up ChatGPT or your Claude or your Gemini or whatever it is, and start essentially texting or chatting that feature,” Zimmerman said. “But I always really encourage people to instead think about 988 … because then you’re getting a real live human being.”
Having graduated as president of her high school’s Raise Your Voice mental health advocacy club, Van Beek recently began studying psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where she wants to continue raising awareness about mental health.
“The events that I participate in, whether it’s through NAMI or NAMIWalks — the mental health walk that we do — it has never felt like a chore to me,” Van Beek said. “I’ve always felt like that’s my purpose.”
The first election issues story reported and produced by the Northeast Wisconsin News Lab (NEW News Lab for short) was published Wednesday.
The consortium of newsrooms includes the Post-Crescent in Appleton, the Green Bay Press Gazette, the Green Bay Press Times, Wisconsin Public Radio and yours truly — Wisconsin Watch.
The collaborative effort formed in 2021 to advance in-depth local reporting on important topics. Previous seasons of the NEW News Lab focused on racism as a public health crisis, lack of affordable housing, local school funding and coverage of local judicial systems.
This time around, leaders from the partner newsrooms used feedback from the Local News Landscape Study conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay to decide which issues to cover.
Reporters from the Post-Crescent and Press Gazette will focus on public safety and education.
The Green Bay Press Times called dibs on the environment.
WPR will tackle the economy.
And here at Wisconsin Watch, we’re reporting on health care.
One thing I appreciate about the NEW News Lab is the collaboration. Working with fellow journalists toward a common goal is part of why I love this work.
We hope this coverage helps you make informed decisions when you head to the voting booth in November.
And if there’s an issue the NEW News Lab is not focusing on that matters to you, reach out to Wisconsin Watch’s statehouse team. They’re covering a different set of issues ahead of the election.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Bryn Schraven is no stranger to death. When Schraven was 19 years old, their dad died in a car accident in the middle of their small Wisconsin town. A mountain of paperwork soon piled up, and so did the comments from well-meaning community members.
“It was very tragic and very sudden … I had some issues feeling unheard by the funeral director and funeral company I went with,” Schraven said, “and I felt a little hurt by some of the things that people said to me at that time because people don’t know how to talk about death and dying.”
Neighbors said things like, “At least he’s in a better place,” or asked if Schraven was wondering if he was in heaven. As Schraven sat down for breakfast on the morning before the funeral, a waitress shared her experience of seeing the accident happen in uncomfortable detail.
“I decided at that time that I wanted to be part of the change … I have to be able to help somehow and turn this negative experience into something more positive for other people,” they said.
Schraven started reading books about grief and death, researching what other options were out there. They discovered the term “death doula” – a trained companion who helps people through the processes of death, dying and grief.
Bryn Schraven, founder of Silver Glass Deathcare, with their partner Darby Casperson in Oshkosh on Aug. 10, 2026. Schraven’s goal is to reach members of the LGBTQ+ community, who can have a unique relationship to grief and death. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
How it works
After spending years training with various death doulas, Schraven started a business this year called Silver Glass Deathcare to help others through the experience of loss and to change the conversation around death. They provide support in the form of death education, planning end-of-life rituals for people and their pets, and being with individuals in their final hours.
“A lot of people seem to have this idea that talking about death is going to bring it on faster,” Schraven said. “That’s a big misconception that I see a lot, is that I’m morbid for wanting to talk about death and dying and grief, and it’s simply not true.”
Similar to how a birth doula helps clients make a birth plan, Schraven and other death doulas will create a custom death plan for each person, allowing people to express their wants and needs for their last few hours. This could include dimming the lights, choosing what music to play and deciding who they want to take shifts at their bedside.
Bryn Schraven, founder of Silver Glass Deathcare, sometimes uses herbs and essential oils for end-of-life rituals. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
Schraven, who is nonbinary, usually opts for a more gender-neutral term instead of doula: death companion or deathwalker. They created Silver Glass Deathcare with the goal of reaching out to members of the LGBTQ+ community, who can have a unique relationship to grief and death. For example, some might want a nonreligious approach to funerals or a bedside vigil that doesn’t involve a church.
Others might not be married to their significant other, which means that legally, their family would decide what to do with their body, Schraven said. Filling out an Authorization for Final Disposition form allows people to designate someone to carry out their final wishes.
“After you pass away, there’s a chain of custody that determines who is in charge of what happens to your body,” Schraven said. “Your spouse comes first, and if you’re not married, then it’s your family – your parents, your next of kin – and not everybody in the queer community has a great relationship with their next of kin.”
“There’s always one or two students in each of the sessions that really stand out for their passion in this space, for the experience that they’ve already had in it and for the vision they have of where they want to take it and how they want to serve,” Merelli said. “And Bryn definitely showed up as that person.”
