 Welcome to Sheboygan County Government, working for you. My name's 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 head or someone from the county who knows what they're talking about. And today we've got Building Services, Jim, Building Services director Jim Tobist with us. Welcome Jim. Well, thank you. Jim is the director of all the buildings throughout Sheboygan County and there are a number of them from the county courthouse to law enforcement, the administration building, and Jim and his staff, of course, make sure that they're well maintained, that we plan appropriately to be sure that roofs and other things are taken care of. And he has all the cleaning staff under his oversight as well, and they do a real nice job for us. So Jim, it's good to have you here. Let's talk a little bit about when you first started with Sheboygan County. The years are flying. When were you first hired? I was hired here in 2000. I'm home grown. Grew up at Usberg and lived away for 20 years in my family. And I decided we wanted to live closer to home, closer to grandparents. And Sheboygan County is such a great place to raise a family. We wanted their kids back here before they started high school. And that's what we did. Three children? I have three children out of college, one daughter-in-law and a grandpa, and one grandchild on the way. And if I recall correctly, they're all pretty good athletes. You had some soccer players and basketball players in the family. Yep. We got to go to state quite a few times. One one of them. It was very exciting. So speaking of exciting, it's got to be exciting to be the Building Services Director. I want to share with you really the mission and roles and responsibilities are of your department. Well the real goal of our department is to serve others. That's why we call ourselves Building Services. Anybody ask us to help them out? Our goal is to serve them. Whether it's constituents, taxpayers, or other staff members of the county employees. We try to maintain the taxpayer assets for the long run. We keep everything clean and running. We mow the lawn, plow the snow, all the grounds and take care of the flags. But the big part of the time is working on the HVAC systems, making sure everything is efficient as possible. Try to fix stuff before it breaks. And you never get any complaints about the HVAC. It seems not a week goes by that I don't hear someone make a comment. And usually it's complimentary of your staff or how helpful they are, how clean the facilities are. A lot of compliments about snow removal this winter and them getting out there earlier and getting the parking lot cleared and the sidewalks cleared. But when it comes to HVAC, when you have an old courthouse and an old health and human services building, the heating distribution or cooling distribution isn't ideal. What are some of the challenges you have there? Like you said, there's old building helping human services from 1927, the courthouse from 1931. They basically just had radiators in the 40s or 50s. They added air conditioning and we have all that much more equipment, all the computers giving off heat and the controls just aren't there in order to redo it to bring it up to snuff. We'd have to tear open walls and that's just not something you do, especially with all the marble we've got at the courthouses. Definitely a challenge, but you can have two people in the same room and one's hot and one's cold. That's just the nature of people and the aging process. Our IT offices on the, not the top floor, but the fifth floor of the courthouse and Josh, our division manager, is about my size so as you can imagine, he prefers things a little cooler. And I think his office, he doesn't have any heat necessarily coming from on his floor, but all the heat from the floors below pour out into his office and I think it's become a good wellness program because I think he's losing all the weight in there. And he does have all the equipment and it just so happens that chimney goes right through that area. They didn't insulate things like they do nowadays. Well we do the best we can and that's one of the challenges of having an older building. You mentioned primary roles and responsibilities of your staff, obviously the snow removal and talk a little bit about the cleaning responsibilities and I know a few years ago there was actually some discussion in the county about should we privatize cleaning services and you really drilled down into that. Touch on that a little bit. I'm very proud of our cleaning staff. They do an excellent job. They're very conscientious. We never have any accusations of theft or anything like that but it is a costly item. They're working second shift so we're trying to be invisible and there was request to look at outsourcing. So I did compare. I've got some bids from some vendors. I talked to people that use out private cleaners and when I compared to what we're spending to what they're paying we would pay the vendor. They may pay their staff minimum wage but what we would pay the vendor we were cheaper. You have to consider the cleaning supplies, the vacuums, the equipment, the scrubbers as well as the disposal costs that we're already paying anyway we would have to still pay with the outsourced company. It turned out to be more cost effective for us to maintain our own workforce and as you said I don't recall in 15 years ever getting a complaint about something being stolen or misplaced and suggesting that one of our cleaners or custodial staff took something so like you said we've got some really good people. And there's a lot of confidential files in the courthouse and child support and register of deeds. A lot of documents that cleaners shouldn't be looking at and our cleaners don't. Right. Very good. How many staff do you have in total in the department and what is your total operating budget? There's 34 members. Half of them are cleaners, half of them are maintenance then we have a supervisor of the hourly people an electrician and a part-time account clerk. Our operating budget is three million dollars a year and the tax levy is about two and a half million dollars. We're getting revenue from renting some places, leasing out some space focus on how much