 Welcome to Sheboygan County government working for you my name is Adam Payne Sheboygan County administrator and co-host of this program and we're very pleased today to have chairman Mike van der Steen back in the saddle welcome back Mike. It's great to be back Adam thank you. Good to have you back my gosh hosting this program by yourself it's no small feat so good to have the boss back and as you can see perhaps from one of the camera angles here Mike is instituting a much more relaxed atmosphere in county government for now on he's allowing all employees to put their feet up on the desk and get a little bit more comfortable. Mike I appreciate that kind of work environment as you know if you follow this program Mike's had some surgery and you want to just share with our viewers quick the status. Well I went through five operations in 13 months now and all the operations are done on my ankles and they're healing up so hopefully I'll be on my feet and walking quite well in the next three to four months. And as I've kitted Mike from time to time when he's actually at home recovering I hear from him a lot more than when he's working full-time so I'm glad to have him up and about too. Anyway it's good to have you with us and this month we're focusing on again one of our very important department heads the building services director and building services director Jim to beast is with us Jim welcome. Thank you it's good to be here. Jim as we were talking about off the air a little bit it's funny how time flies he started with the county back in 2000 became director in 2003 and he's responsible for overseeing all the buildings throughout Sheboygan County and with 20 departments a number of buildings including the courthouse and administration building and and in fact the very facility we're in UW campus. Jim has a lot on his plate. Jim please share by sharing a little bit with our viewers about your little background about yourself and what the key roles and responsibilities are of your department. Mechanical engineer for 30 years married I have three children recently added a daughter-in-law we're lucky that they are living in the county. We moved back I grew up in this area went to school in Usberg I attended UW Sheboygan got my associate degree here went on to UW Milwaukee moved away for about 20 years and came back in 2000 because it's a great place to bring up our kids they were just getting into high school and we just liked everything about Sheboygan County principally our department is serviced to the rest of the other departments we we take care of the buildings we try to do things so that they don't have to be taken away from their role serving the public even if it's taking the shredding out to the dumpster or whatever our department kicked chips in we keep the security we try to keep the building safe efficient for everybody to use and of course open to the public. Now building services again as you said support department for all the other departments how many staff do you have and and what general areas do they focus on you custodial you have maintenance we have 34 people there's 15 cleaners that work second shift there's 13 maintenance workers that work somewhere on first and somewhere on second we have an electrician supervisor a part-time clerk and myself and like you said we take care of the courthouse and the administration building the two jails at the law enforcement center and the detention center for the adults we have the ADRC building out in Sheboygan Falls our health and human services building where the public health is located and other departments and then like you said we assist all the other buildings the highway shops rocky no nursing home the airport our electrician handles all the security at all those places it gets to be quite a load I think it's a half a million square feet something like 80 buildings with electric meters on and total budget our operating budget is three million dollars a year and we've held that pretty steady for the last decade it's been a challenge but we want to keep government cheap and we're holding the tax levy down now are there any areas that you're using private sector folks to help with custodial responsibilities or maintenance responsibilities or electrical responsibilities how do you how do you proceed with some of the buildings throughout the county well we always call in contractors when things break down we our guys can fix pumps replace toilets sinks but if we're doing a remodeling that's going to pull them away from fixing that minor stuff like a month-long remodeling or something then we'll hire a contractor out to do that with a higher contractor in to work with the Freon and the air conditioning stuff sometimes our electrician gets overwhelmed because there's so many places he'll call in electrician to help them out we do not privatize anything yet we have looked into it numerous times we were recently in the 2012 budget we're challenged to say why aren't you outsourcing the cleaner so many other places do it why don't you we had tried it in the 1990s and there were many problems it just at that time the county board decided it wasn't worthwhile but it's hard to put a price on that how how you handle problems it's what we do I guess but there's also confidentiality we've got lots of records of the public their birth records their juvenile record their witness something that can't get out into the public we don't want their identity stolen because we've got their social security numbers and whatever else so those areas were very sensitive but again you can't hardly put a price on that how do we compare our cleaning staff to the private sector luckily or fortunately Sheboyin County shares a purchasing agent with the city and they recently had gotten bids for cleaning services and we were able to compare their the bid prices that we that the city got back as well as what they are using at the police department we call the some other municipal buildings we post office found out what how much their cleaners are costing and to make sure it was apples to apples we divided the cleaning cost by the square footage of the building and I'm proud to say the Sheboyin County cleaners are doing it cheaper than the private sector is doing it at any of those other