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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.

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

Republican lawmakers held a day of back-to-back public hearings in mid-April for bills that would add restrictions to receiving unemployment insurance payouts, ban local guaranteed income programs and prevent state agencies from automatically renewing low-income health insurance. 

A lead proponent testifying at the Capitol was a former Republican legislative aide representing a Florida-based advocacy group with no membership and tens of millions of anonymous donations. One Republican lawmaker noted it was the third time that afternoon that Adam Gibbs had spoken in favor of the bills, all which were aimed at dismantling the state’s social safety net.

“Busy day in the Legislature,” replied Gibbs, communications director for the nonprofit Foundation for Government Accountability.

His pitch that April afternoon was succinct: Wisconsin employers struggle to fill jobs because the state’s unemployment insurance benefits — which are among the bottom third of benefits in the nation — are too generous.

“One of the fastest ways that we can deal with Wisconsin’s ongoing workforce shortage is to keep people who are still in the labor market, those recently unemployed, productively engaged in the workforce,” Gibbs told members of the Assembly Committee on Workforce Development and Economic Opportunities.

The committee later voted 10-5 along party lines to advance the four bills that would add barriers to unemployed workers receiving cash payments from the state. The bills sailed through the Republican-controlled Legislature with only that single public hearing.

Once sent to Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ desk they’ll likely be blocked. Evers has vetoed similar bills in the past and a spokesperson told Wisconsin Watch that “similar if not identical legislation” would face the same fate.

But in Republican-controlled states, FGA and its lobbying arm, Opportunity Solutions Project, have racked up a series of wins. Recently, FGA got national attention for its successful drive to relax child labor restrictions in Iowa and Arkansas. A similar effort supported by the group is pending in the Missouri legislature.

Major Wisconsin Republican benefactors have fueled FGA’s successes. They include the Uihlein family, owners of the Pleasant Prairie-based Uline Industries, and the conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee.

In Wisconsin — where unemployment remained at a record low of 2.4% in May — the group has pushed bills that would broaden the definition of workplace misconduct to ease unemployment benefit denials as well as empower the Legislature’s budget committee to veto future federal jobless relief. It also opposes Medicaid expansion and supports certain election changes such as purging the names of ineligible voters from election rolls and making it harder for clerks to correct minor mistakes on absentee ballot envelopes.

Opponents of the bills include the left-leaning Main Street Alliance which organizes small businesses for grassroots advocacy on economic and social issues. Interim policy director Shawn Phetteplace said dark money pro-business groups like FGA enjoy privileged access with the Republican leadership setting the agenda.

“There are a lot of ex-Republican operatives,” he said. “And so it’s like you leave the building and go right back in on the other side.”

A Wisconsin Watch analysis of the 2021-22 session found that of the 17 bills passed with Opportunity Solutions Project/FGA support, Evers vetoed all but one. The lobbying group also opposed a Democratic-sponsored bill that would extend Medicaid for eligible women for a full year after childbirth; Republicans refused to schedule a hearing, and the GOP-led budget committee stripped it from the governor’s budget. The group also supported 16 bills that ultimately did not pass both chambers.

FGA and its lobbying arm in recent years have kept a relatively low profile despite collecting millions in funding, hiring at least 115 lobbyists and flying lawmakers, including some from Wisconsin, across the country for educational seminars.

In Wisconsin, Opportunity Solutions Project reported three registered lobbyists — two of them in state — and $106,863 in lobbying expenditures during the 2021-22 session. This year’s numbers aren’t in yet, but a Wisconsin Watch tally puts its lobbying expenditures at nearly $275,000 between 2017 and 2022.

Secret donors seek to influence state policy

Watchdogs that monitor dark money groups say FGA is just the latest example of an advocacy organization bankrolled by a small network of billionaire activists intent on deregulation, dismantling welfare protections and restricting voting rights.

FGA doesn’t disclose its donors. But IRS data tracked by the Center for Media and Democracy, which investigates the influence of money in politics, show some of the largest checks came from foundations tied to conservative causes.

The Ed Uihlein Family Foundation donated $17.85 million between 2014 and 2021, according to tax filings. The Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee gave $2.75 million over a similar period. 

FGA’s lobbying arm isn’t required to disclose its funding sources. Critics call that a loophole in the law, giving donors the ability to secretly influence public policy. 

The IRS says charitable foundations like FGA aren’t supposed to engage in substantial political lobbying. But like other similar groups, it shares office space, staffers and other resources with its lobbying arm. Such arrangements allow donors to make tax deductible donations that ultimately end up being used for lobbying.

David Armiak, research director with the Center for Media and Democracy, called it a “bit of a wild wild west with these groups.”

“There’s just not that much analysis or investigations or audits into these groups to see if this stuff is really legal,” he added.

Gibbs has a business card identifying his employer as the tax-exempt foundation — while also testifying on behalf of Opportunity Solutions Network, the group registered to lobby lawmakers. Until last year, Gibbs had worked in several legislative offices including most recently as the communications director for state Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg.

Gibbs told Wisconsin Watch it’s a common practice among charities, including progressive groups, to have both nonprofit and lobbying arms.

“We’re like any of the other ones: NAACP, Sierra Club, all of those types of organizations,” Gibbs said. “We have to file the necessary paperwork with the IRS. But we protect the identity of donors as well, just like all those other organizations do.”

Armiak agreed the issue is bipartisan.

“It’s a problem that exists on both sides of the political spectrum,” he said. “But it’s been exploited because the IRS has been defunded and defanged.”

A review of lobbying records found that Opportunity Solutions Project has focused on public assistance programs, health insurance and election reform. This session, it opposed a rule that would have allowed Wisconsin clerks to correct minor mistakes on absentee ballot envelopes. 

FGA is part of the State Policy Network, a national network of conservative nonprofits. Other network affiliates active in the Badger State include the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty law firm, the Badger Institute, MacIver Institute and Institute for Reforming Government. Armiak said having the same messages and proposals amplified by multiple groups gives them additional weight.

“There are all these different groups, and experts that are calling for one thing, right?” he said. “When in fact, they’re basically the same thing funded by a handful of very wealthy interests.”

Group pays for lawmakers’ travel

At least half a dozen Wisconsin Republican lawmakers have traveled out of state at FGA’s expense for educational seminars. They include Senate President Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, who reported $800 in in-kind donations from the group to attend a legislative conference last December in Florida. He declined to comment.

In April Sen. Dan Feyen, R-Fond du Lac, Sen. Cory Tomczyk, R-Mosinee, and Rep. Clint Moses, R-Menomonie, traveled to Nashville for a two-day meeting at FGA’s expense. The lawmakers have not yet reported the cost of that three-day trip. 

“It was not a super partisan convention or anything like that,” Moses told Wisconsin Watch. “Just more of a think tank.”

Moses said there were Republican lawmakers from at least a half-dozen Midwestern and Southern states. The thrust of the agenda was cutting Medicaid fraud and making it harder for able-bodied adults to draw benefits rather than return to work.

“There’s a lot of people that are not in the workforce that are on the sidelines and choosing not to go back to work,” Moses said.

He brushed off the fact that unemployment rates have cratered with labor participation higher than pre-pandemic levels.

“I’ve heard that argument: Unemployment rates are at a record low and this and that,” he said. “But we still have, obviously, people that are not working and we still have a huge demand.”

He added that demographic changes that include an aging population combined with declining fertility rates also factor into employers’ struggles to find workers.

Feyen also traveled in December to a two-day FGA “educational” seminar in Naples, Florida, at a value of $1,983. 

The sessions included presentations by FGA of its legislative agenda in other states and how similar legislation could work in Wisconsin.

“If something’s working successfully in other states, we want to try and replicate that here,” Feyen said. 

Even though Evers vetoed nearly all of the FGA-backed bills, Feyen said he’s not discouraged, having reintroduced three bills relating to unemployment insurance the day after the meeting in Tennessee.

“We’re bringing some of these bills back, hoping that the governor will finally come around,” Feyen said.

Bills face Evers’ veto pen

With unemployment rates at historic lows Democrats question why Republican lawmakers are focused on increasing barriers to unemployment assistance.

“This is a cynical distraction from the work that we should be doing,” Senate Minority Leader Melissa Agard, D-Madison, said. “But thankfully, they’re not becoming law.”

Civil rights, social welfare and public health advocates said in a May 31 letter the four unemployment bills were rushed through legislative committees without much chance for public comment. Three of the bills received public hearings in separate committee meetings at the same time.

Main Street Alliance, the left-leaning small business advocacy group, was one of the more than two dozen signatories. Phetteplace said pro-business groups like FGA that are awash in dark money claim to advocate for small business employers but are out of step with ordinary people.

“For a long time, you’ve had this sense of identity theft, where you have organizations that claim that they’re speaking on behalf of small business, when really they’re speaking on behalf of their corporate donors,” he said.

Editor’s note: The story and a photo caption were corrected to clarify that the Bradley Foundation is not a family foundation.

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 billionaires quietly bankroll effort to shrink state’s social safety net 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 produced as part of the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab, a consortium of six news outlets covering northeastern Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Shannon Pikka loves the work-life balance of her job in construction. She left an office job in insurance and now enjoys being up early and working with her hands as part of a drywall finishing crew. The single mother’s workday ends around 3 p.m. — just in time to greet her two children from school.

“Kids are coming home at that time, and we got the whole evening now together,” Pikka said. “Our job should not dictate our lifestyle.”

Despite changing careers nearly four years ago, she’s still earning apprentice wages due to setbacks during the pandemic when her youngest was in third grade and schools switched to distance learning. 

“I would be a journeywoman right now had I had a babysitting option so I could have still shown up for work and gained all those hours in the year — so that set me back,” the De Pere, Wisconsin resident said. 

The difference is a full $9 an hour. As it is, she’s making just shy of $27 an hour. But with two school-aged kids in her household, paying all of the bills is a stretch. Pikka gets no child support, and she relies on her parents who live nearby to provide child care for the days she needs to be at a remote jobsite for days or even weeks at a time.

“I’m just trying to make ends meet,” she said. 

But government statistics show many in the community earn a lot less than she does. 

The state Department of Workforce Development estimates that two adults working full-time earning $25.20 an hour each is just enough to be self-sufficient in a household with two children when factoring in the cost of housing, transportation, food and child care. 

The average wage in Green Bay, according to the most recent federal Bureau of Labor Statistics report, was $26.29 in 2022. But the median earnings were $21.84 an hour, meaning that half of workers earn less than that.

In other words, many workers supporting families in northeast Wisconsin are just squeaking by, especially at a time when the cost of living is increasing in Wisconsin and across the nation. 

“Self-sufficiency is attainable for the majority of full-time workers if children are not involved,” wrote DWD spokesperson Jennifer Sereno. “However, the situation rapidly changes when just one child is brought into the picture, let alone multiple.”

That’s because the cost of child care can rival tuition at a state university, the Wisconsin Policy Forum wrote in a recent report. A state survey of child-care facilities found the annual median cost for school-aged children starts at around $10,000 but can be as much as $40,000 a year for high-quality infant care in urban areas like Green Bay and Oshkosh. 

Earnings too high to qualify for benefits

Pikka’s household has no second income, yet she is still well above the level to qualify for many public assistance programs.

Her story represents a growing segment of Wisconsin’s working population: those earning too much to qualify for most public assistance programs but too little to afford anything but basic necessities. United Way studies this group of people known as ALICE: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. Its latest report shows 23% of Wisconsinites fit into this category.

Help such as food assistance through the state’s FoodShare program, subsidized child care under the Wisconsin Shares program care and BadgerCare Plus health insurance are not available to many such families, including Pikka’s. 

“These are people who are working,” said Trisha Witt, who works in advocacy for United Way Fox Cities in Appleton. “They’re earning more than the federal poverty level but less than Wisconsin’s basic cost of living.”

When you add in the 11% of people living below the poverty line, the percentage of Wisconsinites struggling financially is 34%, according to the United Way report.

In northeast Wisconsin, the figures are similar, except in urban areas, where the numbers are starker. In Oshkosh, for example 41% of residents are either below poverty or not making enough for basic needs. 

Barriers to prosperity

It’s not due to a lack of employment. Official unemployment is at record lows with federal agencies reporting Wisconsin at a record 2.4% in April. Northeast Wisconsin was hovering at 2% or less. 

But while very few able-bodied adults are outside of the workforce, lack of affordable child care and transportation can keep people from working and meeting their basic needs. 

“No matter what the economic conditions are like,” said Ryan Long, a regional economist for the state Department of Workforce Development in Green Bay, “we know for certain that there are going to be folks who face barriers to work.”

On paper, Pikka has been relatively successful. For 15 years she sold insurance but entered the trades after becoming disillusioned with a desk job. But a string of abusive partners who ended up incarcerated or moving out of state has left her the sole breadwinner for her family.

Her life had been full of hardship from when she was left at a hospital in Colombia where she was born and never picked up. Pikka spent the next three years in an overcrowded South American orphanage where she said she suffered physical abuse.

“I have scars on my body because the nuns could not control the orphanage, so they beat us up,” she said. 

At age 4, a pair of school teachers adopted her and raised her in northeast Wisconsin. If it wasn’t for her parents helping with child care, Pikka said she could never maintain her higher paying career in construction.

“I wouldn’t be able to do it,” she said. “I’d have to go back to my office job.” 

