THE VISION

Taxes should be based on income and one's ability to pay them. There is no reason a billionaire should pay less in taxes than someone working two jobs just to make ends meet. In Wisconsin, that's closer to reality than most people realize. The state's income tax rate stops climbing at $323,290 for a single filer, or $431,060 for a married couple, with everything above that taxed at 7.65%. Past that point, someone making $400,000 and someone making $400 million pay the exact same rate. There's no bracket in between for the comfortable and the ultra-wealthy. Add up income, sales, and property taxes together, and Wisconsin's top 1% of earners (those making more than about $610,000 a year) pay just 6.6% of their income in state and local taxes, while households earning under $29,400, the bottom fifth, pay 10.8%. Nearly double. Thomson Reuters Tax Wisconsin Watch

You can see the same imbalance up close in Wisconsin's own tax code. The Manufacturing and Agriculture Credit was sold as a boost for factories and farms, but the state's own nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau found that in 2023, the most recent year with full data, filers earning under $1 million made up about 70% of everyone claiming the credit and split just 11% of what it paid out. The other 30%, those earning $1 million or more, walked away with the remaining 89%. Wisconsin Legislature

Josh backs fixing that. He supports adding a fifth income tax bracket (a 9.8% rate on income over $1 million), the same plan Governor Evers put in his last budget before legislative Republicans stripped it out in a party-line vote, without so much as a floor debate. He also supports expanding Wisconsin's Homestead Tax Credit (Senate Bill 60 / Assembly Bill 52), raising the income cap from $24,680 to $35,000 so more working homeowners, renters, and seniors on fixed incomes actually get the property tax relief they've earned. Wisconsin Legislature

None of this is untested. Massachusetts added a 4% tax on income over $1 million in 2022, with the revenue dedicated to education and infrastructure. Three full fiscal years in, it's brought in over $8.8 billion, consistently beating projections, funding free school meals, free community college, and transit and road repairs, with no sign of the millionaire exodus critics predicted. Fair taxation across the board ensures that Wisconsin has the resources to properly fund our schools, infrastructure, and essential services that benefit everyone.

Josh supports a single-payer option for Wisconsin, built by expanding our existing BadgerCare program. The case for doing it is as much about dollars as it is about decency. Wisconsin never adopted full Medicaid expansion; instead, it uses a separate federal waiver that covers adults only up to the poverty line, leaving anyone between 100% and 138% of poverty to rely on the marketplace instead of Medicaid. Every state that touches our border (Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan) expanded years ago. Wisconsin is one of just ten states left that hasn't. Because of that, Wisconsin pays 39.3% of the cost to cover the same low-income adults that expansion states cover for just 10%. Wisconsin is leaving roughly $1.6 billion in federal funding on the table, enough to cover about 90,000 more Wisconsinites. It also just missed a separate, one-time $1.3 billion federal bonus for finally expanding. Congress let that incentive expire this January, and Wisconsin didn't act in time.

Josh also believes we have to stop losing our rural hospitals, and that's not an abstract fear here. In March 2024, HSHS closed Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire, open since 1889, and St. Joseph's Hospital in Chippewa Falls (that town's only hospital, open since 1885) within hours of each other, putting more than 1,400 people out of work. It's part of a pattern: a recent Chartis analysis found rural hospitals in Medicaid expansion states running measurably healthier, with 34.9% operating in the red compared to 41.2% nationwide once non-expansion states like Wisconsin are counted in. Expanding coverage doesn't just help patients. It's what keeps the doors open.

Josh points to what just happened in Madison as proof this is fixable. After years of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos personally blocking it, the legislature finally passed Senate Bill 23, extending BadgerCare coverage for new mothers from 60 days to a full year, nearly unanimously (32-1 in the Senate and 95-1 in the Assembly). It's now law, making Wisconsin the 49th state to do this; only Arkansas still hasn't. The state's own health department found that a third of Wisconsin's 63 pregnancy-related deaths from 2020 to 2022 happened after that 60-day coverage window had already closed. Josh believes that same willingness to act is exactly what full BadgerCare expansion and rural hospital protection need next, because Wisconsinites have a right to life and adequate care.

