 Hello, welcome to the Donahue Group. We're delighted that you could join us for a fun, I think, fast-paced conversation about local issues. My panelists today, Cal Potter, former state senator, Tom Paneski, UW-Shabuigan math professor, Ken Risto, simple social studies teacher. Me, I work for O'Neill Cannon Holman de Young, a very fine Milwaukee law firm. Now with offices in Shabuigan, and I am just a simple lawyer, we've got lots of fun things to talk about here today. That was the short introduction. Yes, very abbreviated. Next episode it will take 15 or 20 minutes. There's actually a fair amount of local news. I'm just going to start out with my favorite, the sidewalk cafe issue. Now, our city people are trying to restrict the use of sidewalk cafes. The Shabuigan press poll actually said that 76% of the people who voted, myself included, voted against any restrictions, leaving a fairly small percentage. Professor? 76, what is that, 24? Very good, excellent. Only 24% of the populace really interested in restricting sidewalk cafes. To me, having sidewalk cafes in Shabuigan is just another sign that we're... Shabuigan is kind of going with the flow. Every city that you go into is filled with sidewalk cafes. I mean, only last three or four months here. To me, it's a wonderful way to spend time. And so it looks like it might be dead. Any other proponents of sidewalk cafes here? No, it's a phony issue. It's a long search of a problem. Yeah, that's right. What was the genesis of the need for this? Was somebody in a wheelchair who couldn't get through because the tables were blocking too much of the sidewalk? Or somebody who came by with a baby buggy or something and couldn't get through? I guess maybe you need to say at least so many feet need to be open for pedestrian traffic. But other than that, I think... Well, I've never seen a cafe that's taken up the whole sidewalk. I think the articulated reason... There were a couple. One was alcohol consumption. And so I think there may be some compromise to rope-off areas. But anything to me that encourages business downtown in particular, I think that's typically where we're looking at it. And there are a bunch of places downtown now where you can eat outside. And they're very pleasant. If you like to eat outside, apparently this group doesn't, but I do. So I do think that the old... What we used to do on the school board, we'd come up with fabulous solutions to things. And then there would always be that pesky question in what problem is it that we're trying to solve? Who owns the sidewalk? The city. The city owns the sidewalk. The city can regulate. So they can regulate the user. But who pays for sidewalk repair? Businesses do. Businesses do. Thank you, Professor. There's kind of a little conflict there, right? Nice arrangement. Well, I just can't get a rise out of anybody on that issue. So we're going to move on. It's a silly, it's silly. I mean, there's been a serious problem with people grabbing beers and wandering off in the middle of the street and creating public havoc. Not to my knowledge. I haven't seen any arrests for that reason. In Madison, you might have a problem. Kids running around making beers. Go to a football game there alone. I've sat in those tables over at Urbain, and I can't recall any teenager coming up and saying, hey, could you just slip me a quick beer as I'm walking by? No. I just don't understand the need of all the things the city needs to confront and deal with or address. I just don't think it's this particular time we really need this kind of legislation. Oh, good. Not needed. Our city alder people are part-time, just like our legislators are supposed to be part-time. My theory is that the less they're in the buildings where they govern, the less mischief that goes on. I don't know if that's true with the state budget now. They're not in the building. They're like a true liberal. Yeah, yeah, the less of the better. This sounds like a creeping conservatism coming into your philosophy. It is. It is. It is. It's the topic, alcohol. We draw a line when it comes to laws here. Who here does not have gray hair? Thank you very much. I'm just going to move on. But in any event, on a slightly more important note... You can talk about dying here. This is a very tough crowd here today, and so crowd control is going to be difficult. Maybe if I could just rope you guys in like the city wants to rope in the sidewalk cafes, it would be fine. I think in a very important piece of business, City Council has recently agreed to an early retirement package for up to, I think it said, between 20 and 22 employees per year, allowing $1,300 per year severance package, which Jim Gisha, who I think was one of the older people primarily behind this said would typically pan out at about $35,000 a year. He expects that might save up to $1 million a year. Good idea? Bad idea? It's worked for the district. The Sheboyganary School District has had some early retirement program in place to encourage people to end their careers early. And it really does save a substantial amount of money because typically those people on top of the salary schedules are making something like $70,000 a year and you're hiring at say $32,000 or that's about a $40,000 difference. And it allows the district to really continue to fund other kinds of benefits without really coming turn to the taxpayers for more and more and more and more money. Is there anything like that at the state level in the university system? Not that I'm aware of. Part of the problem that you have. We go on and on and on for that matter. Well, there you go. And I think you can at the city. Oh, absolutely. Some good souls like Lucy Delavalli taught well in her 60s, put in 40 years of service. So there is no mandatory retirement age for us either. Yeah, whatever your soul can stand. The flip side of that though is and I know the school district has a very expensive health insurance package for retirees. If you're in the school district for a certain period of time there are certain benefits that you get. Up to Medicare time if I am not mistaken. And so those benefits, those retiree benefits I think can be pretty expensive. The article I read in the newspaper really did not speak to retirement benefits