energy gives us grants. That adds up to about a half million dollars. And Jim you probably have one of the best track records of all of our department heads working within your budget parameters. Of course no budget is a crystal ball and every department head does the best they can working with their liaison committee and obviously myself and the county board adopts that budget but no one has a crystal ball but year after year building services seems to be right on budget or providing a positive variance and we certainly appreciate that leadership. It's not the case for every department but it is for most. Most do a good job. Obviously we're taping this program here at UW-Shabuigan and you mentioned that you know you have a number of different buildings, areas of responsibility and as we've mentioned in the past but in case we have some new viewers a lot of people don't know that the county owns the UW-Shabuigan buildings, the grounds, the county owns the facilities here so we have that responsibility. The state of course operates out of the facility there. They're the teachers and the staff here that make this place tick and they do a good job but we own the buildings, we own the grounds and talk a little bit about that relationship Jim. How does that work? We don't have our cleaning staff over here per se but we certainly are involved with any new building project. How does that relationship work? We are similar to the other 13 two-year campuses across the state. They're owned by the counties that they're in. Some municipalities are also involved like the City of West Bend is involved in Washington County but here at Shabuigan it's just the county and the state and the county does provide them some maintenance dollars but it's all state labor We buy the lawn mower, they buy the gas, we buy the light fixture, they buy the light bulb, they pay for the electricity and of course the state runs the professors and the classrooms and the books and all that stuff. I work very closely with the maintenance supervisor here on campus to make sure that they're taking care of our building because it is an asset of the taxpayers. We want to make sure it's kept up and I think they're doing a very good job and this is a definite cooperation, a very advantageous cooperation that's a real asset to the area. At any time a new building is constructed here or an addition is put up and Jim has had a key leadership role with that. We had the Science Building Edition a number of years ago that was a public-private partnership thanks to the generosity of the Bratz family. We had the Acuity Technology Center that was a public-private partnership thanks to the, obviously the generosity of the Acuity we're looking at adding an engineering lab here in the near future that's going to be a public-private partnership and more information will be coming on that in the future but the buildings as you said are owned by the county though we've really been trying to leverage resources from the private sector and the state operates it. What's your role when a new building is contemplated out here? I get deeply involved with the architects to create a bid specification so we can make sure the contractors are all going to build the same building when they give us their bids. That can be a three month to a year long process there are some state hoops we need to jump through to keep Madison informed and we make sure all the stock stakeholders here on campus are involved. Some of the professors, the IT people, the maintenance people gets to be quite involved and frankly the building projects take a majority of my time though. The maintenance guys are really good back at the courthouse they're empowered to take care of things themselves. The building projects are the emphasis of my job. Make sure the taxpayers are getting their dollars worth. We're building the attractive building that will attract students not be some dungeon for people to come into and get service from. And then while it's under construction I work with the contractor. They're always something you find behind the walls that you didn't know was there. We try to get the decision quick so the crew isn't standing there overbilling us or wasting their time making sure they're building things the way the specifications and plans read. And that they train the maintenance staff here how to take care of it once it's done and they walk away. Right. And you've done a phenomenal job. Obviously we always have to balance. We don't want a dungeon but we're not building a castle either. It needs to be functional and it needs to certainly be built well so it lasts a long time. And if you haven't been out to UW-Shabuigan I invite you to come out to your facility and take a look at a couple of the more recent additions that Jim had an important oversight role in the science addition as I mentioned. UW acuity facility, an award winning library, one of the most attractive functional libraries in the state but it's a beautiful campus out here and of course you have bookworm gardens so you can bring the kids along and they'll be opening up here soon with warm weather. UW extension is now co-located here with UW-Shabuigan so it's just a lot going on out here a lot of good things. Final question before I turn it over to Roger. We talked a little bit about your budget and you've done a nice job working within budget parameters. Chairman Testruity the county board, we've been really working hard to hold the line on property taxes and of course every department needs to be part of that solution. What's been your key to success? How have you helped hold the line and be sure that we aren't raising property taxes more than we need to in this community if at all? I think we've been quite successful at that. In fact our operating budget this year is no bigger than it was in 2009 and if we take out the utilities that I have to pay for really don't have any control over what rates they're going to charge us our budget, the tax levy this year is only 1% over what it was in 1999 15 years ago our tax levy for our department was basically the same as what it is now. We have had some pain. We've cut 10% of our staff. We've tried to leverage technology. We're using iPads for