Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see periods of clouds and sunshine with an afternoon thunderstorm and a high of 76. Sunrise is 5:18 and sunset is 8:37 for 15 hours 19 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie are assassinated in Sarajevo, beginning the July Crisis and providing the casus belli of World War I.
Some projects prove to be nothing more than the equivalent of vaporware, a computer industry term for a proposal that never comes into being. Tom Kertscher reports on what looks to be a data-center version of vaporware in Grant County:
Even for a guy like Ron Brisbois, whose job is to cultivate prosperity, a data center proposed for Wisconsin’s Driftless Area was too big to imagine.
Nothing like this had come along in Brisbois’ quarter-century as economic development director in rural Grant County. An up to $2 billion project spanning 500 acres would be at least three times larger — in dollars and space — than any development in the county.
The construction contracts. Dozens of new permanent jobs. Millions of extra tax revenue for schools and local government. This is what economic development is all about.
For months, the out-of-state developers pitching the data center spoke repeatedly with Brisbois. They toured the county in Wisconsin’s southwest corner. They visited Madison to discuss details with state officials.
Their talk was big.
But Brisbois never dug into the developers’ backgrounds.
Then, as if someone flipped a switch, they stopped returning his calls.
Now, a project that would have been historically transformational — and was already highly controversial — is all but dead.
Drawing on two months of behind-the-scenes interviews Wisconsin Watch conducted with Brisbois, here’s the behind-the-scenes story of the rise and fall of a data center proposal.
See Tom Kertscher, A $2 billion proposal, then silence: How a Driftless Area data center deal fell apart (‘Developers pitched a 500-acre project for rural Grant County but, as opposition mounted, they ‘ghosted’ the county’s point person. The potential deal appears to be dead’), Wisconsin Watch, June 22, 2026.
Intriguing, and well worth reading in full. Some deals go nowhere, and amount to little more than big talk.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Lightning strikes Eiffel Tower as thunderstorm rages over Paris: