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The Wisconsin Elections Commission declined to vote Wednesday on whether the state’s top elections official should appear before a state Senate hearing on her reappointment as a fight continues over who will lead elections in the critical battleground state ahead of the 2024 presidential race.

Without clear instructions from commissioners, it is up to Meagan Wolfe, the commission’s administrator, to decide whether she will testify before Republicans who control the state Senate and wish to force a vote on firing her.

“It is a really difficult spot,” Wolfe said. “I feel like I am being put in an absolutely impossible, untenable position either way.”

Wolfe has been a target of conspiracy theorists who falsely claim she was part of a plan to rig the 2020 vote in Wisconsin, and some Republican leaders have vowed to oust her.

The bipartisan elections commission on June 27 deadlocked 3-3 along party lines on a vote to reappoint Wolfe, with Democrats abstaining in order to cause the nomination to fail. Without a nomination from at least four commissioners, a recent state Supreme Court ruling appears to allow Wolfe to continue indefinitely as head of the elections commission, even past the end of her term.

Senate Republicans tried to proceed with the reappointment process anyway, deciding in a surprise vote the following day to move ahead with a committee hearing and ultimately hold a vote on whether to fire her.

Commissioners said Wednesday they would not vote on a motion to either authorize or prohibit Wolfe from appearing at a hearing of the Senate elections committee, as it is not standard for the commission to decide those matters.

“Meagan Wolfe is the chief elections officer for the state of Wisconsin. I have no interest in babysitting who she speaks to,” said Democratic Commissioner Ann Jacobs.

The commission’s decision came despite partisan disagreements about the legitimacy of the Senate’s actions.

“They do not have a nomination before them. I don’t care what they said in that resolution,” Jacobs said. “I don’t have any interest in indulging the Legislature’s circus, which is based on a false reading of the law.”

But Don Millis, the Republican chair of the commission, argued that if Wolfe fails to appear, it could worsen the already tense situation.

“They’re probably going to hold a hearing anyway,” he said. “We’ve already seen what’s happened when we didn’t approve her nomination with four votes. I think that turned out very badly.”

The Senate has not yet set a date for the committee hearing on Wolfe’s reappointment, and Wolfe did not say at Wednesday’s meeting whether she will appear once a date has been set.

Commission won’t tell Wisconsin’s top elections official whether to appear at reappointment hearing is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The big headline from the summer of 2023 not about indictments or blockbuster movies is the weather. It was the hottest July on record. Parts of the country are suffering from weeks of triple-digit temperatures and drought while others are experiencing severe storms and flash flooding.

If Wisconsinites felt a sense of safety from the worst effects of climate change, smoke from Canadian wildfires that made our air quality among the worst in the world for a spell upended that notion. Not surprisingly, this has people wondering what it means for their loved ones, neighbors and the world around them. It’s one of the reasons the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is teaming up with Wisconsin Watch and the Sustainability Institute of La Crosse for an event in La Crosse next month.

Look at a map of the midsection of the country, and the one thing that stands out is the Mississippi River. The vast network of rivers and streams that feed the river drains the waters of 42% of the continental United States. The river carries more shipping traffic than an interstate highway, provides an enormous habitat for fish, waterfowl and other wildlife, and supplies drinking water to more than 50 cities. Food grown in the basin accounts for more than 90 percent of the nation’s agricultural exports.

Yet despite this footprint, there hasn’t been any large-scale news coverage of this area until the launch of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk last year. The desk is a collaboration of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Report for America and the Society of Environmental Journalists. Ten journalists from news organizations across the region are now providing in-depth stories and sharing them widely across media outlets.

“We’re trying to do something that’s kind of unique, which is to take an ecosystem approach to reporting,” explains Sara Shipley Hiles, executive director of the desk and an associate professor at the university. “This kind of takes us outside of our usual, state level orientation or our media market orientation where we’re really thinking just what impacts us locally and helps us kind of fly at a 40,000 foot level and think about well, how are these impacts playing out around me?”

There are two Wisconsin-based reporters that are part of the initiative Madeline Heim, from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Bennet Goldstein, from Wisconsin Watch, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization. The pair will be among the panelists at an event open to the public in La Crosse from 7 to 9 p.m., Sept. 21 at the Lunda Center at Western Technical College.

Get free tickets for “Wisconsin Waters: Issues & Actions” here.

Goldstein and Heim will be joined by JC Nelson, acting center director for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center, Lee Donahue, a supervisor from the town of Campbell on French Island, where residents have been drinking bottled water since 2021 because of because of PFAS contamination in private wells, and a representative from the La Crosse Urban Stormwater Group.

Casey Meehan, director of Sustainability and Resilience at Western Technical College will moderate the panel discussion and a question-and-answer segment with the audience. Lee Rasch, executive director of LeaderEthics a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting integrity in American democracy, will serve as the emcee.

The Wisconsin-based stories over the last year have touched on many of the same topics making headlines this summer: flooding, drought and wildfire smoke. They’ve also touched on issues that affect water quality, such as PFAS contamination and pollution from nitrates and road salt.

Hiles said as the initiative enters its second year, organizers want to explore more solutions reporting as well as spark additional conversations like next month’s gathering in Wisconsin. There is no shortage of issues to discuss in La Crosse after an unusual summer to say the least.

“Especially when the smoke started and that was such a shocking development for many of us here in the Midwest and then the extreme heat, you know, that was raging across the region, you know, if the very dangerous levels in the South and, you know, high levels in the North and, you know, ridiculous humidity and the the flooding that’s happened and the drought that’s happened,” Hiles said. “We’re bouncing all over the place with this crazy weather and it’s just becomes very clear, you know, you can see what’s happening so much more easily when you understand that these are major patterns, not just regionally, but globally.”

Jim Fitzhenry is the editor of the Ideas Lab at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Reach him at (920) 993-7154 or jfitzhen@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter at @JimFitzhenry, Instagram at @jimfitzhenry or LinkedIn. 

Summer of weather records one reason we’re talking water quality in La Crosse Sept. 21 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.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Cicero president Larry Dominick’s disaster declaration enabled Cicero to request assistance for affected families from FEMA. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s declaration enabled the request for assistance.

The day before Independence Day, the summer sun beat down on dozens of clothes and shoes strewn across the backyard and fence of the Cicero, Illinois, home where Delia and Ramon Vasquez have lived for over 20 years. 

A nearly nine-inch deluge that fell on Chicago and its suburbs the night before had flooded their basement where the items were stored in plastic bins. Among the casualties of the flood were their washer, dryer, water heater and basement cable setup. The rain left them with a basement’s worth of things to dry, appliances and keepsakes to trash, and mounting bills. 

The July flood was one of the worst storms the Chicago region has seen in recent years and over a month later many families like the Vasquezes are still scrambling for solutions.

Without immediate access to flood insurance, the couple was left on their own to deal with the costs of repairing the damage and subsequent mold, Delia said. The costs of the recent flood come as the Vasquez family is still repaying an $8,000 loan they got to cover damages to their house from a flood in 2009.

Aggravated by climate change, flooding problems are intensifying in the Chicago region because of aging infrastructure, increased rainfall and rising lake levels. An analysis by Borderless Magazine found that in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, extreme weather events and heavy rainfall disproportionately affect people of color and those from immigrant backgrounds.

These same communities often face barriers to receiving funding for flood damage or prevention due to their immigration status – many undocumented people cannot get FEMA assistance – as well as language or political barriers.

“You feel hopeless because you think the government is going to help you, and they don’t,” Delia said. “You’re on your own.”

The lack of a political voice and access to public services has been a common complaint in Cicero, a western suburb of Chicago where Latinos account for more than four out of five residents, the highest such percentage among Illinois communities.

RainReady program a potential solution  

One potential solution for communities like Cicero could come from Cook County and the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) in the form of their RainReady program, which links community input with funding for flood prevention. The program has already been tried out in a handful of suburbs and is now being implemented in the Calumet region, a historically industrial area connected by the Little Calumet River on the southern end of Cook County.

The RainReady Calumet Corridor project would provide towns with customized programs and resources to avoid flooding. Like previous RainReady projects, it relies on nature-based solutions, such as planting flora and using soil to hold water better.

CNT received $6 million from Cook County as part of the county’s $100 million investment in sustainability efforts and climate change mitigation. Once launched, six Illinois communities — Blue Island, Calumet City, Calumet Park, Dolton, Riverdale and Robbins — would establish the RainReady Calumet Corridor.

At least three of the six communities are holding steering committee meetings as part of the ongoing RainReady Calumet process that will continue through 2026. Some participants hope it could be a solution for residents experiencing chronic flooding issues who have been left out of past discussions about flooding.

“We really need this stuff done and the infrastructure is crumbling,” longtime Dolton resident Sherry Hatcher-Britton said after the town’s first RainReady steering committee meeting.

“It’s almost like our village will be going underwater because nobody is even thinking about it. They might say it in a campaign but nobody is putting any effort into it. So I feel anything to slow (the flooding) — when you’re working with very limited funds — that’s just what you have to do.”

Low-income neighborhoods lack flood prevention resources

In Cicero and other low-income and minority communities in the Chicago region where floods prevail, the key problem is a lack of flood prevention resources, experts and community activists say.

Amalia Nieto-Gomez, executive director of Alliance of the Southeast, a multicultural activist coalition that serves Chicago’s Southeast Side — another area with flooding woes — laments the disparity between the places where flooding is most devastating and the funds the communities receive to deal with it.

“Looking at this with a racial equity lens … the solutions to climate change have not been located in minority communities,” Nieto-Gomez said.

CNT’s Flood Equity Map, which shows racial disparities in flooding by Chicago ZIP codes, found that 87% of flood damage insurance claims were paid in communities of color from 2007 to 2016. Additionally, three-fourths of flood damage claims in Chicago during that time came from only 13 ZIP codes, areas where more than nine out of 10 residents are people of color. 

Despite the money flowing to these communities through insurance payouts, community members living in impacted regions say they are not seeing enough of that funding. Flood insurance may be in the name of landlords who may not pass payouts on to tenants, for example, explains Debra Kutska of the Cook County Department of Environment and Sustainability, which is partnering with CNT on the RainReady effort.

Those who do receive money often get it in the form of loans that require repayment and don’t always cover the total damages, aggravating their post-flood financial difficulties. More than half of the households in flood-impacted communities had an income of less than $50,000 and more than a quarter were below the poverty line, according to CNT. 

Engaging overlooked communities 

CNT and Cook County are looking at ways to make the region’s flooding mitigation efforts more targeted by using demographic and flood data on the communities to understand what projects would be most accessible and suitable for them. At the same time, they are trying to engage often-overlooked community voices in creating plans to address the flooding, by using community input to inform the building of rain gardens, bioswales, natural detention basins, green alleys and permeable pavers.

Midlothian, a southwestern suburb of Chicago whose Hispanic and Latino residents make up a third of its population, adopted the country’s first RainReady plan in 2016. The plan became the precursor to Midlothian’s Stormwater Management Capital Plan that the town is now using to address its flooding issues.

One improvement that came out of the RainReady plan was the town’s Natalie Creek Flood Control Project to reduce overbank flooding by widening the channel and creating a new stormwater storage basin. Midlothian also installed a rain garden and parking lot with permeable pavers not far from its Veterans of Foreign Wars building, and is working to address drainage issues at Kostner Park.

Kathy Caveney, a Midlothian village trustee, said the RainReady project is important to the town’s ongoing efforts to manage its flood-prone creeks and waterways. Such management, she says, helps “people to stop losing personal effects, and furnaces, and water heaters and freezers full of food every time it rains.”

Like in the Midlothian project, CNT is working with residents in the Calumet region through steering committees that collect information on the flood solutions community members prefer, said Brandon Evans, an outreach and engagement associate at CNT. As a result, much of the green infrastructure CNT hopes to establish throughout the Calumet Corridor was recommended by its own community members, he said.

“We’ve got recommendations from the plans, and a part of the conversation with those residents and committee members is input on what are the issues that you guys see, and then how does that, in turn, turn into what you guys want in the community,” Evans said.

The progress of the RainReady Calumet Corridor project varies across the six communities involved, but final implementation for each area is expected to begin between fall 2023 and spring 2025, Evans said. If the plan is successful, CNT hopes to replicate it in other parts of Cook County and nationwide, he said.

Despite efforts like these, Kevin Fitzpatrick of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District argues that the scale of the flooding problem in the Chicago region is so large that a foolproof solution would be “prohibitively expensive.”

Instead, communities should work toward flood mitigation with the understanding that the region will continue to flood for years to come with climate change. And because mitigation efforts will need to be different in each community, community members should be the ones who decide what’s best for them, says Fitzpatrick.

In communities like Cicero, which has yet to see a RainReady project, local groups have often filled in the gaps left by the government. Cicero community groups like the Cicero Community Collaborative, for example, have started their own flood relief fund for residents impacted by the early July storm, through a gift from the Healthy Communities Foundation. 

