 Hello, welcome to the Donahue Group. We're glad you could join us for this lively half hour of conversation about local issues. We're in this beautiful studio with this beautiful Christmas tree. If it appears to be coming out of Ken Ristow's head. It is. Then it's just the Christmas tree killer, but we think it's a very beautiful set. The clock is working now, so all is well with the city. Now you might ask, how can the city do this and still hold the budget? Levy the same, not the levy, the rate, the same. I think it was kind of lost in the storm and drong of the past couple of weeks at the city level that the council and the mayor did a wonderful job, department heads, at keeping the tax levy the same at $8.42 per 1,000. Good, bad, indifferent, not enough? So thank you as an order. Thank you as an order. If the county's gone down and the city's the same. We keep spending as much more money. The school, what are the schools? Skyrocketing, skyrocketing. I wouldn't say skyrocketing, but there have been some increases, much of that increase on the school budget side is because of the referendums. And people knew that going in. They were told exactly that the property taxes would probably go up a little bit for a couple of years. I remember the presentation. 20, I think. No, not the next 20 years. No, it bubbled, it bubbled. It was gonna go up for two years or three years and then come back down. So yeah, you're paying for those big field houses and a very beautiful school over at Jefferson. I actually had a chance to see it the other day. It's a beautiful facility. If nobody's been there yet, they should go and see it. It's a vibrant, great place to be. One of the things that I think might be difficult for people to understand, I know when I joined the school board, it took me a little time to figure out the difference between the levy and the rate. The tax levy is actually going up quite a bit. Well, not quite a bit, but $450,000, I think, and how much is the whole budget? Its budget is, I believe, in the neighborhood of, I don't know, but the budget will rise by $450,000 to nearly $21.1 million. That's the property tax piece of the budget. The budget itself is somewhat larger. The amount is actually going up, but the levy itself, I'm sorry, the rate itself will stay the same. This is because the city is growing. We have not been hit by property tax value decreases as some communities have. Right, right. That helps. It does help. The new budget includes six new patrol officers replacing members who have retired or left the department, new firefighters. Sounds like a reasonable use of the budget. I do think that department departments were called upon to really look creatively at how to save money and so forth. I think the city is thinking about saving or selling some land as well. I'm not aware. Yeah. Yeah, there is some proposals to sell a couple of pieces or parcels or properties that the city does own currently and that's built into that budget and they're making a guesstimate of what they're going to be able to sell in the current real estate market where they're going to get that price where they're going to sell it at all. It'll be interesting to find out. But be able to hold it in this kind of environment with the health care cost rising, with energy cost rising to keep the rate the same is a pretty impressive accomplishment and one that the mayor ran on. So he'll be able to run on that when he decides, if he decides to run again. Sounds like he's going to. I think the huge savings in health insurance premiums projected at 1.5 million could have been 2 million but at least 1.5 million, I think is quite substantial. I know Susan Hart, the mayor's administrative officer was responsible at least in part for mining those savings and having brought it before the council which I think acted smartly in doing that. So I think these are good signs. The county levy actually went down, the dollar amount went down, didn't it Cal? So not only is the rate going down but we're being visited by little birds here. So if you hear the chirp chirp chirping of birds, it's just. It's spring time. The 12 days of Christmas is coming. Either that or we have fans in the animal kingdom. Look, there's a partridge. Exactly. Six loons, well in any event. I just have one question. I mean, they did some insurance changes, they early retirement changes and they use. Sunny Ridge. Oh, you're the county, I was thinking of the city. But Sunny Ridge, yeah, they got rid of Sunny Ridge for the county coming down. Well, I think that's the only way the county could do that. But I was thinking this vehicle fund, did they get used for early retirements and some insurance changes? So there was a little fund that they could play with to maybe get a balance to hold the tax rate the same. And maybe next year they won't have that. I know a few of the aldermen and alder women are very nervous that there have been some quick fixes and some things that are being done and it'll be interesting to see if these things are sustainable over a period of time. Well, the state of Wisconsin did that, of course. I remember just the huge discount of the tobacco settlement. The