Merelli trains hundreds of death doulas throughout the country and said businesses like Silver Glass Deathcare are important to spread this type of work to different communities and regions.
“For any movement, for any type of culture shift we’re hoping to make, we need a broad range of diverse and dynamic voices,” she said. “It’s not my voice alone, and these ideas are not my ideas alone.”
Bryn Schraven, founder of Silver Glass Deathcare, reads at their home in Oshkosh. Books like “The Grieving Brain” by Mary-Frances O’Connor helped Schraven understand grief, death and dying from a different perspective. (Astrid Code / Wisconsin Watch)
In Merelli’s classes, Schraven learned that death isn’t always a taboo subject. In some Muslim or Hindu traditions, for example, it’s common for the deceased’s family to wash and prepare the body to be buried or cremated.
“There are a lot of cultures out there that are less shy about death than we are, and they hide it less,” Schraven said. “I think that that’s really important in as far as spending time with the person that you’ve lost after they’re gone.”
Schraven wants to let families know that this is an option and suggests a ritual that acknowledges each part of their loved one’s body, one at a time — their head, eyes, ears, hands and heart.
“It’s just a really beautiful way to say, ‘We honor your body and what you did for us while you were here, and we are giving you the opportunity to go and be at peace,’” Schraven said.
Schraven is also starting a death and grief book club at Author Apothecary & Bookstore in Oshkosh, which will meet the last Thursday of the month starting Sept. 24. The goal is to normalize the conversation around death and dying through discussing books like “Lost Souls Meet Under A Full Moon” by Mizuki Tsujimura.
“I don’t advocate for censoring death,” Schraven said. “It happens to all of us, and the more openly and freely we can talk about it, the better prepared we are for when that eventuality happens.”
This story is part of Meet a Neighbor, an ongoing feature series focused on the people who make a difference in northeastern Wisconsin. Know someone we should spotlight?Nominate them here.
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Nebraska and Montana implemented the new work requirement rules for Medicaid recipients earlier this year.
In Nebraska, officials say there’s been confusion about basic eligibility, with some people who should have received exemptions being denied coverage due to procedural errors.
Montana leaders stressed the importance of communication, particularly to Native American tribes, who should be exempt from the new rules.
Officials in Wisconsin say they’re implementing ways to automatically determine whether someone is working or if they’re required to follow the new rules.
Federal officials also narrowed the definition of medical frailty, meaning that people who have Medicaid because they are too medically frail to work will be required to prove their condition and the fact that it prevents them from working.
Starting in January, some Wisconsinites must prove they meet federal work requirements to enroll in Medicaid. Around 63,000 people are at risk of losing coverage, state officials say. It’s part of an effort by the Trump administration to reduce “waste, fraud and abuse” in the program and reduce federal spending by $326 billion over 10 years.
As Wisconsin prepares to implement the measures detailed by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states like Nebraska and Montana have already put work requirements into effect. How the process is unfolding offers key lessons for states like Wisconsin facing a Jan. 1 deadline.
Who needs to meet work requirements?
The new Medicaid requirements apply to states like Nebraska and Montana that voted to expand Medicaid to families living at 138% of the poverty level — with the exception of a few states that submitted a waiver to partially expand Medicaid, like Wisconsin.
That program, called BadgerCare Plus, applies to individuals who live at or below the federal poverty level — $33,000 annually for a family of four — as compared to the $45,540 income limit for expansion states.
Only childless adults aged 19 to 64 under the BadgerCare Plus program must meet work requirements — about 200,000 people, according to state officials. That means parents of dependent children under age 19 and people with coverage other than BadgerCare Plus, such as SSI Medicaid or home- and community-based service programs, are exempt.
Other exempt groups include Native Americans, pregnant or postpartum people, caregivers of young children or disabled individuals, veterans with a total disability rating, participants in addiction or rehab programs, and those too medically frail to work.
Starting Jan. 1, 2027, new BadgerCare Plus applicants must show they worked, volunteered or attended school for at least 80 hours in the previous month, or prove they were exempt for that month.
Current BadgerCare Plus members will face the requirements beginning in March 2027. They must show they met the work requirement in any one month of the last 12, or that they are exempt. They can show they received at least $580 in income in a single month or completed combined activities adding up to 80 hours.
In July, Wisconsin Department of Health Services Secretary Kirsten Johnson told reporters officials aim to automate the process as much as possible.
Those system changes will cost an estimated $10 million in the first year, Wisconsin Medicaid Director Amanda Dreyer confirmed, which will be split between the state and federal government.
(Courtesy of KFF)
Nebraska’s early lesson
Nebraska became the first state to implement the new requirements on May 1.