locations and as much as a third of the cost of one of the bidders and it might not necessarily mean if you looked at cleaner to cleaner that the county cleaner is receiving less pay but that when they you look at the total area that they're responsible for cleaning the square footage it broke out that actually we were providing that service taking care of those responsibilities at a more cost-effective rate than had we outsourced it right the private companies got to pay for their supervision and they have to pay they're gonna make some profit and in their insurance and some other things that they have to cover so you can't just look at the dollars per hour for the private cleaner versus the dollars per hour for the county cleaner but overall we are doing it cheaper we'd actually have to raise the tax levy if we wanted to privatize and I just like to take a note to compliment Jim and his staff I've been here 13 years now and every year the budget process seems to get more challenging we have state caps in place now that we didn't have before and how much we can raise the levy chairman van der steen is one of the best track records you can have from a standpoint of Sheboyin County's reduced the property tax levy four out of the last four five years no other county has done that in the state and that doesn't happen if you don't have every department being part of the solution and building services under Jim's leadership has not only been frugal but as you said earlier really is just held the line for years and then when we have looked at outsourcing as some units of government have we are providing a more cost-effective service so it's a tremendous credit to you Jim and your staff and and then when I look at the final results when I come to work day in and day out the buildings are well kept they're clean we don't have trash sitting in the back corner because we're not getting to it because we're under staff the job gets done and again I really compliment building services in your leadership well done thank you very much and I too would like to compliment the building services staff they are really conscientious they do something simple like plowing snow but when you think about it in order to get our parking lots open by eight o'clock in the morning they're getting up at four o'clock or something like that the plow themselves out they're driving to work on roads that may not have been plowed yet by the highway department or the city and then they're hitting it and getting everything cleaned up in three hours or couple hours depending on the snowball and the trust factor you mentioned earlier I know the school district in the past and other units of government have gone to privatizing their their custodial responsibilities and not to say the private sector can't do a good job but we have heard stories of things disappear in offices or something happens and we have so much sensitive information throughout your boy in county whether it's the administration building or health and human services what have you that you don't want that to be a problem and I'm so glad it never has been really have a great track record in that regard going back to UW-Shaboygan where we're taping this program right now and a lot of folks don't recognize that though UW-Shaboygan is run by the state it is your department that has a role with UW-Shaboygan and making sure that the facility is kept up at any additions that happen you provide an oversight role and we provide some financial support to make sure that things are kept up and taken care of here please how does that work what is that relationship it's a very close relationship it's it's mirrored by the 13 two-year campuses across Wisconsin they are all county owned property county owned buildings and run by the state we like you said we provide some funding for them to maintain the the building themselves or replace carpeted or doorknobs or toilet or a sink or something like that and then the state provides the operating staff to edu run the education programs as well as maintain the buildings and the furniture and they pay utilities I work very closely with the maintenance staff here almost every other day we're talking about something try how can we fix something cheaper how can we support this education program and I think it's an excellent example of how county and state and the private sector can work together the private sector does donate to this institution right very good well thank you with that I'll turn it over to Mike thank you much Adam Jim you've been your departments in addition to all the maintenance that you do on our buildings and property you're also involved in energy conservation and all of our capital projects a short time ago you started an energy conservation committee can you tell us why you did that well our utilities kept going up and up and up even in our administration building we weren't adding any staff but the the power use kept going up and up every year it's not just the dollars but the actual kilowatts and it was getting to a point where our just our utilities was a million dollars we got a three million dollar budget and a third of it is going to pay utilities so Adam Payne challenged me in tooth as we were preparing the 2009 budget to cut those expenses by 10% not only stop them from rising but actually drop them by 10% I thought our billing services department was doing a great job we're replacing lights with more efficient lights we're coming up with better motors they were keeping an eye on energy efficiency but we just weren't making an impact I had met with people from Focus on Energy in Wisconsin Public Service and they suggested this energy team as a way to get all the staff to buy in to saving energy just to get them to think about turning off the light when they leave the office turn off the computer at lunch or when they go home at at the end of the day and it's really worked out well we've got a member from each building and we meet together every month we come up with different ideas and they spread it back to the building that they're in and we did meet that 10% goal that first year and we've continued to meet and we've continued to make improvements and this past year I'm glad to say we were able to cut utility use by 15% that's really