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 Wisconsin Rapids Mayor Matt Sacker on Wednesday, August 19th.
Thank you for joining me, Matt, to bring the community an update from the city of Wisconsin Rapids.
Yeah, you're welcome.
Good to see you, Melissa.
Thanks for having
me.
Yeah, good to see you too.
We're doing this in a slightly different fashion with me being remote.
So I appreciate your flexibility and being able to do it this way.
Let's start today's program with a brief explanation of how things work in city government.
That could you give us a rundown of what it looks like for the city to enact a moratorium?
Because the possibility of one was voted on at the planning commission meeting on August 10th.
That doesn't mean the moratorium is now in place.
It needs to be drafted before anything else can happen.
Correct?
Yeah, so.
I. I think it's important to go back a little further and just go through like.
A month cycle and how things go inside the government and that helps kind of then we can throw in where the moratorium comes into that.
So the first, I guess we'd start with council.
Well, okay, we have council for 1 month and then the week after council, I always go in 4 week increments and then if there's an extra week thrown in there, it's just kind of a bye week, I guess.
But the next week would then be all of the department head meetings where I meet with the 15 department heads of all the different departments in the city.
We talk through what's coming next, what they need to get to committee in order to get to the council so that we can make decisions.
So basically it's going to be a one month process if at the council meeting we voted through and it becomes something that we enact.
If not, and they defer it, then it would go for another month, go back to council or go back to the committee and then come back to council the next month to vote on, or we can set up a special committee meeting or a special council meeting.
So, so we do that then the second, so the second week in the cycle is then the committee meeting.
So then we actually meet with the committees.
Everybody gets together, talks about their issues.
The committee then votes on things and basically the committees aren't enacting anything.
They're not passing anything.
They're passing it on to the council as a whole.
And then the third week in there is getting ready.
after the committee meetings, it's getting ready for the council meeting, which would be the fourth week.
We have that time to make sure that we have all our ducks in a row to get it to the council and make sure that it's set.
Then the fourth week would be the council meeting where everything that went through a committee, councils, commissions, boards.
everything is voted on at that time by the council to pass through as enacting that as the new rule or the direction we're going or anything like that.
And if they pull anything out of the agenda, which we did yesterday, then they talk about that separately, pass on the other minutes, and then we pull that item out and talk about it like we did yesterday with the moratorium.
We also talked about ATV, UTV, stuff like that.
So that's kind of the four-week cycle.
Again, if there's a fifth week in there, we kind of let that go through.
So what happened then is...
In order to get things on the council or committee meetings, it happens in two ways.
The department head brings it to myself and then we talk about it before the committee meeting at our department had meetings and then we put it on with our recommendations to put it on the committee meeting or council member gets a referral from a constituent.
or themselves or something that they see, they write a referral that goes into Jennifer Gossick and the clerk's office.
Then we've agreed as a committee right now or a council to bring those to the council meeting so that everybody can decide on talking about them, moving them to the committee or not.
Last night, there was two.
referrals from Alderman Palmquist that everybody agreed to move forward.
So they're going to go on to the committee meeting coming up next week.
So this week right now is going to be actually no next week will be our department had meetings again talking about getting them on the committee meeting.
So again, it's a long process and that's why they're slow to happen.
It's good in a lot of ways.
Sometimes we want to try to speed things up if it's got a timeframe on it that came up out of nowhere or something like that, then we do special committee meetings or we get special approval through myself or whoever to get it on to a committee meeting faster in order to make sure we meet a timeline for a grant or some kind of project that's happening that is, you know, speed is necessary to get it through on time.
So that's kind of what works.
With the moratorium, then it was a
referral made by Alderman Palm quest to get it on the planning commission planning and zoning.
So there are the commission now, keep in mind the commission is appointed from people in the community that are willing to give their time to be on the planning commission.
So that's not made up of council members.
It's five, six, six members of the community.
And so they come there and I'm the mayor is the planning commission chair.
So I would work on that agenda with the director of the community development department and bring the things that need to be brought to the committee on there.
And we talk about those things.
A lot of times if, you know, certain things I'm not going to be able to say exactly what's what and how long, but they require a public hearing and therefore they need to be publicly noticed.
And sometimes that's 30 days in advance.
Sometimes it's 45 days in advance.
So that basically saying we want to get this in front of the public.
So you could go back to the actual data center when.
We did what we always do for the first three months.
We had a meeting with the gentleman in December and then right away was when we talked with the, you know, brought the council together, the planning commission and council together to say, if this offer is being made on the land for a data center, we need to get in front of it.
So it took us three months to talk through the ordinance and then to.
put it on the agenda for a public hearing to get the final agreement by council to approve the ordinance that we put in place.
And some people don't think that that was a good thing, but it was a very good thing that we got that done because if we didn't move fast enough to get that done, it would have been zoned industrial and they would have never had to get a permit or any kind of, we couldn't put any regulations on it.
So we would have just got whatever they built.
So we acted in the next, based on the meeting in December, we acted January, February, March, got the ordinance passed.
And then once that was passed, then in April, that company said, well, now we need to know if we can get the conditional use permit.
So we got to get on the May 4th meeting and we needed it the entire month of April to post that, to notify everybody that was coming.
So that's when everything kind of got started, which is good.
