 Hello! Welcome to the Donahue group. I'm glad you could join us for a fast-paced half-hour of conversation. We haven't been on the air for a while, and so we have all sorts of things to talk about. My fellow panelists, Cal Potter former state senator, Tom Paneski, all in red. Channeling Lee Sherman-Dreyfus, no doubt. Tom, a professor of mathematics at UW-Shabuigan. Ken Risto, now truly a humble social studies teacher. I'm Mary Lynn Donahue. I'm a partner with Hop Newman Humkey, which has recently relocated its office and on on Kohler Memorial Drive. You can give the address if you want. 2124 Kohler Memorial Drive, an unnamed three-story Red Brick building, but moves are always interesting. The old Imperial Motel. The old Imperial Motel, exactly. That's just where we are. We have not been on the air for a while. In the meantime, there have been all sorts of interesting things. Let's start out, I think probably with, to me, one of the more interesting stories is our mayoral race, which is heating up, and we now have four candidates. Right. I mean, we are filming out about the coldest day in the world. Mayor Juan Perez, of course, is back in the race. Terry then Akron. A little bit of a surprise since Terry had kind of sort of let people know that he kind of sort of wasn't running. Bob Ryan, it was quite a surprise to me, and then a fellow by the name of Martin Bowman, I think, who not as well known as the rest of the group. So there will be a primary on Tuesday, February 17th, and then the general election on April 4th. What are you thinking? First of all, who do you think gets to the primary, and what do you think the issues are going to be? I think Van Akron and Perez will be the two contenders. I think you have two incumbents, really. The problem that Perez has is he has the incumbency of being the mayor, whereas Van Akron has the incumbency of not having any baggage on the municipal level, having been in a legislature for a number of years. I think they're going to be two well-known candidates, which is not always the case in a mayoral situation where there's a challenger. Right. In fact, the last election in 2005, I had forgotten there were six people in the primary, and this time there are only four. Tom? Yeah, I think the same thing. Terry just ran for assembly, so people have gotten accustomed to voting for him. He's been in, his name has been out there, so they know who he is. And they haven't had an opportunity to vote for Mayor Perez for four years, so we'll get a chance to know what they think of how he's been performing. All we have here say, and a few letters to the editor, but you're right, two well-known people, and that's who I think will wind up being in the general election. Ken, any decision to do? Yeah, I think it's going to be Perez and Ben Akron. It's going to be a February primary, so if the weather is like today or we have a snowstorm, there might be a surprise out there, but I don't think most people even know Mr. Bowman. I'm not sure he's gonna have the opportunity, the time to get his name out. I don't think Alderman Ryan, after the little soap opera that he went through a couple months back really impressed a lot of folks. And like I said, Cal's right, you're right. There's two names that people have voted for, they know who they are. They're pretty much known entities. The issues, I guess you know, one's going to basically should run on his record. You know, the American look and say, I did this, this, this, and this. Are you happy with the way the city's being run? Do you want four more years? I'm not sure what, you know, representative of Ben Akron is going to bring to the table. I don't believe he has any executive experience. So, as a lawmaker, he's going to have nice connections with Madison and certainly a relationship with the governor. That might be his strength. We can put on the table to the city of Chelewagon voters, but it'll be interesting. The problem with being in Doyle's camp, and Terry Ben Akron has solidly been, which is, you know, sensible, is that he's been in the position of having to vote against municipalities on a repeated basis since Doyle's been in office because Doyle's, the governor's focus is on education. And it's been really a trade off as far as I can tell between education and municipalities. And so it'll be an interesting shift, an interesting shift for Terry Ben Akron. Do you have a sense, you know, one of the things about the Donahue group, of course, is that we're always cordial, almost always cordial. Well, you are a little mean to me sometimes. Well, I'm well-deserved, of course, but I'm just wondering if it's, you would agree, I'm wondering if it's going to be a contentious, unpleasant race. I don't know. I read the press release of the, of Terry Ben Akron's kickoff, and it seemed a little negative. And campaigns are, of course, about that. But am I off base there, or do you think it's good? Well, I think they're going to find whatever they can, because that's the nature of too many politics in Wisconsin and the nation of nowadays. The letter to the editor the other