The dearth of affordable child care in Wisconsin is well-documented. The staff shortage in day care centers itself has a ripple effect. On paper, there are roughly 37,500 slots for children in the 19 counties in northeast Wisconsin. But a survey last year of 1,173 child care centers in Wisconsin found nearly half were below capacity. 

“It is important to note that this is licensed capacity and providers may not be using all slots due to staffing shortages, low enrollment, or other factors,” wrote Gina Paige, a spokesperson for the state Department of Children and Families, which licenses day care facilities.

Hot housing market constrained by supply, rising interest rates

Affordable housing is another key to family sustainability. But a shortage of supply has driven up rental prices across the board.

“It doesn’t really matter what the availability of jobs is like if young folks are getting priced out of certain areas because housing is too expensive,” Long said.

Real estate data show that housing prices across the state continue to rise even as sales slump due to constrained supply and rising interest rates that have added to the cost of borrowing.

In April 2023, the median house in northeast Wisconsin cost $260,000. That’s $23,000 less than the statewide median. But the median cost rose 7% across the region in the previous year, similar to the increase statewide. 

All this happened while real estate transactions slumped after interest rates spiked from historic lows at below 3% to around 6.6% for a fixed 30-year loan in May. 

The numbers are stark: There were more than 1,500 residential home sales in June 2022, just as the Fed hiked interest rates for a third time in response to inflation fears. Ten months later in April of this year, the region saw half as many closed deals at 777.

Property owners who are locked in with relatively low interest rates are less likely to list their homes now because they’d pay higher rates on their next property, said real estate broker Kevin Jones, co-owner of Adashun Jones in Fond du Lac.

“There are more people pursuing the few properties that are on the market,” he said.

Houses harder to find, more expensive to rent

The region has already faced supply constraints as Baby Boomers live longer and stay put, leaving fewer properties for younger aspiring homeowners.

“We have healthy Baby Boomers — I’m one of them — who are staying in their homes longer, and millennials who are clamoring to find homes and are at a disadvantage because they increasingly have to rely on borrowed money,” Marquette University economics professor David Clark said at a recent economics forum.

He said many millennials of child-bearing age — those born in the 1980s and ‘90s — “kind of got dealt a bad hand” coming out of the Great Recession with a weak labor market and so “logically and rationally stayed out of the market” during the time when working Americans would purchase first homes.

Jones, the real estate broker and Fox Valley landlord, said the rental housing market is also hot with rents increasing by 10% to 20% annually. 

“I think it’s because a lot of the rentals have been consolidated into a small group of investors — that’s one side of the story,” he said. “And the other side is there’s just not enough homes and developments that are being created.”

In 2022, the National Low Income Housing Coalition — an advocacy group — listed the fair market price for a two-bedroom unit in northeast Wisconsin at between $757 in rural counties to $889 in the Oshkosh area . The study, citing U.S. Census figures, also found the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in counties across northeast Wisconsin — for that matter, across the entire state — is higher than the recommended 30% of the average income renters in those counties make. 

Home ownership remains elusive for Pikka. For three years, she has rented a two-bedroom apartment for $875 in De Pere where she enjoys living despite the higher housing prices compared to neighboring Green Bay. Once she works enough hours for journeyman wages, she said she’ll try to buy something.

But Pikka, who is 41, said that’s at least three years away. In the meantime she is pursuing another dream. Pikka would like to visit Colombia with her kids to reconnect with her birth parents.

This story is part of the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab’s series, Families Matter, covering issues important to families in the region. The lab is a local news collaboration in northeast Wisconsin made up of six news organizations: the Green Bay Press-Gazette, Appleton Post-Crescent, FoxValley365, The Press Times, Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Watch. The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s Journalism Department is an educational partner. Microsoft is providing financial support to the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation and Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region to fund the initiative. The mission of the lab is to “collaborate to identify and fill information gaps to help residents explore ways to improve their communities and lives — and strengthen democracy.”

Rising cost of living in northeast Wisconsin has many working families treading water  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 our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Wisconsin’s powerful Republican-controlled budget committee, under fire for using a secretive “pocket veto” to block certain funding, denied several of those requests in a public meeting Tuesday, including for one of the largest conservation projects in state history.

The abrupt about-face by the Joint Finance Committee came after Wisconsin Watch reported on how some groups have questioned the legality of the committee not setting a date for a public meeting to review the projects halted by anonymous committee members.

On Wednesday, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers criticized Republicans for using a “secret process” to block projects and said his administration was considering next steps.

The JFC has oversight over state agency expenditures including land conservation deals over $250,000 and in the northern part of the state. By law, committee members have 14 days to object after receiving a request for their approval, after which a meeting must be scheduled.

But in recent months the committee has come under scrutiny after Wisconsin Watch detailed its longstanding practice of exercising a pocket veto to kill projects without holding a meeting. A legal memo obtained through a records request found legislative attorneys doubted the legality of withholding funding for months, even years, without scheduling a meeting.

On Tuesday, with barely 24 hours’ notice, the co-chairs called a meeting to review five projects that had been held up by anonymous objections, one for nearly two years.

One by one the proposals failed on party-line votes on a committee where Republicans hold a 12-4 majority. In a meeting that lasted less than 40 minutes — and as is common included no public testimony — the Republicans voted to block:

• $4 million in state funding to leverage a federal match to close a $15.5 million deal that would conserve from development 56,259 acres around Pelican River for public recreation and logging; 
• $17.5 million for a program to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates for low-income Wisconsin residents;
• The Department of Health Services from plugging a budget hole using several revenue sources, including $2.3 million from the sale of five surplus parcels of land at its Northern Wisconsin Center in Chippewa Falls;
• $1.7 million for the Department of Natural Resources to hire a full-time employee for four years to help implement state obligations under the Great Lakes Compact;
• $288,000 for a Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. tax credit to remodel a historic fraternity house in Madison.

Conservation groups said after the hearing that the JFC’s meeting to clear out a backlog of objections did not go far enough to satisfy the law.

“Because they failed to schedule that meeting within their 14-day passive review window, they don’t have any legal authority over the expenditure,” said Charles Carlin of Gathering Waters, an umbrella group of land trusts in Wisconsin. “So the ball is really back in the DNR’s court.”

Evers has proposed ending anonymous objections but has so far resisted calls to either challenge the JFC in court or allocate funds it had held up without a hearing.

“I’m not sure what’s next. We’re taking a look at that,” he said Wednesday at an event at a union training center in Fitchburg. “Obviously, we’re disappointed in the Joint Finance Committee’s response and why it took so long, why it’s a secret process and then suddenly a decision is made. That said, we’re looking at alternatives.”

Has committee violated law?

Conservationists have argued that repeated objections have threatened the health of the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund. Some groups have proposed more modest conservation projects that are too small to trigger JFC oversight. 

Gov. Tony Evers has proposed ending anonymous objections but has so far resisted calls to either challenge the JFC in court or allocate funds it had held up without a hearing.

Rep. Evan Goyke, D-Milwaukee, a committee member and vocal critic of what he called a lack of transparency, said the committee’s leadership has been feeling pressure.

“I think they wanted to remove everything that’s been sitting there for a long time because they’re not in compliance with the law,” Goyke told Wisconsin Watch shortly after the meeting.

Goyke commended several Republican members — including committee co-chair Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green — for revealing that they had lodged anonymous objections and explained their reason.

Marklein said over the years, the DNR had brought proposed acquisitions or easements with inflated appraisals that were later reduced in price after the committee objected.

“I know I’ve saved the state of Wisconsin a lot by objecting and by getting a better deal, better appraisal and in scoping the project,” Marklein said.

Fellow co-chair Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, defended the committee’s ability to stall projects discreetly while the committee seeks more information.

“Sometimes it’s just getting our questions answered — it’s that simple,” Born said.

Some conservation projects sail through — some die

In recent weeks, a 195-acre acquisition in Vilas County sailed through without objection —as did a 76-acre Mississippi River bluffs conservation easement in Pierce County.

But on Tuesday, several Republicans said town governments opposed the Pelican River project,  and local officials only received the minimal notice of one of the largest conservation deals in state history. However, a tally by WXPR found a mix of support and opposition among the 21 nearby town governments.

“I basically went to the co-chairs and asked them as well as some of the representatives to vote this down,” Sen. Mary Felzkowski, R-Irma, told reporters after the meeting.

She had been an outlier on the committee after revealing herself as one of the lawmakers behind the objection.

“Getting some of this criteria unearthed is — in a very strange and terrible way — a step forward,” Goyke said. “Because even though the process is clearly going to continue, at least we’re hearing more from the majority party about what they’ve done, why they’ve done it and who’s behind it.”

Evers has so far proposed in the 2023-25 state budget legislative changes that would remove some anonymous objections. But those tweaks would have to be approved by the JFC as part of its budget review.

Does new court majority change equation?

But the door remains open for a potential legal challenge arguing the JFC has long flouted the law in a practice that goes back decades. The door may even open wider on Aug. 1 when liberals take a majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which would have final say on whether the committee’s actions were legal. 

Conservative justices, who have controlled the court for the past 15 years, have often sided with the Republican Legislature. But Born said the changing legal landscape was not why the committee convened Tuesday’s “routine” meeting. 

“We are only continuing the work of the committee as it has been done for decades,” he told reporters. “There is no new concern or new thing that’s changing the way we’re doing our job.”

The clearing of the backlog didn’t last long. 

Less than an hour after the meeting concluded, DHS was informed that its plan to spend $8 million of the state’s opioid settlement fund on expanded Narcan, fentanyl test strips and prevention education in public schools had received an anonymous objection from a JFC member.

The letter sent out to the agency didn’t specify when or why the objection was raised. It only said a meeting would be scheduled — at a future date.

Wisconsin Watch Statehouse Bureau Chief Matthew DeFour 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 Republicans clear out projects stalled by secretive ‘pocket veto’ 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.

Days before the Wisconsin Supreme Court election a major union representing transit workers wrote an $18,000 check to Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s campaign.

For the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents bus drivers and mechanics, it was a huge donation compared with their previous donation to a Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate in 2018 for just $250.

“There’s a lot on the line with the Supreme Court race here,” said Donnell Shorter, head of the ATU Local 998 in Milwaukee.

But that $18,000 is a drop in the bucket compared with the contributions of a few dozen ultra-wealthy donors.

Recent filings show a total of 41 individual donors wrote Protasiewicz’s campaign checks for the statutory maximum of $20,000. Former Justice Daniel Kelly’s campaign received at least 21 such donations over the same period.

The disparity between wealthy donors and contributions raised by working Wisconsinites doesn’t sit right with Shorter.

“I represent basically 1,600 people,” Shorter said. “Their voices won’t be heard as loudly as that one billionaire, that one celebrity.”

Both campaigns have boasted record-shattering fundraising from their political allies, but a Wisconsin Watch analysis shows the lion’s share of campaign cash is coming from special interest groups and a relatively small number of deep-pocket donors across the political spectrum.

Records show Protasiewicz received nearly 25,000 individual donations for $50 or less, totaling $568,549. That’s still less than the $820,000 donated by the top 41 donors to her campaign including $20,000 checks from Hollywood director Steven Spielberg and his wife, actress Kate Capshaw.

Kelly’s campaign has consistently trailed in individual donations large and small. His campaign received 3,803 individual donations of $50 or less totaling $139,620. That’s only a third of the amount from his top 21 donors who wrote $20,000 checks.

And those are just donations directly to the candidate campaign funds. Some of the maximum campaign donors have also given $1 million or more to political action committees or political parties to flood the internet and airwaves with campaign ads. And more money has flowed into the campaign via so-called “issue advocacy” groups that aren’t required to disclose their donors, often referred to as “dark money.”

Kelly leads in support when all spending is counted.

WisPolitics.com estimates the Wisconsin Supreme Court spending is on pace to break $45 million, demolishing the previous record $10 million spent in the 2020 high court contest. The previous national record was $15 million in the 2004 Illinois Supreme Court election.

The infusion of supersized checks from both philanthropists and industrialists has good governance groups aghast.

“There’s just an obscene amount of money on both sides of this thing, which raises some serious questions for our democracy,” said Matt Rothschild, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. “The voices of average Wisconsinites are being drowned out, so we don’t have an equal say as to who’s having influence over our elections.”

Out-of-state donors dig deep for liberal cause

Protasiewicz’s campaign has benefited from donors such as Oklahoma energy heirs Lynn and Stacy Schusterman, who each donated $20,000 and also a combined $1 million to the state Democratic Party.

According to Wisconsin campaign finance records, Manhattan dance school director Hana Ginsburg Tirosh wrote a $20,000 check to Protasiewicz’s campaign. She and her Wall Street trader husband Raz Tirosh made headlines for purchasing actress Susan Saranadon’s $7.9 million Manhattan loft in 2020.

Raz Tirosh’s firm, Jane Street, was called “the top Wall Street firm no one’s heard of,” according to a 2021 Financial Times profile, having traded $17 trillion in assets in 2020 alone.

At least three of his colleagues at Jane Street — Sandor Lehoczky, Ron Minsky and James McClave, and their partners — also gave max campaign contributions, increasing the cash haul from households tied to the firm to $120,000. 

That same day, just five days before the February primary, a pair of $20,000 donations also arrived from San Francisco courtesy of Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson and his physician wife Erica.

