 Welcome to Sheboygan County Government working for you. My name's Adam Payne, Sheboygan County Administrative Coordinator and co-host of this program with Chairman Bill Gehring. And today we're very pleased to have our guest, the Treasurer for Sheboygan County. Very important position, Laura Henning Lorenz. Laura, good to have you with us today. Nice to be here. Laura's going to talk a little bit about her roles and responsibilities, very critical responsibilities I might add for the overall operations of Sheboygan County. A lot of folks today, Laura, might not be thinking about their tax bill because those come out in the fall, late winters, sometimes too close to Christmas, some people might say. But you certainly are always thinking about tax bills. Why don't you please begin by sharing a little bit about your roles and responsibilities. When were you first elected? I came into the position in January of 2003, so I've been in the office just a little over three years. And it's just been incredible. I've learned quite a bit. But there's a good team in the office, so that makes a big difference. You know, if you have good people working with you, everything works really well. In addition to that, there are several roles and responsibilities that I do have. I'm the keeper of the investment portfolio for the county. And of course we do collect taxes year-round, not just a couple times during the year. We do that year-round. We maintain the county's bank accounts and file reports at different levels of government by statute on a timely basis. And we work a lot with the public. We are constantly either answering phones or taking care of people that walk into our office. And we do that on a daily basis, Monday through Friday. Now you just said this is your third year now as treasurer. Yes. It just doesn't seem like that much time has flown by already. How many staff do you work with in the office? Well, besides myself, there are four people. Jane Dragan is the office supervisor. She's been in our office just a little over two years, but she's worked for the county for 19. Margaret Stewart has worked in the treasurer's office for 19 and a half years, but she's worked for the county for 25 years. Jack Verhaus just worked in the office for eight and a half years, and he's been with the county for 12. And then Barb Schultz has worked in the office for one year, but she's been with the county for 21 years. That's fantastic people working around you. So if someone comes up to you and asks, well, what is the primary responsibility of your office? How would you respond to that? Well, our primary responsibility is to collect taxes. That is our main responsibility, and like I said, we do that year-round. So we have, you know, whether it's first installment collection or second installment collection or delinquent collection, we do that year-round. And just to give people an appreciation for that, we have about $151 million operating budget in Sheboygan County, $44 million of that is from property taxes. And then there are other fees and state and federal funds as well as investments that you have a responsibility for overseeing and maintaining as well. Please touch on that. Well, the investment portfolio, I report to the finance committee. They are my liaison committee. So I report to them every month with an update on what's all in that portfolio, what's coming due, what's doing good, what's doing bad, but pretty much they can see what's doing good and what's doing bad by the report. And then decisions are made as to how to reinvest depending upon the economy and what the markets are doing. I know every now and then we'll see a letter to the editor suggesting, well, I heard Sheboygan County has $40 million invested in such and such an area. Why don't they tap into that to address some of their financial challenges? Could you please very quickly explain what that's all about? Any time you have any money, even think of yourself. If you had a savings account, would you just leave that an account and not make it work for you? Of course not. You want your money working for you and every dollar that the county earns on interest is a dollar less that they have to tax their taxpayers. So it's always important to stay on top of the investments. I feel that we do that and that we're always investing in safe investments, which again, we do do that and there are some statutory limitations on what we can and cannot invest in. And it's delightful knowing the money that's earned with money that isn't being used to pay expenses at the time. Now besides collecting taxes, managing our investment portfolio and just essentially keeping a close eye on our finances, what other responsibilities do you take care of in your office? There's just a huge long list. But the basics besides collecting taxes would be that we are the central collection point of all deposits. So if the extension office collects some money, all of the money from all of the departments filters down into our office for processing and then preparing for the bank. So everything filters through our office. That's done on a daily basis. We also work with the public like I mentioned. That's always very important. We answer a lot of questions from the public, most commonly, you know, I'm preparing my income taxes right now at this time of the year and I've lost my receipt. Can you reprint them? One of the major things we're just starting to do, we're kicking off in the beginning of April, will be certifying the lottery credit database. That will take us a while to do that as well. Now on the grand scheme of things, I imagine this isn't one