 an award-winning show full of political chatter and insights. We're delighted to be with you and glad you could join us. I'm going to go around and introduce our hearty group, Cal Potter, former state senator, Tom Pineski, former alderman, Ken Risto, former person in charge of social studies at the Shabuagan area school district. A bunch of has-beens. And me, I'm Sarah Palin. No, I'm just kidding. I'm actually just Mary Lynn Donahue, a small-town lawyer, and happy to be chatting about some city and county issues. And we have a fair amount to talk about today, which is always a nice situation to be in. Ken Risto here says that he's all pumped up. Let's start then by talking about the changes in the police department. Don't care. Of course you care. Let me just put the ordinance or the plan in perspective. The salary and grievance committee recently voted three to one to approve the retirement of seven officers, including Chief Kirk and Deputy Chief Shervin, and then some of the more upper-level lieutenants and sergeants and so forth. At a savings of $309,000 to the city on an ongoing basis, each of them will get paid $1,400 for each year of service. And I'm not quite sure how much that's going to cost. But overall, it's clearly a savings. The chief says it's a good idea, but only if that money that's going to be saved is used for officers on the street. Alderman Sirk voted against it, because he's really pretty afraid of what will happen to the police department management of all the upper echelon folks are gone. What do you guys think? I need one more piece of information. When do they expect to retire? By the end of the year. By the end of the year. I missed that in the course of the room. I've been gone, so I haven't been reading the papers fully. Santa Antonio, Sam here, but I do notice you're dressed up for everyone's in blue here today, which I think augers well for the election. I'm your 17 points now, Tom, but let me not digress. So what do you think? Well, this is sort of a side opinion. I did hear that there was going to be a reorganization and the chief was retiring and I thought my first reaction was, they're copping out as a pun. They're instead of moving into the new station, getting it squared away, getting it organized, making sure that things run smoothly. It goes anytime you move into a new place, there's little idiosyncrasies and things that aren't going to, in my, that's just what I thought, they're abandoning ship. They're going to move out, they're going to retire and let everybody else move in and handle it. I thought that's the first thing that came to my mind now. In fact, they should be able to move into the station as I understand it in November. And one newspaper article did quote Kirk is saying, Chief Kirk is saying that he would be there in the new station through the end of December. So, but I understand what you're saying. Long term, they're certainly, Long term, I mean they could, I was thinking, gee, retired next year, you know, retired mid-year or something, but get the station up and running. You've got new people moving in, all sorts of different kinds of activities going on. You got to establish some patterns and all those good people are going to be gone. So, maybe that's a plus, I'll spin it as a plus. The other, the newer people get to set their own patterns, not beholding to the older establishments. They get to decide how they want to do it because the older establishment's going to be gone. And don't tell me you don't care. No, I don't care. What are the chances given the city budget that that money is going to go back into police officers? I mean, because we're looking at a city budget that really faces some real challenges, right? Well, yeah, I mean, particularly Alderman Gisha, I believe Mayor Perez's executive budget came in for a flat tax rate. Gisha, I think, wants to decrease it by a nickel per hundred, nickel per hundred or nickel per thousand dollars of assessed value, must be a nickel per hundred. And in fact, there was a lot of debate on the blog, the Schweigenpress blog, I couldn't resist looking. And Professor Pineski, there was some question about, for a $100,000 house, how much a nickel reduction in the rate would mean. And one of the writers suggested that whatever it was, that money be used for math classes for the Schweigen area school district. So I thought that was, I'm sorry, that's a small aside. So a nickel and a hundred thousand, that's a hundred, what is that, a hundred times for $100,000 house? I don't know, in any event, we'll move right along. But I think, yeah, I think your point's well taken. I think that the retirement is being premised on the fact that there'll be one or two new uniformed officers on the street, but, Cal, what do you think? Well, I think it's probably a good deal, and that's why they're grabbing at it. I think there's some healthcare payments, as well as the compensation for years of service. Those offers don't come along very often. And I think that's something that these guys probably maybe would like their new office in the police station, but when you're offered health insurance at a relatively young age and retirement, you grab it. So I'm sure that's part of it. Plus the fact that they're concerned about more money for the police department, but I think Ken is right. Anytime you have money sort of earmarked, there's always ways around it. Social security was earmarked too. Look where that has gone. So there are all kinds of accounting tricks that can be used. I've seen it used a lots of times. So I don't know that this is written in stone. I do think that the council support will be strong because Chief Kirk's support for the plan is strong. I think if he were expressing any kind of concerns or suggesting he had been pushed out or he couldn't work with the mayor or anything like that, but none of that is being said. And they have two deputy chiefs now, don't they? Is it criminal investigation and traffic? Yeah. Or I mean operations? They used to have two and I believe they have reduced that to just one deputy. One because they used to have two I know. They used to have three then they got down to two. And now they're gonna go down to one. They had a lot of management in that particular department. There's no doubt about it. So I think it's a creative and good idea. I