 Welcome to Sheboygan County government working for you. My name's Adam Payne, I'm the Sheboygan County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Bill Gehring. And today, we're very pleased to have our Building Services Director with us, Jim DeBeest. Welcome, Jim. Hi, Adam. As you know, we have about 22, not about, we have 22 departments in county government, nearly 1,000 employees, and a number of buildings, number of buildings and grounds. In fact, if you're not familiar with county government as a whole, we have the Courthouse, the Administration Building, the Law Enforcement Center, the Detention Center, the Health and Human Services Department, a number of highway sheds, and I can go on and on. And Jim has a very important role, Jim and his staff, of maintaining the majority of our buildings and grounds. And today, we're gonna get a flavor for the role and responsibilities of the Building Services Department. Jim, please begin by sharing a little bit about yourself when you first began working for the county. I'm married, I've got three kids, two in high school, one in college. I grew up in Sheboygan County. I graduated from Wolfsburg High School. I attended the University of Wisconsin-Sheboygan. Right here, we call it the center at that time. For two years, I've got an engineering degree, been an engineer for 27 years. In 2000, the company I was with was merging. I didn't wanna be there anymore. I decided to move back home and started working for Sheboygan County, so it's been seven years now. Started out as an assistant to the manager who's thinking about retiring. In 2003, I moved into his position when he retired. Now, I know you mentioned your kids, and I get the pleasure, occasionally, of reading about them in the newspaper. You've got some pretty good athletes in the family, a couple playing basketball right now. Yeah, my daughter's the point guard for Wolfsburg. Girl's basketball team, they're doing quite well. And my son starts about half the time on the boys' team. He's a junior. Very good, very good. Very proud parents. Started as an assistant in 2000, and you've been the director of building services now since? 2003. 2003, very good. What's the mission and primary responsibilities of your department? That's something that we do day to day, so the exact mission, I'm gonna have to read a little bit here, but we strive to ensure efficient and effective facilities for the Sheboygan County departments of the government that can provide services for its residents. We operate, maintain the physical plant and the equipment. We provide access to the public so they can get to our government offices. We maintain and clean those offices and service areas. We establish requirement for expansion, modernization of replacement or of equipment and or facilities to meet the expanding requirements. We evaluate, develop and control capital projects related to systems, modernization, equipment replacement and new facility construction. And we can establish and control the operating budget for the responsible areas and we control the budgets for major capital and projects. Well, that's quite a mouthful. Yeah, too much. So, no, no, in short, what are some of the, what are the buildings and the grounds that you're specifically responsible for? Well, there's eight complexes that total 500,000 square feet. And like you've mentioned in the introduction is the Courthouse and the Annex, the law enforcement center and across the street and your office, the administration building, the health and human services with the social workers and the public health, et cetera. And we've got the detention center, the jail and there's an agriculture building out in Sheboygan Falls. We recently added some responsibilities at Sunny Ridge and we maintain a little known park called Taylor Park just east of the mall. And then we've got a quasi relationship. We mow the lawn at the veterans memorial right there next to Sunny Ridge and the historical center museum. And I'm also the county's liaison with the UW Sheboygan here. Sounds like you got a lot of time on your hands. A lot of role, a lot of responsibility and number of buildings and grounds that I think as employees, we somewhat take for granted. We come to work each day and we have a nice heated facility especially in a day like today when it's below zero out there and the garbage is picked up at night. You have just some wonderful staff working for you. How many employees are part of your department? There's 30 staff over two shifts. It's roughly half maintenance guys, half cleaners. And we've got a supervisor, a part-time clerk and a full-time electrician that handles any request in the 82 buildings that the county owns and has electric meters on. Excellent, excellent. And as you said, the responsibility is not only from the every evening, generally speaking when they come around and pick up garbage and key responsibilities like that, but also maintaining the facilities, checking air conditioners, heating units to snow removal. That's right, Adam, I'm really proud of my staff. They really take the initiative. They get things done. They don't have to be told every little thing to do. We assign each person a building and they kind of take ownership of that building and they get a little pride for that building. They take excellent care of it. And like you said, they look at the heat and the air conditioning and the snow removal and mowing the lawn and landscaping and also the building security, the plumbing, the electrical, the roofs. We clean the morgue at the courthouse. It's not a pleasant job, but we do that. Lately with the war in Iraq, we've been lowering the flag to have staff quite often. That's our staff. Has to get out there seven days a week, get that done. Energy conservation, we handled all the deliveries. We make signs, we maintain the elevators. It's not glamorous work. In fact, we're doing our best when we're not noticed. If everything's working right, nobody has any complaints. We kind of fade into the woodwork. Very good, very good. I think most of our viewers probably know it now, but there certainly are people in the community that don't that UW-Shabuigan, the building and grounds here, is actually owned by the county. And we certainly have some responsibilities. Your department has some responsibilities in relation to this facility. Please touch on that. The county grounds here is 