You're listening to Perspective on WFHR 1320 AM, 97.5 FM.
I'm Melissa Kaye, bringing you news in our community.
During this interview, I'm talking with Wisconsin Rapids Mayor Matt Zacker on Wednesday, April 15th.
Thank you for joining me, Matt, to bring the community an update from the city of Wisconsin Rapids.
You're welcome.
Thanks for having me, as always, Melissa.
And congratulations on your next term as mayor.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
Thank you to everybody who voted for me and thanks to everybody who ran and congratulations to the winners.
But I appreciate everybody that ran just because it means a lot to the community.
And speaking of running and we have you do have a new council.
person.
Is that correct?
Yes.
Everybody else right now is the same except for Dean Veneman has taken, he resigned his position or didn't run again.
And Todd Furkey was voted into his position.
So Todd did spend some time on the council years ago and is back in the seat again.
So I look forward to working with him.
All right, and then there is one recount going on in the race between Jeff Penskover and Tom Rao.
Yep Jeff Penskover won by one point.
Yeah, that's crazy.
I think he's heard the joke enough that says that was my vote.
So, you know, thank you're welcome.
Yeah, that's pretty wild to be different by one.
I didn't realize though, not too long ago, there was a tie that was broken by I think a flip of a coin.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So it happens first time around.
I you know an alderman I won by I think 10 or 12 votes so it can be pretty close.
Yeah,
well and like we say every vote counts
Yeah, absolutely everybody should know that so it's it's important to get out there and vote so thanks to everybody So yeah, that should be done by the end of the week.
They'll have that recounted
They do a great job, you know, they like they know what they're doing We get compliments all the time and how how well our Elections are run by the clerk Jennifer Gossick and her team.
So thank you to them too.
Well, I know as soon as Election night results are starting to come in Wood County is one of the first websites I go to
to
get the results and and that's where I believe the city ones are reported as
well through that website So
everything goes through there.
It's it's got the auto refresh
right there on the page.
It's pretty
Fantastic do a great job.
It's pretty amazing.
So let's talk about some of the things going on in the city coming up Let's start with the roundabout at Griffith and a street
Yeah, this is kind of been a big thing on the plate a streets on the docket for 2028 and 2030 2028 and 2030 or into 32 for the second half but it is
Moving along well a big question is Griffith and a street because there are accidents there and it's a very The way the way it's built for the amount of traffic and the trucks traffic and turning on to Z or
Griffith Street, which is County Highway Z
also.
That's over there by kind of like the Walmart.
The Quick Trip is on the corner there, right?
Quick Trip is there.
Sportsmen's.
There's a little mini mall there.
So the question was, can we put a roundabout in there, which would make things flow much smoother?
It wouldn't be taking out street lights all the time, like the traffic signal lights get taken out by trucks often.
And that's really, really expensive to keep redoing those.
So it was kind of looked at as a good idea by the state.
county and the municipality would have been extra money for the county and municipality to make it happen.
But we just got word back from the state that their higher ups must have said, no, we're not going to do that because it'll delay things even though we're covering the costs.
It just put it out of the scope of what they're planning on because they're planning on outside of some minor.
changes in terms of traffic flow patterns in and out, stuff like that.
It's going to be the same, kind of pulling it up, putting it back down the same way that it was, that it is now except for, you know, brand new.
So we're excited about it being brand new.
We were hoping to kind of get Griffith in a position to really look to the future as to what we can do with it as a roundabout.
And so the county and the city were going to continue moving forward with trying to get the roundabout.
It would have been kind of a bit of a battle with the state to just see if we could do it.
And by the
state, you mean the Department
of Transportation?
The Department of Transportation and how they have things laid out.
And they have so much on their plate.
There's never anything personal.
It's not one person making decisions.
In the end, it's an organization saying this is how we have to move forward.
This is the amount of money that's there and all that stuff.
So in the end, the council then kind of the Public Works Committee
hold it out or kind of held it out and said we should talk about it as a council because if they don't want the roundabout, which in the past, they kind of said that they were for it, but now that the state brought it back, they brought it back.
And I just asked their opinions yesterday and they said, for the most part, they all said they can do without it.
They don't want us to pursue it so we can tell the county that I have to talk with Roland Hawk from the county and let him know not to spend any more time on it then.
So it's kind of a bummer for me.
I see the future being roundabouts and this was an opportunity to set us up for that.
But, you know, the council has the vote and I respect what they decide and we move forward as such.