We must restore workers' rights by reversing Act 10 and making it easier to join a union. That fight is happening right now, not in the abstract. A Wisconsin appeals court ruled just last week that Act 10 stays fully in force, overturning a 2024 circuit court decision that had found the law unconstitutional; the case is expected to head to the Wisconsin Supreme Court next. Nothing changes for workers until that's resolved, which is exactly why this can't be left to the courts alone. Wisconsin's union membership has been cut in half since Act 10 passed, falling from 14% of workers in 2011 to 7% by 2024. The latest federal data puts it at 6.4% today, the steepest decline of any state in the country over that span. Josh supports repealing Act 10 and Wisconsin's "right-to-work" law, the companion 2015 law that makes it harder for a union to stay funded even where workers vote to organize. Both are already written: all 60 Assembly and Senate Democrats signed onto a repeal package in September 2025, led in the Senate by Mark Spreitzer of Beloit. It just doesn't have the votes yet in a Republican-controlled Legislature.

Every worker deserves paid leave. Wisconsin has no state paid family or medical leave program. If you need time off for a new baby or a sick parent, you're relying entirely on what your employer chooses to offer. Minnesota didn't wait: its Paid Leave program launched this January, guaranteeing up to 12 weeks of paid medical leave and 12 weeks of paid family leave a year, split between employer and employee contributions.

And every worker deserves fair pay without loopholes that deny overtime when it's earned. Wisconsin's minimum wage has sat at $7.25 an hour for 17 years, while 30 other states have raised theirs above the federal floor. Sen. Kelda Roys and Rep. Angelina Cruz introduced a bill this year to raise it to $15 immediately, then $20 by 2030. On the overtime loophole specifically, Assembly Bill 462 targets the most common way workers get cheated out of it: employers misclassifying employees as independent contractors, especially in construction. It adds a $1,000-per-worker penalty and funds new state investigators to actually enforce it.

Josh believes Wisconsin workers built this state and deserve a legislature that backs that up with more than words.

Hard-working Wisconsinites deserve decent, affordable housing, whether they're buying or renting. Wisconsin now has the worst housing affordability in the Midwest, with the median home price hitting $338,000 last fall and the average first-time buyer now 38 years old. A statewide analysis found Wisconsin needs at least 84,000 new housing units by 2030 just to keep pace, and closer to 155,000 if the state wants to actually grow instead of just manage decline. The bottleneck, as the Monroe Times reported on this same study, isn't permits. It's the supply of buildable lots, which has grown far too slowly to keep up.

That's why "make it affordable to build" matters as much as construction itself. The state already put $525 million into WHEDA workforce housing loan funds in 2023, but as of last fall only about $19 million had actually gone out the door, building roughly 1,000 units. That's mostly because the program barred developers from combining that money with other financing tools they needed to make projects pencil out. The fix, Assembly Bill 194, already passed with bipartisan authors and is now law. Josh would build on that with two more bipartisan bills still sitting in Madison: one requiring 35% of the state's low-income housing tax credits go to rural projects like ours, and one streamlining how new residential lots get approved in the first place, directly targeting that lot-creation bottleneck.

On renters: Wisconsin doesn't have a lot of tools to stop a bad landlord, and the numbers show it. In greater Milwaukee, Black renters make up 36% of the renter population but were named in 66% of eviction filings last year. Just this March, Governor Evers vetoed a bill that would have weakened one of the few protections tenants have, a law that currently voids an entire lease if a landlord slips in an illegal provision. Josh believes that's the wrong direction: renters need that protection strengthened, not chipped away.

This approach has evidence behind it. Minneapolis eliminated single-family-only zoning and cut red tape for apartment construction starting in 2020; a rigorous academic study using a synthetic-control model found home prices grew 16–34% slower and rents 17–34% slower than they would have otherwise. The lesson wasn't that any one fix does it alone. It's that building more, in more places, actually holds costs down. That's true whether you're trying to buy your first home in Monroe or rent an apartment in Madison.

