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While Democratic presidential candidates sparred in the last debate before the Iowa caucuses, President Trump held his campaign stop in Milwaukee Tuesday night. Speaking to a packed crowd of more than 12,000 supporters at the UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena, Trump delivered a ninety minute speech that touched on his promises for national security, the economy, immigration, and less energy-efficient dishwashers.

Last year, Republicans sent a bill to Governor Tony Evers’s desk that would have lowered the number of required training hours for nursing aides, but Evers vetoed it.

This Wednesday, Republicans will convene to try overriding the veto and pass the bill. If they succeed, it will be the first veto override in Wisconsin since 1985.

A 2018 healthcare workforce report conducted by several Wisconsin healthcare providers found that over 16,000 caregiver positions, or almost one fifth of all caregiver positions in Wisconsin, are unfilled.

This is a problem for Wisconsin, where the population is becoming, older on average.

As of 2010, 26 percent of Wisconsinites were 55 or older. A study from the state’s Department of Health Services found that by 2040, that will grow to 35 percent. 

John Vandermeer, the president and CEO of the Wisconsin Health Care Association, says the long training period is one obstacle to filling these positions.

“What this legislation is designed to do is to ensure that we have the workforce that we need in order to be in a position to provide that high-quality care,” Vandermeer says. “As a result of the regulatory environment in the state of Wisconsin, it limits the ability of providers to be in a position to have some of the staff that they need to advance excellence in the quality of care that they provide.”

Wisconsin requires 120 hours of training for nursing aides. The federal requirement is 75.

Vandermeer’s statement is echoed by the bill’s supporters, including Wisconsin Senator Robert Cowles. 

Cowles released a statement last November saying the bill would “help students become the caretakers that the residents of these facilities deserve sooner.” 

But, opponents of the bill, including Governor Evers, worry that it would lower the quality of healthcare overall. In his veto message Evers said that stricter training requirements ensure high-quality healthcare while also lowering turnover rates.

And retention is a problem in Wisconsin’s healthcare industry. The 2018 healthcare workforce  study found that in 2017 an estimated 10,700 caregivers left the industry to work elsewhere.

Janet Zander is a spokesperson for the Greater Wisconsin Agency on Aging Resources, a nonprofit aging advocacy group that registered against the bill.

She says this is the bigger problem.

“Those are low-wage jobs with [a] high injury rate. It’s a difficult job” Zander says.

“You can imagine they’re doing personal cares, they’re getting very low wages, in some cases very low benefits, and it’s not the easiest work to do, so many of these folks are leaving the industry to take jobs working at, we use the Kwik Trip example a lot, but also retail stores and et cetera are paying as much without having to deal with the kind of work they were doing, and without having to risk injury to themselves.”

The 2018 study also found that the median hourly wage for healthcare workers was lower than the hourly wage for unskilled entry-level workers in non-health care fields.

The state assembly first voted on the bill in May, where three Democrats, Steve Doyle, Beth Meyers, and Don Vruwink, joined every Republican in voting for the bill. In total, the bill received sixty-six votes. 

If 66 legislators vote to override the veto on Wednesday, the bill will become law.

The local evening news takes a look at marijuana in Wisconsin in 2019: various executive and legislative moves to decriminalize marijuana or legalize it for medical purposes, issues in the state’s burgeoning hemp industry, a journalism project on the disproportionate outcomes of prohibition, and the social justice provisions included in Illinois’ legalization that begins January 1, 2020. Chali Pittman has the year in review.

Nurses at UW Hospital announced their intent to unionize today. They say they’re too understaffed to properly care for patients and don’t feel supported by hospital administration. 

This afternoon, nurses marched into this month’s meeting of the UW Hospital and Clinics Authority Board of Directors, and informed board members of their intent to unionize. 

Then, the nurses walked across the street to the First Unitarian Society to announce their demand for the board to voluntarily  recognize their union. 

