 and welcome back to the Donahue Group. We're so glad that you could join us for another half hour of scintillating conversation about issues of importance, at least locally and around the state. Joining me today, former state Senator Cal Potter, also former assistant superintendent of schools for library services, Tom Paneski, still hard at work as a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Shabuigan, enjoying his summer, I hope. Ken Risto, he still has a job at the Shabuigan area's school district, so we're really pleased about that. As of the taping. At least as of the taping. Director of social studies for the district and a fine teacher. My name is Mary Lynn Donahue. I'm a lawyer and the host of this fine program. We're gonna talk today about issues in the city and in the county. It's been, as always, don't we live in an interesting place, but it's been an interesting time. I thought we would just start out with what I think is one of the guzzier moves of the Shabuigan press in recent history, which was to publish, quite publicly, the salaries of about, what, 40 or 50,000 people. It just seemed that way. Your salary was published. My salary was in there. My salary was in there. And, of course, Cal, you're in retirement and I just claw privately for whatever little bits and pieces I can get here and there, so there's the one advantage to the private sector. I forgot what you make. I think I remember what you make. So how do you feel about that? I canceled my subscription within 15 minutes. All right. I have no problem as a public servant having the taxpayers who are paying the freight know what the beginning salaries of teachers are and see the salary schedule, what we pay people, what the top of the schedule is. I have no problem with them finding out the range which we pay building principals and administrators. I have no problem with them publishing Joe Sheehan's salary because he negotiates that one-on-one and there isn't a salary range. In my view, this is the Sheboygan Press trying to sell newspapers. And if you're that desperate to sell newspapers, you're obviously a dying dinosaur in the tar pit of history. And we have goodbye to the Sheboygan Press in a couple of years because this is just the desperate act of a desperate institution. I think in a dumb business decision, if you're trying to sell newspapers and you've got literally thousands of public employees who are now ticked off and who will cancel their subscription, where do they expect to pick up those losses? They're not gonna get it from people who say, oh, I love the Sheboygan Press now that they've finally published these salaries. There's no constituency. I think that they're gonna gain out of this thing. So they're just gonna promote ill will amongst a good segment of our public sector who are good, hardworking people and have them cancel and they're gonna be sitting there with fewer and fewer subscriptions. So I really don't see what their motivation was other than the real boneheaded decision that this was somehow in public good. My reaction, one of the rationales I said was, these are people paid for by the people. The people don't have any choice to have to pay through the taxes. Well, every time you turn on your light, you don't have any choice about Wisconsin Power and Light. Why don't you publish the oligopoly salaries of theirs or possibly WebCo or Wisconsin Public Service when you heat your home. You wanna see some salaries. Some of these corporate salaries are six figures. You'll make the public employees blush as to what some of those folks get. But nobody talks about some of the other salaries. We have to pay that we don't have any choice in. So I'm not so sure that this is like the great public service issue that they say it is. And most of the salaries were higher than mine. So I was a little. I only worked 35 years, 36 years at the University of Wisconsin-Chimoygan and the university system, it got taught it as being very efficient, yeah. So my salary was lower and I saw another person who I know applied for a part-time job at the campus maybe three years ago. And now I saw her name at LTC and she was making maybe 4,000 less or 3,000 less than I was. I thought, oh, and I just have 37 years and she's got two, two, one. I thought, oops, well, whatever. Well, now here's the worm that starts to crawl through the wood because I think your points are well taken. Your points are well taken. But I for one, at least until I got kind of bored or just sick of following the lines, I with great interest read through some of those salaries. And I mean, and it is just that sort of human nature to want to know what other people are making. And we haven't used the word oligarchy on this show before or the descriptor that you used, but I think your point is well taken as well. I'd pick a fight with you Ken on the specific amounts. My own feeling was is that people who are not in policy-making positions who are just everyday working people probably deserve a little bit more privacy, quite frankly, than the press gave them simply because they aren't policy makers. Once you start getting into a policy-making position, whether you're a principal or the coordinator and assessment curriculum developer of. Are you looking, are you searching for my title? Yeah, I could search for your title for a