Meanwhile, the Vasquez family will seek financial assistance from the town of Cicero, which was declared a disaster area by town president Larry Dominick and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker after the July storm. The governor’s declaration enables Cicero to request assistance for affected families from FEMA.

But the flooding dangers persist.

The day after her home flooded, a neighbor suggested to Delia Vasquez that she move to a flood-free area. Despite loving her house, she has had such a thought. But like many neighbors, she also knows she can’t afford to move. She worries about where she can go.

“If water comes in here,” Vasquez said, “what tells me that if I move somewhere else, it’s not going to be the same, right?”

Efrain Soriano contributed reporting to this story.

Low-income Chicago suburbs eye ‘RainReady’ investments to limit flooding is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

If Wisconsin state Rep. Jimmy Anderson wants to visit residents in some of the northern neighborhoods he represents, he first must leave his own district — twice.

From his Fitchburg home in suburban Madison, Anderson must exit his 47th Assembly District, pass through the 77th District, reenter the 47th District, then head north through the 48th District to finally reach a cluster of homes assigned like a remote outpost to his district.

Unusual? Yes. Inconvenient? Yes.

Unconstitutional? Perhaps.

Though the Wisconsin Constitution requires legislative districts “to consist of contiguous territory,” many nonetheless contain sections of land that are not actually connected. The resulting map looks a bit like Swiss cheese, where some districts are dotted with small neighborhood holes assigned to different representatives.

Wisconsin’s nationally peculiar practice of detached districts is cited as one of several alleged violations in a recent lawsuit seeking to strike down current Assembly and Senate districts and replace them before the 2024 election.

Like similar cases in states ranging from North Carolina to Utah, the Wisconsin lawsuit also alleges partisan gerrymandering is illegal under the state constitution’s guarantee of equal protection and free speech.

Though such claims have had mixed results nationally, Democrats hope the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s new liberal majority will deliver a resounding rejection of gerrymandering that has given Republicans a lopsided legislative majority.

But the challenge to noncontiguous districts could provide judges a way to decide the case without ever addressing whether partisan gerrymandering is illegal.

“It could be that this gives the court a completely neutral basis for deciding the maps are no good,” said Kenneth R. Mayer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor.

Wisconsin’s Assembly districts rank among the most tilted nationally, with Republicans routinely winning far more seats than would be expected based on their average share of the vote, according to an Associated Press analysis. In other states, such as Nevada, Democrats have reaped a disproportionate advantage from redistricting.

Most states are guided by at least four traditional principles for reshaping state legislative districts after each decennial census. Those include districts being nearly equal in population, compact and contiguous and following the boundaries of cities and counties. “Contiguous” generally is understood to mean all parts of a district are connected, with some logical exceptions for islands.

In some states, mapmakers have gotten creative by using narrow strips of roads or rivers to connect otherwise distinct parts of a district. But few have gone so far as Wisconsin in treating contiguous as a loose synonym for “nearby.”

Wisconsin’s detached districts are ”profoundly weird,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Marymount University Law School in Los Angeles who created the All About Redistricting website.

Anderson’s legislative district, for example, includes more than a dozen remote territories scattered around the Madison area that are disconnected from the district’s main portion in Fitchburg, McFarland and Monona. That makes door-to-door canvassing particularly challenging for Anderson, who uses a wheelchair that must be repeatedly loaded and unloaded from a van.

The situation also is confusing for his remote constituents whose neighbors are represented by someone else, Anderson said.

“It just doesn’t serve the people that live in those little bubbles to not have the same kind of community cohesion and interests being represented,” he said.

Gabrielle Young, 46, lives in one of the “land islands” Anderson represents. But until she was contacted by lawyers filing the redistricting lawsuit, Young said she had no idea Anderson had to travel through another district to campaign in her neighborhood. Young agreed to serve as a plaintiff in the lawsuit alleging the disconnected districts violate the state constitution.

“I could have gone the rest of my life living here not realizing it was happening, but that doesn’t make it OK,” she said. “It’s ridiculous.”

Among other things, the lawsuit cites an 1892 case in which the Wisconsin Supreme Court stated districts “cannot be made up of two or more pieces of detached territory.” Yet the practice proliferated over time, with 55 of the 99 Assembly districts and 21 of the 33 Senate districts now composed of disconnected portions, according to the lawsuit.

“Clearly, at some point, things sort of went awry,” said Mark Gaber, senior director of redistricting at Campaign Legal Center, a Washington, D.C.-based group that helped bring the lawsuit.

“It seems pretty clear to me that you have to enforce the words as they are written,” Gaber added.

That has not always been the case.

In 1992, a federal judicial panel considering a Wisconsin redistricting lawsuit essentially endorsed detached legislative districts. Wisconsin’s Democratic-led Legislature and Republican governor had failed to agree on new districts following the 1990 census. The court was left to pick among various plans submitted by the parties. Republican plans proposed districts with literal contiguity, but the judges opted for a Democratic approach that did not.

The federal judges said legislative districts containing disconnected “islands” of land were similar to towns that had been legally permitted to annex noncontiguous areas.

“Since the distance between town and island is slight, we do not think the failure of the legislative plan to achieve literal contiguity a serious demerit,” the judges wrote in 1992.

The political roles are reversed 30 years later. Republicans, who now control the Legislature, proposed Assembly and Senate maps with disconnected districts that the Wisconsin Supreme Court adopted last year. Democrats, who control the governor’s office, are backing the legal challenge.

“The districts are constitutional because they are legally contiguous,” Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said in a statement to The Associated Press alluding to prior court rulings. He declined further comment.

Though contiguity requirements have a long national history in redistricting, they have not always been explicitly defined, thus leaving room for interpretation, said Micah Altman, a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose specialties include redistricting.

Criteria such as contiguous and compact districts must be balanced with other principles, such as distributing the population equally and not splitting municipalities and counties among districts, he said.

“Turning one knob on the system makes you have to turn down the other knob at least a bit,” Altman said.

In the case of Anderson’s district, the disconnected sections likely have not made much difference in the partisan composition of his voters. Anderson is a Democrat, and so are the majority of Madison-area voters.

But redistricting experts say there still is potential for politicians to rig the map to their favor by drawing remote sections of districts.

“When you allow mapmakers to draw districts that are noncontiguous, you give them even more flexibility to perpetrate abuse,” Levitt said.

Lawsuit targets Wisconsin legislative districts resembling Swiss cheese 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.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive their stories in your inbox every week.

Margaret Rose Bostelmann’s ideals are clear from one glance at her well-kept ranch-style house in central Wisconsin.

A large American flag is mounted near the front door, and a “We Back the Badge” sign on her front lawn announces her support for law enforcement. Bostelmann, a Wisconsin elections commissioner, said she voted for Donald Trump in 2020 and added: “I will always vote Republican. I always have.”

But her fellow Republicans have exiled her and disparaged her, sought to upend her career and, on this day in July, brought the 70-year-old to tears as she discussed what she’s been through over the last several years because she refuses to support false claims that Trump won the state in the 2020 presidential election.

Bostelmann, who goes by Marge, previously served for more than two decades as the county clerk in Green Lake County, overseeing elections without controversy. But two years into her term in a Republican slot on the Wisconsin Elections Commission she became a target, denounced and disowned by the Republican Party of Green Lake County, which claimed she had failed to protect election integrity in the state.

Now a suit filed in June by a Wisconsin man who promotes conspiracy theories about election fraud seeks her removal from the commission. Citing her estrangement from the county party, the suit claims she’s not qualified to fill a position intended for a Republican.

The elections commission, which has an equal number of Republican and Democratic members, has faced an onslaught of discredited claims about election fraud in Wisconsin. The most recent drama involves the commission’s nonpartisan administrator, Meagan Wolfe, whose term is expiring and whose future in the role is in doubt. After the three Republican members of the commission supported Wolfe in a June vote, Republicans in the state legislature made it clear they wanted to find a way to get rid of her.

The Republican clashes in Wisconsin exemplify ongoing discord seen across the country, with elections officials shunned, berated and even driven away by members of their own party over their defense of the integrity of the 2020 election.

In Hood County, Texas — a solid red block in a red state — hard-line Republicans successfully pushed for the resignation of the elections administrator, even though Trump won 81% of the vote in the county. In Surry County, North Carolina, where Trump also won overwhelmingly, the Republican elections administrator was threatened with firing or a pay cut for refusing to give a GOP party leader access to voting equipment to conduct a forensic audit. And in Clare County, Michigan, officials are considering possible charges against a GOP activist accused of kicking the party chair in the groin.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has been sued by numerous parties, verbally attacked by voters and earmarked for elimination by GOP lawmakers. It has survived only because a Democrat still occupies the governor’s office and wields veto power.

In an April survey of local election officials nationwide, the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization, found that nearly one in three reported being abused, harassed, or threatened because of their job.

In a rare interview, Bostelmann wept at one point. For the most part, though, she was defiant, insisting the 2020 election was not stolen by Joe Biden.

“I’m a Republican who stands up for the truth and not for a lie,” Bostelmann said. And she predicted the latest legal gambit, which seeks her removal, would fail.

Don Millis, the Republican who chairs the Wisconsin Elections Commission, also has expressed frustration with the election conspiracy theorists. At the commission’s June meeting, he said he considered some of the agitators to be “grifters” who are conning people of goodwill into thinking there is something wrong with the election system.

“It’s not about winning or preventing fraud,” he said of the conspiracy theorists’ motives. “It’s about getting publicity or attention. It’s about grifting, convincing others to donate to their cause.”

In a recent interview with ProPublica, Millis said he was referring to a small set of people he believes are trying to raise money by spreading lies through social media or newsletters. “There are many people who believe them, who don’t know any better,” he said.

From Fraudster to Fraud Investigator

The man who brought the suit against Bostelmann is Peter Bernegger, grandson of the founders of Hillshire Farm, the Wisconsin deli meat and sausage company. Now 60, Bernegger has described himself as a “data analyst” and an “independent journalist.”

He has engaged in relentless — and so far futile — legal efforts to prove fraud in the 2020 election. This mirrors a different kind of legal fight from earlier in his life: trying to overturn his own fraud conviction.

A 2008 indictment accused Bernegger and a business partner in Mississippi of deceiving investors, bilking them of $790,000 in various ventures — including the development of a gelatin, intended for pharmaceutical or cosmetic companies, made from the carcasses of catfish. A federal jury acquitted the partner, who has since died, but convicted Bernegger of mail and bank fraud. He was sentenced to 70 months in prison and ordered to pay nearly $2.2 million in restitution.

Bernegger overwhelmed the courts with claims to clear his name, alleging procedural errors, insufficient evidence, judicial bias, ineffective counsel, violations of his constitutional rights and other misconduct.

“Mr. Bernegger, you file an awful lot,” said U.S. District Court Judge William Griesbach of Wisconsin. “Just let me say that. You file so many things. And in all honesty, I don’t have time to keep up on it all.”

Though most of his claims failed, Bernegger did succeed on one front: He got his restitution reduced to roughly $1.7 million. Ordered in 2019 to get a steady job to make payments on the debt, Bernegger testified that he had limited options.

He said his health was too poor for him to be able to lift heavy objects, drive a truck or operate heavy equipment. “I work odd jobs, a wide variety of them. And it is cash, but it’s legal,” he explained.

When ProPublica reached Bernegger by phone for this story, he immediately hung up. He did not respond to letters and emails seeking comment.

Much of his energy, it appears, is now devoted to stoking doubt about election integrity. In his social media posts and podcast appearances, he has railed against Wolfe, the Wisconsin elections commission administrator, while repeating sweeping, unsubstantiated claims about problems in voting systems across the country. Along the way, he has made alliances with like-minded individuals beyond his home state.

Bernegger has ties to Omega4America, a website promoting a super-fast computing method to identify fraud by matching voter data with property tax records and other large databases. The site solicits donations to a nonprofit called Election Watch Inc.; Bernegger founded a tax-exempt organization with that same name in 2022.

The Texas Tribune has reported that the Omega4America project was initially funded by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a conspiracy theorist close to Trump. Omega4America makes glowing claims about programming marketed by Texan Jay Valentine as a powerful tool that could replace the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a multistate consortium that ferrets out duplicate voter registrations across states. ERIC has been the subject of heavy criticism from conservatives who believe its work identifying unregistered voters for states bolsters the rolls for Democrats.

In a podcast, Bernegger mentioned that he has access to the “Valentine fractal programming system” as he seeks to uncover voter fraud. Valentine, who is listed on the Omega4America website as the site contact, declined to discuss his work or Bernegger, telling a ProPublica reporter: “I have nothing to say to you.”