Officials began to disenroll Nebraskans who didn’t meet the requirements on Aug. 1. Nebraska Medicaid Director Drew Gonshorowski told Tradeoffs in July roughly 200 people could lose coverage on that day. The state Department of Health and Human Services has not released official numbers.
The state sent more than 75,000 letters, 38,000 text messages and 10,000 emails to notify people of the change. Amy Behnke, CEO of the Health Center Association of Nebraska, told Wisconsin Watch some residents still had basic eligibility questions.
“There’s some confusion over who the work requirements apply to and who they don’t apply to,” Behnke said. “The communication that went out from the state was pretty lengthy. It was about four pages long and at a collegiate reading level, and so it was a lot for somebody to digest.”
It’s also hard to know whether someone is part of the Medicaid expansion without contacting the state directly.
“Our health centers don’t have a really good way of being able to look that up,” she said.
Her organization supports Nebraska’s federally qualified health centers, which provide low-cost medical care and help people apply for Medicaid.
She’s already seen patients have their Medicaid applications denied due to procedural errors. One woman was denied because she didn’t meet work requirements — even though pregnancy made her exempt.
“She was able to get her Medicaid restored,” Behnke said. “But that’s always been our fear – that somebody’s not going to know that they’ve lost their coverage until they show up to pick up a prescription or they show up for a medical appointment.”
A stethoscope sits on a table at the Bread of Healing clinic on Nov. 24, 2025, in Milwaukee. Officials in Nebraska, who implemented work requirements early, say they’ve had to work through issues like figuring out whether someone is part of the Medicaid expansion population or if they were denied coverage because of a procedural error. (Jonathan Aguilar / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service / CatchLight Local)
Residents can call the state’s Medicaid help line, but wait times have stretched as long as 90 minutes, Behnke said. She recommends states consider hiring additional caseworkers, which Nebraska has not done.
“They are hardworking individuals (at the call center), and there is just an additional load of work and information that’s needed that comes with these requirements,” Behnke said.
Wisconsin DHS plans to use the additional FoodShare staff secured last year to help with implementing Medicaid requirements, Johnson said, noting the increased budget will add flexibility for other staff to help Wisconsinites.
Behnke urged Wisconsin to prioritize flexibility in implementing the program. She highlighted that Nebraska requires members to meet requirements in just one month of the last 12 and allows individuals to self-attest to medical frailty — policies Wisconsin DHS confirmed it will follow.
A balancing act in Montana
Montana also implemented work requirements on July 1 — the first state to do so after the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released stricter guidelines on medical frailty. For three months, Montana enrollees won’t be penalized if they fail to document community engagement hours.
Dr. Aaron Wernham, CEO of the Montana Healthcare Foundation, said the effects won’t become clear until Oct. 1 – the first day the state begins to disenroll people. The foundation estimates 29,000 people could lose coverage.
Wernham said it remains unclear how Native Americans, who are exempt from the requirements, will be asked to document their status. The state had limited interaction with the tribes and other stakeholders on how to communicate the change, he said, and urged Wisconsin officials to engage those groups now.
Wisconsin could improve implementation by working with partners such as Covering Wisconsin to develop forms, define medical frailty and plan outreach, Wernham said.
Montana has effectively automated systems to determine whether someone is working, Wernham said. But automatically verifying medical exemptions has been more difficult as officials struggle to access claims data, the Montana Free Press reported.
Defining medical frailty
The challenge comes as federal officials have tightened the definition of medical frailty. Rather than automatically exempting people with certain medical conditions, the rules require people to prove their condition and show that it significantly prevents them from working.
The tightened medical frailty definition has overshadowed concerns over Montana’s ability to automate processes, Wernham said.
“There are many patients with cancer that may have a disease that will be lethal if not treated, and yet they might not be too sick to work,” Wernham said. “The real question is, what’s going to happen with those people who have a very serious illness, any doctor would consider them medically frail, and yet it may be hard to say they’re too sick to work?”
An exam room is seen at the Mayo Clinic Health Systems clinic in Arcadia, Wis., on Sept. 19, 2019. The area’s hospital closed in 2011, and this clinic was built to meet the needs of the area’s rural residents. Officials expect rural hospitals to be hit the hardest by Medicaid cuts. (Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch)
For the first year, people can self-attest that they are too medically frail to work. Wisconsin officials confirmed DHS will rely on self-attestation and existing diagnoses codes, reassuring providers they would not have to determine medical frailty. But in 2028, states will have to determine how to verify those exemptions while risking federal audits.
Montana and other states should outline their plans for monitoring who is disenrolled from Medicaid and the potential impacts, Wernham said. That’s something Wisconsin has done by announcing that roughly 63,000 are at risk of losing Medicaid due to a lack of work history on file.
“States aren’t always eager to share their data, especially if it doesn’t look good with the public,” Wernham said. “But the fact is that transparency with regard to data on this program leads to better government.”
