You're listening to Civic Media.
You can tune into any of our live shows on any radio station across the state with the Civic Media app.
Find us in your phone's app store and listen anytime, anywhere.
Across Wisconsin on Civic Media, you're listening to Mornings with Pat Crilo.
powered by Up North News.
Now, from our Lake Wissota studio, here's the founding editor of Up North News, Pat Crite Low.
Hey, good morning, 706.
Nice to have you back here up north on a Thursday, November 13th, 2025.
Parker Olson producing things down there in Madison in Studio A2.
Coming up, Sean O'Malley's gonna join us to talk about...
President Trump pitching a 50 year mortgage.
Talk about short term gain and long term pain.
Sean has run the numbers.
Wait till you hear how much it'll cost anybody that actually signs up for one of those turkeys.
Little later on, we'll be talking to Joseph Pecky.
He'll be talking about the Epstein files, what's been released yesterday, how it sheds light on
What Donald Trump knew what kind of person he was who eventually became president for the United States that'll be coming up a little bit later on Along the way, of course, you can join us at 855-75-CIVIC 855-752-4842 and if you can't call us to text us You can always use the civic media app to text us call us use the voice note feature and let us know what's on your mind We were asking in our last hour whether you're gonna miss the penny
since the last of the pennies have been minted.
I don't think too many people are crying about that, but I then asked, do we now start to take seriously the dollar coin as opposed to all those dollar bills?
Or do we just need to be, you know, phasing out currency entirely?
Everything's going so digital.
I mean, there are people that pay for things, you know, just using their watch or their phone.
Certainly just tapping a credit card now.
How much longer will it be till we don't have bills or coins in our pocket?
Certainly a fair question that we would mind hearing from you about as well.
I don't know.
Parker, you like all digital using your watch or phone to pay for things?
Putting a... But not a checkbook.
You haven't written a check.
And
Right.
I think literally that next weekend, I was helping a friend of mine out with something, and he goes, you want to see something really cool?
And I go, what?
And he brings me a checkbook.
And I'm like, what do you mean cool?
and he opens it and he's got Lambo field checks.
That's pretty cool.
I was very
I love that you're impressed by this.
I was very impressed.
You see, before digital, we're talking mid 90s here or so before you really started with the internet and everything, checks were getting really fancy.
When I was young, of course, they just came in blue.
That was it.
And then occasionally there'd be a few designs.
The design thing actually got
crazy.
I mean, you could get any, you know, sports teams, logos and stadiums.
You could design your own checks.
This whole thing was like its own little sub industry that was really peaking.
Yeah.
When suddenly, checkbooks kind of stopped being used all together, you know?
Yeah.
And Alicia says very well here on YouTube, you know the panic going all digital for money would cause.
Oh yeah.
I mean, come on, one hack, you know?
could bring it all crashing down.
But yeah, yeah, the ones with I used to get those.
Oh, boy, what's the reason
for
my checkbook here?
I don't even remember what's on my checks right now.
Oh, mine's just now it's just a kind of a beige, you know, blue with blue lines.
But when the kids were younger.
Oh, yeah, we had Mickey Mouse on our checks and other other cartoon characters because you're writing checks everywhere and you know, your kids think it's kind of
fun.
I just love you discovering the checkbook.
Like you were digging in Pompeii and in the volcanic ash from ancient times, you find a checkbook.
You pulled it out and I went, okay, whatever.
And I went, oh, it's Lambo.
That's cool.
I like that you're like, yeah, you want to see something cool?
It's an old checkbook.
He knew that I would
it.
And Tony says, show the check to the camera.
I need to check to make sure the numbers are right.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, with the bank account number and the routing number.
Sure.
No, no problem there whatsoever.
Just send it my way, Pat.
I'll take care of it.
Yeah, he goes on to say ignore the miscellaneous charges tomorrow.
Yeah.
You got to check those bills.
But instead, we're going the other way.
All digital, all the time.
We're moving to AI.
And that takes us to the topic of data centers.
And we have now learned a bit more about the data center that is going up in Beaver Dam.
And we've talked about this for a bit.
