In just the first ten weeks of the year, Clean Wisconsin has been in the halls of Madison and Washington to advance new support for addressing nitrate contamination, promoting conservation agriculture, combatting PFAS pollution, defending federal investments in water, infrastructure and climate, and protecting the Great Lakes. While it’s a long road ahead, we are making progress in our legislative priorities for 2025 and 2026.
Clean Wisconsin began the 2025-26 state legislative session by working with a bipartisan group of legislators in the State Senate and Assembly, along with our partners in the Clean Water Initiative (our coalition with the Wisconsin Dairy Business Association, Wisconsin Land and Water Conservation Association and the Nature Conservancy) to reintroduce the Transition to Grazing legislation. The bill proposes creating and funding a new program to help farmers transition row crop acres to managed grazing operations by providing them with financial and technical assistance.
In a managed grazing operation, livestock are systematically rotated through pastureland to optimize their nutrition and the land’s health. In addition to providing excellent nutrition to pastured livestock, managed grazing provides significant benefits to soil health and water quality. The pastured land acts like a sponge, capturing and filtering more nutrients, mitigating flooding in rural areas by absorbing and holding more rain, and building more soil and organic matter than row crops or intensively grazed pastures.
Last session the legislation unanimously passed the Assembly Committee on Agriculture and had a well-received hearing in the Senate Agriculture Committee, but the legislature adjourned before the bill could be brought to the floor. We are now working with the respective agriculture committee chairs, who also cosponsored the legislation, to quickly scheduling hearings in the first half of 2025 so the bills can be brought to the floor in a timely manner.
We are also working with our Clean Water Initiative partners on a set of joint budget requests for the 2025-27 biennial state budget. These budget requests are similarly centered on helping farmers improve rural water quality through state programs that provide funding and assistance for conservation farming practices. We are seeking increases in funding for programs that seek to optimize efficient use of nitrate-based fertilizer, promote planting of cover crops and encourage farmer-to-farmer learning on conservation practices. We are also seeking funding for testing and remediation of private wells contaminated beyond safe use.
The Clean Water Initiative is collectively meeting with members of the budget-writing Joint Committee on Finance to advocate for these programs and funding increases. The committee will look to vote on our requests and incorporate them into the budget bill in May.
Clean Wisconsin and partners from affected communities around the state are pushing for action to combat PFAS pollution. At the state level, the legislature set aside $125 million to address PFAS in June 2023. Nearly two years later, not a dime has gone to a single community or private well owner because of an inability to pass a bipartisan framework for allocating the money. This year both Republicans and Democrats have put forth proposals, but the two sides have not attempted to reconcile the proposals as of this writing. We are urging bipartisan discussion and agreement so people in the Town of Campbell, Wausau, Town of Stella, Marinette, Peshtigo and other communities can access the financial assistance they so desperately need.
When municipal water systems discover they have a water contamination issue, whether PFAS, nitrates or something else, they can seek federal loan dollars to upgrade their systems and ensure they are meeting state and federal water quality standards. Those loan funds are an essential financing tool that allows systems to repay loans over 20 to 40 years, typically. Without them, water systems would have to solely rely on significant water rate increases, disproportionately burdening local rate payers.
The federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) temporarily bolstered the amount of money available in the loan funds so more communities could access the program. Unfortunately, those increases will relapse to pre-BIL levels at the end of federal fiscal year 2026, limiting resources for communities. We are working with our congressional delegation and national clean water organizations to advocate for maintaining BIL levels beyond fiscal year 2026. As costs for system upgrades have only increased since 2021 and PFAS has been found to be ubiquitous in water supplies across the nation, now is no time to restrict access to resources.
Similarly, Clean Wisconsin is engaging private citizens and small businesses across the state to gather success stories from the 2022 federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The IRA is the single most significant piece of federal legislation ever passed to combat climate change. Achieved mostly through tax credits, the legislation incentivized economy-wide transition towards energy efficiency and clean energy.
With a change in administration and full Republican control of Congress, there is interest in eliminating those pointed tax credits to pay for broad tax cuts. Our strategy is to document the Wisconsin-specific successes of the law and share those examples of success with our delegation. It is only by making the issue Wisconsin-specific that we can hope to influence our delegation.
Finally, as Wisconsin co-led for the national Healing Our Waters Great Lakes Coalition, Clean Wisconsin is advocating for the reauthorization of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI). Administered by the EPA, the GLRI invests in restoring the Great Lakes after decades of environmental damage have threatened public health and the regional economy. Since the program’s creation in 2010, there have been over 8,100 projects to improve the environmental health of the Great Lakes, strengthen resilience to flooding and extreme weather for communities across the region, and clean up a source of drinking water for 30 million Americans.
The GLRI is authorized on five-year cycles, and its current authorization expires at the end of fiscal year 2026. While the program has made significant strides over its 15-year history, work remains, and we don’t want to lose the progress we’ve made. Leaders in Congress have already circulated a bill that’s garnered bipartisan support, including from Senator Baldwin, Representative Steil and Representative Moore, to reauthorization the program after 2026. We are working with our delegation and HOW Coalition partners to ensure the reauthorization passes by then.
As stated at the beginning of this article, the road ahead is long on these initiatives, but we are employing a pragmatic approach, meeting with legislators of both parties and working with strategic partners to carry our advocacy as far as we possibly can. Stay tuned over the next two years as these initiatives advance.