The Protasiewicz campaign didn’t directly address whether the combined $200,000 in maximum donations were somehow coordinated in a 24-hour span in mid-February.

Campaign spokesperson Sam Roecker said Protasiewicz did not travel out-of-state to solicit the funds. He said it’s no surprise the race is receiving national attention. As of the March 27 pre-election filing deadline, her campaign has raised more than $15 million.

“It’s widely known that Wisconsin’s Supreme Court came one vote short of overturning the 2020 election,” Roecker wrote in a statement. “So there is interest across the country in making sure Judge Janet Protasiewicz, the pro-democracy and pro-rule-of-law candidate, is elected over an extreme right-wing activist like Dan Kelly.”

Committees do heavy lifting for Kelly camp

Before the primary, Kelly’s campaign reported a pair of $20,000 donations — from Leonard Leo, co-chair of the conservative Federalist Society and Beloit industrialist Diane Hendricks, a top-tier Republican Party patron, who recently gave $200,000 to the Wisconsin GOP. But subsequent campaign records show a flurry of activity with at least 21 individuals writing $20,000 checks to the campaign.

They include Michael White, chair and owner of major Milwaukee industrial manufacturer Rite-Hite, who penned an infamous email warning his 1,400 employees of “personal consequences” if President Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012.

Northwestern Mutual chair and CEO John Schlifske and his wife Kim also contributed a combined $40,000. 

The family owners of Sargento Foods, the Plymouth-based cheese giant, also gave generously to the Kelly campaign, with retired executive Louis Gentine and his wife Michelle shelling out $20,000 each in addition to the $100,000 he gave to the Wisconsin GOP. His son, Sargento CEO Louie Gentine, followed suit three days later with a maximum donation of his own.

For Kelly, other in-state interests include Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby. Real estate interests have also contributed about $37,000 from their membership and a Realtors’ PAC.

Protasiewicz appears to hold a lopsided advantage in direct donations. But that’s not the whole story, cautioned Douglas Keith of the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks money in politics.

That’s because Kelly’s core mega donors have funneled millions into committees running attack ads against his opponent. Wisconsin Democracy Campaign estimates $13.7 million has been spent supporting Kelly or attacking his opponents. Protasiewicz’s allies have spent nearly $11.2 million on her behalf.

“Dan Kelly is raising significantly less money than Janet Protasiewicz,” Keith said. “But Dan Kelly also has gotten substantially more outside money support.”

Illinois billionaire Richard “Dick” Uihlein has funneled at least $4 million into the Fair Courts America PAC that he controls.

The PAC spent at least $5.4 million on advertising attacking Kelly’s opponents including during the primary. And it’s only one of several committees that has spent millions in advocacy and attack advertising in the Wisconsin race. His wife, Elizabeth Uihlein, gave $500,000 to the Wisconsin Republican Party during the campaign.

While donors face caps on direct donations to campaigns, PACs can receive unlimited contributions. And critics say they often blur rules designed to create a firewall between a candidate’s campaign and committees raising unlimited cash.

“They can do whatever they want,” Keith said. “But the limit on them is that they can’t coordinate with the candidates, because then it becomes not independent spending, it becomes a contribution to the candidate.”

In practice that’s often a wink-and-a-nod arrangement between a candidate and wealthy backers, Keith said.

“I see candidates not raising the amount of money you would expect them to raise,” Keith said of direct donations, “which suggests to me that they have a reason to think that they don’t need to raise as much money as candidates in the past have raised.”

Even so, Kelly’s campaign has tried to single out his opponent as beholden to outside interests.

“Janet Protasiewicz is D.C. liberals’ flavor of the week because they know she would be the most openly partisan judicial activist Wisconsin has ever seen,” Kelly campaign spokesperson Ben Voekel wrote in a statement to Wisconsin Watch. “While (she) relies on out-of-state mega donors and state party bosses to fund her campaign, Justice Kelly is proud to have the support of grassroots activists across the state of Wisconsin.”

‘Billionaires on the left, billionaires on the right’

Observers like Rothschild lament that the race is being run on cash from a relatively small cadre of donors on each side.

“It looks like it’s boiling down to a race to see whether (state Democratic Party chair) Ben Wikler can speed dial billionaires faster than Richard Uihlein can transfer money into his misnamed Fair Courts PAC,” Rothschild said. “And that’s not how our democracy is supposed to function.”

Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, a conservative pro-business group, has spent more than $5.8 million through its public advocacy arm on political ads, according to the Brennan Center’s tracking. Because it runs “issue ads” that don’t explicitly advocate for or attack a candidate, they are not required to register as a campaign group or disclose their funding.

A Better Wisconsin Together Political Fund, a coalition of labor unions and progressive social advocacy groups, has spent more than $5 million on ad buys attacking Kelly’s stance on abortion and other issues.

That’s how organized labor gets around the $18,000 spending cap on direct contributions to Supreme Court candidates. Major national unions like American Federation of Teachers have contributed $500,000, while the International Union of Operating Engineers PAC has forked over $300,000 to A Better Wisconsin Together.

The Monona-based political fund has also received at least a quarter million dollars from Lynde Uihlein, a more liberal cousin of Richard Uihlein, whose family’s wealth can be traced back to the Schlitz beer dynasty. That’s on top of the $400,000 Lynde Uihlein gave to the state Democratic Party.

Just south of the border, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker — a billionaire from a prominent hotel chain dynasty — recently donated $20,000 directly to the Protasiewicz campaign and cut a $1 million check to the Wisconsin’s Democratic Party.

The nominally nonpartisan race is flush with party cash. Filings show the state’s Democratic Party has spent more than $9.3 million to support Protasiewicz’s campaign. She pledged to recuse herself from any cases brought to the high court by Democrats. Kelly’s campaign has received more than $578,000 from the state Republican Party and various county committees.

A change of state law in 2015 removed caps on donations to parties and allowed parties to make unlimited contributions to candidates.

Wisconsin Watch reached out to more than a dozen ultra-wealthy donors who cut $20,000 checks to the Protasiewicz or Kelly campaigns.

Only a handful replied. None were willing to comment.

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.

Mega donors fuel record-shattering $45M Wisconsin Supreme Court race 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.

Along a sagging marshland boardwalk near Appleton’s airport, woodpeckers root out grubs from the pitted ash trunks that line a popular pathway through a municipal park.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources late last year approved paying for half of a $1.3 million rehabilitation project that would remove the decrepit trees, improve safety and replace the boardwalk that gives access to Arrowhead Park’s marshy forestland.

But an anonymous objection raised by the state’s powerful budget committee left officials with the town of Grand Chute scrambling to figure out why the project’s funding had been blocked. The committee later approved a smaller amount.

“Whoever objected thought it was too much,” said Katie Schwartz, the town’s public works director. “And so we were given some different options for how to move forward. But that was the extent of it.”

Such objections from the Republican-led Joint Finance Committee (JFC) have become increasingly common under Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, with land conservation in the Northwoods especially targeted.

Wisconsin Watch found that in many cases, the committee has failed to follow state law, which requires scheduling a public hearing on spending halted by such anonymous objections. 

The effect is a secretive “pocket veto” over projects and programs, ranging from a $15.5 million easement to expand recreational access along the Pelican River to a historic fraternity house remodel in Madison and a $17.5 million incentive program to encourage low-income Wisconsinites on Medicaid to become vaccinated — all without a public hearing or explanation.

Evers has so far been unwilling to challenge the committee’s legal authority. Instead he has called in his proposed 2023-25 budget for an end to the secrecy that committee members from both parties have historically used to block spending. 

Little projects held up by big players

State law requires land conservation projects funded under the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program be approved by the budget committee if they exceed $250,000. In 2015, the Legislature under GOP Gov. Scott Walker also required JFC approval for any stewardship projects north of Highway 64, which bisects the state between the St. Croix River bridge and Marinette. 

Wisconsin’s land stewardship program has been used since 1989 to acquire property for outdoor recreation and to protect environmentally sensitive areas. The program, authorized through 2026, provides $33.25 million annually, mostly through borrowing, for various projects.

A Wisconsin Watch review of DNR data found the pace of committee objections to Knowles-Nelson projects accelerated during the Evers administration. From 2014 through 2018, under Walker, the Republican-run committee lodged at least 17 objections; a couple were withdrawn — and only one project was denied.

But since Evers took office in January 2019, the committee lodged at least 26 objections against land stewardship projects. Some remain held up, some were withdrawn, and at least four had funding approved at a reduced level.

In 2021, three parcel acquisitions in Burnett County a few miles from the Mississippi River were held up by anonymous objections. About 93 acres, costing $165,000, were mostly within the Crex Meadows Wildlife Area, a 30,000-acre marshy bird refuge managed by DNR. 

“I have no idea why they objected,” said Paul Stoll, president of the nonprofit Friends of Crex. 

“We’ve had deals go through fairly quickly, but we’ve had some trouble in the last several years.”

Since 2004, the nonprofit has purchased more than 800 private acres and resold the land to the state for wildlife conservation and recreation. But because the parcels are north of Highway 64, the acquisitions must pass JFC scrutiny.

DNR withdrew its requests for the three projects, acquiring 53 of the acres with federal grants not subject to JFC oversight. The other 40 acres inside the nearby Amsterdam Slough Wildlife Area remain in limbo, but the committee has given the nonprofit no indication why.

“We’re big boys. I mean, if it has to be rejected, for some reason, tell us,” said Jerry McNally, who volunteers with Friends of Crex to close real estate deals for the land trust. “But, the way things are set up, there isn’t really sufficient feedback.”

Evers’ budget bill calls for raising the threshold so only projects worth $500,000 or more would come under the JFC’s review. It also seeks to end the practice of scrutinizing every Knowles-Nelson stewardship land deal in the northern part of the state.

It also would require that “if a member of the Legislature objects to a proposed stewardship project approval, that member’s name and nature of the objection be announced publicly.” But it does not clarify the JFC’s requirement to schedule a hearing over blocked projects.

“Unfortunately, the review process for these projects has been weaponized by members of the Legislature to indefinitely suspend critical projects from moving forward, leaving projects hanging in limbo,” Evers said in a February statement announcing various budget measures. 

But those proposals are unlikely to pass because the budget bill’s first stop is before the very committee Evers is proposing to rein in.

Funds blocked without recourse

In 2021, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. awarded funding to help rehabilitate the century-old Alpha Pi fraternity house on Lake Mendota in Madison’s Langdon Street Historic District. The historic designation constrains the use of remodeling materials, adding to the construction costs.

“We definitely don’t take for granted what we have,” said Mike McGuire, Alpha Pi chapter president who lives there with about 30 other UW sophomores. “It’s like one of the best houses I’ve seen in the city.”

The nonprofit, Beta Building Association of Madison, applied for a WEDC historic preservation award to cover some of the $1.7 million remodel. Because the owner is a nonprofit holding company, it came before JFC for review.

The nonprofit’s director, Bart Kocha, said a WEDC official panicked, telling him the funding “was being held up for political reasons.” The JFC sent him a vague, one-page letter saying the money was on hold pending a hearing.

The JFC has formally met at least five times since the July 2022 objection was lodged but has not put the project on its agenda. The only clue to the objection’s origin is a written statement JFC co-chair Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, gave to WisPolitics, alleging the WEDC award was patronage for someone employed in the governor’s office.

“This is the kind of thing that taxpayers hate,” Marklein wrote. “It looks like one of Governor Evers’ staff is getting a sweetheart deal at taxpayers’ expense.” 

His office declined further comment to Wisconsin Watch.

The fraternity’s nonprofit denies any strings were pulled. Evers’ Washington, D.C.-based staffer Derek Campbell is a former chapter president and served on the nonprofit’s volunteer board in 2018.

But the organization has never had a chance to answer the allegations publicly because no hearing has been scheduled.

“Obviously we feel like we’re over a barrel on this thing,” Kocha said. “There’s no transparency to the process, obviously. We don’t even know where to go.”

At one point Kocha met with Marklein in his Capitol office for 45 minutes. He said they chatted affably, and Marklein told his own fraternity stories, but offered no reason for the objection.

“He could have asked questions, to explore anything that was bothering him,” Kocha said. “But he didn’t.”

Anonymous objection halted pandemic program

The JFC also reviews certain Medicaid expenditures under the state Department of Health Services. In spring 2021, as the delta variant of COVID-19 was taking hold in Wisconsin, the agency proposed a $17.5 million cash incentive program to reward Medicaid providers whose patients were vaccinated.

The goal was to get 80% of adults on Medicaid fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.

But the JFC co-chairs wrote to DHS saying an unnamed member had objected. The agency never followed up, and the program was redesigned using federal funding as a $7.4 million “pay-for-performance” program, with a reduced goal of 55% of most adult Medicaid recipients to be fully vaccinated.

A Jan. 12 records request for emails related to the agency’s response to the objection remains pending.

It’s still not clear who on the committee objected to the vaccine program. JFC co-chair Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, said there was a consensus among Republican members that state funding wasn’t needed.

“That was one where we questioned whether it was really necessary,” Born told Wisconsin Watch, “because there were massive amounts of federal money that were coming into the state for COVID relief at that time.”

By the end of 2021, the state health department had paid out $3.9 million to health providers under the modified program. Vaccination rates among participating Medicaid providers ranged between 34% and 61%.