state sold its tobacco settlement to a broker, essentially, and received, I don't know, 35 or 40 cents on the dollar, if I'm not mistaken. And that fixed the whole, you know, right then and there. But, I mean, one could certainly argue that that was not necessarily smart budgeting. But I think overall it will be interesting to see how it works out. The vehicle fund, as I understand, is going to be used in large part for prepaying or paying down the city's pension liability to the state. I know the school district did that. I can't remember if the county did that or not, but I think that's a pretty smart way of doing business and seeing how things go. So, but in any event, I think that very good news from the city. So that's a nice Christmas present when you get your, well, every time you get your tax bill, you're gonna look at it and say, oh my gosh, but you can take our last years and say, oh, not too bad. Right, and of course, we always have to remember that the tax bill is not just the city. I think city residents seem to think, or can think, that the tax bill is just the city. It's not. The biggest chunk, of course, is the school district. The county is a big chunk. The city is a big chunk. LTC is a tiny chunk. Yeah, right, so that's not so substantial, but everyone has some hands in the pie, as it were. So that'll be interesting. The first vote on the budget, actually, which I consider to be fairly revolutionary news, ended up on page seven of the Sheboygan Press that Tuesday, supplanted by much, much more important information, and that is. Somebody walking your dog? No, the censure. The City Council, doing what the City Council does, you know, we really probably can't get too opinionated on this show. Oh, that's right, we can. Yeah, yeah, I know. Silly me, but. Because it's Christmas? In any event, were you on the council when Mayor Schneider was censured? Actually, I went on vacation, and I come back from vacation, and my discovery was censured. Well, I was gone for two weeks. So what happened to the vote? Whether they met, and I thought, what? Anyway, I. And wasn't it, and it was interesting to me, because as I have been told, but don't know myself, Alderman Terry Van Akron was the moving force behind that censure. Now that may or may not be true, but that's what I've been told. Yeah, I don't know, maybe it's the truth, but I think it's a combination of a couple things. They, Mayor had an opportunity to clean up the lakefront. If you remember, Broke and Dry was all shrubs, and there was a firm that was in the area cleaning up shrubs and trees, and maybe on the other side of the street. So he took advantage of a good deal to do the shrubs. Well, I don't think Mary Knowth liked that, because she was head of the parks, or the parks and forestry, and you're tearing down shrubs and trees, and we didn't go through channels. You didn't go through a committee, so maybe somebody got onto an Alderman and said, challenge that kind of thing. It was already done. And then I think there was also some paving in alleys that he had done for, as we were paving streets, paved a couple alleys for a colleague or a friend or something. And then that wasn't budgeted, and so the Alderman got a little upset, you know? So it was for actions that he was doing to make the city better. They decided to censure him for it. And do you remember? He was close, both, too, though. Do you remember what term that was in? Was that his? Because Schneider had three full terms. Okay, well, it may have been the first. When did the Broughton Drive get? Or maybe the early second term or something because Broughton Drive was around before the Marina came. So he went on to continue to have a fairly vibrant political life after that. So the question, I think, will be what will happen to Alderperson Meyer. It was kind of a strange process for those of us who aren't used to the censure process, and it's my sense maybe the council wasn't used to it either because apparently a few mistakes were made here or there. The main problem I have with it is using a fairly serious and specific process or body of rules to address conduct. I don't know. The city attorney seemed to struggle with whether or not a private conversation was actually a violation of the ethics code. I think at one point he said no because there are certain things in the ethics code that those are the violations. It's primarily designed to ensure that people don't profit economically from their service on the council. All governing bodies have these, but there's some, I think Alderman Hanna called the moral statements at the beginning, sort of the representations of why we have these kinds of things, and I believe ultimately the city attorney said that those were enforceable rules that could be acted on. Your thoughts? I watched the debate the following night, and you're absolutely right. The sense I got was that as you have like a preamble in the United States Constitution, it talks about general goals and what we're all about, what we want to accomplish here, and then you get into the nitty gritty of how we're gonna make laws and who's got what powers and all that kind of thing. The ethics code