The nurses are seeking better staffing levels, more dedicated beds for patients and the ability to advocate on behalf of patients without threat of retaliation.

UW Health is one of Madison’s largest employers, with over 21,000 employees. It is responsible for the health of over 650,000 patients at seven hospitals and eleven times as many clinics. But resources are currently strained at the University Hospital, in part because many of the most experienced nurses have left and been replaced by newer ones. Sheri Signer has been a nurse at UW Hospital for seventeen years. She says that a series of recent changes drove them out.

“Over the last nine years the hospital guaranteed the nurses that they would take care of us and that we did not need a union,” said Signer. “Slowly, one by one, little changes started happening and in the last two years things have drastically changed, and now nurses have terrible morale, we are being asked to work overtime constantly, we’re short all the time, patient ratios have gone up, our access to support staff has changed in the hospital, our education has greatly decreased, so the overall atmosphere is just, it’s very low.”

Signer says that the hospital used to have one nurse per three or four patients. Now that ratio is one nurse for up to  six patients.

This can strain resources in critical situations, and led to morale problems even beyond the long work hours. Mariah Clark, a nurse in the emergency department who was one of the speakers at the rally, said that several nurses left because of anxieties about worst-case scenarios.

“People always leave for different reasons,” says Clark. “But we’ve had a very large number of very experienced, seasoned nurses who have been here long enough to see the situation change and have that longitudinal perspective of where we’ve been and where we are now. And they lived in fear that their name would be attached to a never event, something called a sentinel event, that is never supposed to happen in a hospital. Because of the way the conditions had changed, they felt that it was inevitable and they couldn’t in good conscience keep working. So they felt the need to resign.”

A sentinel event is any event in a hospital that results in the death or serious harm of a patient.

The nurses also say that management has not treated them fairly in disciplinary events, where nurses must represent themselves. management has discharged some nurses, and the people still there feel those nurses were not treated fairly. Marilyn Townsend, an attorney for one such nurse, says her client was forced to represent herself in her second language and was ultimately dismissed. 

“I recently represented an unrepresented worker at UW Health who was discharged allegedly for not being sick on the day she took off,” said Townsend. “She tried to present doctors’ excuses and her supervisor said ‘present them on appeal.’ I represented her through the appeal process. They would not let me be present at any of the meetings and even though English is her second language-she only got her citizenship a couple years ago-they expected her to speak for herself. They upheld the discharge.”

Wisconsin’s aging population has led to concerns about a shortage of nurses across the state. UW-Eau Claire launched a 3.

In February, Wisconsin’s elections administration agency won a federal award for creating a program on cyber-security training. It’s one initiative made possible by a federal grant of just under $7 million made to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. 

Reid Magney  is a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Elections Commission. He says that agency prioritized the training of staff to support county and municipal clerks across the state.

“We used the first part of the money to make sure that we had staff in order to not only to secure our system, but also to be able to provide security training to our county and municipal clerks as well, because just having a secure system isn’t good enough when you’ve got 3,000 user of that system,” Magney says. “You also have to train them, and we basically had to develop all of our own training material.”

He says the money also went to implementing new technology, such as a 3rd factor authentication for anyone entering the voter registration system. The money has also been spent on hiring an advertising agency to inform the public about election security. 

And just over $1 million went to a grant that would give election offices money to get new computers. Counties or municipalities that applied would be given up to 12 hundred dollars for a new computer that has malware protection.

“Our highest priority is making sure that the clerks who use our system have up-to-date computers because not only are they accessing our system, but they’re also communicating with voters and they’re also communicating with each other,” Magney says. “If one of them gets infected with malware, or just a run-of-the-mill computer virus, there’s the potential to spread that back to voters [and] other clerks.”

At the end of next month, computers that aren’t up-to-date won’t be able to access the statewide voter registration system — that’s called WisVote.