77 acres. There's nine buildings that the county built since 1962. They cover about 200,000 square feet. The staff is state employees and they operate the facility. They provide the education and maintenance. The county provides them some money for maintaining, replace flooring, paint the walls, stuff like that. Quite often we say, we buy the light fixtures, they buy the light bulbs. We buy the lawn mowers, they buy the gas. We work very well together. It's almost a daily contact to make sure they're taking care of our facilities and making sure that we're providing what they need to educate the students of Shabuigan County. Very good. Thank you, Jim. Jim, probably many people think about the building services department as the quiet department within the county. They think mainly about maintenance and upkeep, but you do get involved in major capital projects. Could you talk about some of the major capital projects you've been involved in the last couple of years? The two biggest projects were right here at Shabuigan County. I mean, it's a UW-Shabuigan. The first one was 2004, we did the Brots Science Building, chemistry rooms, anatomy, physics, geology. I'm probably forgetting some, but we tried to keep the facility ahead of what the high schools were doing quite a bit. Few of them had remodeling projects in there. Chemistry labs were getting to be better than what was here. In fact, what was here prior to 2004 was what I graduated with when I went here at the center. So we have two alumni sitting here right now from UW-Shabuigan. Then in 2007, we built the Acuity Technology Center. It's a new front door to the campus, you might say. You can see it from the freeway. It's quite an attractive building. It provides a lot of technology for the campus to be able to interface with other campuses around the state. And I think both were great examples of cooperation between the state, the county, and the private sector. The UW proposed these buildings and the county board was willing to fund them but challenged the campus to find private donations. And the dean went out and found the Brots Family for the Science Building in Acuity for the Technology Center. And then the state provided all the furniture and equipment. The state provided about a million dollars per project. The county provided about five million dollars per project. And then the Brots in Acuity was a half million dollars and 1.8 million dollars. Again, a prime example of ways that we can cooperate to keep Shabuigan County in the forefront. And as you've said, multi-million dollar projects that you specifically in your department had to keep on task as they were being built to ensure that they remained on task within budget. So we commend you for those projects. What current projects are you working on? Anything going on now or just sitting back? Well, when we moved some departments into the new technology center, now we're remodeling the vacated spaces here. We're also working on a project to upgrade the fire alarm system in the courthouse. Just coming Tuesday, we're gonna be opening bids on two roof projects that we hope to do this summer. And we're trying to find some space that we can consolidate in existing buildings and eliminate a lease and try to reduce our costs to keep the taxpayers happy, I guess. I think we've already alluded to the extension moving to the campus. Now you're playing a key role in that process also. What might that role be? Yeah, working very closely with the architect to make sure that the needs of the extension staff were met in his design for that remodeled space. We had some stuff already on order, so it was kind of a delicate balance to use what we already had planned to use, but yet meet the needs. The extension staff has secretaries and other things that weren't readily planned for that area. Then we're closely with the contractor to get decent pricing, and then things came in way under budget, way under expectations. This summer we worked to get some of the demolition done before school came back in session, so I worked with them to get the schedule. Even though parts weren't delivered yet, they brought crews onsite to demolish the area, all the noisy work before classes were back in session. Then the extension has different committees that they've broken their staff up into, and I'm helping out with those. We're looking at technology, how can we interface the county computers onto the UW system, the phone systems, the signage, how can we differentiate this extension, which is really a separate entity from the rest of the UW campus. And so when people come here to use those services, they know where their front door is. Also looking at how we can facilitate their move without interrupting their services as much as possible. Again, we commend you for your work behind the scenes and getting all those things done. It's fantastic what you've been able to achieve. In general, could you tell our viewers how if a committee or a department head thinks that they need to have an addition to a building or some separate building built, how does that process work? Well, hopefully they contact me, not because I'm the expert, but because I'm dealing with this stuff all the day, all the time, we're thinking about stuff behind the walls and above the ceiling that the department had maybe doesn't think about. Make sure we get all our bases covered, try to come up with an outline of what their needs might be, and then look at past projects, what it costs to do something similar. If we're moving a sink or we're building a room, try to come up with an estimate. If it's something major like the science building or the technology building, we might take some of the consulting dollars and my budget will hire an architect to do some preliminary designs, and then he'll come up with an estimate. I also work with the Highway Commissioner because quite a bit of our parking lot, driveways, all that sort of stuff, we utilize the Highway Department staff, so he can give me good prices on that stuff. Also work with our purchasing agent because he has experience with smaller projects and might remember something that I'm not thinking about. And then we present it to the committees to try and get it into our county's five-year plan. We try to justify that this is something that needs to be done. It needs to go through a variety of different committees to get into that five-year