97.5 WFHR and 105.5 WIRI. Your Wisconsin Rapids Home for locally grown radio. Here's your Daily News Roundup.
From the Wisconsin Rapids local newsroom, I'm Melissa K.
The Wisconsin Rapids Common Council made the deciding votes on two controversial items in the community this week.
The Water Works and Lighting Commission's Solar Power Project now has the stamp of approval from the full council. It passed five to three.
Mayor Matt Zachert tells WFHR the council tried to hear and address concerns from residents, especially those living around the parcel.
Where there are neighborhoods around that whole 80-acre parcel to be able to identify those areas more with different bushes and trees and whatever to make sure that nobody can see the array from their houses anyway.
The Solar Power Company doing the installation is one energy out of Madison. Zachert said it's up to WWLC for the timeline, but the project will begin soon.
I know it's going to start pretty quick and make it through the process pretty quick because the sooner they get it up, the sooner they're making.
You know, they're generating that electricity and everybody's making money off of that electricity.
The second item to be approved is opening up some of the shared roads around the city of Wisconsin Rapids to ATV and UTV traffic.
What we came to realize over time is because Wisconsin DOT as a state is not necessarily putting the rules, you know, clear rules on this, it's leaving it up to everybody else.
This fixes the issue of streets that are only open on one side.
So they went through the painstaking procedure of going through each road that's shared with another community.
Paul Volert with the city streets department says crews will begin placing signs along streets starting in February, notifying which roads are open to ATV and UTV traffic.
The work will be weather dependent, but they're hoping to complete the project by or before the end of April.
When the snow flies, money flies, as snowmobiles arrive, meteorologist Brittany Merlot breaks it down.
The snow capital of Wisconsin in Iron County, the town of Hurley, is the snowiest place in the state and averages 200 inches of snowfall a season.
I think today's snow was minuscule, even of what I had grown up.
A statement echoed up north as winters are warming rapidly. Zach, a local says.
Snow has been hit or miss accumulations that we think that we have nowadays or record setting are normal.
And that's a sad thing about it all.
The unusual warm spells these days are changing conditions for cold weather sports and tourism.
It's morning. We're fighting for money.
Chelsea, a bartender at the Iron Horse says she struggled to survive with slow business a couple years ago when the trails never opened from insufficient snow.
Two years ago, I mean, we got snow this year, but we got like three snowstorms.
Bob, a local beer distributor confirmed sales starkly dropped that year and says things are just different these days.
Pay attention, which way to win this.
As the lake affects snow machine roars now, the snow hits this place comes alive.
Cold snaps create a magical wall of snowfall as the cold air blows across the unfrozen waters of Lake Superior.
It rises over the porcupine mountains and it has laid down over 100 inches of snowfall so far this year.
Business is like a ten form. Ten times what we get with no snow. That's for sure.
Opening up the trails and ramping up relied on booming business for our north woods.
This is a room full of people that I don't know except for like three people.
Even with the lack of snowstorms these days, just the cold, windy days and warm waters create a winter wonderland they rely on.
For civic media news, I'm meteorologist Brittany Marlowe.
Democratic candidate for governor Missy Hughes says her connection to rural Wisconsin is central to her campaign.
Isabella Niazzo has more.
In an appearance on the WXCO Morning Show on Tuesday, Hughes says she is not coming from a traditional political background.
I have never run for office before. I'm not a career politician.
Hughes is the former head of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation.
She was appointed to that post in 2019 by governor Evers and stepped down last September to run for governor.
But before that, Hughes served for nearly two decades as an executive at Organic Valley, a farmer owned dairy cooperative.
She said her time there shaped how she understands rural communities.
And really worked every day at the cooperative to make sure that farmers could stay on their farms and pass those farms on to the next generation.
On renewable energy projects in rural areas, Hughes said local voices, especially farmers, must lead the discussion.
She also says assumptions about rural opposition don't always reflect reality.
In a tough agricultural market, in an economy where Donald Trump is taking away markets for soybeans, for tariffs and things like that,
farmers might be looking for options to find different ways to utilize their land.
And they might be able to utilize their land both for farming and for renewable energy.
She also says as she has traveled around Wisconsin, she's hearing from rural communities that feel isolated from the rest of the state.
There are communities all across the state that are doing incredible work and we should be able to support each other and learn from each other and say,
Oh, you mean that happened? How do you make that happen? Let's do that here.
And I think that a governor who is excited about creating that fabric of working together is the governor that Wisconsin needs right now.
I'm Isabel Annietto.
And I'm Melissa K for WFHR and WIRI News.
Badgers basketball tonight. Hi, I'm Mike Clemens with sports.
The Wisconsin men's basketball team trying to make it five wins in a row. When they face Penn State on the road tonight,
the Badgers women's team with a huge upset beating number 24th ranked Nebraska 63 to 60 in Madison last night.
NBA, the bucks losing to the thunder, 122 to 102 miles Turner, Kevin Porter Jr. out with injuries.
How can the bucks get to 500 doc rivers? Listen, it's been that way all year force when I crying about it.
We got to keep trying to win games.
Baseball fans reactor Freddie Peralta being traded to the Mets who was manager Pat Murphy telling an audience in green Bay
trading Peralta would be one of his saddest days. Peralta, after their crew had set a new franchise record of 97 wins for the season.
I think probably that's the best team that we had on. Nobody was betting this and all name is going to be somewhere after this season.
The first game of spring training, now just 30 days away with sports on my Clemens.
Partly to mostly cloudy with a few flurries today, we're going to get to the upper single digits to low teens by midday.
And the temperatures are going to drop to near zero by late this afternoon.
Tonight, partly cloudy, we're going to drop to near 20 below zero for a low tomorrow sunshine with a high of only 9 below.
I'm meteorologist Sean Cable.
That's your Wisconsin Rapids news roundup from WIRI and WFHR locally grown radio.
Find more news anytime at WFHR.com and WIRI.FM.
Subscribe to this podcast on Spotify, Apple or wherever you find your podcasts.
Thank you.