The community welcoming the investment, even if they weren't really sure what all was going on with it, but now met up the parent company.
of Facebook is coming, making itself more public about its data center plans around the country.
And according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article by Ricardo Torres, Meta talks about spending more than a billion dollars for what's going up in Beaver Dam.
not just for the data center campus, 700,000 square feet, which they say will be at the highest levels of energy efficiency, but 200 million in energy infrastructure investment, including utility substations and transmission lines.
Now, all this will bring in about 1,000 construction jobs, they say, but in the end, the number of permanent jobs will be around 100 people.
And while the investment is certainly
Welcome by some.
There are others who are very troubled or at least concerned about things like water use and the amount of electricity that's going to be needed.
And how is that electricity going to be generated to help this data center keep up with Metis plans to get deeper and deeper into AI.
Now, I believe the the article in the Journal Sentinel does talk about it being
the moves are going to be taken to try to not gobble up all of the water in the area.
The press release that's quoted by the paper says that as part of this meta will restore 100% of the water consumed by the Beaver Dam data center to local watersheds.
Additionally, the facility will use dry cooling, which means that there will be no water demands for cooling once it is operational.
And that's the part where I come in and go, all right, I am not saying that the folks that have environmental concerns are wrong, not by any stretch.
My point on this one is there are things that you can decide
to take a pass on.
You know, we don't need, right now, we don't need mining in northern Wisconsin.
We don't need to spoil the water and the landscape and everything else for minerals currently.
If there were some kind of massive emergency that we needed to mine for certain minerals, I would understand that, but we're going to take a pass for now on mining.
Thank you very much.
Data centers, on the other hand, like I've said before,
It's not like we're going to do less computing.
We are only going to do more computing, which is going to require data centers, which is going to require electricity.
And so I look at that as one of those where it's not a matter of saying no to it.
It's a matter of saying, how do we at the front end of all this make sure that we anticipate
the problems and try to mitigate them.
We said the same thing up here about sand mining.
Everybody thought sand mining was going to be all the rage and I'm in the legislature at the time and there's people saying we got to ban these things.
Others saying we got to go go go and dig dig dig for the sand mines and my point was always look if if a sand mine is coming if you think that's going to bring you prosperity.
Then you better get all kinds of guarantees on the front end in terms of bonding so that there's money there for Reclamation when they're all done, you know digging up all the sand out of there for any future environmental problems get all the promises and writing and The same is gonna have to be the case for these data centers.
I don't think you're gonna have a time where there are zero new ones built in Wisconsin so I would rather see much more transparency and much more
uh, insured accountability if these kinds of things are going to be put up.
So I see the note here about restoring 100% of the water and using dry cooling.
I just don't want those to be just verbal assurances.
And one more thing, make it enforceable.
And again, whether it's been sand mining or data centers or, you know, other facilities that, uh, in the past,
What happens is they get to a point.
They build it.
It's operational.
Then they start breaking their promises and people go, well, what can you do?
We can't shut it down.
To which I would say, yeah, you can.
I think you actually need to get language in there for, you know, again, if it's my hometown and if I could negotiate the thing with the data center, it would be you are going to restore 100% of the water.
You are going to use dry cooling.
You are going to do this, that and the other thing.
And by the way, if you don't, we have a kill switch.
And we're just gonna shut it down, you know, just like you would for, you know, garnishing somebody's wages or you'd put a padlock on the door of a business that needed to be shut down for health reasons or other other reasons is this whole notion of too big to fail or too big to shut down, too big to punish, too big to hold accountable.
I reject that notion entirely.
Now granted, they could say, well,
Too bad, Pat, we'll go down the road and somebody else will welcome us in and they won't put all these restrictions on.
Well, okay.
But I'm going to be able to sleep at night knowing that nobody's going to point at me later on and say, everybody's got to move out of town because they can't get water out of their wells because of the deal you negotiated.
I'm okay with that.
You want to do business here.
We've got a great workforce.
We've got great natural resources.
We've got what you want.
And so you're going to have to work with us.
You're going to have to pay taxes to educate the kids who are going to become your workers of the future.