I think in the end, we did exactly what we needed to do.
We got the conditional use permit in place.
Notice the public so that they could come and start talking about it.
Which is kind of what happened in the end.
We had a bunch of community meetings and what we heard from them was we want more time to understand this better.
So the company decided to delay the process.
We went to them and said, if we want to postpone your hearing.
You bringing it to the planning commission and they said we we agree with that because we see now we need more time to be able to develop our plan our development plan and breach out to the community.
So we did delay it.
I guess at that time I was causing calling it a pause because what we're pausing was their represent or presenting this on a planning commission meeting.
But behind the scenes, they were still working on developing their development plan so that we could actually bring to the community exactly what it is that they wanted to build in there.
Otherwise, we don't have anything to actually bring to the planning commission.
Right.
So that's kind of where, where that was at.
Right after the May 4th meeting, there was a meeting that happened with a group from PNK.
There's four of them.
And Anton was one and Eric Adams was another, Miss Raspberry was another person.
And I don't remember the name of the fourth person.
I apologize to her, but they're there.
And three things happened at that meeting.
We said, one, we needed to hire outside council to put between us and you guys because of the optics of it.
We didn't want anybody's.
trying to say that we're directly in cahoots with you, which kind of goes against planning commission or community development because you work closely with the businesses to develop their project, their plan like Mattelco and and Marianne's when they're doing their stuff and Pizza Ranch and you know everybody that comes to town we try to help them through the process as good.
Business, you know, development people, economic development.
But what we said is we're hiring von Briesen and associates to be our attorney and that according to our ordinance, we would be sending that bill to them because that's what the ordinance is set up to do.
The second thing was that we are distancing ourselves from you so there won't be any direct communication between us and you at this point or moving forward from this point.
And then the third thing is that we would require a community benefits agreement in order to move forward with the conditional use permit.
And they agreed to that also.
And then we never saw them again at that point.
I'm coming under fire because people are saying I did not bring to the community that this gentleman Eric Adams was a part of that meeting.
My, uh, still I stand by my decision at that time, which was everything that I brought to the community was being videotaped.
And I did not think it was appropriate for me as the mayor of the city of Wisconsin Rapids to bring up, um, in a negative way, which is I knew what they were going, that it was going to be seen as and, you know, kind of besmirch.
somebody's name or a company's name.
I think that my job is to be a good mayor, a good representative of the community and keep things professional.
So I decided not to knowing that they knew about Eric Adams and what was going on.
So I let that take its course.
And it was a bit of a gotcha moment.
But in the end, I stand by my decision that if they want to talk poorly about somebody that's their job, but it's not my job as a representative of our entire community.
So, in the end, that was my decision and I'm sticking with that one as well as everything else that I've tried to do to slow this process down like the community asked me to do to be more transparent, which I thought that's what I was doing with all these meetings.
I've given everybody as much information as I can, and I'm going to continue to do that, but it has to be in a productive way.
It can't be in a, in a gotcha way or we're trying to take, you know, something that happened here, something that happened there, twisted together and try to do like the gotcha moment.
I'm not here to be on trial.
I'm here to run the city and do the best job that I can.
I know that that's what I'm doing.
And I go to sleep while at night knowing that I do the best job that I can.
I'm a highly integrity driven person and I'm going to keep being that.
So this has got to play out.
So onto the moratorium.
This is where then the city to count the people in the community asked, can we have a moratorium?
And so.
Alderman Palmquist, again, helping them out with some of the procedural stuff in the government because a lot of people don't know that.
So Alderman Palmquist has been really good about saying if you want to do this, this is the procedures you take by the statutes of the state as to how to make that happen.
So we got it to the Planning Commission last week.
We had that at Rams, again, listening to the community.
We, you know, we did have a bit of overlap here at city hall.
We were planning on having that planning meeting here, but it ended up that there is voting going on here.
And that would have been a bad thing.
And we didn't catch that soon enough.
My fault.
Um, but we quick, quickly canceled it, uh, and, and got that switched to Ram.
So we had more space and put it at a later date at 5 30.
So more people could be there again, uh, at that meeting, we, you know, did not have public comment on the agenda.
but I made an executive call and said we need to let everybody talk and get their thoughts and feelings and information out on the table.
I think that that was a very good thing for us to do as a city, and I think that was very helpful.
In that meeting, there was to be no action taken, but at the end of the overall conversation about the moratorium,
One of the commissioners made a motion to direct staff to start the process of putting a moratorium on paper so that we could bring it back to the planning commission the following month or sooner if we decide on a sooner special meeting in order to do that.
And then we got a second on the motion.
I talked with the attorney on the side and said, can we do this because there isn't supposed to be a motion.
but she concluded that there was no motion to actually create anything.
It was just a motion to direct staff to start the written format of that.
So yes, to answer your question, there was no motion to create a moratorium.
There was a motion to direct staff to start the paperwork, to put down on paper what a moratorium would be and bring that back to us.
And then at that point they can vote on.
taking that information and creating a moratorium at that time.
Then after that, the council would still have to vote on that moratorium also.
So it's not a done deal at that point.
I can't tell you right off the top of my head and I'm learning not to say things if I don't have the exact legal information because then that gets twisted around on me.
So I don't have the exact timeframe as to how long that public hearing needs to be on the moratorium in order to properly notice according to the state statutes how much time that that'll take.