of your top priorities, but one of the things that you help provide to the public is a beautiful atlas. Yes. Sheboygan County, I lose track of time. It may have been four years or so ago. We really took ownership for developing our own atlas and I think it's beautiful. I know we've received a lot of compliments about the improvements that were made through the information systems department and your department. Please share with our viewers a little bit about the atlas, when it will be updated, how they get a copy of it. Well, the atlas will be updated this fall in 2006. We're hoping to have that out, I believe, by October. There's all sorts of people who use it, anywhere from sportsmen and women to folks who just love and have a knack for maps because you have to realize there aren't just plat maps in here. There are road maps. There are all of the maps of the lakes in Sheboygan County with the depths on them. There's so much inside of this addition, the 2004 addition. In addition to that, the covers always seem to be quite an interest point to many people where the cover on the 2004 atlas is from a mural that used to be in one of the circuit court branches. It's a very nice piece of work that's produced by folks here in Sheboygan County. Very nice. Thanks, Laura. Laura, just to clarify, we talked a little bit before about some of our investments may be doing better than others. I think we should clarify that all of our investments are doing pretty well. They're all good investments. It's just that when interest rates go up, some of the investments, if we cash them in, might not gain us quite as much, but we hold our investments to maturity in general. We invest only in good, solid paper and bonds and notes. You talked a little bit about the lottery credit and gaming credit. How does that work now? Will people still get a postcard to certify that they still live in a household? How will your office handle that now? Chairman Gehring, we used to do that, but the Wisconsin administrative code changed approximately three years ago, and that code now allows us to save taxpayers' money. We don't have to print, order printed copies of postcards, probably 30, 40,000 postcards. We don't have to put postage on them and label them and mail them out and get returns from them, and then reenter all of that information into a database. What we're allowed to do now is to use our technology, which is what we should be doing. What would take an enormous amount of cost and labor has pretty much dwindled down into we get to use our technology. We go ahead and we run reports out of our tax system. We have our municipalities assisting us with telling us who they know does get a lottery credit and who should not get a lottery credit, and then we take that information and we load it back into our tax system, a much more efficient way to maintain our lottery credit database. Long term, what it's done for us, and we were just rather tickled and surprised to find out that during tax collection time, we had so many less people coming in and asking for lottery credits because we already had taken care of it prior to the tax bills going out. Now that it's done on an annual basis and not every five years, the records are much more accurate. Really then, the citizen homeowner just has to sit back and wait for their tax bill. If in fact they believe they should get a lottery credit and don't, what should they do? Well, for example, if you have a 2005 tax bill and you're thinking, gosh, you know, I really should have gotten a lottery credit, a couple of things you can do. If you really did qualify for a lottery credit in 2005 and did not get it, you can call our office at 459-3015 and you can speak to one of the folks that answers the phone and they can just make sure that you did qualifying. If you did, they can send you a late claim form. The key to that is they have to be mailed into the state of Wisconsin before October 1st. So there's still a window of opportunity to claim a lottery credit. Otherwise, if you're absolutely sure and you don't need our assistance over the phone to get this done, you can go to the county's website and then click on Departments and then click on Treasurer and then we have a link for lottery credits to get to a late claim form. Who really qualifies these days for a lottery credit? You have to reside in a home. Is that the key or what might the key be? That's exactly it. You have to own property here in Wisconsin. So for example, if you own a home here in Sheboygan County and let's say you have a cabin up north, you cannot have two lottery credits. You may only have one lottery credit in the entire state and you have a lottery credit on the home that's your primary residence, meaning the home that you live in the most. But the key is you may only have one. Do you have any idea roughly how many dollars come back to Sheboygan County taxpayers because of that credit? Yes. One of the forms that I'm responsible for filling out just recently was by municipality and then in total. In total, Sheboygan County will receive 2.7 million dollars of lottery credit relief just in this county. So it's a remarkable dollar amount. And then does the actual credit kind of depend upon how much money is generated in gaming and people purchasing lottery tickets? So where does that dollar amount come from? That dollar amount comes from a formula. And that's all done by the state of Wisconsin. In the fall of each year, they tell us that the reports are out on their website and so we retrieve them. The dollar amounts are by school district. So you've had anywhere from $65, I believe, in the