None of this is big government socialism.
This is just being good to your neighbors in terms of how do you have a pro-business mentality that creates jobs that helps the economy but doesn't give away the store?
it seems to me like we should be able to do that in this country and in the state.
And if you can't, if they go to, you know, we're gonna build our factory in South Carolina instead, well, I guess I certainly get that, but I don't feel like we need to sell ourselves short or sell out our values here because of it.
If you missed it in the last hour, we played some audio from Congressman Tom Tiffany.
He's now a candidate for governor and he was asked directly,
Since he voted to end the government shutdown and to jack up health insurance prices for Americans.
What's your alternative?
He was asked point blank after 16 years.
What's your alternative?
And he said the quiet part out loud He he said we don't have one.
He says unfortunately that has not been done meaning writing an alternative to the Affordable Care Act 16 years and they've still got nothing
Just remember that the shutdown has ended president Trump signed the bill overnight The house had passed the bill the shutdowns coming to an end as part of the promise Senate Republican leader John Thune said a separate vote will be scheduled and if that vote were to pass then the enhanced premium tax credits That make health insurance more affordable would be reinstated or extended or renewed or whatever
And it's gonna be really easy for people like Tom Tiffany to say, oh no, that would just be a big boondoggle to health insurance companies.
I'm not gonna support that.
Well, what's your alternative?
If you don't have an alternative, what you're saying is you do want Americans to have jacked up health insurance prices that are gonna go to the health insurance companies.
You're simply passing the buck quite literally to your constituents.
So whenever this standalone vote is scheduled,
on the enhanced tax credits for the Affordable Care Act.
Just keep that in mind.
We're going to seize that date.
We're going to ask you to call your congressional representative and your senator and just make sure, again, we have people that are finally looking out for us when it comes to affordable health care and not the health insurance companies.
Coming up, Sean O'Malley is going to talk to us about President Trump's bright idea for a 50-year mortgage and how much more that could actually be costing you if you were to sign on to one of those things.
I'm Pat Crightlow from the Heart of America's Up North, live from Lake Basota, here on the Civic Media Radio Network.
You're listening to Civic Media.
Stay up to date on the latest news and information for your local community and Wisconsin by signing up for our free email newsletter.
Visit civicmedia.us slash email to get started.
Okay, along with our weekday newsletter here at UpNorth News, we have a Sunday morning edition.
Sunday mornings with Pat Krightlow with more of a focus on politics.
Our weekday newsletter is a little heavier on Wisconsin features.
And you can sign up at UpNorthNewsWI.com.
It includes a question of the week.
This week's question, should marijuana be legalized in Wisconsin and to what degree?
And interestingly, there's been a little wrinkle in that question since we originally put it out on Sunday morning.
We asked, should marijuana be fully illegal?
Should it be fully legal, including for recreational use?
Or should there be some kind of medicinal use for marijuana, but not recreational?
Well, since that time, we have learned that in this bill that ended the government shutdown, it turns out, shockingly, it was not a clean bill.
No, there were things that were snuck in there.
And one of the things,
deals with federal regulations on hemp, which would threaten to put like CBD oil distributors and other hemp growers in Wisconsin, it would jeopardize their business model by tightening federal restrictions on hemp use.
How this got in that bill, I have no idea, but also snuck in there was that provision that those Republican senators whose phone records were looked at as part of the January 6th investigation.
could sue the federal government and get a half a million dollars.
And a couple senators like Lindsey Graham say they're gonna sue for more because they're so mad, but that's just saying I want as a millionaire senator, I want you the taxpayers to give me even more money because I needed to be investigated for my potential role in trying to overthrow an American election.
Again, how that got in the bill, I will never know.
But again, to answer our question of the week about marijuana legalization, just a straight up and down question about that.
No extra stuff in the bill, I promise.
Head to UpNorthNewsWI.com and click subscribe in the top banner for our question of the week.
Parker, I noticed a story on channel 13 here in Eau Claire about, and I saw this over the weekend driving by Oakwood Mall.
There's an Applebee's, the Applebee's has been there forever.
