 Back to the Donahue group. We're delighted that you could join us for another fast-paced, interesting, and entertaining half hour of news and commentary around Sheboygan County. Joining me today is my trusty panel of experts, former State Senator Cal Potter, Professor Tom Pineski, and semi-professor Kenneth Risto. My name is Mary Lynn Donahue. I'm a lawyer in town, and happy you could join us. As you can see, I've lost control of the show already, but that's alright. Semi-professors, I never know what she's going to call me next. I don't know what that means. And I don't think about it far enough in advance, and I'm afraid that shows. We just have a lot to talk about today. The recall has come and gone. I thought it would be just take a few minutes to recall the recall. And get your ideas, comments, and thoughts on the 3,000-some signatures that were, I was going to say, submitted. No, actually, shredded. Propornedly. On a radio show. What do you think? What do you think it says about the community, about the mayor, about where we stand as a city? People didn't want to recall. That's all. I think it speaks well to Sheboygan people. I think they looked at the issues, and they said, where's the beef? Where's the criminal activity? Why should we throw this guy out of office? And I think that was reflective of that. Couldn't raise the signatures. And I suspect if you'd analyzed that 3,000, it's probably husband and wife and a few kids and some. And so you actually get the number of households. It's probably less than that even. So the impact, I think, is a positive thing for the mayor and it's a positive thing for the community. Well, one of the questions I had was, does the mayor come out stronger or weaker as a result of all of this? I think it's kind of like negative campaigning. If you beat up somebody whether it's true or not long enough, eventually your image is tarnished by it. And I think he'd be better off had this not ever happen. But the fact of the matter is he didn't get recalled. He's not going through the election, so I think he can hang his hat and say, at least the majority of the community is behind me in what way I'd like to do and move on early enough in his term to build, I think, on it. I wonder, it's interesting, I was reading today in the Plymouth Review an article about the new mayor in Plymouth who's apparently having, at least from what I could pick up from the newspaper article, some trouble with his city council. So he read a prepared statement about how everybody needs to be nice and to work together and I thought, hmm, maybe there's another municipality that seems to have, at least right now, the trouble that Sheboygan has, which is kind of pulling together. I read with interest the mayor's unity breakfasts. And it sounded like a pretty good idea to me, ministers, to kind of host the event happening at the library, I think, right? Right, in Roka Room or something. Right, in sort of listening sessions or communication sessions. I think it's a great idea. Will anybody come? You know, I get the sense that the folks who had real disagreements with the mayor are people who are pretty much have consumed the Kool-Aid and I don't see them coming and sitting down and talking in a civil manner with the mayor. I think they've pretty much walked, I mean, given their comments after the recall, that they're appointing themselves to be the Perez watchdogs. I don't know who's going to come if he's really thinking about trying to reach out and build some bridges with those individuals. I don't think they're interested. Which, you know, I was thinking as you were talking about this whole issue in Plymouth, is I'm not sure if just people are taking their cues from what they see on cable television, you know, from Jerry Springer all the way to Hardball with, you know, with Richard, what's his name? I forget his name, Mark Matthews? Yeah, Chris Matthews. Chris Matthews, thanks. And who is the guy that got beat up? I just don't know if it's that, I don't know if it's my generation or our generation, and the era we grew up in, the whole issue of civility and civil disagreement has just been lost, or it's all those combinations of things, but it's certainly not just unique to Sheboygan that people have just lost the ability to just disagree and everything becomes personal and everything becomes, you know, Hardball, and it's disappointing. Yeah, the personal, I mean, hopefully we have disagree, we have disagreements, we have different opinions, and you air them out on the council floor or in discussions before or after council? Not in violation of the open meetings. But you go out afterwards and have a drink and there's still a person and a human being. As long as you don't have a quorum. As long as you don't have a quorum. But, you know, and you figure out how to work the council and how to survive, and sometimes you win a few, sometimes you lose a few, but you go on, you don't make it personal, which is, it seems like it's becoming more and more personal nationally, locally, everything else. That's what sort of you were saying. Become a personal issue, not just an intellectual issue. I'm spending a lot of time, like I said, I'm spending a lot of time trying to think about why that is, and I don't know if it's just people, like I said, taking their cues from what they see in the media, and I know in the classrooms, when I'm working with students, they quickly fall