But
we will put that information out there as soon as we know it, for fact, as we're moving forward with it.
But in a short recap, basically you heard from the public, the moratorium is on the table, it's a possibility, it's started, the process is started, it's government, so things move slowly, like you said, sometimes for good, sometimes we wish it moved faster, but
at least
the process is started.
Right.
And to clarify, I think everybody understood this and I know that it's point of contention and I understand why it is.
But, you know, at the time, the council planning commission and council voted for a conditional use permit with the ordinance that was put in place.
That was a great ordinance that we built and that was built on probably 15 different ordinances that we took from around the country that put together the best possible ordinance at the time that we could see.
Since then, there's other things that have come to light that we're going to work on because this is the thing that's in motion.
And as people are implementing new ordinances around the country, we're taking from them.
We're listening to the people in the community.
I mean, again, I thank the community for stepping up and being a part of the conversation.
There's tons of smart people and they all have their expertise in different ways and they're all passionate.
And so I again, thank the community for being a part of this.
conversation, and I hope that, you know, a big part of me joining office was to get people more engaged in our government, because it is our government.
And again, if you don't like us, I understand that, then we vote in new people, but they still have to do the same job that we're doing now.
It doesn't change anything in terms of the statutes and ordinances.
We don't just get to make up stuff as we go along.
We don't just get to do whatever we want willy-nilly.
It's just, believe it or not, it would be very difficult to sit and say, okay,
If you want us to put this on planning commission, you have to give me $100,000 first.
Like it just doesn't work that way because things are buttoned up pretty tight in order to make sure that we can't do things like that.
And that's why I like it.
And that's why it's designed not to set up dictatorships.
And I support that 100%.
You know, like, yeah, it's good.
It's good for our community and it's good for everybody that's involved in it.
So again,
people have the option I would say get involved and talk to the alderman talk to me talk to the mayor get the actual information that's happening because a lot of stuff that's out there it's just not real and I I'm not.
be smirking anybody's name who's putting it out there, but it's just not based on reality.
There's reality and then there's this whole other narrative that's going on that is not reality.
Well, let's pause right here for a short moment to hear from our sponsors.
I'm Melissa 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 Alyssa Kay bringing you news in our community.
I'm speaking with Wisconsin Rapids mayor Matt Sacker and where we left off we were talking in depth about the moratorium process that has started and how government
functions and how these things have to go through the steps to get to be made into an ordinance or a moratorium or a law.
There's a lot of steps to this process.
And the city is, that is what's happening.
Yeah, and that goes for anything that's going on.
It has to go through its process.
It has to have all these people involved and that's how we stop the corruption and the things that we don't want in the city government.
And it's right here.
It's right in the city hall is here and there's lots of people that will show you the building meet, you know, you can meet the people that are doing the work behind the scenes and make it more of a. Understand better that we're just people doing a job that our government needs to be done, you know, and it's important that we do it and we keep it going because if we don't have it.
Chaos rains.
Yeah, what does that look like?
So right now, you know, for better or for worse, it's what we've built over the last couple hundred years and we have this in place and it's functioning well.
And I encourage people to come by and meet everybody and see what's going on behind the scenes so that you can dispel some of the false narrative that's happening.
And this is just kind of a belief of civic media as a whole, which is the company that I currently work for at this radio station is
Getting people involved in local government makes communities better.
Because voices are heard, you're communicating
with the
people running the city or the area that you live in, your community, your voice can be heard.
And you have always said, reach out to me, email, cell phone number, like you're very, very upfront with the public about, I want to hear from you.
And I
appreciate
that as my mayor.
So.
Thank you for that.
One other
thing that was talked about at the finance, let's talk a little bit about that triangle site because there was some conversation that went on.
That triangle site is between the courthouse and Jackson Street and the river there that is under development.
There was a lot of conversation about different uses for that space.
Can you kind of summarize for us what was discussed?
Yeah, there's a little there's kind of 2 trains of thought rightly.
So the 1 train of thought is we want to build things in the community that bring money to the.
You know, the municipal government so that we can provide, continue to provide police safety services, police, fire, streets, and then the miscellaneous stuff, the library.
excuse me, parks and rec, everybody needs money in order to make this stuff happen.
So on that triangle down there, there's the possibility of building like commercial.
You see them in Madison and Milwaukee.
I see them everywhere.
I go commercial on the bottom and then three, four stories of apartments or condos up top, more affordable stuff, you know, you're renting an apartment.
And again, I've heard people say it's relative right now because the cost of living has gone up so high and renting places.
So that's tricky in and of itself.
But if you build that, then you're going to
the city is going to be able to collect property tax revenue off of it.
So you're always trying to build that base so that you can continue to afford, especially as, you know, as the crap mill came down, we lost a ton of money for the city that came in every year from that building.
Things are happening with the 16 building and, you know, we're trying to work on some stuff yet, but.
If that building ends up going away, we're going to lose another big chunk of money for the federal property taxes.
In the end, you have two choices.
You're either trying to find ways to build.
that tax base back up or you have to find ways to decrease the services in the community and then you have to make tough choices, you know, as it services really are the people doing the services, you know, so if you're taking positions out, you're going to have less people there that can do provide the good services for us.
The other train of thought is to build another
like public space.
