Wisconsin Watch

Increasingly, health care facilities in Wisconsin and around the country require their employees to be vaccinated. Yet in long-term care facilities such as nursing homes — where residents are highly susceptible to severe illness and death from COVID-19 — some workers refuse the shot. Reporting by Madeline Fuerstenberg / Wisconsin Watch.

Eau Claire, Wis., wants to remove all of their lead service lines by 2023. In meeting that goal, they would join Madison and Green Bay on a list of Wisconsin cities that have rid their water systems of lead service lines, which typically consist of both utility-owned and privately owned portions. Reporting by Madeline Fuerstenberg / Wisconsin Watch. Story originally published Sept. 9, 2021.

Drug and alcohol courts allow defendants to minimize punishment if they remain sober, receive treatment for substance abuse and participate in a structured program. Outagamie County Circuit Judge Vincent Biskupic created a similar arrangement with defendants with a key difference: The defendants were answerable only to Biskupic, who set no date for the supervision to end. The atypical arrangement...

Cities across the country, including three in Wisconsin, are piloting basic income programs for residents. The goal: to better understand how providing money with no strings attached can help families turn their financial lives around. Some of these experiments show promising first results, and point to a possible solution to wealth disparities along racial and other lines. But public support for...

Workers like Olivia McKnight, a full-time Popeyes employee and mother of three, often struggle to get by even on wages above the federal minimum of $7.25, and those low-wage workers are disproportionately people of color. In Wisconsin, where the racial wealth and income gaps are some of the greatest in the nation, many feel raising the minimum is long overdue. Now, Democrats in the state are propo...

A program of Wisconsin's Ho-Chunk Nation grants members large sums of money upon reaching adulthood — often allowing young adults to get a leg up in their financial lives. Similar programs, known as "baby bonds," have been floated in recent years as a possible solution to racial wealth gaps. Could it work? Reporting by Ben Baker and Zhen Wang. Originally published August 5, 2021.

Over the past seven years, in at least 52 cases involving 46 defendants, Biskupic has used “review hearings” to either monitor a defendant’s behavior or to pressure them to pay court-ordered financial obligations. In at least one case, he went as far as ordering additional jailtime for the failure to pay overdue debts — a tactic the Wisconsin Supreme Court has warned could be unconstitutional. Rep...

To Greg Lewis, the home was beautiful. Cozy and inviting, the two-bedroom house in Milwaukee had a finished basement, two and a half car garage, an attached apartment and a yard. He had his eyes set on it for 42 days, only to learn that the appraisal, or valuation of the property, was lower than he expected. Lewis thought it was going to be about $100,000, as another house on the same block sold f...

Jammes’ case was among 31 such cases between 2014 and 2020 in which a Wisconsin Watch investigation found Biskupic offered to stay or furlough defendants’ jail time if they complied with his conditions.

Chris Kartsounes had heard enough of Outagamie County Circuit Judge Vincent Biskupic’s demands. In May 2017, at his sixth hearing after having already been sentenced — when a case would normally be over — Kartsounes lost his cool.  “I’m tired of this, your honor,” he said. “I’ve served my time. I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do ... Why do you keep harassing me?” he asked, firing profani...

Shenora Staten-Jordan felt lost when her father, Gary Lee Staten, died of COVID-19 in May. She hadn’t expected to lose him so soon at age 61 — or for a contagious disease to hinder her goodbye. All of that only strengthened her Milwaukee family’s wishes to give Staten — a beloved father and grandfather who spent 30-plus years serving Milwaukee Public Schools — the type of homegoing service he dese...

A federal judge on Wednesday tossed out the federal eviction moratorium, which could make it easier for landlords to kick out tenants behind in rent.

The No. 1 factor for acute gastrointestinal illness in Kewaunee County’s private drinking water wells is cow manure, according to a federal study released today. The findings raise questions about the effectiveness of existing regulations aimed at protecting residents from tainted drinking water. Reporting by Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch. This piece was produced for the NEW News Lab, a local...

For many years, Cassilyn Brown’s home in Madison has housed three generations, including her husband, three children and father-in-law. Since COVID-19 hit, her concerns about her family have grown as their multigenerational household works to stay safe from the pandemic, especially her 79-year-old father-in-law, who has chronic pneumonia and a heart arrhythmia. Reporting by Pratheek Rebala, April...

The state Supreme Court on Monday hears arguments in a case that could determine whether the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources failed to adequately protect water from manure pollution when awarding a permit to a giant dairy farm in northeastern Wisconsin — or whether the agency lacks the authority to issue such restrictions.

When Clint Myrick graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2010, he left with two consequential pieces of paper: a diploma for a bachelor’s degree in music education — and an eye-popping student loan bill. Reporting by Alyssa Huglen. Originally published on May 15, 2021.

The envelope looked like any other — slightly wrinkled, a handwritten address scrawled across the front. Reporting by Clara Neupert ad Jim Malewitz. Originally published on April 24, 2021.

Archeologists have unearthed human remains of Native Americans during excavations of the site along Lake Michigan where Kohler Co. wants to build an 18-hole golf course. The rapidly eroding Lake Michigan shoreline is also raising questions about the future of the project. Reporting by Jim Malewitz . Originally published on May 22, 2021.

Some regional nonprofits administering Gov. Tony Evers’ $322 million emergency rental assistance program may be unintentionally discouraging non-U.S. citizens from applying — even though immigration status holds no bearing on eligibility for the federally financed program. At least eight of the 14 organizations administering the Wisconsin Emergency Rental Assistance (WERA) program ask applicants t...

Democrats and Republicans in Wisconsin use different strategies to win seats in the state Legislature. Democrats have raised more money than ever from campaign fundraising. Meanwhile Republicans have consistently won a greater share of the seats in the state Legislature than their share of the total votes cast due to gerrymandering. Reporting by Peter Cameron in partnership with The Badger Project...

Democrats and Republicans largely disagree on how to proceed with future elections. Proposals include measures that could impact could determine how Wisconsin picks congressional candidates, how it awards its 10 Electoral College votes, how fast results can be announced and who can vote absentee. Experts say major changes to Wisconsin's election laws are unlikely for now because of partisan divide...

Some Wisconsinites have been waiting for unemployment aid from the Department of Workforce Development for months. Workers at the department have to use outdated technology, like a 60-year-old computing program, to process a record number of claims this past year. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the GOP-controlled Legislature have also spent months blaming each other for the agency’s shortcomings a...

The coronavirus has run rampant across Wisconsin’s state prison system, infecting at least 2,153 staff members at adult institutions who self-reported test results and 10,786 inmates throughout the pandemic — more than half of the current population. These outbreaks have killed at least 25 inmates, according to Wisconsin Deparment of Corrections data. The state has detected infections among inmate...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused major backlogs in Wisconsin's unemployment system. Families are still waiting on the Department of Workforce Development to process jobless claims filed last spring, with many missing bill payments, racking up credit card debt, facing eviction or worse. DWD officials say that they have processed more claims in the last eight months than they had in the last four ye...

Rampant COVID-19 infections and thousands of deaths of Wisconsin mink could pose a potential threat to humans, as viruses can hop between species and mutate. Now, mink farmers are gearing up to get the vaccine along with first responders and essential workers in Wisconsin. The state has not seen a mink-to-human infection yet, but evidence of mink-to-human transmission in Denmark, the world’s top m...