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‘Problem-solver’ vs ‘Complainer’ – Inside LuAnn Bird’s run for Wisconsin Assembly

By Bonnie Fuller

October 17, 2024

When her young family was thrown into chaos, she became an activist out of necessity and learned she could chart a new path toward service and satisfaction.

A tragic accident set LuAnn Bird on a path of a life of advocacy and public service. She had only been married to her husband, Phil, for five years when he took one step backwards into an open stairwell in an under-construction house where he had been installing insulation.

Phil, a Vietnam vet, owned an insulation company and was doing the work himself when he fell backward through the hole, broke his back, and severed his spinal cord. He was paralyzed.

“We knew right away that nothing was going to come back—that this was going to be our life with Phil in a wheelchair,” recalled Bird, who is now a candidate for the Wisconsin Legislature in Assembly District 61.

At the time, Bird had never gone to college, wasn’t working, and had two children under five. She had been “raised” to be a stay-at-home mom, and suddenly was now responsible for not only two young children but also for her husband, confined to a wheelchair.

“I had no degree, I couldn’t type. I was grossly unprepared for that event in my life,” she told UpNorthNews.

But that’s when Bird found the mindset and resolve that has led her all these years later to face off against Republican Rep. Bob Donovan. The 61st Assembly district includes Greendale, Hales Corners, most of Greenfield, and some neighborhoods in Milwaukee and Franklin. Donovan is currently representing the 84th District but was drawn out with the new maps and is moving into the 61st in a bid to stay in the Legislature.

LuAnn Bird family

(Photo provided by LuAnn Bird)

This will be Bird’s second contest against Donovan—she ran against him in 2022 and only lost by 526 votes in a differently-drawn district.

The resident of Hales Corner has come a very long way from that housewife who was deeply unprepared for her husband’s life-altering injury. 

Bird had never paid much attention to politics up until then, but six days after her husband’s accident she happened to see on TV that President George H.W. Bush was signing the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 into law.

“I knew that law was going to affect us. I just didn’t know how,” she said. 

She found out a couple months later when her daughter started kindergarten and she brought Phil to the school for the first parent-teacher event, but found that there was no way to get Phil in his wheelchair to her daughter’s classroom. The school had no elevator.

However, because of the Disabilities Act, she knew that Phil had a right to be able to access the schools that his children would attend. 

“I’ll always be grateful for the people that fought for that bill to get passed,” she said of the bipartisan bill. “Because I don’t know where we would’ve been without that.”

Armed with her newfound knowledge about the law, Bird put together her own survey of the 22 schools in their district and started her fight to upgrade the buildings to all be wheelchair accessible.

That mission led her to join the League of Women Voters and then run for her local school board and win. It took two referendums and ten years, but Bird “got it done” and made the schools accessible for all, learning in the process that she was a problem-solver. 

That’s the skill she is now bringing to voters in her campaign for Assembly. 

“When I see a problem, I can’t sit back,” she said. It’s become both her personal and campaign motto.

Since first joining the Whitnall school board, she has earned a BA in Community Leadership and Development (at age 43) from Alverno College, served on her local Sanitary District Commission, was hired as the League of Women’s Voters’ executive director, and then took a job with the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.

At WASB, Bird worked on a research project to learn what school boards could do to raise the achievement levels of Wisconsin students. 

She is also now the president of her local Friends of the Library organization, where she helped fend off a right-wing book banning effort.

“I was miserable about the state of politics for years, especially after [former President Donald] Trump got elected, so I felt that this was my chance to get in there and try to fix it. I wasn’t going to sit back,” she told UpNorthNews of her first run against Donovan. ”It’s too divided, it’s broken.”

Her narrow loss only motivated her activism further. She knocked on doors in support of Justice Janet Protasiewicz and her successful effort to win a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. And she prepared to run again herself in 2024.

“It was really about hanging in there and creating the change we need to save democracy… I was watching the map development. I was ready to run again,” she said.

“What Republicans are doing is so damaging to democracy and what Trump did to try to overtake the US Capitol and attacking the very fundamental thing that we need to keep the country going. And that is the voting systems. To say that it was rigged is so wrong.”

Not surprising with her background serving on Wisconsin school boards, Bird is highly motivated to fight in Madison for increased funding for public education.

She believes that state Republicans are “totally out to dismantle public education as we know it.” Their capping of school district budgets has only shifted the costs down, forcing communities to have to “go out for referendums this year and a lot of them for operational expenses,” not just for large capital projects.

She strongly opposes Republican support of putting “a voucher in every backpack.”

Bird reported that “women’s rights” is the top issue of at least half of the thousands of doors that she’s knocked at since entering the 2024 race. Donovan, meanwhile, has called abortion “evil,” supported the enforcement of Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban and introduced Assembly Bill 975, which would have forced women to live under a 14-week abortion ban.

“Men will say, ‘I want my daughters to make their own decisions. I want my granddaughters to not have to worry that if they have a difficult pregnancy, a doctor’s going to go to jail for performing a lifesaving abortion,’” she said.

Bird thoroughly enjoys the conversations she has with voters in her district, even the Trump voters.

“You can be a Trump voter and I’m going to listen to you. I’m not here to argue,” she explained, saying she listens to figure out what they care about. “I almost always find out that we care about the same things. They do care about women’s rights, they do care about public schools and they do care about the economy.”

She says she’s able to build trust with them and even won over one Trump voter by asking if he would like his young daughter to hear how Trump talks. He replied, “Probably not.”

“I just love it when I have a good relationship with someone and I can help them vote for what’s best for this country,” she said in one of her series of door-knocking stories she posts on X (formerly Twitter).

When Bird’s potential constituents ask her about Donovan, she tells them he walks the Republican “party line” and that he served on the Milwaukee Common Council for 20 years, where he talked “a lot about law and order.”

“But what has he done to really make things better for Milwaukee as opposed to talking down Milwaukee, attacking Milwaukee, and moving out to the suburbs because, oh, he just doesn’t like it in Milwaukee? Well, you were on the council for 20 years, why didn’t you fix things?” she asked rhetorically.

“The difference between me and Bob Donovan is that I’m a problem-solver and he’s a complainer.”

Bird also had a personal revelation — as she worked to get the schools in her family’s district upgraded for both students and parents with disabilities —  about why it was such a critical mission for her.

I was “about six, seven, eight years into it and I’m like, ‘Why is this so important that I would go to these lengths to get access for my husband?’” she said. ”And then I realized that my dad wasn’t there for me, and I knew what that felt like and I wasn’t going to let my kids feel that just because they (the schools) weren’t wheelchair accessible.”

Bird shared that she had a childhood filled with trauma. Her mother divorced her father because he was an alcoholic and then the family, which included Bird’s three siblings moved in with her grandparents in the small village of Oakfield, where she “felt love” and was “cared for.”

She only saw her dad “a handful of times after the divorce.” She describes it as a painful situation. “I loved my dad,” she said, but he never quit drinking.

Then her mother remarried and had another child but that union also ended in divorce — this time as a result of domestic violence. “The marriage was so violent, I had to call my grandma at one point,” Bird said. ”I thought he was going to kill her.”

That experience has taught her to be “compassionate for others that might have gone through that kind of trauma.”

Now, she is bringing her compassion and her record of problem-solving to the voters in the 61st District.

Author

  • Bonnie Fuller

    Bonnie Fuller is the former CEO & Editor-in-Chief of HollywoodLife.com, and the former Editor-in-Chief of Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, USWeekly and YM. She now writes about politics and reproductive rights. She can be followed on her Substack at: BonnieFuller1 ‘Your Body, Your Choice.

CATEGORIES: Election 2024
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