day about Ben Akron staying in the assembly, possibly, for a period of time. The inflection of the letter was sort of, he's going to hold two jobs permanently, but he's already said that he's only going to do it till the budget passes, which in a way is a wise decision in the sense that you want to be there when the vote comes for aides for Schaburgen School District or aides for cities or road aides or whatever. It'd be nice to be in the position where you can say, I'm getting the best buck I can for the city and county and so on of Schaburgen, rather than leaving the seat open and just resigning, because there's not going to be a filling of that seat if he were to be victorious, probably until the time the budget's passed. And there's a special election, isn't there? Yes. This is not an appointment by them by the governor. So and it's a special if there's no, if there's no regularly scheduled election, so there's none in fall, so you can't wait for that period of time. So you have to have a special. Will it be piggybacked on to the April mayoral election? No, it couldn't be because he won't know. Well, you could you could have a special, special election because they don't assume office till mid to April. Right. The last Monday in April. Yeah. Oh, no, no, that's school district. I'm sorry. Yeah. No, I think it is mid April. You're correct. But you could put it, you could piggyback a primary on that if it were the right timing for when the office was being begun. You're going to say something. Well, yeah, I mean, I could think of some issues, you know, OK, recall people now is your opportunity to recall. Well, the recall was really unsuccessful. Those folks had no luck. A lot of people said we don't want to go through it. We'll wait till the next turn around. Sure. So that could be an issue. What does Terry? He votes one way and then sustains the governor's veto by switching his vote. So that could be an issue. People could bring that up. Some of the issues with the ambulance and the Tourism Bureau, you know, animosity with the chamber, but it looks like maybe the Tourism Bureau is turning out to be OK. I don't know. So there are a lot of different issues. Things that Juan has, Mayor Perez has done that seem to be working and the budgets have been low. I don't know. But we've also heard people haven't been all that happy with some of the things that have been going on in City Hall and Terry alluded to that and his press release. So there could be a lot of little issues that come up. It'll be interesting to see because I know the mayor has signed a clean campaign pledge and, of course, what that means exactly is open for debate. But it'll be interesting to see if the other candidates, you know, follow suit on that. And my sense is I don't know. I just I have a I have a sense that people get really contentious and contentious these days. I think the Supreme Court race is going to be pretty awful. And even though we're taping now in mid-January, January is kind of quiet. February, it starts to rev up. But March in these nonpartisan elections, it's an unpleasant time. And I my sense is that it that it may well get that way. Hard to say, though. Hard to say. We'll watch it carefully. Yeah. I mean, also has the city budget gone up? The budget has increased. The rate has gone down. The tax rate has gone down. OK, the tax rate's gone. So you could argue in economic times, who do you want? Is it going to make a difference before we move on real quick? Is it going to make a difference that, you know, Representative Anakren ran for the job and now that he's got that job kind of secure now he feels comfortable enough, you know, dumping the job? I'm hearing a little bit of that. Yeah, I am too. Yeah, OK. It's so close in time. I mean, he must have known. He could have chosen. Right, exactly. That's sitting well with some people. I don't know how big a grounds for that's going to be. That's the possibility. Because there are some folks that are well aware that there's a suspicion that this was sort of choreographed so that if there's going to be a very short brief time between running for that vacant seat, should he prevail? Who's going to have the advantage? Who's not going to have the advantage in getting that assembly seat? So we'll see. Yeah, it's in the Democratic Party. It is hard to know. I think it's such a short time frame between you win your election on November 4th. Yep, and then you start circulating papers on December 1st. You know, that that's pretty tight. Because you haven't even been sworn in yet, right? I wonder you get sworn in January. They're sworn in the first Monday in January. They're already dead. But but he took out papers for mayor before he even was sworn in. Yeah, I mean, it's not unusual. I mean, it's certainly not unheard of for people to have one job and one for another, especially if you're not. I mean, I don't think really he had any choice because if he didn't run, he would be done as of the beginning of the year. And then he wouldn't have a job until we never have a job. Exactly. It doesn't prevail in the mayor