 Hello, welcome to the Donahue Group. We're delighted you could join us for a fast-paced half hour of conversation with some of Sheboygan County's most exemplary and interesting citizens. You got a guest today? Starting on my right, Ken Risto, social studies teacher for the Sheboygan area school district. Cal Potter is joining us, taking time off of his, starting to dig in the yard and so forth, former assistant superintendent for libraries at the Department of Public Education and a wide variety of other titles. Dirk Seilman is joining us today, looking very tan and fit and pretty handsome, I would have to say, in that nice jacket and so forth. He's a town chairman, he's got a fit department. Town chair, town of Mosul chair, also chairing the county's non-motorized transportation grant committee. So he's retired to an extremely busy life. Dirk is with us because our dear friend Tom Pineski's mom passed away. And Tom is at the funeral and so we send our thoughts and prayers to Tom and his family and welcome you. So I mean, I have to be the voice of conservatism? It's kind of tough, huh? I mean, I think our balance is a little bit off here today. But in any event, we're all in a rage about the election, so why not just have everybody screaming off to one side? Well, we're actually talking about some interesting election results in Sheboygan County. The county board gets nine new faces, including just a small round of applause for Peggy Fyder. She beat incumbent Glenn Marcus handily, as a matter of fact, out in the town of Sheboygan Falls, and parts of the town of Sheboygan and Sheboygan Falls. Jim Baumgart had an interesting victory. Anybody want to talk about that? Well, he ran a different campaign. His opponent moved into the district, wasn't incumbent on the county board, but had to run against Jim because he moved. But Nelson was able to go door to door. Jim had torn his Achilles tendon, had surgery and couldn't do door to door. So I guess he did phone calling. So I don't know how that went. I haven't talked to him since that time, but he tried to make contact with his constituency, and apparently it worked via whatever way he could. Well, it's tough to win if you just moved into the district, which I think in terms of Henry Nelson, it was like two or three months. And I think Henry had been a good supervisor, and it was a good race, but it's tough to beat an incumbent when you have just moved into the district, and Jim Baumgart listens to his constituents, so that wasn't a surprising result. Yeah, I think Henry Nelson's a great guy, and so is Jim Baumgart. So I think you'd have to work long and hard to defeat Jim Baumgart. You'd have to beat Joe Liebham, as a matter of fact, and have that kind of name recognition and resources and so forth, so that'll be interesting. One of my favorite races, as I mentioned, I go down to the administration building in Cullen election results for the League of Women Voters every election, and Edith Brugink ran against Adrian Van Dixorn in the southern part of the county. And Mrs. Brugink is elderly to put it mildly, and she came in two years ago when she ran against him. Adrian Van Dixorn almost won, but it was great fun listening to her or watching her watch the returns come in, and there are four different voting places in that particular district, and she was on Tuesday, election night, she was actually ahead for a while, and so she must have her pockets of support. Mr. Van Dixorn must have his pockets of support, but in any event, Peggy Fighter will join Connie Zigglebauer in the diss staff side of the county board, so, but lots of those races went uncontested, and interestingly, along with no candidates at all, just ratings. Yeah, and Val Schultz, current county board supervisor who had decided not to run, was reelected on a write-in campaign, and I didn't get those vote totals to know by how far, but we say goodbye to three wonderful guys, Bill Jens, one of my favorite people in the entire universe. Jim Gilligan, who's been on the county board forever, has Bill Seibold, and so that's many years. It's an end of an era there. It really is, it really is. So, a fella, Al Bosman, from town of Lima, town board, won his race to succeed Bill, and of course, Bill is still the chair of the town of Lima. So, city races, not quite so interesting, only one contested aldermanic race. I thought Ed Surk and Daniel had a pretty spirited race, where you said, and Surk won big, anybody surprised by that? I think he had name recognition because of his previous stint with the city, so I think that wasn't, so he had some type of visibility amongst the constituency out there. Yeah, I wonder, I think it's hard, see if you agree with me, when you're a staff person and you work for an entity, and then, and it happens from time to time, you then become an elected member of the governing body of that entity, and those are two really, really different jobs, and I think sometimes those, I think Ed's challenge is gonna be to keep that separate. He's not the director of HR, he can't be second guessing, or micromanaging the HR department, or the salary agreements committee. I don't know, I think that's kind of tough. Does anybody