 And welcome to the Donahue Group. We're so glad you could join us for a half an hour of conversation and just maybe a little bit of controversy about issues that affect us as citizens of this wonderful county and state and even the nation from time to time. Joining me today, Cal Potter, former state senator and assistant superintendent with the Department of Public Instruction for Library Services. Cal always gets the award for the longest title. Poor Tom Paneski, just a mere professor of mathematics at UW, Sheboygan. Ken Risto, a mere social studies teacher and some sort of mid-level bureaucrat in the Sheboygan area school district. I'm Mary Lynn Donahue and the host of this cheerful group. We're here, boy in the thick of winter, it certainly feels that way. And the election season for nonpartisan elections in April are in full swing. And again, at least in the city of Sheboygan, there are lots and lots of contested races. And the headlines today, just to date when we're taping are that Alderman Dan, former Alderman Dan Berg has withdrawn from the 5th district race, where 4th, sorry, where he was taking on Jim Groff and Joe Heidemann. So that race will be a little easier. I think Mr. Berg cited reasons of health and other reasons and he said I've come to the conclusion that because of the differences on the council I would be a little help to my constituents. So just right out there. Can anybody decipher that for me? I'm not 100% sure. I'll represent my constituents fully, I would think. I moderated the forum and he wanted to make a statement up front and I knew exactly what he was going to say. He mentioned that he was going to withdraw. And in his statement he also said it's been very difficult on him and his wife lately that he had been getting some difficult phone calls and that he can't win. And he says between that and the fact that there's another candidate in the race and he did endorse Mr. Heidemann in the conclusion of his statement, his withdrawal statement. So a combination of things, the press did not cover the fact that he was disheartened by some of the feedback that had been coming his way when he entered the race. Now who, where that's coming from and why and how many people are involved, I don't know. But he was definitely down. He was a very sad individual when he made that statement. But I think there are a number of reasons that are sort of piling on and he said I don't want this anymore. And with the fact as I said Heidemann challenged in the incumbent graph, I think he felt that there was a competition, there was a choice for the voter. Yeah, I don't know why Dan might have thought that the whole atmosphere was a whole lot more friendly than it had. When he left the council it seems to me that the players have changed. I think the council is getting work done and so forth. But there still seems to be some animosity. Not quite at the pitch and tone that it was the year before. But it's still a lively body to be on as opposed to the school board. But we'll get to that. Cal, you indicated that you had moderated a discussion that I think the Democratic Party hosted for all the Aldermanic candidates and most everyone showed up, which led me to think you'd be there a really long time. Well, I set a limit of three minutes for an introductory statement. So all 18 people made a statement within an hour. So it was a very good capsule. I think the other people who were there, particularly newcomers to the council type races, really did pay attention. I think they learned things. They saw issues that probably they never thought would come up. But Cory Bauch was on a business trip and his wife was there just handed out a statement. And Alderman, Alderperson Radke did not come. He said he was ill. And with Berg dropping out, but we had 18 in presence out of the 20. I did send a letter out the day after the nomination papers were filed. So I think we got our foot in the door a little before the Taxpers Alliance. So everybody was amenable to the forum and worked out nicely. Before we go any further, with Berg dropping out this late, there isn't any need for a primary in that particular Aldermanic district. So there isn't going to be a primary or is it too late to do that? I'm not sure. I mean, I don't know the answer to that. His name is on the ballot. His name would be on the ballot. There's no way that you can withdraw your candidacy. And that's why dead people win sometimes. And There's potentially that he could win. He could win a primary. I would presume there would be a primary. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I would presume, although I do not know that for a fact. So it's important for people who are supporting either Heidemann or Graff to still show up the day of the primary. Mm-hmm. So it's important for the city clerk to let us know what the situation is at the Yeah. And I Okay. For that race. I don't want to take us too far off task, but I was just thinking about that in the way over here. Yeah. Now, Cal, you not only were there, but you were running the show yesterday. The press article indicates that the financial status of the city was really the primary focus or topic. Yes. Of the 18 statements that were made, the repetitive was the The property tax burden in the city and Good. It is high. And many of them said we need to have growth. We need to have an industrial park expansion was raised by several that one candidate mentioned that two firms were unable to find the size of parcel they needed in the industrial park. That's on the south end of Sheboygan. So that one of their priorities is to expand the park in some way. The other is to just build up the economic development in the city period. Another person cited reuse of some blighted lands and so on that we could have more economic development, build a tax base that the city needs to do that. And then there are others repeatedly said we need to examine services and what's essential and downsizing where we have to downsize and appropriate level of staffing and so on. But expenses that the cities are city incurs as well as the tax burden was a repeated issue that was brought up in the whole issue. The police station came up with several times with obviously with a couple people on the candidacy list from former police officers