Small business owner, Brenda Tabor-Adams, lives with her husband and 2-year-old son in a silica frac sand mining district between New Auburn and Chetek, WI. They are surrounded by mines. Two separate facilities are within a third of a mile and three more are within one mile of her once-quiet, rural property. In addition, several more mines are proposed or already operating nearby. Brenda’s clients now compete with 1,000 sand trucks per day, or 20 trucks every 15 minutes, in order to get their horse trailers in and out of her property. With trucks running for 12 hours/day, 6 days/week, her life has been turned upside down. Dismissed as “collateral damage” by local officials, she fears for the environmental impact, the health of her family and neighbors and the sustainability of her small business. Tabor-Adams also details troubling issues that regular people face when dealing with multimillion dollar mining companies, including lawyers threatening lawsuits, town and county boards “stacked” with pro-sand officials, and the understaffing and underfunding of the Department of Natural Resources tasked to protect the land and the people. Brenda says, “Our government has failed us miserably…”
Here’s her story.
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Video Highlights from Tabor-Adams:
“I’m stuck here in this house and they won’t… [choking up with tears, hand over mouth]…they won’t help us out.”
“I have a 22-month-old son…and I do fear…why would OSHA say this (silica dust) is a carcinogen?…you know maybe a little exposure is fine but in a 22-month-old kid, what is too much?”
UPDATE #2: March 6, a Dane County Judge placed a temporary restraining order on the Voter ID bill, calling it the “single most restrictive voter eligibility law” in the United States. Local elections all over the state on April 3, 2012 operated under the previous law. A second judge placed a permanent injunction on the law. A trial on whether to grant a permanent injunction is scheduled for April 16. This issue is expected to reach the WI Supreme Court.
Now that photo ID’s are required for voting in Wisconsin, Jennifer “Rita” Platt and John Wolfe drove 45 minutes from Osceola to the nearest Dept. of Motor Vehicles office in Hudson, only to be turned away. Governor Walker and state Republicans recently passed the “Voter Photo ID Law”, or Act 23, which has many Wisconsinites scrambling. Rita and John brought social security cards, current pay stubs, and driver’s licenses from Iowa, but it wasn’t enough. They need to pay for certified birth certificates, and wait for them to arrive in the mail, in order to secure a free Wisconsin ID card issued for voting. To complicate matters further for the couple, the computers at the DMV were down and unable to process their request.
![Kim Wojchik is the Executive Director at Turningpoint in River Falls for victims of domestic and sexual violence. They served 797 people in 2011 who came to them from either Pierce or St. Croix County [Western Wisconsin]. She has seen government funding to her facility decrease by 15% over the past few years, and funding for the sexual abuse program has been eliminated entirely.](http://www.wivoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Kim-500-20120502091251_14.png)