Scott McDonell is in charge of administering elections for Dane County. In a guest column for the Wisconsin State Journal yesterday, McDonell argued that the upgrades this year don’t totally protect Wisconsin elections. He argues that they ultimately protect WisVote from hackers, but leaves counties wide-open for an attack. 

He says he is concerned about hackers holding local election information hostage, especially for cities and counties that have older technology.

McDonell says it is important that Wisconsin invests more in cyber-security before the 2020 primaries in April. 

“Whoever wins Wisconsin basically wins the Presidential election. The rest of the world knows that, and we’re more at risk than we’ve ever been,” McDonell notes.

McDonell suggest that the state should invest in buying something called Albert sensors for every county. 

“What they do is, every malware, everything that they are able to identify at Homeland Security or through the CIA, is loaded into these Albert sensors so that if that traffic with those fingerprints get through your firewall, it will alert both county staff and also the Center for Internet Security staff that you’ve been penetrated,” McDonell says. “[It] also [works] going back out, so if you were to click on a link you shouldn’t click on, that will also trigger this alert. It’s cutting edge, and it’s up to date.”

Dane County purchased an Albert sensor. But McDonell says it cost the county $20,000 — and that’s the nonprofit rate. McDonell says the commercial version can be ten times that. 

If the nonprofit price was offered to all 72 Wisconsin counties, it would cost the state just under $1.5 million. But the elections commission says it’s not in the budget this year. 

However, this week, the U.S. House of Representatives included $425 million in ele...

On October 31st, 2022, the Town of Madison will dissolve and become absorbed into the cities of Madison and Fitchburg. 

That means the Town of Madison’s  assets and liabilities will soon become distributed between the two cities. 

The Town of Madison, the City of Madison, and Fitchburg outlined the town’s dissolution and attachment back in 2003 in an effort to resolve a history of boundary disputes, but the process has its own challenges.  

Jeff Greger is a planner with the City of Madison’s Planning Division. He says the City is examining how additional infrastructure, primarily related to sewerage, will affect its budget. 

“We’re starting to think about things like where people vote, how garbage collection occurs, [and] what people’s taxes are going to look like,” Greger says. “We’re taking over a lot of infrastructure. We’re looking for conditions of streets, we’re looking at conditions of sewers, [and] trying to identify how all of that is going to affect the City of Madison departments and ultimately future budgets.”

Greger also says accounting for the additional 5,000 residents the City of Madison will gain presents the biggest challenge.

The City of Madison has gained residents as part of past annexation agreements before. But when the the process — formally called attachment — happened in the past, such as with the towns of Burke and Blooming Grove, the process was more streamlined, and only a few hundred residents were added to the City of Madison. 

“Having those communications with all [of] those 5,000 residents versus a couple hundred residents just compounds efforts, and another thing we need to do is to assign a zoning classification to each of these parcels prior to attachment, and just the sheer number of parcels is a project in itself,” Greger says.

Beyond infrastructure, the City has noted a “high risk” of housing displacement in the attached town property due to rising property taxes, zoning, and gentrification.

During a presentation to the City of Madison’s board in charge of Tax Increment Financing last Thursday, the Office of Real Estate Services suggested the City of Madison use healthy tax incremental districts, or TIDs, to fund expected infrastructure costs and offset displacement.

When a TID is created, the current value of all taxable property within its bounds is established. 

If the value of that property grows, the City collects all of the related taxes as “tax increment” revenue. 

The City must then use that revenue to pay for improvements made to property in the defined TID.

Matt Wachter is the manager of the City’s Office of Real Estate Services. He says this tax incremental financing process is just one of the tools Madison could use to address these concerns. 

“The city has a whole host of tools and programs that we would look at [and see] how they fit into South Madison, from housing to business assistance,” Wachter says. “All of those pieces will be looked at in the next year or so, so TIF is really a financing tool, but there’s also a lot of work that will be done [with] our general toolbox.”

But, there are signs that the process of displacement may already be in motion.

