You're listening to Perspective on WFHR, 1320 AM, 97.5 FM.
I'm Melissa Kay bringing you news in our community.
During this interview, I'm talking with Wood County Board Chair Lance Plimmel on Wednesday, May 27th.
Thank you for joining me, Lance, for bringing the community an update from the County Board.
Well, good morning, Melissa.
It's always a pleasure to be here, and I appreciate the time that you spend with us.
Well, and the election just happened, and so there's been just a little bit of reorganizing on the Wood County Board of Supervisors and Committees.
Talk us through that process.
What happens?
Absolutely.
So every two years, just like with state representatives, there's an election.
So a new board of supervisors were seated, or was seated.
We have two new members on our board this year, Paul Goldberg and Linda Casper.
And at the time of the election, or right after, we have a reorganization of the board.
And that means new committee structure, new committees, new board chairman, although I guess I'm the old new board chairman again, our vice chair.
How many years is it now, Lance?
A lot.
About 20, I believe.
Somewhere in that vicinity, I lose track as well.
We have a new vice chairman on our board, Jay Kahn, who's out of the Pittsville area, and Joe Zerflu, out of Port Edwards, who's our second vice chair, and then we reorganize all the committees.
They then have a meeting to select their chairman, and we move forward.
It's pretty seamless in the fact that we have a committee meeting typically in the first...
week of the month the county board meeting the organizational meeting occurs in the third and then we're right into the new committee meeting so there's not you know really a lame duck time in there or a period of time where we don't operate as normal but everybody seated we're up and running
I am not somebody who personally likes to just change for the sake of change.
So most of those committees are very similar in appearance to what they would have been prior to the election.
Well, now it's going to be the next question I wanted to ask you is how does that work?
Do people express a desire to be on a specific committee or are they nominated?
How does that?
No, that's a really good question.
We sent out a questionnaire asking where you would prefer to serve or where you might have some expertise.
Generally speaking, and I've done this quite a few times, but
Most of them prefer to stay right where they were.
So if the committee functions really well, and who you anticipate might be the chairman thinks that, or the previous chairman thinks that that committee functions at a high level, I'm not somebody that just likes to change committees.
Now, obviously, when you have new board members, people have to be slotted into certain places.
It is somewhat akin to a spider web.
If you touch one end, the other end bounces all over the place.
It isn't like you pull on one end of a string.
So it takes a little bit of a rearrangement of personnel.
But at the end of the day, it is that you express an interest to desire.
Most of them, it takes two to four years to really learn what a committee does in detail.
So most of the people don't really want to move too much once they get started over from scratch.
Occasionally somebody.
Finds a challenge.
They'd like to go in a different direction and and then those skills tend to get noticed over this next two years, you know, where do they lend, you know positivity to the Conversation and where do we go with
them?
Mm-hmm.
Well and we
We're just talking about so everybody seated you're all in committees.
You're starting the budget process
Yeah, my least favorite time of the year probably your least least favorite time if you're listening out there in radio land as we all do it You know, it seems as though we finished one budget we get all set.
We're in the kind of
audit period from that and reconciliation.
And there's some amendments that handle dollars as they still arrive or as they get spent.
But as soon as that happens, we start the new process.
So it typically starts with a CIP or where we're going to make those investments into the county, the community.
So the CIP.
What's that stand for?
So it's really interesting that it starts that way.
We end up with
about 11, 12 million dollars of requests and we got about four and a half million dollars we can spend.
That math doesn't math, even for me.
No, that has to get peered way, way down.
And we'll work on that.
And some of that is there's dollars that we...
budget last year for expense on that side that don't actually occur and so there's monies that in effect get returned to the general fund that get used carried over into the next year.
Yeah as we move forward and you know and we have some big projects coming up this year we know that we have an ongoing water issue up at Norwood or the Northwood County Annex up in Marshfield that's a roughly because of asbestos
Removal and some of the mitigation some of those other problems that occur that's going to be somewhere between the three and four million dollar project We got a big project.
We're doing down at Edgewater Yes to you know enhance and facilitate that facility moving forward into the next 50 years That's going to be a two and a half million dollar project and then there's those roads and other things
that just absolutely fall apart, you know, and you have to work on.
So, you know, we continually work in that direction.
We will get it done.
It's never an easy process.
Like I said, it's my least favorite part.
Nobody likes dealing with numbers.
But we have an exceptional finance director and our different department heads work with us hand in glove to eventually
get this done.
So that's where we're at.
I hate being there, but that's the process every year.
Well, in that $11 million, $12 million in requests, that's really just everybody going, well, this is our wish list.
It is a wish list.