In an April episode of a podcast called The AlphaWarrior Show, Bernegger said he’s now part of a team of 10 scouring federal campaign data for oddities. He named James O’Keefe as a member of that team. O’Keefe is the former head of Project Veritas, a conservative group known for secretly recording liberal organizations, and has a new media company that encourages “citizen journalists” to investigate election fraud. ProPublica’s attempts to reach O’Keefe for comment were unsuccessful.

Toward the end of the AlphaWarrior podcast, the host urged viewers to “smash” the blue donate button on an Election Watch website to show support for Bernegger and his team.

“It means we sacrifice a movie or a fancy dinner and we throw a couple dollars their way,” he said.

“I Don’t Know That I’d Be Welcome”

Marge Bostelmann still doesn’t fully understand how it got to this point, how she became such a target of Bernegger and others, including people she once thought held similar values.

But she does know that things in Green Lake began to change in 2020, during Trump’s reelection bid. Bostelmann said she stopped paying membership dues to the county party after the party chair became critical of her and of the way the 2020 election had been run in Green Lake County by her successor.

By November 2021, as conservatives carried out investigations into voting accommodations made in Wisconsin during the pandemic — including the use of drop boxes and allowing unsupervised absentee voting in nursing homes — Bostelmann and others on the elections commission came under attack for their votes shaping those procedures.

Kent McKelvey, the Green Lake County GOP chair at the time, issued a press release saying Bostelmann’s actions on the Wisconsin Elections Commission “do not reflect the principles, values and beliefs of the Green Lake County Republicans, in this case, supporting the proper enforcement of the law and of election integrity.”

The press release said flat-out that “Ms. Bostelmann is no longer a member of the Republican Party of Green Lake County.” McKelvey did not respond to requests for comment.

The snub hurt. Bostelmann, a former foster parent who knows many local Republicans through her activities with her church and the Rotary Club, said she stopped attending many local GOP events. “I don’t know that I’d be welcome,” she said.

Even as efforts to prove fraud in Wisconsin fizzled, the pressure on the commission remained intense. Powerful Republicans in the state Senate called for Wolfe’s ouster, blaming her for what they saw as regulatory overreach by the commission, though in her role she carries out the orders of the six voting members.

Prior to the commission’s key June vote on Wolfe, Bostelmann said, she received a disturbing phone call from an acquaintance who had been critical of Wolfe. “The patriots would not be happy” with her, she was told, if she backed Wolfe. Bostelmann took that as a threat.

Still, she and the panel’s two other Republicans voted to reappoint Wolfe. Bostelmann defended Wolfe publicly at the June meeting, saying the administrator had been unfairly targeted “as the scapegoat” by people dissatisfied with the commission and the outcome of the 2020 election.

In a tactical move, Democrats abstained from voting, leading to a final tally of three yes votes. That appeared to mean that the panel did not have the requisite four votes to send the matter to the state Senate for final consideration, and it was widely thought Wolfe would continue in her post because of the impasse.

But the Senate, surprisingly, decided the three affirmative votes were enough for it to take up her nomination. Wolfe’s reappointment is now pending before the Senate elections committee. No public hearing or vote has been scheduled.

Lawsuits are expected, though for now she remains on the job.

“Some judge will tell us who our administrator is. That’s my guess,” said the commission chair, Millis, a tax attorney who favored retaining Wolfe.

Like Bostelmann, Millis has been the target of Bernegger, who on Twitter has ranted about Millis ignoring election system problems, referring to him as “Blind Don.”

Robert Spindell, the third Republican member of the commission, said he hasn’t been chastised for his renomination of Wolfe. He said he thought it best that the Senate take up the matter. “I haven’t had anybody call or criticize me,” he said, noting: “Most of the people I know on this election stuff are not shy.”

Through a spokesperson, Wolfe declined a request for an interview.

Bernegger’s suit against Bostelmann demands that the circuit court remove her from her seat on the commission, citing the disavowal from Green Lake County Republican Party. “She cannot prove she is a member of the Green Lake County Republican Party and is otherwise qualified to hold the designated Republican seat,” he wrote.

The statute that governs commission appointees does not specifically require them to be dues-paying party members.

Records show Bernegger has bombarded the Wisconsin Elections Commission with official complaints and demands for data, often accompanied by threats of legal action and accusations of criminal conduct. In one email he referred to a commission staffer as a “prick.”

“Please note that I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this individual’s erratic behavior that is directed at myself, our staff and local election officials,” Wolfe wrote to the commission in October 2022. In May of this year, Wolfe told the commission Bernegger made her feel “incredibly unsafe” when he noted her home address in bold in an email to the commission and called her a “pathological liar.”

The commission fined Bernegger $2,403 in March 2022 for filing frivolous complaints. Records show commission staff have, at times, forwarded his correspondence to the Wisconsin Department of Justice.

On July 7, the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Criminal Investigation Division served Bernegger with a letter at his home in New London, stating that his actions could reasonably have made Wolfe and others at the commission feel “harassed, tormented or intimidated.” It warned that he could be arrested for stalking if he continued his behavior.

One of Bernegger’s lawsuits over records against the commission is still ongoing.

He has also sued officials in Dane, Door, Grant, Marathon, Milwaukee and Ozaukee counties, the town of Hudson, the city of Hudson, the city of Milwaukee and the town of Richmond in Walworth County. The suits are related to broad public record requests he made for absentee ballot applications, images of ballots, router logs and other materials and involve disputes over costs and access. While many of those have been dismissed, four are still pending.

“We’re all trying to do our jobs to the very best of our abilities. It makes it difficult when we are constantly being undermined and questioned,” said Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood. Her office provided Bernegger with some information when he inquired but denied him certain documentation that Trueblood said was exempt from release. He sued, but a judge dismissed the case.

Another clerk, Vickie Shaw of the town of Hudson, said she had to go to court three times to deal with a Bernegger suit over records. A judge threw out the case, Bernegger appealed, and it was tossed again.

Before Bernegger’s suit, Shaw had quit in 2021, finding the job too burdensome and confrontational. But she returned the following year because, she said, the town “didn’t have anybody to run the April election.”

Bostelmann expressed dismay with Bernegger’s tactics against her and the other election clerks.

“It’s bullying is what it is. It’s truly bullying,” she said. “It’s almost like they are trying to get people who are knowledgeable, and do a good job, to quit to have people who don’t know how to do the job to come in.”

Bullied by her own party, a Wisconsin election official’s GOP roots mean nothing in volatile new climate 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.

Todd Moilanen paddles gently through wild rice beds on Ogechie Lake, trying not to disturb a loon sleeping on its back on a nest of reeds a few feet away. 

Moilanen, an enrolled member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and the Band’s cultural resources director, delights in seeing resurgence of life on Ogechie Lake. For years, the small, shallow lake about 100 miles north of the Twin Cities was too deep for wild rice, or manoomin, as wild rice is called in the Ojibwe language. 

Logging companies around the Rum River built the Buck More Dam in the 1930s, which kept water levels consistently over four feet — too high for manoomin. 

Low water levels are critical for manoomin, a sacred crop for the Ojibwe people of the Great Lakes region. But climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels is bringing more rain and flooding to Minnesota and the Upper Midwest, making harvests of wild rice less reliable. 

For more than 70 years there was virtually no rice, and very little waterfowl and wildlife on Ogechie Lake. But the Mille Lacs Band worked with an engineering firm and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to modify the dam, and in 2015, they implemented a project to restore the lower level historically experienced on the lake, part of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Reservation and Minnesota’s Kathio State Park. 

Eight years later, the effect is dramatic. The shallow lake brims with wild rice, which, as Moilanen paddles through in late June, is in its “floating-leaf” stage, where most stalks lie flat against the water’s surface and others are beginning to emerge above the waterline. Now, wildlife that feed on the wild rice are regular visitors. 

Moilanen points out a wood duck skimming across the glassy surface and a large osprey swooping overhead. His canoe quietly passes the loon; the large black bird with a distinctive white band around its neck stirs awake and dives into the water. 

“That’s the ecosystem that’s coming back,” Moilanen says. 

Wild rice is a fickle aquatic grass that can be washed out by rising water levels, a growing trend in Minnesota, according to 128 years of state precipitation data. The grass seed, or grain, has been consumed by the Ojibwe and other Tribal Nations for centuries, and has garnered widespread appeal in the ubiquitous wild rice soup found on menus across Minnesota and the Upper Midwest.

Tribal, state, and federal governments are working to adapt to the changing environment to ensure manoomin lives on in Minnesota, which is home to more acres of natural wild rice than any other state in the country. 

“We see the extremes more often now,” said Kelly Applegate, director of natural resources for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. “We see water levels that are really high at critical points when the rice is developing.”

For Tribal Nations of northern Minnesota, wild rice’s survival is not just about protecting the environment—it’s also about preserving a core part of their identity. 

The Ojibwe of Minnesota and Wisconsin are Anishinabe people who originated in the woodlands of the northeast. According to traditional beliefs, the Ojibwe were told to move west until they found food growing on the water. They found it in the shallow lakes and rivers of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, and it became a staple of their diet. 

“The reason that we’re here is because of manoomin,” Moilanen says. 

Minnesota’s climate getting warmer and wetter

Minnesota’s climate is getting warmer and wetter. The 10 warmest and wettest years in recorded state history have all occurred in the past 25 years, according to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. 

That change has brought a massive increase in large rainfall events. Since 2000, storms that produce more than six inches of rain have been occurring four times more often than in the 20th century, DNR data shows.

Record snowfall in Minnesota this winter, a sudden warmup in early spring, and a few heavy storms led to widespread flooding across the state earlier this year, prompting the capital city, St. Paul, to declare a flood emergency. In response, Governor Tim Walz signed a disaster assistance bill in April that moved $40 million, the largest amount ever, to an emergency account to help Minnesotans recover from flood damage.

Even small changes can meaningfully alter the environment. Since 2000, there has been a 65 percent increase in the number of rainfalls over three inches and a 20 percent increase in storms with more than one inch of rain. 

The state is getting wetter as the climate warms, according to Minnesota Senior Climatologist Kenny Blumenfeld. The 2010s were a historically wet decade. The early 2020s have brought drought, but it is likely still the wettest among the state’s other bouts with drought, Blumenfeld said.

“When we get the heavy rains, it’s coming as hard as it ever has,” he said. 

The current trend is dry periods between June and October, and really wet periods from November to April. But that can and likely will change, Blumenfeld said, adding that the warming atmosphere only promises more moisture, but it won’t necessarily be clear when that moisture will come. 

Blumenfeld earned a PhD studying major storms in Minnesota, and said the frequency of such storms keeps growing. 

More water in ricing country

The Rum River watershed of central Minnesota, home to the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, received an average of 28 inches of rain a year from 1895 to 2022, according to precipitation records the state began keeping in 1895. The rate has been rising by about half an inch per decade since 1980, according to state climate trend data. 

But for the past 20 years, annual precipitation in the watershed has risen to an average of around 31 inches. 

“It’s a huge deal because that water has to go somewhere,” Blumenfeld said. 

The Little Fork River watershed, home to the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, one of the seven sovereign Ojibwe nations in the state, is also getting wetter. The watershed has an average annual precipitation of 26 inches, which has been growing two inches per decade in the past 20 years. Last year was particularly wet, with nearly 35 inches of precipitation, which contributed to historic flooding. 

Spring flooding in 2022 practically wiped out the entire wild rice crop on Nett Lake, said Chris Holm, ecological resources director for the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa. The shallow lake about 220 miles north of the Twin Cities near the Canadian border is a traditional ricing hub for the Bois Forte Band.

While cultivated wild rice that has been bred for specific qualities is farmed commercially in Minnesota, Tribal Nations often prefer its original form that grows naturally with little or no intervention in the lakes and rivers of northern Minnesota. Tribal members harvest the rice for personal use and for sale to the general public.

Wild rice is sensitive to water levels, particularly in June. Too much spring rain can wipe out beds before they can take root. 

“If you have higher water levels, it takes more energy for the plant to grow up into the surface and leaf out where it can photosynthesize. So with high water levels, you have less plant growth, less manoomin harvest,” said Madeline Nyblade, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota pursuing a doctorate in hydrology. 

Nyblade is part of Kawe Gidaa-naanaagadawendaamin Manoomin, or First We Must Consider Manoomin, a university research group that focuses on tribally driven questions around wild rice. Many of the questions the researchers received about climate change focus on water levels, she said. 

The bigger storms Minnesota is now experiencing on a more regular basis also challenge the rice, especially late in the season. A violent storm with heavy rain and wind can knock rice off the stalks before it can be harvested in late August. 

Applegate recalled a recent year where high water took out 90 percent of the rice beds for the Mille Lacs Band. Then in 2021, the opposite happened — a late summer drought prevented the harvest. The rice around Mille Lacs was tall and thriving, Applegate recalled, but with too little water, ricers couldn’t reach the patches by canoe to harvest the manoomin. 