State budget woes
Medicaid funding is often the largest source of federal funds for states, so it can have a big impact on their budgets. State Medicaid budgets could be reduced by an estimated $665 billion through 2034 under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
This leaves officials with few choices: raise taxes, cut other programs or cut Medicaid — which would mean reducing provider rates or limiting benefits or coverage. The Congressional Budget Office estimated 10 million more people will be uninsured nationwide by 2034 as a result of the new law.
The cuts could affect the entire health care system, even those who are insured, said Vaishu Jawahar, director of policy programs at the national health care advocacy nonprofit Protect our Care.
Programs could be cut or premiums will increase because hospital budgets will be strained. Hospitals could face more uncompensated care as more uninsured patients seek treatment, tightening budgets and potentially increasing costs for privately insured patients.
Jawahar said people who lose insurance may forgo preventive care until their conditions become severe enough to require emergency treatment.
“They’re still going to have to provide care to uninsured people who will come in sicker,” Jawahar said. “… And so, how do hospitals make up for that? They will have to hike costs on people with employer-based insurance.”
Medicaid cuts are expected to hit rural hospitals hardest. A March report by Public Citizen found 446 hospitals nationwide were at risk of closing or reducing services due to cuts. Samantha Peck, rural hospitals and clinics program manager for the Wisconsin Office of Rural Health, manages funds that benefit critical access hospitals across the state.
About 13% of patients in Wisconsin hospitals use Medicaid, but Peck said critical access hospitals in Door County, Oconto, Shawano and New London average about 48% of patients on Medicaid, leaving them particularly vulnerable if more patients lose coverage.
Maternal and mental health programs could be among the first cut, Peck said.
“The biggest worry is that community hospitals will start reducing service lines,” Peck said. “What we’re already seeing is a reduction in maternal care, specifically labor and delivery.”
The NorthEast Wisconsin Community Clinic mobile unit is parked across the street from St. John’s Park on June 18, 2026, in Green Bay, Wis. Clinic leaders said 47% of its clients were on Medicaid in 2025. As a result, they are using the mobile unit to educate people about the coming work requirements. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Clinics prepare to help Wisconsinites navigate changes
NorthEast Wisconsin Community Clinic, a free and low-cost health center in Green Bay, is educating people about the new requirements with its mobile outreach vehicle.
In 2025, 47% of the center’s clients were on Medicaid, which means it’s preparing its budget to receive less federal reimbursement next year. Executive Director Kim Franzen said the clinic will continue serving the uninsured.
“While I’m concerned, I want to make sure that as a health center, it’s our responsibility to take care of people regardless of their ability to pay,” Franzen said.
Franzen worries people might not realize their coverage was denied before racking up medical bills.
“If you lose your Medicaid, now a person could potentially have four therapy sessions (before realizing) that ‘Oh, I didn’t know my coverage lapsed,’ and then as an organization, we have to step back and go, ‘OK, so do we bill the person? Do you write off the expenses?’” she said.
Adam VanSpankeren is the navigator program manager for Covering Wisconsin, which receives federal funding from the Affordable Care Act Navigator Program and responds to calls about health insurance.
Despite recent funding cuts, VanSpankeren hopes people affected by the changes call Covering Wisconsin for help.
“I don’t love that people are affected, but that means we’re going to be able to help those people,” VanSpankeren said. “It’s the people that don’t call us that I worry more about.”
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Social media videos started popping up earlier this year with users complaining about the cost of living in Green Bay, other cities in Wisconsin and other battleground states.
The people posting the videos make claims that run the gamut – some factual, some misleading and some totally false.
Wisconsin Watch and Sunlight Research Desk looked into the trend, but couldn’t determine who – if anyone – was paying the creators to make the videos.
If the videos were paid for, creators not disclosing that paid relationship could be in violation of federal prohibitions on deceptive advertising, one political advertising expert said.
Republicans and Democrats are increasingly paying for user-generated content, raising questions about the future of election campaigning in the digital age.
In May, TikTok user @lifewithjacob1 uploaded a 20-second video blasting Green Bay’s rent prices.
“Why is rent in Wisconsin so expensive right now?” he said. “I’m on a website looking for a new spot. I can’t find anything under $4,000 in Green Bay, Wisconsin.”
He went on to post more than 100 more, bemoaning skyrocketing prices for gas, housing and even dinner at Culver’s. Almost every video on the account, which was created in May, focused on how expensive life is in Green Bay.
The problem? Many of the videos seem to be pure fiction.
It’s not just that the average rent in Green Bay is a quarter of what he claims, according to July figures from Zillow. It’s also that his name isn’t Jacob, and it’s unclear if he’s ever lived in Wisconsin.