During a Common Council Executive Committee meeting in September, Alder Shiva Bidar said out-of-state buyers have purchased many of the rental properties in the Town of Madison because they expect property values to increase after the attachment. 

If that’s the case, these buyers will be able to raise rents higher, which is a concern for an area where the average household income is just about $37,000. 

“These transfers are happening, and there’s already displacement that’s happening because [of] their expectations,” Bidar says. “These investors know what they’re doing in advance, so they’re already displacing residents.”

At this time,

A bill introduced in the Wisconsin senate in April would require local governments to obey state and federal immigration enforcement laws. In a heated public hearing today, supporters and opponents argued about the bill in front of a committee.

The bill would prevent Wisconsin municipalities and counties from creating a safe haven for undocumented immigrants. If local governments don’t comply with immigration detention orders, they’d be fined for hundreds or thousands of dollars a day.

The bill was introduced back in April, but it just received its public hearing today. People passionate about the bill — including Latinx advocacy groups and religious organizations — went before a state committee for about four hours of debate.  

Proponents of the bill say it would help make communities safer, but opponents like Abby Swetz, who represents a representative of advocacy group End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin and spoke  on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, disagree.

“Local law enforcement needs cooperation from local immigrant communities. Local residents serve as witnesses, report crime, and otherwise assist law enforcement. The foundation for this cooperation is often destroyed when local police are viewed as an extension of the immigration system. Survivors of domestic violence refrain from reporting offenses,” says Swetz.

“Individuals with key information about burglaries, or escapees from county jails, fail to contact the police or sheriff’s department. It is an unfortunate truth that as immigration enforcement has expanded, the willingness of immigrant communities to interact with law enforcement has declined. Survivors in a 2018 study regarding immigration policy on domestic violence reported, quote, ‘The decision to call the police depended on their documentation status.’ The community at large is safer when even the most vulnerable community member feels safe enough to report crimes.”

The Wisconsin Catholic Conference, the City of Milwaukee, the Wisconsin Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, and the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault have all come out against the bill.

The Badger State Sheriffs’ Association and the Wisconsin Sheriffs and Deputy Sheriffs Association have not registered in favor of the bill.

Supporters  of the bill argue that it would help keep Wisconsin communities safe by helping immigration enforcement officials deport undocumented immigrants with criminal histories.

Jim Walden, an Illinois resident whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant with a criminal record, spoke in favor of the bill.

“I’m the father of James Ray Walden III, lance corporal United States Marine Corps, whose life was taken on February 24th, 2017 by an illegal,” Walden says. “Five years prior to this accident, [he] had been in trouble with the law five times in that five-year period, was convicted in a court in Maryland of domestic violence, put on probation and an order of protection, and he was still allowed to stay. This is a fact. I have a dead son. That’s it. That is your true cost.”

Other speakers also raised the issue of violence committed by undocumented immigrants as an argument in favor of the bill. However, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found in a 2018 study that undocumented immigrants were less likely than American citizens to commit crimes.

During the hearing, proponents of the bill criticized the policy of sanctuary, where local municipalities don’t fully cooperate with immigration enforcement officials and don’t deport undocumented immigrants. They call it a defiance of the law.

Christine Neumann Ortiz, executive director of the Latinx advocacy group Voces de la Frontera, says she’s disappointed this bill is being debated right now.

“[It’s] right before the holidays when families are g...

The Madison Metro School District currently rents a space on Olin Avenue which serves as the base for four of the district’s intensive intervention programs. 

About 500 elementary and middle school students with disabilities in the district are referred to the intensive support team each year. 

Of those 500, the team selected 36 students who also require a high degree of individualized instruction and support to participate in the programs this year.

Last night, in an effort to reduce its leasing costs and provide these students with their own space, the Madison school board approved making a $4.5 million purchase of the building at 333 Holtzman Road to house the intervention programs. 

Martha Olsen is the Assistant Director of Special Education for the Madison school district. She says that even though the District has been committed to supporting students with disabilities in the past, it can still do better.