So the ideas that's been floated by a lot of people that have talked to me about it is, you know, an amphitheater that can tap into the bands, you know, the higher level bands and even the local bands that we can filter in there that can tap into the circuit that Marshfield and Plover and Stevens Point and Wausau are on, you know, and we can do that and bring people in, which then would bring people downtown.
You'd close off Jackson Street on both sides and be able to
kind of make that one big park with Veterans Park.
And then you have a lot more people coming downtown, and then the buyers have more opportunity to grow in restaurants, other businesses.
There's a lot of things that can happen down there to really be a core destination location.
But that's not going to bring in property tax revenue.
That's going to bring people in, and then your hope is to build apartments and other locations in that area that aren't the center of the location.
We want to keep building up the 4th of July, I should say, Rapids River Side Freedom Fest and, you know, that would be a part of that.
And you can have a more proper band area that people, more areas for people to sit, bring tents in down there, have more vendors.
You know, that's all part of that community spirit.
So that's kind of what we're talking about is which way does the council want to go because it's a commitment and it's going to be there for at least 50 years, if not more.
So it's a big decision and we just need to know which way to go because we don't want to get contractors on the hook and then have to let them down.
We need to kind of make a decision early on.
Or is it a mixed use thing?
Is there enough land there that can be some of?
that would also be more of a community space.
So again, we have to make that.
So the decision was to bring back some basic renderings of what could be down there as a community hub or what could be down there as a commercial residential hub.
Okay.
So again, the process of government is we need to see options.
We need to consider all the options.
It has
to
start somewhere.
It starts with a conversation.
Yeah.
And just to finalize that, nothing happens until the
council votes on it.
There's eight council members and so the only time I have any say in anything outside of managing the municipal corporation and going out and dealing, you know, working with the residents that hired me to be their goal between, between their municipal corporation and them.
is the eight alderman and they vote.
And the only time I have a vote is if it's a four to four tie.
And that usually doesn't happen, but it does happen sometimes.
I mean, I can think of a few in the future that could be horrendous if I have to break a tie on those decisions.
So hopefully that doesn't come to that because I'd rather the council do that and allow me to just continue to be.
relatively neutral and just make the process go, like get everybody educated, informed, and then we make decisions based on that.
When you put me in the middle of it, that doesn't necessarily help.
Like even when you're running for mayor, you don't want to choose the side.
You want to, you represent everybody here.
And so I try to do that to the best of my ability.
It doesn't always work because I am who I am.
And sometimes people just aren't going to like me one way or the other.
That's neither here nor there.
The point is I'm here to represent everybody, all 19,000 people, just short of 19,000 people.
And sometimes we get that a little bit confused when you do have a very passionate group of people that say, we represent everybody, but yet there's still almost 19,000 people in the community.
That's a big amount of people.
So, yeah, so that's whatever we decide downtown is going to be decided by the alderman.
Hopefully, hopefully I don't have to break any ties there.
And if the public wants to weigh in on that, the best option at this point is to reach out to their older person, correct?
Yeah, and they can reach out to me, you know, my phone number 715 315 2925.
typically I'm going to hear what they say and talk to the alderman anyways because again that's who's going to be doing the voting for those residents in their community or talk to all the alderman and just get them to know that your perspective and point.
Again, they have to represent everybody in their districts and differing opinions and all that stuff.
So it's not an easy position to be in.
Keep in mind, they only get paid a couple hundred dollars a month.
Most of the people in the committees and commissions and boards are not paid at all.
They're volunteers from the community that either have an interest in that area or are just wanting to be a part of the decision-making process of the community.
So you got to give them a lot of credit, especially when that can put you in the hot seat.
you know, unexpected.
Well, in our last minute here, let's just touch briefly on the predictive mobility project that is started to be installed on the railroad crossings in the city of Wisconsin Rapids and the
The purpose of this, which was decided, I want to say more than a year ago now, voted on and decided to go forward with this project, went through that whole process, like we've been talking about this entire show of the committees and the council and it being voted on.
But now it's being installed.
People are a little leery because they look a lot like flock cameras.
But the purpose behind the Predictive Mobility Project is safety and enabling, correct me,
from wrong, but it's to enable EMS personnel and fire responders to get to an emergency scene in the quickest route possible without being blocked by a train.
Yeah.
Keep in mind too, this was being done when we had trains blocking roads for the better part of 45 minutes to an hour sometimes.
And so that was kind of what was in place.
We tried to get the money to build, you know,
separation of, you know, put it building bridges over the train, stuff like that on going on to Grand Avenue.
We've tried to move the track many times just to get it off because it's actually crosses 10 roads from here to Port Edward.
So it would be good to get it out of there, but it does have one spur for a chemical company.
So, but in the end, we decided on this link things, which was a program that said, well, we can set up an app.
And according to the sensors that we have on the railroad tracks,
will you'll be able to be notified at any time where the train is at when it's coming in and and again it's a predictive model so that it starts to understand better when trains are coming days and times and all that kind of stuff because there is some you know that
Scheduling to the whole thing.
So they decided to go with it.
It was a grant program.
So we were paying very little money from the city and what money we were paying was coming out of the downtown TIF district or TID district, but the TIF money account in order to pay for our portion of it.
And that was there to be used for the downtown projects.