Health agency officials declined to be interviewed but provided details of the programs and an unsigned agency statement to Wisconsin Watch.

“We recognize that there are often barriers to people of lower income to have access to preventative health care,” an agency spokesperson wrote. “And we strongly believed this approach to vaccinate more Wisconsinites was a good idea.”

Legality of ‘pocket vetoes’ debated

Nobody disputes the JFC’s role in providing fiscal oversight of the state government. But legal experts inside and outside the Capitol say the manner in which it blocks funding violates state law.

Agencies must routinely submit funding plans to the budget committee before the funds can be allocated. Any committee member can object, which holds up spending. But the law says the agency can spend the money if the committee “does not schedule a meeting for the purpose of reviewing” the proposal within 14 working days.

The budget committee must register any objection within the time period. But it often doesn’t schedule a meeting for weeks, months or — in many cases — ever.

A 2022 Wisconsin Legislative Council review determined the JFC isn’t following the law by not setting a meeting date, although it warned the courts would be unlikely to intervene. State Rep. Deb Andraca, D-Whitefish Bay, sought the opinion after JFC held up $2.3 million in stewardship funds to buy 131 acres around Cedar Gorge near Milwaukee for nearly a year. No hearing was ever scheduled.

“It’s almost like a pocket veto,” Andraca said, referring to a technique that kills a proposal when the decision-maker takes no action. “That’s not fair to the public.”

JFC process ‘bad for transparency’

As it has done repeatedly since Evers took office, the administration last summer used federal funds for the Cedar Gorge-Clay Bluffs Preserve purchase and five other conservation projects stalled for months to get around the anonymous objections.

“The governor came through and dislodged the project,” Andraca added. “But the problem is not fixed.”

Madison attorney Jeffrey Mandell, who specializes in government accountability, said the Legislative Council opinion “makes crystal clear” the committee is breaking the law. 

Conservation groups have urged Evers to allocate the funds anyway, arguing that the committee is not using the correct process. Mandell agreed, saying, “The executive branch would be entirely following the law to go ahead and disburse the funds.”

The Legislative Council lawyer who wrote the opinion declined to comment. But in her five-page memo, she warned that a legal challenge might be fruitless.

“I should caution that Wisconsin courts have historically been reluctant to interfere in disputes between the two ‘political’ branches of government,” attorney Anna Henning wrote.

That’s true, agreed Port Washington attorney Tom Kamenick of the Wisconsin Transparency Project. He said the committee’s anonymous objections aren’t prohibited — but they aren’t a laudable way for elected officials to deliberate.

“What they’re doing is a lot of bad governance and bad for transparency, but it doesn’t violate any of the records or meetings laws,” Kamenick said.

Evers declines to pick a fight

The Department of Natural Resources raised the issue in March 2022 when then-Secretary Preston Cole wrote to the JFC that six conservation projects had been held up indefinitely with no hearings scheduled.

DNR’s press office did not respond to questions about any follow-up, and Evers spokesperson Britt Cudaback declined to comment on the legal issues. A spokesperson for Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul said the office was not aware of any complaints filed on the issue.

“It’s clear that the finance committee is exceeding their legal authority,” said Charles Carlin of Gathering Waters, an umbrella group for land trusts across Wisconsin. It has been calling for the governor to override objections when a hearing isn’t scheduled.

A recent high-profile example is an objection holding up a landmark $15.5 million conservation easement deal that would provide public access and recreational opportunities on more than 56,000 acres around the Pelican River in Oneida County. 

The relatively high price tag means backfilling with federal funds could be more difficult. And a large project that conservationists bill as a once-in-a-generation opportunity makes a confrontation over the committee’s blocking land stewardship projects increasingly likely.

“The chilling effect on land conservation has been incredible,” Carlin said. “We really think that the stewardship program is at a breaking point now. Things have to change and we just simply have to put more daylight on this process.”

During a tour of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Evers told Wisconsin Watch that he doesn’t want to override the committee and approve individual stalled projects.

“It’s important to look at this in a really comprehensive way, frankly, instead of kind of piecemealing it,” the governor said.

When pressed on the legal arguments raised by the Legislative Council and others, Evers said: “What we have in our budget will solve that problem. And so that’s where we’re going to be.”

Old habits die hard

One reason the secrecy endures is political inertia. A review of past budget documents by Wisconsin Watch dating back to 2009 found the JFC’s practice of secret vetoes was done under both Republican and Democratic control.

“That’s the process and it’s been there for a long time,” said Bob Lang, who has led the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau since the 1970s.

Former Sen. Luther Olsen, who sat on the committee for 16 years under both Democratic and Republican leadership, said he’s conflicted about the committee’s ability to anonymously block funding and hold up projects.

“I wasn’t around when this was put in place, but I gotta believe it was put in place for a reason,” said the Ripon Republican, who retired from the Legislature after the 2020 election. “And whether that’s a valid reason today, or not, I don’t really know.”

Olsen said anonymous objections that give no reasoning can be difficult to work through if there’s no effort to find common ground. But he did recall a time when an objection allowed the DNR to get a better deal for the state when the committee felt appraisals were too high.

Those in charge now see no reason to change the system. State law gives Senate and Assembly leaders authority to appoint six members each, ensuring a 12-4 split if the majority party controls both chambers.

“I don’t think the process is broken,” Born said. “I think it’s more of occasionally, someone’s upset that their project isn’t going the way they want it to go.”

He declined to discuss legalities but noted it’s been this way “no matter who is in charge of the committee.”

“My experience with Republicans is you don’t win by playing nice, because they don’t play nice,” said former state lawmaker Spencer Black, a Madison Democrat who served 26 years in the Legislature, retiring in 2010. “And if they decide to be bipartisan, that’s because they find out that the other guy can punch back.”

He added, “I would like to see more of that in terms of the governor’s office, but you know, I’m not in politics anymore.” 

Those in the minority say their power is limited as even committee members often don’t know who lodged an objection or why.

“I’m glad the governor is pushing forward with removing anonymity,” said Milwaukee Rep. Evan Goyke, the ranking Democrat on the JFC. “But the non-hearing issue is almost worse in my mind, because it sits and sits and sits.”

Grand Chute boardwalk in limbo

A review of DNR data shows that the committee has reduced Knowles-Nelson funding to at least nine projects proposed during the Evers administration. But some projects sail through without comment.

Late last year, the city of Beloit requested $1 million from the conservation fund to help pay for the demolition of a century-old vacant riverfront building complex owned by billionaire industrialist Diane Hendricks whose development company has been remaking the historic downtown.

The state funding will help expand a public riverwalk and facilitate a $20 million redevelopment with a restaurant and four-story mixed use complex over the site, according to a joint statement between the city and Hendricks’ company.

The million dollars in state assistance to aid a public-private partnership between the city and a Republican Party megadonor elicited no extra scrutiny from the JFC. 

“We are thankful to the Wisconsin DNR and the Joint Committee on Finance who recognized this need for our community,” City Council President Regina Dunkin told the Beloit Daily News shortly after it was approved.

Grand Chute’s Arrowhead Park boardwalk traveled a different path. The co-chairs put the frozen project back on its agenda only after the town agreed to accept less by working through an intermediary.

“We never received any questions from the Joint Finance Committee,” said Schwartz, the town’s public works director.

Emails from December obtained in a records request show state Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Appleton, had conveyed to the town its three options: Accept $400,000 — two-thirds of the funding approved by DNR; make a counteroffer or roll the dice and send it back to the Republican-controlled committee where it could be held up indefinitely. 

The town accepted the $400,000.

A few days after the committee agreed to release the money, Cabral-Guevara issued a joint press release with the town in which she said, “Grand Chute worked tirelessly to get this proposal pushed through. I applaud their hard work and I was happy to help raise this issue with my colleagues.”

Schwartz later told Wisconsin Watch that with the delays and less funding, the town board will discuss “if we’re able to proceed with the project at this time or not.”

As she surveyed the uneven boardwalk, Schwartz said the anonymous objection put the local government in a tough spot.

“We weren’t afforded a chance to answer the questions that maybe were raised or why they objected,” Schwartz said. “So, I guess just information transparency would be a good first step.”

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.

‘There’s no transparency’: Secretive ‘pocket veto’ scuttles Wisconsin projects 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.

Two recently unemployed Chinese nationals weigh their options in a cramped Park Falls, Wisconsin, motel room, not far from where they worked in a former paper mill now being used to mine cryptocurrency.

One of them continues to nurse a stitched-up laceration across his left wrist from an on-the-job injury after he tripped while carrying a computer in August, a few months before he was let go.

Speaking in their native Mandarin, Aaron and Justin — as they refer to themselves in English — came to the United States on visas that allowed them to visit temporarily for “business activities” but not to take jobs in America. The two said they thought they had a long-term future helping a global company, SOS Limited, establish a cryptocurrency mining operation in North America, one of just two known facilities in Wisconsin. 

What they found were what they described as unsafe working conditions and possible skirting of immigration and labor laws. Wisconsin Watch is not publishing their names because they are concerned about their legal status to work in the United States.

The two said they were abruptly fired and spent weeks holed up in the motel until they belatedly got their final month’s salary from their employer. 

Their story is among several troubling signs that the company, which has just a handful of employees based in Park Falls, may not deliver the type of economic boost Park Falls was seeking when the city loaned one of SOS Limited’s current partners $1 million to revive the paper mill, which once employed hundreds of workers. The company’s two other announced North American cryptocurrency mining sites, including one in Marinette County, are also stalled.

Since August, Bitcoin has lost almost three quarters of its cash value. And over the past two years, SOS Limited has seen 94% of its share value erased after raising more than $600 million from investors. 

The story of the two Chinese nationals is also part of a larger tale about an economically challenged Midwestern mill town and the shadowy industry that produces Bitcoin, Ethereum and other digital currencies.

Cryptocurrency mining operations were prohibited in China in 2021 due to concerns over criminal activity and economic stability. They’ve since moved to countries with laxer regulations such as the United States.

“The (Chinese) government banned crypto mining operations in the country,” Aaron said. “Then, we saw an online post about hiring workers to the U.S.”

Crypto business takes root in rural Wisconsin

A combination of local, regional and global factors brought two Chinese citizens to a town of 2,400 people in rural Price County, one of the least populated in the state.

For decades, Park Falls was a company town centered on the iconic Flambeau River paper mill built along the banks to harness hydroelectric power to run the plant.

“It meant a lot to this community,” said John Tapplin, a former mill employee who was president of the local union. “At one time it was probably dumping like a quarter million dollars every two weeks into the economy.”

But the mill’s future has been uncertain since its longtime owner sold it in 2006. It operated for little more than a decade, temporarily shutting down in 2019.

Then New Jersey-based businessman Yong Liu and several investors stepped in and restarted operations the next year, buoying hopes that the paper mill could return to being the economic heart of the community. Some employees were called back to work.

The city issued a $1 million bridge loan to keep things running, but in the end a combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and depressed commodity prices killed the business, recalled Mayor Michael Bablick.

“It was sort of a slow drip for quite a while,” he said. “Finally, it just went down and just couldn’t seem to find its way back open again.”

The mill was sold off at auction to a liquidator. A number of creditors, including the city of Park Falls, went to court for payment. The judge ordered Liu’s business interests to pay the remaining $828,108 of the loan earlier — a process that’s still underway.

Since then, the current owner has farmed out some of the space to various companies while dismantling other parts of the mill.

“They’re doing, I think, all the things you’d expect a liquidator to do,” Bablick said. “They’re removing equipment, they’re removing valuable copper, things like that.”

Bitcoin mining comes to Park Falls

Last year SOS Limited, whose shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange, began installing racks of computers inside the former paper mill to mine cryptocurrencies.

“The company’s vision is to become one of the leading block-chain technology service providers in North America,” it wrote in a filing with financial regulators, referring to one of the key components of how cryptocurrencies are created and maintained.

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, have emerged over the past decade as a form of digital currency created by sophisticated computers solving complex computational problems to create unique strings of information. Mining operations compete with each other to work out these complex problems, thereby creating a digital currency that can be traded on the open market for hard currencies including U.S. dollars. 

The Chinese government has long been hostile to digital currencies, partly because it’s difficult to regulate them, but also because the computers use massive amounts of energy, which has raised environmental concerns.

In a recent 46-page report, the White House estimated the greenhouse gas footprint of electricity  powering U.S. cryptocurrency production in  2021 was equivalent to the average annual greenhouse gas emissions from 3 million gas-powered automobiles. The United States now hosts about one-third of global Bitcoin asset mining, the report said.

In Park Falls, the arrival in early 2022 of a cryptocurrency operation received a cool reception.

“The city does not believe this use is the best use of the property in terms of jobs for our area, however, that is a matter solely for the owner of the mill to decide,” City Administrator Brentt Michaelek stated on the Park Falls Facebook page.

Even so, the site’s industrial zoning meant the city couldn’t stop it.

“Our legal analysis, and I think it’s pretty common sense, (is) that you can probably run computer servers if you can run a paper mill,” Bablick said.

Officials also found cryptocurrency mining preferable to the alternative: a fallow and blighted mill in the center of the city. 

“Things can really go wrong in a huge industrial facility real quick when there’s nobody there,” he added.