“Our students share public restrooms, hallways, and common spaces with anybody that walks into that building,” Olsen says. “While our landlord is very supportive of us and our programs, we’re also reminded that we need to be a little more quiet, watch out for the cars driving in and out, and leave the landscape rocks alone, because it’s not our space.”

Olsen also says her students deserve a safe environment, but opponents of the proposal argue that separating students with disabilities from their peers amounts to segregation. 

Andrea Ruppar, a professor of special education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that removing students with disabilities from their peers defeats the whole purpose of special education. 

“Special education cannot exist in the absence of general education because our goal as special educators is to support students’ access to the general curriculum,” Ruppar says. “If we don’t have a general curriculum, then there’s nothing for us to help students access. Then special educators are put in a position of making a whole curriculum for one, or two, or three, or five students.” 

Ruppar also says that segregating students with disabilities leads to poorer educational outcomes, and makes it more likely that they will be segregated as adults. 

In a four to three vote, the school board voted to approve the purchase of the building last night. 

School board member Ali Muldrow was one who voted to buy the site. 

She asserted during last night’s meeting that the District has a duty to meet students where they’re at, and that providing a place for students with disabilities to learn isn’t clearly segregation. 

“We send educators into the jail, we send educators into hospitals, we send educators that allow for them to meet students where they’re at for whatever reasons that they are where they’re at, and I think to characterize this programming as segregation is a really complicated thing to do within special education,” Muldrow says. 

Both supporters and critics of the proposal agree on one thing: the Olin Avenue location is not ideal. 

“The Olin Avenue facility sucks, to be blunt about it. I’ve been in there, I have clients in there, [and] I’m not going to sing any praises about that facility,” says civil rights attorney Jeff Spitzer-Resnick.

He also says he’s frustrated the District considered purchasing the Holtzman Road site without community input.

“This action last night was taken without really significant, if any, input, other than the three minutes that people were allowed to give in public comments,” Spitzer-Resnick says. “There’s [also] a Special Ed Parent Advisory Committee that was not really consulted on this huge purchase, and so [both] the administration and the board need to do a lot better job engaging with the thousands of families that have children in special ...

Wisconsin law requires that “upon receipt of reliable information that a registered voter has moved,” the Wisconsin Elections Commission must notify the voter by mail. 

If the Commission does not receive any response from the voter within 30 days, it is required to remove that voter from its rolls, even if the voter hasn’t actually moved.

On Friday, Ozaukee County Circuit Judge Paul Malloy ordered the Commission to clear 234,000 voters from its current rolls after sending out letters in October. 

“I don’t want to see anybody deactivated, but I don’t write the legislation. That’s not my domain,” Malloy said in his oral decision. “Once the legislature has studied this issue and they’ve decided how to proceed, that’s really their prerogative and then people can disagree with it or agree with it through voting, but I think it’s very clear that [the Wisconsin Elections Commission] had a legal duty, [but] they didn’t think the policy was appropriate and they went away from it.”

Judge Malloy’s decision came a month after the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty sued the Commission for saying it would wait one to two years to remove such voters from its rolls. 

Mike Browne, Deputy Director at One Wisconsin Institute says this legal action will ultimately suppress potential voters.

“We believe the timing of this current legal action is suspicious because it’s happening in the lead up to the spring elections, and potentially there are hundreds of thousands of people who could be flagged for removal from the voter registration rolls and forced to re-register, even in cases when they haven’t moved, on election day, which creates delays, chaos, [and] frustration, potentially discouraging people from exercising their franchise, and we believe that is absolutely the wrong way to go,” Browne says.

Lucas Vebber is a deputy counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. He says that despite concerns about voter suppression by deactivation, the issue at hand is a narrower one. 

 “This issue is entirely, 100 percent about a state agency that is failing to follow the law as written,” Vebber asserts. “With regards to anybody who finds themselves deactivated as a result of this, of course in Wisconsin we make it very easy to register again. Those individuals are able to do so at any point between now and election day, and then they can even show up on election day and register there. This case, as I said, is 100 percent entirely about a rogue state agency that is not following the law.”