good long time and never find it. I'm the only specialist in the district. Ah, a specialist. I'm a special specialist. A specialist. Unique. Yeah, I thought that was just for insects, but in any event, once you get into those kinds of positions, to be honest with you, I think it's fair game. I think that, and I have no problem with attaching a name to the position, but if it's a school secretary for goodness sake or a brand new teacher or even a teacher who's been in the district for some period of time, I guess to me it is that sort of curiosity that does not bring out the best in all of us, you know, as I'm reading through and saying, aha. Oh. Hmm. Yeah, just to be able to cross it. Of course I looked at the highest salaries and I went the top five or top three, LTC. And then they could think, okay, that's an appointed board. That's, and they have taxing power and they're not accountable. Is that going to be subject to change in the future? It may or may not be. Yeah. Yeah, so that's what crossed my mind. But overall it seems to have died. I mean, there hasn't been any ongoing dissent. I was surprised that there wasn't a lot of people who make Walmart salaries, writing back saying, I don't make this, I covet them and I think they shouldn't make that. I think maybe the press thought that's what they would generate is a lot of letters to the editor, but it sure is indeed very quiet as a response. Yeah. So I don't know if it was worthwhile or not. And I hope it was accurate. You know, I know that in many cases that some of the state newspapers used to do that with state employees and sometimes they would in some positions include benefits and others not. And sometimes, you know, cursory reading of these was not a fair comparison because the data they got sometimes indeed included benefits. And in the private sector, we generally don't talk about people's, you know, packages that they have, retirements and others as part of the pay. We say they get so much per hour, the salary is so much. Also I thought that the years of experience was potentially misleading because Chief Kirk has not been the police chief for 28 years. I was on the police and fire commission when we hired him and so it's less than a decade and not certainly not to take away from the fact that Ian I'm going to presume he has 28 years experience in the police department, but people just reading those things casually may have drawn conclusions that weren't substantiated. So the district numbers were all over the board. I mean, they gave me credit for three years of parochial school education. So I'm not sure we had a violation of separation of church and state there, but on the other hand, one of my colleagues didn't get recognition for the years she served in a different school district. And so there was some real variation. Some administrators who worked their way through the ranks were as likely like Kirk. Their years were added in there even though they were only in those administrative posts for a couple of years and so on and so forth. So there was, yeah, the years were, the numbers were fairly accurate from at least what I talked to people about. I didn't look at the list, because I thought it'd be really hypocritical to meet a list after complaining on being there, but I did get one telephone call from a concerned anonymous taxpayer. This seems that most concern taxpayers are anonymous. Wanting to know why I was paid more than most teachers and then I had explained that I have an 11 month contract as opposed to a 10 month contract. He thought that was reasonable and I was so pleased that he thought that was reasonable. Yeah, were you upfront with him? Yeah, yeah, and that wasn't, of course, mentioned or that doesn't discuss ministerial administrators. Some have 12 months, some have 11 months and you've got all those kinds of variables as well. Exactly, exactly. Different responsibilities. Our elementary principals, some of them have responsibilities beyond their building and then some of them don't and so it gets to be like an apples and oranges situation. And to its credit, I think the press did indicate that there were not clear, that the comparative information might be somewhat misleading from position to position and so forth, but yeah. That was fun, you keep the page and sit down at dinner. Who's sorry, they teach at the school system, let's find them, who's teaching at the UW, let's find them. Except for Ken, you know, who's purer than all of that. So I was, I was. But just by listening I could figure it out. I mean, for people to tell me. Yeah, sure, yeah. Just bless you, I think that's, that is so principled, I'm impressed. So, and the rest of us can fill you in because I have them all committed to memory. By the way, I don't, by the way, just for the record, I don't make policy. Well, that's another argument. Okay, okay, okay, you read his opinions. I make sure opinions which are usually ignored. Provide input. Just when you thought it was safe to take out construction bonds for the police station, that was just an interesting couple of weeks. Now, a lot of this happened when you, Tom, were in Germany with the mayor. Are you suggesting a connection? No. Oh, I don't recall. Well, they didn't have a council meeting or anything. Well, that's true. That's true, I'm sorry. Do you think there's a