I think that it's a good thing.
My understanding is there was sensors, but I do understand now that there is the ability to see on a camera the train.
I understand why people are concerned with that.
on my understanding of it in the beginning was that it was just sensors, but they can't see the train.
So, but the whole goal is to make sure that EMS and fire can get out out from behind the train as fast as possible.
And then we all as residents have the ability to download the app.
and see the train whenever we want to where it's at and be able to go around it in a different direction.
So we're not sitting behind the train waiting.
That was the whole goal behind it.
It does come around at the same time as the flock cameras, but the flock cameras are actually set up right after I became mayor.
Again, I know I've always had concerns with the flock cameras.
understanding that the main goal from the police department is safety when it comes to finding people fleeing crimes or if an elderly person with dementia maybe disappears or if there's an amber alert that they can track down license plates faster.
But I understand all the fears that people have of everything else that they can do when you're allowing them to put cameras on your cars and track license plates and car makes and models, stuff like that.
It's an easy turn into, you know, facial recognition and all those things, even though the police will say it's a contractual thing and nobody can abuse the system.
It's human nature, right?
So, you know, there's right to be concerned and I understand that.
Um, but again, it was something that the council voted on with the best intentions in mind that nobody was saying we want to set up a mass surveillance system on our community.
It was joining a group of people that were working on protecting our communities.
If we want to change it, we need to bring it back to the table and talk to the aldermen and have them take a look at things again.
So talk to your aldermen and get them to write a referral on it.
That's how the system works.
And correct me if I'm wrong.
This is a Wisconsin company, LinkThings.
LinkThings, yep.
Is it Wisconsin?
Yeah.
Or it's at least
Midwest.
We're
at
least in this area.
And then once it's installed completely, the general public can download the apps.
and the safety of the firefighters and they'll have a heads up display in their fire station that shows where the trains are so that they can easily map where they need to go.
Yes, and we will be able to see it on our phones also as residents.
So it is a win for everybody understanding that it is technology that's at play.
Well, we've run out of time today, Matt.
I'm Melissa Kay speaking with Wisconsin Rapids Mayor Matt Zachar.
Thank you for taking the time today.
Thanks, Melissa.
Have a great day.
You too.
And thank you to listeners joining us for News in Our Community on Perspective, 1320 AM, 975 FM WFHR.
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 Wisconsin Rapids Mayor Matt Sacker on Wednesday, August 19th.
Thank you for joining me, Matt, to bring the community an update from the city of Wisconsin Rapids.
Yeah, you're welcome.
Good to see you, Melissa.
Thanks for having
me.
Yeah, good to see you too.
We're doing this in a slightly different fashion with me being remote.
So I appreciate your flexibility and being able to do it this way.
Let's start today's program with a brief explanation of how things work in city government.
That could you give us a rundown of what it looks like for the city to enact a moratorium?
Because the possibility of one was voted on at the planning commission meeting on August 10th.
That doesn't mean the moratorium is now in place.
It needs to be drafted before anything else can happen.
Correct?
Yeah, so.
I. I think it's important to go back a little further and just go through like.
A month cycle and how things go inside the government and that helps kind of then we can throw in where the moratorium comes into that.
So the first, I guess we'd start with council.
Well, okay, we have council for 1 month and then the week after council, I always go in 4 week increments and then if there's an extra week thrown in there, it's just kind of a bye week, I guess.
But the next week would then be all of the department head meetings where I meet with the 15 department heads of all the different departments in the city.
We talk through what's coming next, what they need to get to committee in order to get to the council so that we can make decisions.
So basically it's going to be a one month process if at the council meeting we voted through and it becomes something that we enact.
If not, and they defer it, then it would go for another month, go back to council or go back to the committee and then come back to council the next month to vote on, or we can set up a special committee meeting or a special council meeting.
So, so we do that then the second, so the second week in the cycle is then the committee meeting.
So then we actually meet with the committees.
Everybody gets together, talks about their issues.
The committee then votes on things and basically the committees aren't enacting anything.
They're not passing anything.
They're passing it on to the council as a whole.
And then the third week in there is getting ready.
after the committee meetings, it's getting ready for the council meeting, which would be the fourth week.
We have that time to make sure that we have all our ducks in a row to get it to the council and make sure that it's set.
Then the fourth week would be the council meeting where everything that went through a committee, councils, commissions, boards.
everything is voted on at that time by the council to pass through as enacting that as the new rule or the direction we're going or anything like that.
And if they pull anything out of the agenda, which we did yesterday, then they talk about that separately, pass on the other minutes, and then we pull that item out and talk about it like we did yesterday with the moratorium.
We also talked about ATV, UTV, stuff like that.
So that's kind of the four-week cycle.
Again, if there's a fifth week in there, we kind of let that go through.
So what happened then is...
In order to get things on the council or committee meetings, it happens in two ways.
The department head brings it to myself and then we talk about it before the committee meeting at our department had meetings and then we put it on with our recommendations to put it on the committee meeting or council member gets a referral from a constituent.
or themselves or something that they see, they write a referral that goes into Jennifer Gossick and the clerk's office.
Then we've agreed as a committee right now or a council to bring those to the council meeting so that everybody can decide on talking about them, moving them to the committee or not.
Last night, there was two.
referrals from Alderman Palmquist that everybody agreed to move forward.