into that when there's disagreements about things, because you want to have social studies classes where kids are engaged in talking about those things, but it almost as if I always have to go through the, this isn't going to be, you know, all-star wrestling, you know, verbally, and we're not going to just, we're going to actually talk about substantive stuff, and you have to defend your opinions with reasons, as opposed to attacking the other person. Well, and just to point out that this is the building blocks of the Donahue group, is that we came together to, with diverse opinions, and to share them civilly, in a highly intelligent and entertaining fashion, but, and except for Ken Risto, we seem to be succeeding, I think, you know, relatively well. And I've been restrained, I thought. You know, I mean, I'll applaud the mayor for trying to bring some unity, but I don't know that he needs to do that. I mean, he just needs to kind of step back and just do the job, you know, I'll try to, you know, do a good job for the city of Chicago. I think offering, you know, to the other side is a good gesture, but I think, like Ken said, I don't know, they're going to show up, and they're probably preparing for the next mayoral election, and see if they can knock them off, you know, I think that's the next step. Yeah. And then there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that. Yeah. It will be interesting to see how all of that plays out. See, I think the mayor comes out a little strong at the end of the recall. Yeah, obviously, Cal's right that going through the process wasn't fun, and it certainly isn't helpful to getting the work of the city done. But I think that it was, in a sense, it was sort of a reverse referendum on being mayor. And I think at the very least, the city of Sheboygan is saying, let's give this guy some time to actually do his job, and we can make an evaluation when we have elections. And at the most, they can say, you know, they threw their best shot at me, and the public clearly is behind what I'm trying to do. So for him afterwards to reach out, I think is a really good thing, a very positive thing. And I think if he uses that as a basis for continuing forward with some of the tough, tough budget decisions are going to have to be made, I think he's going to be okay. I think he really is. It is going to be one tough budget. Was there ever a budget, Tom, when you were in the city council, where there was no proposed dollar increase? It is my understanding that that is going to be the mayor's proposal is that, and I may be wrong, but, and I know certainly from start to finish, things can change, but that there will be no dollar increase so that the amount of the budget for 2007 will be the same as it was for 2006. I may have that wrong, but that was my understanding of what the mayor was going to come up with. That's pretty revolutionary, I think. I mean, it, I don't recall, I guess, I think we always had some increase in my years on the council, but we always got shared revenue from the state, and we always counted on that. There was federal revenue sharing at that time, too. At time, too. We had federal revenue. There's none of that at all. Right. Well, see, that was one of the things. At that time, the federal revenue sharing was supposed to be earmarked for, I forget what, but it got used for operations in the police department. Oh, is that right? Yes. So it became operational money, and then, of course, then the police department grew a little, and then it disappeared. Now where does the money come from? Yeah, I think some of those, yeah, those federal block grants came out of various crime bills and those kinds of initiatives. So they were, yeah, they were earmarked for, for police, for police protections. Well, and you remember, we had the mayor here one session with all of his little budget posters, and it's, it's a pretty grim picture. Pretty grim. Which leads me into the next topic. Just yesterday, so you can tell when we've been taping, there was a three-hour meeting I read in the newspaper of the Public Safety Committee talking about the design for the police station. My own view is, is that referendum that Clayunas and Vanderheel had originally proposed, I don't think governments should use referenda a lot. I mean, we elect people to make decisions, and so they shouldn't be throwing those decisions back at the, at the community. But from time to time, something is important enough, and I thought just not a referendum on whether there should be a new police station, because I sure think there should be. What kind of class range do we want to look at? And I thought it was an interesting, an interesting referendum proposition, and Alderman Vanderheel actually, I think one of the proponents turned around and voted against it. What do you think? Good government, bad government, good idea, bad idea? Well, I think you're to a point now where you're saying, what is it that the police department needs to function? I mean, do they need the garage? Do they need any maintenance? Do they need a fitness room? Do they need a shooting range? What is it that that police department needs? Then start looking at what the bottom line is for that facility that everybody agrees they need. And eventually we're going to get a sticker shock because whether you build a garage for your house or you build a house or whatever, today things aren't cheap. And I