plan, and then as you know, the county board will vote on that and determine what year that project might actually occur. Once the project is approved by the county board, how does the bidding process work and how do you determine which bids to select? If it's a smaller project, I'll write up a bid specification and do some drafting on my own, but typically a hair and engineering firm, let's say like these roofing projects that we're gonna open bids up this coming week. They wrote a detailed specification about exactly what materials we wanted used, how they were supposed to put it together. Sometimes the book gets to be two or three inches thick about exactly what we want done. Make sure we're getting our biggest bang for the buck and the taxpayers are getting what they paid for. It also assures that all the contractors are bidding apples to apples. They're all bidding on the same thing. We advertise in the newspapers that we're looking for bids. We end up showing the contractors the area to make sure there's no misunderstanding about what they might be running into. And then the bids are brought to the county clerk and opened up publicly at a committee meeting. Often they're referred back to us to make sure that the contractors included everything they weren't supposed to include, especially if there's one bid that's way off of the other ones. And then come back to the committee and the committee actually awards the bid, awards the project to the bidder. We have to follow very strict state statutes on that. And it's often given to the lowest bidder, but occasionally we'll find we have some previous experience where the lowest bidder might not be the lowest cost for the county. It might be somebody that doesn't get things done on time and ends up delaying the project, costing us money. They might be somebody that asks for extras all the time, or they're not providing us the service we need once the project's done. We also put a little bit of weight to try and give the, we try and give the jobs to a local contractor, someone whose employees are taxpayers or a sub-boying county. If the bids are close, the committee may decide to give it to that local contractor. And then finally, which county board committee or committees do you typically work with? I'm report to the property committee for most of my stuff, but of course I have to go to the finance committee to get funding, and I do that quite often. Sometimes there's some emergency that comes up, something we never thought about budgeting for, I have to find some funds. I also report quite often to the health care committees. They kind of use me as an engineering consultant for some of their projects. Health and Human Services Board quite often. And then occasionally the law committee or the airport committee which is now the transportation committee. Okay, thank you. I'm sure our viewers after hearing that response are thinking, oh my goodness, and that's a lot of committees to interact with or report to, but as one of the support departments per se, whether it's building services or our finance department or HR department, you're providing assistance to essentially every department and all employees throughout the county. So very important. You just touched on the fact that you need to go to finance when there's a financial situation. As you know, Jim, we just completed the 2008 budget process. We just completed the five-year capital plan and you touched on that just a moment ago, but could you please share with our viewers a little bit about some of the upcoming projects that you anticipate being worked on in the future? As you and I both know, just because it's in the five-year plan doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna ultimately be funded by the county board because they make annual appropriations, but of course we plan ahead and there are some big projects out there in the future. I don't know of any building projects per se that I'll be working on. I know that far out in the range, there's a highway department project. I don't know if I'll get involved with that or not. I pretty much hands off on the highway department project so far, but it is in the plan and like you said, if the board decides to go through that, I would think they would get me involved. I don't really know of any more. I take that back. In order to save money to the taxpayers, try and keep the tax levy down, some years ago I created a 15-year roofing replacement plan and like a 10-year air conditioning replacement plan. It was my goal to get that in the five-year plan where the projects could be bonded for, spread those payments out instead of impacting in that one particular year that we did the work. It also allowed me to prioritize projects countywide. Let's replace the worst roof in the county, not the worst roof that I'm responsible for, but the worst roof in the whole county. And then let's do it in some logical order. It also allowed us to plan for replacements, kind of look into the future. Which roof is gonna fail next? Which is the oldest air conditioning unit? Let's get them replaced before the roof starts leaking and it ruins the wall and it cost us that much more to fix things that happened because we weren't on top of it. It also reduces the interruption we have to our staff if we can plan ahead, get things scheduled where it won't interrupt the service to the constituents. There's no question in your 10-year, there's been a real spike I think in some very significant projects. As you touch on the science building, the Acuity Technology Center, just two major projects that you've had a key leadership role in overseeing and helping with that project implementation. From your perspective, I imagine it might be kind of nice if things smooth out a little bit. Of course, there's other key important projects such as roof replacement and issues that aren't as glamorous as an Acuity Technology Center but certainly there's no lack of things for you to be looking at and working on. I think there's a lot of stuff that's kind of been put on the back burner that day-to-day operations, even contact with the employees in my department are not as available as I'd like to be. Often they've got questions in their mind but they maybe don't think it's worth a phone call but if you contact them they'll, and we can solve things ahead of time. But this big project like the Technology Center it's taking