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Since launching their campaigns for Wisconsin governor, both Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and Democratic Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley have touted the concept of local control.

Each argues that communities deserve “a seat at the table” in matters of commercial and industrial land use, but their records as public servants illustrate contrasts about when competing local and state interests should carry the day.

The issue is worth considering in this year’s midterm election as Wisconsinites face mounting energy costs and a queue of construction proposals for new transmission lines, power plants and data centers.

“I want to get Madison out of the way where it makes sense,” Tiffany told attendees of the annual Wisconsin Counties Association conference in September. “Local officials understand their communities, and state government should be working with them rather than creating additional obstacles.”

Yet Tiffany is an architect of some of the most consequential environmental regulatory rewriting of the past 15 years, stripping municipalities of several powers to regulate shoreland development and mining in their own backyards.

Crowley has worked with the state to address Milwaukee County’s budget issues. Just a few years ago, Milwaukee County was heading for a “fiscal cliff,” the culmination of a decades-long pension scandal. 

Without state intervention and the “tools to raise additional revenue and fund local priorities,” the county would face “tough decisions,” Crowley wrote in 2022. The following year, the Legislature authorized Milwaukee County to increase its local sales tax rate by almost half a percentage point.

Neither candidate has offered many specifics in their campaign pitches, and neither campaign responded to requests for comment.

But their policymaking records offer some clues.

During Tiffany’s time in the Wisconsin Legislature and Congress, he has conveyed a general desire to get the state and federal government “out of the way” of local decision-making. Crowley’s time as a county executive and state Assembly member highlights his support for public spending on property development and the creation of minimum environmental standards to protect public health.

Local control and mining operations

Crowley has argued for “a case-by-case” treatment of mining projects without staking a claim over the industry’s merits.

Still, he continues to push for amassing consensus and would not rule out allowing new mining permits before consulting with local communities. 

In January, when a PBS reporter asked him to explain how he would respond to new mining permit requests, Crowley said he would convene a work group of experts to obtain the best information possible.

“It’s about working with the local municipalities, working with the groups and the stakeholders that are on the ground,” he said.

Comparatively, Tiffany’s time in the Wisconsin Senate from 2013 through 2020 saw him take up the mantle of getting the miner, emblazoned on the Great Seal of the State of Wisconsin, back to work. He ushered in several bills intended to loosen restrictions that businesses said stymied economic growth.

The first of several successful proposals started with the 2013 reworking of the state’s iron mining law, which instructed regulators to start the mining permitting process on the presumption that some environmental damage to wetlands is a necessary operating condition of the industry. 

Supporters maintained the reforms assured developers they could expect regulatory certainty and expeditious review of new projects.

A few years later, prompted by a bill Tiffany co-authored, the Legislature lifted the state’s moratorium on sulfide mining, which can release toxins, and stopped requiring companies to prove they could successfully operate and close sulfide mines elsewhere in the United States or Canada without polluting the environment.

Tiffany also sought to curb local authority too when regulations posed risks to obstructing economic development.

Two 2013 bills proposed restricting local governments’ ability to regulate nonmetallic mining, including frac sand operations, and would have prohibited them from creating water quality and air quality standards, permits, restrictions and monitoring requirements.

Tiffany told Wisconsin Watch at the time that some local units of government are “trying to establish mini-DNRs,” by conducting their own air and water testing. “That’s the purview of the state,” he said. 

The contentious proposal didn’t make it to the chamber floor for a vote.

Local control and land acquisition

In 2015, Tiffany co-sponsored legislation that took the opposite view on local control in the context of land acquisition.

Republicans and Democrats have long clashed on how to finance the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program. The fund enables the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to purchase private land and easements for habitat preservation and recreation or issue grants to organizations or municipalities to do the same. 

Both Tiffany and Crowley say they support allocating money for the program, but Tiffany has long expressed reservations about its focus on purchasing new property.

In 2015, Tiffany sought to curb state authority by requiring the Wisconsin DNR to obtain approval from every municipality and the county in which the property is located before acquiring new properties. The bill didn’t advance to a vote. Tiffany now says he would fund the program so long as the dollars maintain existing public lands.

Crowley has said repeatedly he supports strengthening the program, drawing parallels to his support for county lands. 