Climate change shifts plant growth

Applegate, an enrolled Mille Lacs Band member who grew up in the area, has seen shifts from climate change. The moose have moved further north. The white birch trees are receding. And beds of manoomin that served his people for generations are more regularly being wiped out by high waters. 

“As Anishinabe and tribal people, we depend on these wild plants for our food, medicines, craft materials — cultural objects made from plants. They’re a very integral part of our culture,” Applegate said. 

Climate change is rapidly shifting where and how plants grow in Minnesota, and the pace is concerning to the Mille Lacs Band, he said. 

Historically, Native people in the Great Lakes region could expect bountiful wild rice, according to Mike Dockry, an assistant professor with the University of Minnesota and a member of the First We Must Consider Manoomin Research Group. Dockty is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a traditional ricing people of the Great Lakes region. 

“It was growing on many, many more lakes than it is now, and tribes were free to move,” Dockry said. 

Any one lake might have a bad harvest, but people could find another that was booming, he said. Settler-driven land use and large scale water system management geared toward agriculture has contributed to fewer bodies of water with wild rice. 

Wild rice itself is well adapted for variability as an annual plant with seeds that can lie dormant for years if conditions aren’t right, and has genetically benefited from variability over time, Nyblade said. But land use systems like dams that created stagnant conditions prevented that in many water bodies, and now climate change is bringing variations such as warmer winters. 

Disconnected from the traditional seasonal migration pattern by the United States’ reservation system that limits them to specific plots of land, Native people are left to focus on preservation and protection of traditional resources. 

“How are we going to harvest these traditional plants if they move out of our area?” Applegate asked.

Bois Forte Band: ‘We need a break’ 

Up on Nett Lake, members of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa are due for a good year. Flooding largely wiped out the wild rice crop in 2022. 

“We need a break,” said Chris Holm, ecological resources director for the Bois Forte Band. 

Historic flooding hit the Rainy River Basin in 2022. The area, straddling the U.S.-Canadian border, experienced heavy snow melt combined with large spring storms. 

Holm has worked with the tribal natural resources department for 30 years. Most of the total crop losses for the Bois Forte Band have come in the past decade, he said. The Tribal Nation takes the rare step of insuring its wild rice crop through the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Claims are rare, but all three that have been filed in his tenure have come in the last decade, including in 2022. 

This season, conditions looked poor again with a snowy winter, a late ice out — when winter ice melts on frozen lakes — and high water levels through May. 

“We thought we were in trouble,” Holm said. 

But the Bois Forte Band may get the break they need this year. An early summer dry spell appears to have salvaged the rice crop for now. The rice has good germination this season, Holm said.

But the increase in heavy thunderstorms makes Holm nervous. A big August storm can knock even the most promising rice off its stalks. 

Less predictability to wild rice harvests

Ann Geisen, a lake wildlife specialist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, specializes in shallow lakes where wild rice thrives. Based in Aitkin, north of Lake Mille Lacs, she covers seven wild rice-rich counties in Minnesota. 

She’s noticed an increase in extremes in recent years that has brought less predictability and greater variability to wild rice harvests. 

Geisen began working for the DNR in 2001, the same year the agency started managing lakes to help improve wild rice growth. That effort is mostly done by removing beavers and their dams to clear outlets — running water connecting lakes to other water bodies — for lakes with wild rice. Free of dams and other natural debris, water will spread across more lakes, lowering their levels. 

Beaver dams are very effective at holding back water, to the point where removing a dam can lower lake levels by a foot. Good rice lakes are very shallow, so an extra foot of water on a four-foot lake is a huge percentage, Geisen said. 

“We cannot control the weather, but we try to set the stage so that when there is a weather event the impact is reduced,” Geisen said. 

The DNR and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe are working together on improving conditions at Swamp Lake, located about 100 miles north of the Twin Cities. Manoomin once thrived there, but largely disappeared in the 1990s, when water levels got too high for rice. 

Through historical records provided by locals and site visits, Band and Minnesota natural resources staff found the lake’s overgrown outlet channel. They hired a contractor to clear the channel in 2021. Thirty-five beaver dam removals later, the 6.5 mile channel was flowing without obstructions. 

Suddenly the water had a place to go. Water levels on Swamp Lake dropped, and in August 2021, 10 wild rice plants were observed in the middle of the lake. While water levels were too high last season, Geisen said they’re hoping more rice will come this year.

If there’s not ample rice this year, the DNR and Mille Lacs Band plan to seed the lake with wild rice. They decided to try seeds sourced from a single nearby lake if Swamp Lake doesn’t replenish naturally, Geisen said. 

Geisen is encouraged by these intervention success stories, but she knows the fight is lopsided. If the big storms that are becoming more common late in the season continue, it won’t matter if all the beaver dams were pulled — the rice will be mostly lost. 

“I’m getting concerned that with climate change, it’s not enough,” she said.

Geisen is keeping her fingers crossed for this year, as conditions so far are favorable. That’s a sentiment echoed by the Bois Forte and Mille Lacs bands. The relatively dry summer has stabilized water levels after a major spring melt, and the rice is looking good in many parts of the state. 

The most sacred mashkiki

Paddling through the rice on Ogechie Lake, Moilanen is optimistic about this year’s harvest. As the Mille Lacs Band’s cultural resources director, he works to connect enrolled members with traditional practices, and takes out young ricers for their first harvest each year. 

He loves passing on the traditions and teaching others how to gather mashkiki, the word for medicine in the Ojibwe language. Manoomin is considered the most sacred mashkiki, with its use as a staple crop that sustained people during lean times and its connection to the Ojibwe origin story. 

While Ogechie Lake’s water issues were mostly the result of a dam instead of rainfall, its management is a success story for manoomin, and proof of nature’s resiliency. For more than 70 years, high water levels caused by a dam aimed at boosting profits for loggers and farmers meant that just one percent of the lake had rice. 

But the manoomin wasn’t gone — it was just dormant, waiting to rise again under the right conditions. 

This year, manoomin covers 70 percent of the lake, and the stalks are beginning to break the surface as they reach towards the sun. With the rice comes all the life it can sustain — the lives of waterfowl and of the Anishinabe people. 

“It goes so far beyond restoring wild rice,” Moilanen says. “It’s a whole lifecycle, a whole world is restored.”

Climate change, more rainfall threatens wild rice in northern Minnesota 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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Gov. Tony Evers found himself in familiar territory last week, issuing his first 10 vetoes of the legislative session.

Only this time, instead of putting the legislation to bed, as a veto has done for decades in Wisconsin, the governor’s pen triggered a “veto watch” among Democratic lawmakers.

“Our caucus has determined protecting Gov. Evers’ veto to be a top priority,” Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine, told Wisconsin Watch, adding that Democratic lawmakers are “remaining extremely vigilant and will do so throughout the session to ensure that we are able to uphold (the governor’s) vetoes and prevent Wisconsin from moving backwards.”

But why do Democrats need to be on alert when Republicans control fewer than 66 seats in the Assembly — the two-thirds supermajority needed to override a veto?

The answer: The Wisconsin Constitution says that to successfully override a veto, lawmakers only need support from two-thirds of members who are present on a given day — not two-thirds of all Assembly members. So if just three Democratic lawmakers were absent on a given day, Assembly Republicans could have a two-thirds majority and would be able to undo Evers’ vetoes.

It’s been a record 38 years since the Legislature has overridden a veto, a failure that “in recent decades has made the governor’s veto power practically invincible,” according to a January 2023 memo on the veto override process from the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau.

How do vetoes work in Wisconsin?

When lawmakers send a bill to the governor for a final signature, the governor has six days, excluding Sunday, to veto it or it becomes law. Once the governor vetoes a bill, it first returns to the chamber where it originated. In the Assembly, Republicans control 64 of 99 seats. In the state Senate, they control 22 of 33 seats. The Assembly can vote on a veto override for the same bill multiple times during a session, whereas the Senate may only vote for one on the same bill once, according to the LRB.

Evers has vetoed bills passed by the GOP-controlled Legislature at a record-breaking clip in recent years. During the 2021-22 legislative session, he struck down 126 bills sent to his desk, or 32% of all bills sent to his desk, the most by any governor in a single session in Wisconsin history. Other governors have vetoed on average 3.7% of bills they receive, the LRB reported.

Four of the bills Evers vetoed last week would have made changes to Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance system. Another would have prevented state agencies and local governments from restricting the sale of gas-powered vehicles.

But with such slim margins this session, the governor’s veto doesn’t feel invincible to Democrats, and lawmakers are planning accordingly in an attempt to avoid being caught off guard by a surprise vote scheduled by their Republican colleagues. To prepare for a potential surprise override vote, Assembly Democrats are slated to receive a briefing from the LRB on the veto override process this fall, Neubauer spokesperson Sidney Litke told Wisconsin Watch.

When could a veto override take place? 

Veto votes may take place at any time during a regularly scheduled floor session. Those periods include Sept. 12-15, Sept. 18-21, Oct. 10-13, Oct. 16-19, Nov. 7-10, Nov. 13-16 and in 2024 on Jan. 16-19, Jan. 22-25, Feb. 13-16, Feb. 19-22, March 12-14 and April 11, 16-18. 

Next year on May 14 and 15 any vetoes that have not been overridden are automatically placed on the calendar for what is known as a “veto review floorperiod.”

“All of our members have made this commitment to be in Madison for every scheduled session day,” Neubauer said.

And now that there are vetoes available to be scheduled for an override vote, the Democratic leader said all 35 of her caucus members will also be in Madison on all skeletal session days — procedural sessions usually involving only a few members that are required to maintain established floor schedules on session days when the full body doesn’t actually meet.

Evers is also conscious that his veto authority is protected by the slimmest of margins.

“After the last election I met with all the legislators on the Democratic side and said, ‘You can’t be sick this year.’ And so far that’s worked out,” the governor told Wisconsin Watch earlier this summer in Oshkosh. He added, “We are well prepared to ensure that we keep the margins where they should be. Obviously, the Republicans have a large number of people in the Legislature, but the Democrats will always be there.”

Both Evers and Neubauer said they have not discussed with Republicans an informal deal to avoid a surprise override vote.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, through a spokesperson, didn’t respond to a question about whether he would schedule an override vote if Democratic lawmakers were absent and Republicans had a two-thirds majority on a given day. Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, through a spokesperson, didn’t respond to a question about whether he would support an override effort that had been approved by Assembly Republicans using procedural tactics.

Why would a veto override matter? 

Neubauer cautioned that a snap override attempt could harm the Legislature as an institution.

“People … have an understanding of the ways in which the rules have been changed in the Legislature — through the gerrymander and otherwise — to further consolidate Republicans’ power,” she said. “And I don’t think that an unscheduled veto override attempt would reflect well on our democracy and on the institution.”

She continued, “That being said, we just have to be as prepared as possible.”

Senate Minority Leader Melissa Agard, D-Madison, echoed Neubauer, likening a surprise override vote to other recent Republican “over stretches,” including lame duck legislation in 2018 that sought to weaken Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul, Republicans’ decision to gerrymander the state’s voting maps to insulate their majorities and the attempt to submit fake presidential electors to Congress after the 2020 election.

“These types of parlor tricks are not true governing,” Agard told Wisconsin Watch. “They aren’t in the best interest of our state.”

Could courts play a role? 

A Republican veto override would leave little recourse for Democrats.

Even with liberals taking control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court last week, Democrats could face a tough path to reversing any potential surprise overrides via the courts.

Aside from what’s in the constitution, the Legislature sets the rules for override process. There are no statutes governing the process and the Legislature can change or enforce the rules however it wants, according to the LRB memo.

The state Supreme Court stated in 1983 that “if the Legislature fails to follow self-adopted procedural rules in enacting legislation, and such rules are not mandated by the constitution, courts will not intervene to declare the legislation invalid.”

The LRB concluded in its memo that the courts have no role in overseeing the veto override process.

“The veto override process is an internal, procedural matter created and governed by the Legislature alone. The Legislature adopts rules that regulate the process, and courts may not adjudicate the application or interpretation of the rules,” LRB director Rick Champagne wrote. “The veto override process is in every way a self-determined legislative process.”

Neubauer said Democrats are prepared to prevent it from getting that far.

“Our caucus is very clear that this is one of our top priorities for this session,” she said. “We’ve discussed it countless times and we are in very close communication with every member of the caucus and will be throughout the session to make sure that we’re doing what we need to do. And people will make real sacrifices — time with their family, vacation, time in their districts — in order to make sure that we are doing everything in our power to protect the veto.”

Wisconsin Watch reporter Jacob Resneck contributed to this report.

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Wisconsin Democrats on ‘veto watch’ after Tony Evers blocks 10 bills is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

In 2019, Blake Grannum experienced a catastrophic flood in her home in Detroit’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood. Water overtopped nearby canals and rushed into her basement, destroying a washer and dryer and forcing her and her mother to go to the laundromat during the pandemic. 