even know what the motivation for him to run was? I was just wasn't able to follow the race, and I don't think there was a whole lot of public community forums where the two of them could really talk a little bit about, I don't remember hearing anything on WHBL either. Any major issues, I don't think there were. I mean, I think just two candidates, both of them pretty credible, put their names up. Hill has not lived in the district real long, is my understanding, and works outside of the area, and Searick, but I think they both worked. I believe they were both out there talking to people, and that's what democracy is all about, and we wish you had more of it. I think Ed was just one of those retired guys who all of a sudden needed something to do. I don't know, you two managed to stay busy enough, so I hope to attend. I haven't run for local policy yet. Me too, me too. You could announce today, Cal. Maybe I'll run for school board after I retire. There you go. See if I can manage the transitional that you were saying, just talking about. I'll be somebody's worst nightmare. Yeah, there you go. Requit whatever revenge you wanted on the powers that be, who knows. I'm just wondering what Ed'll bring to the table, and what perspectives he'll bring, and it'll be interesting to watch. He really will. Yeah, it's my sense he's not necessarily a friend of the mayor, but who is these days, huh? So. People are running already. Well, I think, I was a little surprised at the mayor's early announcement. Dirk, what do you think? I don't think he really, I mean, it's one of these things that's happened a couple of times where somebody asks him a question, are you running? He says yes, and all of a sudden it's like, it's this major announcement, and I think in the mayor's mind, of course I'm running, I've said it before, I'll say it again, and I'll have a specific announcement somewhere down the line, and it must be a slow news day or something, because all of a sudden it's a headline in the paper. If anybody is surprised that Mayor Perez is running again, I sure don't know him. And he's already noticed he's going to do two terms, and he said he's gonna be moving on after that, so yeah, he's been really upfront about that. Anytime anybody, whether it be Dave and Carol on WKLH, or whoever it might be, he's sort of asked the question, he answers it, you're right. He's been on WKLH? Well, they did that thing at Blue Harbor. At Blue Harbor, that's right. It was the same thing. They kind of just, yeah, they just kind of asked him out of the clue of the sky when they were doing the Bratwurstay thing, you know, well, what do you think? And he said, yeah, planning on running. He just made it, did it as a side, and I remember that making all sorts of- That was a front page headline as well. Yeah, splash as well. Well, let's see, he only has to do that about 10 more times. Yeah. Well, and Bill Wangeman has thrown his hat in the ring. I was surprised that the Sheboygan Press printed his column in the Sunday paper. I mean, isn't there a general rule of thumb that when you're running for office, you don't get to be on Dirk Seilman's radio show? It has always been a tradition that if you're running opposed, that you do not participate on a radio show or you do not have regular columns in the paper. Now, with Jim Bumgard, he ran his column all the time. On the other hand, that wasn't really political stuff, but neither is Wangeman, and that's probably the differentiation that they're making if it were somebody talking about politics. But it is, to some extent, you could argue it's an unfair advantage because his name is in there, and if he writes a good column, people say, oh, that was interesting, and that's a plus for him. I'm surprised that no one really at the press has sat down and at least said this is our policy because it seems to be pretty fluid right now. Yeah, I don't- Well, from my experience, I used to put out columns and I used to do television shows such as this, and it usually was around the time of announcement or nomination, paper circulation commencing, June 1st, something of that, for a November election, so maybe- Or sometimes even the formal filing. You can say you're running all you want, but until you actually file- So I think maybe the press is just saying it's so doggone, far in advance, that we just can't, in justification, cut out one of our columnists. We need all the good copy, we can get this one. And his columns are interesting. I think he's a good city historian. I'm glad it's a fluff that's put in those papers. Yeah, it'll be interesting. We'll talk in our state segment about Shirley Abrahamson throwing her hat in the ring. I mean, the day after the Supreme Court race, which I thought was interesting, we'll get to that. But I think the rumors are still out there that Terry Van Akron will run, that I've heard Jim Gisha will run. I've heard that Mark Hanna will run. Certainly Bob Ryan has, I got a little interesting, little flyer from Bob in the mail that he must have sent to his constituents that was unusual, had some unusual text in it, but led me to think that that might be his way of staying in the public eye. I don't know, one