So they're going to go on to the committee meeting coming up next week.
So this week right now is going to be actually no next week will be our department had meetings again talking about getting them on the committee meeting.
So again, it's a long process and that's why they're slow to happen.
It's good in a lot of ways.
Sometimes we want to try to speed things up if it's got a timeframe on it that came up out of nowhere or something like that, then we do special committee meetings or we get special approval through myself or whoever to get it on to a committee meeting faster in order to make sure we meet a timeline for a grant or some kind of project that's happening that is, you know, speed is necessary to get it through on time.
So that's kind of what works.
With the moratorium, then it was a
referral made by Alderman Palm quest to get it on the planning commission planning and zoning.
So there are the commission now, keep in mind the commission is appointed from people in the community that are willing to give their time to be on the planning commission.
So that's not made up of council members.
It's five, six, six members of the community.
And so they come there and I'm the mayor is the planning commission chair.
So I would work on that agenda with the director of the community development department and bring the things that need to be brought to the committee on there.
And we talk about those things.
A lot of times if, you know, certain things I'm not going to be able to say exactly what's what and how long, but they require a public hearing and therefore they need to be publicly noticed.
And sometimes that's 30 days in advance.
Sometimes it's 45 days in advance.
So that basically saying we want to get this in front of the public.
So you could go back to the actual data center when.
We did what we always do for the first three months.
We had a meeting with the gentleman in December and then right away was when we talked with the, you know, brought the council together, the planning commission and council together to say, if this offer is being made on the land for a data center, we need to get in front of it.
So it took us three months to talk through the ordinance and then to.
put it on the agenda for a public hearing to get the final agreement by council to approve the ordinance that we put in place.
And some people don't think that that was a good thing, but it was a very good thing that we got that done because if we didn't move fast enough to get that done, it would have been zoned industrial and they would have never had to get a permit or any kind of, we couldn't put any regulations on it.
So we would have just got whatever they built.
So we acted in the next, based on the meeting in December, we acted January, February, March, got the ordinance passed.
And then once that was passed, then in April, that company said, well, now we need to know if we can get the conditional use permit.
So we got to get on the May 4th meeting and we needed it the entire month of April to post that, to notify everybody that was coming.
So that's when everything kind of got started, which is good.
I think in the end, we did exactly what we needed to do.
We got the conditional use permit in place.
Notice the public so that they could come and start talking about it.
Which is kind of what happened in the end.
We had a bunch of community meetings and what we heard from them was we want more time to understand this better.
So the company decided to delay the process.
We went to them and said, if we want to postpone your hearing.
You bringing it to the planning commission and they said we we agree with that because we see now we need more time to be able to develop our plan our development plan and breach out to the community.
So we did delay it.
I guess at that time I was causing calling it a pause because what we're pausing was their represent or presenting this on a planning commission meeting.
But behind the scenes, they were still working on developing their development plan so that we could actually bring to the community exactly what it is that they wanted to build in there.
Otherwise, we don't have anything to actually bring to the planning commission.
Right.
So that's kind of where, where that was at.
Right after the May 4th meeting, there was a meeting that happened with a group from PNK.
There's four of them.
And Anton was one and Eric Adams was another, Miss Raspberry was another person.
And I don't remember the name of the fourth person.
I apologize to her, but they're there.
And three things happened at that meeting.
We said, one, we needed to hire outside council to put between us and you guys because of the optics of it.
We didn't want anybody's.
trying to say that we're directly in cahoots with you, which kind of goes against planning commission or community development because you work closely with the businesses to develop their project, their plan like Mattelco and and Marianne's when they're doing their stuff and Pizza Ranch and you know everybody that comes to town we try to help them through the process as good.
Business, you know, development people, economic development.
But what we said is we're hiring von Briesen and associates to be our attorney and that according to our ordinance, we would be sending that bill to them because that's what the ordinance is set up to do.
The second thing was that we are distancing ourselves from you so there won't be any direct communication between us and you at this point or moving forward from this point.
And then the third thing is that we would require a community benefits agreement in order to move forward with the conditional use permit.
And they agreed to that also.
And then we never saw them again at that point.
I'm coming under fire because people are saying I did not bring to the community that this gentleman Eric Adams was a part of that meeting.
My, uh, still I stand by my decision at that time, which was everything that I brought to the community was being videotaped.
And I did not think it was appropriate for me as the mayor of the city of Wisconsin Rapids to bring up, um, in a negative way, which is I knew what they were going, that it was going to be seen as and, you know, kind of besmirch.
somebody's name or a company's name.
I think that my job is to be a good mayor, a good representative of the community and keep things professional.
So I decided not to knowing that they knew about Eric Adams and what was going on.
So I let that take its course.
And it was a bit of a gotcha moment.
But in the end, I stand by my decision that if they want to talk poorly about somebody that's their job, but it's not my job as a representative of our entire community.
So, in the end, that was my decision and I'm sticking with that one as well as everything else that I've tried to do to slow this process down like the community asked me to do to be more transparent, which I thought that's what I was doing with all these meetings.
I've given everybody as much information as I can, and I'm going to continue to do that, but it has to be in a productive way.
It can't be in a, in a gotcha way or we're trying to take, you know, something that happened here, something that happened there, twisted together and try to do like the gotcha moment.