think arguing over nine million or versus 13 million is probably splitting hairs really in a long run. And that station is going to sit there for 50 years or 60 years, and a difference of three, four million bucks I think is really petty politics in my opinion. And I think when you look at what we're investing in schools and, you know, God bless the Shabongan school system for getting the field houses and all the additions to the schools, but we've been made an investment that should be good for many, many years for the kids of this community. Of course we did that by binding referendums. Right. And I think people, when the push comes to shove, would say if the police need these things and it's going to cost us three or four million, I think the taxpayers probably are not going to have a revolt over the fact that it's going to be 13 million rather than nine million. I view it as I'm in charge of the dollars. I don't know what a police department needs. That's the police chief's job. However, I can ask the police chief to convince me that he needs this or I could say, I think that's fluff you could do without. Convince me that you need what you need and I could support it. But if you can't convince me, then since I'm in charge of the dollars, I won't give you the dollars for that My experience is the directors try to get as much as they can for what they, you know, they want the Lincoln or the Cadillac, Taj Mahal model, a police station. They want it all. If I have an opportunity, I want it all. Well, maybe you can't get it all. So I'm the only one that could say, yes, you could have the dollars. No, you can't have the dollars. I think, and here's my question. And can you, from a social studies civics perspective, but Tom, just having been on the council, it seems to me that the discussion here is properly in the public safety committee and then moving to the council. Is this something that the process is not, doesn't seem to be going very efficiently. Let me put it that way. Is this something that the mayor should be directing or is this really city council driven? I tend to think it's city council driven, but is it an executive or a legislative matter? And it's just because it seems to be going slow and pretty inefficiently, which is what government is from time to time, but... Governments like that all the time because it has to take a variety of points of view it wasn't ever designed to be efficient. And it's using taxpayer money. Exactly, exactly. So it needs to be accountable. And I think you also have to consider the dynamics of where the mayor is and the relationship he has with the council. And I think that's one of the tough spots that the mayor is in. If he takes initiative, you're going to have folks in the community accusing him of essentially running a junta. And then if he allows the council to organically grow the solution while he's not providing leadership. I saw that going on this summer where, you know, the council's allowed to make comments and I think there was some criticism of the mayor saying he doesn't have the control of the council. Well, first of all, Sheboygan City government isn't designed for him to have control of the council. And secondly, if he sat, if he actually did, you know, start stepping on people, all of a sudden we're saying, well, the guy's trying to quash all sorts of discussion and this is his agenda now. He's only going to call on the people that agree with him and we've got all that kind of yabbering going on. So he's in a tough spot. I think the council's going to have to pound around on this for a while and let them sort of find out where the public is on this. Because the public, again, is faced with, again, as we often are in contemporary times, we want government, we don't want to pay for it. You know, we want to have, you know, property tax freezes, but we want to have, you know, support our police department with whatever it is they want. And the city's going to face a really tough choice because I think what the police department will eventually want and what the public is willing to pay, well, it's certainly not going to be around $9, $10 million. Cal, I thought your point was interesting. To me, there is actually a fair amount of difference between $9 and $13 million. And I understand your historical perspective and overall it may not be that much. I guess my question, and I have not seen this in at least newspaper articles or at least recently, would be the cost per household under each scenario. So under a $9 million or $8.8 million and a $13 million, what would it cost the average homeowner over what period of time? And of course the school district, I thought, did a brilliant job of showing that this, I mean, that referendum was huge. That was a huge amount of money. $32 million, but they were very good at showing that it was $22 per house over a 20-year period of time or whatever it was. And we haven't... Thank you. Always a gentleman. We haven't really thought about... That hasn't been articulated for us and I think that would be helpful, quite frankly, on both sides of the discussion. What's it going to cost? We had a discussion, not the police station, but the marina, the lakefront. And I considered the lake... When I was on the council, it was the lakefront. Do we do New Harbor? And of course we had the PCBs prior to that. But I thought, you know, I'm going to vote for the money to put in the stone and