 Welcome to Sheboygan County Government, working for you. I'm Dan Lemuel, County Board Chairman, co-host of this program. This tape that we put on monthly, along with Adam Payne, our administrative coordinator. And we bring you on a monthly basis the services that county government provides, the residents of Sheboygan County and the people that provide those services. Today we have with us Shannon Hayden, the Planning Director. And Shannon is going to talk with us a little bit about the Planning and Resource Department. And Shannon, you're our newest department head in Sheboygan County. And why don't you start by giving our viewers just a little background about yourself and the position of Planning Director. Sure. I originally grew up in the city of Oshkosh, and as soon as I was old enough, I got out of there and went to UW O'Clair for my bachelor's degree and finished a master's degree at the University of Milwaukee. Both those degrees are in geography, which you can get a job in geography. For those of you who are thinking of pursuing it. The Planning Director position oversees basically two functions, the Planning and Resources side of the department, and then also the property listing office. And we'll talk a little bit more about that, I believe, later. And those are the... Why don't you just give us, as we start out this discussion, the mission and primary responsibilities of the department? Sure. The mission of the department is to improve the quality of life in the communities of Sheboygan County to protect the natural resources within those communities and also improve the property records in those communities. And our responsibilities include overseeing the shoreline floodplain ordinance, the sanitary ordinance, the land division ordinance, and then also the update of the tax records within the county. Dan, I think we've let her off too easy already. Now, when she had to share a little bit about herself, she's moved to the area, she's bought a house here, and she also worked with the department in a previous capacity. Now, what was that? I was formerly the Assistant Director of Planning, and in April I took over the role of Interim Director. And then recently in August I was named the Planning Director, which I'm very excited about. We have a great group of staff, and I think Sheboygan County is a great place to live. I'm happy to have moved in here and now be a taxpayer in the county. And is it better than Oshkosh? You said as soon as you're old enough, you left Oshkosh. You know, there's a lot of people that enjoy the city, and I still have family there, and I do like it, but I don't think I could live there. Sheboygan is definitely a much nicer community. The roads are better kept, I think. You talked about the staff in your department. How many employees do you have in your department and how is the department structured? We have 12 staff. Most of them are represented union staff, except for one who, the real property listed, is also management staff. One of the greatest benefits that I can say that I have working with my staff is they all have been there for a long time. We do not have a high turnover rate. I believe our least senior staff has been there for between six or eight years, and some of my other staff have been there between 20 and 25 years, so they bring a wide range of experience and wealth of knowledge, and I tap into that all the time. I really think that that is probably the key to making that department successful. Great. You mentioned the real property list here before. Could you just explain a little bit? I mean, we have, you've talked about tax, taxes before, you talked about property listing, deeds, things like that. We have other offices in the county that take care of some of these things also, because maybe you could explain a little bit about the responsibilities of the real property list here. Sure. That office takes care of all of the land divisions or if a subdivision is created from a parcel, or any of the transfers that occur within Sheboygan County, except we're in the city of Sheboygan. The city of Sheboygan handles those services separately. However, anything that occurs related to a parcel in the county is funneled through the real property listing department or office, and they handle all the legal descriptions for the tax bill. So anytime an individual would need to have a legal description of their property, they could call the real property listing office. Some of the other individuals who use that office are realtors, attorneys, when they're doing title searches or any kind of work associated with real estate, and then also title companies to work. So if you've sold or purchased land in Sheboygan County at some point in time, somebody used the real property listing office throughout that process. What is... I'll share with everybody my ignorance of this area. What is the difference between the Register of Deeds Office and the Real Property Listers Office? Sure. The Register of Deeds Office records all of the documents that you need recording by state statute or any other document that you wish to have in the official public record, such as birth certificates, death certificates, land records, such as the deeds, your mortgage is recorded in the Register of Deeds Office, and what we get is just a small portion of that. The land records information is transferred from the Register of Deeds to our office for entering so that we can keep those records up to date. So people searching in their Real Property Listing Office will look for the document numbers and then go down into the Register of Deeds and actually pull out the actual deed or the map for their searches. Okay, thank you. You mentioned earlier that you're enjoying your time in Sheboygan County, that it's a beautiful county, that the roads are in good shape, and we also have a lot of very nice recreational facilities and opportunities. Why don't you touch on that a little bit? Sure, we have a number of facilities, as you mentioned. One of them is the Old Plank Road Trail. It's 14 miles running from Erie Avenue at the end, just west or east of I-43 is a trailhead. You can park your car, go under I-43 via a tunnel, and travel on the trail all the way out to Greenbush. And we're hoping to, in 2004, we have some grant money to extend the trail from the Greenbush Trailhead all the way out there to the Wade House. So an individual could bicycle from the city of Sheboygan to the Wade House within probably 2005, I believe it will finally be ready to go. And also, the