Rep. Katrina Shankland

Maddy summaryThis bill establishes a $25 million fund to provide financial assistance to businesses in Wisconsin that want to open new locations or expand into vacant commercial spaces. The program allows the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation to award grants to eligible for-profit businesses, while explicitly excluding nonprofit organizations from receiving funding. Eligibility rules for the grants are designed to be similar to those used in a previous 2023 initiative, giving the corporation flexibility to set specific application procedures. Although the bill was introduced to support local commerce recovery, it ultimately failed to pass during the 2024 legislative session.

Maddy summaryThis bill designates the monarch butterfly as the official state butterfly of Wisconsin. It achieves this by adding a new section to the state statutes that explicitly names the monarch in this role and updating the Wisconsin Blue Book to include butterflies alongside other official state symbols. While the legislation was introduced in the 2024 session, it did not pass into law during that legislative cycle.

Maddy summaryThis bill proposes changing how Wisconsin voters select candidates for U.S. Senate and House of Representatives seats by implementing a top-five primary system followed by instant runoff voting. Under the new rules, voters in the primary election would be able to rank up to five candidates of their choice in order of preference, rather than selecting a single candidate from a specific party. If no candidate receives a majority of the first-choice votes in the general election, the system would automatically rerun the election using the voters' ranked preferences to determine a winner without requiring a second election. The legislation also includes provisions to ensure voters are clearly informed about how to cast votes across different party lines and how write-in candidates are handled within this ranked-choice framework.