everything to create a harbor, because that's our resource. The lake is our resource. If we don't have a marina, okay. Sometimes along down the road, we'll have a marina, but we need to protect our shoreline and have a harbor, because that's our resource. And there were people who said, we're stupid, you know? And that's going to be that point of view. So I think the council has to step up. I don't know the need or referendum. They talk to their constituents and some will say, yeah, you should do it. Some will say, no, you shouldn't do it. Council member decides, moves ahead. Talks to his other council members, what do you like about it? What don't you like about it? Talks to the mayor, what do you like about it? What don't you like about it? Formulate opinion and move ahead. Any predictions on when all of this is going to get resolved? I don't really know. Well, it's really, you know, we have a strong council system, not a strong mayor system in Sheboygan. We don't have a Chicago John Dele type system. And as a result, it takes some, I think, guts in the part of people who are in the city council to come up and make decisions. The marina was a good example. It wasn't popular, it wasn't easy, but they made a decision. The police station is another one of those issues. And if they can't stand the heat, they shouldn't be on the city council. And I think, like I said, talk to the police and find out what they need and then see exactly whether this is a Taj Mahal or is it something very basic and then go back to your architects and your contractors and see what it's going to cost. But it's not going to be cheap. Houses, as I said before, aren't cheap today. You don't get much for a million bucks today anymore. And as a result, I think you have to say that this is going to be more expensive probably than you'd like it to be. And we don't have to beat this dead station too much longer, but my own view is that particularly with schools but in any kind of public building, it's worthwhile making the place look decent. Because I think, and to build a decent facility, but also so that it's an edifice that the community can have some amount of pride in. And at last, too, there's certain materials last better than others. We have a tendency to stay with public buildings for 25, 30, 50, 80, 100 years. We had schools until we did the renovations. We had schools that were over 100 years old. Plymouth Utility Building was built in 1901. It has been in that same location. Post office was built during the Great Depression. It's part of the New Deal. That's still standing there. And the County Courthouse is still standing there strong. City Hall? Yeah. What's stunning to me is that they're talking about, when we have every 25 years, we have to build a brand new Bradley Center down in Milwaukee. Yeah. When it comes to sports complexes, we're not afraid to go and ask the taxpayers for various tax breaks or tax incentives or in some cases sales taxes to support those things. Well, that segues nicely into the next topic that I'd like to just have your thoughts on, which is the two Walmart's in this not huge area. I'm stunned at how quickly some private buildings get abandoned. Presumably when these two Walmart's go up, the Walmart at the Taylor Center will close down. The Century Store didn't last very long. The Pigley Wigley went through this great huge building spurt, if I can say, and they had built a fairly nice, a very nice supermarket on Wilson Avenue that they abandoned. And I know it's being used, so it's not as if it's just sitting there unused or whatever. But there doesn't seem to be that hesitation to just keep changing from one huge building to another huge building. So what do you think about having two Walmart's in Sheboygan? You know, the irony of building these buildings and letting them sit is that people complain about taxes, but actually people pay for those things. They pay for it through the prices that they pay other products. And so the private sector has a tax on you as well when they do things. It'd be nice if these buildings could be retrofitted for police stations or something else. They looked at that. Didn't they look at the Century Building? I thought for the police station, I thought it was a great idea, but in any event, who do I know? Because my children will say not much. Well, in the case of the Piggly Wiggly on the south side, they built over there solely as I talked to some of the folks who used to be part of that organization. They built there solely so that no one else would build over there. That was the only reason that drove that decision over across the street. They realized that was a prime piece of real estate that was going to be developed. And if they didn't build over there they would end up having some competition. It's worked very well for them until... I think the Walmart that's being built in the south side is a super Walmart with groceries, right? So Piggly Wiggly is the only grocery store in the south side of town. I know some folks will drive on the other side to get there to go over to Park and Save or whatever it's called this week. But really, I mean, that's that. What are you going to do? You look at the Kmart over in the south side of Sheboygan which has maybe five or six or eight or ten cars except for the holidays over there and it's criticized for being older. Our mall is always criticized for being older and not looking modern