SOS Limited embroiled in controversy

SOS Limited’s arrival in Wisconsin coincided with the company’s public acknowledgment that it’s under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“The company intends to cooperate with the SEC with respect to the investigation,” SOS Limited wrote in a Feb. 25 filing with the financial regulator.

The SEC served a subpoena to the company following allegations of fraud raised by a pair of investment firms that publicize — and then profit from — publicly traded companies that mislead investors.

The investment firms’ critical reports, published in February 2021, questioned the company’s legitimacy as a cryptocurrency operation.

Hindenburg Research, which publishes information and makes stock bets on what it suspects are failing companies, seized on SOS Limited’s publicity photos of another one of its alleged equipment suppliers. Other sources suggested that the photos were actually from an entirely different — and unconnected — Chinese cryptocurrency operation.

Another research firm released information that the company purportedly supplying SOS Limited with $20 million worth of computer equipment to mine cryptocurrencies was actually a shell company created to give the illusion of progress.

“We find the company’s claims regarding its supposed cryptocurrency mining purchases and acquisitions to be extremely problematic, if not fabricated entirely,” Culper Research wrote in its Feb. 26, 2021 report. 

The allegations came from short-seller investors who place bets that a stock’s price will fall. That’s controversial, but the researchers defend their methods, saying they shine a light on corporate misdeeds.

“Our business model is to find fraud and bet against companies that we think are engaging in fraud,” Hindenburg’s Nate Anderson told Wisconsin Watch. “So our positioning is aligned with our beliefs.”

Anderson said there are questionable lines in SOS Limited’s recent regulatory filings that show $307 million of the more than $600 million raised by shareholders are “unspecified receivables,” meaning the company has not detailed what it’s doing with roughly half the money that has poured in from investors.

SOS Limited executives and attorneys did not answer questions emailed by Wisconsin Watch. But in a March 2021 web statement, the company denied what it calls “distorted, misleading, and unsubstantiated claims” and pledged to answer its critics. 

“SOS stands behind the integrity of the company and remains committed to maintaining transparency and the highest ethical principles,” it said in a lengthy web statement.

$5 million settlement reached

The company has agreed to pay $5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit by former shareholders who had sued following the allegations raised by the research firms. SOS Limited admitted no wrongdoing, but it also did not answer the core allegation contained in the complaint.

“There has been a distinct lack of communication from SOS on its business operations, and its questionable deals,” Anderson said. “And it seems clear that shareholders want the answers to those questions.”

But some investors hope the problems are more of a cultural disconnect than evidence of fraud. 

József Gazsó said he has bought about $32,000 worth of SOS stock since March 2020. He also handled investments for friends and family in his native Hungary.

“This move to the U.S. was a good business move,” Gazsó told Wisconsin Watch from Budapest, where he works in logistics. “If they prove that they can mine in a safe and economic way, with renewable (energy) they have a huge upside potential.”

He said his own firm in Hungary does business with a large Chinese company that’s often averse to the type of investor relations and normal publicity that U.S. shareholders demand. He admitted he sometimes doubts the company will continue to issue new share offerings while showing little public progress in cryptocurrency mining.

“If the company is a scam, I have been a fool,” he texted after an interview with Wisconsin Watch. 

Wisconsin expansion put on ice

The cryptocurrency operation quietly expanded in early 2022 by beginning to move its equipment outside the confines of the mill’s thick walls. 

The din of computers and cooling equipment has been a problem in other parts of the country including Niagara Falls, New York, a city that’s used to the roar of North America’s largest waterfall. 

In Park Falls, Michaelek, the city administrator, said officials noticed the expansion had begun without the owner pulling any permits.

“They were starting to put footings outside the building,” he said. “We told them you can’t do that.”

The company came back with an application, but it was voted down in August because there was no engineering survey on how much noise the outdoor operation would generate.

While that was happening, SOS investors hungry for updates looked to the Price County Review, a weekly newspaper headquartered in Phillips, the county seat, for updates on the cryptocurrency operation.

Company executives shared a write-up in the local newspaper, one of the few reports of progress on the ground after SOS had raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors.

The company last June released a short video, a rare public statement about its cryptocurrency operation in Wisconsin. It showed the interior of the Park Falls operation. The video was evidence of cryptocurrency mining at the first of three U.S. sites it had announced in April 2021. 

That announcement described a partnership with U.S.-based holding companies with power agreements in Park Falls; Stacyville, Maine; and Niagara, Wisconsin.

“If and when the site operations get underway, the company anticipates it will create significant jobs (sic) opportunities in the U.S.,” the company wrote in an April 2021 press release.

Crypto future unclear

But experts in Wisconsin are skeptical that cryptocurrency mining operations will ever offer meaningful employment after they are up and running.

“It’s analogous to some other things like data centers,” said Tom Still of the Wisconsin Technology Council, a Madison-based nonpartisan advocate for the state’s tech industry. “You know, a lot goes into them in terms of construction but not necessarily a lot of employment afterwards.”

Cryptocurrency production is largely unregulated in the United States, and it’s unknown how many are in operation in Wisconsin. Still said he’s aware of only one other cryptocurrency mine in the state: Digital Power Optimization’s facility in the town of Hatfield, about 50 miles southeast of Eau Claire. The operation runs on renewable energy.

Alex Stoewer, chief operating officer of New York-based Digital Power Optimization, said his firm’s model of partnering with renewable energy producers is keeping it in the black.

“Despite the difficulties in the broader crypto market, this operation continues to generate positive cash flow, much of which is being reinvested in a maintenance plan for the hydro infrastructure, canal and dam,” he said in a written statement.

SOS expansion slowed elsewhere

“The only information we ever had about it was inquiries from reporters, or from potential investors,” she told Wisconsin Watch.

Aside from Park Falls, SOS Limited’s other two projects in Maine and in Niagara, Wisconsin, have yet to materialize. Niagara city administrator Audrey Fredrick said there has been no activity on the site of a former paper mill since April 2021, when the company announced its plans in the city of 1,600 people in Marinette County along the Menominee River.

But she said there have been reports of people traveling to the city near Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to see if there was anything happening.

“People tried to sneak on the site,” Fredrick said. “Like, investors who felt they were duped, and of course the site is secure because there’s a landfill … and dangerous because there’s a dam there — but no, there’s nothing.”

SOS Limited’s U.S. partner in the three sites is Liu, who for nearly two years had owned the Park Falls mill. Reached briefly on his cellphone, he told Wisconsin Watch that so far only the Park Falls site has broken ground since there were technical hurdles in Maine and his company has yet to finalize a power buying agreement for the Niagara site in Marinette County. 

“But we built one in Texas in Fort Stockton,” he added.

To date, there’s been no mention of cryptocurrency mining in Texas in any of SOS’s regulatory filings. 

Immigration questions loom

Asked about the employment of Chinese nationals without work visas in Wisconsin, Liu said the men were contracted by clients in China that lease capacity to mine cryptocurrencies.

“That’s not our employees,” he said.

A contract signed by Aaron and reviewed by Wisconsin Watch shows he was employed by Shenzhen Beibeizhu Technology, also known as BBZ. The company is a main supplier of equipment to SOS Limited, and some shareholders have questioned in online forums the true nature of the two companies’ relationship.

Aaron also signed a contract with SOS Limited’s U.S. subsidiary.

“I have been communicating with the Shenzhen-based company for the promised work visa and job contract since my arrival,” Aaron said.

It wasn’t until after the two were dismissed that Aaron learned the SOS Limited’s U.S. contract wasn’t signed by the company. 

And despite Aaron’s arm injury, he had to continue lifting heavy equipment as part of the job.

Ming Luo, the site supervisor in Park Falls, declined to comment.

“My company said that I should not talk too much,” he said. 

He referred questions back to Liu, who did not respond to subsequent calls and messages.

Attorneys who advise undocumented immigrants said it appears both the employer and employees may have broken the law.

“In some ways, they’re both at risk because they have both potentially done things that are contrary to our immigration laws,” said Erin Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. 

She said the two Chinese nationals run the risk of being arrested by federal authorities for working without the proper permits. But she said there’s evidence suggesting they were lured under false pretenses by being offered a contract with the U.S. company, which means the employers could also be held responsible. 

“It’s a very strange situation,” she added.

Keeping the lights on

Bablick, the Park Falls mayor, said the former paper mill is being underutilized as a cryptocurrency mine. And he said he’s troubled by reports of workers going unpaid.

“The (mill) owners could have done better as far as getting tenants in there, that would have been very useful for the town, and I tried to work with them,” he said. “It’s just, they made a business decision. It made sense for them. It wasn’t the best for us.”

Still, he said, Park Falls is a resilient town that’s weathered the transition remarkably well.

“But I almost feel like the way it went away the last time was probably the best possible time,” he said, “just because of the labor market constrictions and just the way the economy is.”

A worker-friendly labor market has meant that many former mill workers have found employment elsewhere. A decade ago, he said, there would have been lines of unemployed.

“Even though they’re probably not making as much money as they used to be, they at least had an opportunity to find a job,” he added.

Chinese workers seek new start 

In the weeks after being dismissed from their job and offered a flight back to China without any guarantee of payment for their last month of work, Aaron and Justin spent several weeks in their hotel room, uncertain of their next move.

“They have been asking me to go back to work, but I don’t want to,” Aaron told Wisconsin Watch on Dec. 6.

Days later, they left Park Falls for good. By the middle of the month, they received their final salaries. Justin and Aaron are staying with friends in Chicago to figure out a way to remain in the United States.

They said they didn’t encounter any prejudice against them personally during their time in Park Falls, but there was at least one unsettling sign that the foreign presence is unwelcome.

Inside the mill on a brick wall somebody scrawled in yellow paint a racist slur targeting the Chinese.

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.

In rural Wisconsin, former employees lift curtain on troubled crypto mine 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.

Listen to reporter Jacob Resneck discuss this story on Milwaukee’s WUWM.

Oconto County Clerk Kim Pytleski has a series of colorful, hand-drawn posters in her office for the barrage of questions she fields from election skeptics, including one that reads, “Perception has become Reality!”

“People are throwing skepticism and these comments out there, but they’re not doing the homework on what this really entails,” she said gesturing to a chart that lays out the chain of custody for ballots from the city, village and town polling places to her county’s vote counting center.

With political polarization reaching a fever pitch, front line election workers are reporting novel challenges such as aggressive questioning of longstanding practices. And although violent threats have been rare, some clerks are offering crisis training — and stocking trauma kits — actions that years ago would have been unimaginable.

“I have an ‘R’ after my name,” said Pytleski, a Republican, referring to her party affiliation for county clerk, a partisan office in Wisconsin. “That might protect me a little bit from some of the backlash that we are seeing. But … they know that the process is what I’m protecting and that I will defend it vigorously.”

While many states administer their elections at the county level, Wisconsin elections are run at the local level with some 1,850 clerks in cities, towns and villages overseeing the polls where citizens vote. It’s a complicated process that has come under intense scrutiny since former President Donald Trump falsely assailed the 2020 election results.

Pytleski, president of the Wisconsin County Clerks Association, said she learned long ago to shrug off criticism from cut-and-paste emails or scripted out-of-state phone calls haranguing her about unsubstantiated rumors of fraud.

But part-time clerks in small communities, including towns with just a few hundred people, are stretched.

“We’re losing those boots on the ground,” she said. “People are saying it’s not worth it anymore.” 

Attacks on the 2020 election results in Wisconsin started with Trump, took root among his followers, and were fueled by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s fruitless taxpayer-funded inquiry. Some Republican candidates then echoed unsupported claims of widespread fraud.

“I think there’s a weariness of elections,” said Portage City Clerk Marie Moe, president of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association, which represents more than 863 clerks in the state.

“We’ve had clerks leave the field,” she said. “Some (of it’s) normal attrition, … but let’s face it: (City clerk) is my full-time job. A town clerk, that’s their part-time job. And it’s more than a part-time job.”

Urban clerks prepare for worst case 

It’s hard to quantify the extent of threats against people who run the polls due to the decentralized nature of Wisconsin’s elections. But elections officials from small towns to big cities say they are regularly put on the defensive by people convinced there’s coordinated fraud or vote tampering that denied Trump re-election in 2020.

Gov. Tony Evers, during an Oct. 13 campaign stop in Green Bay, told Wisconsin Watch that election deniers are doing real damage, undercutting a system that relies on good-faith public servants.

“First of all, it (rampant election fraud) is not true,” the Democrat said. “Second of all, every time they do that they essentially are creating havoc for people at the local level.” 

Evers added: “We’ve got ourselves in a bad place, we’re gonna get to the point where we’re not going to have workers to do the job.”

But that could be an overstatement, as frontline clerks say they have enough people in place and are committed to running a smooth November election — despite the pressures.

Milwaukee clerk: ‘I’ve gotten death threats’

Milwaukee has been one of the biggest targets, said Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of Milwaukee Election Commission.

“There’s been all sorts of conspiracy theories,” she told Wisconsin Watch. “I’ve gotten death threats.”

She said her staff have sent almost every harassing or threatening email or voicemail to Milwaukee law enforcement and the FBI.

“But for the most part, we’re just all here and focused on the same end goal,” she said, “which is making sure that anyone who’s eligible to vote and wants to vote in this upcoming election is able to do so.”

In Dane County, Stoughton City Clerk Candee Christen said election workers in the city of about 13,000 were educated earlier this month on active shooter drills and first aid as a precaution against violence on Election Day.