I mean, it
is the things they need as well, but it's also, these are the nice to haves.
These are the need to haves.
Yeah.
And, you know, and that's exactly the way we frame it, you know, kind of critical, urgent.
Would like to have would be nice.
Yeah, there's a few categories there Urgent generally needs to get taken care of and you say well, what would be urgent?
Well, for instance the state could come in Or let's just say state regulation They don't come in and you have to have certain water temperatures for instance at our nursing home facilities And you have a water heater you always have redundancy but one goes down and you need to replace another one because you can't have a single day
that you don't have that capability.
So those kind of things become urgent,
obviously.
Some of the issues up at Norwood, we had to water.
I mean, that was urgent.
We had to immediately treat at a fairly high cost until we can do that entire pipe replacement.
And when you get facilities that are, you know,
50 70 years old that happens and people say well, why didn't you do it ahead of time?
Well, I'm just guessing out there general public most of you probably did not replace your car battery When it was four years old just because it was kind of do you wait till it dies, right?
Well, you know over 50 years.
That's kind of what happens.
It still works, you know, so we're gonna we're gonna get by until Till we have a problem, right?
Yeah, so that's you know, that's the unfun part.
That's where we have a lot of graphs a lot of tables
of pages and numbers and at the end of the day from my perspective we try to make those black not red and come up with the best solution we can because we know the property tax levy impacts people negatively and the lower we can get that with providing the services that are either a required or expected is the other part of that puzzle.
Yeah and you mentioned Edgewater Haven how is that project going?
Well, right now, they're in the design and planning stage.
It's been moving forward, seen some artist renderings.
They're still fine-tuning that.
You know, when we kind of look at the future and where we're going to go, there's a certain amount of dollars that you would expect to spend.
And when the architects come back and, you know...
It's typically higher than that number.
And then you start saying, well, what can we change that might get us back down to where we anticipated and still facilitate having the same kind of improvements we wanted?
And it sounds ridiculous.
It might be things is minors.
Certain life fixtures can cost several thousand dollars more than others that do generally the same thing.
Lights might be a bad idea because then you're gonna say well then you're gonna use you know fluorescence that LED or something That's not the case.
It's just you know, do you use wall sconces or do you use ceiling lights?
Do you use a certain type of flooring or a different type?
But those changes can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a difference.
That's a big project.
Yeah, that project's moving along right now It has not been approved in its entirety by the board the planning process was approved, but I think
I hate to speak for the whole board because I get one vote just like they do.
But at the end of the day, the projections are a significant savings over doing what we're doing right now, even after we expend the money to do the improvements.
Right.
But for those who aren't aware or haven't been catching these updates with Edgewater, you're changing one wing into more of an assisted living versus a nursing home.
And that was a really long answer to what is CIP, Capital Improvement Project.
So
I apologize for
that.
That's OK.
We got there.
So once that is done and completed, when is the projected completion of that?
That's a good question because it hasn't started yet.
Right.
I'm guessing it's going to be much like our jail, too.
We had tremendous supply.
problems, delays when we started that.
Part of that was the COVID issues, obviously coming out of that.
Right now, what's going on in the world, different places, there's still supplies that aren't getting where they need to get.
But I think once we get started on that, start to finish, you're probably looking at a year and a half to occupancy.
So if everything went as planned, I think we would probably break ground.
Probably early next year would be a projection.
I I think I'd be way too optimistic to say late this year Yeah, but again, you know, it just depends what happens day to day.
You know, I walk into the office typically on Monday morning You kind of have a list of things you're gonna go over and then over the weekend trouble occurred And
somebody's walking into your office
going Lance I need you to deal with this.
Yeah, I mean it can be human resources
you know, related issues.
It can be, you know, a road problem occurred somewhere, you know, a disaster, you know, a flood type thing where it takes out, you know, a county road.
And then all of a sudden that ends up at the top of your list that day and you don't get to the other things.
And that's where critical comes in.
You know, we talked
about,
you know, if we have a major county highway that washes out in a storm or something else happens, that all of a sudden goes from we were going to do it in three years to that's urgent.
And
Yet unlike the federal government we can only spend what we have we can't print money So then what do we delay or what do we put off and in oftentimes that?
You have to engage a lot of department heads and say, hey, can we get by?
Can you go another year?
How do we make this happen?
Because we don't print money.
We can't have deficits spent.
Juggling.
Yeah, we're juggling all the time.
Well, let's take a brief pause here to hear from our sponsors.
I'm Alyssa Kay talking with Wood County Board Chair Lance Plymouth, and you're listening to Perspective on 1320 AM, 975 FM WFHR.