connection there too? Yeah. You're not here, we don't have a council meeting. The mayor was there in Germany, and I don't think they had a council meeting. Tom and his spouse were on the mayor's trip to Germany, in Italy, and maybe we'll have a chance to talk about that a little bit. And I apologize, that did come right after you folks came back, and Alderman Boran, newly elected, introduced a resolution to set up a study committee relating to Act 40, which is a recently enacted legislative provision which lets municipalities, if they have contracted with a county law enforcement agency, to eliminate their police departments. So apparently in other parts of the state where there was some discussion about eliminating police departments, the conclusion was drawn that you couldn't do it. That statutorily, if you had a police department, you had to maintain a police department. So Act 40 is all about the business of how you can, in fact, if you contract for other services, dismantle your police department. It was a very interesting time. Boran walked into it, he gets this surveyed and says, oh, people would like to see him combined or save money, and so he introduces the resolution, and voila, the police department gets on the phone, they talk to their, you know, supporters, yeah. That was an answer, nephew. Occultants and signs appear in front of City Hall, and probably calls go to Boran, and all of a sudden the intent got changed. Well it was a close vote in the first place, eight to seven, to establish the study committee, so it was not like it had overwhelming support to begin with, and so I thought it was just very, very interesting how quickly that turned around. It goes back to all concepts that we have talked about in our brief period of time on the air here about what do we really mean by shared services, and can there be anything that is really systemic in terms of shared services as opposed to ad hoc, let's share this, let's do this, you know, what if we, let's get together on this particular, but an actual plan to rationally and clearly and efficiently run municipal government, and. What would Act 40 fit Kohler? Surely. Because they have a very tiny police department, and maybe they could pass it on to the county or share services, that would seem like it might fit Kohler, a small community. But we have, if you'll remember, we have a strong police force in the city of Sheboygan Falls, in the city of Plymouth, and then the village of Kohler does have its own department. And Elkhart Lake, yes, any other, I don't, I think all the other municipalities either just depend on sheriff's services or there are some townships that actually contract with the sheriff's department for additional services. The village of Usberg does that, the town of Sheboygan, the village of Random Lake. Cascade, I believe, most, I think probably will, though. So they get extra protection and they pay for that. But eliminating institutions that are either beloved or sometimes not so beloved in a community is a big deal. I think the study committee would not have necessarily proposed that, but it was interesting just how it all played out. Then the day after, we're back to the North 23rd Street site. For those of us who thought the City Hall site was puzzling at best, it was just... Chief Kirk has extra status. There were community rallying around him. Why would I like the 23rd Street? Why not? But they didn't like it before. Yeah, I mean... They didn't like it before. And of course now, Vandervaard is back on the page with perhaps a more economical proposal. What do you think? I think timing is gonna be a major factor here. I think what has happened is that people are analyzing that downtown site is not being ideal for a place department. If you want a firing range or you want cooperative operations with the Sheriff's Department at some time of its garage facilities or whatever. There's no room down there. No, I know. You probably can build a city hall in that site let alone add onto it. So I think it's a bad site, a bad choice initially. But now to reopen the issue, I don't know what the Vandervaard site would require as far as environmental surveys. That's been a construction site for many years and sometimes you need feasibility studies which take months sometimes. So I don't know if it's gonna happen to broaden it beyond 23rd. Maybe the chief's idea was, well 23rd Street's been looked at better than any other site. And if I don't want downtown, this is the quickest show in town to get my police station built. Well, and I think the North 23rd site certainly came in first in terms of all the criteria that were set out in terms of the best location. And it's interesting stuff. I just, I think the council is taking a bad rap for looking at kind of reopening the issue. Let's decide it all over again. Well, Bob LaTree I think spoke at the council or the committee hall or the council meeting and said, first it was Sheridan and then we got some new public officials and we rescinded Sheridan. Then we had this study, had so many. Then we decided to vote down 23rd Street. Then we voted down Vandervaard and then we voted the city hall site. Now we're turning away from that again and going back to 23rd Street. Where is the council, where are we? You vote down one and then you don't vote it down anymore. Well, we've