In their current form, AI data centers will lead to job loss, depletion of natural resources, and increased utility costs for residents. I support a complete moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers until all of the following conditions, at minimum, have been written into law:

-New AI data centers will be built using ONLY union labor.

-AI data centers must operate on their own complete, on-site, green renewable energy resources. They must put a stop to the irresponsible overconsumption of our natural resources, and put more energy back into the grid than they use. This will, in turn, lower energy costs for residents.

-AI data centers will be subject to environmental regulation and inspection to ensure they do not contaminate our water and soil.

-AI companies will pay their fair share in taxes. Revenue from those taxes will provide property tax relief and a stipend to residents who have lost their jobs to AI.

-AI companies will be required to fund career re-education programs for residents have lost their jobs to AI.

Josh supports the cannabis legalization push Rep. Hong has signed onto, along with most of the Democratic caucus, and using the revenue to finally fund infrastructure Wisconsin keeps putting off, starting with rural broadband. The current bill, Senate Bill 1045 and its Assembly companion, has 14 of 15 Senate Democrats and 33 of 45 Assembly Democrats signed on as cosponsors, Hong included. Not a single Republican has joined it. The state's own Department of Revenue estimates it would bring in $23.7 million the first year, climbing to $118 million, then $192 million, then $258 million annually by 2029-30 as the market matures.

Wisconsin is already losing this fight by default. A Legislative Fiscal Bureau analysis found Wisconsin residents spent $121 million on legal cannabis in Illinois in a single year, handing our neighbor $36 million in tax revenue that could have funded schools and roads here instead. That's money leaving the state every year Wisconsin waits.

Hong's own plan points to Michigan's licensing system as the model to copy. Michigan legalized in 2018 and now sees roughly $1.8 billion in annual sales generating over $266 million in tax revenue. Michigan also shares that money locally: every city and county hosting a licensed retailer gets a direct payment, more than $59,000 per store in a recent year, that they can put straight into local budgets. That's not abstract money in Madison. It's the kind of dollars a county like ours could put toward exactly what Josh is proposing.

Broadband is exactly where that cannabis revenue could go to work. About 11% of Wisconsin still lacks high-speed internet, concentrated in northern, central, and southwest Wisconsin, our part of the state. Even after the $1 billion federal BEAD program finishes its work, the state's own task force estimates more than 31,000 Wisconsin locations will remain unserved with no funding lined up to reach them. The state just opened a $60 million stopgap grant to chip away at that gap, a fraction of what's needed. Josh believes a legal, taxed cannabis market is how Wisconsin closes it, instead of leaving rural residents to wait on Madison while Illinois keeps pocketing the difference.

We need to make it easier for new childcare providers to open their doors and ensure existing providers have the funding they need to thrive. Wisconsin already took a small step here: the last state budget created a two-year pilot letting providers care for more toddlers per staff member, from roughly 1-to-4 up to 1-to-7 for kids 18 to 30 months, and let family childcare homes grow from a cap of 8 children to 12 without reclassifying as a full group center. That ratio pilot is set to expire in mid-2027 unless the Legislature acts to keep it. Josh would make it permanent, not let it quietly lapse.

The bigger crisis is funding, and it isn't hypothetical. It's happening right now. The state's Child Care Bridge Payment program, the temporary replacement for the pandemic-era Child Care Counts program, expired June 30. A Department of Children and Families survey found more than 75% of providers plan to raise rates because of it, and a separate report found the funding loss could shut down a quarter of Wisconsin's childcare providers. This isn't new to Green County: Brooke Skidmore, who owns The Growing Tree childcare center in New Glarus, testified that Child Care Counts funding let her raise her staff's wages by $2 an hour, and warned what losing it would mean for families and workers here. The Legislature isn't scheduled back in session until January 2027, so whoever Wisconsin sends to Madison this fall will be the ones deciding whether this gets fixed.

