 Welcome to Sheboygan County Government, working for you. My name is Adam Payne, County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Tom Wagner. And as you know, every month we strive to focus on a different department, different programs and services, and raise greater awareness about the very important work of county government. And today, we are really pleased to have one of our 19 department heads here, Mr. Jim Tobist, our Building Services Director. Welcome, Jim. Thank you, Adam. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to have you. This isn't Jim's first rodeo. He's been our Building Services Director for nearly 18 years. And he has immense responsibility. When you think about the 19 departments, there's a lot of different buildings and grounds, health and human services, the courthouse, the administration building, a detention center. We just build a new transportation facility. And all of this is under Jim's purview. This is staff that help clean these facilities and maintain these facilities and plan for improvements. So really important. And so today we're going to learn a little bit more about those roles and responsibilities. But before we get into it, Jim, why don't you start by sharing a little bit about yourself. And I know you're from the community, but give our viewers a sense of who Jim Tobist is. Yeah. I'm from Usberg and proud of every stereotypical characteristic that goes with along, along with that. I'm a professional engineer. I've been married 35 years next week. I've got three kids, three grandkids. I started here in 2000 when I quit my job of 20 years and decided to move back to Sheboygan County, back to my roots, and it's a great place in Sheboygan County to raise a family. Yeah, it is. And we were just talking before the program started, both Jim and I have some weddings in front of us, and it kind of shows that we're getting a little grayer and a lot going on in our lives. Well, it's good to have you here, Jim. As you said, you've been with the county for a number of years. You know your job inside and out. You just built this transportation facility, which we'll talk about a little bit later in the program. But start off setting the stage. What is your department's mission, primary roles, and responsibilities? To provide efficient and effective space where other departments can serve the residents of Sheboygan County. And how many staff do you have working for you? We have 32 staff, 15 maintenance workers, 14 cleaners, an electrician, a clerk that helps me out, and then a manager that handles more of the day to day things. And when you think about the number of buildings and grounds, give folks a sense of just how much square footage, how much area you're working with. We have just under a half a million square feet. And then we have another 200,000 square feet that I have a quasi-relationship with, like here at the county at UW Sheboygan. It's county-owned facility, the job center. In order to be efficient at doing that, we assign our maintenance workers and our cleaners to different buildings rather than everybody come to the courthouse and say, boss, what do you want me to do today? They know they're assigned to, let's say, health and human services. They get to know those clients, what their needs are, what their schedule is. The first Monday of every month, they have this meeting or they have immunizations where they got to be open at night. They get to know them clients and what they need, and they become more responsible, take ownership. Some people aren't used to working that way, but they get responsibility. They fix what needs to be fixed, they clean what needs to be cleaned. And then we give them the authority to go out and buy what needs to get purchased, and I think it's a much more efficient way to run the department. But again, it goes along with some training and some teamwork and got to have some camaraderie and people have to take on that responsibility. Well, what you're describing is you empower your staff to get out there and get the job done and problem solve. And you mentioned in purchasing supplies or equipment, and some people might think, geez, that's giving a lot of discretion. Yet, Jim, you have one of the best fiscal track records in the county working within your budget parameters year after year. So obviously your staff are following your lead and doing a nice job. Very quickly, and you gave a couple of examples, but some folks might, it may not be obvious to them, what's the difference between a cleaner and a maintenance worker and I think cleaning most people follow. But what about maintenance work? What type of maintenance worker are your staff doing? Maintenance workers do everything from cleaning roof drains to cleaning toilets that the inmates plugged, fixing pumps, couplings, HVAC equipment, rebuilding shafts and ear handlers besides replacing filters and belts and that normal kind of stuff. There's always something that breaks. We try to be proactive and fix things when they start sounding bad before they actually fail. We try to be invisible that the department doesn't even know that they're lost to air conditioning. We get it fixed before they notice that. But sometimes the unexpected comes and we rush to get things fixed and back up and running again. And your staff always do a nice job. Having worked in the administration building for years, I mean, you've got really good people. In addition to the examples you gave, some of the ones that I think are the most costly but also impressed me from a standpoint of your staff skill set is maintaining boilers, maintaining HVAC systems, dealing with air conditioning units and all of this is getting more complex with technology. How do you garner support from the board and proceed with planning when it's time to replace a roof or a boiler or an air conditioning unit? Give folks a feel for how that process unfolds. Well, I'm in touch with the manager in our department and the other guys that are seeing something make this bad noise or they fixed it a couple of times and we really ought to think about replacing it. And I try to look long term like five years out and say, let's fix these things or replace them. Maybe we have to delay things a little bit to meet budget goals and we