It was my pleasure to open up Ben Gruber for Assembly’s campaign kickoff. I hope you will consider helping in whatever capacity you can to help Ben win in November and come out to vote and send Ben to the state assembly to drive the change we need.
And while I have never followed a script and certainly didn’t follow this one below word-for-word, here are the remarks I prepared and touched on briefly prior to Ben taking the floor.
Hi, I’m Joe. I’m an IT geek, a small business owner, and I’m involved in my community in Argyle. I am also running for Village President of Argyle and the Lafayette County Board of Supervisors — albeit unopposed, so I think I got the job.
I went out east for about twenty years. But I came back for family and honestly I missed corn between my cities and towns, and that small town community where people know each other and take care of each other. Argyle is exactly that kind of place.
Since coming back, I’ve seen this over and over: Argyle shows up. Argyle volunteers. Argyle organizes. Argyle puts its shoulder into things when something needs to get done. Heck, they even have a name for it — “The Argyle Way.”
We’ve grown community events in the last year and created a welcoming community where people come out because of it.
Downtown, Argyle community leaders and business folks took real chances. They looked at buildings that had been blighted for decades and said, “We can do better.” They put their own money behind it. They brought those buildings back to life. They created office spaces, an event venue, community spaces, and in some cases housing — which we badly need.
The Village of Argyle Board believes so much in the “Argyle Way” that they helped secure the former FNBT bank property in Argyle to create a community center with an expanded library within it. And the Friends of the Argyle Public Library — a community organization — has already stepped up to cover the cost of the building in year one so our taxes remain flat. They’re deep into the planning and fundraising to retire the debt and fill the space.
That didn’t happen by accident. That happened because people in Argyle believe in Argyle.
But here’s the honest part: we’re carrying a lot of this on our own backs.
We can fundraise for new playground equipment for the park. We can fundraise for books for the new library. And that matters — it says something about our communities and who we are. That we invest in the future we want for our kids and our community. But we can’t fundraise roads. We can’t fundraise water lines or sewer lines. And we can’t keep asking the same people, who are already giving their time, their money, and their energy, to solve problems that are bigger than any one town or village to bear alone.
And then we run into the real problem.
The system is backwards.
Under the way Wisconsin funds village governments, rural communities are stuck in a catch-22. We’re told we need growth to generate revenue. But we can’t get that growth unless we’re allowed to invest first — in housing, in infrastructure, in basic capacity. No revenue without growth. No growth without revenue. That’s the trap.
And that’s not just an Argyle problem. That’s Ridgeway. That’s small towns all over rural Wisconsin. Communities with strong people, strong leadership, and strong ideas — stuck inside a funding structure that doesn’t match how rural communities actually work.
That’s why leadership matters at the state level. Ben believes in community leaders. He believes in the people who take risks, who show up, who put their towns on their backs. He’s one of those people himself. And he’s willing to take that next step — to go to the Assembly and fight to change the rules so our communities can actually succeed.
Because we’ve had too much of the same old, same old. And meanwhile, rural communities are falling behind. School enrollment declining, opportunities shrinking, young people leaving.
If we want a different outcome, we need different voices at the table. Voices that understand places like Argyle and Ridgeway. Voices that are willing to break this catch-22 and bring the tools back home so our communities can grow and keep the people who make them great.
That’s how rural Wisconsin moves forward.