You’ll hear that from every community. They’ll have their own story about how they influenced all Indian culture. But we look at the food and the dance and the fun party aspect and that’s unique to our region.”

And yet Chawla’s parents also encouraged their children to learn English and make their own way while they lived in the Detroit area and then moved to Rochester, New York when Chawla was in fourth grade.

“They really emphasized the fact that we needed to speak and learn English very fluently,” Chawla recalled. “They never pressured us to be outside of the American culture. They taught us about our culture. But they didn’t do it in a dogmatic way. It was interesting growing up. I sort of resisted Indian culture. And I think that is a common thing with young immigrant kids. But eventually, as I have gotten older, I’ve come to embrace it more and more. I talked to my parents this past weekend and tried to get some family recipes written down because I think sometimes if you don’t learn the cooking and the culture that you were brought here with, if you don’t learn it, it just dies. Those family recipes might be cooked for the last time and they may never get tasted again. I think it is important to take whatever my parents know and to teach it to my daughter. She’s 12-years-old.”

And his daughter is the opposite of Chawla growing up. She embraces the culture.

“I’m actually taking her to my cousin’s wedding and so she is going to her first Indian wedding in a couple of weeks,” Chawla said. “She is going to get the full immersive experience. This wedding is in Puerto Rico, so I’m like, ‘Where are they going to get the horse from so the groom can come riding in on a horse? Who is going to cater it and do all of that?’ It’s going to be very fun. I have to do a lot of shopping for my daughter so that she has enough outfits for all of the events because she is growing out of all of her Indian clothes.”

Chawla learned the benefit of hard work growing up, especially from his mother, and how it leads to opportunity and the American Dream

“My mom was an army nurse in India,” Chawla said. “And so when we came to the United States, whatever certifications and degrees you have in another country, they don’t really apply here. You have to sort of start over. I really admire my mom because she was learning to speak and write English and at the same time, she was studying for all of her exams. She started as a nurse aide and then became a licensed practical nurse and then eventually studied and became a registered nurse. I think seeing how she would not only go and work 50-60 hours and come home and study and in between all of that, still have time to care for her family and cook for her kids and support her family in these ways, I found that work ethic very inspiring. And I think there is a common thread amongst a lot of communities having that work ethic and putting work first, education first and family first in that way where one generation sacrifices for the opportunities of another generation.”

In his professional life, Chawla is the director of software and data engineering for the non-profit Search, which collects, share and analyzes data especially in the area of public safety for public agencies. In one area, it allows them to see the lasting impact of involvement in the criminal justice system on people.

“One of the big efforts right now is the Clean Slate initiative,” Chawla said. “What they are trying to do is expunge a lot of the criminal histories that people have. You go and apply for a job and people see that you had an arrest or conviction years ago, that could impact your ability to get housing and employment. A lot of the times, the quality of those criminal histories is not very accurate. You might have been arrested and then all of a sudden, that charge was disposed of or there is no actual prosecution or official thing happen, but it is still on your record. Or these days, with a lot of the changes in marijuana laws, al lot of those changes come with expunging people’s criminal records and removing those convictions. We do a lot of work with that. I think that work is very important because it really helps people to get an opportunity to really achieve their potential and find housing and employment, which is pretty central to building a foundation.”

Chawla got involved in politics early in his life in Madison, working on other people’s campaigns.

“A lot of the time, I spent working on people’s campaigns, building websites, helping out, just volunteering,” Chawla said. “I also worked as a poll worker. I also volunteer on state and national campaigns doing doors and really just organizing people to get out and vote.”

But the 2016 federal election had a deep impact on Chawla as he saw the opportunity to achieve the American Dream that his family took advantage of as immigrants slipping away for those who come after.

“These days, income inequality is off the charts,” Chawla emphasized. “There is a real opportunity gap. We’re seeing an erosion of our institutions like public education and even our civic and political institutions. So one of the things that I thought was important was this country has given so much to the immigrants who have come here, so I think it is important to give everything we have for what we have been given.”

And so when long-time supervisor John Hendrick decided to retire in 2018. Chawla decided to throw his hat in the ring and emerged from a four-way primary to run a hard-fought, clean campaign that saw him win by a 52-48 margin. He has been unopposed and reelected twice since then.

Chawla has focused on the environment as a part of the Environment, Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee. One of his top concerns is the ability of Dane County to mitigate the impact of climate change.