Well, and you mentioned that trucks, when they turn on some of these intersections, they take out the traffic lights, which then the city has to replace.
There are a couple right now that are missing.
I just asked you about them here before we started.
There's missing street lights on the East River Expressway and Third Street right there by the hospital.
And then another one on Lincoln Street and the East River Expressway again on the same
road.
And they get taken out there a little bit like magnets, you know, if a car is going to swerve or, you know, an accident happens, somehow they always end up taking out the light, not always, but a lot of times, or trucks, trucks, because they take an angle that doesn't allow them to get under it, they'll actually, you know, pull it from the top out and, and destroy it that way.
And they're, you know, better than a hundred, a hundred and some thousand dollars to replace and get positioned back in there.
So it's an expensive thing.
And that's why part of the reason we're hoping to get away
from that to allow truck traffic to flow through there.
But everybody's got different opinions.
They can say, well, trucks aren't going to navigate around about it as easily, even though they do it all over the state and country at this point, because they are the future of our roads.
We're moving away from stop signs and street lights.
So this was an opportunity.
Again, I'm not going to be a dead horse.
It is what it is at this point.
But yeah, I think we're going to see them more and more.
I told them right at the end, I said, my goal was to try to get one at every light down A Street.
to get rid of the lights and put in roundabouts, but it's not to be so.
Not to be,
perhaps
yet.
Yeah,
you know, and again, my job is to just, once they make the decision, I make it happen.
I'm not gonna say anything bad about it in the end.
That's the way the government is.
We have a representative, they make the votes and decide, and then my job is to make that happen.
So I appreciate them listening to me when they let me share my opinions.
Yeah.
Well, I've been wondering about those streetlights driving through town, and I'm sure many other people have as well,
or
maybe they know, and I'm just not in the know.
Well, if they're gone, it's because somebody took it out.
And then it takes a while to order them and get them back in.
That supply chain still is a little tricky since COVID.
Where does the money come from to replace those?
It's from the city because it's city lights.
WWLC does the work because they know the electrical side of everything.
know how to put up the the polls.
So so we kind of contract them in a way like this department pays that department to make that happen.
But the money would come from streets department engineering is the ones you kind of help make that happen.
But there's a there's a contingency for stuff like that because we know what's going to happen so many times a year.
Any
idea how many times a
year I don't know a fan but it's a couple of times a year if not more you know.
And again to have that money there makes more sense than scrambling for it afterwards.
And we are a good community about being smart about having the contingencies there, the savings account in the different areas that we needed to so that we're not scrambling and gotten ourselves short.
And that's part of running a good budget.
Tim Disorsie does a great job at running a great plan.
Got a plan for those
unexpected things.
You just don't know we're going to
happen.
Yep, absolutely.
Well, one thing that's going to be changing this year going into May is there is not going to be a no-mo May.
Is that correct?
That is correct.
The council voted to do away with
that their thoughts were that.
And I tend to agree that it was kind of abused.
It started out to be something that allowed
pollinators to kind of have more access to, you know, pollinate better.
But in the end, I think we kind of found out that grass in the end isn't the best source of pollination.
It's more like the flowers and the wildflowers.
And we totally agree if people can plant more gardens, whether it's just a circle of wildflowers that they mow around or whatever, I think that that's great.
And it looks nicer and all that.
But what was happening is we just had too many, too many people that took advantage of it through
and didn't cut through June, then it would go into June.
And then we'd have to start chasing them down to get it cut.
And by that time, you got three, four foot grass, and it's more like a field at that point.
So I think to be able to do away with that and stay on top of it from the get go will help us out, keep our community looking good.
And I think it's important to do that, even though I know we have the...
the controversy of people on both sides.
If it's my yard, I can do what I want.
If it's my house, I can do what I want.
But at the same time, we are a community.
We're a municipal organization.
We want people to move here.
We want businesses to grow here.
And that's not going to happen if the city looks horrible.
So we do have to balance it out with some kind of control mechanisms.
So for the people who have saved those signs for every year going forward or up?
In the past year, I actually just moved one in a garage today.
Oh, yeah.
You never know.
They could be worse.
Something on eBay, somewhere down the road.
I don't know.
Yeah, I've seen some old signs out there recently.
So it's always interesting.
Like it's interesting too.
I run a campaign.
I put up a first time around for mayor.
I put up 100 signs.
I found 70, you know, I got 75 back.
25 went missing this year.
I lost 15 more.