Through a reverse image search, Wisconsin Watch and Muckrock’s Sunlight Research Desk identified the man in the videos as Connor Printz, a self-described “user-generated content creator” who gets paid by brands to make social media posts that don’t look like ads. It’s a burgeoning industry, and one that many Americans may never have heard of — though they’ve likely seen these kinds of posts.
This model is spreading nationwide as dark money groups try to sway voters stealthily by hiring social media creators to push their agendas. Wisconsin Watch and Sunlight Research Desk identified more than a dozen users publishing near-identical messaging about the cost of living in battleground states — claims that oscillate between factual, misleading and downright false.
The videos targeting Wisconsin don’t mention specific political parties or candidates, but they’re strikingly similar to videos where creators in other states supported or knocked certain candidates — part of what MS NOW called a “secret paid influencer campaign.”
It’s unclear who, if anyone, is funding the videos about Green Bay and Wisconsin, or what the goal is. Printz declined to answer questions, and the videos and biography on his account have since been deleted, a phenomenon common with short-term social media campaigns.
The videos themselves do not indicate whether they were paid for. If they were, one political advertising expert said, creators not disclosing that paid relationship could violate federal prohibitions on deceptive advertising. The trend raises questions about the future of political campaigning and the reforms needed to protect elections in the modern age.
Meanwhile, though many of the statistics the creators shared are false — Green Bay is often hailed as a particularly affordable city — the posts speak to a question increasingly on Americans’ minds, one that could prove pivotal in upcoming elections: Why is everything so expensive?
Making money on misinformation?
To try to understand who is behind the Green Bay videos, Wisconsin Watch and Sunlight Research Desk researched creators using public records databases, scoured campaign finance records, conducted reverse image searches, interviewed elected officials representing the city and compiled more than 5,000 videos.
Among the findings: The person shaking his head disapprovingly over the high cost of living in northeast Wisconsin is a former college basketball player turned social media creator whose LinkedIn profile says he’s based in Los Angeles.
While @lifewithjacob1’s TikTok bio said he was “Green Bay born and raised,” his Claremont McKenna College basketball webpage says he’s from Waterbury, Connecticut, and attended high school in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Printz claimed to live in Green Bay and sometimes referred to moving from California to Wisconsin in TikTok videos posted under the @lifewithjacob1 account. Wisconsin Watch and Sunlight Research Desk found no evidence he has ever lived in Wisconsin.
Today, according to his LinkedIn, Printz works as a user-generated content creator through SideShift, a platform where organizations hire content creators. His account states he manages between six and 10 social media accounts at a time, “completing campaigns for brands.” SideShift did not respond to Wisconsin Watch’s questions.
According to the American Marketing Association, user-generated content is “sponsored content that looks and feels like genuine customer posts.” While the person on screen has likely received payment or free products, the videos are meant to feel like they’re ranting or raving about something of their own accord. It’s typically a cheaper way to advertise than making sponsorship deals with high-profile influencers or celebrities.
When those posts endorse or recommend brands, products or services, federal law and platform policies require they be labeled as ads or sponsored content. TikTok did not respond when Wisconsin Watch asked if its policies require such disclosures for videos like Printz’s.
Political organizations are increasingly buying this form of content, eager to leverage its authentic — and often undetectable — feel.
Both political parties are hiring influencers to build online enthusiasm for their candidates. Democrats have poured tens of millions of dollars into these secret influencer campaigns since their 2024 election defeat, according to a New York Times report. The influencer firm Creator Grid, which has received funds from the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, boasts connecting “Republican candidates with the internet’s most powerful conservative influencers,” the Times reported. This election cycle, MS NOW reported that influencers received payment to post favorable content about politicians in California and Michigan and attack a candidate in Illinois.
Wisconsin Watch and Sunlight Research Desk found similar videos about the cost of living in cities across the country: La Crosse. Milwaukee. Madison. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Charlotte, North Carolina. Atlanta, Georgia. Many of the users creating these videos have similar usernames, including @rantswithsaum, @rantswithcarlyy or @rants.with.k. Wisconsin Watch contacted several of the users behind the accounts but none responded.
It’s unclear who paid for the videos Wisconsin Watch identified. The Sunlight Research team searched spending records for registered political action committees and political candidates in key swing states but found no evidence of payments to the influencers or influencer platforms tied to these videos. And while Wisconsinites will elect a new governor in November, spokespeople for candidates David Crowley and Tom Tiffany both said they had not paid for or even seen the videos in question.
What is clear is that this type of political content is in demand: Wisconsin Watch found a listing on SideShift from “Project Bullhorn” offering creators $1,500 monthly to “speak on the rising crisis of affordability in the United States ahead of the 2026 midterms.” Project Bullhorn is one of several influencer efforts the New York Times reports Democratic donors are funding. A leader of the initiative declined to answer questions from Wisconsin Watch on the record.