“When I was elected in 2018, our district in the Isthmus here had a lot of flooding pressure,” Chawla recalled. “There are a lot of people who are very concerned about the safety of their homes. If the storm that hit us would have shifted 10-15 miles, we would have seen a very different outcome in the Isthmus and the city of Madison. We saw a lot of devastation in western Dane County and the Cross Plains area. What we are trying to do is build additional flooding resiliency. The main way to do that is move water through our watershed faster. So we’ve been working towards that. We had an entire taskforce on lake levels. I think we came up with some very solid recommendations. It was a pleasure to serve on that committee.”

And even though it seems like it has rained every day in April and one would think the water table is very high with a potential for future flooding, Chawla put it in perspective.

“We were in a drought condition last year and for the spring so far, we are three-tenths of an inch below our average,” Chawla related. “Even though we’ve had a lot of rain events, we haven’t had a lot of rain fall from them. One of the things that we’ve implemented — this was a resolution that I put out — is we have different dams in our watershed. Based off weather patterns, those dams are adjusted. One of the things that I felt was important to do was for the county to inform the community about we are managing those dams based on weather conditions and make that information public. We should know when they are holding water back because they are trying to get the water levels up, which is something they actually did because the water levels were very low coming into the year. And that is also based on 6-14-day weather projections on when to open those dams and really get the water flowing through. I think having that aspect of public information and having the public know what we are doing to manage lake levels and why we are doing it is very important as a way to educate the community, but also as a way for us to learn if we have done things right or wrong.”

The other crucial environmental issue is clean water.

“We have a lot of phosphorus from a lot of manure and dairy farming operations in our rural and in the urban area, there are a lot of leaves from trees that combine to create a lot of strain on our lakes,” Chawla said. “We’re looking at a lot of ways to reduce that phosphorus pollution, which is removing the legacy phosphorus pollution that is in the creeks and watersheds, partnering with producers to put things in like cover crops and buffer strips and really keep that manure out of our watershed. And a real emerging issue is the PFAS contamination. Those are forever chemicals. You can take one eyedropper full of them and drop it in Lake Monona and that body of water would be impaired permanently. When we think about the margin of error that we have, it’s very low. And we also think about the health effects. A lot of people subsist off of the fish in our lakes. And a lot of times, there may be an income disparity there between the folks who are recreationally fishing and those who are doing it for subsistence. If you think about the potential for irreparable damage to people’s health and to our drinking water, it’s horrible. We’ve already shut down one well out of an abundance of caution. But if we get into a situation where we have PFAS contamination like French Island near La Crosse where they had to switch to using bottled water, it could create a dire situation that we would not be able to recover from.”

With a newly-elected Dane County Board, the most diverse in its history, Chawla sees the long-lingering jail project that has gone from $75 million to $266 million and for various reasons, including the pandemic, has yet to be built. Chawla has voted against the jail project three times although a strong majority have passed the jail project amendments. And now that the jail population has declined during the pandemic due to various factors.

“We’ve seen in the pandemic a real steep decline in our jail population,” Chawla said. “That’s been due, in part, to a difference in the way that we are policing. There is a lot more cite and release citations that local police departments are doing rather than arresting someone and bringing them to the jail. There is also a lot of different programs that we can us like electronic monitoring. And we can look at how quickly we can give people their initial appearances by looking at night and weekend court and using some of the techniques that we have been using doing a lot of these virtual hearings. We also have to look at very important things like adjusting our Huber model to give us the possibility of having that managed under the purview of a public health perspective and by our Health and Human Services Department rather than having a criminal justice sort of perspective.”

According to Chawla, there are several jail facilities including the 6^th and 7^th floor of the City-County Building and the much newer Public Safety Building. Chawla would love to take a data-driven lens to the jail project to determine the most cost-beneficial and humane way that the jail project can be built.

“One of the things I was really proud of is we worked with the Sheriff’s Office to get a daily jail report so we know the population of the jail, why the people are there, and the demographics of the population as well,” Chawla said. “Having that information and looking at trends and having this report from close to the start of the pandemic to now is going to show us how our jail population has changed. And that is going to really help us going forward. I think we can learn from the pandemic and we can take what we’ve learned in the pandemic to look at how we can have a permanent reduction in our jail population. We haven’t seen a real public safety impact from that. I think particularly when you look at things like cite and release, someone has done something wrong and they have received a citation for it and don’t spend a night in jail and then don’t come to their trial and it gets adjudicated, I think that is a better approach to take. There is less disruption on a person’s life and it reduces the chances of recidivism or committing more serious offenses.”

There are a lot of issues that the Dane County Board will face in the coming two years. And Yogesh Chawla stands ready with his data-driven lens to help preserve the high quality of life and restoring the possibility of opportunity for all Dane County residents. The fate of Dane County is in the board’s hands.