The community southeast of Madison also replaced the standard first aid kits with trauma kits at its four polling places. The precautions, recommended by county officials, didn’t come from any specific threats but rather a need for general preparedness.

“It’s a balance between trying to get our poll workers aware — it’s something we’ve not talked about in the past — but also not scare them away from being a poll worker,” Christen said.

Republicans ‘stocking the shelves’ with poll workers

This election season there has been a surge in election workers nominated by the Republican Party to staff the polls, potentially displacing longtime, nonpartisan poll workers. Wisconsin Democrats did not answer questions about their poll worker numbers.

Municipal clerks are nonpartisan. But state law gives political parties the right to nominate election inspectors in each polling place. The formula guarantees the party whose presidential or gubernatorial candidate got more votes in that polling place’s last election to one more election inspector than the other party.

Election inspectors are empowered to decide whether an absentee ballot questioned on technical grounds — such as an incomplete address — should be accepted. And they can take a vote if there’s disagreement among poll workers.

Wisconsin’s Republican Party has invested resources in its “election integrity unit” that’s aggressively recruiting party faithful to work the polls. The state party told Wisconsin Watch it has 5,053 people signed up, three times as many nominees as in the 2020 election.

GOP leadership pointed to Brown County as an example of where the party’s ground game is a model for the rest of the state.

Brown County Republican chair Jim Fitzgerald said when he was elected in 2018, the party kept its list of poll worker nominees stuffed in manila folders; now they’re on spreadsheets.

“When I came into office four years ago here, the list of poll workers I had were probably 90%, unaffiliated with very, very few Republicans,” Fitzgerald said.

Fitzgerald said Republicans are taking advantage of their right to nominate poll workers this election. 

When asked, Fitzgerald and other county party leaders didn’t dispute Joe Biden won Wisconsin in 2020. But he said the party’s membership is concerned about voter integrity — and it’s important that the party feed the demand of its members.

“We stocked our shelves with poll workers and poll observers, because that’s what the voters wanted,” he said. “Otherwise they were going to sit out.”

2020 election spurs volunteer

Green Bay had a chaotic election in spring 2020 when the pandemic was keeping people out of public places, the vaccines had not been released and many older poll workers were unwilling to put themselves on the front lines.

The number of polling places was scaled back from 31 to just two due to shortages of poll workers. Two years later, Republican volunteers like Matt Roeser have signed up to help out where he’s needed by the Brown County GOP.

“I wasn’t really political before the 2020 election,” the 52-year-old salesman from Green Bay said. 

Roeser said he was undergoing cancer treatment in spring 2020 and his absentee ballot didn’t arrive in time.

“So I didn’t get to vote,” he said. “I was a disenfranchised voter. So I became involved and wanted to understand the process more.”  

Roeser’s one of the 100 to 200 poll workers signed up by Brown County Republicans to be a poll observer or worker — he hasn’t been told which. 

Brown County Democratic chair Terry Lee said much of the past chaos had to do with the public health crisis at the time, and he blames Republican state lawmakers for not allowing an all-mail-in election, as Evers had proposed. 

“It was obviously not ideal,” Lee said. “But you have to hearken back to a picture from Rep. Robin Vos, Assembly Speaker, him in full hazmat gear, saying there’s nothing to fear.”

But he said his party hasn’t really changed its voting integrity strategy that much in the past two years.

“Starting in 2020, we wanted to make sure that there was a voter assistance hotline,” Lee said. “But our main goal is always to make sure that every eligible person can vote.”

It’s less clear how the Democratic Party of Wisconsin is approaching the poll worker ground game statewide.

State Democratic Party leaders would not disclose poll worker numbers. In a statement, the party said it would field workers in at least 35 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties.

“WisDems’ focus is on making sure every eligible voter is able to cast a ballot and have that ballot counted,” spokesperson Hannah Menchhoff said in a written statement.

GOP loyalty tests

Lifelong Republicans whose job requires impartiality and adhering to laws and regulations have found themselves in an uncomfortable position after anger simmered over Trump’s defeat in 2020.

Marge Bostelmann was Green Lake County’s clerk for 24 years before being appointed in 2019 to the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission as a Republican clerk designee.

She drew fire for siding with Democratic commissioners to provide nursing home residents absentee ballots during the 2020 pandemic rather than send in special election deputies while the facilities were limiting or banning visitors. She also was the only Republican member who voted to approve new Dominion voting machines, which have been a main target of Trump’s unfounded claims.

Green Lake County GOP chair Kent McKelvey responded with a public letter lambasting her work on the commission, expelling her from the party and claiming the “country is under a full-on assault by untold numbers of people, groups, and foreign actors, all wishing to gain control and fundamentally change our uniquely American way of life.”

“The Green Lake Republican Party denounced me because of my actions on the WEC,” Bostelmann told Wisconsin Watch. 

But she said she has no regrets; her actions were aimed at creating free and fair elections at the state and local level.

“I’m very conservative in a lot of ways,” Bostelmann said. “But I’m not going to let the Republican Party tell me how to vote on something that makes it harder for the clerks to run an election.”

Partisan ground game intensifies

Republican leaders say municipal clerks have resisted party efforts to staff polls with their people.

“They get very defensive because in the past, they got to pick all the friends they wanted and all the people they liked to work the polls because the county parties never gave them names,” said Republican state Sen. Kathleen Bernier, a former county clerk from Chippewa County. 

She recalled at least two municipal clerks in Chippewa County who resisted using the party list when hiring election inspectors during her 12 years as county clerk.

She has been critical of efforts to undermine trust in the process. But she said showing up and getting involved are the best solutions.

“Fight fire with fire, man,” Bernier said. “We can sit and complain about all the activity that Democrats do around the electoral process, but we can’t just sit back and do nothing.” 

In Milwaukee, Woodall-Vogg confirmed there’s been an uptick in party-nominated poll workers from both sides. The Republicans have given her office a list of more than 200 people — twice as many as two years before — though not everyone on the list responded to work the polls. Democrats provided a similar number.

“Prior to 2020, we would never receive anything from the Democratic Party, we would always receive a small list from the Republican Party,” she said.

She plans to randomly pair Democrats and Republicans to work together on Election Day.

“We have seen it only have a positive effect,” she said. “There’s not really any hostility. They’re all there for the same reason.”

Still, Republican clerks like Pytleski in Oconto say they’re worried about injecting politics into the nuts-and-bolts of holding free and fair elections.

“Because pendulums swing,” she said. “We want to write election laws that are in place, no matter which political party has the majority, because we all have to play by the same rules on this — play nice in the sandbox.”

Jacob Resneck is a Report for America corps member. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch collaborates with WPR and 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 clerks face challenges as voter skepticism becomes new reality 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.

Listen to statehouse bureau chief Matthew DeFour discuss this story on WPR’s show Central Time.

Conservative activists are pushing officials to remove thousands of people from Wisconsin’s voter rolls, pointing to holes in the state’s voter database that have allowed some ineligible voters to cast a ballot.

But their efforts also have spread misleading information, Wisconsin Watch found, conflating ineligible and eligible voters and sowing doubts about the upcoming election during a volatile time for American democracy.

Such efforts aren’t unique to Wisconsin. The New York Times recently reported on attempts in Georgia, Michigan and Texas to have tens of thousands of people removed from voter rolls. The newspaper reported the effort — which includes instructions from an influential think tank with close ties to former President Donald Trump — aims to flood election offices with challenges that are costly and time-consuming.

The activist groups include the Thomas More Society and Wisconsin Voter Alliance, whose members challenged the 2020 election results and worked on the more than $1 million taxpayer-funded 2020 election investigation that Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos shut down in August. 

Another effort targeting thousands of voters who might have changed addresses is underway by a group run by Peter Bernegger, who previously filed numerous complaints with the Wisconsin Elections Commission that it deemed “frivolous.”

On Sept. 27, Wisconsin Voter Alliance president Ron Heuer, who worked on the 2020 election investigation, warned local clerks that their systems are vulnerable because, by his estimate, there are potentially thousands of people under court-ordered guardianships whose votes could be fraudulently manipulated. He pointed to the case of an Outagamie County nursing home resident who voted in 2020, even though a court had ruled she was “incompetent” to vote months earlier.

Officials acknowledge gaps

A Wisconsin Watch investigation has found a yet-to-be-determined number of Wisconsinites whom a court has deemed incompetent to vote are still listed as active voters — and actually cast ballots in past elections. 

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell said he is reviewing the 1,013 ineligible voters in Dane County deemed incompetent after a sample of 20 included two who were still listed as active in the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s voter files — one of whom voted while ineligible in April 2019.

“We’re going to review our data and make sure it’s accurate,” McDonell told Wisconsin Watch.

The total number, although unknown, is likely too small to have affected the results of the 2020 election, in which 3.2 million cast ballots in Wisconsin.

It is certainly less than Heuer’s claim because in his warning to the state’s 1,800 clerks, he conflated people under a court-ordered guardianship, many of whom can vote, with the much smaller subset of those who have lost voting rights. And the Outagamie case — while indeed an example of someone who shouldn’t have been able to vote in 2020 — shows how administrative error is the most likely reason these ineligible voters cast ballots.

Heuer’s work has already prompted public officials to take action. On Oct. 3, the Wisconsin Elections Commission issued a guide to local election clerks warning they cannot purge voters unless they find “beyond a reasonable doubt” a voter is ineligible. “Inactivating a record based solely on the allegations of a private party,” the agency wrote, “is unwise and may violate the law.”

WEC spokesman Riley Vetterkind acknowledged to Wisconsin Watch the system for tracking incompetent voters could be improved, although it would require a legislative fix to ensure they are tracked the same way as other ineligible voters, such as felons still serving a sentence.

The WEC also has changed its voter data so that the public can’t see the names and addresses of those who have been identified as “incompetent” — data that state law requires court officials to keep private. WEC made the change in August after it released that data to Heuer, who used it to build his case that thousands of ineligible voters could still be on the voting rolls.

Heuer’s group is now suing the court officials who handle guardianship records in 13 counties to access the names and addresses of everyone placed under a court-ordered guardianship. The group’s earlier requests for those records were denied. Heuer said their goal is to determine the true number of ineligible voters who have cast ballots.

The push to purge names from the voter rolls — from Heuer, Bernegger and others — is the latest front by partisan activists who have relentlessly challenged the validity of the 2020 election and now may be trying to create grounds to dispute future election results, according to David Becker, a non-voting board member of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), which Wisconsin and 32 other states — run by Republicans and Democrats — use to maintain their voter rolls.

Research finds little fraud

Think tanks on the left and right agree there is little fraud in U.S. elections. The conservative Heritage Foundation tracks “proven” cases of electoral fraud nationwide. By its numbers — which it says are not comprehensive — there were four instances of fraud in Wisconsin in 2020: two of them controversial prosecutions in Fond du Lac County where voters had listed a UPS store where they get their mail as a physical address. Experts have described some of these instances as incorrect votes and not fraud because the voters didn’t know their registration was improper.

Election watchdogs say the specter of systemic corruption at the polls is dangerous because it undercuts the public’s faith in democracy.

“Widespread fraud does not exist,” said Lauren Miller, a lawyer with the liberal Brennan Center for Justice that tracks elections. “It’s always a serious concern when people believe the lie that their elections are rigged.”

Becker said age-old attempts to “artificially inflate” voter list accuracy bring more risks in the current climate.

“When we get to the point where we can’t accept that our side has lost an election, the next natural step is political violence,” Becker said. “And that is not a hypothetical. We have already seen this. 

“When tensions get as high as they are, when grifters have been incentivized to keep the anger going to keep donations flowing in, then you get a very, very dangerous situation.”

Number of incompetent voters disputed

The activists presented their information about incompetent voters to an Assembly committee, which then pressed the Elections Commission on the matter. On Sept. 22, the WEC responded to the Legislature saying it had already begun an independent audit of its voter roll data related to voters deemed incompetent and is working with court officials to “improve the reporting and inactivation” of such records.

On Sept. 27, Heuer warned the state’s more than 1,800 clerks that there are some 15,000 Wisconsin residents under a court-ordered guardianship, but fewer than 1,200 listed in WEC’s voter roll file as incompetent. Heuer concluded the true number of incompetent voters is underreported and thus the whole system is vulnerable to “elder voting abuse.”

But the information he cited was misleading.

The voter roll data file is a constantly updated public record with voter names and addresses that anyone in the public can obtain for $12,500. Heuer obtained a version of the file with about 1,200 names and addresses of voters listed as “ineligible” and the reason “incompetent.”

When Heuer broke down the list by county, he found several counties had zero ineligible voters listed as incompetent. When he shared that information with county court officials, several told him that there were far more people adjudicated incompetent to vote in their county than were listed in the WEC database.

“It really caused a tizzy,” Heuer said.

He then requested guardianship numbers in each county between 2016 and 2021. Based on responses from about a third of the state’s district courts — and using a per capita projection — he came up with the 15,000 estimate.

However, the numbers Heuer used include everyone placed under a guardianship — even though not all of them have lost their right to vote. Also some are deceased — and some may never have been registered to vote — so they wouldn’t appear in the public voter roll file. And some people placed under a guardianship and deemed ineligible years ago may have had their right to vote restored.