for employees who would take this early retirement package. So I'm going to presume the million-dollar savings does take into account any extended benefits that people would have. But I think it's a good idea. Well, along with that they even said I think the paper article said they have an opportunity to reorganize a department if people leave. Exactly. And that's where I wanted to kind of lead the conversation at this point. Getting back to my idea which is why not take a look at how you do business and how you structure your department and so forth. I think that's difficult to do unless you have retirements. I know Sharon Winkle had a number of retirements at the library two years ago and did a massive reorganization of the library saving I think considerable money but it really required that retirement flexibility I guess you'd say in order to do that. So I hope it happens. I think it's a great time. Were there some proposals to reorganize the organizational boxes while you were on the council? Because I ran into Carl Table and I don't know if Carl was when he was an alderman whether you were in that was that during the time you were an alder person? No, I wasn't on the council. Because Carl had all sorts of ideas too that he shared with me at the Y one day of saving money on a municipal level by really organizing boxes and consolidating offices, responsibilities and so on. He must have been, he wasn't on the council. He was the seventh district and I think that was when I was there it was Arbke and Leonard. So I don't recall when Carl came in. Any imagination that you can bring into the public sector that is really required in the private sector on a regular basis I think is a good thing. In that same vein it's my understanding that the city council is looking at new health insurance packages for city employees both of which have some pretty stunning savings two million dollars a year if city employees are it's not channeled, what is the word? I know we talked about it in the school district but are directed to just one... Preferred provider? Yeah, to one health care provider 1.5 million if they go if they're still allowed to do the Aurora split or St. Nick's. I know it's very tough whenever you change insurance and people lose their doctors they have those personal relationships and I think it's hard to say well we're going to save $500,000 a year and you've got to give up your doctor but from a city perspective from the taxpayers perspective it makes sense. State has provided incentives for low cost plans if you're doing a state level if you choose the one that's least expensive the state will pick up the cost and if you choose one a myriad of other ones you pay the difference. Steerage, that's what it's called. I think we call it a preferred provider. How does that work with union contracts? Well it's negotiated with... The provider is negotiated? The provider is negotiated, correct. Or the fee that they have to pay? Both. I think this may be an issue for the city is they're looking at these ways of saving really substantial amounts of money really large part large buckets of money and how that will interact with union negotiations if they're re-opener clauses and such but it seems to me to make sense again looking at more efficient ways of doing business The problem you get with health insurance is when I was on the school board Roger Lies the current finance director did a fabulous job of looking at different ways of through steerage and whatever to take cheaper plans and so forth save the district a bundle of money but at a certain point it's as lean and as efficient as you can get and there's really no other place to go with it but I know Susan Hart the mayor's administrative officer I always get that title wrong too has been really instrumental in looking at some of these health care savings and so I think hats off to her and the council and hopefully the union soul well just kind of just put a little interesting twist on the story here is that in April we had some new alderman elected the business alderman so to speak so they snap up the ambulance service and now they're and it's only April through October just beginning of October that's not very long reorganizing the health care packages early retirement and the new alderman are involved in it Gisha and Mark Hannah and so the business kind of aspect or approach to things and then we get you know the health the human relations director says it's time to retire the financial director says it's time to retire and of course Tom Holton had moved on last year to a better you know a better job so this activity is going on it seemed like maybe the finance people and the human relations people thought I'm near age 65 I don't want to start a whole new project and rearrangements maybe it's best to retire I mean I'm just supposing and let get a new person so they could do the work and create the savings and stuff but you got some active alderman well yeah I think you know if I call the stars are being in alignment but you've got a mayor who's pretty adamant about keeping taxes where they are you've got certain costs that are reality and so you know not speaking for the union leadership by any means but if you face that reality you really start looking at trying to save on benefits or you talk about members you know not working I mean we face in a sort of a same way in the district the school district side the same thing we have a 3.8% increase we're allowed under the caps do you want that money going into ever increasing health care benefits or do you want to actually increase salaries and those salary schedules will keep up try to keep up with inflation you know there's a lot of incentive on the part of both parties to find better ways of providing health care coverage to your folks I mean the district for example we made one change which saved everybody win-win we had members who had the option of the old health care package to show up in an emergency room 24 hours a day 365 days a year and people would bypass the clinics and go right to the emergency room because you'd get faster treatment we simply made the rule that you unless it was a life-threatening situation you needed an emergency room if there was a clinic open you