Sure.
but it looks a little different now.
It's like, it's a half, half and half building.
The other half of the building has been remodeled, redone.
It has a whole new exterior to look like an IHOP.
The
old International House of Pancakes, the IHOP.
And sure enough, here's the story.
A dual branded Applebee's IHOP restaurant is about to open in Eau Claire.
So we're getting to the point now.
AppleHOP.
AppleHOP.
where they're now blending restaurants together.
Apparently they've remodeled part of the inside to look like an iHop as well, which just has a very weird feel to it.
Like you're sitting in a restaurant, you think you're sitting in an Applebee's, but you look over there and there's an iHop, you know, or you're sitting at an iHop with your eggs and bacon and pancakes and you're looking at a place known for steaks and dinners over there.
a little off.
Yep.
Let's see, Tony.
Oh, just iHop.
Meh.
I want green Applebee's.
Oh, green Applebee's.
I see what you did there.
Very nice.
So yeah, we've got the dual branded restaurants.
I
I like the idea of you know of a breakfast place that then transitions into a dinner place I mean we've got the Chippewa family restaurant here, and we've got a few other family restaurants in the area But you don't change the decor You know it's not like you came in for breakfast and then when you come back in they've changed all the furniture And there's different stuff on the wall.
It doesn't work that way Maybe it does maybe maybe that's the wave of the future.
Maybe everything on the wall is just a it's a screen
You know, like at a sports stadium, those wraparound scoreboards?
Sure.
Yeah.
And they just, they just changed the scenery that way.
And pretty soon we start to wonder, are we even real?
Are we just in a virtual reality that the scenery just changes all around
us?
I'm starting to feel like an old Bugs Bunny cartoon where the artist just keeps changing the background on them as they're walking along.
You paint the tunnel
run through it to the other side.
You think you're going into the bathroom and it turns out it's just a door that's been painted on.
Yeah, it's just a screen.
It's just all virtual reality.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, like on hockey arenas, you know, you project stuff onto the ice where it looks like you're about to skate into a canyon, you know, fall off a cliff, but you're still on the same surface.
We are in such dark, weird new territory here, you know.
I like it.
Yeah.
But, you know, we wouldn't have been there except that we were passing through on our way and noticed, as I mentioned on Monday, how busy the malls were this last weekend.
That it appears people are already starting their Christmas shopping.
I've talked about how the catalogs are coming in already.
I mean, I was even looking at TMZ this morning, you know, for entertainment news and things.
And of course, right there is prominently featured, you know, here are some gifts where obviously they get a cut of the proceeds.
But it was a lot of, you know,
digital type stuff.
You're all the little gadgets.
Maybe you need a new phone.
Maybe you need a new wireless speaker.
So I wonder, have people already started that?
I know I have.
The UPS guy showed up yesterday with the first couple of gifts that I've purchased for Christmas.
So it's underway.
Yeah, it's and it's sometimes it's tempting when you you see something and you're like Oh, this person would really like this now.
It's like, no, no, no, you actually have to wait for the holiday.
Otherwise you get by something else again.
But it does appear to be underway, but I'm going to have to be out in that area again today because you remember yesterday I went through all the old manuals that I found in the basement, all the old trying to find the furnace one trying to find the furnace one.
I eventually got the furnace fixed anyway.
You did.
We're very proud of you.
Thank you internet.
Yep.
I did that all by myself.
Turns out I needed it again early this morning.
I've got a desk lamp over here.
It's called a banker's lamp.
It needs a special bulb.
Those little compact fluorescent bulbs are not the kind I have just sitting around.
And I have no idea what kind of bulb I can't read any of the markings on.
I needed the manual.
So there I was down in the basement again, five o'clock this morning, looking for just the right manual.
And I've got it.
I'm the pack that has that.
Coming up next, Sean O'Malley is going to talk about your money and the markets and the magic sarcasm of a 50-year mortgage.
I'm Pat Critello.
This is the Civic Media Radio Network.
As I've mentioned, the Civic Media app has a voice note feature.