‘More expensive than NYC’
From May through July, Printz posted roughly two videos a day about Green Bay’s cost of living.
In May, he claimed gas prices in Green Bay soared to almost $7 a gallon. While the Iran war has driven fuel prices up, prices at local pumps peaked this spring around $4.50 a gallon.
“Is Green Bay, Wisconsin, actually more expensive than New York City?” Printz asked in a June video, recounting the experience of a friend who purportedly moved from the Big Apple to Packerland, anticipating a lower cost of living.
“Guess what? It was just as expensive. Rent prices were crazy. Gas was crazy. Culver’s is so expensive, more than almost every restaurant in New York City,” Printz said.
In another video, he said tuition at Wisconsin colleges now cost $70,000 annually.
“Just makes you question if it’s worth it now,” reads text on the video of Printz repeatedly shaking his head. According to CollegeBoard data, Wisconsin’s public universities charged in-state students $10,600 on average in 2025.
💵$4k rent? $7 gas? More expensive than NYC? A deluge of TikTok and Instagram videos are making outlandish claims about Wisconsin’s cost of living. In some cases, the people behind them – self-described “user-generated content creators” — are using fake names or don’t even appear to live in Wisconsin. The videos seem to be part of a growing trend of paying influencers to post on political topics, often without any disclosures. Here’s why it matters. Read more at the link in our bio.
In addition to the overblown numbers, locals might spot other faux pas. In one video, Printz asks for feedback from his “fellow Wisconsiners,” a term that would make any self-respecting Wisconsinite cringe.
Green Bay resident Allyson Brunette started seeing the videos pop up in her TikTok feed around May. The inaccuracies were obvious, she said, especially the part about $4,000 rent.
What was less obvious was where all these videos came from. She clicked on the creators’ profiles and discovered that not only did they often follow each other, but some of the users following them were making parallel videos elsewhere.
“It seemed that there was almost this network of these avatars with similar usernames and almost identical content in different cities and states across the U.S.,” said Brunette, who wrote to Wisconsin Watch in May about her suspicions.
“I was like, am I nuts? I think this is a coordinated effort,” Brunette said in a July interview. “What immediately struck my mind, as someone who’s 38 and lived through the Facebook misinformation of the last few elections, was: Is this gearing up to shift political (opinions) before the gubernatorial election?”
Brunette isn’t the only TikTok user raising the alarm about these types of claims. On many of Printz’s videos, commenters called out misinformation and offered the facts.
“Obvious rage bait,” wrote one user in response to the claim that Green Bay is more expensive than New York City.
“Literally nothing you said is true,” wrote another.
Is it legal?
Experts say this novel influence model seems to test the limits of laws governing campaign finance and advertising.
Christopher Terry is an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Minnesota who studies political advertising. He told Wisconsin Watch these types of videos could potentially violate state and federal law, even if they don’t mention candidates, parties, elections or products.
Paid posts are a form of commercial speech, which is not subject to the same First Amendment protections as standard political speech, Terry said. If creators don’t disclose that they were paid to create posts, that could violate the Federal Trade Commission prohibition on deceptive practices, Terry said, though he noted the agency has not enforced that policy against social media influencers to date.
“It has warned a bunch of them. It has threatened a ton of them, but it has not actually brought an enforcement action against any of them,” Terry said.
Any posts that mislead voters about candidates or referendums could also potentially violate a Wisconsin statute barring “false representation … intended to affect voting in an election,” Terry said.
“Any chucklehead in any northern Wisconsin bar will give you an opinion on a political thing … That’s fine,” Terry said. “If he’s paid to think that and paid to sit in the bar and talk to people about it, that’s something else, right?”
Meanwhile, democracy advocates have called on the Federal Election Commission to clarify laws to explicitly require that influencers post disclaimers indicating who paid for their political content.
Prices, misinformation on the rise
While many of these videos are riddled with false information, they channel popular frustrations over real spikes in prices.
“Gas is not $7 a gallon in Green Bay, and average rent is not $4,000. But they’re both more expensive than they used to be … It’s simply true that people are anxious and concerned about the cost of living,” said state Sen. Jamie Wall, D-Green Bay. “And I hear that from people across the political spectrum.”
Across the country, consumers have been sour on the economy for years, said Joanne Hsu, who oversees the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers. The monthly consumer sentiment survey, first conducted in 1946, asks Americans how they feel about the economy and where it’s headed.
The answer in recent months: still not good. When survey workers asked Americans in June about their personal finances, 56% brought up high prices without being prompted.
In Green Bay, where the average home value is about $290,000, the cost of living remains relatively low. But local residents are feeling the strain of rising prices too, state Rep. Amaad Rivera-Wagner, D-Green Bay, said.
Still, he fears the misinformation could stifle Green Bay’s future.
