 Welcome to Sheboygan County Government, working for you. My name's Adam Payne, Sheboygan County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Bill Gehring. And today we're very pleased to have a guest sheriff, Mike Hempke, with us. How are you, Sheriff? I'm great. How are you guys? Very good. Thank you. As you know, Sheboygan County has 23 departments, a number of very important programs and services in one of our larger departments. And certainly one of the most important is our law enforcement agency, the Sheriff's Department. Today, Sheriff Hempke is going to talk a little bit about the roles and responsibilities of the Sheriff's Department and some of the new initiatives and things that Mike's been doing during his tenure. Mike, please begin telling us a little bit about yourself and how long you've been sheriff. Sure. I'm a native of Sheboygan County, born and raised in Plymouth. I am married to my wife Ann. I have two adult children and I have a newly born grandson. Very good. As far as professionally, I've been with the Sheriff's Department for 29 years. As you mentioned, I've just completed my first four-year term as sheriff. I've worked in just about every aspect of the Sheriff's Department in my career. And during your career, and obviously one of the benefits of being there for nearly 30 years is the tremendous experience you've gained. But what do you feel as Sheriff now are some of your primary challenges? Well, like every other county department and any other governmental entity, budgets, tax levy caps and what impact they have on our ability to provide the services that the community has come to expect is definitely a challenge. Jail overcrowding, although we're not pressed with that issue right now is something we certainly have to be proactive and strategically plan for in the future. And if there are alternatives to incarceration, as opposed to incarceration, we have a couple of communication projects that are currently in the process of cellular 911, which is a program or technology that will allow our communication center to triangually locate the origin of a cell caller. Right now, if somebody uses their cell phone to call 911, we have to get a location verbally from them in order to determine where they are. And many people who have cell phones are mobile and they may not know and that sometimes creates concerns or issues as to where they are and how we're going to send resources to them. And another program that we have going on in our communications areas, radio frequency rebanding, which to many people, it's really a non-issue. But to us, it's an initiative on the part of Spring Nextel in their, I guess, desire to get additional radio bandwidth, which is going to require law enforcement entities on an 800 megahertz radio system to narrow their band. What that means to us in Sheboygan County is that we have 1500, approximately 1500, radio users, individual radio users on our 800 megahertz radio system require all of those radios to be reprogrammed. So obviously challenges associated with law enforcement in general, but the possible crowding in the future at our detention center, communications, as you said, whether it's 911 and being able to respond to people, or just communications with the law enforcement agencies throughout the county. As you said, four-year tenure, as you look back at those four years, what are some of the areas that you really feel you've made some accomplishments, made some strides? Well, reorganization of the upper administration of the Sheriff's Department was something that I campaigned on and we were successful in doing that. We've actually streamlined our administrative hierarchy at the Sheriff's Department, thereby being able to provide resources at a lower level. Of course, with that comes more responsibilities for the people in those upper administrative positions, but that seemed to have worked out well. I've reinstituted the canine program. We have one canine actively on duty and a second one that'll be coming soon, so I was proud of that accomplishment. I actually reinstated the special deputies program, not in the way that people may have remembered it in the past, but through a unique partnership that our department has developed with the Shabuigan Area School District, where we're providing school security officers to supplement the Shabuigan Police Department liaison officers in some of the Shabuigan schools, these officers are recently retired law enforcement officers who I have granted through my constitutional authority as Sheriff's Special Deputy Status. So that program is relatively new, but is working out very well and is unique. I believe we're probably the only department in school district partnership in the state. And right now with school safety and security issues being a concern, I think we're actually ahead of the curve when, with this program. So I'm really proud of that accomplishment. We continue to contract with the State Department of Corrections to board inmates, state inmates in our county jail. As you know, the state prison system is overcrowded and thereby they need alternative places to place these state prisoners and we've been contracting with them for four years now. That's generated a significant amount of positive revenue for our department. Speaking of corrections, our rehabilitative programs in our correctional facility, I think stand out amongst other county jails in the state of Wisconsin. We have a partnership with LTC where educational opportunities are provided to our jail inmates. We have a chaplaincy program that is actually spun out into a mentoring program where there are people in the community that are willing to mentor inmates who maybe have been recently released from jail and maybe having issues or concerns that they can utilize these resources to help them stay on track so that they don't come back to our jail. Our Huber Law and AODA programs in jail are, I think, second to none in the state. So I'm proud of those rehabilitative programs that we're able to offer. In fact, today we're having our jail inspection by the Department of Corrections and I had been down to the detention center for a good part of the morning this morning and the gentleman who was doing the jail inspection had actually highlighted some of those positive things that we're doing in our corrections facility. Public relations and accessibility to the public personally, that was something I campaigned on and although it keeps me incredibly busy, I