You can look at that Civic Media app, call up one of the stations where you hear this fine program or any other program, and you'll have the option to call that station, text, or leave a voice note, a quick little voice message.
Feel free to use that to let us know your questions and comments through the Civic Media app, civicmedia.us.
Sean O'Malley joins us now at a new time to talk about your money and the markets and
I thought maybe we wouldn't have quite as much to talk about because with the government shutdown, there hasn't been, you know, a lot of data that's out there.
But we do have something to talk about because the president of the United States has been talking up the notion of a 50 year mortgage, not a 15.
not a 30, but a 50.
And I think everybody knows what the selling point would be.
It's like, well, if you stretch it over 50 years, your monthly payments can be so much lower.
That's Donald Trump's answer to affordability.
Sean, good morning.
What's the punchline?
You'll be paying a little less per month, but what you're paying total in interest.
I mean, you've run some numbers on here.
Do you want to grab an example here?
So what I did is when I first saw it, I thought, okay, let's check what the actual difference is because I'm betting it's pretty low.
And having run the numbers through an actual mortgage model,
Adjusting of course for the fact that you will have a slightly higher interest rate and I think I actually went a little maybe Too low on the increase because the the typical increase in interest rates as you go from 15 year to 30 year is between 50 and 75 basis points So that's one half of a percent to three quarters of a percent.
So what I did is I just added a half a percent going from 30 years to 50 years and
It was revealing.
The payment, if it doesn't go down much, goes down by a whopping 5%.
So you're still paying 95% of the same mortgage payment monthly.
You're just doing it for an extra 20 years.
So, interest cost wise.
Did you roll the numbers on like a $500,000 house to give us an example?
I did.
I did.
Yeah, I did it on a $500,000 because average home prices are in the US are $522,000 and change right now.
Check the number.
Okay.
So, we're a little bit below that, but we're, you know, in the ballpark of what a lot of people are seeing these days.
So and so on a 30-year mortgage current interest rates you're going to be paying a little over $600,000 in interest expense over those 30 years If you were to do the same with a 50-year mortgage You would be paying 1.2 over 1.2 million dollars in interest expense over 50
years on a $500,000 home you'd be paying 1.2 million in interest payments
Correct for a monthly payment that is maybe about five percent lower.
Correct What could possibly go wrong?
I mean you would for anybody else you'd say get out of here For Donald as a matter
Yeah,
That was the engine that was driving the economy forward at that point in time.
So they started doing crazy stuff, the pick a pay, you know, the the ninja loans, no income, no job or assets.
And when they when it came to maturity, there were some some lenders that did a 40 year mortgage out there, but nobody was crazy enough to do a 50.
until, until now from a guy who has, you know, he's made his money by trying to get people to pay more money than the otherwise would.
He's got a, you know, for example, he loves to see his properties valued low for tax purposes, but then he grossly inflates their value when he's trying to sell them.
And it's one thing to do that on the margins, but Donald Trump, you know, super sizes this.
Take a look at the book.
you know lucky loser by two people surprised winning authors very good book goes through that in great detail and you know the other thing is that why would you take business advice from a guy who's gone through bankruptcy how many times
five or six yeah at least
So this is not the guy you should necessarily be taking financial advice from.
We're talking to Sean O'Malley.
He's a Hudson native, a lengthy Wall Street career in anti-money laundering, financial risk management, data analytics, compliance, fraud, and risk management.
You were around Wall Street when it all went down when we were talking about
housing and real estate and mortgages.
And so, pardon the psychological question.
It
I mean,
And, you know, the, the, the algorithms, you know, TikTok and Instagram reels and whatnot, you just never know what it's going to feed you.
And sometimes when you watch something that feeds you more of it.
And I've, I've never watched movies like, is it the big short?
Is that like, like the quintessential movie about the housing bubble bursting?
a margin call.
Okay.
Yes.
But,
As a matter of fact, after reading the big short, there was one of one of my colleagues and I
actually attempted to be the guys in the big short, but I realized that we needed to have an is to master agreement and we just didn't have basically the Brad Pitt character in the movie to help us get it.
We actually, we actually did contact one of the guys who probably could have done it, but he said no.