area. Exactly. It would be out of work for four months. Yeah, I think it's just that vote is a little tight, you know, people who vote. That's one of the reasons why there's always been a very strong movement to keep these terms as two years. And oftentimes courthouse positions. So yet you kind of make the people who are in those positions think twice before they do some things. Right, exactly. They don't play games by having a long term and then be able to run for all kinds of other offices in between. Exactly. Exactly. Well, it's interesting. I mean, and of course, on the national level, if you if you lose your race for president, you still have your, you know, your second job. But in any event, lots of other things going on. I was very pleased to see the Police and Fire Commission appoint Tim Iric as interim chief. I've known, well, I got to know Tim's performance and such when I was on Police and Fire Commission. He's a really he's a great guy. He's a classmate of mine. Is that right? Yeah. You know, I went to high school together. We've known each other for a long, long time. And he's had no occasion to arrest you for. No, he has not had an occasion to arrest me being the law biting. I find I'm standing citizen that I am the very good and a little bit of luck. Tim and I went to high school together and I've known he was actually our basketball manager when I was I was sitting. I don't say I played basketball. I sat basketball, but he was he's a great, great guy and a real and to a certain degree was, you know, he never said this. But people who observe the Police Department thought he was passed over from time to time for various promotions. So it was a happy ending from my point of view. I think so. And I don't know what the timeline is for hiring the new chief. If that's going to happen quickly or not. I am I was on police and fire when when we hired Chief Kirk and we hired him from the inside. He was clearly, clearly the best candidate. You know, there was just no doubt in my mind. And so I wonder if there's going to be a push to hire. You know, out of the out of the office or or how that and you've got to hire the best person, whether he's in-house or or not. But it'll be interesting to to see how that works. The Sheboygan Press did an interesting couple of articles on the Fire Department's Ambulance Service and Orange Cross, which appears to be alive and well. There's some disputes and I think you can take figures and do whatever you want with them in some respect or whatever. But it appears that the ambulance is financially relatively successful and good service and and such. Do you is it all a slate of hand or are we in good shape? It seems to me, I mean, I shouldn't say it's real real straightforward, but you look at and it seems to me what the city was doing was saying how many extra people did we hire? How much equipment did we have to hire if we had an ambulance service versus if we did not have an ambulance service and you take that money compared to the revenue and you should be pretty straightforward. I was reading some of the criticism of the number crunching and I'll be honest with you, I didn't quite get the criticism. I didn't quite understand it because it was laid out to me as you know, going in, you got to hire a certain number of EMTs or additional staffing at your various stations and you have to obviously buy other equipment and you know what your costs are going in. So I wasn't I read the criticism and I read the criticism and it's eluding me what exactly the nefariousness is that the people are suggesting is going on. I just somebody else needs to explain it to me, I guess. The city's new finance, head of the finance department, Terry Hansen, is pretty sharp and so I would basically trust what he comes up with. I think they did add expenses. They added the cost of equipment and people obviously and paramedic firefighters are going to be more expensive than non-paramedic firefighters. But you have all this additional revenue and so I guess it's just a question of how you attribute the revenue and they're finding I think like the municipal court is that collecting these fees is not as easy as they might have thought and Medicare as usual is the best payor and the most efficient payor and a good government program as it were. But as I said when we were talking about this long ago, there was a duplication of services with Orange Cross and the fire department. Personal experience with my dear mom. And they both showed up. They always do or they always did rather. So instead of having two burly guys in the kitchen, you had five and so this does seem to be a more rational allocation but we'll just have to see how that goes and. You know at our age you've got a lot of experience with ambulances, you know it's the nature of the beast and I've not had personal, well a guy was in a car accident that was not my fault, nobody was hurt but the guys showed up and they were very, very professional and they were great. People I've talked to have said that when they've arrived that they've been real happy with the way