It was one of several floods the neighborhood experienced in recent years; heavy rains overwhelmed sewer systems and flooded basements five times between 2011 and 2021. During that last major flood on July 21, 2022, six inches of rain fell on the region, inundating freeways, stranding hundreds of people in vehicles, and filling basements with sewage backup.

Jefferson Chalmers has been called the “Venice of Detroit.” It’s a unique, historic neighborhood, oriented around a canal system and waterfront parks, and built on one of the vast swamps that once lined the Detroit River and Great Lakes.

Neither the overbank flooding from the canals nor the sewer backups have put Grannum off the neighborhood.  She now lives with her fiancé in a house that sits a few feet beneath the flood wall, next door to her childhood home.

And it’s clear why she might want to stay. From the dock in Grannum’s backyard, you can watch boats idle past and look out on the many ramshackle boathouses on Harbor Island in a neighborhood surrounded by water.

“It’s just a vibe here,” Grannum said. “You have different income groups, different cultures, different types of people living in this area.”

But some worry the costs that come with flooding could potentially create a process of “climate gentrification” here. In cities like New Orleans and Miami, this process has seen wealthier and whiter residents displace low-income residents and people of color in less flood-prone areas. 

But in Jefferson Chalmers, climate gentrification could mean that those with the resources to manage the risks and expense of living in a floodplain may replace those without them.

The neighborhood is already changing; it’s become more white in recent years. In 2016, 88% of the neighborhood residents were Black, and just 8.5% were white. In 2021, 74% of residents were Black, lower than the citywide average of 78%. Whites now account for 18%  of residents here.

Incomes are also rising. In 3 of 7 census block groups within the neighborhood, median income increased by between 13% and 80% since 2020. The median household income in 2021 was $56,395, higher than the city’s median of $34,762.

And home renovations are increasingly common while housing prices are rising. Meanwhile, a redevelopment plan for the neighborhood calls for $640 million in new investments – mostly new housing and retail. A streetscape renovation and several new businesses and developments have brightened up a stretch of Jefferson Ave. that hadn’t seen much love in decades.

Still, Jefferson Chalmers remains among the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods, with 39%  of residents living below the poverty line, higher than the citywide average of 32%. 

And now, the forces of climate change threaten to make the area increasingly unaffordable for those low-income residents.

In 2021, the Federal Emergency Management Agency placed the neighborhood in a designated flood zone, requiring homeowners with federally insured mortgages to carry flood insurance. Only about 35% of units in the neighborhoods have mortgages. Those that do could pay thousands of dollars more a year for flood insurance if they’re federally insured. The designation has also paused some affordable housing developments in the neighborhood that rely on state and federal financing.

Meanwhile, the city of Detroit  has signaled it will fine or litigate against those with defective or missing seawalls if they don’t bring them into compliance. Seawalls can cost tens of thousands of dollars to replace or rehab.

Residents see an existential threat from both the high costs and high water. These frustrations, coupled with climate change uncertainty, have left some questioning the neighborhood’s future.

“Is it time to turn the page in the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood?” longtime Jefferson Chalmers resident Frank Bach wrote on the website Nextdoor. He pointed to the extreme fluctuations in water levels and the neighborhood’s location on a former wetland as challenges that might be difficult to overcome.

“What was made here in the 1800s isn’t working anymore,” he wrote.

Plans to save a neighborhood

Getting the neighborhood out of the designated flood zone is a high priority for those who want to see redevelopment continue.

In 2022, city officials held a meeting to present a $161 million U.S Army Corps of Engineers plan that would have built berms along the riverfront, closed off the connection of two canals to the river, and installed a removable stop-log dam – a barrier to keep out high water – on the deepest channel connecting the canal system with the Detroit River. They planned to pay for it with federal funding.

But residents blocked the proposal, fearing it could disconnect the neighborhood from the river, destroying its character and leading to stagnant, bug-infested canals, where a Great Lakes Water Authority outfall also periodically dumps combined sewage and stormwater. Residents said there was a level of distrust that the city would effectively manage the stop-log dam, considering Detroit’s history of financial problems and poor city services.

Following the rejection, the city said it would proceed with fining and litigating against the owners of 107 homes it determined to have missing or deficient seawalls. But city spokesperson Georgette Johnson said the city will wait until it has repaired seawalls on 17 city-owned parcels before going after other property owners. They’re targeting this fall for completion. 

Several residents who spoke with Planet Detroit supported another proposal spearheaded by resident Jay Juergensen, a Jefferson Chalmers resident and lead organizer for the Jefferson Chalmers Water Project community group. 

Along with large investments in regional stormwater infrastructure, the plan seeks $40 million to create wetlands and levees on the Detroit River, make topographical changes, and fund seawalls on the canals. Juergensen estimates that the seawalls would cost around $11 million.

It’s unclear if Juergensen’s plan has found any official support. In a segment on Detroit Public Television’s “One Detroit” program, Tyrone Clifton, director of the Detroit Building Authority, referred to it as “ambitious.”

Without financial assistance and coordination, the process of hardening Jefferson Chalmers’s shoreline will likely be lengthy and expensive – and may still fail to remove the neighborhood’s floodplain designation.

FEMA previously told Planet Detroit that seawalls may be recognized as part of an effective flood mitigation plan. But Ken Hinterlong, senior engineer for FEMA, said any reevaluation would also need to ensure that there is adequate “interior drainage” in the neighborhood once levees and seawalls are built, something that could continue to be a challenge for an area that was previously a wetland and has experienced frequent sewer backups.

John Myers, who lives on the Fox Creek canal, said the city can’t treat the problem as the responsibility of individual property owners because a continuous barrier is needed. He said residents would get a better deal if these improvements were solicited in bulk.

“We wouldn’t all try to pave our little section of the street in front of our house,” he said.

How to get out of a flood zone

One of the residents with resources to deal with flooding is Nicole de Beaufort, who lives on Jefferson Chalmers’ Fox Creek canal. She and her partner, who own their home outright,  invested their savings in raising and hardening the seawall to protect the property against future floods. 

“All told, we spent about $50,000, which feels like an incredibly large sum of money,” she told Planet Detroit. “So it makes me feel extremely fortunate that we could (do that), but I recognize that that opportunity is not available to my neighbors. It feels unfair that we have individual solutions instead of systemic solutions.”

Michelle Lee, a Jefferson Chalmers resident who was previously director of housing and neighborhood stabilization for the nonprofit community development corporation Jefferson East, Inc., believes some amount of public funding will be needed to help residents repair seawalls, noting that many people in the neighborhood still struggle to afford things like furnaces after the widespread basement flooding in 2021 destroyed many appliances.

Citations for missing or poorly maintained seawalls point to the difficulties of addressing the issue. According to records obtained by Planet Detroit, the city ticketed 23 properties for inadequate seawalls in early 2021. Johnson from BSEED said just four properties have since been brought into compliance.

Meanwhile, the development of affordable housing in the neighborhood is on hold.

“Every project going up in Detroit has to use some type of federal money,” Lee said. Community Development Block Grants and Home Investment Partnership funds offered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development contribute to many such projects. However, an executive order previously directed federally funded development to avoid floodplains.

A special assessment district, a levy to pay for improvements that benefit a specific area, is another option for generating funds for seawall repairs that several residents expressed support for. In 2022, officials in Midland and Gladwin counties approved a SAD for certain properties to repair dams that were damaged in the 2020 flood. Although such a plan in Jefferson Chalmers would compel some residents to pay for improvements to someone else’s property, it could be a net benefit for everyone who lives in the floodplain. 

 Johnson said the city would neither advocate for nor oppose a special assessment district.

An uncertain future

One shortcoming of FEMA’s flood maps is that they’re based on past data. Richard Rood, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan, said that the practice of using historical averages to calculate risk is no longer working.

“How quickly things are changing is something that we don’t appreciate,” he said. “Right now, each 10-year period is exhibiting a statistically different climate than the previous 10-year period.”

And while climatic extremes could produce both exceptionally wet and dry periods, Rood predicts the “next few decades are very wet.” This aligns with data from the last few decades showing most of the eastern U.S. getting more precipitation as the West gets drier.

If enforcing seawall requirements proves unworkable, city and state leaders could ask FEMA for assistance in relocating residents away from the floodplain. 

Voluntary buyout programs as part of a “managed retreat” process for moving people away from areas likely to be impacted by climate-fueled disasters have reduced the flood risk for many in other regions. 

But the FEMA buyout program has also been criticized for facilitating “white flight” on account of its tendency to move white residents away from racially diverse neighborhoods to majority-white areas. For now, Johnston said the city of Detroit is not considering asking for such a buyout.

“You can’t put a price tag on this neighborhood,” Grannum said. “You come here, you’re still in the city, and it’s quiet. You can experience nature, and it’s on the water in the city of Detroit.”

Lee worries about the neighborhood’s older residents getting pushed out due to expenses associated with flood insurance, seawalls, and cleaning up from floods and basement backups. They may be able to sell their homes for high prices, but Lee said that still won’t offset the costs of moving and studies show the financial benefits of aging in place. 

She added that her older neighbors could also lose a sense of community and means of finding support if needed.

“People want to stay here,” she said. “They raised their kids here; they know their neighbors…you need those types of connective tissues.”

Meanwhile, de Beaufort is questioning her decision to invest in the neighborhood. 

“The public will in our community is to have a beautiful neighborhood that enjoys this amenity of the water,” she said. “But I don’t know if the political will is there to address this systemically, and that’s disappointing.” 

Climate costs imperil Detroit’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood 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.

Janet Haas two decades ago saw potential in a field of thistle, grass and bushes that Milwaukee County had neglected: Valley Park, nestled between the Menomonee River to the west and homes in one of Milwaukee’s most racially diverse neighborhoods to the east. 

“The county doesn’t have any money, and they haven’t had any money for years,” said Haas, 65, who has lived most of her life in the Near West Side neighborhood, called The Valley or Piggsville. “One day I just decided that the thistles were as tall as I was, and I wasn’t going to take it anymore.”

That meant persuading her mom and a friend to join her in pulling weeds and planting bushes and flowers in the park. The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District built the park as part of a multi-million dollar project to protect the neighborhood from flooding – but, Haas said, it fell into disrepair after its completion in 2001.

Valley Park is now a meticulously maintained community gathering spot — complete with walking and biking trails, a play structure and shade trees. Residents take pride in the tidy park — evidenced by their weekly cleanup events, such as a June 22nd gathering of about a dozen neighbors.  

“We all know each other, we look out for each other,” said Moses Mcknight, a resident of 17 years, as children and adults moved mulch and watered flowers in the park. “We like to fix things up, and keep it that way.” 

But neighbors at the Thursday evening cleanup worry that a $1.2 billion plan to widen the Interstate 94 East-West Freeway corridor will disrupt their gatherings and undo progress.

I-94’s six lanes stretch above the Menomonee River and run south of Valley Park — carrying commuters between downtown Milwaukee and the city’s western suburbs in Waukesha County. Backed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation plans to add two lanes to a 3.5-mile segment of the highway. 

Valley Park sits in the middle of the planned expansion. Aside from increasing noise and air  pollution as more cars zip down a wider highway, residents worry the addition of about 29 acres of asphalt — the equivalent of more than twenty football fields — will increase flows of stormwater into The Valley and surrounding flood-vulnerable neighborhoods. 

The state transportation department acknowledges the extra pavement will increase stormwater runoff, but it says it won’t analyze precise effects on runoff until the final design phases of a project expected to break ground in 2025. 

“Who’s going to benefit? Because it’s not going to be us,” Haas said. “The soil is going to be crummier and more polluted. We worked on this park, why should we give it back?”

The transportation department declined to be interviewed for this story. In an unsigned statement emailed by a spokesperson, the department wrote, in part: “We work to avoid or minimize the impacts of infrastructure improvements to the natural and human environment while delivering projects efficiently.”

Flood-prone neighborhoods at center of I-94 expansion

Evers and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation want to expand the interstate to decrease traffic congestion and high crash rates, and repair aging infrastructure in what Evers has called one of the state’s “most congested and dangerous roads.” 

Menomonee Valley Partners, a nonprofit dedicated to redeveloping the Menomonee River Valley, has praised the state’s decision to proceed with the project.

But more than 20% of households near the corridor lack a car, and expansion opponents point to volumes of research showing that widening highways can actually increase traffic volume. They say the expansion will disproportionately disrupt Milwaukee’s Near West Side neighborhoods that the highway shaped six decades ago.  

The expansion cuts through some of Milwaukee’s most flood-vulnerable areas. 