had a change in the city council so there are people who probably want their kick at the cat that they've got strong views and it's a new day. Sheridan Service has worked well with them. That city county committee, that committee that was gonna study Sheridan Service was working with the 23rd Street site. Maybe they could have done something there but maybe they still can't. Yeah. Well, and I don't know but my sense is that the county would still be certainly willing to work with the city and it certainly seems to have a whole lot to recommend it and I remember at least that lots and lots of people including the mayor and some of the council people were just surprised at the vote on the city hall site because it was certainly not ranked very high. It has all sorts of issues as we've just talked about and so although it does appear to look like the council is dilly-dallying and can't make up its mind, I think from my perspective as far as this goes with this important issue, it really makes sense. And then there's the question of the cost. Costs of between $14 and $17 million have been floated for that new police station. One of the advantages to the city hall site, I think just because it would have had to have been so small is you'd keep it more in the $7 to $8 million range which I think is frankly, I'm not even sure the city can afford that but I think it needs to find the money for that but the cost of the station I think is gonna be the next huge problem. You get the site and you pay for the site and what's left to build. So there's gonna be renovation of city hall because if they go over to North 23rd, they'll obviously wanna renovate city hall because other offices will expand. The planning department will probably wanna move back in. And the city attorney's office. And the space behind it where the police garage was. Yeah, so there's gonna be renovation costs there. Right, yeah. Exactly. So they need a little bigger plan instead of just. And I don't know about you. That's correct. That's absolutely correct. But you work, walk into city hall. It's not a pleasant building. I mean, it doesn't scream out. Gamut, gamut, gamut. Gamut, gamut, gamut. Thank you. It doesn't scream out welcome. Yes, yes. Bienvenuto. So I'm all for spending at least a little bit of money in terms of renovating or not renovating but just cheering up city hall at least a little bit. And so we'll see what happens. I think you're right. The price thing's gonna be a major stumbling block. You suppose they'll wanna go to referendum? I don't know. Unless they change this. You could do it in September. Weren't they looking at naming rights for city facilities? Yeah. Maybe we could name a police station. I see as we sit out here now, the Acuity IT Center is beginning out here. Yes, it is. And I think a gorgeous tree came down if I'm not mistaken. But it's an exciting building. That's a very wonderful. It's gonna be nice. In a year, it's supposed to be up and operating. So we're looking forward to it. The library is coming over from its current location and that'll be part of the facility plus more computer rooms. And we have this compressed video. These are these video kinds of classes between the sites and so there'll be more of those so we can host those and that will enable us to bring more education courses into the campus. So that's gonna be nice. What are you gonna do with the existing library? And that's gonna be remodeled too. I haven't looked at the plans but some of it will be classrooms, some of it will be conference rooms because we are getting short on conference rooms. And maybe part of it will be used by the students also. They need space also. Not wanting to forget about the students. Students who pay the bill. There you go. They pay the bill. At least part of it. It'll be a very neat building and acuity was very generous. Well Tom, wasn't there some suggestion or some talk on the floor of the council of exploring the issue of naming rights? Wasn't Mark Hanna starting, you know, he put it in place over at in the Schmognery School District and... Big time. Yeah, I thought there was some F. I think he was discussing, wasn't he? For companies to name certain types of public areas. And it's one thing to have a gym named after you but a police station. You know, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm holding my tongue. Because I thought maybe we could name it the Moved Police. Now we're going to get kicked off the air. Now we're going to get kicked off the air. This is the end of the show. Great potential. Oh, you two just stopped it right now. I was thinking along those lines too. There's three of you. Here we go. That had never even occurred to me. I can just feel myself getting read. Just even just considering it. I screamed tracks so I could have a bullhorn in the bathroom. All right, enough. I'm going to take this off after over in the public library. Dear listeners, as you can see, no control whatsoever. All right, moving right along. One of the interesting pieces of the public comment session during the Act 40 discussion at City Hall was Dulcy Johnson's fairly impassioned speech presentation about residency and how surprisingly the fairly large number of city workers, police, and firefighters who live outside of the community. I know that there are certainly