I'm not here to be on trial.
I'm here to run the city and do the best job that I can.
I know that that's what I'm doing.
And I go to sleep while at night knowing that I do the best job that I can.
I'm a highly integrity driven person and I'm going to keep being that.
So this has got to play out.
So onto the moratorium.
This is where then the city to count the people in the community asked, can we have a moratorium?
And so.
Alderman Palmquist, again, helping them out with some of the procedural stuff in the government because a lot of people don't know that.
So Alderman Palmquist has been really good about saying if you want to do this, this is the procedures you take by the statutes of the state as to how to make that happen.
So we got it to the Planning Commission last week.
We had that at Rams, again, listening to the community.
We, you know, we did have a bit of overlap here at city hall.
We were planning on having that planning meeting here, but it ended up that there is voting going on here.
And that would have been a bad thing.
And we didn't catch that soon enough.
My fault.
Um, but we quick, quickly canceled it, uh, and, and got that switched to Ram.
So we had more space and put it at a later date at 5 30.
So more people could be there again, uh, at that meeting, we, you know, did not have public comment on the agenda.
but I made an executive call and said we need to let everybody talk and get their thoughts and feelings and information out on the table.
I think that that was a very good thing for us to do as a city, and I think that was very helpful.
In that meeting, there was to be no action taken, but at the end of the overall conversation about the moratorium,
One of the commissioners made a motion to direct staff to start the process of putting a moratorium on paper so that we could bring it back to the planning commission the following month or sooner if we decide on a sooner special meeting in order to do that.
And then we got a second on the motion.
I talked with the attorney on the side and said, can we do this because there isn't supposed to be a motion.
but she concluded that there was no motion to actually create anything.
It was just a motion to direct staff to start the written format of that.
So yes, to answer your question, there was no motion to create a moratorium.
There was a motion to direct staff to start the paperwork, to put down on paper what a moratorium would be and bring that back to us.
And then at that point they can vote on.
taking that information and creating a moratorium at that time.
Then after that, the council would still have to vote on that moratorium also.
So it's not a done deal at that point.
I can't tell you right off the top of my head and I'm learning not to say things if I don't have the exact legal information because then that gets twisted around on me.
So I don't have the exact timeframe as to how long that public hearing needs to be on the moratorium in order to properly notice according to the state statutes how much time that that'll take.
But
we will put that information out there as soon as we know it, for fact, as we're moving forward with it.
But in a short recap, basically you heard from the public, the moratorium is on the table, it's a possibility, it's started, the process is started, it's government, so things move slowly, like you said, sometimes for good, sometimes we wish it moved faster, but
at least
the process is started.
Right.
And to clarify, I think everybody understood this and I know that it's point of contention and I understand why it is.
But, you know, at the time, the council planning commission and council voted for a conditional use permit with the ordinance that was put in place.
That was a great ordinance that we built and that was built on probably 15 different ordinances that we took from around the country that put together the best possible ordinance at the time that we could see.
Since then, there's other things that have come to light that we're going to work on because this is the thing that's in motion.
And as people are implementing new ordinances around the country, we're taking from them.
We're listening to the people in the community.
I mean, again, I thank the community for stepping up and being a part of the conversation.
There's tons of smart people and they all have their expertise in different ways and they're all passionate.
And so I again, thank the community for being a part of this.
conversation, and I hope that, you know, a big part of me joining office was to get people more engaged in our government, because it is our government.
And again, if you don't like us, I understand that, then we vote in new people, but they still have to do the same job that we're doing now.
It doesn't change anything in terms of the statutes and ordinances.
We don't just get to make up stuff as we go along.
We don't just get to do whatever we want willy-nilly.
It's just, believe it or not, it would be very difficult to sit and say, okay,
If you want us to put this on planning commission, you have to give me $100,000 first.
Like it just doesn't work that way because things are buttoned up pretty tight in order to make sure that we can't do things like that.
And that's why I like it.
And that's why it's designed not to set up dictatorships.
And I support that 100%.
You know, like, yeah, it's good.
It's good for our community and it's good for everybody that's involved in it.
So again,
people have the option I would say get involved and talk to the alderman talk to me talk to the mayor get the actual information that's happening because a lot of stuff that's out there it's just not real and I I'm not.
be smirking anybody's name who's putting it out there, but it's just not based on reality.
There's reality and then there's this whole other narrative that's going on that is not reality.
Well, let's pause right here for a short moment to hear from our sponsors.
I'm Melissa 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 Alyssa Kay bringing you news in our community.
I'm speaking with Wisconsin Rapids mayor Matt Sacker and where we left off we were talking in depth about the moratorium process that has started and how government
functions and how these things have to go through the steps to get to be made into an ordinance or a moratorium or a law.
There's a lot of steps to this process.
And the city is, that is what's happening.
Yeah, and that goes for anything that's going on.
It has to go through its process.
It has to have all these people involved and that's how we stop the corruption and the things that we don't want in the city government.
And it's right here.
It's right in the city hall is here and there's lots of people that will show you the building meet, you know, you can meet the people that are doing the work behind the scenes and make it more of a. Understand better that we're just people doing a job that our government needs to be done, you know, and it's important that we do it and we keep it going because if we don't have it.
Chaos rains.
Yeah, what does that look like?
