A new Dane County committee aims to provide a roadmap for local communities. My report for Isthmus newspaper.
Reporting
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Data centers become the watch word
Candidates for governor answered questions on data centers in Madison the same night that a data center company held an open house on a proposal in Dane County. Reporting for Civic Media with Savanna Tomei-Olson.
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Caledonia data center proposal advances despite opposition
A plan to add a data center in the Village of Caledonia has inched forward, but opposition has forged unexpected alliances. My report from Racine County, with Stuart J Wattles.
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Advocates renew push to address missing and murdered Black women
A bill to create a task force on missing and murdered Black women and girls nearly passed the Legislature last year. Advocates, including the mother of Sade Robinson, say the time for action is overdue. My report for Civic Media.
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“It’s a compromise:” Lawmakers land on budget proposal
“There’s things to like, and there’s things to dislike,” said JFC co-chair Mark Born. “I’m not going to spend a lot of time dwelling on the things I don’t like.” My report for Civic Media.
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The Wisconsin Civics Games
I host the spring election show and am joined by Eve Galanter, founder of the Wisconsin Civics Games. We talk civics education, voter turnout, the declining coverage of local government, and a new bill that would update civics education requirements in the state.
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The future of labor organizing
I speak with journalist and author Dan Kaufman about the firing of Jennifer Abruzzo, former General Counsel at the National Labor Relations Board, on Trump’s first day in office, and the future of the NLRB.
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West High civics club spurs proposal to lower voting age
Lowering the voting age isn’t a new idea. But students in the civics club at Madison West High School are following a national trend to give 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote in school board elections.
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How Wisconsin Got “Foxconned”
It’s been four years since Wisconsin inked a contract with Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn. The year was 2017, President Trump was in office, and then-Governor Scott Walker was running for re-election. After just months of consideration, Walker signed an agreement for Foxconn to come to southern Wisconsin — after all, Wisconsin was “open for business.”
At the time, Foxconn promised to invest $10 billion into a high-tech LCD screen manufacturing facility. They said it could bring 13,000 jobs to the state, the majority of them blue-collar, family-supporting jobs. But four years later, the plan to build LCD screens has not materialized. Foxconn is expressly not producing LCD screens, while weighing what to do with the thousands of the acres of land and new infrastructure built explicitly for them. Meanwhile, homeowners have been evicted from their homes and the State of Wisconsin and Mount Pleasant are now on the hook if Foxconn backs out of the deal.
I sat down with Madison-based journalist Lawrence Tabak, who has been reporting on the Foxconn deal since its beginnings and is out this month with a new book about it. It’s called Foxconned: Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes, and the Sacking of Local Government, released from the University of Chicago Press in November 2021.
We discuss the context of the deal at the time, the flaws of the underlying economic analysis produced by Foxconn analysts, the “blighting” of the land and eviction of Mount Pleasant homeowners (and the unusual clearance granted by the legislature to do so), the future of Wisconn Valley and why Governor Evers renegotiated the deal – plus why the abundance of governmental-sponsored economic development is a bad deal.
Useful links:
- Find this post on wortfm.org
- Visit Lawrence Tabak’s website, and follow him on Twitter here.
- Find Tabak’s new book from the University of Chicago Press, here.
- Read more of Tabak’s reporting in Belt Magazine and the American Prospect
- More listening: Tone Madison interviewed Tabak in 2018; Reply All explored the local politics and evicted homeowners in 2018.
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City Of Madison Faces Lawsuit Over Police Oversight Board
The Madison Common Council formally established the Police Civilian Oversight Board last September. The 13-member board was years in the making, and intended to bring more oversight and accountability to the Madison Police Department.
Now, it’s the subject of a federal lawsuit against the City of Madison. My report for WORT News.
Read on wortfm.org. Picture of demonstration on May 30, 2020 after the killing of George Floyd.