Welcome.
You're listening to Perspective on WFHR 1320 AM, 97.5 FM.
I'm Melissa Kaye bringing you news in our community.
I'm speaking with Wood County Board Chair Lance Plymouth and where we left off we were talking about some of the improvements that will be happening at Edgewater and budgetary things.
Now let's move on to a more fun topic that people will, you know, are enjoying the very warm weather today.
But all of our parks are open.
Great time of year.
And one of my favorite things that we do in the county is the parks.
And part of the reason for that is the parks can be enjoyed by everybody.
Many of the programs that we run within the county are required to run for a certain subset of people.
And everybody can get out and enjoy the parks.
And we have
A jewel of a park system and right now all of our campgrounds are open most of those were open around the first of May Sarah Park our new acquisition last year, which many remembers the consolidated employees recreation area Isn't that was opened last Friday for camping.
I happened to drive through the park and Probably Saturday It looked like it was going very well, you know, we're thrilled to have that facility As well as the others and then I guess they're the real
special part of this is for 20 plus years, we planned some additions and some improvements up at Powers
Bluff.
And you saw the world-class bike trails we put in last year.
And now the new shelter building is almost complete.
We're waiting for the front doors.
The rest of the building is generally done, but the front doors, there's a supply issue.
They were back ordered.
You kind of need doors.
And the special size, it's not like we go to the hardware store and just buy some.
Hopefully that will get done.
But that is an exceptional facility.
It'll allow us to run year-round events up there.
It's something that people often ask, why do you plan?
Well, you plan so when funds become available, whether that be through state grants or other opportunities, that you're ready to go.
And about 20 years ago, we put these plans together, come into fruition.
I was up there, like I said, about a week or two ago as well.
Just about complete and we are scheduled to host the Wisconsin County Forest Association annual summer tour and
we are supposed to be using that facility.
So Chad or Fritz, if you guys are listening, our park and forestry directors, I'm hoping that's happening.
Otherwise you're going to be digging up some parks.
We're looking for another.
Exactly.
We're looking for either another location.
Maybe put up a tarp.
Tarp.
I mentioned that.
You know, one of those screens that hang up.
Sure.
Or hopefully the doors get in.
But again, you know, another feather in the cap of the parks department.
And our parks are used, even the campgrounds.
Almost 50% of the occupancy at those parks are local residents, you know, of the county.
And so we highly encourage you to use those facilities to take advantage of it.
Make your reservation, get online, get that taken care of.
And the
online reservation system, that's fairly recent.
Yeah, a couple of years ago, you know, totally to that.
way of doing things.
There are, I'm sure that if you have no access to online reservations that there is some work around.
However, I would recommend that if, you know, especially those peak weekends, you know, for instance, there's no way right now, I'm guessing that you would get a campsite for the weekend of the waterski tournament.
That's probably not going to happen.
Fourth of July, obviously, I think this year, the fourth falls on a Saturday, doesn't it?
I believe so.
You know, that weekend's probably going to be a tough one.
but, you know, get the reservation in.
And then the one thing we encourage, you know, the campgrounds are great all the time.
And obviously people work around, you know, their weekends are free, but there's typically always room during the week.
And if you want a little bit quieter environment, little, you know, few less people running around.
Sometimes when I drive through the park, it's Sunday night or Monday, the various ones just to see how it went over the weekends.
I think that's the best time.
So I would encourage you to, you know, maybe you do the weekend and you stay for a couple of extra days and see what nature.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You get to enjoy some of the natural sounds.
And I mean, kids laughing and playing and running around is fun to hear too.
But
absolutely.
So
is nature.
So we're getting there.
And like I said, that's one thing, you know, we ask you to enjoy, you know, whether you be at NEPCO or South Park or North Park or Dexter, you're going to see improvements with bathrooms.
You're going to see a signage going up at Sarah Park out on the highway to further identify that.
Oh,
good.
So we.
won't blow past it anymore
when we're driving.
Yeah, we had that conversation.
I did that again the other day.
So you've seen some really beautiful stonework and signs that were done at the entrances of our various parks.
And that was actually done with the materials.
If you're old enough, if you're as old as me, you remember the old beach houses we used to have at the beach and we had lifeguards out there and everything.
We actually
When we dismantled those, we saved that rock.
Oh, wow.
And we used those to build those signs.
And they're really great.
So the new one right now, the foundation was in when I went by Sarah Park, when I was in Sarah Park last week.
I'm assuming they'll start working on.
the stonework itself this week.
But yeah, signage.
And that's tough up there.
If you're going to Sarah Park, it could be real cognizant of where you are, because it's really easy to blow by the entrance right now.