The cost side backs up why this matters. Wisconsin's own 2026 survey put average full-time infant care at $17,400 a year in a center, more than a year of in-state tuition at UW-Madison. The lead teachers providing that care average $13.55 an hour, less than half what the average Wisconsin worker makes. That's not a market working. It's parents and providers both losing.

Josh looks to New Mexico as proof there's a better structural fix. New Mexico built a dedicated trust fund, insulated from year-to-year budget fights, to guarantee child care funding regardless of which party controls the legislature. Since launching universal, no-cost child care in November 2025, the state has seen 63 new providers register for business and more than 12,600 additional families enroll, backed by higher reimbursement rates and facility-expansion loans for the providers doing the work. When parents have reliable care for their kids, they can go to work with peace of mind, and that strengthens our entire economy.

Every person deserves the fundamental right to make their own decisions about their body. In Wisconsin, that right exists today only because of a hard-fought legal battle, not because it's secure. For three years after Roe fell, an 1849 law threatened to ban nearly all abortion in the state. In July 2025, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that decades of newer laws had effectively repealed the old ban. Abortion remains legal in Wisconsin today, up to about 20 weeks.

That protection is thinner than it looks. The same day, the Court dismissed a separate case brought by Planned Parenthood asking it to rule that the Wisconsin Constitution itself guarantees a right to bodily autonomy. The justices said the question was no longer urgent, not that the answer was no. Wisconsin's abortion rights today rest on how one set of justices read old statutes, not on a constitutional guarantee. A future court, or a future legislature, could read it differently. Wisconsin Democrats already wrote the fix: Assembly Bill 355, cosponsored by nearly every Democrat in both chambers, would write into law that every individual has the fundamental right to bodily autonomy, including the right to access abortion, and leave that decision to a patient and their doctor rather than a fixed cutoff. It never got a hearing in the Republican-controlled Senate. Senate Democratic Leader Dianne Hesselbein has now gone further, promising that if Democrats win legislative majorities this November, enshrining reproductive freedom permanently in the state constitution will be a first priority, taking the question out of any single court's hands for good. And even where abortion is legal, access isn't guaranteed everywhere: only three clinics in the entire state offer in-person abortion care, in Madison, Milwaukee, and Sheboygan, meaning 71 of Wisconsin's 72 counties have no local provider at all.

Bodily autonomy doesn't stop at reproductive care, and in Wisconsin, transgender people are living through the same fight. Wisconsin currently has no law banning or protecting gender-affirming care for minors or adults, which sounds neutral until you see how it got that way: Republicans have passed bans three separate times since 2023, most recently a package of five bills in February 2026 restricting medical care, school sports participation, and even allowing lawsuits against providers up to 33 years later. Governor Evers has vetoed every one, most recently in March 2026, standing with LGBTQ+ Wisconsinites as he did it. That protection depends entirely on one person's signature. It got weaker in June 2025, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Skrmetti that states are free to ban this care for minors if they choose to. That ruling doesn't touch Wisconsin today, but it removes the constitutional backstop that might once have blocked a future ban here. The gap between "legal" and "accessible" is already showing: facing threats to federal funding, Children's Wisconsin and UW Health have both scaled back some gender-affirming care for minors even without a state law forcing them to. Legislators including Rep. Ryan Clancy are already drafting proactive protections, covering discrimination in housing, employment, and insurance, that they say could finally pass with a Democratic trifecta after this November.

Neither fight is unique to Wisconsin, and neither has to stay this precarious. In 2022, Michigan voters amended their state constitution to guarantee a right to reproductive freedom, striking down a dormant 1931 abortion ban for good and taking the question away from whichever party next controls Lansing. Minnesota has gone further on trans health care specifically: because the protection is written into state law rather than left to a governor's veto, transgender youth there kept access to care even after the Skrmetti ruling gave other states the green light to take it away. Josh believes Wisconsin deserves that same certainty on both fronts, not a right that depends on which four justices or which governor happens to hold the pen this year.

