{"id":522,"date":"2026-08-06T20:46:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T20:46:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/?p=522"},"modified":"2026-09-22T17:12:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T17:12:09","slug":"making-a-difference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/making-a-difference\/","title":{"rendered":"Making A Difference"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\"><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;\">WHEN CITIZENS ASK THE QUESTIONS, THEY GET ANSWERS &#8212; SOMETIMES BETTER ANSWERS THAN JOURNALISTS GET. DAVE IVERSON, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER OF PUBLIC TELEVISION STATION WHA-TV, A PARTNER WITH THE WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL AND WISC-TV IN THE &#8220;WE THE PEOPLE&#8221; PROJECT, RECALLS HOW ONE CITIZEN MADE A DIFFERENCE &#8212; AND EVEN MADE FRONT-PAGE NEWS &#8212; AT THEIR OCT. 7 GUBERNATORIAL DEBATE.<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\">&#8220;A couple of interesting things happened during the debate. We had audiences of citizens asking questions from the University of Wisconsin Green Bay campus and from satellite locations.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\">One person from Eau Claire got up and asked probably the best question of the night. He was wearing an American flag shirt and when I saw that I thought, &#8220;Oh, geez, what&#8217;s going to happen now?&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\">In Wisconsin, the be-all, end-all question of the campaign was the question of property taxes. The state legislature has required that two-thirds of the cost of schools has to be removed from personal property taxes by 1996. None of the candidates was specifically addressing this.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\">So this guy stands up and says, &#8216;We&#8217;re just not satisfied with what you&#8217;ve said about this issue. We want those tax plans delivered by Oct. 25.&#8217;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\">Well, by setting the deadline, the candidates couldn&#8217;t get out of it. What were they going to say? We won&#8217;t do it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\">Both candidates promised to deliver their plans and that became the Page One story around the state.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\">It showed the value of a citizen asking the question: You can&#8217;t kiss-off a citizen in that circumstance.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\">It was a significant moment in the debate and one of the best, if not the best, example I know of showing how citizens can make a difference.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>WHEN CITIZENS ASK THE QUESTIONS, THEY GET ANSWERS &#8212; SOMETIMES BETTER ANSWERS THAN JOURNALISTS GET. DAVE IVERSON, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER OF PUBLIC TELEVISION STATION WHA-TV, A PARTNER WITH THE WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL AND WISC-TV IN THE &#8220;WE THE PEOPLE&#8221; PROJECT, RECALLS HOW ONE CITIZEN MADE A DIFFERENCE &#8212; AND EVEN MADE FRONT-PAGE NEWS &#8212; AT THEIR [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,71,73,108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catalyst-by-date","category-civic-catalyst","category-impact","category-winter-1995"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=522"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5401,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522\/revisions\/5401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}