Wisconsin’s education funding system is broken. Some school districts receive a bigger portion of state funds than others, and the state isn’t fully funding special education services. The money school districts get from the state has also been lagging behind inflation for years, which means local property taxpayers are being asked to make up a bigger share of the funds. We need to fix the state funding formula to take the burden off of local property taxpayers, and make funding more equitable for all school districts. Each child in every part of the state deserves access to a great public education.

Housing prices have skyrocketed and middle class families are being priced out. Many Wisconsinites can no longer afford to purchase a home, and rents are rising way faster than wages. By increasing state investments in housing, we can help alleviate the pressure on the market. We can invest in infrastructure to encourage housing development. We can support renovation of properties that have been sitting empty. By creating more housing opportunities, we can help keep costs down.

Wisconsin is a prime target for massive AI data centers because of our geography, but we need to make sure we are making smart decisions about potential projects. We can't let big corporations take advantage of our communities by promising future economic growth, if it just means we're ending up in bad deals that use our land and water and saddle us with significant increases in energy costs. We need to act as a state to come up with a plan before the AI companies make the plans for us.

Healthcare costs are out of control. Wisconsin residents deserve access to healthcare that is high quality and affordable. We need to work to bring down prescription medication costs. We need to increase access to mental health services. And we need to finally expand Medicaid, which will increase access to healthcare to tens of thousands of Wisconsinites, while saving our state roughly $1.7 billion annually.

Wisconsin’s child care industry is in trouble. Without public investment in child care, we are going to see up to a quarter of child care centers close in the very near future. Those staying open will continue to raise tuition rates, making child care too costly for many families, and causing more parents to drop out of the workforce. And people who would like to have kids will choose not to because it’s just too expensive. Wisconsin is at risk of becoming a state where only the wealthiest families will be able to afford child care. This will be detrimental to our state’s economy, especially in rural areas where child care providers are already scarce. We need to re-think child care and recognize it as a piece of our economic infrastructure, and invest in Wisconsin’s kids.

Local governments struggle every year to balance their budgets, especially when there is a need for major projects. Fond du Lac County is currently deciding how to move forward with building a new jail, and the projected costs could mean huge property tax increases for County residents. We need better tax policy that returns state tax dollars directly to local units of government so they do not have to rely on larger levels of debt and property tax increases.