 Welcome to Sheboygan County government working for you my name is Adam Payne County administrator and co-host of this program with chairman Roger Distruty and as you know every month we strive to bring a different department to you and talk about roles and responsibilities and this month we're very pleased to have Aaron brought with us our planning and conservation director and I think it's been nearly six years now right? Six years I've been with the county about three years close to three years as planning and conservation director or interim planning and conservation director. Just the other day Aaron popped in the office and we were talking about some project he's been working on there has been so many good things happening in Sheboygan County and and certainly in large part because of Aaron's leadership or the work of his staff or the cooperation with the city so this program we're gonna get to know a little bit more about Aaron Brault our planning and conservation department and a lot of wonderful projects good work that's in play. Aaron please start by sharing just a little bit about yourself six years with the county three years as director tell us a little bit about your professional background. Sure in the planning arena I worked for a private planning firm out of Madison coming out of college for four years new Sheboygan area well the firm I worked for helped design the layout of Blue Harbor we did Plymouth's comprehensive plan at the time city of Sheboygan's comprehensive plan at the time so I knew the area quite well before we moved here I grew up in the area I'm from two rivers originally and then went to Indianapolis for three years while my wife finished her medical training there and then moved back up here to Sheboygan knew we wanted to come back to Wisconsin and Sheboygan was on our list and we actually moved here for her position and I guess we've been here your wife's doctor here in town right yep she's a pediatrician yeah very nice very nice well we're certainly pleased you move back to the area and again a lot of good things going on set the stage a little bit what are the roles and responsibility of the planning and conservation department. We have a varied role I think throughout the community we have a number of ordinances we administer in our office including things like the shoreland ordinance that the county has our sanitary ordinance so if you have a septic system or a holding tank or a thing of that nature in your on your property that is administered through our department we also have a number of programs household hazardous waste waste pharmaceutical disposal we are the recipient of a grant back in 2005 2006 the non-motorized transportation pilot program is administered through our office all the counties mapping parcel mapping any kind of GIS data light or data layers are in our department as well so we do I guess we dabble on a number of different things we have our conservation division which helps farmers out manure storage buffer strips go through that division as well so very interesting every day is different when you talk about ordinances that deal with setbacks or septic clarify a little bit for our viewers that's predominantly more on incorporated or rural areas yeah our jurisdiction is primarily outside of the municipalities as far as shoreland each municipality has their own rules and regulations they primarily follow what the county does however our jurisdiction is just outside those outside of the incorporated areas and about what's your total budget and about how many staff there's 15 full-time staff on our our table of organization we also have two people in our office that are housed in the county but they're not really county employees they're there for project specific grants that were were part of and then our budget for 2013 I believe was about 2.1 million dollars in operating very good so you mentioned you know predominantly rural areas on incorporated areas that's those are your primary customers but you've obviously been providing other programs and services that benefit everyone in this community more directly such as the the pharmaceutical program what is that how does that work that program and the household hazardous waste definitely benefit everybody and or you know we deal with everybody in the county with those programs waste pharmaceuticals we have disposal boxes at four police stations throughout the county sheboygan Plymouth Kohler and sheboygan falls where folks can get rid of their waste pharmaceuticals so they don't end up flushing them down the the toilet there's a lot of studies going on out there that that's starting to affect our fish and wildlife population that as those chemicals get into our water stream they're not treated at the water treatment plants or in a septic system those chemicals aren't treated so they're going up food chain just like other pollutants and also important for that they don't get in the hands of the wrong wrong people or kids or visitors that might be visiting your house you don't want them accidentally thinking it's candy or something like that so safe place to drop off dispose of those and then you have your hazardous waste disposal site what every couple of them a couple times a year folks can come and bring materials yeah about four or five times a year we have that usually every other month in the summertime the schedules on our website and that we we we alternate between the eastern side of the county and so folks can bring their their hazardous waste and dispose of it properly we contract with the viola environmental services and we've had a great partnership with them for the last couple years it's amazing the stuff we get we still get DDT every year I believe that chemical is banned in 1961 or 1962 so there's a lot of stuff out there yet so how about some more significant projects that you've been working on throughout the county lately this past year it's been primarily a lot of dredging work the Sheboygan River as you know there was a lot of activity going on on the Sheboygan River this summer so with the great partnership as you mentioned before that we had with the city and a number of other entities EPA DNR UW extension it took up army Corps of Engineers you name it I mean it was a great learning experience but yeah there was some great work down on the Sheboygan River this year we were fortunately picked to receive some