think they should look outside the department for a replacement for the chief. I know that's very difficult. And I was on the police and fire commission when we hired Chief Kirk and he was clearly from my perspective the best candidate. But there are always difficulties when you hire from the inside and then there are difficulties when you hire from the outside. And of course the city's last experience with the chief from outside was not good. I don't remember the fella's name. But I believe he was from Stevens Point and basically never really moved to town and had to buy the loyalties. And I don't think even lasted a year if I'm not mistaken. So we'll see what happens. The city council has been busy. We have now passed. That's never good. They're busy? They've been active. Yes they have. Yes. And what the council did at its meeting last week was to pass a comprehensive ordinance regulating where sex offenders, registered sex offenders can live in the city of Sheboygan. 2,000 feet from a variety of places where children would likely congregate. And it is essentially from what I understand means that there's no place really in town that a sex offender, registered sex offender can now live. The ordinance also makes it an offense for a landlord to rent to a registered sex offender if that person is within 2,000 feet of a school, church, daycare center, park, recreational trail. They're just a long list of places. So we've now basically made the city of Sheboygan off limits to registered sex offenders. Not all sex offenders need to register under the law, but many do, including minors. And so it'll be interesting to see what happens. You know, when you think about 2,000 feet, I was trying to put it into the terminal, into something that I- More math again, Tom. Visibly, visually see. And you know, a football field, 100 yards is what, 300 feet. So we're talking six football, almost seven football fields, distance. So- About two thirds of a mile. And it's, no, 5,000 to 180 feet. So it's- It's less than a half. Less than a half. Less than a half a mile. Because all of the sex offenders really can't travel beyond that. So that 2,000 feet's really critical. So you, yeah. It's bizarre. It's bizarre. So within it, within where children live. So children live. So yeah, you're right. There's no place that they could live in the city. And other communities are doing this. I mean, if you watch television, everybody's falling over each other to pass these ordinances. I don't know what's gonna happen to the people who are, you know, released from prison where they're gonna go. You're gonna have a congregation of mountain rural townships or something. I don't know- Well, Dirk Salmon is very concerned that the town of Mosul will become a dumping ground for all- We should have put a ring around the city and they got to live in this ring 2,000 feet away from the city. Well, there's certain practical difficulties. I do think what is happening is that there will be a move by all of our towns and villages and cities within Sheboygan County now to pass these kinds of ordinances. So you will come to the point where there will be literally no place in Sheboygan County that a sex offender can live. Do you remember the story called A Man Without a Country? Yes. And it prohibited this fella and you probably remember it better than I do, but it stuck with me just from being a little kid. Somebody who was punished by saying basically you can't have a country that you can live in. And I think this is sort of coming to it. My question is what problem does it solve? I think one could suggest that there would be fewer child sexual assaults. But there are many, now these folks register and they're kept track of. Now there will be a push. There'll be more underground activity. There'll be less registration. People who have family in Sheboygan County won't be able to, they come out of prison and they won't be able to come back and live with a spouse unless the spouse has been in a place for two years or longer. Current sex offenders are grandfathered in. So if you are a registered sex offender, you live in your apartment and you don't get evicted, you're fine. But if you do get evicted, as the way I read it, essentially you're gonna have to not only leave town, but you're gonna have to leave the county. So definition of sex offender, like they've been found guilty of a felony or something. Right, there are four different classes of sexual offenses in Wisconsin statutes and the registration law, which comes from Megan's law, or Megan's law, which was passed on Florida some years ago. I don't know the details, but it's for more serious sex offenses. And so not every. That's just classified and you have to register. Right, so not every sex offender is required to register. And so now there's a concern that the judges will say, well, you don't have to register as a sex offender. Well, that's not going to happen. I mean, that's not. What if you have a juvenile who and juveniles found guilty of serious sex offenses can be ordered to register. They're sent away to a treatment group home and they wanna come back to town to reintegrate with their families and so forth. These children aren't going to be able to come back because unless their family has been in an apartment or a house for more than two years. So I just think that there are a lot of pieces of this that maybe haven't been thought through. And then from my perspective, of course, I think it's constitutionally infirm. And I did offer to Alderman Gisha that I would represent the city. Even when it's sued, but I think it might be a losing case. I don't know. The council's resolution was carefully crafted, relies on an eighth circuit case from Iowa that found a similar law to be constitutional. It hasn't really been dealt with in Wisconsin. So it'll be interesting to see what happens, but is it good public policy? Well, you know, the repercussions for the Department of Corrections is gonna be difficult. What are they gonna be required to do if you can't find a placement for your ex-inmate? Do you then have to set up sort of halfway houses for people who've served their time, apartment house, and then is that a good type of situation where you've put 10 people together in a rural area who have served their time but can't live any place, you have