Elkhart Lake Glambula school district all the way up to $95 in the Sheboygan area school district. So quite a rain. Whether it's $65 or $95, that's a nice amount of money to be able to deduct from your property taxes. Thank you, Laura. This morning, as Laura knows, we had a department heads meeting. We have a monthly department heads meeting and I can't help but feel every time I meet with the department heads, just what a great team we have in place here. And though it's been three years, you're still one of our newer department heads and I have made some real nice improvements in the treasurer's office. You've mentioned that a couple, but please share with us some of the innovations, some of the changes you've made in the treasurer's office to benefit the people of Sheboygan County. Well, one of the things I told you, I think three years ago, actually two things I can remember, were that we wanted to be able to allow taxpayers to pay their taxes online. And we've been able to accomplish that. Again, folks can go to www.witreasures.org and they can pay their property taxes online by e-check, which means you either have a checking or savings account and then it's basically a wire from your account to the county or you may pay by credit card and there are convenience fees with each type of transaction that the taxpayer pays, but it's a very convenient form. We have measured all of the payments that we had during the calendar year of 2005 and we took over 400 payments online. So every year it seems to increase. It's becoming more and more popular. The other thing I wanted to do was to document the tasks we do and the instructions on how to do those things and we've been able to accomplish that as well. It was a pretty big undertaking. And I've noticed and perhaps some of our viewers have noticed that obviously you've allowed now another option for people to pay their taxes that may be more convenient for them. I know more people I think are dropping them off with a self-addressed envelope so you can send the receipt back, but the other key thing I've noticed in the administration building is our lines don't seem as long or even when there is a line people seem to move through pretty quickly. What do you think are some of the reasons for that? Well, I think that we have folks that are very knowledgeable and being able to receipt the taxes. In a very detailed sense we've had some folks that are returning as our as temporary tax staff. So when they come back and they're familiar with the software that we use it's easier for them to do the work that they have to do. You know I'm not in the hallway standing with a stopwatch or anything timing the line but in general I will ask folks and I think that they've been waiting at our peak time which is usually the last week in December usually waiting about 15 some said 20 minutes and in general most people didn't think that was too bad but the other options are very good options and I always strongly recommend that folks use them because I don't want them to have to be waiting in line at all because we do have the outside curbside drop box which is very convenient for people and of course they can send them by mail or drop them off we have an interior drop box as well. As you've had a chance to develop a real good feel for the office operations you've made some changes shared some of those with us today what are some of the other goals maybe more long-term goals that you have for the department? Well in general we want to for example take those documents that we've accumulated now for all of the different tasks that we do and we want to make sure that they're accurate so we're going to test all of them have different people doing the task and going through the instructions and make sure that they're working. We'd like to we've seen some departments have had policy and procedure manual we think that that would be a good idea for our office just in general those are things we'd also like to continue with automation. Any anywhere we can find some type of automation we'd like to do that. One of the things that we're testing right now and we're very excited about in the office is a remote deposit system and what that does is it images all of the checks that are to be deposited to our bank and then instead of sending them to the bank by a courier or what have you they are just electronically submitted so we don't have to send those to the bank anymore thanks to modern technology. Now your office is somewhat unique in that you both have the role of serving the public as a whole as well as working very closely with some other key departments of register of deeds real property listing there's a an important relationship there just to make sure that property tax records are accurate and complete and followed through on please touch on on that relationship just a little bit particularly with those two departments. It's real interesting we are work basically flows from one department to the other when it comes to property for example if Adam you sold your home to Chairman Gehring and you would have to submit a deed to the Register of Deeds office for to Ellen Schleicher's office so the process starts there and the paperwork starts there the next step is that paperwork then flows to the real property lister that office then records that information in our land slash tax software that we share together and then further later on when all of the assessments are done and everything is checked out through an open book and a board of review then later on a tax bill is eventually generated and that's where I come in in our office and we do the collection