 Hello, welcome to this week's Legislative Update. I'm Jim Baumgart, your host and Nanette Willebusch to my left is the co-host. Thank you, Jim. To this wonderful program we have today because it's wonderful because we have Jowyn County's outstanding treasure with Laura Henning Lorenz and she's the only treasure we have. That is correct. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. We have, of course, what our founding fathers thought was important and it was is to have local people elected to offices and we have sheriffs and we have Regis Burdeed, treasurer, court, all of those individuals and they have oversight by the county because they have county government and they have oversight by the people. It keeps our government honest and it really improves the quality of service to the people because we're all accountable and so we wanna stress that and this program and the next four or five programs we have coming up which we're gonna invite local elected officials be they Republican or Democrat to explain what they're doing to make Jowyn County better. Right. I think Nanette wants to ask you a bunch of background. Yeah, thank you Laura. Thank you so much for coming in to visit us today. Thank you for inviting me. You're welcome. So why don't we start out? Tell us a little bit about yourself, how you came into this profession and maybe a little bit about how you became elected to treasurer. Okay. Well, first of all, my husband and I are lifelong residents of Sheboygan County. I graduated from Lakeland University. Go muskies. Yes, go muskies. And I have a bachelor's degree but I majored in accounting and business administration and then I minored in economics. I think that background led me to loving the world of accounting. So, and many other aspects that are in our office right now but the accounting piece. And then when Sandy Fisher, former county treasurer retired, that was when I decided to run for election in 2002. And then after winning that election then I took my oath of office in January of 2003. And have been accountable to the people ever since. Yes. Yes. Very much so. And they keep watching us, don't they? They do. Yes. That's a good thing. Anyway, so tell us what does a treasurer do? I'm thinking of those green guts in Harry Potter where they're sitting in this tall tower counting money. I'm guessing you're a little bit different from that. A little bit. Certainly we are the fiduciary for the county. You know, it's our responsibility to safeguard the people's money. And I think most people realize that we collect taxes. We collect all of the delinquent and we collect second installment taxes. But other things that people aren't maybe as aware of that we do in our office is we also do real property listing. We work with the assessors and we do assessing. We work to gather the assessment data from the assessors. Not only the local assessors, but also the state assessors. And we also oversee the lottery and gaming credits annual certification. We work with all levels of government, all the different entities, so. Town cities, villages. Town cities, villages. We work locally at the county level as well. We work with all of the different departments. We work with the county board. I report to the finance committee. And of course, then also the county administrator. And I just want to clarify, your office does not set the property tax rates. Those are the individual municipalities, correct? That is correct. Are you collected on their behalf? We collect the data from the various municipalities. We have what's called a mill rate form that's filled out every year by each of our 28 municipalities. And they provide us with that information so that we can do the calculations and then ultimately print out the tax bills. So yeah, we also work with the state legislators and also once in a while, not often, but once in a while, we even need to work with our federal government as well. The kind of thing that takes place is important because the things we do in Siobhan County can be affected by what happens in Marinette counties and other counties. And so you have an association that tries to coordinate the best policies that works for the most counties possible, don't you? Yes. Actually, I belong to three different associations. The association that I'm most active in would be the Wisconsin County Treasures Association. They hold quite a bit of education. The association works with the University of Wisconsin to keep us well informed and up to date and continually educated. On the cutting edge. Yes. And really, what a lot of the viewers may not realize, your staff and the staff of many County Treasures Office are updating their staff so that when there are changes, there are computers saying they can save money or save time for the taxpayers. You try to get the legislature or the county to make those changes so that they benefit the people the best possible. Right, right. So we often, so a good example of some of the technology that we've recently implemented. We just went live in September, so last month with a new land record enterprise system that was a two year undertaking before going live. And then we also went live last week with our web portal. So all good and exciting things, new technology that we implemented. I wanted to ask, I know there's a push at the state level and in some municipalities to make this an appointed position. For as long as I know, the Treasurer's always been elected and I'm guessing you would say you would like to keep it that way. But why, why is that important to do that? Well, yes, the County Treasurer's position in Sheboygan County and throughout the state is an elected position. It's a four year term. I think that it's important that I stay elected, that the position remain an elected position as well as several other county positions. Some of the reasons for that would be, certainly we are accountable, as Jim mentioned at the earlier in the program, we're accountable to the people. I think that's a very important mechanism in our, every day that I walk into the office, every day I know that I am serving the public. I'm not always thinking that I'm the county treasurer but I'm thinking I serve the public and that's what I am here to do today. I'm to work as hard as I possibly can and to serve the public. Could you imagine having Laura walk into an office and she's at the treasurer's office and she is at the beckoning of a county administrator who can hire or fire her. She may not be willing to raise a question because her job is on the line. Now it's still on the line if you're elected a treasurer but you have the ability and the pulpit to be able to say we shouldn't be going in this direction. We should be doing this because it doesn't benefit this industry, it benefits the people and taxpayers of Wisconsin or Sheboyton County and you can appoint people and it looks smooth but at the end our forefathers said that's not good because we're gonna have problems down the line and I think our elected officials and some of them that we have I didn't vote for but I think we have quality people running and I think they do a very good job and it should be the people's right to decide if they shouldn't be there rather than some administrator who may wanna fire them because they're not jumping to hither or two. Yes and you know to add on to that the Wisconsin Constitution leaves a wide variety of checks and balances in place for both the elected officials and appointed positions and then at the county level ultimately we all report to the county board ultimately the county board reports and is accountable to the public. So the checks and balances in place are important. They work well, they're very efficient and very effective currently in our society. Well we had a financial person in one of our townships appointed position that they didn't catch doing something wrong for a couple of years and in the kinds of checks and balances we have on the county level that's unlikely to ever possibly happen. I mean anything's possible but just our forefathers were very wise in making sure that we didn't destroy ourselves because we were thinking we're being so much smarter than they were. You answer to us not to a bureaucrat. Not to some of us. So what are some of the things that you at the duty that you'd like to stress? Well going back to the associations that we belong to several members in our office belong to the Wisconsin Real Property Listers Association. So there's folks that are very active with that association and then they also belong to the Wisconsin Land Information Association. All good associations that provide continuing education. So those are all very important things. Excuse me, is there a misconception? Is it something, here's your chance to clear up. What do you think? Is there something that people don't understand about the treasurer's job that you wish they did? In the next minute. In the next minute. Just real quickly, sometimes people think we collect the current or first installment taxes. That we always want to let people know and it is stated inside the tax bill that that one they need to pay at their town, village or city. That's the big one. And of course, we have many local banks that assist us all during the year to collect first installment and or second installment. So we encourage folks to utilize that option if it's convenient for them. We do want to thank Laura and Lorenz. Our present county treasurer who has been around for any number of years. 2002, correct? 2003, January of 2003. Is that right? And we want to thank you for coming and sharing with the viewers the duties and responsibilities of the treasurer's office and the importance of its elected position. Till next week, this has been Legislative Update.