seems to have the same sort of general idea that people should behave in such a manner and deportment that brings honor and integrity to the office and all that sort of thing. And then it goes, like you said, into very, very specific, I actually looked at it, very, very specific kinds of behaviors. And so the question is exactly, the city attorney did seem to really struggle with that question, and I would think that between the meetings, you would have some time to think about it. And maybe just one of those areas of the law that's just vague and it's not, it's gonna be hard to find out whether you really can't actually punish people for it. It seems that the easier way to do is to look at, the council does have some codes of conduct. Do they not? It seems to me that they do. I got the impression from the debate and the discussion. They weren't online that I could find unless they're hidden someplace and I couldn't find them. It would have been better to probably censure her under the code of conduct that you might have for the common council as opposed to the code of ethics, which is really a state statute, right? Well, it adopts the state statute. The city ordinance is fairly limited. There are lots of other things the city could put into that code of ethics and for whatever reason, when they enacted the ordinance, they apparently chose not to do it. But I mean, the essence of it is you can't make money. And use your influence to make profit, essentially, from your position on the council, which is a very good, I mean, Judge Ziegler or Justice Ziegler has certainly been struggling with those concepts and so forth. So I guess the main concern that I would have, I think it's a political issue and people, it's politics. That's right. And it's the conduct of people in office and how the conduct themselves ought to be at a level where you don't get too picky. And when I was in a legislature, we had our disagreements with people and we'd say, that person's a jerk, but you don't oftentimes confront them and say things, I'm gonna do this or that. There are certain things that you have to have a thick skin and you just accept the fact that you differ with somebody and you just go on. And you go on. And you realize that in the conduct of business, people not having healthcare and kids getting an education and roads being paved are more important than whether somebody's a jerk or not. And that's where you've got to, I think, develop a thick skin plus also as a candidate or a participant in government saying, this isn't what I ought to be doing and this is something that's a waste of my time and we'll get sort of a negative infringement on the whole process if it becomes too public of a petty type situation. Right, and there may be a fear that that will happen. I mean, Alderman Ryan starts it by saying, the mayor put his foot in his mouth. I mean, that wasn't very courteous and then Alderperson Meyer apparently said some fairly nasty things and who knows what that whole conversation was about and certainly not worthy of the office. And I don't know us how Alder people ought to be saying discourteous things that are headlines. I don't know. It depends on how elevated we want our civil government to be. I kind of want it to be elevated. School board, we all actually managed not to really call each other's names and so forth. I always said the code of conduct was no hitting, punching, kicking, spitting. And now we need to add- No name calling. And no name calling. No name calling, yeah. That's why kids have codes of conduct, you know. We treat each other. So I think the city council needs to really pat itself on the back for the fine work they did on the budget and to reinforce for city residents that it's their interests that they have at heart and hopefully they'll be able to focus on those things and that this will, number one, kind of fading people's memories just as it did for Mayor Schneider and number two, not happen a lot again. This is a slippery slope. And develop a matureness of, there are a lot of newcomers. I mean, the Mayor is relatively new when their council members are new that this is an arena where you don't get into this petty stuff. This is, you get to the bigger leagues, you just gotta learn to conduct yourself in a different level and you pass on things when certain conduct, certain things are made. I mean, if you get upset over little things, it's just gonna not let the wheels of government turn the way they ought to. Yeah. Well, and I think the Mayor did mention, in that letter to the editor, I don't know if we commented on it last time. It's hard to remember, but I think he did say that he was gonna start getting a thicker skin and that's probably a good course of conduct for him to take. You know, one of the things that kind of disturbed me a little bit is that the council members are arguing through the media when Alderman Gisha introduced this ethics resolution or this resolution to go to the ethics board and he then sent copies to the radio station. Of course, he worked there and he sent copies to the media and I thought, you don't do that. I mean, you know, I mean, people do that, but if you're really