exceeding the mark nice job you talked a little bit about few of the projects that are the accomplishments of those projects but other than just turning things off what projects has this committee pushed us into considering and in what things around the horizon for maybe other things to do right now we've been concentrating things that pay for themselves in that first year so we're not getting additional tax levy dollars we are rather than wait for a light fixture to burn out we're seeing that maybe we need to replace them ahead of time to get that energy savings and we this group has pushed us to do that we taking advantage of rebates from focus on energy it also made us aware of some new technologies the LED light fixtures are changing like every month but they're more and more efficient and a side benefit to our department is they'll last 10 years so we don't have to go and replace that light bulb every year like we have in the past we relit the bicycle tunnel and put motion sensors on it so it wasn't lit all night long it's only lit when somebody's actually going through it we've replaced motors more often than what we had been doing with high efficiency type rather than getting them repaired on things on the horizon we're relamping all the highway department sheds right now they're with light fixtures that take about 10 minutes to warm up so when one truck leaves they're not sure when the next guy's gonna come they don't turn it off because it might be 10 minutes of wait for the lights to come on so now we've gone to fluorescent it's called a high bay fixture they can turn them off every time they leave because they come right back on other things that we've looked at was some solar energy at the veterans memorial to pay for their their lighting but they've got such long payback periods like 25 years we're not sure that the solar panel will even last that long so we're trying to be prudent with how we're using the tax dollars in the future there's probably some things that like a three-year payback that would be worthwhile to the taxpayer for us to put in some heat exchangers to grab some of the heat of the building before it gets exhausted out things like that we're also trying to develop a long-range plan so if this boiler fails we know right away what we're gonna replace it with that's something that's more high efficiency and how much money we can get back from focus on energy sounds like you're doing a great job in that area Jim to take a look at the capital improvements program there's been a lot of building projects that we have instituted in Sheboygan County in the past you tell us a little bit about some of those projects and mostly your involvement in those hello big construction projects are bonded projects the last multi-million project that we did was here at the UW Sheboygan the acuity technology center as can be seen from I-43 that was some time ago but as you know the economy slow and with your direction we're keeping the tax levy down so there are some buildings that were under consideration and they're being put on hold so I have been working on smaller projects replacing roofs before they start to leak replacing air conditioners before some building ends up without air conditioning for the whole summer let's replace it before it fails we're replacing some boilers again before they fail but also to get some energy efficiency improvements things that I'm working on right now is air conditioning unit at Sheboygan Falls building and we're putting all the controls on the computer part of the cost-cutting cutting measure that we did was we eliminated the maintenance worker that was out at that building in Sheboygan Falls so to save time from somebody driving back and forth all the time by putting it on the computer we can see the temperature in each individual office from the courthouse we can fix settings without having to drive out there we're recently upgraded the 29 fuel tanks that the county has there were some state regulations to protect against spills we did that we replaced the security system at the jail where the guards can touch the screen and open doors or turn on lights or open an intercom message or camera and we replaced that in the entire building it's always something I'm working on replacing boilers this summer at the highway department this afternoon I'm meeting with somebody about the roofs for this coming summer trying to get things bid out early so we're the first ones and we can actually get lower prices than if we waited till May to bid things out could you tell us a little bit more about that bidding process you know how to we go out for bids and how do we select the the people that are going to be doing these projects for Sheboygan County anything over 25,000 that that we estimate will cost 25,000 is bid out if it's a smaller project I'll write a bid specification to make sure that all the contractors know exactly what we want I don't really have a lot of time for that lately and we've had we've been hiring engineering firms or architects to create the bid specifications and draw the plans and we advertise locally and in the plan rooms across southeast Wisconsin bidders submit a bid they're open publicly at a private property committee meeting or some other county meeting and then we review the bids to make sure everybody's on this bidding the right things they're not trying to cheat us on something and then it's awarded to the lowest price bidder now in some of the other projects I was on the building committee for the Rocky Knoll I know that you act as kind of almost a project manager and stay on top of all these projects you give us a little to give the people at home a little bit idea what that entails I I feel it's my job to keep projects like that under budget even though that one at Rocky Knoll was serving the people of Rocky Knoll I assisted by keeping track of all the invoices that were paid with any remodeling project you open up a wall there's always a surprise I tried to deal with them quickly to so that the crew isn't standing there waiting and getting paid and then make the economical decision that will keep us under budget so I'm tracking a monitoring I'm coming up on the site every other day or every day or whatever is needed to make sure that everything