Wisconsin Eye Could Go Out of Business

Jon Henkes. Photo courtesy of Henkes.

Jon Henkes, then a lobbyist for the UW system, was one of the founders of WisconsinEye. The group began in 2007 after a couple years of work by Henkes and others to get it off the ground. The goal was to make state government more transparent, offering gavel-to-gavel coverage of the state Legislature and it has been a great success.

In the last two-and-a-half years WisconsinEye covered 2,648 state Capitol and public policy events, produced 218 studio programs and 401 campaign-related events while reaching over 2.4 million website page views and more than 320,000 unique visitors, the group notes.

It has a massive archive of coverage “with more than 18,000 hours of freely available programming and coverage,” and “all coverage is delivered without editing or partisan spin.”

WisconsinEye’s perspective is that of the fly on the wall: it captures and records all the public meetings of officials, not alway pretty, in the state Capitol.

Perhaps the clearest indication of its standing, at a time when the two parties disagree on nearly everything, was a unanimous vote by all 132 members of the state Legislature to create a no-strings-attached, dollar-for-dollar match of up to $10 million in order to build a permanent endowment to assure the future of WisconsinEye.

Two of it strongest backers, Henkes notes, are Gov. Tony Evers, who signed the legislation passed as part of the last state budget, and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos.

So why is the group in danger of going out of business?

The problem is the short-term budget. The group could run out of money by December 15 and it can’t access any of that money from the Legislature until it raises the $10 million in matching dollars. Meanwhile it has hit a bad patch trying to raise money.

This is a group that has always depended on contributed income. Its average annual expenses over the last three years were about $1.2 million and nearly that entire annual budget came from contributed income.

In its early years, Henke notes, the group had funding from conservative individuals and groups like business owner Diane Hendricks, Terry and Mary Kohler, the Bradley Foundation and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and from liberals like Chris Abele and the Argosy, Evjue, Bader and Joyce foundations, along with the Wisconsin Education Association Council.

By far its biggest supporter was Hendricks. “From the very beginning building the organization until now Diane Hendricks has donated in excess of $14 million,” Henkes says.

But Hendricks is now holding off, Henkes says. “Diane has said to us, ‘I’ve done a lot but it’s time for other donors to step up.’”

But few are doing so. “In the last 18 months we have done 50 meetings with donors, with proposals totaling $9.2 million and all have declined,” he notes.

It’s a particularly difficult philanthropic climate right now, Henkes says. People are skittish about the economy. Federal funding cuts by the Trump administration have led to major campaigns to replace the money by groups like Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television. Meanwhile the level of campaign contributions has gotten so high that “there’s a lot of fatigue about political giving,” Henkes notes, and WisconsinEye gets lumped into that category.

Meanwhile the Bradley Foundation and a liberal group Henkes wouldn’t mention have passed on funding WisconsinEye “because we are not an advocacy organization.”

It’s as though the mission of WisconsinEye, to create a transparent record of government, to document the democratic process in action, is seen as less important than winning the ever more strident battle between the two parties.

“It leads you to that thought certainly,” Henke says. “It’s win at all costs now.”

As Henkes has made his case to the media one story raised questions about his salary. For the 2023 calendar year he earned $290,000, pretty high for a group with a $1.2 million budget. But Henkes wears a lot of hats because his staff is so small. “We’re just six staff members,” he says “and we have to do a lot. We’re a lean and mean organization.”

His salary also goes back to 2012, when he returned to the group after a number of years as vice-president of development at Augustana College in South Dakota. The WisconsinEye board of directors, stuck with a director they dismissed for doing a poor job, had to woo Henkes back to Wisconsin, as one former staffer told Urban Milwaukee. Henkes has served as President and CEO since then, for more than 12 years.

And his salary was cut — to $150,000 in 2025— and Henkes is now working without compensation as the group struggles to find financing.

Henkes is hoping he can convince the Legislature to take some of that $10 million allocated for the endowment and change it to immediate funding to assure the organization can continue. Meanwhile he is still working to attract donors, and cut through the fog of hyper-partisanship that makes a pro-democracy group like his seem less vital. An October press release about the group’s funding emergency says it all:

“A healthy democracy demands that truth is accessible to all, our voices are heard, and our leaders are accountable,” the release declares. “Wisconsinites deserve to see their government in action  — unfiltered, unbiased and accessible. Open government is more than an ideal; it’s a necessity.”

And never more needed than now.