“That’s one of the most frustrating things about social media is that we are now fighting an army of misinformation, sometimes by innocent bystanders, but sometimes by bad actors,” Rivera-Wagner said.
“This is where that confusion can actually cost or have real impact,” he said. “There might be people in and around our community or businesses thinking about moving or working in our community, and they’re seeing a larger narrative that is not only inaccurate, but doesn’t actually talk about how much work we’ve done to make Green Bay still one of the most affordable places to live in the state or the country.”
This story is part of a collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Door County Knock, exploring the factors that make pet ownership in Door County a pricey challenge. Read Wisconsin Watch’s story here.
Click here to read highlights from the story
Pet owners told Door County Knock about how they struggled to find rental properties that accept their furry friends.
Places that do often charge additional deposits tack on monthly charges per pet ranging from $25 to $75 or more and implement weight and breed restrictions.
Officials with the Wisconsin Humane Society say 24% of people who surrender a pet statewide cite housing as the reason.
Experts say dogs in particular can increase insurance costs, as dog bites are the number one claim under homeowner’s insurance nationwide.
Landlords say the extra deposit and fees help cover damage and labor costs for picking up after pets when owners fail to do so.
Owning a pet and finding rental housing can be difficult, especially in a tight rental market like Door County. As of May 2025, Sturgeon Bay’s vacancy rate — the percentage of total housing available – was less than 1%, and local housing experts say the rest of the county is similar.
Add pet policies and extra fees, and finding affordable rental housing when you have pets is an even bigger challenge.
Laurel Grey’s dog, pictured in her Sturgeon Bay apartment, was grandfathered in when the property owner’s policy was changed to prohibit pets. She pays an additional $75 per month. (Courtesy of Laurel Grey)
Laurel Grey moved to Door County with two dogs and two cats. She had to stay in a motel while she was looking for housing, before selling her home in Onalaska. Grey said she called every place she could find and eventually got into a property in Sturgeon Bay.
The apartment’s pet policy included an extra deposit and a $50 per animal per month fee — an extra $200 a month. Three of her pets died before apartment management changed the policy to prohibit pets, except for service animals or emotional support animals (ESAs).
Though Grey’s remaining dog was grandfathered in and allowed to stay, she said, the monthly fee was raised to $75 per animal per month. The issue of pets and housing is one of economic inequality, she said.
Anybody who can’t afford to own a home or chooses to rent is either not allowed to have a pet or has to pay significantly more in housing costs, according to Grey.
“Do you realize how classist that is?… I used to be judgy of surrendering pets, but there may truly be no other option for some people,” she said.
Shelters feel the fallout
Housing insecurity and a lack of affordable pet-friendly housing are among the biggest reasons animals are surrendered to the Wisconsin Humane Society, according to Corey Viars, the organization’s media specialist for its Green Bay and Door County campuses.
When people surrender pets to the Humane Society, they fill out an intake form that includes the reason they are doing so, Viars said, and “housing” is cited by 24% of people across the state. Of that number, almost half are related to moving, and a third are related to landlords not permitting an animal.
“One of the most common reasons for surrender is moving and simply not being able to find pet-friendly housing,” Viars said. Pet deposits and pet rent increases add additional barriers to pet ownership, he added.
The Door County Humane Society does not have as many animals as some of the other campuses, according to Viars, because it is one of the smallest campuses in the state. However, seven animals were adopted from Door County during the first week of August, he said.
Strong emotions are almost always involved when people are giving up a member of their households.
“Our intake desk is an emotional place, and those surrendering due to financial or housing reasons are no exception,” Viars said. People are “heartbroken” when they have to surrender a beloved pet because they have nowhere to go with them, he added.
More than just a pet
Pets are more often than not a member of the family, according to Door County veterinarian Dr. Sherry Billett.
In her practice at Peninsula Veterinary Hospital, Billett said she has seen firsthand the “substantial and oftentimes quite devastating” emotional impact of having to give up a beloved pet, but it is not a very common occurrence among her patients.
Dr. Sherry Billett and Brianna Derbique treat Toffee at Peninsula Veterinary Hospital in Sturgeon Bay, Wis., on Aug. 12, 2026. Billett told Door County Knock that most pet owners she’s spoken with refuse to give up their furry family member. They’d rather continue to search for housing, even if it’s outside of Door County. (Kara Counard for Wisconsin Watch)
Most of the pet owners she encounters refuse to give up a pet and continue to search for housing, she said, even if it means moving out of Door County.
“This is not hard to understand since, in the vast majority of cases, pets are members of the family, so it makes sense that the same loving dedication be extended to them as well as human family members,” Billett said in an email.
She is aware of cases where a pet owner has to move to an assisted living or similar facility that will not allow pets, and others where individuals and families have difficulty finding any housing that will allow pets even with a deposit.