So, but for that, I would be on my own island somewhere.
So as somebody who has seen this up close and you we all like to naively think, well, nothing like that will ever happen again.
But we just were talking a week or two ago about the AI bubble that we've got here.
But when you see something like this with a 50 year mortgage and you've seen what you've seen about the abuse of, you know, mortgage securities and things like that.
I mean,
How does it make you feel when I first told you, hey, Trump's putting a 50-year mortgage out there, and you've seen what people do on Wall Street with these things?
I thought, OK, that is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard, most risky, very certainly.
And just sort of looking at with a potential economic impact would be anytime you see product innovation happening in a particular marketplace.
in order to make that product, whatever it is, be it a house or whatever, more affordable to the consumer, you know you are towards the end of that cycle.
You know that there is a correction coming.
One of the reasons that I continue to ring the bell using your analogy about today's marketplace, particularly around AI, is that in the Nvidia, the big company, right, the $5 trillion market capitalization company,
Yes, they're big in AI, but they're basically, they're making the chips.
I heard a good analogy from Paul Krugman, the noted Nobel Prize winning economist.
He said that Nvidia is sort of like, if everybody is out there mining for gold, you know, analogously in the AI world, Nvidia is selling them the picks and shovels.
But at a certain point when people sort of realized there isn't that much gold out there to be had,
Picks and shovels are going to go on sale.
And so yeah, you're seeing a situation where the marketplace has yet to realize and sort of make it clear what the economic benefit, how the revenue is going to happen, how they're actually going to make money with this.
So in that sense, it's a little.com-ish.
Yeah, Sean O'Malley is with us talking about your money in the markets.
The US Supreme Court heard the case on the president's decision to invoke an Emergency Economic Powers Act to enact tariffs.
You've heard the arguments made by the Supreme Court, made by the Solicitor General on behalf of the Trump administration.
Where do you think this is going?
Yeah, so I sort of did it in sort of a, you know, who's thinking what, because there are a couple of parties in play here.
So I thought, let's start with what Trump thinks.
And that should be pretty obvious.
He thinks he can unilaterally decide to tariff any country he wants.
And, you know, one of the most egregious examples is when he...
you know, kind of rage tweeted after seeing the commercial during the World Series that the province of Ontario had put on using Reagan's very own words about tariffs to essentially shame Trump and make him look stupid, which granted is pretty easy to do.
But that's still what he thinks.
He thinks he can unilaterally do it.
Now, you know, the Supreme Court, I think the one thing that's kind of holding them back is they're saying, well,
you know, repaying the tariffs could be very messy, right?
I mean, how are we going to undo all this?
How are you going to figure it out?
Whereas businesses have come back and said, well, it's not messy at all.
Every customs entry, every entry for everything coming into the country has a line item for the tariffs paid.
So, all you have to do is go through the line item, see who paid it and return the money, which is what
By the way, Trump's attorneys have already agreed to should they lose the Supreme Court case.
Right.
Now, the gamblers are thinking Trump's chances of winning this case are maybe about 24%, only about 24%.
So everyone is expecting that the Supreme Court will say, no, you can't use tariffs in this way.
I just like that the administration officials are now talking about providing some kind of a check or a bonus to Americans because the tariffs have been so successful.
And it's like, well, then who put those tariffs on in the first place?
I mean, you're paying people back the money that they paid.
You invoked this national sales tax.
Now you're getting them a rebate and you're claiming to be a hero.
And I love how Trump lies about the magnitude, even though his own Treasury Department is clearly publishing the numbers, which is why we report them here on your show.
Trump is talking about, oh, we've collected trillions of dollars.
BS.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Plain, simple BS.
The last number reported and we're still waiting for the October number, admittedly.
But through September, the total collected was 214.9 billion as reported by the US Treasury Department.
So if you're going to try to return that, okay, that's fine That's an admirable thing to do but considering that it's already cost the the average household $2,400 You know that's if anybody wants to do that trade I'll sign up as the exchange and happily I'll give you $2,000 if you give me 2400 all day long.
Yeah.