serious, you just go about your business and let the media find out that you've done this. So he's creating a situation and I was just disappointed that he did that. It would have been better if he just introduced the resolution, talked to his fellow Alderman, had them sign on and it comes up and he gets voted on, yes or no. Well, you know, it's a double-edged sword having TV. And you wonder why, yeah. I mean, it took me things, he protests a bit much. That's a thoughtful comment from Professor Risto. No, I got the same impression, Tom, that the sort of outrage that was sort of being perpetrated, I mean, it was a very thoughtless thing for Alder Woman Meyer to do. It was probably a little tacky for Ryan to go public and make a private conversation something public. You just simply say, probably there should have been more water off the back, but these are personalities, obviously, that are, quite frankly, a little immature for public services. Cal was talking about and they're just young and they'll learn that. I mean, there are things I've said when I was younger that I wish I could take back, you know? But then I think there were some opportunists who had an opportunity to be in front of the cameras and to make some hay about it. It could have been, it could have been handled in lots of different ways than this. And so one wonders what all the agendas are here. This isn't the end of civil society as we know it. I know it. You know, you think it's like the end of the Roman Empire and Caesar was taking power here. Well, and much as we love these TV cameras and we really appreciate the opportunity to flap our lips here, it is an interesting process when you introduce a television camera into a courtroom, a board room, a city council chamber, or now the Wisconsin legislature after many, many years, now having those matters televised. I know I was pretty appalled when the cameras came into the school board room. Ultimately, I think it was fine. It was great and it was a good thing, but I thought, oh dear, now we need to, you know, class our act up a little bit. And actually we were fairly classy to begin with. But there's just that tendency to want to play to the camera instead of attending to the business around the table. And I think that's absolutely human nature. And to have cameras in these meetings, I think is extremely important. And I would never suggest that they be taken away, but it does, I think it adds a dynamic that is not there otherwise. And so it'll be interesting to see how it- I watched school board meetings before and after the cameras. And I think, oh, I think you're absolutely right. Overall, it gives people an opportunity to see what's going on that they never had an opportunity. A lot of us aren't going to, especially we're a little older and especially when the weather gets lousy, to really know what's going on at school board meetings or city council meetings. And this gives people an opportunity to see what's going on and be more informed. And that's all to the good. But people's behavior do change. There were certain board members who rarely said anything. And when they did, it was pretty important or raised an issue. And now they were a lot more chatty. And they were saying things that I was sitting in the audience saying, I'm not quite sure why they were making that comment. It was rather silly. But everybody needs to have their five minutes of camera time, I suppose. It's just moving on. And as we hope the city council will, so shall we. And this really speaks to both in the county and the city, they're going to be new faces. I'm kind of, I don't know, amazed is the word, but the number of retirements on the county board of long, long, long-term members is I think pretty interesting. It's like a class that's graduating here. Exactly, exactly. There was a great article in the Saturday at Shboygan Press about Jim Gilligan, who is a long, long, long-term member. They're all about the same age in the 80s and they've been around for 20 to 40 years. Right. They're all leaving. Bill Seibold, who I've worked with. Bill Jens. And just a particular word about Bill Jens. I think all these county board supervisors were terrific, but I just have a special place in my heart for Bill Jens, who has been not only the chair of the county board and I think a voice of conscience for that body and chair of the town of Lima and one of the most honorable people that I have ever dealt with and it's been a pleasure to work with him and all the supervisors, but just personally I'm going to miss Bill, I think as much as anybody and he's just a swell guy and justice is done when Bill Jens is around and I think that's pretty amazing. It's not amazing. It's just the way it is, but other people leaving, Dan Berg is not running. Will he run for the city council again? I wonder. I don't know if that will be his, I mean, that's interesting. Ken Conger, I think Ken had said that his term would be relatively short. He's been on six years though and I think has done a fine job. Henry Nelson is fairly new and I understand a fine supervisor, Held Reimer, a good guy, Val Schultz, and was Val on the city council? Val was on the city