enjoy that. I enjoy getting out into the community and talking to people, telling them who we are, what we do and how it impacts them as a department. As you talked about those accomplishments, you really touched on some different areas that are contained in the Sheriff's Department. Please give our viewers a feel for, well, how is the Sheriff's Department organized and what are the primary roles and responsibilities of a Sheriff's Department? Sure, a Sheriff's Department is different than municipal law enforcement agencies in that the Sheriff goes back to the days that the country was being formed. It was really their first form of law enforcement term. Sheriff actually comes from the English term of sheriff and constable in that and that part of our heritage came from England and came here. But Sheriff's Departments are different in that they're required to not only obviously provide the law enforcement services that people immediately think of when they think of law enforcement or police departments, but we run the jail as I had mentioned before. That's a huge part of our operation. Half of our human resources, half of our budget is dedicated to that. Incredible responsibility, could be incredible liability there when you're talking about the types of situations we're dealing with and corrections. This Sheriff is also required to provide courtroom and courthouse security. So we have bailiffs in the jail if anybody's seen TV, those law enforcement officials that are in jail are Sheriff's deputies. The Sheriff is also constitutionally required to provide a civil process division within the Sheriff's Department. That's a division where we have, actually have full-time deputies that do nothing but serve civil process, legal papers, summons in all kinds of small claims, evictions, and all kinds of different things that I guess keep our legal system moving. So that's another responsibility. In addition to that, the Sheriff is required to provide a water rescuer recovery unit for the jurisdiction that they're responsible for. We do that a number of different ways. We actually have a combined city county dive team, and we have some very good partnerships with fire departments in terms of water rescue capabilities. The Sheriff is also required to regulate the transportation and storage of explosives in their county. And typically, we do that through our emergency management person who is under our table of organization. We have four divisions at the Sheriff's Department, a patrol division. Their responsibilities are obviously patrol handling, calls for service, accident investigations. We have a bicycle patrol unit that basically is made up of deputies. We do counteract, which is similar to dare, a drug education program in the elementary schools that's done through our patrol division. We also have a triad partnership with senior citizens in the county where law enforcement and seniors have teamed up to provide information about crime and the fear of crime and how that would impact senior citizens. We have a criminal investigations division. That's our second division that obviously investigates crimes. These detectives are trained specifically to handle specialized investigations, whether it be computer crime, sexual assaults, and just a myriad of different types of specialties that go into criminal investigations. I mentioned our corrections division, which is obviously responsible for the incarceration of inmates from our county courts, and we have a support services division that is in charge of our emergency management that I had mentioned just previous, communications division, and our training. So those are the four different divisions and some of the responsibilities that go with them. Obviously I've had a chance to not only interact with you, but some of your staff and at the administration level throughout, and I just am always so impressed with the professionalism of the officers and the administrators as a whole. And as we were just talking about a little bit before the program started, my son is taking Boater Safety, which is another service that the Sheriff's Department obviously provides. And you mentioned that was a partnership through the Department of Natural Resources. Yes. We get reimbursement from the Department of Natural Resources to do Boater Safety. I'm not sure if we do any, I don't think we do any type of snowmobile or firearm safety programs, but there could be opportunities for them. We've done the Boater Safety for quite some time. Likewise, we, through different state initiatives, whether it be through the Department of Transportation or other departments, we do specialize details, traffic enforcement, saturated patrols for OWI, operating while intoxicated, or seat belt enforcement, speed waves where we might get information from the State Department of Transportation that there's high accident rates in certain areas, so they may provide a funding to do additional radar enforcement or traffic enforcement in those areas. So that's positive proactive law enforcement partnerships that we develop through state agencies. So in total, how many employees do you have and approximately what is your total budget? We have 180 employees, give or take a few on any given day. And a 15, just over a $15 million budget in 2007, very good. Sure, from time to time, your department gets involved in special events. We have the senior golf tournament coming up this summer. What do you prepare for that type of activity? Well, planning, obviously, is critical when you're planning for any event, but an event of that scope, pre-planning is very, very important. Fortunately, the senior golf outing this year, we have a perfect template from the 2004 PGA championship that was held at Whistlin Straits that all we really have to do is modify for this particular event. There'll be some modifications made based on what it is that the expectations are for the venue, the citizens, the community, and those types of things, but we have a perfect template. So planning is obviously very important. And with that planning and with these larger events, we obviously have to work with several different departments, different governmental entities, several different departments within the state government and Shiboy and county government, local townships and municipalities. So being able to get together, communicate and plan is what's critical to make these things successful. There are also some referring events, such as Road America and the county