Given that narrow focus, Judge Malloy also denied the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin’s entrance into the case, saying that their intervention would make the case “fruitlessly complex.”

If it had been granted intervention, the League would have moved to dismiss the case. 

Erin Grunze is the Executive Director for the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. She says the League sought to intervene because the Wisconsin Elections Commission hadn’t argued that the moving information it receives from the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, isn’t reliable. 

“From our perspective it’s very disappointing because we know that that data is inaccurate,” Grunze says. “We know that it produces false positives in that it identifies people who the DMV thinks have moved when in fact they have not, and they’re voters who go to the polls regularly. We know that based on when [the] process was done in 2017 in advance of the spring election in 2018 and we had voters come forward who attempted to vote in their locations and were told they were no longer on the voter registration lists.” 

Grunze also said that the League is currently exploring their legal options for follow-up on Friday’s ruling with The Fair Elections Center, which is representing the League. 

Jon Sherman, who serves as Senior Counsel with the Center,

Yesterday, a Midwest-based environmental advocacy group filed a lawsuit against Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission. That’s the agency in charge of regulating public utilities.

The lawsuit challenges the commission’s approval of the Cardinal-Hickory Creek Transmission line.

The Cardinal-Hickory Creek Transmission energy line would run through southwest Wisconsin and northeastern Iowa. 

Yesterday, two environmental groups  filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Public Service Commission’s approval of the energy line. The lawsuit adds to the ongoing debate surrounding the transmission line. 

Supporters of the project say that it would lower energy costs and would increase transmission of energy from renewable resources. But George Meyer, the executive director of the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation, one of the two environmental advocacy groups who filed the suit, says that the energy isn’t worth the environmental costs.

“The line is going to run about 100 miles through what’s known as the Driftless Area, or all Southwest Wisconsin,” says Meyer. “It’s an area that has tremendous natural resources. There’s going to be wetlands and streams crossed, our forests divided in two and impact on natural scenic beauty of the area. And that’s an important part of the tourism industry that is the second major economic factor in southwest Wisconsin.”

Meyer also says he’s concerned that the line will pass through  private property.

In the lawsuit filed yesterday, the environmental groups take issue with the mechanics of the Public Service Commission’s vote to approve the project. The suit alleges that two members of the Public Service Commission should have recused themselves.

Those  members of the Public Service Commission are  Chairwoman Rebecca Valcq and Commissioner Mike Huebsch. 

Valcq formerly worked as an attorney for the Wisconsin Electric Power Company, a state utility, and Huebsch was an advisor to the Midwest Electric Grid Operator. 

According to the lawsuit, Valcq and Huebsch should have recused themselves due to these conflicts of interest. 

The Wisconsin Wildlife Federation, along with the Driftless Area Land Conservancy, another environmental advocacy group, filed a motion to ask for the recusal of Valcq and Huebsch earlier this year. 

In September, the Public Service Commission dismissed that motion.  They found that the option was not properly brought before the Commission and lacked a legitimate basis for recusal.

Howard Learner, the executive director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center, says that if the lawsuit goes through, then the decision to allow the line’s construction would be placed before a different Commission.

“In these sorts of proceedings, having a fair and impartial decision maker is absolutely vital to constitutional due process and what most of us think is a fair decision-making process,” says Learner. “Unfortunately in this case, with due respect to the commission, two of the commissioners had conflicts of interest or otherwise situations created an appearance of bias or an appearance of a lack of impartiality. As a practical matter, we simply believe they should not have been hearing this case.”

Learner also says at least one more lawsuit will be filed this week.

American Transmission Company, a company helping construction the transmission line, declined to comment. 

The transmission line is projected to be in use by 2023, but these lawsuits could delay that timeline.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misspelled the names George Meyer and Howard Learner.