the guy that's on weekend call so he can look at the HVAC system which we've gotten out of all everything's computerized control. It makes it for more efficient operation but it also lets us check things from remote locations. We've got cell phones of course so we don't have to look for a pay phone after we got paged and all that other technology is a great thing. We're getting a lot more productivity and the delegation and empowerment that I mentioned before I think is a big thing. We empower the people that are closest to the problem to get it fixed or if they hear an odd noise let's figure out what that is and correct it turns into a problem. There's a big puddle on the floor or there's part that got mangled because it didn't get taken care of we're working at keeping costs down by fixing it before it fails. Excellent very good thank you Jim. Thank you for the great work that you and your staff do and you've done some wonderful things and I kind of knew before you started working you do a great job because you had the good sense to marry a gal from my home area in Cedar Grove actually. I feel a little old because she was in one of my freshman Sunday school classes way back when so that dates me so but in addition to a lot of the maintenance work that you do how about some of the capital projects and the energy efficiency programs that you set in place. My department we try to stay invisible like I mentioned we're going to fix things before the big puddles on the floor hopefully the staff doesn't even notice that we're working there we change the light bulbs at night we're cleaning at night etc but I do have some of my bigger capital projects are also somewhat invisible nobody's going to see that the roof got replaced they might see the crane there for a month but a big project I just helped the highway department I managed a project to replace their heating system from steam to hot water because of age and we also replaced their air conditioning system for the office again something that people driving past aren't going to see those types of projects in 2013 added up to about $1.7 million worth of projects we upgraded the elevators at health and human services so instead of clickety-clack relays now we've got computers and they're talking to each car talks to each other so they're being more efficient as the car goes down it even regenerates some electricity to put back into the grid but a majority is we've got almost a 20 year roof plan and we've slowly been replacing the roofs. This year I'm really going to be busy and those projects are going to be more visible projects the total that we expect to spend is about $6 million we're adding a lobby addition onto our health and human services to consolidate waiting rooms and provide better service more attractive service to the clients that use that building combined dispatch is a big project the city dispatchers hopefully become county employees and we're going to dispatch out of county buildings all the city police department and the county sheriff's department it's a highly visible project because it's been in the papers I'm sure it will be in the papers we want to make sure we get it right the first time and we build it it's attractive and operating well for the users in smaller projects like at our aging and disability resource center in Sheboygan Falls there's no entrance vestibule or canopy with the ice and snow and rain and the elderly clients that use that building we want to make it a safer entrance. We also have things on tap for the future. And some of these projects you mentioned how do you figure out the bidding process and who's selected the contractor which contract did you select by state law if it's over $25,000 we have to bid it out so if it's close to that amount I'll do the drawings myself write a little specification for a smaller project like we built two offices in one department. If it's a bigger project like this lobby addition at health and human services that hire an architect who hires engineers or if it's an HVAC project I'll hire the engineer directly. They write a very detailed specification sheets and sheets of plans and make sure that all the work that is intended to be done is documented in words and pictures and then the bids go out the contractors give us their bids and we property committee traditionally awards those and we always select the lowest bidder. Jim I know a few years ago we established the county energy conservation team how is that working out and what has been saved as a result of that. That is also very good success. In 2008 the utility bills for the county not counting the nursing home in the highway department was almost a million dollars a year it was getting to be a major part of the building services budget. We were challenged by Adam and the committees to save some of that money so we created an energy team to try and get some ideas of how we could get other employees involved in saving energy and raising the awareness that first year we saved 10 percent. Since 2008 we've saved $650,000 in utility costs it's not actually the cost it's the energy used I'm not taking advantage of the price reduction that we've recently had in natural gas I'm seeing the energy that we used at those prices was actually reduced by a value of $650,000 and pardon me what were some of the different measures that you did or what did you do to make that happen. A big thing was to make the employees aware is to turn the light off when you walk out the room especially when you leave for the day log off your computer and shut it down. Other bigger things that we've done is sealed up all the cracks and even nailed windows shut in our health and human services building again it's a temperature issue that we mentioned before in such an old building but we're saving energy by doing it we don't want to have one window open in somebody's office and they're cold and the other people say why isn't the heat catching up. Another thing we did at our laundry in the jails we now inject ozone into the washing machines it allows us to wash all the clothes in cold water it uses less soap and in fact it makes the drying time less so we're using less to heat the water and we're using less to dry the