In the last five Milwaukee County budget cycles, he recommended county leaders spend tens of millions of dollars on parks and trails, drainage infrastructure and waterfront protection.

In other environmental areas, Crowley also has reined in local control by creating baseline standards. As a state legislator, he backed bills that would have imposed statewide requirements for mandatory lead testing and inspections and restricted the ability of municipalities to privatize their public water or sewer utilities.

Wisconsin governor candidates talk about supporting local control, but their records are mixed depending on the issue is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Milwaukee faces a big challenge: replacing tens of thousands of lead water pipes that pose a potential health risk to residents — all by a 2037 deadline imposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

At the end of 2025, Milwaukee Water Works still had over 55,000 residential homes or properties with lead water lines on the utility-owned side, customer-owned side or both. The utility had yet to identify the makeup of pipelines serving another 27,000 properties. 

But Milwaukee can’t replace all the pipelines at once — and some neighborhoods face greater risks from lead exposure than others.

So which areas should officials prioritize? 

Part of the answer lies in a surprising place: a tool University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers originally developed to study the connection between neighborhood disadvantage and human health.

Lead does not impact neighborhoods equally

Milwaukee’s pipeline problem dates back to 1872, when the city mandated the use of lead in service lines. Although the city abolished the mandate in 1962, older lead pipelines remained in many older residential buildings.

Downtown Milwaukee includes a scattering of homes with non-lead service lines — many due to having already been replaced by the city.

Milwaukee has replaced nearly 15,000 pipelines since beginning its broader efforts in 2017, said Milwaukee Water Works Superintendent Patrick Pauly. When federal funding became available under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the utility expanded its effort, increasing the pace from about 1,000 lines a year to 5,000. 

The expansion included a priority program launched in 2024, which focuses on equity and offers free replacements to eligible residents. 

But scaling up the effort required more than funds and construction crews. The city also needed a systematic way to decide where to work — one that recognizes disproportionate risks across the city.

“We needed to expand the lead service line replacement program, and we needed to develop a, for lack of a better word, defensible method to expand that program,” Pauly said.

What Milwaukee’s priority system looks like

The resulting system assigned each property a score based on three factors: 

• 70% comes from the Area Deprivation Index (ADI), a measure of relative socioeconomic disadvantage developed by UW-Madison researchers. 
• 25% comes from the percentage of local children who tested positive for lead poisoning. 
• 5% comes from lead service line density in the area.

Together, these measures help the utility determine where replacement will yield the highest benefits. 

The city updates each property’s score every other year as new information becomes available, Pauly said. 

The scoring weights heavily toward neighborhood disadvantage as broader challenges residents face can compound risks posed by lead exposure. 

Nationwide, communities burdened by economic disadvantages and racial inequalities can face greater risks of lead exposure, according to a Montclair State University study of New Jersey. Such neighborhoods often contain older housing and sit near former industrial sites.

The ADI relies on attempts to quantify disadvantages in Milwaukee, and its origins have little to do with water infrastructure.

A tool developed to understand health disparities

The ADI measures neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage or adverse social exposure using 17 U.S. Census American Community Survey measures. They include factors related to income, education, housing, and employment.

The index assigns scores to census block groups — small geographic areas that generally contain several hundred to a few thousand people.

Block groups receive a national percentile ranking from 1 to 100 or a statewide decile ranking from 1 to 10. Higher rankings indicate greater socioeconomic disadvantage relative to other areas.

Researchers have long recognized that people’s health depends on far more than the medical care they receive. But measuring the influence of social and economic conditions on health isn’t easy.

Dr. Amy Kind has spent much of her career trying to figure that out.

Kind, a professor of geriatrics and gerontology at UW-Madison and founding director of its Center for Health Disparities Research, grew up in Niagara, Wisconsin, before training as a physician. 

During her residency in Boston, she saw that the medicine she prescribed could do only so much when patients returned to homes without healthy food, stable housing or access to other basic resources. Those experiences helped shape her interest in finding ways to measure such disadvantages. 

Researchers have used indexes like ADI since the 1980s. In 2014, Kind led a group of University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health researchers in updating ADI using modern census data, refined it to the census block level and validated its usefulness across several scientific studies. 