me away from that day-to-day stuff. It's really a big commitment and maybe I'm more detailed than I need to be but I wanna make sure that every time the contractor has a change that we're actually paying the right price we're not being overcharged and there's always changes that come up every day they're finding something especially now that we're in the remodeling part of a project. They open up the wall and it's not at all what people thought was gonna be in the wall. Something didn't fit together because it's an inch smaller than what we thought it was on the original plan and constantly trying to change things. So there's, I try to get things done that aren't, let's choose a solution that's not gonna extend the project deadline. Something that's relatively easily to build but yet gives us the right results. Not a band-aid solution that we're gonna have wish we did different five years from now but something that's a good solution but yet relatively easy to build so we can keep it under budget and on time. Right, and you've got a good track record of doing that. I know one of the areas in particular I've been very pleased from a timing standpoint is just as you were coming on, I think you started in 2000 as you mentioned we were looking at putting an addition on Rocky Knoll and we had a project manager there and hindsight's always 2020 but of course there was just some discussion about well what level of detail and review did we get from that project manager and how effective was that individual or that company and of course with acuity and the science addition you took that leadership role and your attention to detail I think is really bore fruit for the county. We know that we've had a close eye on things and earlier you touched on your staff just the very good staff you have in place and of course while you've been focusing more on some of these key projects, I know one of your key staff, L Nelson has definitely had to step up and provide more of that day to day interaction with staff. Talk about Al for a minute, how long has he been with the county and he's really your right arm, is he not? Yes he is, he's been here well over, I shouldn't say well over, I think it's around 30 years. So he knows the buildings inside and out because he's been here since some of them were built and other ones, he's been in and out of every little cubby hole and had to fix this three times before so let's replace it this time. But he's really, like you said, he really stepped up, he started, he did more of the capital, the minor capital improvement projects, little equipment replacements, things like that that my position used to handle where Al was strictly the day to day to make sure that his staff was doing what they should be doing. He's now actually delegated more authority to his staff which I think really works well, it gives them more initiative, it gives them more pride in their buildings, it feels that they're a real value to the county and I think they are really proud of the whole staff. It's good to hear, we are as well, just interacting with some of the cleaning staff whether it's Cheryl at the administration building or Mark Shore who spent some time there and now at a Taylor Park and just your whole team, you've definitely got a good team in place. As you think about your department and the five-year capital plan and easing off of some of these at least major buildings that have been constructed or additions, what do you anticipate for the future for your department? What do you see as some changes that may be happening or challenges ahead? Probably a big challenge is Al Nelson will probably get to be retirement age soon and finding somebody to replace him is gonna be a real challenge because he does cover two shifts maintenance guys in the morning and cleaners and some maintenance guys in the second shift. He's in on the weekend to make sure the boiler is working or whatever. He's very committed to his job, finding somebody to replace at that caliber will be tough. Also, I'd like to do more to challenge the staff to find energy conservation measures that we can do stuff that makes sense, not only reducing their maintenance like the new LED light fixtures, you don't have to replace them for 20 years, but other more substantial projects that we can save money because utilities costs have gone up probably doubled in the last five years since I've been the director. And that certainly has been a challenge for all of us. Chairman Gehring has led the county in a time when we've delivered some of the lowest property levy increases or in fact a decrease for 08 and every year when we establish targets whether it's building services department or others, if we try to maintain no more than say 2% or 3%, which I think most people would feel is reasonable when you're dealing with fuel and the utility costs that you've been dealing with and they're doubling in five years, it's an example where sometimes a one size fits all approach doesn't work. Right, we have cut staff by 10% since the previous manager left. Somebody in every job description has left the department. We've also taken on more work, as you know, the Veterans Memorial, the museum, different things, different areas. So we've been trying real hard to do more with less. So far it's working out. It sure has, you've been succeeding. Well, Jim, thank you so much for being with us today. Very nice overview. Appreciate you joining us as well. Next month, Julie Glancy, the county clerk is gonna be with us, assuming she's feeling good. She was under the weather this month and Jim to beast was kind enough to come in this month. So we hope to have Julie with us next week, next month, and she's working very hard and preparing for the April elections and all the work associated with that. But until then again, thank you, Jim, for your very nice overview and appreciate the work you're doing. Thank you. On behalf of Chairman Gehring and the Sheboygan County Board, thank you for joining us. If you have any suggestions or would like a particular department focused, please don't hesitate to contact our office at 459-3103. 459-3103. We try to focus on all 22 departments, although clearly the areas that are out there and more active, whether it's the healthcare centers or health and human services, they tend to be here a little bit more, but we're certainly open to suggestions. So thank you for joining us.