city of Sheboygan has hooked up to our trailhead. So one could bicycle from the lakefront to the trailhead and then go out. Some of the stops along the way include Kohler, the city of Sheboygan Falls, the city of Plymouth, and then along the way, the various towns, people stop at the cross sections with the trail and hop on there. It's a great opportunity for individuals who live in a rural part of the county so they're not trying to walk on a busier, higher-speed roadway. They can utilize the trail and still enjoy some fitness. In addition to that, we have the Broughton Marsh. It's a 14,000-acre wetland ecosystem, and it's a wonderful resource if you enjoy any kind of recreational boating or hunting. You can hunt out at the marsh. If you want any information about that, you can call our office, and we can talk about that a little bit later. But there is some private property surrounding the marsh, so you'll want to make sure that you've clearly identified where you are. And if you want to go on private property, you need to request permission. In addition to that, we have a 66-site campground at the developed portion of the marsh and a restaurant which has wonderful food. And in the wintertime, snowmobilers utilize that area a lot, and there's a number of opportunities out there. And then, in addition to that, we have a number of boat landings, and it'll take me a minute to think about them off the top of my head. We have Gerber Lake, Yetzir Lake, Big Art, Elkhart Lake, Little Elkhart Lake, and Crystal Lake. I believe there's five where you can put in a boat and enjoy fishing. In the wintertime, people utilize those launch areas for their ice shanties, as I put in place for that. And some of those facilities have restrooms, so you can take care of those needs when you're out there fishing. And those are the major facilities that the county has that open up a lot of opportunities for the residents. Some great facilities, and I know your department provides a complimentary map, so if any of our viewers wanted to get a sense of where these lakes are or lake accesses or learn more about the marsh, they can do so. Speaking of the marsh, there's been a fair amount of publicity of late with the drawdown, and could you give our viewers a snapshot of what's happened out there the last few months and what the status is of the drawdown? Sure. Just very briefly, because I know some people aren't 100% sure of why the whole process was begun in the first place, Sheboygan County was spending approximately $35,000 to $40,000 every year removing floating cattail mats that cattails are a natural plant that occur in a wetland area, but because of fluctuations in the marsh water level, because of the large drainage area, the roots break free and the mats float into the dam, and it becomes this giant land mass almost, so the highway department has to fish them out and truck them somewhere, so we're running out of disposal space and there's significant cost. So we decided to, after a long study and public input process, draw down the marsh so that the cattails could establish a strong root system and then also so we could increase the diversity of vegetation out at the marsh. Another portion of it is that the wildlife and species diversity at the marsh was starting to diminish. A key indicator of that is what's called macroinvertebrates, or the crawfish might be considered one. Things that fish eat, the smaller organisms that the diversity was dropping off, so that kind of indicates that there was some balance that needed to be restructured out there. So we're drawing the marsh down with increasing the various types of vegetation we start to see an increase in bird diversity and other tenant wildlife species that will be out there which will improve the water quality and also just the general system health. Right now we've actually put the boards in the bypass to bring the water level back up yesterday. One of my staff has a great way of saying it's not magic, it's not going to come up tomorrow. We're anticipating perhaps boating can begin again as it's limited right now with the water level being lower back perhaps in the middle of October. We're hoping a lot of it, all of it is dependent on what kind of rain event we have. To give you a little bit of an example, in the middle of August we had about a two inch rain event and it brought the level of the water up 24 inches at the drawdown level. So the marsh can fill up quite quickly but if we don't have any rain to do that or if we have dry conditions it will not occur. So we'll find out how successful we were probably in the spring or next summer. Very nice overview and if you haven't been out to the marsh in a while I encourage you to get out there. Again whether you like to swim or boat or fish or trap or just hike and the colors I'm sure this fall will be nice and then stop in the lodge and have a sandwich or refreshment but it's a neat place to check out and I know there's been a lot of work out there. You've mentioned some improvements already the possibility of expanding or extending some of the trails that we have. You've mentioned the work out at the marsh to improve that, to improve the functionality there. What other opportunities or things do you see on the horizon to improve facilities in the county? Right now in our five year strategic plan we have a project on the horizon for 2006 to develop the Sheboygan County portion of the Interurban Trail and I've received a number of inquiries on that extension especially since Ozaki County has completed their portion. Right now the Ozaki County trail ends right at our county line so people are itching to get further north. To give you a little bit of a background the Interurban line came up from Milwaukee and it brought a number of individuals into the area for the weekend or the summer home type of scenario. Some of it I'm sure was probably business travelers though back in those days people didn't travel for business as frequently as we do today. We would like to take that old right away and put a trail through there for bicycling or rollerblading, walking those sorts of things. We're hoping to get started on that doing some engineering. Negotiation will have to do with the right away acquisition I think but we're working on that and if that actually can move forward we'll be quite excited because there's a number of great opportunities for that. That's the big one that's on the horizon besides the other ones I've spoke about. Stewardship was a big initiative in Sheboygan