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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.

Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

Yes.

A nationally representative poll of U.S. adults in March 2023 asked:

“Do you have a family member who has ever been killed by a gun, including death by suicide?”

The results: 19% said yes, 73% said no and 8% said don’t know.

The poll by KFF, formerly Kaiser Family Foundation, was done online and by phone in English and Spanish. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

In 2022, 56% of the 48,187 U.S. gun deaths were suicide, according to provisional data as of Aug. 14, 2023, from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Homicide accounted for 41% of gun deaths in 2022.

More than twice as many suicides by firearm in 2020 occurred in states with the fewest gun laws, relative to states with the most laws, KFF reported in 2022.

This Fact Brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

KFF Health Tracking Poll

Google Docs 2022 US firearm deaths total, by type

KFF Do States with Easier Access to Guns have More Suicide Deaths by Firearm?

Has nearly one in five Americans lost a family member to gun violence? 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 partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

No.

Nationwide, college tuition has increased about three times as much as inflation since Ronald Reagan’s presidency ended in January 1989.

For public and private universities, the average annual undergraduate tuition and required fees, in current dollars, for all two-and four-year schools was $14,307 in 2021-22, according to the latest figures from the National Center for Educational Statistics, a federal agency.

That’s 438% higher than the 1988-89 figure of $2,658.

The Consumer Price Index measure of inflation was 121.2 in January 1989 and 282.6 in January 2022 — about 133% higher, according to figures from the Federal Reserve.

So tuition has increased about 3.3 times faster than inflation.

This claim, recently made by former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, is slightly different than, but not far off from a previous accurate claim he made in 2016 that college tuition as of then had grown four times the rate of inflation since 1978.

This Fact Brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

National Center for Education Statistics Tuition and required fees | Current dollars

FRED (Federal Reserve Bank Of St. Louis) Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average

Brookings College prices aren’t skyrocketing—but they’re still too high for some

PolitiFact Scott Walker says college tuition has risen at four times the rate of inflation

Has college tuition increased four times the rate of inflation since Ronald Reagan was president? 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 partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

Yes.

The candidate who carried Wisconsin in the 2020, 2016, 2004 and 2000 presidential elections won the state by less than 1 percentage point.

2020: Democrat Joe Biden, 49.5%; Republican Donald Trump 48.8%.

2016: Trump, 47.2%; Democrat Hillary Clinton, 46.5%.

2004: Democrat John Kerry, 49.7%; Republican George W. Bush, 49.3%.

2000: Democrat Al Gore, 47.8%; Bush, 47.6%.

Democrat Barack Obama won Wisconsin by 6.7 percentage points in 2012 and 13.9 percentage points in 2008.

The first Republican presidential debate for the 2024 election is scheduled for Aug. 23, 2023, in Milwaukee.

Republicans will choose a nominee at their national convention in Milwaukee in July 2024. The Democrats’ convention is in Chicago in August 2024.

Election experts say Wisconsin is one of a handful of battleground states that could decide the 2024 presidential contest.

This Fact Brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

270toWin Wisconsin Presidential Election Voting History

State of Wisconsin Canvass Results for 2020 General Election – 11/3/2020 6:00:00 AM

State of Wisconsin Canvass Results for 2016 General Election – 11/8/2016 6:00:00 AM

Has Wisconsin been decided by less than 1 percentage point in four of the last six presidential elections? 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.

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.

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.

Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

No.

Wisconsin’s constitution says: “The chief justice of the Supreme Court shall be the administrative head of the judicial system and shall exercise this administrative authority,” but adds “pursuant to procedures adopted by the Supreme Court.”

The chief justice’s role as court administrator was challenged when the court’s liberal majority voted Aug. 4, 2023, to create an administrative committee comprising the chief justice and two members selected by the majority.

Liberals gained a 4-3 majority three days earlier with the swearing in of Janet Protasiewicz who was elected in April.

Chief Justice Annette Ziegler, a conservative, called the majority “rogue.” She said their vote was “illegitimate” and “gut(ted)” the chief justice’s authority over internal court procedures and rules.