funding to finally clean up our river it's been on the radar for about 30 years and being talked about and I think those early steps that folks in the community made prior to the are leading up to the being able to get the funding was probably one of the main reasons why we got that funding there's 40 42 other communities on the Great Lakes that are listed as areas of concern and Sheboygan was very fortunate in being able to finally make something happen and I want to come back to this River Harbor clean up a little bit more later in the program because it's just been such an incredible opportunity for this community and a lot of hard work and a lot of money a lot of money's gone into it more recently the board passed an intergovernmental agreement between the city and county with a new bike trail that's proposed in the city Sheboygan and this is going to be another asset for our community please talk about that a little bit sure that that's been a project in the making since about 2008 that's when the the first round of funding was allocated for that project was 2008 we wrote and received another grant to leverage some of those dollars even a little bit further and it's an abandoned rail line that currently runs through the heart of the city of Sheboygan very dilapidated you know there's trash strewn everywhere throughout the corridor it's overgrown so I think it's going to be a really nice amenity for for the entire community it'll spruce up an area that's been sort of forgotten about the rail line stopped using it I believe 30 40 years ago if not more so it's just been sitting there out of sight out of mind for quite some time so and if you look at that corridor there's a ton of destinations 31% of the county's population lives within a mile of that corridor 10 of the 16 public schools are within a mile of that corridor so you know I see it as a great project is a great partnership between the city and county on that as you mentioned we signed an intergovernmental agreement the city will soon at their next council meeting adopt that and that just lays out long-term maintenance of that who's going to take care of the day-to-day mowing keeping the lights on that kind of thing so it's kind of a unique project and that with the non-motorized program sometimes a community will apply for funding and they'll put in a new sidewalk or a new pedestrian or bike trail and they'll take responsibility for it but in this instance the county really took the lead obviously with the support of the city sheboygan but we're going to own this 1.7 mile segment the city's going to help maintain it cut the grass and do that ongoing maintenance but what you know again what a wonderful opportunity to improve property values and give folks another opportunity to get to and from work or play and do it in a safe environment yeah it's it's again i mean you you mentioned improving property values the nationwide statistic from the the board of realtors is that home sales that are adjacent to are very close to trails urban trails like this will be typically jump nine percent versus other similar like homes that may not be close to a trail and they tend to sell about 20 percent quicker so you know can't guarantee that's going to be the same in the city of sheboygan but nationwide those are the statistics but when but the alternative is right now folks got an old dilapidated rail that's over grown strewn with garbage and that probably doesn't attract anything that folks want in their backyard so absolutely not a wonderful turnaround nice work on that well with that i'll turn it over to roger distruty thank you good to have you with us erin i appreciate it as you know the county and all municipalities are under more pressure to reduce the property taxes and we're asking your department to do that over the years too how how are you handling these challenges yeah i i over the past few years and and i i think we've seen this in in a number of county departments we two years ago merged with the the conservation at that time the land and water department and now we're the planning and conservation department so we merged and we've gained some synergies there not only from staffing types of issues but also small things when we merged there was four or five different printers we were using we've consolidated that down to two you know we have one of these all-in-one units it makes sense now instead of paying 20 cents per color copy we're now paying six cents so you know we're looking at both big and small types of items and in our department over the last few years and and we hope to continue this we've been able to diversify our funding away from the county's property tax levies through grants both public and private so we've been quite fortunate again over the last few years and doing that and i know you've been very successful about being able to acquire some grants and it's been able to do some very good things how have you been able to do that and what's the procedure on making that happen well first it's it's coming to the the board to get permission to apply for these types of things over the last few years as i mentioned we've we've gotten some public and private grants one of them is a watershed study that we're working on in the otter creek watershed comparing to the fissures creek watershed up in howards grove otter creek being out by plymouth and and fissures is our control and then otters is our test watershed but we are able to work with the nature conservancy and get a 1.5 million dollar grant through the colder trust for preservation to do this study so that's helping in some of our staffing costs and helping offset some of the the costs we've or the reductions we've received in our tax levy over the years and i understand there's been a recent number of ordinance changes association associated with your department maybe you could explain some of the significant changes and how that it would would affect some of the citizens in our county sure the the biggest one the the the two ordinances we changed this year or went through revisions on where the the shoreland the county shoreland ordinance which is chapter 70 of the county shoreland or the county code of ordinances and then chapter 72 which is the sanitary ordinance and the shoreland ordinances the sanitary ordinance was primarily small changes there was different language adopted at the state level that we