two sides of the story in terms of whether that's a good idea or a bad idea. Dulcy was charged up when she made the speech. I thought it was quite articulate. What are your thoughts? Well, she lost, she was on the council when we voted to adopt and drop the residency requirement except for department heads. I had lost twice at it bringing it to the council and the third time, Terry and I, Terry Van Ackermas on the council, we agreed that certain people who make decisions have to live in the city. So that's police chief, fire chief, director of public works, the planning director. They make decisions affecting the city so we don't want conflicts of interest if they're living outside the city making decisions to affect the city. And then we said anybody else could live where they want. And the reason we adopted that employees had relatives who lived in the towns, maybe a mother who lived in the town. All of a sudden they would like to live there next to their mother but then they would have to give up their job at the city. So they would rent a fake room saying this is my residence in the city and then go live in the town with their family and relatives. And it was just causing all kinds of conflicts. Besides the other argument is you have an opportunity these people are living around the area and you could hire them, they're good people and they would like to work for the city but they live in the town. They are not gonna move to work for the, they have the skills to work. So they won't move into the city to work but if they could work for the city and live where they were, I'm glad to do it. So there had been a residency requirement and there was a vote then to eliminate it. To eliminate it. Yes, because I remember friends of mine doing exactly that work for the city in some capacity and they were actually had a fake address. They're playing that game. Playing that game, yeah. And that's not, you don't need to play that game, yeah. They're maintaining a residence, what it looked like a residency. I always feel that because I'm an employee of the Shibuya nearest school district I should be living in the district. I'm not sure I want to make that public policy. I know that in Milwaukee they just got done with a study of guys out at Lakeland and some other folks, Mark Shug, and the economics professor just did a study and MPS is really hurt by the residency requirement and trying to maintain and find teachers to stay in the Milwaukee public school system. They say that lots of people, a good number of people, that's the deciding factor about whether they wanna work at MPS or not and the research that they did. They had a chance to read it. The law has always been debated in the legislature as to whether it ought to be repealed, allowing municipalities and school districts to have it and the vote was always close and it was always, it prevailed that municipalities still could but Milwaukee was always the driver in this whole issue and it was basically white flight. Whether you're left with all your white teachers or your white police officers living in River Hills or wherever it is in the suburbs and is that a good sign to make the city blacker than it is and but generally the trend has been away from residency because spouses are involved. Especially in school districts, two teachers, so one, they live in one district, the other one needs to find a job in that district and if they can't, they don't use the professional skills. So I think the general feeling is that more rational viewpoint on this is, all right, if you want your police and fire available, say they have to live within 20 minutes or whatever response time you need for them to get to an emergency and not simply be where they live. Let them be hired under skills and let them be available but give them the choice of where they want to live. Right, I mean there are certainly balancing issues and considerations on both sides of it but I think just the enforceability of it is very tough and makes city officials spend a lot of time on things that could be spent in better pursuit than where somebody's living or if the apartment is just a fake address or whatever. So, well I don't think there's any move on the part of this council to change the residency requirements. So I think, although as I said, I thought that it was just very interesting. It does show that I think the growth of towns around the area, I mean, Sheboygan has city issues like any other city suburban kind of split into terms of where is it good to live and what can we do in the city to make things more attractive. We're running out of time. I just wanted to pitch to you folks and to anyone who's listening that the Lao Meng American Veterans Memorial is almost up and running, scheduled for its grand dedication on July 15th. It certainly has been going on for a long time and I've been somewhat involved in it and it's a beautiful design. Ray Hernandez, the dean at UW Sheboygan was one of the prime designers along with Stevie Ager at Bray Associates and it's just been a really nice effort on the part of the community. Governor Doyle is going to be here as part of the dedication ceremonies or so we've been told and the president of the United States has been invited. So who knows what'll happen? July 15th, 12 noon at DeLand Park. Thanks, it's been a nice time.