Billett also sees the numerous benefits of caring for pets that extend beyond emotional well-being, she said.
“Pets provide many people with the type of loving daily caretaking interactions that help prevent loneliness, that promote responsibility, that provide a reason to care for their own personal health in order to be able to take care of their pets, and that facilitate meeting other people when out on a walk or at a park,” she said.
Aging and Disability Resource Director Jennifer Fitzgerald said she has also seen firsthand how pets help alleviate isolation and improve quality of life for both pets and the ADRC’s consumers. This becomes especially important when older adults lose a spouse, she added.
ADRC clients encounter housing challenges involving pets, according to Fitzgerald, but the agency does not get directly involved. Rather, it provides people with a housing list as a resource, she said.
The risks landlords weigh
The Door County Economic Development Corporation keeps an inventory of available rental properties in the county, although it is not exhaustive, according to Executive Director Michelle Lawrie. However, the inventory can provide a snapshot of what pet owners encounter when looking for a place to live.
The list contains 42 properties, and 21 of them explicitly identify themselves as pet-friendly. The rest do not specify whether they allow pets.
A surrendered cat is pictured at the Wisconsin Humane Society’s Door County campus. The organization has campuses in Green Bay, Door County, Ozaukee County, Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha. Because Door County is one of the smaller communities the agency serves, more resources can be allocated toward feline ringworm treatment. Animals are transferred into and out of Door County, based on animal needs and space considerations. (Heidi Hodges / Door County Knock)
Rebecca Willoughby is the property manager for SCS Sturgeon Bay Estates, a market rate housing development. All of the properties owned by SCS are pet-friendly, she said, but they have restrictions against certain breeds.
A $250 deposit is required for pets, as well as a $50 per pet per month fee, Willoughby said. ESA and service animal owners are not charged additional fees or deposits.
The deposit and fees are to offset the costs of pet damage, she said, such as cats or dogs urinating or defecating indoors, or scratching things. Cat urine can be especially difficult to remove, she said. Renters sometimes do not pick up after their pets outdoors, which leads to more labor for maintenance services, Willoughby added.
The tight rental market in Door County does not factor into the policy, she said, and renter eligibility hinges on things like income qualifications and other leasing criteria.
Dog-related liability is a real insurance concern as well, according to Andrew Franken, president of the Wisconsin Insurance Alliance.
Insurance costs for property owners can be impacted by the presence of a dog, Franken said, and all companies handle the issue differently.
Nationally, dog bites are the number one claim under homeowner’s insurance. In Door County, there were approximately 63 dog bites reported to the Door County Department of Health and Human Services in 2025, according to data provided by county staff.
When a dog bites someone a second time in Wisconsin, there is an automatic “double damage” law. It means the dog owner can be liable for twice the amount of damages if the owner knew about the first bite.
Breed restrictions
Pet-friendly rental housing often specifies what types of dogs can live at a property.
Larger dogs are disproportionately affected by restrictions, Viars said. Fifty-pound weight limits are common, and some insurers and rental companies do not allow specific breeds. Pit bull terriers, Doberman pinschers and Rottweilers are often the focus of these types of restrictions, according to rental industry sources.
Deanie Sprau’s golden retriever, Abby, is pictured at Peninsula Veterinary Hospital in Sturgeon Bay, Wis., on Aug. 12, 2026. (Kara Counard for Wisconsin Watch)
The Humane Society has stopped labeling dogs by breed, according to Viars, because breed identification can be inaccurate.
“When we used to assign a breed, it was often a guess proven wrong by DNA tests,” Viars said. “We focus on the personality and attributes of each individual dog during adoption counseling.”
Knock contacted Door County rental properties represented in DCEDC’s inventory to find out more pet policy details, and they ran a gamut of restrictions, with several mentioning breed and weight limits.
What does ‘pet-friendly’ mean?
Among Door County property listings, the following pet policies were indicated:
no additional pet fee
$25 per month per pet
$45 per month per pet
$50 per month per pet
$75 per month per pet
$250 deposit per pet
half-month’s rent
breed/weight restrictions
A renter with two dogs might be looking at an extra $100 per month in pet rent. That’s $1,200 a year before any deposit. Landlords say the fees correlate directly to expected costs brought on by animals.
Balancing pets, people and housing
The Humane Society said more pet-friendly affordable housing would result in fewer surrenders. The problem is not only a Door County one, according to Viars, but state and nationwide.
Many of the people in Grey’s apartment complex are older adults — she herself is 69 — and she knows at least a dozen residents who would take a cat. One of her neighbors, who just turned 80, moved into the complex after a divorce, she said. She used to own cats and she adores them, Grey said.
“It’s just sad. She’s someone who is lonely, who would benefit from having pets,” she said.
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