Justice Rebecca Dallet said the majority properly scheduled the meeting where the vote was taken after Ziegler declined requests to schedule a meeting. Dallet said the change makes procedural decision-making more inclusive.

This Fact Brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

Milwaukee Press Club (21:20) Newsmaker Luncheon with former Gov. Scott Walker

Wisconsin State Legislature Wisconsin Constitution

AP News New liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court majority moves to weaken conservative chief justice

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Journal Sentinel: Rancor flares on the Wisconsin Supreme Court as its new liberal majority moves to blunt the chief justice’s power

Does Wisconsin’s constitution ‘clearly’ say the Wisconsin Supreme Court chief justice administers the Supreme Court? 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 Weekly is a roundup of the week’s top headlines from around the state by Wisconsin Watch and other trusted news outlets.

• Gov. Tony Evers’s recent vetoes could still be overridden

• Oshkosh police use Marsy’s Law to shield officers who shot suspects

• Milwaukee interstate expansion raises flooding fears

• Harassment of state election officials under scrutiny

Access to some stories listed in the Wisconsin Weekly roundup may be limited to subscribers of the news organizations that produced them. We urge our readers to consider supporting these important news outlets by subscribing. 

Thanks for reading!

Legislature

Wisconsin Democrats on ‘veto watch’ after Tony Evers blocks 10 bills

Wisconsin Watch — Aug. 11, 2023

Republicans control 64 of 99 seats in the Assembly, not enough for a two-thirds veto-proof supermajority. But they could still override a gubernatorial veto if at least three Democratic members are absent due to illness or other reasons. Democrats are prepared to ensure that doesn’t happen.

More on Evers’ vetoes from The Associated Press: Evers vetoes GOP proposals on unemployment and gas engines but signs bills on crime

And welcome to our newest reporter: Wisconsin Watch hires Jack Kelly as new statehouse reporter

Law Enforcement

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

Wisconsin Watch — Aug. 9, 2023

Police departments in other states that have adopted a constitutional amendment expanding victims’ rights have shielded names of officers involved in use of force incidents. Oshkosh is first reported department in Wisconsin to cite the law, though other departments have released names, some within 24 hours.

More from WTMJ4: Viral video of wrong suspect beat, arrested in Kenosha prompts calls for accountability

Environment

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

Wisconsin Watch/WPR — Aug. 10, 2023

Gov. Tony Evers has signed off on plans to expand a 3.5-mile stretch of interstate to improve traffic flow from downtown Milwaukee to the western suburbs. Area residents worry the extra pavement will cut into green space that absorbs local rainfall.

More from our partners:

• Ensia: Inundation and injustice: Flooding presents a formidable threat to the Great Lakes region
• Grist: South Side Chicago neighbors fight Lake Michigan’s erosion and flooding

Elections

Bullied by Her Own Party, a Wisconsin Election Official’s GOP Roots Mean Nothing in Volatile New Climate

ProPublica — Aug. 7, 2023

Wisconsin Elections Commission Republican appointee Marge Bostelmann has been exiled by her local GOP chapter, prompting a lawsuit from prominent election denier Peter Bernegger that she should be removed. The Department of Justice warned Bernegger in June that his belligerent communications with the commission could be grounds for arrest.

Cities and Towns

What will Popple River, Wisconsin’s second-smallest town, do with a 5,000% increase in state funding?

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel — Aug. 8, 2023

A recent increase in shared revenue for local municipalities gave small towns some of the largest increases to address road, fire and EMS funding.

Health

Wisconsin residents endure long waits due to FoodShare and Medicaid changes

Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service — Aug. 7, 2023

Recent changes in public benefit programs have caused some to lose benefits entirely and others to face challenges getting their applications reviewed or renewed.

Did Florida decide that its middle school curriculum will include that some enslaved people benefited from slavery? (YES)

Did a Marquette University poll find that 50% of US Republicans don’t believe that Donald Trump had classified documents at Mar-a-Lago? (YES)

Wisconsin Weekly: Legislative Democrats now on ‘veto watch’ 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.