The Valley, Merrill Park and other neighborhoods north of I-94 face “high” vulnerability to flooding, according to recent mapping by the environmental advocacy nonprofit Groundwork Milwaukee, The New School Urban Systems Lab and other partners. Neighborhoods just south of the highway — including parts of the Mitchell Park, National Park and Clarke Square neighborhoods — face “very high” flood vulnerabilities, the research shows. 

The analysis indexes flood vulnerability according to impacts on health, such as how many people lack health insurance and face certain chronic diseases; socioeconomics, including age, income and racial demographics; and housing, including the age of housing stock and portion of households lacking a car.

According to the report, The Valley faces a “medium” flood exposure level, or how likely it is to flood during heavy rainfall. But many surrounding neighborhoods — including Merrill Park to the east and parts of neighborhoods along the Menomonee south of I-94 —  face a “high” risk. The analysis doesn’t consider how the I-94 expansion might affect flooding.

With roughly as many white residents as people of color — mainly Black, Latino and Asian Americans, The Valley is among Milwaukee’s most diverse neighborhoods. Residents of color make up larger majorities in other flood-vulnerable neighborhoods touched by the expansion. Those include Merrill Park (54% Black, 19% Hispanic or Latino) and National Park (7% Black, 73% Hispanic or Latino), according to an analysis of 2020 census data by Marquette Law School research fellow John Johnson. 

Institute for Nonprofit News collaboration partners report that cities throughout the Great Lakes region are experiencing crises resulting from intense rainfall, archaic wastewater systems, crumbling infrastructure and segregated housing, creating a perfect storm of flooding vulnerability and environmental injustice. Rural areas, Indigenous communities and ecosystems in the Great Lakes also face great risk from flooding, endangering hard-fought gains in environmental restoration and community development.

Runoff analysis to come late in project

Understanding precisely how much the I-94 expansion will affect those neighborhoods requires a detailed runoff analysis, said Lawrence Hoffman, senior manager of GIS and Data Services for Groundwork USA, who helped lead the vulnerability mapping project. 

In its Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement published in 2022, the state transportation department acknowledged that adding acres of impermeable pavement will increase stormwater runoff, but said “the water that would be collected from I-94 would be treated better than it is today.” 

The department said it won’t calculate the “quality and quantity” of the runoff — and finalize solutions to address it, such as retention basins or grass-lined ditches — until the project’s final design phase. 

That’s too late to offer such critical information — and long after the project’s public comment period, which closed in January, said Cheryl Nenn, a riverkeeper for Milwaukee Riverkeeper, a self-described “science-based advocacy organization working for swimmable, fishable rivers” around Milwaukee. The state transportation department plans to include feedback from the public comment period in a final Environmental Impact Statement, expected to be released this year.

“It is frustrating, because they acknowledge there’s pollution, they acknowledge that there’s a litany of different things they can do to minimize that — or ameliorate those impacts, but they don’t commit to anything,” she said. 

Milwaukee has strict local rules for minimizing runoff from new projects and redevelopments, but the I-94 expansion, as a state project, isn’t bound by them, Nenn added. That includes a rule that developments above a certain size can’t generate additional runoff. 

“There’s been a lot of really serious work to deal with flood management in the watershed, and that work continues,” Nenn said. “This type of a project is going to make it harder for us to achieve our goals for clean rivers.”

Milwaukee seeks to address stormwater runoff 

The sewerage district has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into flood control along  watersheds, with a goal of reducing sewage overflows and basement backups to zero by 2035. That includes along the Menomonee River, which runs parallel to I-94 before turning south and crossing beneath the highway at Valley Park. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources lists the river as “impaired” due to its high levels of phosphorus, E. coli, polychlorinated biphenyls and other issues. 

The district saw more than 2.1 billion gallons of wastewater discharged in 2020 alone, data show. And a single overflow in 2022 released 750 million gallons of untreated wastewater into local waters. But those volumes remain far below the billions of annual gallons discharged in past decades, including when residents of The Valley and surrounding neighborhoods faced disastrous flooding.   

Peggy Falsetti, 75, has lived in The Valley for 48 years and recalls a time when children would play in standing water as the Menomonee River surged over its banks. 

“I remember waking up one morning and the water was all the way up to 39th Street,” she said.

After flooding in 1997 and 1998 damaged about 130 homes around The Valley, the sewerage district spent $12 million to build Valley Park. The department constructed a levee and floodwall where the park meets the Menomonee to protect local homes — one of several projects to curb the Menomonee’s flooding. 

Residents say the Valley Park project has worked to limit runoff. But they worry that widening the highway that looms overhead will reverse some of that progress. No one in the neighborhood will lose their home to the I-94 widening, but the roadway will grow closer to where residents live and play.

Neighborhood concerns about the project stretch beyond flooding. 

While taking a break from guiding neighborhood children through their park upkeep duties, Valley Park’s volunteer master naturalist, Ann Bowe, worried about how the expansion will affect the health of local children. Living near highways — and pollution from cars — can worsen heart and lung disease in kids and teens, according to the American Lung Association. 

“It’s bad enough that we have the freeways that we have here,” Bowe said, gesturing to the road. “But why are we going to spend, what, five years probably building more?”

Milwaukee residents fear more flooding due to planned I-94 expansion   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.

Jera Slaughter looks at her backyard with pride, pointing out every feature and explaining how it came to be. The landscaping committee in her apartment building takes such things seriously. But unlike homeowners who might discuss their prized plants or custom decking, Slaughter is describing a beach, one covered in large concrete blocks, gravel, and a small sliver of sandy shoreline that overlooks Lake Michigan. It’s a view worthy of a grand apartment building built on Chicago’s South Side in the 1920s and deemed a national historic landmark.

But repeated flooding has over the years radically remade the private beach. Slaughter has lived in the Windy City long enough to remember when it extended 300 feet. Now it barely reaches 50. Her neighborhood might not be the first place anyone would think of when it comes to climate-related flooding, but Slaughter and her neighbors have been witnesses to a rapid erosion of their beloved shoreline.

“Out there where that pillar is,” she said, pointing to a post about 500 feet away, “that was our sandy beach. The erosion has eaten it away and left us with this. We tried one year to re-sand it. We bought sand and flew it in. But by the end of the season, there was no sand left.”

Recent years have seen high lake levels flood parking garages and apartments, wash out beaches, and even cause massive sinkholes. It’s a growing hazard, one that Slaughter has been desperately fighting for years.

“All things considered, this is our home,” she said.

Lake Michigan has long tried to take back the land on its shores. But climate change has increased the amount of ground lost to increasingly variable lake levels and ever more intense storms. What was once a tedious but manageable issue is now a crisis. The problem became particularly acute in early 2020 when a storm wreaked havoc on the neighborhood, severely damaging homes, flooding streets, and spurring neighbors to demand that City Hall support a $5 million plan to hold back the water.

“We need to be prepared for higher lake levels,” said Charles Shabica, a geologist and professor emeritus at Northeastern Illinois University.

Though Shabica says the erosion in the Great Lakes region won’t be on par with what rising seas will bring to coastal regions, he still notes it’s an issue that Chicago must prepare for.

“We’ll see climate impacts, but I think we can accommodate them,” said Shabica.

Beyond flooding homes, that epic storm opened sinkholes and washed out certain beaches, leaving them eroded and largely unusable. But the people of South Shore refused to give in easily. In the wake of Lake Michigan’s encroaching water, residents have organized their neighbors and prompted solutions by creating a voice so loud that politicians, engineers, and bureaucrats took heed. In 2022, State Representative Curtis Tarver II helped secure $5 million from the state of Illinois to solve the issue.

“For some odd reason, and I tend to believe it is the demographics of the individuals who live in that area, it has not been a priority, for the city, the state, or the [federal government],” Tarver said.

After years of tireless work, folks in this community have convinced the city to study the problem of lakeside erosion to see how bad this damage from climate change will be — and how fast they can fix it.

Slaughter founded the South Side Lakefront Erosion Task Force alongside Juliet Dervin and Sharon Louis in 2019 after a few particularly harsh fall storms caused heavy flooding in the area.

Chicagoans in the predominantly Black and middle-class South Shore had noticed the inequitable treatment of city shoreline restoration projects. Beaches in the overwhelmingly white and affluent North Side neighborhoods received more media coverage of the problem, faster fixes, and better upkeep, according to the group. This disparity occurred despite the fact that South Side beaches have no natural barriers to the lake’s waves and tides, placing them at greater risk of erosion.

“We were watching the news coverage [and] what was happening up north as if we weren’t getting hit with water on the south end of the city,” said Louis.

The threat is undeniable to Leroy Newsom, who has lived in his South Side apartment for 12 years. Despite the fact that another building stands between his home and the lake, he and his neighbors often experience flooding. The white paint in the lobby is mottled with spackle from earlier repairs. During particularly intense deluges, the entryway can become unnavigable. A large storm hit the city on the first weekend in July, inundating several parts of the city and suburbs.

“When we get a rainstorm like we did before, it floods,” he said.

Newsom lives on an upper floor and has not had to deal with the particulars of cleaning up after flooding, but he has noticed it is a persistent issue in the neighborhood.

Louis, Dervin, and Slaughter have spent countless hours tirelessly knocking on doors and even setting up shop near the local grocery store to teach their neighbors about lake-related flooding. They wanted to mobilize people so they could direct attention and money toward solving the issue. They also researched the slew of solutions available to stem the tide of the lake.

“People were making disaster plans, like, ‘What if something happens, this is what we’re gonna do’. And we were looking for mitigation plans, you know. Let’s get out in front of this,” said Louis.

Solutions can look different depending upon the area, but most on the South Side mirror the tools engineers have used for years to keep the lake at bay elsewhere. What makes these approaches a challenge is how exposed the community is to Lake Michigan in contrast to other neighborhoods.

“South Shore is uniquely vulnerable,” said Malcolm Mossman of the Delta Institute, a nonprofit focusing on environmental issues in the Midwest. “It’s had a lot of impacts over the last century, plus, certain sections of it have even been washed out.”

The shoreline throughout the city is dotted with concrete steps, or revetements, and piers that extend into the lake to prevent waves from slamming into beaches. It also has breakwaters, which run parallel to the shoreline and are considered one of the best defenses against an increasingly active Lake Michigan.

“The best solution that we’ve learned are the shore parallel breakwaters,” said Shabica. “And we make them out of rocks large enough that the waves can’t throw them around. And the really cool part is it makes wonderful fish habitat and wildlife habitat. So we’re really improving the ecosystem, as well as making the shoreline inland a lot less vulnerable.”

Shabica also mentions that this isn’t a new solution. The Museum Campus portion of the city, which extends into the lake and includes the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium, used to be an island before engineers decided to connect it to the shoreline in 1938.

The main component of the plan to help reduce repeated flooding in the neighborhood is to install a breakwater around 73rd Street using the funding Tarver helped earmark for the issue, according to Task Force co-founder Juliet Dervin. This solution would help prevent the types of waves and flooding that damage streets, most notably South Shore Drive, which is the extension of DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Past damage to the streets has rerouted city buses that run along South Shore Drive and interrupted the flow of traffic.

One local resident installed a private breakwater at her own expense following the 2020 storm, just a few blocks from Slaughter’s house, and it has tempered some effects of intense storms and flooding. But since this breakwater is smaller, surrounding areas are still vulnerable. Breakwaters can range from a few hundred thousand dollars to millions of dollars, depending on size and other factors.

Despite funding now being allocated to fix the issue and government attention squarely focused on lakefront-related flooding there are still hurdles to overcome.

Both the Army Corps of Engineers and the Chicago Park District are in the middle of a three-year assessment of the shoreline to determine appropriate fixes for each area. The study will finish in 2025, decades after the last study of this kind was conducted in the early 1990s. This gives Slaughter pause.

“If I tell you this continuous erosion has been going on for such a long time, then you would have to know, they have looked into it and studied it from A to Z,” she said. “What do you mean, you don’t have enough statistics? We’ve done flyovers and all kinds of things. People who’ve been here filming it, when the water jumps up to the top of the building, they’ve seen it slam into things.”

For her, the damage has been clear but the prolonged period of inaction and lack of attention from outside groups means a shorter window to implement fixes. Slaughter sees this as a fundamental flaw in how we approach issues stemming from the climate crisis.

“The philosophy,” she said, “is repair, not prevent.”

South Side Chicago neighbors fight Lake Michigan’s erosion and flooding 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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An Oshkosh police officer shot and wounded a suicidal 34-year-old man two blocks from the man’s house this summer after authorities say he pointed a hunting rifle at them.

Benson Thao’s identity was splashed in news stories across the region in the weeks after the June 29 shooting, in which the Winnebago County district attorney announced the police officer was legally justified in firing his service rifle.

Yet the identity of the officer and some of the others involved in the incident remain withheld from the public — even in court documents.

The reason for breaking a longstanding norm in Wisconsin law enforcement transparency?

