"Just Plain Wrong"
How a rural Wisconsin county rallied to save their nursing home from being sold to profiteers.
Tim McCumber was at the front of the room, visibly upset. “There is no actionable item for this board to take tonight! ” he shouted with exasperation into the room. He was standing up, his ID card swinging on a lanyard around his neck as he gestured. He used the gavel in his hand to punctuate his words, shaking it at the crowd before him.
“Now you won! The damn nursing home hasn’t been sold, and it hasn’t been closed!” McCumber banged the gavel on the table in front of him and stalked out of the room.
Not all meetings are this rowdy in rural Sauk County, Wisconsin. Not by a long shot. But tonight, the small room is packed with local residents who had caught wind of the county’s plan to shut down their local nursing home and they had turned out en masse to oppose it. But the meeting never happened. McCumber, the Board Chair, called the meeting to order for only two minutes before gaveling out. Public comment was never heard.
The Sauk County Board of Supervisors seemed taken aback as the room had filled with people, many elderly, carrying handmade signs reading “Save our Nursing Home.”
When the people show up, business as usual can’t occur.
Judy Brey and her sisters took turns caring for their mother in Madison for five years before Judy suggested they move her an hour and a half up I-90 to Reedsburg, which had not one but two five-star rated nursing homes. In Reedsburg, her mother could be in a nursing facility right up the road, so close Judy could walk there.
Her mother, Millie, had dementia, but had also had a long and full life. Millie had raised five daughters and a son, gotten an education, worked. She loved listening to classical music on Wisconsin Public Radio. She and Judy would listen together as Judy put lotion on her mother’s hands.
Having her mother so close for those last 15 months made a world of difference. Judy and her sisters could not only visit, but also get to know the staff and help oversee Millie’s care. Judy had spent her career as a teacher and was now a grandmother, her grandkids living just a few blocks away. She’d never given much thought to nursing homes, but now she was getting a crash course in Medicaid ratings, staff ratios, and care meetings. “I saw how tremendously important the quality of care was, both for my mother and for the rest of us, too,” she said.
The preciousness of her mother’s last months and the importance of the care she received were still fresh in Judy’s mind when, in 2023, she learned that the Sauk County Board of Supervisors was considering selling the county-owned nursing home to a private buyer. Like the senior care center that Judy’s mother had been in, the Sauk County Health Care Center had a 5-star rating. The building sits on the western edge of Reedsburg, with big windows looking out at a still-rural landscape. This nursing home was well-loved and relied on by so many in the community. It had been built by the county in 2009 for 15 million and was now valued at 30 million, but the Board was offering it to ARIA Healthcare for just 5.1 million.
“Not only did this not make sense,” says Judy. “But I felt it was just plain wrong.”
Judy suspected that the move to sell was purely ideological: “They don’t believe that the government should be involved in healthcare, even when the evidence shows it’s working well and fine.” This is a trend across the state, however. Community-owned nursing homes have been put up for sale, only for profit-seeking companies and private equity firms to grab them up, slash staffing and care, and lose ratings. Lincoln County’s Pinecrest home was sold, and the entire staff was laid off. Portage County is barreling ahead with its nursing home’s sale, even after two county referendums in which citizens voted to keep it. But Judy also knew that in St. Croix County, residents had fought the sale of their publicly owned home– and won.
Judy Brey wasn’t the only person in Sauk County who wanted to save the county-owned nursing home from being sold to a for-profit business. Soon, a small group formed, calling themselves Citizens for Sauk County Health Care Center. Setting up in local parking lots, they circulated a petition opposing the sale. They collected money to run ads in the local paper, hosted “call-in” days, and made t-shirts to wear at Board of Supervisors meetings.
“We had people in every role,” Judy explains. Some people updated the group’s Facebook page, some people laid out the ads, and one man, a retired economist, helped the group muck through pages of budget documents to help make sense of the numbers the Board was throwing around.
Things were moving fast. The Board of Supervisors started accepting proposals, and a broker was retained to negotiate a deal. One proposal was from Aria Healthcare, which submitted papers to incorporate in Wisconsin, using the Reedsburg nursing home’s address as its business address. Seeing the writing on the wall, the nursing home’s director resigned and, assuming it would only take a few months to close the deal with Aria, the county named a temporary interim director to oversee the facility.