WEC keeps incompetent voter data in a non-public file that is accessible to local clerks, who must review it periodically to update the registration status of voters, Vetterkind said.

“It is possible you may find voters who, despite being adjudicated incompetent by a court, registered, continue to be registered, or voted in an election(s),” Vetterkind said, although he declined to estimate how many. “These cases are unfortunately a product of the limitations that state law currently places on the process for centrally compiling adjudicated incompetent records.”

Guardianship numbers parsed

Dane County Clerk of Courts Carlo Esqueda, who is also the county’s register in probate, told Heuer in an August email that there were 1,004 people in Dane County placed under guardianship between 2016 and 2021. But he also warned him that he shouldn’t conflate guardianship numbers with the much smaller subset of incompetent voters. Heuer never asked for the smaller list.

Esqueda told Wisconsin Watch that after removing deceased voters and those who can still legally vote, the number of incompetent voters shrank to 281.

“I have told Mr. Heuer that, as have several of my colleagues, and he refuses to back off at least the strong implication that guardianship equals the loss of the right to vote,” Esqueda said.

Responded Heuer: “In future communications we will be refining our numbers as information becomes available. When we get the info, we will share it with the public.”

McDonell told Wisconsin Watch there are 1,013 people from Dane County listed as incompetent in the WEC’s files since 2007, including 75 marked in the voter file as inactive. In the sample of 20, he found eight had never registered, one was inactive because of a finding of incompetence, nine were inactive for other reasons — such as being deceased — and two were active, including the one who voted. That person was adjudicated in November 2018 and voted in April 2019, but has not voted since, McDonell said.

Possible out-of-state movers targeted

Other groups are also pushing clerks to purge voter rolls. In September, Wisconsin clerks received an email that claimed about 47,789 people had moved out of the state but, according to Bernegger, of the Wisconsin Center for Election Justice, were still active voters.

Bernegger asked clerks around the state to mark those who had left the state as “inactive” on the voter rolls. 

In his email, which Wisconsin Watch obtained, he said he used WEC and the U.S. Postal Service’s change of address data to find voters who should be removed. 

Simply relying on something like the USPS database, which is optional and doesn’t include someone’s date of birth, to identify people who moved is problematic, said Becker, the ERIC board member and executive director of the Center for Election Information and Research.

ERIC works with states to identify voters who have moved out of a state and therefore are no longer eligible to vote there. But, he added, each state then relies on its own laws and policies before a voter is removed. In Wisconsin, local clerks contact voters directly to see if they’ve actually moved.

ERIC’s ‘sophisticated’ system

Wisconsin’s GOP-run Legislature mandated that the state join ERIC in 2015 to improve voter roll maintenance.

The software used by ERIC is “extremely sophisticated,” costs a lot of money and uses non-public data to compile the lists sent to states, Becker said. 

Election officials and local clerks should strive to keep voter rolls as accurate as possible, Becker said, adding that every state inevitably has voter lists that include people who are no longer eligible and exclude eligible voters.

Both are a problem, he said, but the reality is that “well run” and “largely accurate” voter rolls pose little danger as very few ineligible voters are knowingly or unknowingly voting illegally.

“That number is not zero, but it’s really close to zero,” Becker said. “It’s remarkable how close it is to zero.”

Keeping the voter rolls accurate is an “essential function for all election officials,” WEC’s Vetterkind said. He added that the work of third-party groups is welcomed as they can sometimes help find “errors and inaccuracies.”

However, Vetterkind said these groups are not screened, can be partisan or can make incorrect statements about the law or rely on incomplete information. Responding to these groups is up to local clerks, Vetterkind said.

Bernegger acknowledged in his September email to clerks that not all 47,000 people he found had definitely moved and were no longer eligible voters. Bernegger and his attorney did not return messages seeking comment. 

Activist has history of complaints

Bernegger previously filed complaints with the WEC about voters having improper addresses on their voter registrations. WEC dismissed the complaints, fined Bernegger $2,400 and called the complaints “frivolous.” Bernegger has yet to pay that fine, according to the WEC.

Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney, the Republican nominee for state attorney general, seized on Bernegger’s information and charged five people with felonies for registering to vote using a local UPS Store address.

One of those people previously told Wisconsin Watch that she didn’t know it was illegal to use that address, where she gets all her mail, as her voting address. 

ERIC has become a target of activists, who claim it is a liberal voter fraud plot. Criticisms of the organization are similar to those against ballot drop boxes, absentee ballots and machines that count votes, Becker said, calling them “guardrails of democracy” that have contributed to more accurate and secure elections.

“And when the guardrails of democracy are attacked … that creates a period of uncertainty in which the losing candidate can incite anger and violence,” he said. “And that may be the intended result here. 

“It may be that they’re just trying to set the stage for future anti-democratic behavior to deny any election that they lost.”

Incompetent voter case fuels suspicion

One of the factors driving the activists is that they have found at least one case of an improper vote being cast in 2020 — although a closer look at the circumstances in that case points to administrative error, not a sinister scheme to steal the election.

The case involves Sandra Klitzke, a resident of the Brewster Village nursing home in Outagamie County, who had voted in the November 2020 and April 2021 elections, even though a court had removed her right to vote in February 2020.

On March 31, the Thomas More Society filed a WEC complaint on behalf of Klitzke and her daughter, Lisa Goodwin, who stated she “could not explain why the WisVote voting records would have indicated that my mother voted” in the 2020 or 2021 elections. A third-party law firm investigated and dismissed the complaint on technical grounds in May.

Normally the county register in probate mails notification of an ineligible voter to the WEC, according to Jennifer Moeller, president of the Wisconsin Register in Probate Association. The WEC then updates its information and notifies the local clerk, who is the only official authorized in Wisconsin to deactivate a voter’s registration.

It’s unclear why Klitzke’s name was not switched to “ineligible” in the WEC voter file. Both the WEC and Outagamie County officials said court records related to Klitzke’s guardianship information are confidential under state law.

System breakdown?

Town of Grand Chute Clerk Kayla Filen, who was not clerk at the time, confirmed her office did not deactivate Klitzke’s registration until April 2022.

Klitzke had been registered as an indefinitely confined voter dating back to 2007 and had voted as recently as 2017 before the 2020 election, Filen said. She was also listed as indefinitely confined in 2020. Indefinitely confined voters automatically receive absentee ballots without having to request them, Filen said.

A Wisconsin Watch review of Klitzke’s absentee ballot envelopes from 2020 and 2021 show them both signed in a shaky hand. In the 2020 election — when the WEC suspended the state’s special voting deputy program in nursing homes because of the pandemic — an employee at the county-owned facility had signed as a witness. 

In 2021, two witnesses from the town of Grand Chute signed the envelope, reflecting the normal process of special voting deputies witnessing nursing home voting.

Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson, a Democrat, said the case feels “manufactured.” 

“They probably had to search high and low to find one case, we all know that there’s a lot of money, there’s a lot of horsepower behind this and for whatever reason, they’re targeting Outagamie County,” Nelson said in an interview. “And I stand by the county clerk, and I stand by the Brewster Village administrator completely and fully.”

Activist undeterred

Heuer said there are more cases out there as “many” people have come forward with stories of loved ones with cognitive disabilities voting.

His group has filed public records lawsuits in Brown, Crawford, Juneau, Kenosha, Lafayette, Langlade, Marquette, Ozaukee, Polk, Taylor, Vernon, Vilas and Walworth counties to obtain the names and addresses of everyone under guardianship. A Juneau County judge ruled against the Wisconsin Voter Alliance on Aug. 24 but the other cases are pending. 

Disability Rights Wisconsin opposes the release of the names and lobbied WEC to shield the names of incompetent ineligible voters in the public voting file, said Barbara Beckert, Disability Rights Wisconsin’s external advocacy director. 

“A lot of the communication related to this issue over the past year or so while all these different investigations have been going on has been confusing and at best misleading and sometimes very clearly inaccurate,” Beckert said. “Our experience has been that often people under guardianship aren’t certain whether or not they have the right to vote.”

The group has successfully helped restore some people’s voting rights, for example, someone who was deemed incompetent to vote at age 18 because of a developmental or cognitive disability, but is older now and no longer under the guardianship of a parent.

During the pandemic, Beckert said her organization reminded nursing homes across the state that Medicare and Medicaid guidelines require them “to affirmatively support the right of residents to vote.”

“Why aren’t we concerned about the vast majority of people who live in these facilities who have the right to vote and who might not be able to exercise it?” Beckert asked.

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.

In search for illegal Wisconsin votes, activists uncover gaps — but no plot 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.

Kevin Gundlach, president of the South Central Federation of Labor in Madison, said his office phone has been ringing constantly from workers seeking advice on unionization. He estimates employees from some 20 private sector workplaces in his 11-county region around Madison have sought to organize this year.

“This is the first time we’ve seen this level of interest,” he said. “There is no doubt. We’ve never seen this before.”

A wave of Republican laws over the past decade cratered union membership in Wisconsin, but recent private and public sector worker mobilization has demonstrated the staying power of organized labor.

Labor membership in Wisconsin fell dramatically after the passage of Act 10, the anti-public sector collective bargaining bill in 2011, with the sharpest decrease in the nation over the next decade. As of 2021, Wisconsin reached a new low just shy of 8% of the total workforce unionized. Over the past decade, Wisconsin unions lost 124,000 members, or about a third of their ranks, driven largely by the death of public sector unions.

“I don’t think any other state lost almost half their membership in one fell swoop the way that Wisconsin did,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Emeritus David Nack, who specializes in labor issues.

But amidst a labor shortage, private and public sector workers are notching wins across the state as they organize against outsourcing, budget cuts and what they consider threats to academic freedom in local schools.

Gundlach said private sector workers are complaining of worsening conditions with the proceeds of their labor padding executive salaries and enriching corporate stock investors.

“They’re making record profits,” he said. “And they’re not helping out the workers and the families within our communities.”

Gundlach was once a unionized Dane County employee. But Act 10 changed all that, stripping his union of many of its core powers and limiting its ability to bargain for raises,  benefits and safe working conditions. The law requires a majority of all employees to vote to re-certify their union each year, a frustrating hurdle that caused many public sector unions to disband.

In Madison, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) lost more than half of its membership in the past five years going from 11,062 in 2016 to just 4,848 this spring.

But rather than fade away, some unions switched to become nontraditional employee associations. While they can’t collectively bargain over a contract, they can speak with one voice over working conditions. 

Many county employees are now members of Dane County Employee Group 720 — a move endorsed by the Dane County Board, which codified the right for county workers to self-organize in an ordinance.

There continues to be friction: the Wisconsin State Journal reported this summer that Shawn Tessman resigned abruptly from the county’s Department of Human Services and criticized elected officials for siding with organized employees who called into question the judgment of management.

Privatization efforts thwarted

How far Act 10 goes to limit the power of organized labor in higher education is still playing out more than a decade later. In Oshkosh, about 100 university custodians and groundskeepers faced the threat of layoffs after the UW-Oshkosh signaled it intended to outsource the work to a Tennessee-based company.

“Recruitment and retention of dedicated custodial and groundskeeping employees remains difficult in this economy,” Chancellor Andy Leavitt  wrote in an open letter to students and workers, explaining why the university had been exploring the move to a private vendor.

But after students and faculty picketed and delivered multiple petitions, with at least 1,000 total  signatures, the university administration abandoned the idea.

One of the forces behind the effort was a local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin that doesn’t have legal standing to collectively bargain for contracts for faculty members due to Act 10.

“We have broad First Amendment rights to organize and advocate for our working conditions,” said AFT-Wisconsin Vice President Jon Shelton, an associate professor at UW-Green Bay. “And so we’ve been able to do some pretty interesting things to build power on our campuses in the past few years.”

The custodians and groundskeepers had once been unionized but lost certification several years back, said David Siemers, a UW-Oshkosh professor and co-president of an AFT-Wisconsin affiliated union on campus. A major fear was that the workers would lose their state benefits, including health care coverage, if their jobs were privatized.

“If we hadn’t spoken up and if others hadn’t spoken up, I think they’d have liked to simply wash their hands of a management problem,” Siemers said. 

He attributed the lack of retention to the wider problem of stagnant wages for state employees despite a multibillion dollar budget surplus.

“The state needs to understand that it needs to pay more money in order to hire successfully,” Siemers said.

Another union-led effort helped scuttle a similar outsourcing plan at UW-River Falls.

“Our locals are being creative about how to build power,” said Shelton of UW-Green Bay. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, we can’t collectively bargain in a meaningful way. So let’s just not do anything and wait for collective bargaining to come back.’ What a union does is it builds power in the workplace. And that’s what our locals are doing.”

Threatened strike brings breakthrough

In perhaps the most high-profile recent example, more than half of Madison-based UW Health’s 2,600 nurses threatened to strike after their quasi-public employer refused to recognize their union.

UW Health — whose governing board is a mix of appointees of the Legislature and governor — argued that Act 10 precludes it from recognizing the union after its last contract expired in 2014.

UW Health registered nurse Tami Burns said one motive for unionizing was to have more say in daily operations inside the hospital. 

“I mean, the policies that are made are made by people who don’t do the job every day,” she said. 

She has worked in the vascular surgery section of University Hospital in Madison since 2017. She said managers have complete control over their section with nurses unable to speak up if they have concerns.