Police and prosecutors say the officers were victims for having a gun pointed at them and Marsy’s Law, a constitutional amendment passed by voters in 2020 to protect victims’ privacy rights, includes law enforcement.

It’s the latest example of a national trend in which more than a dozen states have passed nearly identical amendments leading some law enforcement agencies to withhold identities of witnesses and officers in police shootings, a practice civil liberties advocates say erodes police accountability. 

In Columbus, Ohio, police officers involved in fatal shootings have had their identities withheld and even their faces obscured in edited body camera footage released after city attorneys cited privacy for police officers under Marsy’s Law. 

In Florida, the state’s highest court is weighing a legal challenge brought by the police union to prevent the city from releasing the names of officers who shot and killed suspects, arguing the officers are victims and should be afforded privacy. 

Civil libertarians point to similar episodes in South Dakota and North Dakota that were reported before Wisconsin voters approved Marsy’s Law at the urging of a lobbying effort funded almost entirely by a tech billionaire.

DAs diverge on release of key information

A similar nonfatal shooting by Stevens Point police in April played out quite differently than the Oshkosh incident. Police shot and wounded an armed man after he allegedly opened fire on officers who had surrounded him in his home’s detached garage. 

Initially, the names of the police officers were withheld in charging documents against Nicholas E. Meyer, the wounded 41-year-old who faces attempted murder charges.

But Portage County District Attorney Cass Cousins released the names of the two officers — Alexander Beach and Zachary Gartmann — in a press release announcing that he had cleared their use of deadly force.

“There is nothing specifically in the statute that says these names must be kept confidential,” Cousins told Wisconsin Watch. “I think there’s always gonna be a tension between transparency and victim rights.”

Sometimes the names of police officers are released while the investigation is underway.

In Grand Chute, town police Lt. Russ Blahnik was named less than 24 hours after he shot a 34-year-old fugitive twice in the leg on Aug. 1. The Outagamie Sheriff’s Office said Pierce Don Lee Folkerts ignored commands to drop what later proved to be a replica pistol after leading police on a foot chase through an apartment complex. He’s expected to survive.

Uncertainty in applying Marsy’s Law

The difference in disclosure standards can be traced to uncertainty among police and prosecutors on how to fairly apply Marsy’s Law — a constitutional amendment approved by nearly 75% of Wisconsin voters that broadens the definition of a crime victim and strengthens privacy protections that critics say comes at the expense of the rights of criminal defendants.

Oshkosh Police Chief Dean Smith said law enforcement officials are keeping with a national trend to afford more privacy to victims — including their own police officers acting in the line of duty.

“The voters have said this is what they want,” Smith told Wisconsin Watch. “And this is a piece of that.”

But civil rights groups argue the constitutional amendment question on the ballot was simplistic and didn’t fully explain the implications of the law. 

“Who in their right mind would be opposed to expanding victims rights?” said Margo Kirchner, executive director of the Wisconsin Justice Initiative, a public interest lawyer group that unsuccessfully challenged the constitutional amendment in court. “And that one question just leaves out so much information on what it does to defendants’ rights, what it does to the rights of the public to know about police shootings.”

Wisconsin’s constitutional amendment made it through the Republican-controlled Legislature with bipartisan support including an endorsement from Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul. The 64-word question went to voters with no mention of changing standards for transparency in police shootings.

A foreseeable problem

Critics in the legal community say the complications created by Marsy’s Law were clear but crime victims’ rights are an untouchable third rail in politics.

“A lot of people knew that this was a problem coming,” said Ed Fallone, an associate law professor at Marquette University Law School who ran unsuccessfully for Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2013 and 2020. “And unfortunately, if you were an elected official or candidate for office, like myself, the smart thing to do from a vote-getting standpoint was to just keep your mouth shut.”

Oshkosh’s police chief pointed to the Winnebago County district attorney’s decision to withhold the names of the officers in deference to privacy concerns under Marsy’s Law. Still, he admitted it can cause frustration among some members of the public.

“This is a difficult thing,” Smith said. “I don’t know if when Marsy’s Law was enshrined within our Constitution, if there was a consideration of all the areas that this could touch.”

Winnebago County District Attorney Eric Sparr — a longtime prosecutor who began his career in the office in 2005 — said other than juveniles or victims of certain sensitive offenses like rape or domestic violence, it has long been standard for prosecutors to identify police, suspects and even witnesses in court filings.

“Once Marsy’s Law hit, we shifted right away and pulled all victim names from public documents,” Sparr told Wisconsin Watch.

That can include police officers that deploy lethal force. Sparr said he understands public concerns about loss of transparency but it’s a tough call and local prosecutors are left trying to interpret victims’ privacy rights, which he says are “annoyingly poorly defined” and left up to interpretation.

“There’s not a lot of guidance as far as implementation,” Sparr said. “Department of Justice has made some efforts to interpret and share their interpretations so there can be as much uniformity as possible around the state, but it’s just inherently difficult when the language and the amendment was really very general.”

The state Department of Justice referred Wisconsin Watch to a 2021 advisory from its Office of Open Government that discusses balancing victims’ privacy requirements with disclosure responsibility under the public records laws.

“Authorities cannot create a bright-line rule or policy to withhold all victim records and information,” it said. “Authorities must still apply the public records law balancing test to each and every record, on a case-by-case basis, to determine whether to release the records or information.”

Kaul declined to comment. But he did release a statement this spring on the third anniversary of the constitutional amendment.

“Ensuring that the rights of crime victims are respected both makes Wisconsin safer and is an important part of achieving justice,” Kaul wrote in a statement posted on the Marsy’s Law for All foundation’s website. “I’m proud of the excellent work the Wisconsin Department of Justice does to stand up for victims in Wisconsin.”

The department’s Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) investigates many police shootings in response to a 2014 law requiring outside agencies to assist such investigations. It continues to release the names of police officers in case files posted on its website.

But it has allowed local authorities to interpret the complex and competing responsibilities. In the case of the Oshkosh police shooting, it deferred to that city’s police department’s interpretation of officer privacy in a press release.

Fallone, who chaired the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission for two years until stepping down in July, said Marsy’s Law allows some police departments to backslide on transparency.

“It’s in the eye of the beholder,” Fallone said. “And I’m not surprised that some police departments and prosecutors define the victimhood of police broadly and other departments define it narrowly.”

Marsy’s Law doesn’t shield disclosure in Milwaukee

In Milwaukee, only one of the officers in a pair of police shootings on Cinco de Mayo that wounded two people has been identified in public documents. Milwaukee Police Officer Andrew L. Langer’s last name was included in charging documents against a teenager who allegedly fired an illegally modified pistol that fired rapidly like a machine gun.

Milwaukee police officials confirmed there is only one Langer on the force. He was also one of at least nine officers named in a lawsuit brought by a man who was clubbed, pepper sprayed and tased by several Milwaukee officers in a violent 2018 confrontation in which he fought off several officers. The incident attracted significant publicity and public scrutiny after being captured by bystanders and recorded on police body cameras.

The Milwaukee Common Council recently paid a $175,000 settlement after the civilian sued alleging excessive police force.

A Milwaukee Police Department spokesperson said it doesn’t publicly release the names of officers involved in shootings. But Fallone credits its police chief for not interpreting Marsy’s Law as a barrier against disclosure of officers in court records, public records requests or by members of the police commission. 

He said it’s important that the identities of officers involved in use of force be known so they can later be held accountable — which doesn’t always happen.

“Residents are still upset about officers who have kind of moved around and never really faced any consequences for their actions,” he said.

No charges were filed in an unrelated Cinco de Mayo shooting after the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s investigation found a 22-year-old Greenfield resident — whose name was not released — had been defending himself in a chaotic scene in which he exchanged gunfire with subjects in a car and legally owned the weapon.

The district attorney said MPD’s use of force remains under investigation in both May 5 nonfatal shootings. But in cases that aren’t prosecuted it remains unclear whether an officer’s name would be released.

Winnebago DA: Police aren’t automatically victims

In Shawano County in 2022, a police officer shot and killed 46-year-old Lucas Christenson in his home after he threatened his wife and her son with a shotgun. Shawano Police Officer Jeff Buettner fired 11 times — striking Christenson twice — as the man trained the gun on his wife and then aimed it at the officer.

Sparr conducted the legal review of the death of Christenson — who had mounted an independent challenge for county sheriff in 2014 — in response to a request by the Shawano County district attorney.

The sheriff’s office — which investigated the shooting in conjunction with state investigators — didn’t directly release the name of the police officer but did release Sparr’s full report, which identified everyone in the Nov. 19, 2022, incident aside from the dead man’s wife.

“We do a memo to law enforcement that does have those names,” Sparr said. “What they choose to do with that, ultimately is up to them.”

The decision to publicly name the officer who fired the deadly shots in that report contrasts with the recent withholding of key officer names involved in nonfatal police shootings in Oshkosh. 

Sparr said it’s a judgment call he has to make on a case-by-case basis.

“I don’t know if we were ever truly faced with the question explicitly of whether that officer or those officers were victims,” Sparr said. 

He said the person whose life was most threatened in that incident was the man’s estranged wife — whose name was withheld — not responding officers.

“The main person at least who was endangered in that one was someone else, not law enforcement,” Sparr added. “And so I guess I wasn’t, in that case, really thinking of them as victims.”

In another incident from this year, an Oshkosh police officer fired on a wanted suspect as he allegedly drove a car toward the officer. In that case the officer’s name remains blacked out in a legal memo and withheld in charging documents obtained by Wisconsin Watch.

Montrael Clark, the 44-year-old suspect who survived a gunshot to the forehead is identified in charging documents and faces felony charges of reckless endangerment.

If the case goes to trial, the facts of the case will be presented to a jury.

“And then clearly, names are coming out, people have to testify,” Sparr said. “There’s no way around it at that point.”

Fallone said taking police officers’ claim of victim privacy to the extreme, means normal scrutiny is made difficult.

“The day-to-day work of being a police officer could pretty much be construed by some in their own opinion as falling under Marsy’s Law,” Fallone said, “which makes any sort of public oversight and transparency and even some cases of discipline, quite difficult.”

In Dane County, the district attorney’s office hasn’t named officers in two recent press releases announcing it had ruled their use of force justified. But their names were released by the state DCI whose agents investigated the shootings.

The last time District Attorney Ismael Ozanne named officers who used force was in a March 2022 press release clearing Madison police officers who had tased a suicidal man in November 2021 after he shot himself with his own gun.

Ozanne did not respond to requests for comment about his office’s policy. 

Background to constitutional amendment

Marsy’s Law has been approved by voters in ballot measures in at least 14 states, though it has been overturned in Montana and Pennsylvania over questions of its conflict with the U.S. Constitution.

The movement to adopt the constitutional amendment was self-funded by tech billionaire Henry Nicholas III. The law is named after his sister who was killed by an ex-boyfriend in the early 1980s. 

In 2020 Wisconsin became the latest state to enshrine the law in its constitution after a $1.5 million legislative lobbying effort that at one point employed five registered lobbyists. 

Marsy’s Law for Wisconsin — which was funded entirely by Nicholas’ national organization — spent nearly $4.5 million to sway voters to support the constitutional amendment.

Wisconsin Justice Initiative tried to organize opposition but was outspent by a ballot measure that enjoyed support from both major parties.

“They had this single issue and a lot of money,” Kirchner recalled from the 2020 campaign. “They had ads on the air telling people to vote yes, there was nobody in response who could afford television ads.”

A legal challenge claimed that the ballot question was too simplistic. When the group won in Dane County Circuit Court, Wisconsin Justice Initiative publicly urged Kaul not to defend the amendment considering the well-publicized challenges in implementing it in other states.

“They could have decided to not appeal and just let Marsy’s Law fall — and they chose not to,” she said. “So Josh Kaul’s office chose to fight for the validity of the amendment.”

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ultimately decided to uphold Marsy’s Law. But the 6-1 decision was fractured with five separate decisions applying different legal reasoning. For now it’s the law of the land with the criminal justice system left to sort it out.

Legal challenges to Marsy’s Law continue

There is another challenge pending in the Court of Appeals, including a contempt order against a prosecutor who allowed both victims to hear each other’s testimony in a battery case. Courts routinely sequester witnesses so their testimony can’t be influenced by others, but Marsy’s Law guarantees victims the right to attend every hearing and stage of a trial.

Marsy’s Law for Wisconsin’s state director Nela Kalpic said since 2020 there have been multiple incidents where law enforcement fired shots and the names of those officers have been released. She said she was not familiar with the Winnebago County examples, but acknowledged a potential need to clarify how the law should be fairly applied.

“It is appropriate going forward that state and local policymakers and courts work out the application of the law over time,” she said.

For critics like Fallone, the two-time Supreme Court candidate, the constitutional amendment that “sailed through with minimal scrutiny” has left just these sorts of complexities for the criminal justice system to untangle. It won’t be easy.