had to go there if you didn't you paid the emergency room procedures and it was amazing how people's behavior changed exactly and the same with in the old days the old package really didn't have any prescription deductibles so there was no incentive to try generic drugs as opposed to the name brands and then we changed the incentive program and lo and behold people do respond to incentives after all it's like the economists tell us they do well yeah I mean it's a if you get the bill and you find out the extraordinary charge for the MRI or the CAT scan and then you get into this what has always seemed to me an unseemly advertising campaign about you know we and they never say we can do it cheaper but we're more experienced or whatever but it's again to the extent that you can build in economic power on people's parts to make decisions and save money it seems to it seems to make some sense but going back to I mean the city is going to get a new public works director Bill Bittner I think has just started seems like a nice guy we have a new city assessor Marie Ellis had retired we have well I think fairly soon have a new finance director some really excellent candidates came forward in the second round of interviews and then with Ed Cerk retiring I assume they'll be in search for an HR director I think your point it may be well taken that people are really beginning to see that the city government is changing the mayor on his own can't really do it but if the mayor has a good council that is working and you just there's there are some changes in Russia so it just kind of moves the start of the movement but here's my thought is that any executive coming in typically even the minister at your church typically is going to bring in not too much time there'll be a turnover on just that second layer because you bring in your own people and so forth so I think this is kind of a natural process as well as just what to follow up on that Bittner is that the new the gentleman coming in it he's from is it Rockford yes and they got a new mayor and he says the mayor was looking to get a new public works director and so he because he had been there for a while and it wasn't him right well it was time for him to move and now he's moving to Sheboygan and he likes Wisconsin yeah and taking a fairly substantial pay cut yes but in any event people just may not know that our department heads I think unlike really any other unit of government in this area have five-year contracts or terms of service they can only be terminated for cause with I think three quarters of a vote of the city council so really unless people retire your chances of of removing people from office like you see in a regular city kind of situation just doesn't exist here so I remember Renee Susha being very surprised because she was very upset about Sharon Winkle's attempt to get a five-year contract and the city attorney at one meeting pointed out to her that all department heads have what Sharon Winkle was trying to get you know in a more private organization through her board and Alderman Susha was stunned and I think a number of council people were I mean it's an interesting it's real job security let's put it that way and even better than the school districts administrative building principles and so on across the district have two-year contracts and I don't think the superintendent can have more than a two-year contract with perhaps it's a rolling contract you can continue to look at it but you can't extend it out more than two years formally I think for your department heads having a contract is a smart idea it's a difficult job you have bad snowstorm and the streets aren't plowed properly it's easy for a council person to say let's get rid of this bum and the emotion of the day or the library director for example somebody doesn't like a book on the shelf and the emotion of the time can sometimes take a toll that I think these contracts protect against it and let people calm down before they really make a decision well that structure was put in place you know years and years and years ago because they didn't want to have a strong mayor I mean Sheboygan's municipal constitution for lack of a better word was really set up to make for a weak mayor form of government so mayors couldn't just come in and bring everybody in now it's full time mayor that was kind of a trend in Wisconsin at the turn of the 20th century that they were looking at the big mayors and the corrupt mayors of Tammany Hall and they wanted to have a mayor there was suspicion about a strong mayor and more of a preference to hiring competent people to stay in positions no matter who happened to be mayor and who didn't and so I think there's a suspicion in Sheboygan that was a strong office when in fact as strong as people really think it is although stronger than it would be if we had a city administrator but let's move on I just wanted to comment on you mentioned right at the beginning leaf removal we're on Thursday now but apparently it was just at random before and now they're zoning off the city into five zones for five different days and more efficiently collect the leaves there's enough things are moving forward here see we got garbage pickup on the north side of Monday and leaf pickup on Monday on the south side south of the union so they don't overlap they don't bump into each other it's a miracle they know how to do it well moving right along I like being a member of this club this works out pretty well yeah exactly I wanted Ken to talk a little bit about there have been the usual headlines about Sheboygan students and test scores and so forth and just a connection between the local and national side of the political world it's been called leave no child untested but is more formally known as the George Bush calls leave no child behind Mary and Wright Adelman who coined that phrase the head of the children's defense fund as I understand is very angry that this law bears that name which was so contrary to her thoughts but in any event that's more than you want to know about the title leave no child behind is up for reauthorization at the federal level it passed overwhelmingly way back when of course was not funded as it had been promised has held the has made our