they were treated and the way the fellows conducted themselves so. Well I was real happy with Orange Cross and the fire guys. Yeah, I'm just just, yes. You know it was a lot of people in a fairly small kitchen so you know we'll have to see how it goes. Signs of the time, big headline of Kohler laying off lots of people, Richardson is laying off 15. Unemployment in Sheboygan County has gone from, I think it was 4.7% up to past 5% in November and I just have to think that that's gonna, that that's gonna continue to grow. Any thoughts on that? I mean it just, it feels pretty terrible and. I think the spin off of the economy that was analyzed last fall, car industry going down and now we're gonna see part manufacturers start cutting back and we're seeing people who lost their shirts for because of meat off or whoever else they were involved with can't buy the yacht anymore and you know you just can see this thing spinning around the rings that the pebble that was thrown in the pool last fall are now starting to branch out and we're gonna see another six months of probably layoffs until this thing bottoms out. Yeah. And it spread all over the country. I mean this is what's very, very interesting. The last couple of recessions is short and as small as they have and even the one in 80 was focused in mostly in the Midwest but this is, this is all over the country. There's in a single state that's a scapegoat. It's in a national, right? There are riots in Latvia and all over the place. It is, it's really, it's really an amazing, an amazing process and you're right. I mean it just is, we are certainly an interrelated economy to put it mildly and I'm on a bunch of boards and always asking people for money, one of those things. And I've been turned down now by two funding sources for a small project that I was trying to raise a little bit of money for, saying we're giving nothing. This little family foundation is giving nothing and I think for a lot of the nonprofits that I'm associated with that's really, that's really pretty tough. Everybody's, even Harvard, even Harvard, their endowments have just taken a tremendous pounding and so they're not in a position. They're not in a position to do that. We've got staff over at the Shboyganry School District who had considered retiring but they're looking at their portfolios now and they're probably not going to be retiring. And we're gonna be facing, it's not really been public knowledge yet but we're starting to get emails the last couple of days that are softening the ground. Our school district will be looking at, for the first time, no doubts some layoffs unless something dramatic is done in terms of revising teachers' contracts, they're all opening that. They have the capability, both parties of opening the contract up and reexamining it but we're gonna have $1.5 million for the next three years each, so 4.5 million in shortfall. And when you have a school district and mostly it's mostly staff and mostly employees. And so with some declining enrollments and then the X factor is what's the state gonna be able to do in terms of the funding formula? The governor filled a hole with the transportation budget the last time around but it'll be interesting to see when you know how K-12 public education is gonna shake out. When you look at the deficits of Madison hands. So you could easily see numbers of teachers. South High has been told to plan and three or four teachers being laid off. And that's just one building out of several dozen. Right. And of course the school district is huge and that in the overall scheme of things is not much but in an entity where there have been no layoffs for years and years and years and years and where there's been either steady growth or steady holding steady in terms of student population which is where you get your money. I think it really is a challenge. And we'll talk about this in our next program but the possibility of the state balancing its budget and on the backs of whatever I don't know it seems daunting to put it mildly. So it'll be interesting to see how all of that plays out. We're just kind of rushing from topic to topic here but from really bad news to good news I was delighted to read about the Schmidt Construction Contribution to the Marsh Tower project. The friends of the Broughton Marsh have been trying to raise money for a long time for that wonderful observation tower in the marsh and I haven't really been out there very much just kind of around the, I think it's just a wonderful nifty resource. I was doing a little bit of research on the marsh itself and the donation by Charles Broughton of a good portion of the land and how they had taken these canals, built in these canals and how they're trying to restore it more to a wildlife kind of circumstance but I think the marsh, the tower will be very neat and give people access to a view of the whole area like the Parnell Tower I think to some extent and so congratulations to the Schmitz because apparently that was just the funding they needed to get over the hump and we'll just have to see where it