and a few police officers in the audience. They did raise issues of how you're going to equip it. Balances in various accounts and whether they could be used, things like that. Several candidates who were incumbents did toss out plaudits that the wheel tax was repealed as well as the stormwater fee was repealed. And so there were a number of candidates saying things are going in the right direction, things the council works better now than it did before and sort of incumbents saying why do we need to change in essence. Things are going along better. They're more sensitive. They do communicate better. And then others are saying communication, the challengers, many of them saying communication needs to be improved. We need to have less contentiousness. How much is this a carryover in the theme that occurred before the turnover that did occur in the council before with the change in mayors and so on? I don't know. But there were a share of people saying things have to be financially better analyzed. There are a couple of people who are insurance people, a couple of people who are financial advisors who are running, particularly in the first district. There are five candidates and several are people who dabble in the insurance and financial end of things who said we need to do things like zero-based budgeting and more scrutiny and better control of the dollars and that type of thing. This race is, I think, notable for the fact that several retired police officers are running and the wife of a current police officer. Did you get a sense that a police department agenda was being advanced by those candidates? Not at all. There were three retired, as you said, officers running and a spouse of an officer. And that's out of the 20 candidates, now 19 with Berg's departure, so four of those. Mr. Longman did raise the issue. He did say I'm retired and Christensen's retired and Van Der West is retired. And he says none of us think alike. He said if we got on any topic, he says you would find myself and these other guys who I know will come up with different conclusions and make different choices. So do not. He took sort of the preemptive strike. He said don't paint us all with the same brush. Don't think that we're here to represent the police department. We're individuals who have in retirement moved on many times pursuing other activities today. One sells insurance, I guess, and others. Well, they do different things today. And they say that you can expect independent thought. So there was a sensitivity there. And Mr. Longman took the initiative in his statement to talk about it. Okay. I remember in an old school board race the phrase the four-man machine was used, the accusation that people were together and working together and thinking together. And so no four-man machine here, three men and one woman machine. So this was just, the candidates, there were no questions and no feedback or anything. The candidates expressing themselves. You had questions, right? Yeah, we had an hour. You had an hour of questions, too? Yes. Oh, okay. But I, that's why I set the limit of three minutes. Otherwise I'd been there all night listening to candidates by taking an hour of statements. Then we opened it up and then we had everybody in the audience direct their question to a particular district. Okay. And then we had questions that, you know, ranged from financing of the police department as well as mass transit, a number of different issues that came up. Well, that's fine. You found it pretty good. Well, it kind of begs the question, though, Cal. All of a sudden sort of spontaneously there's a fervor of civic responsibility among retired police officers? Well, that's... I mean, when they made their statements, was there some sort of common theme among those fellows? And Mrs. Tyshinski? Well, Lyle Vanderwist said he lived in his community his entire life. He served the police department for 30-some years. And he just felt an interest and he felt he wanted to be part of being in the government. None of them brought up that they had a bone to pick with anybody about police officers or, you know, be how they're treated or the police department how they're treated. So all stayed on the issue of I bring to the table talents that I'd like to share on the council. So they didn't let on that they had any agenda that was reactive to how the police department might have been or will be treated. How was your audience? Good number? Yeah. I was impressed at 30. I would say it's more like 50 that came. Wow. So I thought it was good. I think that's... I mean, actually on a cold winter's night. I think that's a fairly impressive turnout. And particularly early on... As an aside, I didn't even know Skybox. They were at Skybox. I didn't know they had a room down there where you get a host, some kind of event like that. That might be the old... The old off-brow. The old off-brow. The rot-scaler? Yeah. That's what used to be called. And they've renovated that room as much. They've renovated everything else to the point where you don't recognize it. Well, it's... We used to have a ceiling that was about six and a half feet. Six and a half feet. Yeah, yeah. That's brushman. Did anybody get... Those who were speaking, Cal, about needing to look at greater scrutiny at the city budget and bring costs down, lay out any specifics or any areas they thought where those kind of cuts could be made? Normally they avoid those kind of things. Well, one person talked about... Several people talked about the benefit package that public employees have. And, of course, that's always problematic when you have unions. You have to negotiate unilaterally. Say you're going to cut benefits. But healthcare and insurance in general, being some of them cited as being out of line to the private sector, that was raised. One candidate raised the bus system saying that we ought to go to a dial, dial a ride that is actually more focused. This person cited several large cities that had gone to dial a ride where they'd come right to your door and you don't have as much criticism of empty buses. Of course, that leads into the whole issue of how the school system needs the bus system because, of course, you don't have... In a larger city, you don't have school buses running the routes. You have the mass