is what we want it's within the specification that we required in the contract and we're not going to go over budget we appreciate you giving everything that detailed attention Jim now when you work with the county board we've got nine standing committees you've got one committee that really you work with directly but how do you interact with with all the other committees I like you said I do report to the property committee and we do they do meet twice a month so I'm spending most of my time with them but like when the Rocky Knoll project was going on I attended every health care committee meeting provided an update of where we are in relation to half done with construction 60% done where we are with financing what any changes might have come up just to keep them apprised same thing with the guard station at the Sheriff's Department I met with law committee anytime they have any questions about a specific project because it's really under their responsibility I'm there to answer their questions that's great we really appreciate the time that you put in being there to answer all those questions and give them that detailed explanation of that project with that will turn it back over to Adam thanks Mike I think so far we've asked Jim probably a lot of questions that are pretty routine for him relatively easy to answer so I think it's time we up the ante a little bit could you please explain to our viewers exactly why the Green Bay Packers lost the recall that's going on who's going to be our next governor and do you support this recall no let's go with one like upcoming planned projects what do you got on the horizon that is important to Sheboygan County any any new buildings anything that is rather significant that you're planning for there's long-range plans to move the highway department shop out of the city of Sheboygan more centrally located that's been postponed over the years but they have indicated that I'm going to be more involved in what they have in the past in fact I was just at the highway department yesterday talking with the highway commissioner about building situation the jail had had plans to add a third and fourth floor due to some efforts at Adam's suggestion they've gotten the inmate population down right now but eventually we see that that is going to happen we're going to have to do those sorts of things for now I'm dealing with architect here at the U of Sheboygan we're updating the master plan to see how we can support they're talking about some more four year to match bachelor degrees what type of buildings might be remodeled or added on to serve those needs and then all the roofs and the air conditioning that an ongoing project and that's what I think I hope viewers take from this discussion is talking about building services and a lot of people as I would have thought 13 years ago when I started this job well that's about cleaning the corridors and the bathrooms and making sure that the light bulbs are changed but building services has so much more going on from A to Z whether it's overseeing multi-million dollar projects as you personally have done or if it's responding quickly to emergencies and in the building that may be a water leak that's running from floor to floor all the improvements you've made the cost efficiencies you've made there's just a tremendous amount going on in building services one of the things that we're all dealing with Jim and certainly use a department head is trying to hold the line you've had a excellent track record in keeping your costs down and coming up with cost efficiencies how do you see the future and and what challenges do you see coming to your department as we continue to strive to hold that line yet need to continue to maintain our our buildings and continue to put new roofs on and things that aren't getting any cheaper yeah and the buildings are getting older and they're needing more maintenance it is definitely a challenge in the past we've cut staff by 10% I think we're getting to be about bare bones I'd like to say we're gonna leverage technology but you still got to have a guy to be able to take the pump apart and put it back together it's we hope to work smarter I hope that we get more training to our staff that they can do things quicker and smarter improve communication with computer technology of course trying to cut down and travel as much as possible yet it will be a challenge because the buildings are getting older fortunately Mike and the other county board supervisors have to decide they're gonna what priorities are gonna be established and how we're gonna pay for it but it is an ongoing challenge and it's not getting any easier well we appreciate you being here today you covered a lot of information if you have additional questions about building services or you heard something from Mr. to Beast today that you'd like to learn a little bit more about whether it's the bidding process and and the thresholds there or the roles and responsibilities of staff please don't hesitate to contact Jim likely his assistant Gail will answer the phone is that the case yeah or I answer it directly because she's only part-time and to get that information you can go to the county website we have all the departments listed there background information about those websites phone numbers and if you ever struggle to get ahold of anybody in Sheboygan County whether it's chairman Mike van der Steen or myself Jim to Beast or anyone else you can always contact our county clerks office and Julie glancy and her staff do an excellent job and they'll get you in the hands of the right person so thank you for joining us today next month we're going to have Aaron Brault here our planning director planning and conservation director some of you may recognize that name Aaron Brault because he was formerly our manager of the non-motorized transportation program he is now our planning and conservation director doing an excellent job and a lot going on in Sheboygan County with planning and conservation efforts one in particular that we've been focusing on right now is the dredging and cleanup of our Sheboygan River and Harbor so please join us next month to learn about that and our non-motorized program and other activities and planning and until then thanks for joining us