Yeah
Again, it's something we've seen so many times where the check is in the mail is almost the mentality that we get out of this.
But by the way, it either is not actually coming or it's money we already took from you in some other backdoor way.
But it's the same with all the trade deals where he's actually bringing things either back to even or even worse than original, but he still gets to announce, quote unquote, a deal.
and look like a winner that way and it's just right
No.
And by the way, that 40 billion total for Argentina, you know, you can look at it a couple of different ways that it either could go back to farmers or it could pay for enhanced Obamacare tax credits and instead is going to help out another politician that he likes.
We break all this down with Sean O'Malley weekly.
We appreciate the insight into it, Sean, and we will talk to you next week.
All right.
Thank you.
All right.
Still to come, we will be talking to Nancy Stencil.
She's the Marathon County Democratic Party Chair.
She'll be in for Chad Holmes, who's off taking a little bit of time off.
Sports-wise, don't forget, we've got Badger Football against Indiana Saturday, starting at 9 a.m.
And on Sunday, the Packers versus the Giants coverage begins at 10 a.m.
on some of the stations of the Civic Media radio network.
I'm Pat Krightlum.
You're listening to Civic Media.
Temperatures across Wisconsin right now at 8 minutes before 8 o'clock are by and large in the mid 20s, but it is still 19 degrees in Hayward right now.
It's about 27 here in the Chippewa Valley, 28 in La Crosse, 27 in Amory, Oshkosh here at 32 degrees right now.
The warm spot is along Lake Michigan where temperatures are in the upper 30s already and just a nice pleasant stretch of weather ahead.
Details of the forecast throughout the day on your local Civic Media radio station.
James Kelly is here, he does news for Civic Media out of the Chippewa Valley newsroom.
James, good morning, how are you?
Good morning.
I would be better if the temperatures were above freezing
as would we all.
But, you know, this is what we get.
Did you happen to catch any of the northern lights the past two nights?
I did not know.
OK, sadly, you're in good one of these times.
I did see
them out of a plane once.
You saw them in a plane once.
Yeah, flying back
from Wisconsin to New York.
That was just lucky.
Oh, yeah, but that that had to be really nice.
That's great.
So James is covering some of the news in Western Wisconsin for us and that includes a lot of discussion about a wheel tax for Eau Claire for the uninitiated and you could almost call me as one of them because wheel taxes while they've technically been on the books for many, many years, they weren't really needed in many places because the state budget did a good job of, you know, funding shared revenue.
And as this current
legislature run by one party over the past 15 years has been a bit more tight shall we say on the budget there have had to be other ways to raise revenue and many communities have looked at a wheel attack so Claire's looking at one right now and it does not make everybody happy James.
Yeah, no, it doesn't make everybody happy, but the sense that I got from the public hearing on Monday that they had on it before they approved the budget on Tuesday, the city council in Eau Claire, was that people don't like the wheel tax, but they also don't want to lose the other services that they would have to cut if, you know, you need to find an additional $1.2 million in the budget.
this gets you there and you know for for what it's worth there was an amendment proposed on Tuesday to sunset it by the end of 2028 that was proposed by council member Joshua Miller the thought is that with new district maps and a new biennial budget in 2027
By 2028 there may be a different you know funding sharing model with the state and you may be able to get these projects that you want to do funded without needing to raise the wheel tax on your own residents.
There's never anything wrong with a sunset date that says okay let's review this and see if we want to extend it or if we want to let things go.
I feel like you should have that ability to review things which
By the way, I'm going to jump right in because I can hear people going.
Well, hey, what about the enhanced tax credits for the Affordable Care Act?
Isn't that what this is?
Yes, that's exactly what this is.
They are sunsetting and a whole lot of people in Congress think that they should be extended, but a whole lot of other people think they shouldn't be.
But at least there is that review process.
And that's what somebody is proposing for the wheel tax.
And a review is always a healthy thing.
It's just that you're going to pay political consequences one way or the other.
All right, getting back to some of the stories that James Kelly is covering for us.
at Civic Media.
Speaking of those services, Eau Claire Transit Bus Fair.
