Browsing: Infrastructure

The City of Milwaukee is willing to pay a new marketing and communications officer for The Hop, its little-used $128 million streetcar, up to $108,000 per year plus benefits.

There’s more evidence in recent days that the federal government spends money in two ways — too quickly and too slowly.

One wonders what revolution in Wisconsinites’ preferences for where to live and to work will make commuter trains feasible in Milwaukee where they weren’t in Minneapolis.

With fewer passengers and mostly empty seats, it’s time to shut down the Hop, Milwaukee’s $128 million streetcar.

Despite a much ballyhooed second line added last April, ridership on Milwaukee’s financially challenged streetcar, the Hop, last year was still nearly 30% below that of pre-COVID 2019.

Port Washington’s announcement of another billion-dollar data center project in southeastern Wisconsin is focusing attention on the challenge of meeting the voracious energy needs of this new economic opportunity.

Small nuclear modular reactors are a big deal for Wisconsin, given our developing AI economy and Gov. Evers’ Clean Energy Plan.

Facing a $5 million bill to run the free streetcar known as The Hop next year, Alderman Scott Spiker wondered if a huge increase in handing out parking tickets is the funding answer.

Government overregulation is imperiling the start of a $1 billion plan to expand broadband service to the hardest-to-reach places in Wisconsin.

America’s energy grids are strained, and Michigan is reconsidering nuclear’s role in meeting consumer demand. Wisconsin, too, should take note.

Wisconsin will need to build 200,000 housing units by 2030 to accommodate all the people who want to live and work here. Sheboygan County is a microcosm of the problem — but on the forefront of a possible solution.

Wisconsin is handing out almost $79 million in federal funds to private businesses to build charging stations for electric vehicles at a make-or-break moment for both the EV and charging station industries.

At the national level, recent studies show that small businesses are not contracting with the federal government as frequently as in the past. And those that do are becoming more concentrated in a handful of congressional districts around Washington, where rent seeking is the norm.

Wisconsin has, in state Sen. Rob Hutton, a mad-eyed optimist, for the Brookfield Republican imagines that this is the time, after decades of trying, that Wisconsin could repeal its minimum markup law… He might be right.

Legislative leaders say costly project not needed or wanted Wisconsin officials in the Evers administration, supported by politicians in many…

The city of Milwaukee announced it is building a new line for the $128 million streetcar known as The Hop. Unanswered anywhere in the strangely incurious media is why the city would open that line now.

When and why did bringing internet access to every home and business in Wisconsin become the sole province of government, rather than the marketing mission of established private internet providers?

Among the bills Republicans are considering in the Legislature is one eliminating the last remnants of Wisconsin’s personal property tax. The bill, AB2, sponsored by Rep. Dan Knodl (R-Germantown), would end property taxes on everything but real estate.The move is one the Badger Institute long has advocated.

Wisconsin and the other 49 states are positively swimming in broadband funding, all of it the result of the Biden administration spending bacchanal.

“Drowning” might be a better word.

Robin Vos spoke a hard truth the other day, something unpleasant because it is incontrovertible.

Speaking about the future of funding an important Wisconsin priority, the speaker of the state Assembly said, “The gas tax is declining whether we like it or not.”