County in the last couple of years there's been a lot of discussion input from the public a committee was formed decisions were made, dollars have been appropriated and right now I believe you're in the process of working with an advisory committee and selecting some projects why don't you give our viewers a sense of where that's at and what types of projects have come in for funding? Sure, actually this evening is the meeting where the decisions will be made as to which projects will be funded and at what level and those recommendations will be passed along to the resources committee which oversees the department as part of the county board. They are ultimately the committee that will make the final decision we have six wonderful projects that have been submitted for application one in the village of Alcart Lake to increase some nature trails around their athletic field one in the city of Plymouth to do some remediation and restoration after the removal of the dam at Meyer Park and submitted an application for a promenade at the sea rice coal property to enhance some of the things that they're doing down there we had two applications for purchase of development rights from the Sheboygan area land conservancy and then an application for purchasing land within the Milwaukee river basin heritage and wildlife area it's an extremely long name and I never can fully remember it but those are the six projects that would be potentially available for funding this year we have approximately $80,000 in the I believe the total request for $547,000 so obviously not every project will be funded and I'm not there's a couple that could be funded for the amount requested but I'm anticipating but I don't want to speak for the committee they may choose a combination of projects to fund at a lower level or they could choose to fund one project at the entire amount we'll see how things go tonight but I do believe there will be at least one successful project hopefully a number more that can move forward with the county stewardship funds and the best situation is when we can leverage county dollars with local or private or state or federal dollars to make some of these good projects happen speaking of initiatives mark growth planning has been discussed more and more throughout the county Chairman Lemme who's lived here pretty much all his life you and I moved to the area within the last year or two myself four years and people are finding that Sheboygan County is no longer a great secret it's a wonderful place to live and raise a family and with that development pressure comes more pressure on our towns and municipalities and how we're going to grow and do so wisely what is the county's role right now being proposed to help us prepare for smart growth and good land use planning in the county back in I believe the spring of last year the stewardship ad hoc committee had recommended grants to communities to assist in their comprehensive planning efforts in part with the thinking that right now few communities actually have a full blown comprehensive plan as identified in the state statutes and portions of the plan to guide them through the land use decision making process however they for example with the stewardship funds with the plans that are there very few of them say this parcel would be worthy of recreational opportunities so the thinking was if we could get communities completing their smart growth plan and identifying key areas and key projects that what they would like is conservation and recreation in the county there'd be a rational nexus between the dollars being spent and the lands being used or developed so we've committed to giving $5,000 per local unit of government for comprehensive planning and then if that unit of government chooses to partner with at least one other community for example the one that we know is going to work for a partnership is the town of Sherman and the villages of Random Lake and Adele have agreed to go in together they would be eligible for a total of $30,000 of county grant money to help them move forward with the comprehensive planning process now help them leverage some other dollars from the state and help them get through the process sooner and I think just as an aside that's a great place to start because they are receiving a lot of development pressure coming up from Ozaki County so I think whether in a position to really have some great planning efforts there but I think so far that's been really receptive and ultimately the plans that are generated through this process will help the county with its comprehensive plan so if people fail the plan they're planning to fail and we really need everyone to work together and discuss what we're going to look like 10, 15, 20 years down the road and where we want growth what areas we want recreational trails what areas are preserved or areas for industrial development and not only does the stewardship fund provide a small incentive for helping a community start those plans but I know you've been active with the extension agents and holding seminars that would be my last question before turning it back to Dan what has the county done to assist communities in looking at this well right now we are working with very slowly putting together this process to be honest this sort of thing is somewhat foreign or it's a new process for a lot of the local units of government and some of them are a little bit skeptical some of them are a little bit upset because it's coming from the state but I do believe it's a good thing and that when the final product is done they'll be happy because they'll have a tool to be able to make decisions by what the county so far has been offering are the workshops but we have a number of data sets available and we hope to have a package that we can put together for the consultants that the communities choose to use for their planning efforts some of the communities have chosen to go off on their own and intend to write the plan on their own and are doing the various things components independently in those respects the extension office has been working closely with them in addition to a number of communities on some visioning or community planning efforts where they sit down as a group and say we want housing to be here in our community and we don't need industrial and development in our community so let's keep that off the map and that sort of thing between the county's data sets and what extension is doing our thinking is that communities will have very little that they'll need