fair that you have to prepare for. How was that preparation different? Well, you know, Road America and the county fair have been around for so long that it's almost second nature in how we've done that. And in terms of the county fair, there has been a change over the years in that the fair association has taken a more of an active role in providing security on the grounds itself. So other than traffic and some of our officers being involved in off-duty security employment through them, that pretty much runs itself. Road America over the years from the time that I started to, before the time I started in the 60s and early 70s when there used to be a lot of problems out there for some of the people that might have remembered almost like riot conditions to the time that I started there to now has really de-escalated in size, scope, and nature of problems. So again, that is basically a traffic responsibility for us and Road America has its own internal security there. So that's not much of a problem. The PGA and what is coming to Sheboygan County, you know, again, I think we need to have a coordinated effort in response to these things and that is unique compared to the other events that we host in the county. So I believe that as we continue to have these events there, you know, that'll become somewhat second nature too. Does the county and your department gain any additional revenue for doing this additional security or work? In 2004, we had an agreement with the PGA in the state of Wisconsin to cover our costs. I was actually transitioning into the position of sheriff when the planning had already been started for that and that was my initial concern that, hey, look, I'm not really interested in making money off of this event, but I certainly don't want this event to be supported by taxpayer dollars. So we were able to work out an agreement and all parties came through and lived up to their end of the agreement and we offset our cost of our personnel at that event. The same holds true for this event here. So in terms of additional revenue, no, but we're providing a service, we're providing presence, we're providing security and traffic control at no cost to the taxpayers of Sheboyin County. Your department does offer additional services to municipalities within the county. Could you explain how that works? Yes, we for a number of years have contracted with several villages and townships. We have the village of Random Lake, the village of Cedar Grove, the village of Usberg, the town of Holland, the town of Sheboyin, and just recently the village of Gondola has contracted some additional law enforcement hours from us. These contracts work like this. We provide specialized law enforcement services to their communities whereby we will enforce their village and town ordinances specific to their villages and towns. In the Sheriff's Department, we don't come into each of the 17 or so different townships there are and gosh only knows how many villages there are in enforced individual ordinances. We have countywide ordinances that are parallel, many of those local ordinances, but if we're contracted with them, we will enforce their specific ordinances. In addition to that, if they have special events or special concerns in their community, we will make it a point to address those. So it's beneficial to them in the terms that they get specialized enforcement. We can be there to provide them a presence at a special event and obviously it's good for us in that it's not a huge revenue generating source, but again, it offsets our costs and it provides what's important to me is law enforcement presence in these communities. And then finally, are there any trends in law enforcement, any particular law enforcement problems in Sheboygan County that are emerging? Well, I don't think Sheboygan County is unique from any other part of the country. Something that we obviously have to stay on top of is drug and gang issues and criminal activity that could be associated with that. Methamphetamine is moving across the country and is starting to crop up in our part of the state. We've had a couple of meth labs that we've had to close down and they're unique in that not only is meth a very addictive and a very hard substance for a person to be rehabilitated off of, but the environmental mess that the manufacture of this, manufacture of meth causes is also a huge concern. There's been a lot of talk of late with the police department, the city of police, the city of Sheboygan building a new police department and with that discussion has come well, what opportunities are for the sheriff's department and the city of Sheboygan Police Department to interact and coordinate or share services more? And before you touch on that, I know and certainly you know a lot of good work has happened in the past where the sheriff's department and the city of Sheboygan Police Department have been sharing services or resources. Please touch on that a little bit and give our viewers a better flavor for it. Sure. We've had a great partnership not only with the Sheboygan Police Department but with all the other municipal law enforcement agencies in the county. And really that's no credit to me. That's been something that's been going on for a long time here with the advent of the 800 megahertz radio system that I referred to and I'm not sure the inception date maybe the chairman knows but that was really a technology that was the backbone to even draw us municipal users together even more whereby our radio system, our 800 megahertz radio system is the backbone for all municipal law enforcement, transit and all of the other users out there. So yet we have a common radio frequency. Instead of having half a dozen or a dozen separate radio frequencies we have one which ultimately probably saves the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in the end. Our records management system that law enforcement shares with each other is accessible for all the users that are on that system. So the availability for one law enforcement agency and or officer on the street to obtain information county wide on an individual or an incident is right at their fingertips. That's been a great initiative. We share photograph and fingerprint information with the other law enforcement agencies via computer technology. Our MEG unit, our drug unit has been around for a long time. That is a cooperative effort of law enforcement throughout the county to staff and to work on drug issues in the county. We have