way or the other. What he did say was, I'm sending this even though I'm unopposed, because this is Sheboygan politics and anything can happen. And I thought, well, that's odd, but it's true. What do you expect the groundswell of writings to be organized without him knowing about it? Such that at the end, we count all the writings and he's out. I don't know. And Joe DeCecco is elected, is elected older person. I don't know, but I thought that was strange. So I'm interested in your opinions as to whether a primary hurts or helps Mayor Perez come the real campaign season. And the bottom line is gonna have a primary. I think it's pretty clear that there will be at least three people running. And to some extent, it's like hiring somebody to do a poll for you. You know where you stand and you kind of have a sense of what the issues are and whoever comes in second can make the determination. Do whoever came in third, do I try to ally with that person? Do I change my issues? Do my issues seem to be working? So I don't think it hurts Mayor Perez. It depends, I think a lot on how the tenure of the campaign goes if you have five opponents and you're all beaten up, living daylights out of you. I mean, there's not much left of the pork roast. After they're done beating them up after seven months. But if they tend to divide up the vote and then when push comes to shove at the end when there are only two candidates and the other ones are not allied with the remaining challenger, then it's to somewhat the incumbent comes out of the race because the opposition is divided so much. So there are good, I think two ways of looking at it, there's positive and there's negative. I think it happened, I think the real X factor is gonna be vernacrine because of vernacrine announces, I don't know, does he have to vacate his assembly seat? No, okay, so that's the important thing is that that assembly seat was open. I think some people might think about running for mayor and would rather go to Madison. But if he's got a free ride and he can run for mayor and if he wins, fine, if he loses, he doesn't lose anything as far as his position in Madison, then that makes things very different. But how can you? I don't know how these guys separate themselves. When you go through the list of the folks who are challenging, I don't know how they separate themselves out. So I would guess that it's going to be pretty much, let's all talk about why we don't want Juan Perez mayor. And then once we find out how the dust settles, then we'll figure out from there where we go to separate themselves. But I would think that everybody who's unhappy with the current mayor is gonna divide their votes out over those two or three depending on how many candidates you got. And so I think he's gonna survive, he's gonna least survive to the general. And then you go from there. But you're right, I think you'll get a sense of where your strength and where your support is. It's not easy being a mayor these days. You've got a slowing economy. In the case of Sheboygan, you're landlocked. So your tax base really isn't growing. When you look at the demographics, the more fluent people end up moving outside the city. And so you end up having a disproportionate number of people who need more social services, who need, you end up really start going toward a black hole. And the answer I think is in any area, not just Sheboygan is that there's gotta be greater regional or county city cooperation because I sit out in the town of Mosul, but I recognize that you can't just let the city of Sheboygan keep going downhill. We're all in this together. And I think that's what the county has to work on and the city has to work on as well. Although the city I think has done really pretty well over the last three years, I mean just in terms of the tax rate and certainly there's been a whole lot of building and some commercial development and so forth. But my question is, how does Terry Van Akron run for the assembly in November and then circulate nomination papers starting December 1st for mayor? I think his constituency would feel if nothing else puzzled and maybe something a little more dramatic than that. I don't know because I think Terry Van Akron would be a formidable candidate. It's like last name is such a great name, you know? But I just don't know how all of that would play out. It depends what kind of opposition he has in line with what you're saying is he may, if he feels that he is being pushed pretty hard, have to make that statement. If I am elected or re-elected to the assembly, I will not run for mayor if whoever his opponent is makes that an issue in the campaign. Right, right. And the Republicans, I don't know who they would, I mean, Terry Seed is feeling safer and safer, I think. I mean, I'm not sure who the Republicans would put forward. When Zemple ran against him as a first, as a newcomer, he was a pretty articulate young man compared to Terry, he was young anyway. That was a reasonably competitive race. It would be interesting to see who the Republicans come up with to run against him. Certainly whoever does will have a substantial amount of money behind them, that much is clear. Wisconsin Association