transit who takes care of that need. So that would be another dimension of how you would have to alter that. But a number of people talked about prioritizing services. Well, of course, that's oftentimes difficult because whose service is more important? It's the one you use, I guess, or the one that you're missing at that particular instance. Well, certainly the county has struggled with that. And I know the school district has tried to prioritize the services and programs. And unless something is really fairly, clearly pretty frivolous, there's always a constituency, there's always an articulated need, and it really is hard to balance out, you know, potholes in the street versus buying new trees versus 5% contribution to health insurance versus, you know, and it just goes on and on. Well, you should start with, this is the pot of money I have. Instead of, these are the services I want to offer because then you, the pot of money grows when you have the service. You start, this is the pot of money I have. I have to do this, I have to do this. And then you start to prioritize when the pot starts disappearing. Well, and that actually has been very effective and we'll get to that a little bit later in the program about the school district which had, school districts in general had qualified economic offers or QEOs imposed on them in 1993. Three or four? And there's some chatter about repealing the QEO but as a school board member at that time I was able to say along with my fellow school board members we have this pot of money. That's it. And of course revenue caps have been imposed on municipalities now at least for two years although, I mean there's room for growth but it's a limited growth but that is interesting. There are long cultures, hard cultures to change where, you know, unions and management have worked together in a certain way for years and years and years and years and if it's a new time, is it a new time? I'm not sure it is but if it is how do you make those cultural changes? Well, you know there's one aspect of this whole issue of taxation that people very seldom bring up and that is the shift of the tax burden in the state from a broad base to a very narrow base. Correct. It goes back to the Lucie administration starting with M&E, machinery and equipment that was taken off the tax rolls and then it was followed by Line A personal property which is inventories and other things that are in a manufacturing sense in materials. Then we went into egg land value, use value so today a farmer doesn't pay a lot on their farmland any longer. Right. Computers recently were taken off the property tax rolls. You can just go through almost a 30 year period and there was one property tax exemption after another enacted by the legislature that has shifted substantially the tax burden from a broad base of property to homeowners. At the same time, shared revenue on the federal level was cut out during the Reagan, starting in the Reagan years and continued throughout the years of budget cutting. On the state level, the decision was made that there would be more school aids, two-thirds state pickup, not putting as much into shared revenue. And so shared revenues to municipalities on the state level were cut back or froze or minimized. So you add up that with the squeeze that energy costs and healthcare costs and all the other things that municipalities face, it is something that people need to realize. I'm not making excuses. I'm just saying the homeowner today is picking up a bigger part of the burden than they have, say, 30 years ago. Yeah, I agree with that and just add a couple other things. Non-profits get the property tax exemption and the two things that the council repealed, the stormwater tax that was applied evenly to all, including the non-profits, so now they're going to get the free ride and the wheel tax. Some people have five, six cars and some people have one and the non-profits have cars and trucks and stuff. And that's now gone too. So you throw the non-profit and then there's a big chunk of people who are non-profits that don't have to pay the property tax. Sure. A couple of things, though. I do think Cal's point is very well taken is that we talk about Wisconsin being a property tax hell and we're going to certainly an expensive place to live, but you're exactly right is that the shift in the tax burden has been fairly astonishing, but it's been quiet. It's been incremental and so the load for property homeowners has just grown and grown and grown and so it actually is a selling point in Wisconsin that taxes for manufacturing concerns, at least regarding personal and real property are significantly less than they used to be. And some people, as they retire, leave the state just for that reason. There's no arguing that people with a decent house pay in five, six, seven thousand dollars in property tax and it's outrageous for somebody who's on a fixed income. How do you change it? What you do is you start examining the end result of the shift and saying, well maybe the state ought to do what a Florida does and you start looking at your excise taxes on liquor and beer and start looking at your sales tax and say, well maybe if we have a tourist trade that's worth anything as Florida really does, maybe you ought to go to a 7% sales tax. I don't like the sales tax either. It's regressive, but it's less regressive than the property taxes. At least you have some choice whether you're going to buy a $50,000 car or a $10,000 car or a lot of other items. So there maybe ought to be an examination of how we finance some of our units of government in this state and there's always been a reluctance to do that because people don't want occupational taxes or local income taxes or local sales taxes although we've granted things to the brewers and we've granted things to counties a half a percent which they can levy but cities don't have that flexibility and maybe it's time we do that because every election we hear from people who are saying there are people who are being taxed out of their home. Well if that's the case and I'm sure it is in many cases we ought to look at a different way of financing these services. Let somebody who, you know, one of the beauties of the sales tax of course in a tourist state and if we brag about