to then create a sort of an island where these people are housed. And I'm not so sure that's good public policy or good use of taxpayers' money and corrections time to start finding housing for people who have served their time. So I can see down the road, this is gonna be very problematic. Just what do you do with these people? Well, they won't be able to live in the state. I mean, I do think this has a bit of a snowball effect. I mean, do you want to be the final municipality standing that hasn't passed one of these ordinances? No, not at all, not at all. I mean, it might lessen the costs of probation and parole in Sheboyton County because there'll be fewer people to supervise because they'll have to be transferred to other counties or other states. Derny, you always bring up the interesting question. Are there, you're talking about the full, the state being every village and every town having some kind of laws. Is there some sense of how many communities have passed laws like this already? I don't know. Or is it just a very small number at this point? So we could be far away from that situation. I would not be surprised within a year if most of the municipalities in Sheboyton County have not passed an ordinance like this. And while I think it, from my perspective and my limited, truly limited constitutional scholarship, I don't think it passes muster. It might, I mean, it might be held to be constitutional and so it's interesting. And I just don't want people to think that their children are gonna be safe from sex offenders. And that's the concern, is that this does not solve that problem. You know, I could see all kinds of interesting little, you know, somebody does find a place 2,000 feet away and then you get a builder building a house that's close to 2,000 feet away and a family moves into the house. Now the sex offender is no longer 2,000 feet away because a family has moved into an area. Well, the 2,000 foot requirement is absurd in the sense that we don't want these people in proximity of children. That's not the purpose of it at all. The purpose of it is to create a zone where we don't want people like this in our community. And I understand that given the snowballing or the irrational race to the bottom that's probably going to happen, that Cheboygan doesn't wanna be the last, as Mary Lynn said, the last enclave that actually opens up its doors to any particular group of citizens that we may or may not want in our midst. You know, that's, I understand that. I also understand why 14 aldermen don't have the courage to vote no because you know how that's gonna play out. And I hope that God, that people who challenge this law don't try to seek relief in the Wisconsin Supreme Court system or any of our local courts because they're all elected officials and we all know what those campaigns are gonna look like. So now we have to rely on the wisdom of the framers that gave federal judges lifetime parole, lifetime judges terms. It actually is parole, I think in some cases. You know, no one, and I think it's kind of odd, you know, what's next, murderers or people who have been convicted of manslaughter who've served their time? How about people who have been guilty of armed robbery? And now we're, you know, basically what we're simply going to create is you serve your time, it used to be in the old civics classes and I'm not, you know, I find it odd that I have to defend sex offenders. But I think there's a greater principle here that I was taught in my American civics classes. You pay your dues, you go back to society and we accept you back into this community and there seems to be all sorts of exaggerated recidivism rates being thrown around to begin with, but we don't punish people for something they might do. And I think we're forgetting that being an American is hard duty. I mean, we all put up with things we don't like because we want to live in a free society. There's things that I read I don't like, there's things I watch on TV I don't like, there's things on the internet I really don't like. And if I were the dictator of the universe, I'd get rid of them. And this is one of these things where I think we forget that there's a certain amount of risk. And I say that as a husband and as a stepfather. I'm not excited about having certain folks in our communities. But there are lots of different folks I don't like in my community necessarily. But we live in a free society and that's part of the risk we have to take. And I think we often forget that. And I'm just, I just really am very concerned that this is just the tip of the sword, you know. And I think the other issue is before I yield the floor is if you really are interested in protecting your child from sexual abuse, you know, worry about, you know, your crazy uncle Louis or somebody in your family structure. Cause those are the, you know, we always talk about this murder, the person most likely to murder you is a member of your family, somebody you know. And the same thing with sexual abuse in this community is any social worker in this town will tell you is that it's the predators are the people within your own families. The people that are in the roofs, underneath your own roof in many cases. Not this, the cases that tend to get in the media where there's one person soliciting in a park, you know, behind a bush. I mean, those aren't, those are not the vast majority of the kinds of things that threaten our kids. It really isn't. And so if you think this law is gonna protect you, you're just, you're living in a dream world. Well, well said, well said, well said. There it is. So now my chance for public office has been completely decimated on this show. No, I was gonna say, we'll destroy this too. We're not gonna go to your district and vote for you. No, Ken, actually you destroyed that chance probably a long time ago, but in any event. And I understand, again, I really do understand what the older, you know, when they're faced with this race to the bottom, you really don't wanna be, but it either there is this big, vast movement and we're the last, we're gonna be in the last in line or we're the first. And if we're the first, then shame on us. Or if we're one of the first, shame on us. All right. Said by the guy in the blue shirt. The, oh, that's right. Tom's got a blue shirt. You all have blue shirts