might fix it and rubber band it for a while to get it until we can replace it. But primarily, and I even get called out into the highway department and rocking all that, look at their roofs and prioritize countywide, which is the worst roof in the county and which one should we replace. And I had a plan that's been like 15 years now. We've replaced almost every roof in the county. And to me, that's a priority. If you get water coming into the building, then everything starts to go bad. Absolutely. Same thing with boilers. There's much more efficient things out there. We'd like to jump on it right away. We try to be cost effective and get a long range plan of, let's replace this one and see if that's the kind of model we want. And then it requires conversation with you, Adam, to justify. And then I go to my committee. Property committee is the one that I report to. And then, of course, you're always going to end up at finance committee because they control the purse strings. But if I'm working out at the highway department, I'll go to transportation committee, rocking all their health care committee, to share if I'm with the law committee. I'm jumping to all these other committees helping justify projects to improve the buildings that they occupy. And eventually, depending on the dollar amount, it ends up at the county board. And it might be referred to yet another committee. So there's lots of oversight. But I think I come up with a good justification and we get things done that we need to get done. Your track record's been superb. And again, it often can end with someone like Chairman Tom Wagner and the full county board providing the dollars. And we only have so many dollars available. But because of your planning and looking at everything out there and justifying what needs to go sooner rather than later, we've had a really good system in place. So thank you for that. Tom. Thank you, Adam. Welcome, Jim. Glad to have you here. We've had a number of construction projects going on that you've been involved in. You want to tell us about some of those? Most recently. Yeah, most recently, the Combined Dispatch Center. We remodeled the law enforcement center to make enough space to bring in extra dispatchers so that we could dispatch not only county squads, but city police department squads. We combined the two together. And when we did that, there were quite a bit more codes that we followed. It's completely self-contained. They've got their own generator, their own air conditioner, and a backup air conditioner. They have bathrooms right there. And then technology has exploded since it was built in 1981. Each dispatcher now has a half a dozen screens. Maybe the sheriff has already told you different things that they've done. But we've created a good space where they can work. And it's got bulletproof glass in case a sniper comes or a tornado comes and starts blowing out windows because we need that to work when emergencies are happening around the rest of the county. Another project was an addition here at UW-Shaboygan to add on engineering building. I'm an engineer. I did take classes here. But we could only take the three credit classes and then had to transfer to a four-year campus for the lab classes. So this addition added space for those labs where they could offer the five credit classes here. And people that work at different businesses throughout the community could come here at night and get their bachelor's degree without having to uproot their family or stop working. And then most recently, as Adam mentioned, was a transportation committee, or transportation complex we called it, out between Plymouth and Elkhart Lake. Right, and I think health and human services, too. We did an addition to that, right? You were involved in that, as always. Yes, I was. It was a lobby addition. Added security, a little bit more screening as people made their way into the building. Because it's the biggest department, there was no room that they could have just one big staff meeting. So we added a really large conference room and have had public meetings in that space, as well. Suffice it to say, Tom, that there's a lot of plaques with Jim to be his name on it in this county as our building services director. Well, that's just a lot in a relatively short time that we've been upgrading dramatically when you really put it all together. Those are some big ticket and very needed facilities in my opinion. One of the biggest ones, obviously, was we sold three of the highway sheds and built, as you referred to, in town of Plymouth Highway J in 67. So what was your involvement with that project? I started out early helping the highway department people communicate with the architect, work through the design, and then reviewed all those designs before they went out on the street. We tried to make the plans. I think there was 140-some sheets and three and a half inches of spec book, lots of late nights reading through stuff to make sure we've got stuff covered as much as possible in the time that we had to do that. And then on-site every day, reviewing things with the contractor, trying to see if there were problems arising and get those problems solved before the contractor got delayed. We wanted to keep things on schedule. I also approved all the invoices and dealt with all the changes and the cost that associated with those changes. But what I'm, and I'm with the Highway Commissioner or Transportation Director, tell you more about the building, but I just wanted to say that I'm really proud of we built a building with minimal maintenance. It's quite energy efficient. And yet we brought it in million dollars under budget and six weeks early. And that was a testament to you and Greg and really the whole team for the county working out there. And of course, on top of that, we also sold the three other facilities, one in Elkhart Lake, one in the town of Plymouth and one in the city of Sheboygan. So we put them back on the tax rolls, and which is a great deal always. So yeah, I've heard nothing but positive things about the facility we built out there on 67 and J. So thank you for your hard work out there. As I said, we've had some steps that you try to take to keep costs down and with the bidding process and different things that we