how many Illinois people come up here is that they're paying the tax when they spend their money in this state. That is true. Well that actually in a backdoor way segues into the school board raise. Just bringing it back to a local level and whatever our conversation is it would really behoove us to be behaved enough so that Risto here does not get fired but in any event. Tell me about the Canada school board because I really don't know anything about the Canada. I'm pretty much ten years I think. There are three positions that are open two town positions or non-city positions we include the town of Wilson, town of Sheboygan actually town of Sutterville and the village of Cleveland and so we have some surrounding areas. Two of the nine spots are for those townies as we call them and then there's one city spot that's open. My Shua Vang who was appointed and then a one year term is retiring she's having a fifth child and for some reason doesn't think she has time for the school board I can't understand why. So those meetings but induced labor. But Jeff Squire is running now for the town spots we've got three running for two Jeff Squire, Mark Mansel who was recently appointed to take Teresa Blondel's spot and Al Yante who was in that race to be appointed or was one of the candidates for the appointment that Mark Mansel won but Al retired principal of Jefferson School was running so we have a principal running X principal running against Mark Mansel and Jeff Squire and Mark Mansel is a detective with the Sheboygan Sheriff's Department nice guy and Jeff Squire of course has been around for a while and is currently the president of the board and I guess wants another three year term and at the city level with my Shua leaving Scott Lewandowski who is a candidate for the Common Council is also a candidate for the school board he's running against Fong Lee who is a Hmong fellow who graduated from Lakeland College and has three little kids and so it's interesting Scott Lewandowski and Al Yante from what I have read in the newspaper are clearly very very critical of the school system and I don't know how they're focusing so much just on Sheboygan but education in general they don't really much care for the way things are being done now I don't know where some of the other candidates stand but I don't get much of an idea but it's a real contested race which we haven't had in the school district for a little while since 2004 I think we had a contested race or maybe in 2003 but it's been a couple of years in the cycle because every three years you have three every two years right you have three coming up every year every year that's right every three every year we have three coming off and we're rotating right or up for election are there any issues? I mean curriculum issues budget issues seems like it's always a budget issue well it's going to be kind of hard to tell because nobody's really had a chance much to talk about these issues yet I know that during the gubernatorial race Al Yante wrote a letter to the editor which pretty much supported Governor well sorry Green for Governor represented Green for Governor and took a couple of pretty big swipes at the Wisconsin Teachers Association Wisconsin Educational Association the Teachers Union saying that you know pretty much from Al's perspective the letter pretty much argued that you know unions are one of the major reasons why you know education is in such a sorry state that it is but other than that locally he hasn't said too much no he's been a principal he's been a lot of meetings I'm sure he knows a little bit about how the district works compared to say a lay person coming into the into the board setting and we'll see and we'll see how that all plays out it should be interesting it is good I think in a district where 33% of our students or minority students 33-35% to have minority representation on the board and by all reports my show of Vang did a wonderful job and so it'll be interesting to see how things play out just in the last couple of minutes one of the issues and when I was on the school board negotiations with the unions was pretty simple because we had this qualified economic offer 3.8% and we usually take it or leave it take it or leave it we actually usually the total package exceeded the 3.8% and there was a decent relationship between the unions and the administration I felt consensus bargaining which has some good points to it the push now in Madison WEAC, the Wisconsin Education Association Council put a ton of money into Doyle's race Wisconsin manufacturers and commerce put a ton of money into Green's race it sounds like there may be votes to repeal the QEO what do you think? I mean one of the... You want to go first? No If that's going to be about, you know... The challenge there is that the QEO was of course tied to the, as Calvin said earlier the commitment to funding of two thirds of local government and those two pieces sort of fit together and so any kind of taking off of, you know... Once you start playing with that whole system you're going to have to revise and reformulate everything you know, so I just really think that I'm a little cynical No I'm a little cynical about it Really? I think the Senate will pass it and I think the assembly won't pass it and then the governor can say just kick the can down the road because if you take off the QEO caps as much as they've hurt some certain districts I don't think they've really hurt Sheboygan terribly much the truth be told because we're a growing district given the funding formulas but I think you're going to kick the can down the road for another couple of years and look at it much more systematically right now I haven't seen anything come in a legislature beyond let's get rid of that piece if you do that you're going to start looking at the two thirds commitment maybe that's what they want to do and the funding formulas which I think are really skewed and the Wisconsin Supreme Court has said eh, not the best system in the world but constitutionally not in firm and so barely passing constitutional muster barely and I think that ought to be looked at as well some sort of more equitable form of funding across districts so in any event we're wrapping up but it was an enjoyable conversation and we'll be back