on. Blue shirt team today. There we go. I love it. I love it. Well, you see, it matches my eyes, so, you know. And that's why we all got together and did it very well. We must have coordinated that advance. Layoffs, it's certainly been an interesting financial time to put it mildly. Tom's wife is a stockbroker and I expect she's probably not sleeping much at night anymore, but in... It has been stressful for her all day. Well, and for everyone. News today that Kohler is laying off 50 people, 38 of them managerial spots, which I thought was interesting and 12 line workers. And then the city, excuse me, the finance committee has been reviewing the Department of Public Works budget, which calls for a 4% decrease, which in essence would be a layoff of five people. We haven't really talked about laying off anybody at the city level for an awful long time. And so it seems to me that the council and particularly the mayor are pretty serious about keeping the tax rate in line. What do you think? We're going to see more of these layoffs. Well, as long as people say they're going to have a no tasks increase with the value of real estate not going up. You don't have a built-in, let's say a goose laying golden eggs anymore. Actually, we're having declining values. And I think unless energy costs do stay down as they've come down, you're not going to have that as an avenue. You're going to have to pay your gas bills, new heating bills as a municipality, just like anybody else. So where do you get the blood out of the turnip here? I mean, it comes down to personnel, which are usually 70% of your costs. So you're being between a rock and a hard place. And so it was inevitable. I think that eventually once the contingency funds were spent, you're back to the wall here and it's people. It's a sad reality. All we can do is hopefully the economy turns around a bit for stockbrokers and other benefits, as well as the energy costs stay down. Tom, when you were on the council, was there a strong feeling about keeping the tax rate steady? Yeah, so I remember. Well, we wanted to keep our bond rating solid. That was always in front. And nobody liked to raise taxes. Yeah, well, there you go. Yeah, so I think there was, I don't know how strong it was, but it was, we really didn't want to raise taxes, if we didn't have to. Yeah. We also stressed that oftentimes, we were such a small part of the overall tax burden. The school system had, was the largest part and we then followed by us and then the county. You know, your point is well taken because I know Mayor Perez at every opportunity says, really the tax bill is not just the city, it is the city, it's the county, it's the school district, it's the vocational district and then there's a tiny little piece for the recreational budget if I'm not mistaken. And so, and we need to keep that in mind, but I think, of course the school district rate will continue to rise because of the referendum and we all agreed that we would be willing to pay more for the field houses and for a new Jefferson school. So yeah, I think your point is well taken there, but it'll be interesting. We'll talk a little bit in our next segment about the Janesville GM plant closing up a year early, a year in advance, but the specter of layoffs is just something that, whether the city or in private industry, isn't anything that we've really seen in the Sheboygan area. Well, I take that back. Pantare closed, yeah. And of course, not directly in the city, but Tecumseh's certainly been on the ropes for a while. So you wonder what people will do and how they will make those adjustments and so forth. So, but... Public works has always been, it's the easiest one to get at versus public safety because the police and fire could argue those are essential services and you can't afford to scrimp there. Right. But in public works, it's cyclical. In the summertime, you can hire a lot of temporary people to do your outdoor work and your maintenance and stuff and then come winter, you can't do those things and if you have somebody on the full-time payroll, you have to find jobs for them to do. Then of course, they paint the furniture, or they paint the benches, they clean up, they do a lot of internal work, but you can only do that so often every year. Right. And so it's an easy kind of place to say, well, we don't need to hire a full-time person when this person retired. We just leave the job going, we'll hire a temporary in the summertime. Sure. I do think that the Department of Public Works had Bill Bittner, seems to have a pretty good grasp, but he's not been here very long, but I think he has a good grasp of the issues and what needs to be done and so forth. Just a plug for the Sheboygan Public Education Foundation, known as the E Foundation, which raises money for projects within the school district that are not budgeted for in the public budget. And I don't think that we touched on this last time, but speaking of the fieldhouses, the equipment has to be replaced and that hasn't been budgeted for. People are being asked to make small donations when they come in to use the equipment. You've started, have you started working at? Not yet. But you will. But I will be. And are you okay with giving $10 to? Sure, I knew that going in. I think there was among people in circles who were talking about the referendum, understood well in advance that we'll build these things and we'll get people going into them. And quite frankly, last year already, there was a conversation in the halls of central support saying, we gotta raise money and we should start charging the public. And I was pretty emphatic to saying, no, you promise the public as a condition, well not a condition legally, but certainly a promise was made publicly that these would be open to the public without charge. You cannot, within one year, all of a sudden announced surprise. We, you know, everybody knows that that equipment wears out. It's been getting tremendous use south at least and at North when I've been there. And so, am I surprised? No. Do I think it's a reasonable thing to do? Sure, absolutely. It's nice to see the Education Foundation involved because it really is a good group. It has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and an excellent board and we have to say goodbye and we'll talk again next time.