have to go through as a public entity, which we should. So you wanna talk about that a little bit? Yeah, the Highway Department bought the land before I was involved, but fortunately they bought it a relatively poor farm field so it didn't take much off the tax roll. It was close to their pit. And then to save money, the Highway Department did all the site work. They were able to get gravel out of their relatively close pit. It was also within a mile of Rocky Knoll. We were able to connect to their water tower. Otherwise we would have had to build two high capacity wells to handle the sprinkler systems that are now required by codes everywhere throughout that building. So we laid a mile of pipe and now we can utilize the Rocky Knoll water tower, which also helps them because we're turning water over faster and it's a better quality for the Rocky Knoll residence as well. And then Rocky Knoll had a sewer pipe that they run to the city of Plymouth to pay them to treat the sewer and then we were able to lay a quarter mile of pipe and we were connected to that main as well. We split out some of the contracts so that the precast was separate from building out, separate from the utilities. So they weren't marking up each other's work, making a higher percentage. And then we did not have a construction manager. Me being there and tracking all the changes and we were able to save 2% right off the top for that. Which is a substantial amount of money when you look at a 24 million dollar project. We're in the process currently of upgrading our security at the courthouse and also upgrading basically the steps, et cetera, that were basically collapsing. You wanna talk about that? Violence is up across the country and mass shootings are getting more and more and the courthouse has an emotional place. People come out of court and one person is a loser or they had their kids taken away or they got a divorce and they're just upset. It's a high risk place to work. So we did many studies and found out that county people, residents and staff would feel safer if we had a guarded entrance. So we were going to implement that and it's not just gonna be guards but we're gonna have an X-ray machine and a metal detector just like you would have going to the airport. To do that, we decided to do that at the front entrance. Unfortunately, we don't have handicap accessible entrance there. So we're having to add a ramp and a circle drive to have some handicap parking. At the same time, our front entrance of the courthouse had granite steps that have been sliding away from the building over the years and I already had a project in to reset those steps. So we combine the two projects together. The ramp and a planter will make us, oh, allow us to reset fewer steps. We're actually saving money by combining the two projects together. We've studied many other counties, what they were doing, we've got many policies written and hopefully we'll be implementing this middle of October, maybe the first part of October. If you're visiting in the courthouse, you'll now have to enter the entrance off of 6th Street. So we have, when these capital projects are bid out and the contractors are selected, how has that done? Any time a project is over $50,000, we're required to bid them out. So typically I hire an architect, sometimes it's an engineer-only type HVAC replacement. They write a bid specification and draw a plan so that all the contractors that are coming to bid on the project are bidding on the same work. We put advertisements in the paper, people come and bid on it. At bid due date, we open up the bids and we read them out loud so everybody knows that everybody else bid. Very public process. And then a committee awards the project to the lowest responsible bidder. And then they order the material and the work begins. Thank you, Jim. Adam? He runs through that so matter of fact, isn't he? Yeah, it is a big process. It is a big process and he covered it well and particularly the secured entrance. I want to compliment Chairman Tom Wagner on providing the leadership and support on the county board to see this through. It was time for Sheboygan County. So many counties our size and larger have a secured entrance and as Jim mentioned, over 90% of our employees completed a survey supporting a secured entrance. It is an emotional place. I thought you described that very well. So I'm pleased with the work that Jim's doing overseeing this and our sheriff's departments directly involved with the security component of it. It's going to be their officers at the sheriff's department that'll actually be manning the operation. So we're hoping by October, as Jim said, that we'll get it done. It's going to be a bit of a change for some of our visitors and employees because everyone's going to have to go through that front door. But as you use the analogy, just like an airport or frankly, more and more courthouses across the state, it's the right thing to do because we want to provide a secure environment for our employees. So thanks again, Jim, for that work. One of the tasks that department heads perhaps don't care for annually is the budget development. And we are in the midst of the budget development. It is what it is. We all have that role and responsibility to prepare that. And we do that under the guidance of the finance committee, the county board chair. And it's my job to work with all the departments to pull that together. And as I mentioned earlier, Jim does a stellar job preparing his budget each year. And as just about every department head is very well aware unless they're new here, is that it's a challenging process. We only have so many resources to work with. And again, 19 departments that are relying on minimal resources. So Jim, the question would be for folks learning more about your specific department is how do you go about each year preparing a budget, knowing you have limited resources and if roofs need to be replaced or boilers have to be replaced or just the day to day custodial or cleaning responsibilities have to occur? What's, give us a snapshot of your feeling for that budget process and what goes into it? Well, every year the costs go up. Contractors charge more of the materials are going up in price. And frankly, our wages are every year