children better test takers to our faults made them more accountable what do you think well it's no child left behind it's been the reason I mentioned that is because when educators get on cameras like this or they talk among the cells we use that acronym NCLB and technically speaking it's really that's not even the name of the legislation it's the reauthorization of the secondary elementary and secondary act elementary and secondary act elementary and secondary act elementary and secondary ESA or something along those lines am I talking points that I got the other day from my union was to make I never call it no child left behind call it you know ESA leave no child behind I think most people would probably agree that the law probably had good intentions and it's certainly focused in on making schools accountable it's certainly focused in on saying that we couldn't look at just the average performance of schools we need to look at every subgroup of students including kids with special needs I think certainly in the district it's really focused us on those subgroups made us more attentive to their needs and I think it also really has focused on really paying attention to reading, writing, arithmetic, the three Rs and now science is coming online that being said the law like lots of laws has all sorts of odd little I would think pernicious kinds of spin offs what's happening across the country and it's starting to happen sadly in the Sheboygan school district is some buildings have talked about in Sheboygan even getting rid of recess and a Washington elementary was playing around with doing that I don't know if they ended up doing that at all we know that social studies instruction where I'm responsible is declined in the elementary schools and now there's talk in the middle schools providing more time for focusing in those areas at the expense of music and art and Fayyad and even social studies instruction because social studies is tested on the state level but there's no penalties or sanctions if you don't do well it's the federal law and there's no social studies component to the federal law and I think the other law the challenge the law faces is that when you talk about 100% that may be great political rhetoric and it certainly is nobody wants their child left behind certainly I know I wouldn't want my child left behind but the reality is eventually in this system a school that's even high performing because of socioeconomic status like Kohler will be a school at risk because all you need is one or two kids just to have a bad day at school or just one kid who just decides to pencil in because what I think what the taxpayers understand is there's no penalty for the student to do badly on this test there's no penalty at all in almost all school districts nobody's not going to be nobody is going to be held back or punished in any way and so we do have students in the district who come in and say I don't want to be here you can't make me do well and they just kind of go through the motions and you've got some of that going on and then the other challenges of course is finally is I think you've got a real challenge in a district like Sheboygan where we have kids who literally have just come out of countries where they don't speak English and they are now at the moment this should change but at the moment they're given the same test as every other kid and yes you can make some adoptions and kind of help them with some parts but when you get to the reading test they have to do that test by themselves and so when the Sheboygan area school district has ten percent of their students are called ELL English language learners levels one and two which means they just have a very very very very simple command of English and not too surprisingly a lot of them did do well in that test so it's it's a lot that really needs to be in my view revised and rethought and reconsidered that won't happen this year presidential politics are going to get in the way of all that I think Congress will kick that can down the road and see who the next person is in the White House it seems to me that well I'm interested in your views on the role of besides just giving money the role of the federal government in local education decisions accountability it seems to me if you have a law like leave no child behind no child left behind thank you I got it you should fund it probably and not use it as some sort of bully pulpit for castigating school districts and teachers and so forth I mean put your money where your mouth is on the other wrinkle that I don't think many people understand about the law is if you're going to have the national government come in with a national testing system then you may as well be in for the whole the whole pinata you should have a national set of standards and a national set of criteria right now every state can decide their own level of competency and so Arkansas can claim that 98% of their kids can read and Wisconsin is claiming 70 well as Arkansas head of Wisconsin no the bar is just set lower under the prevailing law every state has given the opportunity to find competency any old way they want to and Wisconsin to their credit hasn't really lowered the bar or changed the bar they did a little bit in math and science after the first couple years of testing but they haven't compared to other states really lowered the bar so that every kid can jump over it well we have just a minute left you were an educator a legislator what what role of any should the federal government to have do you think well I think they should guarantee opportunities they should guarantee service levels but they should be very careful on defining what performance is when it isn't for example Wisconsin leads the nation has for many years and kids doing well on national standardized testing whether it's SAT or whatever Wisconsin's I think proven that what they have developed for education is has done a good job I don't think the federal government should be so prescriptive to force Wisconsin to start dismantling what they found is successful to teach to the test and do things which then indeed start watering down what the end result is and we have to wind it up at that point but great discussion thank you for joining us