We need an adequate living wage directly influenced by inflation and the rising cost of living, that allows working families in Wisconsin to meet their basic needs with dignity. Here's how far Wisconsin is from that today: MIT's Living Wage Calculator puts the federal poverty line for a single, childless, full-time worker at $7.67 an hour in 2026. Wisconsin's minimum wage is $7.25. That means a full-time worker earning Wisconsin's minimum wage is, by definition, working in poverty before they've paid for a single thing. No children, no dependents, just showing up for a 40-hour week.

It gets further from "adequate" once you add actual costs. In Green County, MIT calculates a single adult needs $21.68 an hour just to cover food, housing, transportation, and health care, essentially identical to the $21.88 statewide average, because rural Wisconsin isn't meaningfully cheaper to live in. For a single parent with one child, that jumps to roughly $38 an hour. Minimum wage doesn't come close in Monroe any more than it does in Milwaukee.

Josh supports the bill Sen. Kelda Roys and Rep. Angelina Cruz introduced this year to close that gap. Beyond raising the standard minimum wage to $15 immediately and $20 by 2030, it would raise Wisconsin's tipped minimum wage, just $2.33 an hour today, to $7.50 immediately, then $10 by 2030, after which it's permanently pegged to half the standard wage. Rep. Cruz has pointed out that roughly 800,000 Wisconsin workers earn less than $20 an hour today: home health aides, early childhood educators, grocery workers, nursing assistants, the people rural Wisconsin depends on most. After 2030, both wages would stop requiring a new law every time. They'd move with inflation automatically.

That last piece isn't untested. Minnesota has indexed its minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index every year since 2014. It rose to $11.41 an hour this January, a 2.5% adjustment, with no legislative fight required. A Wisconsinite and a Minnesotan working the exact same full-time job, at their state's minimum wage, take home over $8,600 more a year in Minnesota. No one who works full-time should be living in poverty, and closing that gap doesn't require reinventing anything. It requires Wisconsin to do what its neighbor already does.

We should be fully funding education at the state level so that local communities are not forced to shoulder the burden through rising property taxes. Wisconsin used to operate that way. In the 1990s, after a run of steep property tax increases, the state committed to covering roughly two-thirds of what school districts spend, with local property taxes covering the rest. That promise was repealed in 2003, and the ratio has since drifted the other direction. In Kenosha, district officials say the state is now covering just 36% of this year's allowed spending increase, leaving the other 64% to local taxpayers, the exact reverse of the old two-thirds deal.

The results show up in the numbers. Wisconsin ranked 26th in the nation in per-pupil spending in 2023, down from 11th in 2002, and spent 9.9% less per student than the national average. Adjusted for inflation, Wisconsin's per-pupil spending has grown just 2.4% since 2002, while the national average grew 21.1%. The 2025-27 state budget didn't reverse that: it increased what districts are allowed to raise, but included no increase in state general aid, meaning that increase has to come entirely from local property taxes. Statewide K-12 property tax levies rose 7.8% this past December, the largest jump in more than three decades.

You can see exactly what that means in Monroe. After voters rejected an operational referendum in November 2024, the district cut 22.5 positions, including core classroom teachers. More cuts followed in 2025: the German program, a special education teacher and two aides, bus service for 300 summer school kids. Voters rejected a new $2.75 million-a-year referendum again this April, and the district is now cutting 22.5 more positions. Superintendent Joe Monroe has said plainly that Wisconsin's overreliance on local referendums to fund basic education isn't sustainable, and that meeting that need is the state's responsibility, not a repeated local ask.

Monroe isn't alone, and this isn't just political rhetoric anymore. It's now a live legal question. In February, a coalition of Wisconsin school districts, teachers' unions, parents and students sued the Legislature, arguing the state's current funding system is unconstitutional and fails to guarantee every child a sound basic education. Republican lawmakers have moved to dismiss the case; Democratic members of the Joint Finance Committee filed in support of the plaintiffs instead, writing that a constitutional promise isn't optional. That fight is still unresolved. Meanwhile, Wisconsin has fallen from 1st among its neighboring states in per-pupil spending in 2002 to a distant fourth today, well behind both Minnesota and Michigan. Josh believes Wisconsin shouldn't need a lawsuit to do what the state promised thirty years ago: fund its schools so kids in Monroe don't lose their German class, and taxpayers don't foot a bill Madison was supposed to cover.