You know, Eau Claire has a good transit system covering parts of the city and what are they doing now for school students?
Yeah, kind of the opposite of raising revenue at this time.
They're going to make the bus fare is free for K through 12 students in the city.
They're already free for faculty and students at UW Eau Claire.
The idea is that you take a little bit of a financial hit now, it's going to reduce revenue by around $20,000.
And you hope that these students, once they graduate and remain in the area, they start using the bus again when they're actually fully paying and you kind of expand the transit system in that way in the long term.
It makes perfect sense because again, what you want is you want your communities to be places where after graduation, they don't just take their cap and gown and put it in the car and drive away and they never come back.
You want to feel like, okay, this is an affordable city.
I now know how the bus system works.
I know as a kid who rode city buses all the time, there is nothing like a good mass transit network to get you from one place to another.
And this is, I think, a great way to incentivize it.
Absolutely.
come up to Chippewa Falls here now where, again, St.
Joseph's Hospital is just a stone's throw away, and when the hospital was lost after that HSHS corporate decision, it didn't even take, it didn't just take care of people who were trying to live.
It took care of people who were no longer living.
Chippewa County lost its morgue.
Yeah, and there was really no other place in the county to go with that So they've been contracting with the Altoona based Stokes proc and the month funeral chapel for those services The Chippewa Valley Health Cooperative just noted like thank you to you guys, you know for helping us out in this time, but
You know, it's obvious that a private funeral chapel is not exactly capable of doing everything that an actual county morgue can do.
This was always a temporary solution before you could get, you know, a new hospital opened up in this area.
So now the Chippewa Valley Health Hospital or Health or Cooperative Hospital, they have a lot of different names here.
Basically, the old St.
Joseph's facility is once again operating as the county morgue.
So that's a big boost for the area.
Yeah, I mean, it is the kind of thing you you don't want.
to think about it, but you miss it when it's not there.
I just think about what the alternative is.
And let's end on a food note.
We talk about a lot of these things with Sharita Booker.
She didn't include this one.
This is one, you know, near and dear to the Chippewa Valley.
There is an Eau Claire cheese curd crawl.
Not a pub crawl kids.
Cheese curd crawl.
Yeah, this is curd crawl 2.0 return of the curd.
So there's there's 11 restaurants listed on on this list from Visit Eau Claire and actually two of them are
Outside of Eau Claire, one's in the Menominee area, one's around Osio.
The other ones are all in Eau Claire.
So the idea is to get people to visit more of these local restaurants.
I did go through the list.
I've been to a few of them.
I've had the cheese curds there.
I have to say, the cheese curd hype was...
Not overhyped when I moved to Wisconsin.
It was very
accurate.
Yeah.
Can I get this online?
Can I see it?
Or is it like a booklet or
what?
Yeah, you can download a mobile pass onto your phone.
The pass expires exactly one year after downloading it.
And you go to each location.
You redeem the pass.
You can earn some points, get some stickers.
Come
on, I got my browser open.
Where do I go?
Tell me.
Yeah.
You just go to Visit Eau Claire.
Visit Eau Claire.
Visit Eau
Claire dot com.
OK, there we go.
That bookmarking that thing.
Get out there and get some curds.
Who doesn't love a good cheese curd crawl?
James Kelly covers all this specific media out of our Chippewa Falls newsroom.
James, thanks very much.
Have a great day.
Thanks, guys.
Have a good one.
All right, we'll talk to you a little later.
When we come back, we'll be talking to Nancy Stencils.
She'll be in here for Chad Holmes, who's taken the week off.
Some well-deserved time off.
We'll talk about that as well.
And Joseph Pecky, still on the way, as is Todd Alba.
from UpNorth News.
Follow what we do at UpNorthNewsWI.com.
This is the Civic Media Radio
Network.
but it can be hard to find news about your local community.
Civic Media is dedicated to providing quality local and state news coverage across Wisconsin.
With the Civic Media app, you can get notifications about local stories that matter to you and your community.
Find the free Civic Media app in your phone's app store and choose notifications from the menu to tell us what kind of news you want to hear about.