We are working on the signage.
You and I have both done that.
Yeah, we've both done it.
And actually, the Parks Director told me he almost did it the other day.
So we're working on it.
But we're not alone.
No, we're not alone.
Well, let's move on to another topic here that was kind of a hot issue during the election.
And our county clerk, Trent Minor, had to, he put out a response in the minutes from the Wood County Board of Supervisors meeting minutes.
And there was a social media post that was up on a Facebook page, and it looked like it came from the county.
And Trent addressed that.
Yeah, kind of disconcerting.
So,
First of all, this is happening everywhere.
So I want you to be extremely cognizant of where you get your information and to verify it and make sure it's right.
But in this case, they made it look like the county put something out.
County politics is nonpartisan.
You don't run on either side of the aisle, nor do our elected officials participate in that way within an office.
So if you saw something that appeared to have one of our...
department has or one of our constitutional officers endorsing a candidate or speaking on one side or the other of a political aisle, it didn't come from us.
It came from an outside source.
And we immediately contacted the poster of that, asked to have that taken down immediately.
If that wouldn't have occurred, then we probably would have pursued legal action immediately or legal...
conclusion to that particular issue.
But more importantly, Melissa, you and I were talking, is really check stuff.
I bet if I pulled my phone out of my pocket right now, I probably have 10 to 20 spam calls.
My email inbox is loaded with click here.
You know to pick up the $50,000 That we've approved for you and the person alone that has now been you know approved of which you never applied for in fact I got so tired of these that I used to just hang up now I actually wait till they get a live person and I say 50 I was asking for 500 and can I have that money tomorrow?
Here's my you know, I I'm thinking they're burning my time I'm gonna burn theirs, but the point is in today's world Check the source.
Yeah, if there's something that you think came from the county that seems odd
call us and notify us.
Somebody said to me, didn't you notice that on Facebook?
I don't have a Facebook account.
I have never had a Facebook account.
I will never have a Facebook account just so I don't get in those arguments.
But check, double check, recheck.
And so we have an outstanding county clerk.
Trent Minor is the model of county clerks around the state.
Others call him, they seek advice, and he got on this right away to take care of
it.
And then addressed it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Immediately.
You have to be clear that you're not going to use, in effect, our name or that forum to make it look as though we're doing something that we should not be doing.
Right.
Because sometimes it's about those optics.
It's the appearance of.
It's all optics.
We touched on that briefly before.
Right now, you'll see.
let's say a Facebook post come out or something on YouTube and it comes out at noon and you assume it's somebody doing this from work.
The thing is you can schedule these to go out anytime.
So if you were at home and you wanted to post something, you can put all that together and have a post the next day at noon.
It appears as though an employee, whether it be from a company or county employment is doing that during work hours, that's not necessarily the case.
But if you think there's something happening that shouldn't, let us know.
We will look into it and we'll make sure that it doesn't.
And reach out to the source directly.
Maybe don't engage with that Facebook post, but call Wood County.
That's exactly the way I would handle it.
Get ahold of us.
We have the tools to deal with that.
We also have a law enforcement that can deal with it if it's something that is illegal.
So we would more than gladly take a look at
that.
Lance, I don't think I'd click on that $50,000 offer
in your email inbox.
I'm sure everyone he gets tired of these.
Yeah.
So, you know, I used to just hang up and I'm thinking, I'm going to waste your time.
I'll call you back.
And I might not even say anything.
I might just walk away from the phone for an hour.
Let the line be tied
up.
Well, and if it's a if it's a computer, I mean, sometimes that you can almost tell
you can with the delays.
You know, this is one thing that I have asked some of our legislators both at the state and federal level to look into because it's gotten to the point of.
Without exaggeration, I probably get 50 unwanted spam calls a day and obviously they keep changing the number.
I keep blocking the number.
I'm on the no-call list.
They can even make it look like it's coming from a
local number.
Yeah, you know, I'm on the no-call list and I think they have to put in place legislation whereby if they can ascertain where these come from or who's doing it, that the fines are really big.
You know, I'm talking
maybe a hundred thousand dollars you know after the couple of infractions and and where it quickly moves up to the millions of dollars because this is it's just tying up phone lines is tying up time and it's a problem.
It is.
Well I always appreciate you coming in Lance.
There's always so much more we could talk about but we run out of time again.
I'm Melissa Kay speaking with Wood County Board Chair Lance Plymouth.
Thank you for taking the time today Lance.
Thanks Melissa.
Always enjoyable.
And thank you to listeners joining us for news in our community on Perspective 1320 AM, 975 FM WFHR.