the consultant to do for them when it comes time to pull it all together for their actual plan and we do that for communities because we know budgets are tight everywhere and we're not reinventing the wheel because we already have that information in our office very good, thank you Shannon, earlier you talked about some of the different areas that your department gets involved in and three of the areas that we really haven't talked about yet are the areas of the septic systems floodplain shoreland zoning and land divisions and our department was 19 years ago and I was selling a residential property and I had one of your long-term employees come to my property and tell me I need to put up my own system could you talk a little bit about that area of your department? Sure, it's actually a big portion of our department and a lot of why our department was created was because of the shoreland floodplain ordinances and the sanitary ordinances that will mandate from the state a lot of people are beginning to move out into the rural areas of our county and they're finding that perhaps things aren't as simple as they thought just walk up and buy a lot and put your house up you have to think about where is my septic system going to go our office handles all the permitting process with that you would go out and find an installer and they take care of all the permitting the check on that system make sure that the installer has done their job make sure that when you should have a pretty clear mind there's some maintenance as you know of your septic system and some things to be aware of when you have one on your site but you should have ease of mind that it was put in the ground properly and it's going to last the lifetime that it's supposed to and that's kind of what our department is responsible for is the hydraulic floodplain which is we have jurisdiction within 300 feet of a river or stream and there's a number of stipulations with that too but for simplicity's sake we'll say that and then a thousand feet of an inland lake and within that area there's a number of restrictions I guess if you will on certain things that you setbacks from the waterway things that you can do expansion types of things I always recommend if you are near a waterway call our office the worst that can happen is it doesn't apply to you and then you can move forward with like that the land divisions anytime you want to split off a parcel of land you should always call our office again it's called their subdivision ordinance which confuses a lot of people if they wanted to split off a small piece of land but it really applies to any division of land under 40 acres and given that even in farmland is sold in 40s likelihood of you needing to do work under our land division ordinance is pretty high so call our office if you plan to buy or sell a piece of land that isn't already existing to make sure you're in compliance so you talked about a lot of things in the last couple of minutes I know so if a person is going to go out of an incorporated area out of shabuaig employment into the rural areas and buy a piece of property or even buy an established residence what should they do to protect themselves the first thing I would do is if you're interested in a home or if you're interested in a lot call our office and find out any information that you might have on your parcel for example if an existing existing home before you would close on the house some banks do require that the septic system is inspected to ensure it's not failing and that seems somewhat cumbersome at the time it's probably about a 250 or 300 dollar cost however if you purchase the home and the septic system is failing you're going to have a much more significant cost associated with it and so the other thing we're finding is the sanitary code has changed and there are a number of times when a mound system is the system of choice because of the soils and the depth of the groundwater we have a lot of high groundwater in our county those systems tend to be a little more expensive however it opens up opportunities for you as a homeowner a potential homeowner that perhaps you went to have a few years ago so you want to call information about the existing septic system or if there's no septic system you want to make sure that a soils test is done on the property to make sure that you can put one there probably one of the biggest misconceptions that we have is that if a lot has been created it's buildable and that's not always the case the only way that one can tell if a lot is buildable is if a soils test has been done and if you're out there looking for a lot and no soils test has been done I would highly recommend putting that as a contingency of your closing because you don't want to get stuck with a lot you can't build on so those are two big ones making sure that the lot is buildable and then the rest of it is handled by the individual you choose to install that system in 30 seconds if a person has a 40 acre parcel a 50 acre parcel and you want to split off just a couple acres for building what do they need to do to protect themselves they need to hire a surveyor to do a certified survey map and split that parcel off they'll also need to have soils test done on that lot that they're splitting and if there's an existing house with a septic system on anywhere on that 40 acres they would need to have a septic inspection done so those are all things that you need to keep in mind when you're deciding to divide your land and if we have a few more questions but we're running out of time if anybody has any questions on any of the things we've talked about or any other areas that they feel your office could help you what number would they call how would they get in touch with you you can call 459-3060 and any of our staff would be more than happy to help anybody we want to make sure that people get in in the early end so that we can help them through the process at the same time thank you Shannon it was very interesting I've learned some things and hopefully our viewers learn some things also next month our guest is going to be Chuck Mayor he runs the county airport I think he's been with the airport since his inception quite a few years ago and he knows everything there is to know about the airport and all the improvements that are going on in the future of the airport and we look forward to Chuck next month thank you for listening if you have any questions suggestions for our shows call 459-3103 we'll be glad to entertain your suggestions thank you