But the people were moving fast, too. Folks from all over Sauk County were getting involved in Citizens for Sauk County. 1,300 people signed the petition, and dozens of signers spoke at board meetings. Members of the group made phone calls, and some even had sit-down conversations with their representatives. When they did the math, the margins were tight. There were 31 Supervisors total, and they were pretty sure they had 15 on board to keep it, and 16 who wanted to sell it.
But when it came to the vote, 18 Supervisors voted to sell. “They didn’t listen to us,” Judy said. “They didn’t care.”
The vote was in September of 2024, and Aria Healthcare wanted to move into the Sauk County Health Center building before the end of the year.
Petitions, public comment, letters to the editor, phone calls, meetings. It felt like Citizens for Sauk County Health Center had done everything right in petitioning their government and making their voices heard. They had demonstrated tremendous opposition to the sale, but nothing had worked. Judy suspected the handful of Supervisors who changed their minds had done so during a closed-door meeting that board members had with ARIA– a meeting local residents weren’t able to attend.
So, the group contacted the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council for help. They were connected with an attorney who helped file a lawsuit regarding the sale and the open-meetings violation. They filed the lawsuit on October 31st, right before Aria was supposed to take over. The case is still pending today.
“The lawsuit was a good tool to use,” explains Judy. “It wouldn’t have worked alone; you have to do all of it– the organizing and the lawsuit together. The lawsuit put everything we had been doing into the public record, so it can’t just be ignored. The lawsuit wouldn’t have teeth without the rest of the organizing.”
By June 2025, the deal with Aria still hadn’t been finalized. The County offered Aria a lease instead, and the company moved into the building. Aria announced the employee packages to the staff. Seeing the unsatisfactory pay and benefits changes being offered by the for-profit company, staff — many of whom had been at the nursing home for years — began to resign.
By July, Aria Healthcare had backed out of the deal. The interim director left the Health Center, and the County hired a permanent director again. Reluctantly, the Board of Supervisors funded the Sauk County Health Center for one more year— just as the taxpayers in Sauk County had always wanted.
It was all this that led to Tim McCumber’s gavel shaking and yelling last summer. The room had been packed with local residents outraged that the board had been making plans without listening to them. People from all walks of life were there- retired farmers, teachers, nurses, doctors, pastors, middle-aged men and women who grew up visiting their grandmas at the nursing home. There were even three residents of the Sauk County Health Center there, lined up in their wheelchairs, ready to speak. McCumber had pointed at Judy and said, accusatively: “You brought these people here.”
And Judy thought: Yes, these are your constituents. They came because this matters. And because this is a public meeting.
Wins aren’t just won; they are worked for. And most wins can’t be kept unless you hold on to them.
Judy and the Citizens for Sauk County Health Care Center have learned that good, old-fashioned organizing– talking to people, calling them up, asking them to join you– can build a formidable base of support even in a small place like Reedsburg.
But they’ve also learned that who sits on their local board matters, or “who holds the purse strings,” as Judy says. That’s why, going into the elections this spring, they’ve recruited nine candidates – each one supporting the health center – to run for the local board. Judy has been spending her afternoons knocking on doors and stamping mailers.
All of this organizing has made the public ownership of the Sauk County Health Care Center a hot election issue. Just last week, the local paper ran candidate responses to a series of questions, including one about their position on the nursing home. Now, Judy is simply asking her neighbors to vote.
But even after long days of canvassing, registering voters, organizing, and meetings, Judy has one more thing to do. She still goes to the nursing home to visit the elderly, even though her own mother, Millie, passed away years ago. Sometimes she interviews the residents and types up their answers on a paper, which is then displayed in their rooms, to document who they are for visitors and staff to appreciate; just little notes about their lives, where they are from, what food and music they like. “I just want the people to remember they had lives before they came here, and that they are worthy humans needing good care.”
This is just amazing, and so inspiring to be reminded of the power of the people.
Thank you for this incredible story. That helps me remember even when so much chaos is around us we have a voice and others will join us. Standing firm in what we believe is truth and perseverance keep us focused on the importance of being a voice for others.