 Welcome to this week's legislative update. I'm Jim Baumgurt. Your host and with me is Nanette Wille-Busch, who is the chair and she's from Elkhart Lake. I am. And live on a farm. I do, I do, yes. That's not who we have here. We have the county treasurer, Laura Henning-Lorens, and we're going to be talking about some of the outstanding things that have been going on in that treasurer's office that has saved county residents hundreds of thousands of dollars over a period of time. Oh yes, real money. And a treasurer is a rather frugal person, so they like saving money. So welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, both of you. Well, we had done a program a week earlier and now we have another one we want to talk about. What do we want to talk about? Well, first we want to ask, Laura, thank you for being here, first of all. Tell us about who you are, how you got to be a treasurer, and what you like most about it. Okay. Well, my husband and I live here in Sheboygan County, of course. We're lifelong residents of Sheboygan County. We love it here. I graduated with my bachelor's degree from Lakeland University, and I majored in accounting and business administration, and I minored in economics. From there, it pretty much, the story goes, I had worked for Sheboygan County in an accounting position, and while I was going to school, had loved working with numbers. So after I graduated and after my predecessor, Sandy Fisher, had announced her retirement, I thought, well, I'd like to go back to the county because I had been working in the public sector at the time and wanted to work with a great team of people in that office. So I was elected in November of 2002 and took my first of office in January of 03. 14 years, and you still love it. I still love it. And one of the few jobs where you have to swear on the Bible that you're going to uphold the county and state constitution and the county rules, and most people don't have to do that. Yes. So you're in charge of our money. That's part of our duties. Yes, we are the fiduciary of the county, and one of our responsibilities is to safeguard the people's money. So to that end, we, property taxpayers, would like to know that it's being well spent and that it's being spent responsibly, efficiently, and you are, as a county employee and your staff, you are using money to use your office. So tell us some of the innovative things you've done to save us money and to make your office more efficient. If I could just, before Laura starts, sometimes to save money, you have to spend money for updating computers so that they can do what it wants rather than to hang on to something so it's still old and making it harder for work groups to get their job done. So spending money sometimes saves money. Right. So beginning in January of 2009, I'll start that far back. Okay. The real property listing was consolidated into our office. Can you tell me what you mean by real property listing? Real property listing, sure. Real property listing, after somebody files their deed and their register deed's office, that information flows to our office, and that information is utilized to update the assessment and tax rolls. Basically, we need to make sure that when we send out tax bills, the bottom line is it has to go to the bite owner, the right legal description, the right acreage, the right school districts, et cetera. It is tricky, too. And it's a very technical and complex work that gets done. And I didn't mean to interrupt you. That's okay. So how have you been innovating? Well, the property listing came into our office at that time. We also took on the assessment for the entire county except for the city of Sheboygan. So that was a big change in our office, but the bottom line savings was a minimum of $70,000 per year. That you saved the taxpayer? That we started saving taxpayer money, yes. You worked hard to save more. Per year, yes. By April of 2010, it was apparent that combining city services with the county and us taking on the city of Sheboygan property listing made sense. So a little over a year later, we were consolidated with that piece, and that came into our office. And much has happened. We continue every year through the budgeting process to make sure that we have up-to-date computer equipment so that we don't fall behind as far as that goes. And it also could be a security issue if we fell too far behind. You also save staff if you get equipment that is more efficient instead of adding staff because you've got more duties. You can either stabilize your staff or lower it a little bit. Right, right. And we've done a lot of those things through the consolidations that we've done. We further went on to consolidate. Many people don't know this, but our tax bills used to be calculated in our IT department and printed there. And IT for those that don't know what IT stands for? Information technology, yes, yes. And it just so happened that they were working on consolidations and it made sense for that to fall into our office. So in the very end, our municipalities that we communicate to were getting communications from one office versus what used to be at least three or four offices. So it also consolidated communications. But most recently, our very most exciting and most recent innovation was going live with our new land record enterprise software. That was a huge, huge savings to taxpayers in that we have to pay annual maintenance for these softwares. The annual maintenance for the computer software that we use every single day. And it just so happens that that is 50% lower than what we're currently paying to the company that we had been using. So a big difference in the cost there. So we're really happy to report that. I'm sure the county gave you a big bonus for that. No, no, no, no. When that had been nice, I'd have to say no. You don't get what you say. No, it is. And we also went live with a new web portal. You wouldn't imagine how important that is to folks. Yeah, when I realized I could pay my taxes online without having to drive to Sheboygan, that's huge. Yes, yes. Talking about that, that is one of the innovative things that we've done is we've utilized a third-party vendor to do our online payments. And it grows every year. You'd be amazed how many people pay online. One of the things that is important in this whole process is that you're elected by the people and independent of what the county administrator or the county board decides while they can influence it. You are independent enough so that you and all the other treasurers in the state can come up with innovative ideas that will save tax-worth money. You're not on the calling and whim, although we all are a little bit, to some boss. You are at disposal of the people of your county and responsible to them. And that check and balance is a wonderful thing that needs to really be protected so that we can continue the efforts that you and the other treasurers have been doing throughout Wisconsin. Yes, I think that's very well said, Jim. I couldn't have said it better myself. I think that if that were ever to change, I think that would just dramatically lessen the voice of the people in their government, because it's not our government, it's their government. So, I'm sorry, you're doing innovative things. Yes, well, we've already covered just about everything on our list here in terms of innovation. I want to make sure that we fit this in. If people have a question, how do they contact you? Can they call you? Can they email you? Can they just reach you directly? We are very approachable, so we are located in the county administration building on Fifth and New York Avenue. We have an email address of www.sheboykincounty.com as our website. You can also email us at countytreasurer at sheboykincounty.com. Our telephone number quickly is 920-459-3015. And your busiest time of the year is when? I mean, it's busy all the time. Right before tax time or when you're getting tax money? It just gets very busy starting in November at the end of October, the beginning of November, because we start to build the tax bills. One other thing that's real important in our office is the innovation we've done with the lottery and gaming credit, because that's very important. We want to make sure, and it is our job to make sure that the most people that are eligible for that credit on their tax bill receive it. Whether they buy a lottery ticket or not. Whether they buy a lottery ticket or not, correct. I get a little bit of my money back. I don't buy much, but when it gets up to something worthwhile like $150 million, I'll buy a couple of dollars. Oh, good. Keep doing that. I encourage you to do that. It comes back with property tax relief. It does. And just to be clear, you're not the office that sets our property tax bill at the right. That's the municipality. So if people think they're paying too much in taxes, they don't complain to you. They complain to their local town chairperson. And with two minutes left, which you wanted an extra minute here? Yeah. Each municipality sets their own levy, and then we receive that and we make the tax bills in December. And you had something that you wanted to have a spare minute before I end the story? Just that you want people to know. Just that our office is open to them. We're very available to them. And if they ever do need to, if they have a problem with their property taxes, we run into people that, you know, life happens to them. And we want to work with all of our taxpayers. For closures, you try to work with them to make sure that they don't have to sell. And that's an effort that I think the county does a good job at trying to prevent foreclosures rather than to see how many they can do. But out of time, we are running treasure of Sheboygan County. I want to thank you for joining Nanette and I and sharing with the public some of the wonderful things that you're doing and a very complicated subject. Until next week, this has been Legislative Update. Thank you.