A FEMA spokesperson wouldn’t weigh into the politics surrounding the agency, as teams assessed flood damage from storms two weeks ago.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration may change how the federal government responds to disasters.
“I can tell you that FEMA is here today on the ground and in Wisconsin and Milwaukee County working to support the state of Wisconsin, to conduct assessments, to support the state’s request to conduct these assessments as they make a determination about whether they want to make a request for a major disaster declaration,” Nicole Wilson a FEMA spokesperson, told “UpFront,” which is produced in partnership with WisPolitics, over the weekend. “All I can tell you is that FEMA is on the ground today in this community to support the state of Wisconsin.”
Multiple Federal Emergency Management Agency teams are assessing damage in Milwaukee, Waukesha and Washington counties. The ultimate decision on a disaster declaration will come to President Donald Trump once Gov. Tony Evers officially requests one, which the governor has indicated he will.
“There’s no timeline,” Wilson said. “I can’t give you a timeline because we’re here as long as the state needs us out here to conduct these assessments, and then once the assessments are complete, the data is handed over to the state and then the governor makes that determination, and I don’t know how long the governor’s going to take to make that determination. Once he makes that determination, FEMA, we will make the request and that recommendation to the president. And the president, I certainly couldn’t tell you how long that would take for the president to make.”
Greg Engle, the Wisconsin Emergency Management administrator, says he feels confident “we are going to have a very good collection of information” to secure federal funds after FEMA’s flood damage assessment.
“The atmosphere is we have a lot of people working really hard, and trying to work as efficiently as we can, and working in great partnership,” Engle said. “FEMA provides excellent support. They have been reviewing damage assessment information that we collected last week. They’ve been reviewing that since the end of the week and the beginning of this week and have been able to validate a lot of the information that we collected last week, and that’s going to speed up the process for us.”
Engle also wouldn’t speculate on any concrete timeline.
“It’s very difficult to put a timeline to it,” Engle said. “We’re working very fast to get the information together so that we can provide that recommendation to the governor and ultimately anticipate making the request for the federal declaration. But the timeline then is going to be depending on FEMA and what happens in the administration.”
Wisconsin’s Legislative Black Caucus is launching a series of statewide town halls ahead of the midterm elections, looking to engage Black voters and send a message to the eventual candidates for governor.
“The purpose of these town halls is to ensure that the issues that Black Wisconsinites need to hear and put forth in our policy agenda-making is at the forefront,” state Sen. Dora Drake, D-Milwaukee and chair of the Legislative Black Caucus, told “UpFront.” “Every candidate should have an answer to these issues that are brought up during these town halls.”
Events will be hosted in Green Bay, Racine, Madison and Milwaukee during September and October.
Drake said the caucus could endorse in the Dem primary for governor.
“That is something to be determined,” she said. “You know everyone has their own decisions, but I think we want to ensure that there is a conversation being had about the issues that are impacting Black Wisconsinites.”
Recent polling shows a majority of Wisconsinites view the Democratic Party unfavorably.
“I think part of it is frustration,” Drake said. “We saw that people put all their hands on deck for a presidential election that didn’t turn out the way that it did. I’ve heard that people want Democrats to fight more and stand on the issues that we stand on, and I couldn’t agree more with that.”
Wisconsin elections commissioners Ann Jacobs and Don Millis are weighing in on President Trump’s vow to end mail-in voting ahead of the midterm elections.
“I understand the impulse to go hand-count ballots,” Millis, a Republican commissioner, told “UpFront.” “For me, the most important requirement, the most important consideration, is that we have a hard copy of ballots in Wisconsin. The vast majority of people fill out paper ballots. They are stored. They can be recounted. For those who have a need for accessible touch screens, in one of two ways, there’s a record of that ballot. So that’s the most important thing, and we have that in Wisconsin right now.”
“Among my many reactions are that if we eliminate mail-in ballots, we’re going to actually make it harder for Republicans who have historically used absentee voting to vote,” Millis added. “And I don’t think that’s good for the base of the Republican Party, so I’m not sure that’s a wise strategy.
“Listen, I understand the president’s concerns, and I think a lot of us have concerns that there’s a perception that elections aren’t fair,” Millis said. “I think elections have been, (there’s) overwhelming evidence that elections have been fair, that votes have been counted.”
Jacobs, the Dem chair of the commission, called the idea “a hodgepodge of crazy conspiracy theorists’ greatest hits.”
“We’ve got the whole bamboo ballots rearing its ugly head so that now he wants watermarks on ballots,” Jacobs said. “I thought we had dead and buried that one, and I guess not. We’ve got some other greatest hits like we’re going to count all the ballots by hand as if that’s going to happen in a single evening.”
Jacobs said states are tasked with handling elections.
“The first thing is states are tasked with elections,” Jacobs added. “That is literally written in the Constitution. Now Congress can establish laws that supersede that, but not an executive order from the president. It’s very specific. Elections belong to the states unless Congress does something that changes the rules for the states.”
She said Trump’s proposed changes would cause long delays.
“We sure as shooting wouldn’t have the results late on the evening of Election Day or early the next morning,” Jacobs said. “You would be looking at weeks before ballots could be counted and results announced, and in a swing state like Wisconsin, that would make a big difference for the country. I think it would just be insanity.”
U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden says he grabbed a pair of socks in his suitcase to help rescue an 11-year-old boy after a crash in Iowa.
“I heard a massive, massive boom,” Van Orden recounted on “UpFront.”
Van Orden, a former Navy SEAL, said he stopped and turned around after Iowa State Police say a minivan crashed into a semi on the side of the road.
“I ran back to the truck and opened up my suitcase and grabbed two pairs of socks,” Van Orden said. “It’s the only material that I had, and then I put up two constricting bands because there wasn’t enough material to make a tourniquet. By then, several more people arrived, and I asked if anyone had a knife, and a guy handed me a carpet cutter, and I cut the seatbelts and used those as tourniquets for his arm and leg to stop the bleeding.”
Van Orden visited 11-year-old Sawyer Whitt in the hospital Monday. He said his family was driving to a memorial to honor his daughter, who died two years ago.
“The dad and I had a conversation, and he didn’t obviously know we had lost our daughter, and I said I’m so thankful that you’re not going to be joining a club you don’t want a membership in. And I’ll be frank, the two dads got a little misty.
“That was essentially a wound of war,” Van Orden added when describing the crash. “When I say the entire side of his leg was missing, that’s from the knee down to the ankle, and he was bleeding in his right wrist, and from my experience, there’s a high likelihood he would have bled to death before the ambulance showed up.”
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