Every child deserves the chance to learn without the distraction of hunger. Wisconsin lawmakers already agree, at least on paper: the current bill sitting in Madison, AB48/SB67, states plainly that "no child in this state should experience hunger and that every school-age child should benefit from access to at least 2 healthy, nutritious meals during the school day." It's gone nowhere. Governor Evers included universal free meals in his last budget request, and the Republican-controlled budget committee stripped the $148 million proposal out in May 2025, the same pattern that's killed every version of this bill since Democrats first introduced one in December 2023.

The need behind it is significant, and it hits rural communities hardest. Nationally, child food insecurity runs close to 20%, and in some rural counties it's estimated as high as 50%. More than 80% of the counties with the worst child hunger rates are rural. In the Wisconsin regions Feeding America tracks closely, roughly one in six kids doesn't reliably know where their next meal is coming from, and every single county in that footprint saw child food insecurity rise last year, not fall. That's not a big-city problem passing us by. It's happening in the same small towns where school budgets are already stretched thinnest.

Nine states have already made the jump to free meals for every student, including Minnesota. In its first year, Minnesota's program grew breakfast participation 40% and lunch participation 15%, and by its second year, the state had served over 300 million free meals total, saving families an average of $1,000 per student per year, with nearly every public, charter, and private school in the state taking part. That's not a pilot program anymore. It's the new normal next door. Josh believes Wisconsin shouldn't need a ninth attempt at the same bill to get there. Every kid in Green County deserves to sit down to lunch without anyone checking whether they can afford it, so they can spend that hour thinking about anything other than being hungry.

Real local control means having a true say over how local dollars are raised and spent. Right now, many communities in Wisconsin only have the illusion of that control, and the history of how we got here is almost exactly backwards from where the state started. In 1911, Wisconsin was the first state in the nation to adopt an income tax, and as part of that deal, the state promised to share 90% of that revenue back with local governments to fund services and hold down property taxes. That share didn't stay near 90%. By the time of last year's reforms, it had fallen to 6.8%, and the formula behind it had been frozen for two decades before that. On top of that, a 2011 state law caps how much most cities, villages, towns, and counties can raise in property taxes each year at the rate of local new construction. not inflation. This means a town that isn't growing can't raise more money to keep police, fire, and road budgets even with rising costs, no matter what residents want.

The state finally increased shared revenue substantially in 2023, and that was progress. But look at what came with it. The same law that delivered the money also barred local governments from placing any limits or conditions on quarry operations, added new staffing mandates with automatic aid cuts of 15% for any community that falls short, and narrowed what local referendum questions are even allowed to ask. That's the pattern: the state hands back a fraction of what it took, then uses the moment of leverage to take a little more control away. You've seen versions of this already on this page — the ban on local minimum wage ordinances, the ban on local rent stabilization. This is the same story with a different name.

Wisconsin's constitution has technically guaranteed local governments "home rule" since the 1920s. In practice, the state's own nonpartisan Legislative Council has laid out a four-part legal test that lets the Legislature override almost any local ordinance it wants, and courts have used it to strike down local decisions from Milwaukee to Madison. It's a promise that only exists on paper.

It doesn't have to work this way. Earlier this year, a bipartisan bill let regional emergency medical services districts raise money outside the usual levy cap, tied to actual inflation, so rural EMS systems don't have to choose between a levy cap and an ambulance response time. It was progesss made on flexibility, and it took Democrats and Republicans working together to get it. Colorado took the idea further: in 2019, it became the first state in the country to repeal its own ban on local minimum wage laws, handing that decision back to the communities closest to it. Josh believes Wisconsin communities don't need Madison's permission to decide what they need — they need Madison to stop taking that decision away.

