🏗️ A 16-story building with no parking?

🏈 ‘Fire Fickell’ Chants at Camp Randall Fall on Deaf Ears

• Despite a disappointing 2025 season with several blowout losses, UW-Madison Badgers head coach Luke Fickell will be back coaching next season, athletic director Chris McIntosh said last week.
• Since he was brought to the team in 2022, Fickell’s tenure has been plagued by issues at the quarterback position. After a 34-0 loss to Ohio State on Oct. 18, McIntosh made the unusual step of releasing a statement acknowledging the program’s issues,vowing to devote more resources, and backing Fickell. [Fox47, ESPN]

🏗️ A 16-Story Apartment Building With No Parking?

• A proposed 16-story apartment building on West Wilson Street would have 320 “micro” apartments and no parking. City planners seem unsure of the idea, saying that it’s unprecedented for a housing development of that size to not offer parking except for projects built for UW-Madison students.
• Developer Randy Alexander said he intends his project to appeal to renters who otherwise couldn’t afford to live downtown. The apartments would all be smaller than 400 square feet, and the ground floor would include expanded space for tenants to store bikes.
• The site, which currently houses the four-story Shorecrest Apartments, is only 66 feet wide. Some members of the Madison Plan Commission have expressed concerns about vehicle access, and the city has asked Alexander to resolve those issues. [ 🔒WSJ]

🍎 Feds Order Halt To SNAP Payments. Evers Says ‘No.’

• Gov. Tony Evers said that SNAP payments would continue to flow to Wisconsin recipients, even though the Trump administration threatened states that did not halt those payments.
• The administration appealed a federal judge’s order that the United States Department of Agriculture provide SNAP food assistance payments. But immediately after that order, but before the appeal, Evers authorized the payments in Wisconsin, and said he would not reverse course. “No,” he responded in a one-word response on social media to the federal demand.
• 🎧 What’s driving Evers: On the City Cast Madison podcast recently, Evers told host Bianca Martin that feeding the hungry was so important to him that he planned to continue being involved even after he retires in 2026. [WPR, Bluesky, 🎧 City Cast Madison]

Veterans Day is Nov. 11, and Madisonians are finding all kinds of personal and innovative ways to honor those who have served. For years, Madison’s longtime Irish rock band The Kissers has been involved in a project to use music to honor the soldiers of World War I.

On the City Cast Madison podcast today, host Bianca Martin talks to Kissers frontman Ken Fitzsimmons on how that project has evolved into a new multimedia “rock ‘n’ roll history concert,” “The Foe & The Fallen,” that will premiere on Veterans Day at the Barrymore Theatre.

Here are some more things to do in honor of Veterans Day around Madison, as well as the surprising reasons why Wisconsin does not recognize it as a state holiday.

😦 What Do You Mean, Veterans Day Isn’t a State Holiday?

That’s right, while Veterans Day is a federal holiday, Wisconsin is the only U.S. state that does not also recognize it as a state holiday. That means state employees do not get the day off, and schools are open.

The reasons behind that are complicated. Wisconsin had always been a strong supporter of Armistice Day, the worldwide occasion that celebrated the end of World War I. In the 1950s, the U.S. government renamed Armistice Day as Veterans Day to honor Americans who served in all wars. But Wisconsin stuck to observing Armistice Day, and while there were some efforts in the 1980s to add Veterans Day as a state holiday in Wisconsin, it did not gather enough support to pass.

Those efforts have resurfaced in recent years. In 2022 the Wisconsin Senate passed a bill to make Veterans Day a state holiday, but it has not come up for a vote in the Assembly. In his 2025-26 budget, Gov. Tony Evers included a provision that would make both Veterans Day and Juneteenth state holidays, but it was removed by the Republican-led Joint Finance Committee.

Last month, a group of Democratic lawmakers introduced “The Veterans Promise,” which would align Wisconsin with the U.S. government’s observance of Veterans Day.