“(Like any marker), it may not be the thing that ultimately drives the risk,” Kind said. “But it has been an extremely strong marker that something going on in that area is increasing risk, whatever it might be.”

An unexpected use for health research

“When we first developed the metric, we thought that perhaps it would be used primarily by health systems, primarily in the research community,” Kind said. 

Instead, Kind and her colleagues heard from many community groups and local governments that were interested in using index data to guide their public health work.

Since 2014, the University of Wisconsin has tracked over 3,500 academic papers citing the index and more than 400 examples of its use across different fields. That includes a recent Kind study linking environmental factors to the likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Meanwhile, the index helped officials in Puerto Rico decide where to send nurses to combat dengue fever and the mosquitoes that carry it.

That wide interest prompted Kind to develop the Neighborhood Atlas in 2018, making the data more accessible. 

Kind said she enjoys seeing the index be used in sometimes unexpected ways to address local challenges. That includes Milwaukee’s effort to protect children from lead exposure, where officials are using it as one component of their model. 

Thousands of pipelines replaced, thousands more to go 

Milwaukee Water Works has replaced lead pipes at more than 6,000 properties under its priority program, which launched less than three years ago.

The work has been largely concentrated on the city’s North Side but has also expanded into near South Side neighborhoods. 

Pauly expects the utility to reach a milestone next year of 20,000 lead lines replaced.

But officials will soon face a difficult question: how to pay for replacements after  Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding runs out in 2028.  

One possibility is returning to a funding system that required homeowners to pay part of the cost of replacing the privately owned portion of their service lines. 

“I don’t believe the city has the financial capacity to take on fully funding the private side replacement costs,” Pauly said.

That could present another challenge for a program designed to prioritize neighborhoods where residents already face financial disadvantages.

For now, residents living in homes with lead service lines that are not yet scheduled for replacement can take steps to better understand their own risk. 

Julie LaRose, lead and nutrition program coordinator at the MacCanon Brown Homeless Sanctuary, runs one of the many programs in the city where residents can submit samples of their tap water for free lead testing.

LaRose recognizes residents’ concerns about their tap water. But she also emphasizes that Milwaukee water is highly regulated, and she has not seen any samples tested through her program exceed one part per billion (ppb) of lead. 

That’s far below the FDA limit for lead in bottled water (5 ppb) and the EPA’s threshold for utility action (15 ppb). 

“If you’re nervous about this, let’s test it,” LaRose said.

How a UW tool helps Milwaukee decide which lead pipes to replace first is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Hydrogen has the potential to be a climate-friendly fuel since it doesn’t release carbon dioxide when used as an energy source. Currently, however, most methods for producing hydrogen involve fossil fuels, making hydrogen less of a “green” fuel over its entire life cycle.

A new process developed by MIT engineers could significantly shrink the carbon footprint associated with making hydrogen.

Last year, the team reported that they could produce hydrogen gas by combining seawater, recycled soda cans, and caffeine. The question then was whether the benchtop process could be applied at an industrial scale, and at what environmental cost.

Now, the researchers have carried out a “cradle-to-grave” life cycle assessment, taking into account every step in the process at an industrial scale. For instance, the team calculated the carbon emissions associated with acquiring and processing aluminum, reacting it with seawater to produce hydrogen, and transporting the fuel to gas stations, where drivers could tap into hydrogen tanks to power engines or fuel cell cars. They found that, from end to end, the new process could generate a fraction of the carbon emissions that is associated with conventional hydrogen production.

In a study appearing today in Cell Reports Sustainability, the team reports that for every kilogram of hydrogen produced, the process would generate 1.45 kilograms of carbon dioxide over its entire life cycle. In comparison, fossil-fuel-based processes emit 11 kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of hydrogen generated.

The low-carbon footprint is on par with other proposed “green hydrogen” technologies, such as those powered by solar and wind energy.

“We’re in the ballpark of green hydrogen,” says lead author Aly Kombargi PhD ’25, who graduated this spring from MIT with a doctorate in mechanical engineering. “This work highlights aluminum’s potential as a clean energy source and offers a scalable pathway for low-emission hydrogen deployment in transportation and remote energy systems.”

The study’s MIT co-authors are Brooke Bao, Enoch Ellis, and professor of mechanical engineering Douglas Hart.