I never, you don't know if the wind took them away or if somebody's got them hanging somewhere else.
Well, we did
have some crazy
weather.
There was some crazy weather right after we put them up.
We got too few to snow.
So that destroyed a lot of
them.
Well, let's take a brief pause here.
We'll come back and talk about that crazy.
whether that we received.
We'll pause for a short moment to hear from our sponsors.
I'm Alyssa Kay talking with Mayor Matt Sacker and you're listening to Perspective on 1320 a.m.
975 FM WFHR.
Welcome, you're listening to Perspective on WFHR 1320 AM, 97.5 FM.
I'm Melissa Kay bringing you news in our community.
I'm speaking with Wisconsin Rapids Mayor Matt Sacker and where we left off we just touched on the incredible storms that we've gotten here this spring that have caused some issues in the city.
Let's talk about that a little bit.
Yeah, I can't.
I can't speak highly enough of all the people that work at the city, the city streets department and park and rec that helped out and then and with the two feet of snow we got out of the blue granted it only was here for a couple of days but you know keeping that at bay for there's almost 48 hours straight that they had people in the machines pushing that off the roads in order to stay on top of it so you know my
my thanks go go out to them for all the work that they did and that was it was nicer to be able to get some new people on the road too and get some training done that way just because not always uh you know you can't keep people running you know after they're tired so it was good to be able to
see that, see them work together as a team and really take pride in that.
And then, of course, the ice storm that came soon thereafter, that was, you know, streets working together, but the bulk of that fell on WWLC, the electric company.
Well, because
there was a lot of, there were trees that came down
a couple of streets that were closed
over on the other side of 8th from Walmart.
I was
trying to get there that day and there was a street closed down with trees down and power lines down.
Yeah.
And I appreciate everybody's patience.
I know a lot of people wanted, you know, their electricity back on sooner, but
We have a limited amount of people.
We actually had some folks come in from Marshfield to help us out as we help them out in different communities.
So it's nice that we can do that.
But again, you can't, you know, once it gets dark, you're not going to put these guys in danger.
So you have to say, you know, go home, get some sleep, get some food, you know, be back in the morning when it's light out again.
We've had accidents in the past and we don't want that to happen.
So I appreciate everybody's patience in figuring out how to make it through and letting them go.
through methodically stay safe and get everybody's electricity back on that was a that was a big endeavor and I definitely appreciate everything that they do
and what a great
Teaching moment for our next young younger generations of this is how people used to
have to live like we
didn't have you know
I go back to covid days and my kids, you know, so they're all young at the time and they're like what happens if we run out of toilet paper?
Well, there's options.
There are options just like they used to do so
Well, let's move on to something fun that's coming up here soon with Summer fast approaching not that it feels like it at the moment
moment.
This summer, we have a newly titled Fourth of July celebration called Rapids Riverside Freedom Fest.
How is that coming along?
Yeah, everything's going great.
We get great responses from the community.
People are excited.
Everybody's always loved it.
I think, again, going back to COVID after that, a lot of things stopped and they just weren't picked up again.
And I think we're going through that transition right now still in society of what it takes for a community to have volunteers that not only lead and organize, but
and people that are willing to help do the work and be a part of that.
And right now, we're just trying to light the spark again to get those people in place to take it on.
And if it's the city that helps with that leadership, Emily Kent is doing a great job leading the way with the community, friends of music.
They're doing a great job.
They're the ones that are bringing in the bands.
We'll have bands playing at three and six o'clock.
We'll have speaker systems set up so we can make sure that music
is heard as far away as possible, that the national anthem is heard when they sing the national anthem.
We have a kid's zone, so they'll be doing that.
We've got a dunk tank set up, so I think they want to get me in there for an hour or two, and hopefully it'll be a nice warm day.
Nice warm day, yes.
Not too warm, but... So that'll be fun.
We've got Centrelia.
We're doing some...
bingo there and yoga in the park.
Gonna have a lot of vendors there.
The farmers market will be there for a while.
We'll have a craft center on one of the streets.
So we want, yeah, we just want people to try to make it a whole day activity, bring the family down.
And the hope is from here we can expand it out over the next couple of years and get more people involved in that sense.
But we don't want to do it too fast either.
I mean, it's a good thing to get people down there, but at the same time, we want them to have stuff to do.
So I think that's great.
What we are doing is we're running into an issue.
We had to fill an $850,000 budget shortfall this year, and we did that by the departments working hard to cut back on their budgets.