Everyone deserves the peace of mind of knowing that when they call 911, help will arrive. Across Wisconsin, that's no longer a given. Roughly 79% of the state relies on volunteers to staff ambulance calls, and that volunteer base is shrinking fast. Statewide, 41% of EMS agencies now operate with six or fewer staff, yet those small crews still cover 80% of all staffing hours. Some Wisconsin EMS services have already closed outright, and the workforce that's left has turned over by 67% in the last decade, worn down by burnout from stretched, under-resourced crews. PBS Wisconsin + 2

You don't have to look far to see it. Belleville Area EMS, which already served Green and Dane counties, agreed this fall to take over ambulance coverage for New Glarus after its EMS service struggled to keep up with staffing. The partnership, now called Sugar River EMS, means nearly tripling Belleville's call volume and doubling its staff. The district now covers about 10,000 residents across 100 square miles, with more than 80 responders staffing stations in both villages around the clock. Nine future paramedics started training this January, and the department covers their tuition and books, about $2,000 a person. That's people in Josh's own district stepping up to keep each other safe. WMTV 15 NEWS + 3

Wisconsin helped make that possible. Last October, Governor Evers signed three bipartisan bills built for exactly this crisis: one lets joint EMS and fire districts raise money outside the usual local levy cap, tied to inflation; one funds EMS training through the technical college system and reimburses tuition costs like the ones covering Belleville's new recruits; and one raises Medicaid reimbursement for ambulance calls where a crew responds but doesn't transport the patient, care that used to go unpaid entirely. The levy change specifically rewards communities like Belleville and New Glarus for consolidating instead of each struggling alone. These passed with support from both parties, not as a partisan project. WSESI October 2025 News +2WMTV 15 NEWS

It's a start, not a finish line. Wisconsin's Office of Rural Health estimates it could take another $500 million to fully stabilize EMS statewide, far more than what's been delivered so far. Josh believes the people who show up when we call 911 are true heroes, and heroism shouldn't depend on whether their department got lucky with a grant cycle. Wisconsin took the first steps this year. Josh wants to see it through

We need to make it easier to start a family farm and protect existing farms so they can be passed down to the next generation. Rep. Jenna Jacobson and Sen. Mark Spreitzer introduced legislation this fall to create the Farming Forward Program, a refundable tax credit for both beginning and established farmers when farmland or equipment is sold or leased to a new generation. It's modeled on Wisconsin's existing beginning farmer credit plus similar programs already working in Minnesota and Iowa, and it has the backing of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, the Wisconsin Farmers Union, the Dairy Business Association, and the Wisconsin Agri-Business Association, a genuinely rare lineup for Wisconsin agriculture policy. Josh supports it.

One of Josh's priorities as your next state representative is to work toward a state funded program that purchases food directly from Wisconsin farmers to provide free school meals for all children. This isn't a new idea for Wisconsin: state law already requires DATCP to promote farm-to-school purchasing, and a bill introduced this December, Senate Bill 770, would fund DATCP grants specifically to build and expand those programs, with priority given to districts where the most kids qualify for free or reduced-price meals. The need for state-level funding just got sharper: this spring, the federal government abruptly cut a $5.48 million agreement that had been supplying Wisconsin schools and food banks with locally grown food, after Wisconsin schools alone had already drawn down $2.8 million through the program the year before. Relying on Washington clearly isn't a plan. Building something Wisconsin funds and controls is.

During a recent meeting with a local farmer, Josh learned that dairy farmers in Wisconsin are not, in practice, permitted to sell milk directly to consumers. Current Wisconsin law bans the sale of raw milk, with one narrow exception: a farmer can sell it directly to a consumer at the farm itself, as long as it isn't run like a business and isn't advertised in any way. That means a dairy farmer cannot legally build a customer base, post a sign, or sell at a farmers market. We must change this. Allowing real direct-to-consumer sales would let farmers escape the volatility of the commodities market and increase their profit margins. A Republican state legislator has introduced bills in back-to-back sessions to open this up, most recently working on new legislation this year — proof this isn't a partisan idea, just one that hasn't found the votes yet.