our guys get more experience and their wages go up. But I think it's important we keep the staff that we have because the more we maintain the less we have to replace it extends the life of the equipment. If we keep carpet vacuumed that fibers don't break down in the dirt. But the challenge is as I'm sure listeners have heard already the state has imposed cap on us and that cap gets filtered down to each department. So I have a target I have to meet. Despite the cost going up I still meet the target. So I'm weighing what our priorities are. I'm here listening to my crew saying this piece of equipment keeps breaking down it's time we need to replace it. Depending on those priorities how bad it is we put it in the budget or maybe like I mentioned before we band-aid it till we can get it in the budget. Try to prioritize. Like I said I'm from Usberg and I'm a tight Dutchman so we try to keep the cost down. I'm a taxpayer as well as you and I try to be fiscally responsible. Well let's just give an example. For example equipment. You will go about look at the equipment and listen to your coworkers and put that in priority order will you not? Yes. I don't want to wait till all the floor scrubbers in every building are shot. So we know that they last 12 or 15 years so we start let's look at which one's the worst and start replacing that. So we do one a year try to keep the cost down. Same thing with our pickup trucks. Every place has a pickup truck because we plow the parking lots. Some of them are getting to be 10 years old. They don't hold that many miles on but I don't want to wait till all of a sudden one year we got to replace three of them because that's going to impact the tax levy and don't want to do that. You know to put this in perspective for you very quickly because this might be the discussion the budget discussion that people start tuning out on but it is property tax dollars that county government largely relies upon and of course the county board like all of us like Jim Tobias just said we strive to be as frugal as we can and keep those costs down. And again from a track record standpoint for the last 10 years the property tax levy's gone up on average less than 1% a year. So the fiscal track record of the county is outstanding. With that said you have to have sufficient funds to provide your staff with reasonable cost of living increases CPI, health insurance goes up, paying contractors the cost of supplies all of that goes up and the state has this one size fits all net new construction cap on local government where we can only raise property tax levy to the amount net new construction occurs in your community. At this point the board has been exceeding expectations and working well within those parameters but at some point and we know we're real close net new construction isn't sufficient to cover even wage and benefit increases for employees CPI. So every year Jim and all of our department heads have a challenging role to work with the limited resources they have and establish priorities and ultimately the buck stops with the county board they determine what's going to be funded, what's not and as staff we do our best job to help establish priorities, rank things, justify information and Jim I just think you've done an absolute stellar job with your budget over the years. Although he'll be the first to tell you you know those are tough decisions and there are needs and when you put off maintenance just kind of like road work. When you put off road work and maintaining our transportation system it gets more costly down the road to recover from that and the same goes for taking care of our buildings and roofs and everything else. So Jim I just want to say thank you I think you've done an outstanding job as our building services director you've just come off the heels of building this transportation complex that we're all beaming with pride. We had over 800 people at the open house so Jim got to thump his chest a little bit and a lot of people I know went up to Jim and all of us since that nice work so we appreciate your leadership Jim. Thank you I enjoyed the project it was learning it was challenging but that's part of what I like about the job it's a big variety every day there's something different to it. We only have a minute left but why don't you give folks a sense of one of the big projects ahead of us that might be another significant investment in the significant effort in the county involving the sheriff's department. Corrections. Oh man completely skipped my mind yeah the jail is full my staff is busy I should have remembered they're busy because their inmates are full they're even sleeping under stairwells in some places but we're gonna have to add on it's gonna be as big or bigger project than the transportation complex and another whole set of different codes. Yeah and of course the county board and all involved are doing everything we can to have alternatives to incarceration and try to reduce the pressure on that facility but unfortunately sadly, sadly we may have to put a significant addition on our detention center which is incorporated in the county board's five year capital plan and one that none of us are relishing but it could be an upwards of a $25 million or more investment and that's not where we wanna be spending our time in dollars but we have to do something. Well with that Jim thanks again for being here appreciate the overview. If you have any questions about building services if you're interested in working for the building services department we have needs for cleaners and custodians we have needs for correctional officers we have needs for CNAs at Rocky Knoll please don't hesitate to contact Jim or contact our HR department and ask about openings or opportunities to get involved but we appreciate your time. Next month we're gonna have who's gonna be here next month? Greg Schnell I had to look. Greg Schnell our transportation director is gonna be here next month to talk more specifically about the transportation complex and how that's working as well as the incredible work that's being done by his staff to keep our roads maintained and being sure that we're keeping our transportation system in good order. So until then thanks for joining us and we'll see you next month.