enough. It's just the nature of a competitive commercial enterprise is there is going to be this, what did Schumpeter call it, the creative destruction of capitalism. Am I thrilled that Walmart's coming to town? No, I'm not thrilled at all about it. But obviously when you look at what they're going to bring to the tax base of the town of Sheboygan and the city of Sheboygan, it's going to be quite the, I suppose it'll be an improvement in that respect. It's probably a reflection on the people in Sheboygan County looking for a price in their shopping habits. I mean, we've got a super center in Plymouth and you're going to have two in Sheboygan. That's a lot in the county of 110,000 people. I guess that's my question. We just do keep building and building and building and they obviously are profitable. Walmart is not in the business to lose money and so it will be and tax space wise, of course it makes a lot of sense. The Walmart on the south side of town has energized that area of the city in just an extraordinary way. The traffic issues for the Deer Trace complex, getting onto the interstate, at one point I understood that the Department of Transportation had four or five roundabouts planned all within like a mile so that my mom who never was able to get used to the 8th Street rotary, you know, people would just be circling around and around. Sheboygan is nuts after what we went through down on East Street. It'll be interesting to see. A few years ago everything basically was on the north side. Then you had Taylor Mall went up, you had Northgate, you had all the stores up there. What was on the south side? You had that big piece of land that had the oil tanks or whatever, containers on it which wasn't being used. There were no stores down there. And now the south side? You might have Renaissance on the north side with a new Walmart there and the new Monards right across the street from the new Walmart. Where does that put Taylor Heights? Which seems to be turning into somewhat of a ghost town and I always get nervous when I see cash and check-in goes and whatever those things are called where people are borrowing money on their paychecks. And similarly in the south side it used to be very vibrant, I think it was called Washington Square where the Kmart is and there used to be a park and save there and that was considered, you know, and then as you worked your way down, Burnett's was there. That used to be the vibrant area working all the way down to say Union Avenue. Everything seems to be fish. What's going to happen is you'll have the development on the far south side of town but it'll be interesting to see what happens over there. So the next big problem or insight is what do you do with the properties that are becoming little used? Who's going to be creative and find creative uses for the buildings and or the land? Well who knows? Maybe we have a major league team here and buy some up and build a, build a sports arena. Or maybe that's where the new police station can go in the old Walmart building because I think never mind. Discussions are siding. I'm just kidding. The nursing home issue remains lively in Sheboygan County. I thought there were two very thoughtful pieces point counterpoint in the in the Sheboygan press a few days ago. One from the Union perspective, one from Supervisor Van der Steen. I think really reflecting the complexities of a government entity operating in a highly, highly, highly competitive area. Nursing home care is it's like opening a restaurant. When you do it well, it's really a treat but it's a mighty, mighty hard way to make a living. Any thoughts about, I mean it seems to me that it's a done deal in some respects that Sunny Ridge will be privatized and people will, if they have jobs, the jobs aren't going to be as good as they are now. And somehow I think the community suffers from that. But what are your thoughts? Well, I think there's an offer on the table and the county board probably looks at their compadres around the state and sees only about three counties still in nursing home business. I think they're hell bent on saying we don't want to be in the nursing home business and the alternative now is this offer a realistic one, is it a good one? And if that's the case, I think the scenario you played out is going to happen. I think that the consumer's point of view will be as the feds continue to low ball reimbursement formulas to private homes, how many slots will there be for people who need public assistance nursing home care? Right, and it is very tough. One of the good things that's come out of this whole movement I think is putting time and effort, not enough money, but at least some money into alternatives to nursing home care. Because as much as we talk about how we love our nursing homes, people are, the parents who say to their kids do anything, but don't put me in a nursing home. It's a heartbreaking decision and so it really is a very, very tough, tough measure. I think government just is not going to be growing. This is a little different because private sector building, what's the building going up on 6th Street? The retirement homes. Retirement homes, assisted living, nursing home. Right. The full service. Seamless transition. I think actually that's a wonderful idea and it has worked well out on the north side with Morningside. We've got to wrap it up, but it's been a pleasure and we'll see what our predictions bring.