District 50's rural communities depend on reliable roads that are well maintained and cleared quickly in the winter. That's gotten harder for a specific, fixable reason. Wisconsin's transportation fund runs mostly on the gas tax, and the state stopped tying that tax to inflation back in 2005. Since then, the state has had to transfer $2.6 billion out of the general fund just to keep the transportation fund solvent, including $749.7 million in the last budget alone. Meanwhile road construction costs have risen far faster than the money coming in: between 2020 and 2023, Wisconsin's transportation spending grew just 5.3%, while national road construction costs jumped 56.8%. The math doesn't work, and local roads are what falls behind first.

You can see it on the ground. In Wisconsin, 11% of town roads are rated in poor condition, and 76% need significant maintenance or reconstruction. Winter clearing is straining too: Manitowoc County just announced it's dropping snowplow service for three municipalities because it can't find enough workers, leaving those towns to hire private contractors. That's not a one-off. Counties across the state are competing for a shrinking pool of licensed plow operators every winter.

Wisconsin already has one program built specifically around what Josh's plank is describing, and it's worth building on rather than starting over. The Agricultural Roads Improvement Program funds repairs to the rural roads and bridges farmers depend on to move their products, and it's been genuinely effective: since 2023, it's funded 120 projects across 56 of Wisconsin's 72 counties, including $30 million just for failing culverts and small bridges. More than 23.5 million tons of agricultural products, worth $13 billion, move on ARIP-funded roads every year. The 2025-27 budget kept it going with another $150 million. Josh wants to see it expanded further and protected from budget cuts, because a milk truck that can't cross a weight-restricted bridge is a farm that can't get paid.

The bigger fix is structural. Maryland tied its gas tax to inflation in 2013, and the rate has adjusted on its own ever since instead of requiring a legislative fight every few years. California, Michigan, Illinois, and six other states do something similar, and roughly two in three Americans now live in a state with a gas tax that moves with the cost of living. Wisconsin used to be one of them, until 2005. Josh believes safe, passable roads aren't optional in a district like ours, and getting there means fixing the funding mechanism, not just patching potholes one budget at a time.

We must protect our land, air, and water for future generations. The health of our communities depends on the health of the environment we share, and in southwest Wisconsin, that starts underground. The Driftless region sits on karst geology, thin soil over fractured limestone bedrock, which lets contaminants move into groundwater in days instead of years. A multi-year study of private wells in Grant, Iowa, and Lafayette counties found 42% exceeded safe standards for bacteria or nitrates in one testing round and 27% in another, with both agricultural runoff and septic systems contributing. In Lafayette County alone, one of Green County's own neighbors, 17% of over a thousand wells tested had nitrate levels above the safety standard. Families on private wells here don't get a boil-water notice when something goes wrong. Most never test at all.

Wisconsin also just lost its most trusted conservation tool, and it happened this summer. The Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program, named for a Republican governor and a Democratic one, spent 37 years protecting more than 750,000 acres across every part of the state, from the Ice Age Trail to local boat launches. In 2024, the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down the anonymous veto legislators had used to quietly block individual land purchases. Rather than find a new way to reauthorize the program, the Legislature let it die. Governor Evers proposed a ten-year, $100 million-a-year renewal. Senate Democrats offered a bill, then a fallback one-year extension with no changes at all. Neither got a vote. The program expired on June 30, the first time in its history it has ever been allowed to lapse, despite polling that shows roughly nine in ten Wisconsinites, across party lines, want it kept.

Neither of these problems has to stay this way. Minnesota funds its version of Knowles-Nelson, and free well testing for nitrate-vulnerable regions like ours, through a permanent trust built into its state constitution: a small, dedicated sales tax that voters approved once and that can't be stripped out in a budget fight or left to die because leadership won't schedule a vote. Josh believes Wisconsin needs conservation funding built the same way: protected, predictable, and outside the reach of whichever party happens to control the Legislature that year. Land, air, and water don't belong to one party or one budget cycle, and the people whose well water hasn't been tested in years shouldn't have to wait for the next political fight to find out if it's safe.