of Manufacturers and lots of other folks will be throwing a lot of money toward whatever Republican, because I think they think that this city, that Seed, even though it's a city more than its county, is starting to move away from the Democratic Party a little bit. I would characterize that as a very safe Democratic seat. You think so? I think Hybeham was really an anomaly. Nobody knew he was a Republican. He ran more as an older person, the person who would, and he was on TV all the time and people knew him, and he was this kind of young, vigorous guy and he out-campained his opposition, and I think that was an anomaly. And I think now Terry is in, and I think it's a group question whether he even will have opposition come forward. And I'm embarrassed, I don't remember. Who was the opposition two years ago? Did he have opposition? I don't think, no, he did not. Yeah, I don't think he did. Oh yeah, was that Jose? Oh yeah, that's right. Remember the Spanish language ad or whatever he ran that was so controversial? Yeah, oh that's right. The mimicking of a Spanish lady, I think it was. Right. Yes. Yeah, that was pretty classy. You know, one of the things that will benefit certain Democrats is that the margin of majority in the assembly is I think like three seats today. It was much greater. Right. The last election narrowed it. And if this economy continues to go down the tubes in all manner of dissatisfaction continues with the Bush administration, I think Democrats should do fairly well. So I think there are a number of Republican incumbents that need to be defended. Plus there's going to say if they're gonna have any chance of more influence in Madison, they've got to up that majority for more than three seats. So I think they are gonna pick and choose seats. And I don't know that this is the one where they dump all their money. Yeah, I think they lost four or five or six in the last election. It's gonna be a Democrat, probably gonna be a Democratic here nationally. The challenge with if the economy keeps souring, you know, some of it may in Wisconsin come against the Doyle administration. So that may play. But if you're a Republican, you're gonna be focusing on holding your seats and trying to regain those that you lost two years ago. Which were marginal seats, I think. Which were marginal as opposed to going after somebody who's a pretty entrenched incumbent. Right. I think the Republicans would have to come up with a really super candidate before they would put any money into this particular race. Well, speaking of the mayor's race, you know that a number of people are interested in running because the council, OK, raises for the mayor through 2012. It's 3% a year beginning in May of 2009 on a vote of nine to six. The ones who voted to approve the mayor's race were Boran, Berhasselt, Montemayor, Meyer, Manny, Clayunas, Hannah, Bauch, and Gisha. Voting against were Heidemann, your older person, Jean Kittleson, Eric Rindfleisch, Ryan, Vanderheal, and Wongamon. And so it's interesting to see how that'll play out. By 2012, the salary will be $78,631, which is a decent living, I would have to say. And do you think that we had this go through because we've got any number of Walder people who are thinking of running? That's possible. I mean, that's so cynical. Well, it cut both ways, though. I mean, some of the names we mentioned earlier voted no, I mean, Hannah Wongamon voted no, some voted yes. No, Hannah voted yes. Oh, Hannah voted yes, I'm sorry. And so did Gisha. Okay. And Manny was lame duck, so he can vote his conscience. I mean, $70,000 is what we pay for an assistant principal in the Schaboy-Generes School District, or maybe some would argue that's too much money. Bragging, complaining, or apologetic. Well, I'm just simply saying, when running a city, you're talking about the challenges a mayor faces and the kinds of budgets and the challenges of a city even the size of Schaboy-Generes. The flat rate. $70,000, I mean, is for a lot of families, I understand in Schaboy-Generes, a very nice, comfortable sum of money, but given the responsibilities, it's not outlandish, and 3% a year means that you're basically holding for inflation right about now, so it's not terribly out of line by any stretch of the imagination. Oh, and I'm not suggesting that it isn't anyway. I think it's reasonable. People have talked about a city administrator or city manager, you're not gonna get that person for less than $110, $120,000. That's right. At least, at least. Maybe a bit more. Yeah. And Mayor Perez, I think, has been a good manager and he takes this seriously and he's trying to change some of the culture within City Hall, and for that reason, he gets flack, and I think a prime example was the earlier vote on the salary increase when it was seven to seven, and basically what the mayor did is he withdrews himself. He said, basically, I am voting on what very well could be my own salary. I'm just gonna wait till the two missing, all the people are back, and he got flack for that, and said, well, you're not showing leadership and all this sort of thing. Oh, the press editorial was amazing. Right, I mean, I thought it was just the right thing for him