had to incorporate into our ordinance but the shoreland ordinance was a year in the making we had a great group of stakeholders that got together that was another state revision that the state had worked on for eight years in a bipartisan manner and the counties adopt those rules and when we got those new rules from the state we got a stakeholders group together among we invited lake association members to the table border realtors home builders primarily anybody who might be affected by the shoreland ordinance and so we work with them for over well about a year coming up with the the new language that we are able to change per the state code and the the the primary changes in or i guess the changes that will affect our citizens the most are really non-conforming existing non-conforming structures that people might own around our inland lakes those rules are more flexible than what the old ordinance was and then setback the language on setbacks is a little more flexible than what the prior ordinance was so overall on the shoreland ordinance again a great stakeholders group put in a lot of time and typically you know that that ordinance can be a little contentious at times and when it came to the public hearing we had nobody show up and i think that was due to the the staff in the planning department again reaching out to all these different groups and and there was no surprises to anybody so those were that was the big one long answer to a short question and we touched on it a little bit earlier but another thing we've been involved with is the hazardous waste collection in the county and there are some possible changes in this upcoming year would you explain sort of where the locations are and i know you said the the website has some of that available would you expand on that a bit sure again we have two locations one in the eastern part of the community or county and that is the shaboygan southside highway shed which is just off of i-43 south of county highway v along the frontage road and then in the western part of the county we use the Plymouth highway shed which is just north of state 23 off of county highway o or oj i believe is what that county road is and the big change and i think it's a an exciting change for our citizens is that this year we'll be accepting electronics in the past electronics were a charge of i think to get rid of a tv it was 40 45 bucks this year included in the the ten dollar fee to get in which is what we've had now for the the past year or two i can't remember past year to help again go going back to offsetting our costs we implemented that fee last year so included in in the the ten dollar fee to get in not only can you get rid of your hazardous waste you can bring in electronics for free well i guess it's not free you're paying the ten dollar fee but but it beats 45 dollars and um you know we've been encouraging neighbors to get together if they want to split the cost of the the ten bucks to pack up one car and and bring as much as they can and that ten dollars is for whatever you can bring in i know you mentioned about the fee at at the the budget cycle um two years ago then we talked about that at finance and uh about trying to pick up some fees to cover the cost some of the concern was if the uh you possibly people wouldn't bring in their material because there was a cost involved have you seen any of that or the good citizens want to come in and do the right thing yeah we we our numbers did fall last year compared to prior years however the volume didn't go down a whole lot so i think some of those you know the neighbors getting together type of thing started to happen and that's what um you know when we implemented that fee we talked to other counties that had a fee and and that's what they saw especially the first year uh you know they saw things start to go down but then they started to pick back up once people got used to to having the fee and i think with the electronics um i don't i i'm guessing that it's gonna sure go up i mean that's a a need in any any community right now nobody knows what to do with all their old electronics that are building up in their basement or garage or wherever they might be and i know you're part of the friends of the marsh group um i sat in on a few meetings myself and uh you're working on a new endeavor out at the marsh would you explain on some of those details about that yeah out at the shaborgan marsh um the the friends group is uh working with an architect right now to get some conceptual drawings of a potential new building out at the marsh right now the old lodge is getting pretty old it it it needs some costly repairs pretty pretty regularly and it's not really set up for meeting space uh camp white coda has programs environmental programs out at the marsh and and they're in the back of a donated trailer so we're looking at combining those two different types of uses more of a meeting type of hall with camp white coda and giving them a learning space and and potentially a new storage building too the storage buildings out there right now you can go push and move them so they're one good windstorm or one good snowstorm away from falling down so it's definitely time especially for the storage buildings to have something a little more i guess recent or updated out there so yeah the the friends group is really focusing now on the on the building the learning center and and meeting space from the county perspective there's really nothing out on the western side of the community when we host meetings out there to have a place to meet so we're looking at that as a something coming here in the future hopefully in your future in your future yeah and we still have three guys in a grill out there running our marsh restaurant and of course that beautiful 80 foot wooden tower i think it's still the tallest wooden observation tower as i know it's still the tallest i know there's some other counties now looking to put a tower up in fact that one county took our plans i think or asked for they asked for them and the friends group didn't want to give them up without a cost and the contingency on the plan was that it it had to be 79 feet rather than 80 that's right we would still maintain the tallest tower in the state so well if you haven't had a chance to you're looking to take a little drive or see some beautiful scenery and now with the snow down a little bit and i i