She said employees have no right to have an advocate in the room if they’re being disciplined by a manager. And if they are sanctioned and want to challenge it, “it’s the same person who disciplines you, that reviews it. So I’m sure you can see where that goes: nowhere.”

The end result, she said, is that nurses have few protections and find it difficult to have a voice in the hospital wards and to advocate on behalf of their patients.

“That’s a huge part of a nurse’s job,” Burns said. “It’s in our code of ethics that we have to advocate for patients, and it makes it really hard to do that.”

After employees threatened a three-day strike — and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers intervened to broker a resolution — UW Health administrators softened their stance, asking the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission to rule on whether the nurses can organize under Act 10.

Private sector unionization underway

Unionization has increased across the nation, but it’s unclear whether Wisconsin’s private sector is following that trend. The National Labor Relations Board announced a 58% increase in petitions nationwide this summer over a nine-month period. 

But an analysis of petitions filed in Wisconsin over the same period show the increase was modest — 21 petitions filed compared with 17 during the same period a year earlier. Eight of those recent petitions were by Starbucks coffee shop employees in places including Madison, Milwaukee and Appleton.

Indeed, since 2011, the rate of petitions has mostly decreased. It spiked with 44 workplace petitions in 2014 but since then it has been less than 30 a year. 

Gundlach, with the South Central Federation of Labor, said these figures aren’t keeping pace with the activity he’s seeing in his region.

“It took one group of workers six to eight months with me meeting with them,” for them to be willing to approach a union, he said. “The actual vote that will occur could take a year or longer, because there’s a lot of organizing that gets done within the workplace before they even go public.”

Coming out of the pandemic’s lockdowns has caused many workers to reassess their value as front-line essential workers in services, trades and manufacturing.

“Workers have a sense of the leverage and the value they have,” said labor economist Laura Dresser, an associate director for the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) at UW-Madison. “You can see that in the high rate of churn.”

In its State of Working Wisconsin report for 2022, COWS sought to dispel the notion that Wisconsinites are staying out of the workforce. Participation in the labor market is actually higher now than pre-2020, with more than two-thirds of working age Wisconsinites in the workforce.

That’s several points higher than the 62% national average.

Organizing in schools

In public education, Wisconsin teachers unions are galvanizing members who say their academic freedom is under threat by conservative critics who want to censor their lesson plans.

In the Superior School District parents filed a complaint over fifth graders being taught about gender identity.

Shelton credited AFT-Wisconsin’s local in Superior with organizing parents and community members to speak in defense of a 30-minute presentation used to teach fifth graders about gender identity.

Minutes from an August 2022 school board meeting show that 30 people defended the curriculum against the six who criticized it. Ultimately, the school board voted 5-2 to keep the curriculum in place.

“Without support, oftentimes a lot of people will be afraid to teach things,” Shelton said. “We think we’ve really been able to impact things over the past few years, in spite of the very significant legal limitations we have against us.”

Future remains unclear

Labor experts and leaders say there’s a renewed energy across public and private labor sectors as employees increasingly push back against a long period of stagnant wages, rising costs of living and shrunken benefits such as health insurance and paid time off.

It remains unclear whether Wisconsin worker leverage is here to stay. A recession could lead to higher unemployment and dilute the relatively strong position of employees.

But some labor experts predict the momentum will continue as more workers experience the real gains from organizing for better conditions.

“Workers are always going to advocate for equity and voice in their workplace,” said Professor Michael Childers, co-chair of UW-Madison’s School for Workers, “regardless of whatever legal constructs exist to assist or thwart them.”

Jacob Resneck is a Report for America corps member. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch collaborates with WPR and 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 workers show renewed energy after decade of anti-union laws 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.

Editors’ Note: This story has been updated to eliminate the incorrect reference to  Act 327 applying to projects like the 2016 construction of the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee. 

Since it took aim at public sector unions in 2011, Wisconsin’s Republican-run Legislature  passed a series of laws designed to undercut private sector unions and keep local governments from raising minimum pay and working conditions on municipal and county contracts.

Lawmakers also eliminated the requirement that the “prevailing wage” be paid to workers on state-funded construction projects. The biggest change hit in 2015, when Wisconsin became the 25th state to pass so-called “right-to-work” legislation.

The changes, labor leaders and experts say, have caused flattened real wages for construction workers, higher pay for their bosses and local governments stuck offering wages that make it difficult to hire contractors — and hard for those workers to make a living.

‘Right to work’ hits Wisconsin

The state’s “right-to-work” law prevents private sector unions from requiring workers covered under a collective bargaining agreement to pay dues. Non-dues paying members are often referred to as “free riders.”

Union leaders concede they took a financial hit after the law was enacted. But they say there’s new energy now among workers, with strong majorities continuing to financially support their unions — even though monthly dues are now voluntary and the drop in membership hasn’t been as steep as some union leaders had feared

In 2021, there were about 36,000 workers covered by a union-negotiated contract who were not union members. That’s about 14% of the total number of employees represented by unions in Wisconsin. In 2015, the gap wasn’t that much wider with about 30,000 or nearly 12% of workers, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

“I think they’ve been able to retain the current membership that they have pretty well,” David Nack, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Workers, said of Wisconsin’s labor organizations. 

Labor organizers say the same things: they’ve shifted their focus and redoubled efforts to serve their memberships which they can no longer take for granted under “right-to-work” laws.

“I haven’t seen a huge effect in construction trades,” said Jeff Mehrhoff, a business manager for the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades district that covers more than 2,400 skilled workers in Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “As a matter of fact, I think it’s had the opposite of what I think maybe these other people that are supporting ‘right to work,’ what they intended.”

“It’s forced us to want to look internally and maybe make some changes,” he added. ”It’s just made us do our jobs better is what it did.”

Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby, fought hard for its passage, arguing it would create economic growth and new opportunities for the state’s economy.

Critics say instead it’s had a negative effect on individual workers. Frank Manzo IV, a co-author of a study by the pro-labor Illinois Economic Policy Institute, compared the economies of states with strong collective bargaining laws with so-called “right-to-work” states from 2011 to 2018.

“Those ‘right-to-work’ states see slower economic growth, lower wages, higher consumer debt levels, worse health outcomes and lower levels of civic participation,” Manzo said in an interview. 

Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce declined to comment on those findings or be interviewed. But it did lobby to prevent Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, from attempting to repeal “right-to-work” and other Walker-era initiatives in his first months in office. 

Conservative advocacy group Americans For Prosperity Wisconsin called Evers’ attempted rollback an “attack on worker freedom.” The Republican-led Assembly ultimately stripped it from the budget bill.

And while free-market think tanks like the Badger Institute predicted economic gains for ending closed union shops through “right-to-work” laws during the runup to the 2015 legislative vote, they have been relatively quiet since with a dearth of studies conducted since its passage.  

Prevailing wage repealed 

Another sweeping change, also pushed by Wisconsin’s business lobby, was the 2017 repeal of Wisconsin’s prevailing wage law that since the 1930s had required a wage floor for workers on state-funded capital projects.

The MacIver Institute, a free market think tank that promoted the “right-to-work” legislation, also argued that by allowing economic forces to dictate wages, rather than a federal formula, there would be substantial savings on public projects by repealing prevailing wage laws. 

That didn’t exactly pan out. A labor-linked study analyzed 72 highway projects in Wisconsin and found that, on average, the inflation-adjusted cost-per-mile rose slightly from an average of $3.37 million before repeal of prevailing wage to $3.43 million after repeal. 

The result reflects what the nonpartisan Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau found in 2015 about the potential impact of the law: that existing research and evidence suggested “relatively small effects to no statistically significant effects” in overall costs.

Supporters of the repeal say the doom and gloom predicted by unions didn’t come to pass. Construction employment in Wisconsin has skyrocketed, with federal labor statistics showing around 130,000 workers this year compared with a decade ago when there were around 93,000.

John Mielke, president of the Wisconsin chapter of the Association of Building Contractors, said his largely nonunion membership reports more competition on projects since the repeal of prevailing wage law. 

“And we believe that when you have more competition, people are sharpening their pencils and providing more competitive pricing,” Mielke said. “Have we done a study to confirm that? We have not; anecdotally, I can tell you that it’s true.”

Mielke said the healthy sector has resulted in robust employment numbers for union and nonunion skilled workers alike.

“The biggest challenge we have as an industry is we don’t have enough people to do the work available,” Mielke told Wisconsin Watch. “When you have a shortage of labor, that has a tendency to increase wage rates.”

Workers’ pay drops; CEOs see rise

But a study in 2020 by the labor-linked Midwest Economic Policy Institute found that while the sector is booming, the prevailing wage repeal helped funnel much of that wealth toward the top.

When adjusted for inflation, construction workers’ average wages in Wisconsin fell by around 5.2% among blue collar workers, while wages fell only 1.7% in Illinois and Minnesota, which have prevailing wage laws.

According to recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data, average weekly pay in the construction industry was $1,104 in 2017. Four years later it would rise by just $121, which didn’t keep pace with inflation, according to the same federal agency. 

Drawing on U.S. Census Bureau data, the labor researchers found that while construction workers’ share of take home pay decreased in 2018 after repeal, construction industry executives saw their salaries balloon.

They estimate that more than 130,000 construction workers cumulatively earned  $346 million less than if prevailing wage laws had been in effect. Over the same period, pay for nearly 1,200 construction company executives rose by $111 million.

“The implication is that Wisconsin-based construction CEOs captured 32.1 percent of the drop in labor income and kept it for themselves, contributing to greater inequality in Wisconsin’s construction industry,” the researchers wrote.

Mielke, president of the contractors’ association, challenged those findings, noting “the vast majority of construction is and has always been private and therefore exempt from prevailing wage.”

“Why would a change in a set pay rate for a small section of (the) construction industry result in more money for CEOs?” he asked.

Living wage blocked

Republicans also have thwarted attempts by local elected officials to impose higher minimum wages for county and city contracts in the state’s most populous counties. 

Then-Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, negotiated a one-time increase in the state wage in 2005, but the law also prohibited cities and counties from boosting the minimum wage above the state’s $7.25 which is now far below what employers routinely offer to entry level workers. 

That pattern of state preemption of localities continued with state lawmakers passing laws that prohibit cities including Madison and Milwaukee from requiring contractors on public projects from paying a “living wage.”

That was demonstrated in 2017 when Act 327 stopped Milwaukee County from boosting wages not only for county workers but contractors and employees providing county services to $15 an hour by 2021.

“Because the cost of living is higher here than in most parts of the state, Milwaukee residents need higher wages,” Milwaukee County Board Chairwoman Marcelia Nicholson said in a statement to Wisconsin Watch.

But the state law made that type of arrangement illegal, and the wage floor remains frozen between about $12 and $13 an hour, which falls below average entry-level pay in Wisconsin, which is above $13.

With workers in short supply, hourly wages rose $2 (adjusted for inflation) between 2018 and 2021. Despite the gains, racial and gender disparities persist, a report by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found.

Median earnings of Black men ($17.68), Black women ($17.17), and Hispanic men ($17.12) is more than $5 lower than the median earnings for white men ($23.11), it said. 

Women of all races have made gains, though, and in the past 42 years the gender disparity has been largely supplanted by a racial one, the report found.

“The distance that black and brown workers are from white workers in terms of wages is substantial,” COWS associate director Laura Dresser, a labor economist, told Wisconsin Watch.

Labor peace agreements out

Lawmakers also did away with project labor agreements in which public entities negotiated working conditions on public projects. In the name of harmonizing labor laws across the state, Act 327 bars local governments from setting wage, hour and hiring standards — even voluntary ones with developers.

Nicholson told Wisconsin Watch that local leaders resent being repeatedly preempted by state lawmakers when they try to raise the standard of living for their residents.

“It was incredibly disappointing (to) lose the gains achieved for Milwaukee County residents because of decisions made by people who do not live in this community,” she said.

Jacob Resneck is a Report for America corps member. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch collaborates with WPR and 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. 

Workers lost ground on wages in wake of Wisconsin’s anti-labor laws 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.

Act 10: The 2011 law signed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker that limited collective bargaining for non-public safety public employees to inflationary wage increases. Previously employees could bargain over benefits, working conditions and higher wages. The law also required affected employee unions to hold annual recertification votes in which a majority of all members must agree to retain their union. It also required certain public employees to pay higher pension and health insurance premiums.

Living wage ordinance: Before 2018, some Wisconsin cities set minimum base wages above the state and federal minimum wage for public employees and contractors’ employees. Republican lawmakers adopted 2017 Act 327, which preempted local governments from setting such wage floors. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle had previously signed a law blocking local governments from setting their own minimum wage above the state level, but it exempted local public employee living wage ordinances.

Prevailing wage: Wisconsin, beginning in 1931, required state contractors, like a road construction company, to pay workers the average wage in a given area for similar workers. The Republican-authored 2017-19 state budget repealed the state’s prevailing wage law. Federal prevailing wage floors remain in place for certain federally funded projects.

“Right-to-work” laws: In 2015, Wisconsin became the 25th state to adopt legislation that allows private sector workers to decide whether to pay union dues. Under federal law, unions must represent all employees in a workplace. As a result, “right-to-work” laws allow employees to receive the benefits of negotiated contracts and union representation in employment disputes without having to pay.

Glossary of terms related to Wisconsin unions 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.