an indoor range at the sheriff's department which has just recently been refurbished. That is open to all law enforcement agencies including the Coast Guard and federal law enforcement that may be stationed in Sheboygan County for their use. Training, we share training resources, training officers back and forth on a regular basis accident reconstruction. What that is is having special officers specially trained in accident dynamics and being able to actually reconstruct an accident and we use those in a serious injury or fatal accidents to reconstruct an accident and determine to the best of our scientific ability what caused that accident. The Sheboygan County Most Wanted that many people may be familiar with in the newspaper is a joint effort of all law enforcement in the county to get those names of those 10 Most Wanted in there. I mentioned our dive team earlier. That is a split or shared makeup of that team with city and county law enforcement officers and technology in general. Obviously some of this technology for accident reconstruction crime investigation is very expensive. The ability to share that with our counterparts across the county just saves money. It only makes sense that these high price pieces of equipment that aren't used that often that they should be pooled and shared together. We strive to continue to do that. Our Crime Stoppers line is really a private public venture but all law enforcement in Sheboygan County contributes to that Crime Stoppers. And we have a Crime Stoppers number that people can call in to report crimes and remain anonymous and be eligible for a cash reward. Number of examples I know you could continue to go on and it's just good to hear because again people are always saying units of government need to be working together, sharing services, sharing resources, and the Sheboygan County Sheriff's Department has a long and healthy track record of working with the other municipalities and the other law enforcement agencies throughout Sheboygan County. With that said, as you know, certainly as Chairman Gehring knows we're always striving to do more. We're always striving to improve upon that. Do you see any opportunities on the horizon? The combined dispatch issue is being researched and evaluated again. That's an opportunity. I don't know what the city police department has in their plans in terms of training rooms and specialized maybe like interview rooms or things like that that we could utilize. You know there are a myriad of different opportunities that are available but again I think that and we take this for granted so often here I think locally that because I see this I don't see the same sharing in when I go across the state and meet with other sheriffs and other municipalities that we are really head and shoulders above the rest and what we're already doing with our counterparts. But depending on you know the size and scope of this police department I am sure there will be opportunities to share and I'm just eagerly awaiting to see what comes of that. You mentioned earlier that the 800 megahertz really that radio system really helped bring a lot of the units of law enforcement together and that was back I think just when I started in 1999 when we started formulating that and making that happened but certainly sure if I don't want you to sell yourself short because it starts with personalities and people being willing to work together and overcome turf and all the other things that enter into those discussions and you've certainly led by example and I know you've been opened exploring opportunities and you just mentioned one that of late is getting a little bit more attention that is joint dispatch the city of Sheboygan's looking at building this new police department we have a city county shared services committee that is exploring future opportunities whether it's in law enforcement or other areas and you have at least one member of your staff who's participating on a subcommittee exploring this at this point what's the status of that that discussion sure the combined dispatch status is the subcommittee that you had mentioned is researching the cost staffing levels equipment that would be needed in order to combine this and they've had several meetings and eventually they'll make a recommendation back to the shared services committee as to what they they found out conceptually I think it's a it's a great idea it's a great opportunity it's not it's not uncommon in other parts of Wisconsin but like anything my concern is is that it's it's done properly from the get go that's too important of a entity or a responsibility that they provide to to not do it it's a lifeline for citizens out there who are calling in for for help it's the lifeline for our officers it's really the heart and soul of of a of an emergency agency is that communication standpoint aspect of it so it's got to be done it's got to be done right and I think it can be very successful will it be done at a savings initially maybe not but I think over over time you'll gain efficiencies and a single point of contact and so many other things that will avail itself that it would save money in the future and in the end if a recommendation is to pursue it of course the dollars and cents will become a big issue because as you said if we can show that in fact it would make for a more efficient approach but it's as costly as we have now or more costly the county board of county board of supervisors that should avoid common counsel everyone's subject to levy restraints and other pressures by the community to keep taxes in check and that obviously will bear on that decision as well yes I know we only have a minute left and I just want to thank you Sheriff Helpe for your time today covered a lot of ground gave a lot of good information and and and as you know and I know I speak for chairman Bill Gehring as well you've been a pleasure to work with during your 10 year and I I look forward to that going on for some time into the future so thanks for joining us today thank you next month we're going to have Jean Stark the administrator from Sunny Ridge here as you know there's also been discussions of late about the status of the Sunny Ridge health care center and being privatized a lot going on there and Jean Stark the administrator will be here to talk a little bit about what's going on and the transition that'll happen in the future so until then on behalf of the Sheboygan county board chairman Bill Gehring thank you for joining us