imagine that tower probably doesn't have any snow on the steps but you might want to drive on out to the marsh and grab a beer and a and a hamburger and and walk the the steps and and see a nice sight although it's certainly a lot more attractive and fun to do i think in the summer then in the dead of winter but now would be a time to do with the little snowfall we had with that with that melt i want to go back to the topic we were talking about earlier erin and that's the the shulboygan river harbour cleanup dredging it it surprises me a little bit because erin and a chad from the city chad pelichak there's been a fair amount of press or coverage of this over the years and of course it's been going on for years though recently there was an update at a chamber form and we had maybe 60 70 people there and i think many of them were surprised to just you know hear what they did about it they hadn't been following it that closely so let's just take a couple of minutes and set the stage uh let me start by saying in 14 years as county administrator this is probably one of the projects i've gotten the most satisfaction out of from a standpoint of what it means for this community i mean it has just been so cool to see the county board and the city common council and all the other state and federal agencies you mentioned earlier pulled together and leveraged nearly a hundred million dollars to once and for all after 30 years clean up a superfund site one of what 43 on the on the great lakes so we were so fortunate as erin mentioned to have this opportunity and all of us who had a little role in it it's just satisfying to see it happen because we know it's going to be just be such a huge improvement for our community economic development water quality wildlife habitat you name it so to set the stage just what was cleaned up erin where where did they start and and what work has been done sure in in 2007 and 2006 uh they started up in the shaboygan falls reach of the river and they completed the the the dredging of the superfund area up in that stretch of the river in 2007 and then these past two years it was primarily from the pollutants being taken out of the river the dredged area was from kiwanis park down to the mouth of the the river the harbor and so what they from about the kiwanis park area down to the a street bridge prior to the dredging was about two to three feet deep in most areas give or take and now a channel is going to be there without the pollutants that you mentioned of about eight to ten feet in that stretch so very significant uh you know increase in depth although if the lake level keeps going down you know it's but but anyways two to three feet from eight to ten eight to ten so all from a street out to the harbor it went the the federal navigation channel was dredged down from 11 feet or down to 11 feet to where about where it makes the big curve uh and right at that curve is where it went down to 15 feet so again very big change all there was areas of the harbor that were you know 10 11 feet deep already however it was hit and miss and some areas were very shallow in that stretch so overall great improvement um you mentioned economic development i know my counterpart chad pelishek at the city that you've mentioned he's dealing with some developers down in that area now that are quite interested in in putting up a development so um already we're starting to see some increased development activity along that stretch so well as the three of us know i mean imagine trying to um attract development here come on to shavuigan county and we've got this beautiful harbor and marina and this beautiful quarter through the parks oh by the way it's a super fun site and uh you can't eat the fish and there's warnings about uh eating the fish and swimming in the water i mean all that goes away and and it's just such a tremendous accomplishment it also speaks to just how expensive it can be to clean things up uh when we you know when we've done things in history that we just didn't know better wasn't as though wasn't i don't think people intentionally were trying to pollute this river or harbor but ultimately that happened and it has been very costly to to get it cleaned up but now now we can market this area as a hopefully it will know it'll be taken off the list delisted as a super fun site over time the fish will be safer to eat the ducks that some of the hunters may shoot that fly whether they're in the city or out of the area they'll be safer to eat and if you're taking your kid swimming or whatever you just know you're in a safe place yep and you know another thing to mention it was an interesting project over overall i mean there was a thousand tons of debris that came out of the river so bowling balls was a big one that had been thrown in the river over time bicycles uh you name it so um you know in addition to the the pcb's being and the ph is taken out of the river uh there were some interesting uh things that transpired during the project thousand tons of debris and i think at one point erin you told me that if you took all the sediment that was removed it would go up to the 45th row at lambo field or something about the 45th or 50th row of lambo field and um you know on a more local perspective uh the new american orthodontics building or the former thomas building on on uh washington avenue and and or state 28 on the south side of the city it would fill up about 42 of those buildings so there was a lot of sediment about a truck every three to five minutes my compliments to you and your leadership and you think about success stories erin mentioned earlier he's from two rivers just just north of us here and uh leaves the area and mary's a doctor he's obviously a sharp young man comes on back to the community and starts as our non-motorized transportation pilot uh manager or a leader there and then was promoted to director and now planning and conservation director because we consolidated that area has done an excellent job a lot of feathers in his cap a lot of good work in this community and i hope you've enjoyed a little overview of our planning and conservation department if you have any questions or want to learn more about it don't hesitate to contact erin or one of his staff and next month we'll have nan tod here from the clerk of courts to talk about those very important responsibilities so until then thank you for joining us