In the midst of a beautiful Bucks win last night, lots of #progressivebeer being sold all over the Wisconsin, and our #kamalabeer being consumed by the vast majority of female U.S. senators at our Veep's latest dinner party, we hesitate to post a story that is worrisome to Wisconsin, but it's too important not to.
This is about PFAS, a dangerous chemical that is making people sick in Wisconsin and is being ignored by the Republican majority state legislature for the benefit of polluting corporations.
In our podcast recording last Wednesday and live on Devil Radio 92.7, we learned from Doug Oitzinger, past mayor of Marinette and leader of their clean water movement there, and Zach Vruwink, City Administrator of Rhinelander, how their cities have been affected by this poisonous chemical. Doug talked about high school boys getting testicular cancer and Zach talked about a potential situation where water would have to be bussed into Rhinelander if they PFAS contamination gets out of control.
In short, this is an issue of extreme importance to the State of Wisconsin and needs to be dealt with immediately so that more people don't get sick.
Governor Evers rightly proposed money in the state budget for a host of ways to protect Wisconsinites, by hiring more DNR staff to do PFAS testing, to getting studies done to know how much PFAS in the water is dangerous, to forcing companies who contaminated our waters with PFAS pay to clean it up.
Robin Vos and the Republican cowards who do his bidding just stripped all of those measures out of the state budget, and all that is left is a window dressing bill to pay to replace old PFAS laden fire extinguisher foam with non- PFAS foam at city fire departments. Sure it's a step forward, but it does't do anything to fix the root problem of corporations putting poison into our lakes and streams.
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