And then, unfortunately, we weren't able to fill three positions, which are being worked on now this year as the budget, the numbers come in.
We had to work through a COLA and get everybody a bonus this year, but there's just a lot of questions that are out there.
And that's a
cost of living?
Cost of living.
adjustment but a bonus would be more of a one-time thing so it's different because the cost of living follows you the next year and you're building on it so it's tough because government is employees, employees do the services and employees are always going to be the most expensive part of
any organization, especially a government where they try to still do benefit packages, healthcare, stuff like that.
So again, that is good.
But at the same time, when the budget is tight, we budgeted for the last many, many years, $25,000 for the 4th of July fireworks and some of the music that was going on or something in there.
But for that same price right now,
for the same show we had last year would be, instead of 25, it would be $30,500.
So instead of just trying to pull that out of taxes or the general fund, we're trying to ask people to help fundraise for this.
So we are putting out there.
Again, Emily Kent did a good job building up.
donation or sponsorship packages so that we can get it out to the businesses and local residents.
You can donate as much as you want or as little as you want.
And then we can, you know, sponsorship.
We put up their names and logos and different packages that we have.
So we want everybody to see that.
You can get it on our website.
We're sending out emails to as many people as we can get their emails to and just getting it out to the public.
We're putting out, um, you know, YouTube, or, um, sorry, Facebook blasts and our, and our website and all that.
So we're doing everything we can through Joe's help here also to just try to get it out to the people and communicate effectively.
That's been part of my platform for two years is how do we get a conversation going with the people?
And we've done a good job doing that with the new website and just being attentive.
So it's working well as far as I can see and this is part of that.
So let us know and please help contribute to the cause and let's build this up and have a great time this 4th of July.
And as you
said you're hoping to make it a full day of entertainment
and
so the farmers market kicks off at
Like what, eight, nine?
Yep, it'll be there early.
A little bit different site because they have to stay out of the blast zone, but they'll be on Grand Avenue, part of Grand Avenue.
So everybody will see it and we're kind of spreading out the vendors more so there's food in different areas and drinks in different areas so that there's more room to walk around.
Are you inviting more food trucks?
Yeah, we are putting that out.
Vendor, you know, they got to get permits to do it, so we're encouraging them to reach out to the city and get those going so we can get as many as possible.
Again, the more people the more food they're gonna buy and drinks we want to you know families to be down there with their kids and having a good time with that You know and hopefully we can encompass everybody, you know the meat hotels doing a great job You know servicing the community the rafters are down there, too So the more we can do that with the businesses the bars and restaurants are you know, they're all part of that business area So I look forward to helping that area to continue to develop a lot of big things are going to be happening with Jackson Street
from the bridge all the way up to Grand Avenue where the the meat hotel is and that's going to change the dynamics of the courthouse parking lot and how Second Street is going to be different.
First Avenue and Market Street most likely are going to be or they are going to be vacated.
So it's gonna change everything down there and that'll all be part of the 4th of July area.
Granted everyone's gonna say, where are we parking?
We'll figure out parking, come down, have fun.
You know, if we have to walk a few blocks to get there, you know, there's plenty of places to park.
Well, in that area between the courthouse and the river there,
that
parking lot, parking area and the streets, you're working together with the county
to... Yeah.
That's what I was kind of alluding to, if market street is the street between the courthouse and the parking now and that's going to be vacated.
So that'll be all become a big parking lot in front of the courthouse.
So people don't have to
cross an active
road to get from the
parking to...
It's always a little scary.
I mean everybody's good about it, but it's still, you know, with the roundabout there.
So that parking lot, you know...
may take on a different shape later on, but right now that new parking lot will be there.
So then the second street will then go directly to the roundabout, and then first street will become vacated so that we can have a bigger parcel to develop there instead of that smaller, we call it the triangle rock area there.
It'll actually gain quite a bit more square footage in that area for redevelopment.
Well, and for people
who are familiar with Wisconsin Rapids history, the original
fire department station used to be on that parcel
yeah
which is just fascinating
to me yeah yeah there's a lot of stuff even that I don't know just being you know here 20 years and seeing the pictures of what used to be and how the different streets were formed it's pretty amazing and how far it's come since
then
Well, I definitely appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today, Mayor Zachar.
Yeah, I appreciate it, Melissa.
Good to see you, as always.
And thank you to listeners joining us for news in our community on Perspective 1320 AM, 97.5 FM WFHR.