on it so it pretty much is a full circle process and then we start all over again do you find in your experience that because of that you know relationship the steps that needs to go through are there common questions or occasionally do you see a common concern raised by people that you need to address or that we could help people with um generally generally this all goes very smooth we we have this pretty much down to a pretty good science sometimes it's a little confusing for taxpayers if they split apart one piece of property and they split it into several pieces you know how does that affect my tax bill or how will my tax bill be coming out and in reverse if you take several pieces of property and then you combine them together that's always you know how how does that work with my tax bill so in general the answer to that is the year that it's split apart or combined you still get a tax bill for for all of the different pieces that you have and then the following year is when you get the tax bill based on what the property really ended up being in the transaction you mentioned something earlier that i think all three of us share pride in and that's the county website chairman gearing i think really let the fire to get that going and the information systems department took the lead and every department had to participate and build it and provide information and you've really used that as a tool to help people in the community if they want to tap in get some information they can do so what's on the the website that is helpful to taxpayers from the treasurer's office standpoint well again i'll go back to the county atlas besides being able to purchase that in our office and then as well as the county clerk's office julie glancy and the registered deeds ellen schleicher it's available at the uw extension office in shabuigan falls um and then both first national banks in plymouth community bank in plymouth and the national exchange and trust bank in adel but in addition to that many people utilize the order form that we have on our website um we also added which is new as of last year we also added a website for all of the counties for closed properties and i brought a sample along today of that particular website and it's a very very nice website joy schneider in the information systems department and dav ditmer worked with our office to get that up and running and it's a real nice website in that you can certainly find everything from how do how do how does the system work where's the bid form what are our terms and conditions and then you can take a look at each of the individual properties that you're interested in bidding on right now we don't have any properties for sale they are all sold but perhaps by this fall there will be more properties again for sale outstanding outstanding are you able to track to see the type of use that's occurring or are you finding that more and more people are going to the website well last year when we put all of our properties out for sale we actually did receive seal bids for one particular property from a party not in shabuagon county so we do know that people are utilizing it and anytime we get phone calls in our office we do also direct people to that website and we help them to get onto the website all they have to do is go to www.co.shabuagon.wi.us and that's the county's main webpage and from there they just click on departments and then they just click on treasurer and we have a table type format where you just look in the table and look for tax for closed property for sale will take you to that particular site like i said we have the county atlas order forms we have links to the department of revenue we have links to lottery credits and we use it for quite a few very common things that are are needed from our office outstanding you have really made it a priority to get rid of the in rem property i know in past years it would kind of sit there and languish but you really made it a priority to get that month that property out there market it got those dollars back to the the taxpayer we appreciate that Laura thank you very good discussion in 30 minutes we covered a lot of ground and i really appreciate the emphasis and focus on the website because obviously not only did our viewers get a brief snapshot of your important rules and responsibilities but if you want more information i encourage you to check out the county website whether it's the treasurer's office or the other 22 departments throughout sheboyan county a lot of valuable information and if people have questions after seeing this program Laura what's the best way for them to follow up and get information there's several ways i mean certainly they can just pick up the phone and they can call our office our telephone number is 459-3015 we also have a means of contacting us through the website through email so that's another way that we we do answer questions as well very good well again on behalf of the county board and chairman gearing and myself out on pain it certainly was a pleasure to have you with us today and we certainly appreciate that Laura Henning Lorenz our county treasurer was with us and it continues just to do a fantastic job for sheboyan county so until next time please check out the website don't hesitate to contact Laura if you have questions or certainly the county administrator or county chair's office our number is 459-3103 probably throwing a few numbers out there today but if you have suggestions on a particular department that you would like to see emphasized or an issue discussed we'd be happy to follow up so thank you very much for joining us