goes from there. As we kind of wind down here a little bit we have news for our audience, our vast huge audience. The Donahue Group started in February of 2005 and we did that in response to a show that some of us had done. Were you in on that? We did a coverage here of the November 2004 election and we were on the air live for about two and a half hours or so and no offense to the guys in the booth but we didn't have a whole lot in the way of technology in terms of finding out what the vote totals were and so forth but we had a great time and this program was sort of born out of that and the four of us come to this from very different perspectives I think. We thought we could all sit around a beautiful table and the clock is gone but a beautiful set here and in a most cordial studio with wonderful people and talk about the issues of the day in a sensible and respectful kind of way and I think that we've kind of accomplished that. We have decided to wrap it up after four years and paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin TV shows and Neighbors Stink After Four Years. American Idol. American Idol. That's it. American Idol gets tired and so does the Donahue Group so we're gonna hang it up after this episode in our state episode but we wanted to thank all of you for kind of sticking with us. I'm just gonna ask you guys to walk down memory lane and other than the show that I personally remember where for some reason I started to laugh hysterically. We have been. It was a good comedy show I came for. Yeah. This is an award winning show by the way. Not much of an award but we did get an honorable mention and I've got that plaque and well it's actually not a plaque it's a nice little certificate. Retire when you're on top. Retire when you're on top. Any thoughts that you have just sort of goodbye thoughts? I never saw that episode. I never saw that episode. Did you actually show Scott? I'm looking at the control panel here. Did you actually show us having or did you take a little of that out or took a little bit of it out? Yeah, put in more music. Yeah, we had a little bit of laughter on the set and then people started laughing and feeding off one another. No I didn't get a chance to get out to the center very often so where the studio is here so it was always nice to kind of get out here and I didn't really know time at all until we started doing the show so it's been a pleasure getting to know Tom and I knew Cal professionally a little bit here and there but I had a chance to do some things socially together and that's been fun and I'm gonna miss the chair. Yeah, better than any chair we've had before. I called the Hallister Cook chair and I can sit here and look like I'm doing masterpiece theater. So no, it's been a lot of fun and I've enjoyed it. Yeah and I've appreciated getting to know you Ken and I appreciated your vision, you know your historical perspective on the constitution and everything else and it's not, I have to correct you, it's the University of Wisconsin College. Boy, good, not the center. I'm old school, I still think about it. It was a bill I introduced to second college. To make it a college and I got to know Cal a lot better and his passion for campaign financing. Oh my gosh, and same with Mary Lynn. Isn't it fun when Cal just kind of just ramps it up and just takes off, that was a part of Cal that I had never seen before and I was like, whoa, you go. Yeah, so I've enjoyed every moment. That's why I wore red today just to stand out. I was considered the conservative or the whatever. The right-wing ideologue. The right-wing ideologue, yeah. So I've enjoyed it, I'm gonna miss it. I'm looking at the plot. There we go, there we go. So, Cal, any parting thoughts? Well, I look forward to doing this because I had done this show. I used to start it out doing a show like this in Madison, I would do every week a 15 minute show that the Madison community cable tape they'd come to my office and I'd have the governor in and I'd have the state superintendent and anybody I could drag off the street practically in the Capitol, we would do this and then later on I moved it to the cable vision office and had my own show there and then got together later on with Jim Baumgart and did a show. So this is sort of a continuation of something that I didn't wanna wean myself from because I enjoy doing this type of thing. And so it's been nice renewing and as well as establishing friendships with you folks as well as keeping in touch with the issues because I do have a passion for a lot of issues and I hate to sort of go in hibernation. And so often when you're not in put in a setting with other people with like interests, you don't always get to talk about these things with the level I guess of discourse and the depth. And so it's sort of like a nice discussion group here that we've had and I like that because you don't have that oftentimes in any other setting. Well, farewell. Thank you so much and thanks to Scott and Carrie and Fritz and Steve. Fritz has been our built-in laugh track. We've loved that and we'll see you again.