“Once you amend the Constitution to put something in there,” he said, “you kind of have to live with it.”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Oshkosh police cite ‘Marsy’s Law’ to withhold names of officers who shot suspects 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.

This summer’s Independence Day weekend was meant to be a historic moment for Chicago, featuring the first-ever NASCAR street race with cars speeding through the city’s downtown. But these plans were partially derailed as history was made for another reason.

Record rainfall inundated city streets, flooded underpasses and swamped more than 2,000 basements including many with sewage. Like many climate disasters, the flooding disproportionately impacted the city’s most vulnerable, such as immigrants and communities of color.

The swollen Chicago River’s flow was reversed, allowing stormwater and untreated sewage to pour into Lake Michigan, the drinking water source for millions. Mayor Brandon Johnson, who lives on the city’s West Side, which was hit hard by the flooding, described the disaster as a sign of climate change and a harbinger of things to come.

As this six-part collaboration will highlight, cities throughout the Great Lakes region face similar crises, with archaic wastewater systems, crumbling infrastructure and segregated housing creating a perfect storm of flooding vulnerability from sources that range from excessive rain and overflowing rivers to lake storm surges and sewage system flooding. Rural areas, Indigenous communities and ecosystems in the Great Lakes also face severe risk from flooding, endangering hard-fought gains in environmental restoration and community development. In each instance, environmental justice issues go hand in hand with flooding risks, and partnerships with impacted communities are key to finding solutions.

Bipartisan Infrastructure Law brings opportunity

In June, the Biden administration announced sweeping climate resilience initiatives that include reducing flood risk, “supporting and learning from tribal communities” and advancing environmental justice.  

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act include funding to address climate change and bolster resilience in coastal areas including the Great Lakes. The Inflation Reduction Act includes a $575 million National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) project to assist these communities with “natural infrastructure,” carrying out “community-led relocation” and otherwise protecting against extreme climate impacts, in keeping with the administration’s Justice40 Initiative mandating at least 40% of investments go to disadvantaged communities. 

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law also includes $11.7 billion — on top of existing base funds — for the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which offers below-market-rate loans and some federal grants to upgrade wastewater treatment infrastructure. This is especially important to deal with combined sewer systems that carry both stormwater and sewage and become overwhelmed during heavy rain, causing sewage to bubble up into basements and necessitating sewage releases into rivers and lakes.   

Basement flooding from overburdened sewage systems is not covered by the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which provides affordable flood insurance, produces flood-risk maps and mandates flood-related zoning and building codes for the nearly 23,000 communities covered by the program. 

“It would be unrealistic to expect FEMA to map areas that would be vulnerable to urban (sewer system) flooding because they’d have to have perfect information about (cities’) storm sewage systems, and frankly most cities don’t have that information themselves,” says Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

So residents dealing with devastating basement flooding that plagues Chicago, Detroit and many other Great Lakes cities during heavy rains are left struggling with a patchwork of city programs and private insurance to deal with the health and financial implications.  

Calls to prioritize flooding resilience

Community leaders and other experts say funding and initiatives such as those created by recent federal legislation must be deployed strategically and equitably to prepare the Great Lakes region to better withstand flooding, while all levels of government must prioritize resilience and aid for flooding survivors. This includes revamping the NFIP, reforming city and state policies on flood preparedness and relief, and investing in green infrastructure.

And it is crucial to make sure the communities most affected by flooding have leadership roles in developing and implementing policy.

“Authentic community engagement starts from the ideation stage all the way through to implementation” of policy, says Crystal M.C. Davis, vice president of policy and strategic engagement for the Alliance for the Great Lakes, a nonprofit Great Lakes protection organization. “It’s imperative if we are seeking to be equitable that we invite community representatives to be at the table from the very beginning of these conversations.” 

But Milwaukee residents say state officials have treated community input as an afterthought as they advance a $1.2 billion highway project that could cause more flooding.

As Wisconsin Watch reports, the state is expanding the I-94 highway and the added pavement will likely cause more stormwater runoff. The surrounding neighborhoods that are at risk for flooding are disproportionately home to people of color. The state transportation department acknowledges up to 29 acres of new pavement could cause problems, but the department won’t analyze the precise impacts until the final design stages of the project.

Industrial pollution adds to flood risks

In some ways, the Great Lakes region is well-positioned to withstand climate change, and even reap some benefits. The region has an abundance of available freshwater, and longer growing seasons could have some benefits for agriculture. 

But flooding is among the dire threats that climate change does pose in the region. And the social and economic impacts of flooding could be exacerbated if more people and businesses move to the Great Lakes as a refuge from extreme effects of climate change elsewhere.

The Great Lakes region historically has been home to heavy industry, with countless factories, steel mills and power plants located on lakes and rivers. This legacy poses particular risks, as flooding can spread toxic contamination into communities and drinking water sources.

“The challenges are especially prevalent along the Great Lakes because industry has long operated on the shoreline in order to have access to water,” says Howard Learner, executive director of the Environmental Law & Policy Center (ELPC). “That’s frankly different than most other regions. If you look at the West Coast or East Coast, shoreline property is largely used for residential activities combined with ports and marinas. In addition, the Great Lakes are freshwater — increasingly a scarce domestic and global resource.” So the stakes are arguably higher if flooding contaminates that water.

In its 2022 report “Rising Waters,” the ELPC notes that while Great Lakes water levels have always fluctuated, climate change is driving more extreme highs and sometimes lows. The six-foot swing between a record low monthly average level in 2013 and a close-to-record high in 2020 is “unprecedented,” the ELPC report says, and new record highs are likely in coming years.

Drew Gronewold, associate professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, notes that warmer temperatures mean increased evaporation from the Great Lakes, which can modulate water levels, but warmer temperatures also increase precipitation. If a climate event like a polar vortex curbs evaporation, then lake water levels can rise drastically. 

“The ocean is getting warmer, the atmosphere is getting warmer, the oceans are evaporating more and the atmosphere can carry more of that water to the Great Lakes” in the form of precipitation, he notes. Meanwhile the Great Lakes can flood surrounding communities even without high water levels, as more intense windstorms create powerful waves. 

“Whether the water levels are high or not, the Great Lakes can be rockin’” during storms, Gronewold says. “You can have 20-foot waves. We have evidence that through climate change, these storms are getting more intense.”

Along miles of Chicago’s lakefront, such storms mean trouble for homes, businesses and roads. Between 1996 and 2014 the Army Corps of Engineers spent more than half a billion dollars bolstering eight miles of Chicago shoreline, the ELPC report notes, yet during 2019–2020’s high water levels, waves caused half a billion dollars in damage. 

As Grist reports, in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, a century-long battle with the lake has worsened with climate change. A catastrophic storm in 2020 had devastating consequences, causing flooding in homes, large sinkholes and washed-out beaches. In the wake of Lake Michigan’s encroaching waters, residents of the lakefront neighborhood have organized to prompt solutions, and created a voice so loud that politicians, engineers and bureaucrats have rallied around the group to carve a path forward.

The RainReady program in Chicago also aims to enlist residents in creating green infrastructure like permeable pavement and rain gardens that can reduce flooding in hard-hit neighborhoods, including by revamping vacant lots. As Borderless Magazine reports, the RainReady program has two facets that are inadequate in many other local-level flood mitigation efforts: community leadership and serious funding.

Meanwhile, in Detroit, flooding has been especially problematic in the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood, a historic area known as “the Venice of Detroit” for its canals and proximity to the Detroit River, Planet Detroit reports. In 2021, FEMA designated parts of the neighborhood as Special Flood Hazard Areas. The city of Detroit has signaled it will fine or litigate against those with defective or missing seawalls, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars to replace or rehab. The financial stress on lower-income residents in the majority-Black neighborhood could accelerate displacement and gentrification. 

“Hard” infrastructure, such as seawalls, is often not the best approach to flood control. Experts often recommend dispersing river waters with “soft” approaches like creating wetlands and slowing down a river’s flow. 

“The solution can’t be trying to put up concrete and steel barriers to cordon off these places; all that does is push the water on someone else,” says Learner. “This is a matter of modernizing our land-use planning and zoning practices to adjust to today’s climate change realities and using the federal climate resilience funds to help ease the transition.”

Climate change makes FEMA flood maps out of date

There is no shortage of data showing how rainfall has increased and storms have become more intense in recent years, attributed to climate change, in the Great Lakes region. 

In the Great Lakes basin, the annual mean temperature was 1.6°F warmer in 1985–2016 than 1901–1960 and annual precipitation was 10% higher in the second time period, with about 35% more rainfall on the four wettest days of the year, the ELPC found in a 2019 analysis.

But nationwide, government agencies have not done enough to incorporate climate change predictions into policy, experts say.                     

FEMA’s flood maps are out of date, experts charge, and the land use standards that are part of the program have not been updated since the 1970s, Moore says. Additionally, in many states, property sellers are not required to disclose past flooding. All of this perpetuates development without adequate preparation for or protection from flooding, critics say.

“There are homes all over the country being built in full accordance with FEMA’s requirements that we know are probably not safe for the long haul,” says Moore with NRDC. “In the Great Lakes region, you have these crazy swings in lake levels which have caused widespread flooding. And rivers and streams feeding into the Great Lakes are often not big rivers, so they can be very flashy” — quickly swelling and flooding. “If a 5-inch [rain]storm is much more likely to occur today than 30 years ago, you’re building for a world that doesn’t exist anymore” by relying on outdated codes.

In response to advocates’ demands, FEMA has launched reforms of its flood insurance and mapping programs, accepting public comments. Among various reforms, advocates want stricter standards for critical infrastructure like medical centers and water treatment plants.

“Right now if you’re building a hot dog stand or a hospital, they’re built to the same standards of protection,” says Moore. “I’d argue one of those is more critical during a flooding disaster. These are long overdue improvements we desperately need FEMA to adopt.”

Flood risks higher in formerly redlined neighborhoods

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) mapped Chicago-area flood damage payments from public programs from 2003 to 2015, and found lower-income communities on the South and West sides of the city accounted for the most damage.

“During flooding events, the elderly and residents with disabilities or illnesses are most vulnerable, particularly when power outages and transportation disruptions inhibit them from meeting daily needs, such as climate control and medical treatment,” CMAP reported. “Low-income residents may struggle to pay for flood insurance, the clean-up costs and loss of personal belongings, as well as the repairs that could reduce their flood exposure in the future. Property damage from reoccurring flooding can contribute to larger scale disinvestment that is not fully captured in insurance claim or disaster relief data.”

NRDC’s analyses show that lower-value properties tend to suffer proportionally higher flood damages, reflecting the extra vulnerability of lower-income people. And a 2021 study by the real estate firm Redfin found that in Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit and other cities nationwide, flooding risk is higher in formerly redlined and yellowlined communities — where racist lending policies concentrated Black homebuyers in the 1930s through 1960s.

“Americans living in formerly redlined neighborhoods — many of whom are people of color — are more likely than those living in non-redlined neighborhoods to see their homes jeopardized by water damage,” the study said. “Due to decades of disinvestment, formerly redlined neighborhoods aren’t as financially equipped to prepare for and recover from natural disasters, which are becoming increasingly common.”

While redlining was outlawed in 1968, those same neighborhoods still tend to be disinvested and home to Black residents. 

Monica Lewis-Patrick, president and CEO of the community organization We the People of Detroit, says that she knows of “elders still living in homes where they’ve never been able to clean up the feces and wastewater in their basements” from past flooding. “We can’t bifurcate the issues of climate and environmental justice,” she says.

The environmental injustices posed by flooding also play out in other complicated ways.

Sahan Journal reports that Indigenous communities in Minnesota are seeing their traditional wild rice harvests endangered by flooding and rising water levels. Wild rice grows in shallow lakes and rivers, and Tribal Nations have worked hard to restore and maintain wild rice beds. One successful project modulated a dam to lower water levels and let rice thrive again.  But climate change means Minnesota is getting warmer and wetter. Last year, the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa saw their wild rice harvests largely destroyed by spring flooding. 

In all of these situations, as the stories in this collaboration show, there are ways to mitigate the impacts of flooding and help communities prepare and recover, if the communities are directly involved in the solutions.

“If we want to be equitable, this is the time where we hold ourselves accountable,” says Davis, from the Alliance for the Great Lakes. 

She adds that even though the new federal funding prioritizes environmental justice and community participation, much effort is needed to not only bring local leaders to the table but make sure grassroots organizations actually have the capacity to meaningfully participate.

“We have to acknowledge we’re starting at a deficit for a lot of the community groups — they’ve been doing this on a shoestring budget. This is the opportunity for them to really staff up and get the assistance they need, [and] be an integral part of this fight for the long haul.”

Inundation and injustice: Flooding presents a formidable threat to the Great Lakes region 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.