to do. He said, basically, I want Council to decide what the mayor's salary is. The mayor shouldn't decide what his salary is. Can you imagine if he had voted the other way with the press editorial? The same people would have been screaming that he was in a conflict of interest. No, I thought the mayor showed real judgment there. I mean, especially when you have absent, older, romantic folks not in the chamber, you know, it's not a burning issue. It's not a pressing issue. The city is gonna keep on running. You wait for the vote. I thought the press editorial was bizarre, quite honestly. I thought the mayor's letter in response to it was awfully good. You know, basically just saying, this isn't my job. It's not my job to set my salary. It's the council's job and they need to take the responsibility and the ownership for making those decisions. And it was a pretty articulate letter. Acknowledging as his other letter has, that letter some time ago is that he does tend to attract a lot of controversy. It's a gentle way of putting it. But yeah, I thought it was, I thought it was just a strange editorial I would have to say. Because it seemed to me to be perfectly appropriate. Yeah, I think he used good judgment. We had the same thing on the legislative level. For years, the legislature would vote on their own salary. And we went, I remember, oh my God, I must have had three sessions without any increase. Because nobody had the cuts enough to raise their own salary. But yet, you knew that you're getting further and further behind and somewhere down the line, you'd need to make a jump to try to get respectable again. So what we did is we changed the way, there was a committee made up of people from the department administration as well as the leadership and the legislature would set these salaries. And then we would take it as part of the total non-union package. And that was, in that way, you were doing something that you'd fall back on and say, here, reasonable people looked at what ought to be the salary level and will vote on it after they have made a decision. And I think the mayor is seeing the same thing. Well, let somebody else look at the situation, come up with a reasonable amount and then I'll live with it. So I thought it was a very good move on his part. Interesting, other elections, just talking about primaries, the city of Plymouth election for mayor was very interesting to me. And they have a fairly contentious body there and have had for a number of years, Don Pullman, who barely survived the primary, won convincingly in the general election. So that was really nice to see. I think he's a pretty decent guy. And so you never know in primaries. Sometimes it's a real signal as to what's going on and other times it just gets people all robbed up. Quite often, if there's a primary, the people that are opposing the incumbent are the ones that are all fired up and a lot of the incumbent supporters say, oh, he or she, they're gonna make it through the primary and I'll work in the general election. And once in a while there's a surprise, but I think that might have happened in Plymouth where more of Pullman's supporters came out in the general election, whereas the primary opponents were kind of energized more because they were fighting for that second position and they got a little better turnout among their supporters. And as we're coming to an end, end of an era in the Sheboygan area school district, Board of Education, Maeve Quinn, is finishing her ninth year on the Sheboygan area school board. Dirk and I had previously served with distinction, I might add. So proclaimed distinction. If we say so ourselves. But I didn't vote on a pay raise. And Maeve is just a person of integrity and principle and served the school district well over the nine years and will be missed. And our best wishes to Maeve is she moves on to other pursuits. And it was great because Jenny Pothist, I think is how you pronounce her name, came in first. This is the person who will essentially be replacing Maeve. And she beat Larry Samet and David Gallinetti, not by much, but... Was Gallinetti the third? Yeah, I think there were about 10 votes apiece. But considering that Jenny was brand new, I thought that was an interesting way that it played out. But so I, you know, Plymouth area has some new school board members to one convincingly in some fairly contested races, Mark Ryan and Jerry Prawl. So overall, I think the landscape got mixed up at least a little bit. I wonder if there'll be more contest for older people next season? What's interesting is last year, I think seven of the eight elections were contested. And here it was, as we just said, one out of the eight. So it goes in cycles. It really does. So, well, in any event, we've dissected the election locally and some new faces and new challenges. And thank you all for joining us. Dirk, thanks for joining. I think we did a fairly balanced job. Fair and balanced, isn't that? Dirk is a very balanced person. There we go. There we go. And the rest of us are slightly un-pinched. As opposed to in bad. As opposed to in bad. As opposed to in winning last year. But thanks for joining us. And we'll see you next time.