Gas bubble

Dropping an aluminum can in water won’t normally cause much of a chemical reaction. That’s because when aluminum is exposed to oxygen, it instantly forms a shield-like layer. Without this layer, aluminum exists in its pure form and can readily react when mixed with water. The reaction that occurs involves aluminum atoms that efficiently break up molecules of water, producing aluminum oxide and pure hydrogen. And it doesn’t take much of the metal to bubble up a significant amount of the gas.

“One of the main benefits of using aluminum is the energy density per unit volume,” Kombargi says. “With a very small amount of aluminum fuel, you can conceivably supply much of the power for a hydrogen-fueled vehicle.”

Last year, he and Hart developed a recipe for aluminum-based hydrogen production. They found they could puncture aluminum’s natural shield by treating it with a small amount of gallium-indium, which is a rare-metal alloy that effectively scrubs aluminum into its pure form. The researchers then mixed pellets of pure aluminum with seawater and observed that the reaction produced pure hydrogen. What’s more, the salt in the water helped to precipitate gallium-indium, which the team could subsequently recover and reuse to generate more hydrogen, in a cost-saving, sustainable cycle.

“We were explaining the science of this process in conferences, and the questions we would get were, ‘How much does this cost?’ and, ‘What’s its carbon footprint?’” Kombargi says. “So we wanted to look at the process in a comprehensive way.”

A sustainable cycle

For their new study, Kombargi and his colleagues carried out a life cycle assessment to estimate the environmental impact of aluminum-based hydrogen production, at every step of the process, from sourcing the aluminum to transporting the hydrogen after production. They set out to calculate the amount of carbon associated with generating 1 kilogram of hydrogen — an amount that they chose as a practical, consumer-level illustration.

“With a hydrogen fuel cell car using 1 kilogram of hydrogen, you can go between 60 to 100 kilometers, depending on the efficiency of the fuel cell,” Kombargi notes.

They performed the analysis using Earthster — an online life cycle assessment tool that draws data from a large repository of products and processes and their associated carbon emissions. The team considered a number of scenarios to produce hydrogen using aluminum, from starting with “primary” aluminum mined from the Earth, versus “secondary” aluminum that is recycled from soda cans and other products, and using various methods to transport the aluminum and hydrogen.

After running life cycle assessments for about a dozen scenarios, the team identified one scenario with the lowest carbon footprint. This scenario centers on recycled aluminum — a source that saves a significant amount of emissions compared with mining aluminum — and seawater — a natural resource that also saves money by recovering gallium-indium. They found that this scenario, from start to finish, would generate about 1.45 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every kilogram of hydrogen produced. The cost of the fuel produced, they calculated, would be about $9 per kilogram, which is comparable to the price of hydrogen that would be generated with other green technologies such as wind and solar energy.

The researchers envision that if the low-carbon process were ramped up to a commercial scale, it would look something like this: The production chain would start with scrap aluminum sourced from a recycling center. The aluminum would be shredded into pellets and treated with gallium-indium. Then, drivers could transport the pretreated pellets as aluminum “fuel,” rather than directly transporting hydrogen, which is potentially volatile. The pellets would be transported to a fuel station that ideally would be situated near a source of seawater, which could then be mixed with the aluminum, on demand, to produce hydrogen. A consumer could then directly pump the gas into a car with either an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell.

The entire process does produce an aluminum-based byproduct, boehmite, which is a mineral that is commonly used in fabricating semiconductors, electronic elements, and a number of industrial products. Kombargi says that if this byproduct were recovered after hydrogen production, it could be sold to manufacturers, further bringing down the cost of the process as a whole.

“There are a lot of things to consider,” Kombargi says. “But the process works, which is the most exciting part. And we show that it can be environmentally sustainable.”

The group is continuing to develop the process. They recently designed a small reactor, about the size of a water bottle, that takes in aluminum pellets and seawater to generate hydrogen, enough to power an electric bike for several hours. They previously demonstrated that the process can produce enough hydrogen to fuel a small car. The team is also exploring underwater applications, and are designing a hydrogen reactor that would take in surrounding seawater to power a small boat or underwater vehicle.

This research was supported, in part, by the MIT Portugal Program.

© Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

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