The paradox of a political party wholly invested in growing the social welfare state but refusing to open the government to feed impoverished Wisconsinites ought to be getting more attention, Angela Rachidi says.

“Democrats put themselves in the situation we’re in, and it’s non-winnable,” says Rachidi, a researcher who has written extensively about FoodShare and SNAP at the American Enterprise Institute and the Badger Institute.

“A lot of households are going to be affected in a major way. We should be very concerned about it.”

If the federal government shutdown continues, funding for an estimated 700,000 state residents who use SNAP — the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly called “food stamps” and branded as FoodShare in Wisconsin — will be suspended at the end of October. They receive an average of $190 a month through FoodShare at a cost of about $1.7 billion a year.

Technical college graduates and small business owners will be big winners in the massive Vantage Data Centers development soon expected to become the largest employer in Port Washington.

The four-building campus, named “Lighthouse,” is part of OpenAI’s and Oracle’s Stargate Project, a plan to invest $500 billion in building new artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States over the next four years. Construction on the Lighthouse project is slated to begin before the end of the year and expected to be complete by 2028.

In an announcement last week, data center operator Vantage said it and Oracle will provide “more than 1,000 long-term jobs and thousands more indirect jobs” once the Lighthouse campus is complete. At least 300 of those are expected to come from Vantage, Port Washington officials said, while the remaining 700 or so would come from Oracle and OpenAI. In a February letter to residents, Port Washington Mayor Ted Neitzke wrote that many of the Vantage jobs “pay six figures, and many do not require a four-year degree.”

A new Marquette University Law School poll found that 55% of Wisconsinites believe the costs of data centers outweigh the benefits.

At least one of the stories about the poll inadvertently supplied a possible reason why that is the case.

A story in the Journal Sentinel, one of the state’s Gannett papers, stated that data centers have drawn criticism from some “over environmental concerns about sustainability because the facilities require an enormous amount of water and electricity to operate.”

That statement in regard to water use, repeated over and over by opponents, is categorically false.

The biggest data centers planned for Wisconsin, the Microsoft project in Mount Pleasant and the Vantage project in Port Washington, are not a threat to local water systems or to Lake Michigan — a fact opponents either can’t believe or won’t admit, as we reported in a story two weeks ago.

Early on in the proposals made by Vantage and Microsoft, developers explained that both campuses would be using something called a closed loop cooling system. Rather than perpetually passing cold, fresh water past hot computer units, a closed loop system uses a kind of antifreeze that circulates in the system and is cooled by a chiller.

In a closed loop system, no liquid is lost or needs to be replaced. Such systems are heavier on power use but much lighter on water use than open-air evaporative systems.

The City of Milwaukee is willing to pay a new marketing and communications officer for The Hop, its little-used $128 million streetcar, up to $108,000 per year plus benefits that include a pension, deferred compensation plan, health and dental insurance, paid parental leave, a comprehensive wellness program, onsite clinic services, an onsite employee assistance program, alternative work schedules, long-term disability insurance, group life insurance, tuition benefits, paid vacation, 12 paid holidays, paid sick leave “and other paid leaves,” a flexible spending arrangement and a “commuter value pass” for the Milwaukee County Transit System that — unlike The Hop — actually covers more than a two-mile route downtown.

Some of the reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel make well under half of that and have already been doing marketing for The Hop for years, so there should be at least a few candidates.

Traffic delays for Milwaukee and Madison area commuters reached record highs in 2024, data from the Texas A&M University Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report show.

In 1982, the average commuter in Milwaukee spent a total of 13 hours over the course of one year delayed in traffic, consuming an average of 2 excess gallons of gas. By 2024, Milwaukeeans wasted 57 hours in traffic, consuming an extra 38 gallons of gas.

In Madison, the picture is similar. Annual delays per commuter are up from 15 hours in 1982 to 52 hours in 2024, and excess gasoline consumption is up from 3 gallons to 16 per commuter.

“I support it throughout the state. I live on a residential stretch of County Highway within village limits. We have no shoulders to the road. Children and dogs live here. Deer and wildlife are abundant. Speeding is prevalent, usually at highway speeds. It is unsafe for residents to turn into our driveways because of speeders who tailgate and pass even while we signal a left turn. Speeders often pass over single and double yellow lines. It would be a good use of technology to ensure safety for the community and other drivers.”

— Judith Perlman, Cleveland, WI

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