1410 WIZM

Alli Karrels, the Executive Director of a museum in Sparta, says they are facing a crisis right now that could possibly shut down the museum. The Deke Slayton Space Museum honors “Deke” Slayton, who was one of the original NASA Mercury Seven astronauts and grew up around Sparta.

The Deke Slayton Museum has been a Monroe County institution for over a decade. The museum receives over half its funding from the City of Sparta in the form of a $40 thousand annual grant. The city of Sparta is considering cutting the funding they receive for 2012. This reduction in funding would shut the museum down. The city's budget committee meets on the 27th.

The museum has artifacts on loan from NASA including a piece of the moon, a bicycle collection spanning decades, and they provide tourism and education for the community.

Not too often you wake up and your drugs are on fire. That's what happened to an Onalaska man who, along with a roomate, are now in jail facing drug charges.

On Monday, after Onalaska fire fighters put out a fire in the home of 24 year old Scott Stalsberg, they found drug drug paraphernalia and mushrooms in the basement. After a another search, police found more drug paraphernalia, mushrooms, marijuana and the prescription drug Hydrocodone.

Now Stalsberg along with 23 year old Justin Dahlberg are in jail facing a combined 5 drug charges. Another man from Madison who was staying in the residence was released on signature bond for possession of Marijuana.

Second meeting this week for the special committee of lawmakers in Washington tasked with cutting over a trillion dollars from the federal budget. La Crosse congressman Ron Kind is watching the work of the debt supercommittee from the outside but says they can't get from here to there without dealing with soaring increases in health care spending.  Kind says the key is for the federal government to change how it reimburses for health care.  From paying for quantity of care to paying for quality.   Fix that and get people back to work, Kind says, and the supercommittee's task becomes a lot less difficult.

If the supercommittee can't agree on at least $1.2 trillion in cuts by Thanksgiving, automatic across-the-board cuts will kick in.

Time for another look at crossing guard numbers in La Crosse, perhaps. Police have cut the numbers of guarded intersections in the city down to five for the current school year. But that plan is based on out of date measurements, says city council member Bob Seaquist.  He wants another look at a couple of Losey boulevard intersections.  Seaquist says there's more kids now living to the east of Losey who could use a crossing guard and the traffic is heavier than when police measured.  Police cited tight budgets for the most recent crossing guard cuts.