clothes and well as our county electrician keeps us high highly informed of all the new technologies and we're switching over to quite a few of the LED light fixtures they use substantially less energy and it also helps my department because they last so much longer we don't have to replace them every 6 months their LED exit lights last 10 years we're lowering our maintenance costs because we've gone to LED technology. Jim what committees on the county board do you typically work with? I report bi-weekly to the property committee I'm working very closely with them and then it seems like I always need money to build something so I'm working with the finance department as I have employees retire I need to replace them so I'm working with the HR committee and then as I'm doing projects about the county I work with the health care committee if I'm helping them out with a construction project out at Rocky Knoll at the health care center I work with the transportation committee if there's anything at the highway department or the airport and the law committee I'm involved with with the dispatch center and previous projects that we've had at the jail I get around to almost all the committees thank you very much for your good work Jim. Thanks again. As I think about it you probably spend as much time with the 9 different liaison committees as any department head in the county you lucky guy. I enjoy it there you go. Oh yeah a lot of good people to work with you know we wrap up one budget and strive to work within budget parameters and here it is March this may be shown in April but we're already working on our 2015 budget and every department will receive specific targets based on budget assumptions what have you and what do you find is generally your key challenges or fundamental challenges when you're asked to prepare your department budget each year a fundamental challenge from a facility department is to try and think a year and a half ahead what might break down it's almost you got to have a crystal ball we typically spend this much on plumbing or did last year we have some catastrophe that made it higher than we expected and has this electrical thing been given us a hassle that we're going to have to pump up that part of the budget a little bit to cut back a little bit on the air conditioning repairs but again if something fails we have to fix it so it's a big challenge to try and predict what's going to happen we do have a lot of history like I said but as our buildings are getting older and older administration building in the jail is getting to be 12, 15 years old and that's when things start to fall apart you do have a contingency fund but it's a relatively modest one in the big picture correct the property committees in charge of allocating funds from a contingency fund it's $100,000 a year and it's the way it's designed strictly for emergencies we've got a boiler that went out and there's no heat in this building we have to hurry up and fix it I don't necessarily have the chance to get to the finance committee to try and seek other funding this is something that needs to get taken care of right away or if the toilets are all plugged up at the correctional facility and pipes are breaking and there's no time to go to a committee to ask for permission to fix that you just got to make it happen correct when our staff is very good at that we are man for two shifts a day Monday through Friday but we do have people on call 24-7 and the inmates do plug toilets and we get called in on the weekends so take care of that of course you have salary increases that may or may not happen but usually we try to do something around cost of living and health insurance I thought one of the other areas you might bring up though were utilities because that's obviously largely out of your control the price of the utilities is largely out of control but this energy team has really helped us as I said before we're almost a million dollars now we're something like a thousand part of that is because prices have dropped on natural gas because of the poor economy and the fracking that they're finding additional supplies but a lot of it is we're just saving energy our natural gas is down 32% our electricity is down 16% and we continue to whittle away at those uses a lot of good changes a lot of improvements there with that energy team we only have a minute remaining that you see hotter coming to building services a big challenge I see is retirement a lot of my staff is getting to be up in age and maybe a third of them could go any time they decided they wanted to leave and I'm afraid we're going to lose a lot of knowledge they know the sound that this pump makes or this boiler makes and when it doesn't quite sound right they know how to fix it now how do I transfer that knowledge to younger staff a big challenge succession planning I was just meeting with a couple of representatives of the sheriff's department this morning and they shared that they're looking at possibly 20 retirements at the sheriff's department in the next two years and it takes even more time to fill positions there because of all the background checks and everything else so without question that's going to be a challenge for all of us in the future well Jim thank you for joining us today a lot of good information if you wanted to learn more about building services good things that Jim does or have suggestions for building services don't hesitate to give him a call his number and information is on the county website otherwise you can contact the county clerk's office and he or her his staff can always point you in the right direction next month we're going to have Ellen Schleicher here a register of deeds she does very very important work whether it's recording birth certificates or our sales of property so we're going to hear from Ellen but until then I want to thank Jim for his good work and the important leadership he provides it's it's rather remarkable once he starts going through the list of all the different projects and things going on in building services and as he said much of it behind the scenes so thank you for joining us on behalf of Roger Distruty and the county board have a good month and we'll see you soon