council, yes. And he lost a kind of bitter race there on the council. I don't remember who it was, Bonnie Serta or, but I don't remember who it really lost to and it was kind of recent. It was recent and I think a little- Then he ran for a county supervisor and got elected. And so I don't know, I think he's done a fine job but I'm just wondering what his thoughts are if he's gonna, if Mr. Berg and Mr. Schultz are gonna jump back into the city council race because that leads me to the next piece which is we have eight older people who are gonna be up for re-election. And as I understand, first of all running for city council does not take a whole lot. You only need 20 signatures on nomination papers from your district and I'm looking right at the camera because people who are out there and interested in city government ought to think about or county government ought to think about running. It's an interesting experience and makes you a better person in great public service. That's my pitch. But Richard Manny has already indicated he's not running. If an elected official files a notice of non-intent to run, then the usual nomination time is in place. But if you don't file that notice, in other words, you're an incumbent and you just don't file. There's another five days? Yes. Another five days to file nomination papers? That's a relative they do a lot. It was put in place because there are people who have handpicked their successor and then on the last day that person puts their papers in and the other guy doesn't. And obviously everybody thought the incumbent was gonna continue and somebody just slipped in the back door. So they're saying if you're gonna play that game, we're gonna give the process or the system a number of days after that for someone else to file papers. And that seems fair. It is. It was. And it happened in legislative races frequently. A long time incumbent would handpick when it was staffed people or something like that. It happened in Milwaukee in a couple cases and where they filed papers and people just said, well, we didn't know that this person was gonna run. There were about 20 people who were waiting for this person to retire and they just were snuckered out of the game. Well, and of course, City Council only requires 20 signatures. Obviously a legislative position is much more significant. Well, Bob Ryan is up. I'm sure Mr. Ryan will be running Jean Kittleson from the third district. Jean has been on at least two terms. I believe this would be her third term. Jim Bourne is up. He's brand new. And I would expect, and is now would likely be the new chair of the committee of the whole as Alderman Meyer has been taken from that position. Jean Clayunas has been in just one term. This is her first term. She's quite thoughtful. Bonnie Serta has been on, now Bonnie Smith. Yeah, excuse me, Bonnie Smith, right. Right. And... My understanding is she's not gonna run. Okay. She works out at the university now. She basically got married. She works in the business office full-time. She was a student out there for a while while she was doing other things and also going to school and working part-time. And so now she's kind of had a full-time job out there. Recently got married and she's talking to me like this is gonna be my last term. Okay. She's not gonna... So I don't know that she's announced it, but so I'm probably overstepping my bounds. No, you heard it here on the Donnie Dove group. She can and I, you know, but she had indicated she thinks it's gonna be her last term. She's not gonna run again. Cutting edge news here, right here in this room with the Christmas tree. With the Christmas tree, so yeah. Alderman Hanna is up for reelection. I would fully expect that he'll run again. He hardly had an opponent last time and so I don't know is how anyone will come out of the woodwork there. I think he's established a pretty strong position in a fairly short period of time. And then Silas Vanderweel in the eighth district is up. So it will be interesting to see who stays and who leaves. Manny and maybe Smith leaving and it may be, so it'll be interesting to see how that goes. I don't know what the whole theme will be. We've had a number of themes where let's have change, let's have new faces. Now we have new faces and they're slip ups and what to say to who in all of them. Gets them in trouble and all people say, well, we gotta do something about this board. More new faces again. I would think Kiunis and Kittleson and Bourne are gonna be just fine. They conducted themselves real well in this whole process and it's still a little while away and people's memories will fade. I don't think there gonna be any serious trouble unless some issue comes up that they happen to be on the wrong side of, but I mean property taxes have been held reasonably in advance. The police station is done. There's been lots of progress and lots of issues. I don't sense at this point that people are angry at the general council like we were feeling about a year or two ago. So unless, again, but politics, couple weeks is a long time. There you go. We'll end with those words tonight and thank you for joining us for this wonderful half hour.