Tickets to Green Bay Packers games are getting more expensive for the third year in a row. The team on Thursday announced a $3 to $5 per ticket price increase for the coming season. “Our goal each year is to be at the league average in terms of our tickets prices,” President and CEO Mark Murphy said in a statement. “This increase maintains our position near the league average.”

Workers at a Janesville company are playing a key role in the gubernatorial recall controversy. Workers at Data Shop Inc., or DSI, are reading copies of the recall petitions and entering the names onto a database, under contract with the state's Government Accountability Board. DSI received digital copies of the petitions and has been working on the project since last week.

Merrill residents and business owners are torn on whether their city needs a new, 120,000-square-foot Walmart SuperCenter to replace the town's roughly 23-year-old, 73,870-square-foot one. At the heart of the local debate is how Merrill's locally owned stores -- particularly grocers -- will compete with the big box store, which plans to include groceries and a pharmacy in the proposed building. Merrill is home to about 10,000 people -- and Dave's County Market and Drew's Piggly Wiggly grocery stores, along with several specialty shops that will compete with Walmart.

Madison and Middleton are at odds over state legislation introduced this week that would help Middleton deliver financial support to help four companies — including Spectrum Brands — expand there. The bill would loosen restrictions on tax incremental financing in Middleton. In addition to Spectrum, which recently announced it would relocate from Madison's West Side to Middleton, the employers planning to grow include Electronic Theatre Controls and two unnamed companies.

The Janesville City Council on Monday will consider a $9 million incentive development agreement with SHINE Medical Technologies. The city would guarantee SHINE about $5 million—including utilities, land and $1.5 million cash—if certain criteria are met, including property tax payments and employment. The city also would agree to back $4 million in loans from a private party.

Two economists at a 2012 real estate forecast gathering Thursday gave differing views of the economy ahead, with one more optimistic than the other. For some local business people at the downtown event, neither was optimistic enough. Marquette University professor Mark Eppli was the less optimistic speaker. "It's difficult to get momentum in single family home market," Eppli said. "Apartments are clearly back from a property-type perspective, retail is on its way back, office is still in trouble as far as the eye can see and industrial is okay." The more optimistic speaker, Bob Bach, chief economist with Grubb & Ellis, said, "The bottom line is that the economy is doing pretty well, even better than the Federal Reserve thinks it's doing. We're heading in the right direction. We've seen a pickup in economic indicators, but I'm not ready to put on a party hat. We still have a way to go because we're still digging out of a deep hole. Unemployment is still elevated. We're still six million payroll jobs shy of where we were in 2007."

Changes proposed to attract more tenants to Chippewa Valley Technical College's high-tech business incubation center include broadening its focus, a $1.35 million remodeling project and potentially even a new name.

A Portage County Circuit judge will decide today whether to bar the city from redeveloping CenterPoint MarketPlace. That decision would stop the city from carrying out its redevelopment plans for the mall until a judge could decide in April whether the city properly condemned the property. The city revealed plans in December 2010 to move Mid-State Technical College into the downtown mall, and condemned the property in May after negotiations to buy the property from owner Valley Bank fell through.