So right now, you know, for better or for worse, it's what we've built over the last couple hundred years and we have this in place and it's functioning well.
And I encourage people to come by and meet everybody and see what's going on behind the scenes so that you can dispel some of the false narrative that's happening.
And this is just kind of a belief of civic media as a whole, which is the company that I currently work for at this radio station is
Getting people involved in local government makes communities better.
Because voices are heard, you're communicating
with the
people running the city or the area that you live in, your community, your voice can be heard.
And you have always said, reach out to me, email, cell phone number, like you're very, very upfront with the public about, I want to hear from you.
And I
appreciate
that as my mayor.
So.
Thank you for that.
One other
thing that was talked about at the finance, let's talk a little bit about that triangle site because there was some conversation that went on.
That triangle site is between the courthouse and Jackson Street and the river there that is under development.
There was a lot of conversation about different uses for that space.
Can you kind of summarize for us what was discussed?
Yeah, there's a little there's kind of 2 trains of thought rightly.
So the 1 train of thought is we want to build things in the community that bring money to the.
You know, the municipal government so that we can provide, continue to provide police safety services, police, fire, streets, and then the miscellaneous stuff, the library.
excuse me, parks and rec, everybody needs money in order to make this stuff happen.
So on that triangle down there, there's the possibility of building like commercial.
You see them in Madison and Milwaukee.
I see them everywhere.
I go commercial on the bottom and then three, four stories of apartments or condos up top, more affordable stuff, you know, you're renting an apartment.
And again, I've heard people say it's relative right now because the cost of living has gone up so high and renting places.
So that's tricky in and of itself.
But if you build that, then you're going to
the city is going to be able to collect property tax revenue off of it.
So you're always trying to build that base so that you can continue to afford, especially as, you know, as the crap mill came down, we lost a ton of money for the city that came in every year from that building.
Things are happening with the 16 building and, you know, we're trying to work on some stuff yet, but.
If that building ends up going away, we're going to lose another big chunk of money for the federal property taxes.
In the end, you have two choices.
You're either trying to find ways to build.
that tax base back up or you have to find ways to decrease the services in the community and then you have to make tough choices, you know, as it services really are the people doing the services, you know, so if you're taking positions out, you're going to have less people there that can do provide the good services for us.
The other train of thought is to build another
like public space.
So the ideas that's been floated by a lot of people that have talked to me about it is, you know, an amphitheater that can tap into the bands, you know, the higher level bands and even the local bands that we can filter in there that can tap into the circuit that Marshfield and Plover and Stevens Point and Wausau are on, you know, and we can do that and bring people in, which then would bring people downtown.
You'd close off Jackson Street on both sides and be able to
kind of make that one big park with Veterans Park.
And then you have a lot more people coming downtown, and then the buyers have more opportunity to grow in restaurants, other businesses.
There's a lot of things that can happen down there to really be a core destination location.
But that's not going to bring in property tax revenue.
That's going to bring people in, and then your hope is to build apartments and other locations in that area that aren't the center of the location.
We want to keep building up the 4th of July, I should say, Rapids River Side Freedom Fest and, you know, that would be a part of that.
And you can have a more proper band area that people, more areas for people to sit, bring tents in down there, have more vendors.
You know, that's all part of that community spirit.
So that's kind of what we're talking about is which way does the council want to go because it's a commitment and it's going to be there for at least 50 years, if not more.
So it's a big decision and we just need to know which way to go because we don't want to get contractors on the hook and then have to let them down.
We need to kind of make a decision early on.
Or is it a mixed use thing?
Is there enough land there that can be some of?
that would also be more of a community space.
So again, we have to make that.
So the decision was to bring back some basic renderings of what could be down there as a community hub or what could be down there as a commercial residential hub.
Okay.
So again, the process of government is we need to see options.
We need to consider all the options.
It has
to
start somewhere.
It starts with a conversation.
Yeah.
And just to finalize that, nothing happens until the
council votes on it.
There's eight council members and so the only time I have any say in anything outside of managing the municipal corporation and going out and dealing, you know, working with the residents that hired me to be their goal between, between their municipal corporation and them.
is the eight alderman and they vote.
And the only time I have a vote is if it's a four to four tie.
And that usually doesn't happen, but it does happen sometimes.
I mean, I can think of a few in the future that could be horrendous if I have to break a tie on those decisions.
So hopefully that doesn't come to that because I'd rather the council do that and allow me to just continue to be.
relatively neutral and just make the process go, like get everybody educated, informed, and then we make decisions based on that.
When you put me in the middle of it, that doesn't necessarily help.
Like even when you're running for mayor, you don't want to choose the side.
You want to, you represent everybody here.
And so I try to do that to the best of my ability.
It doesn't always work because I am who I am.
And sometimes people just aren't going to like me one way or the other.
That's neither here nor there.
The point is I'm here to represent everybody, all 19,000 people, just short of 19,000 people.
And sometimes we get that a little bit confused when you do have a very passionate group of people that say, we represent everybody, but yet there's still almost 19,000 people in the community.
That's a big amount of people.
So, yeah, so that's whatever we decide downtown is going to be decided by the alderman.
Hopefully, hopefully I don't have to break any ties there.
And if the public wants to weigh in on that, the best option at this point is to reach out to their older person, correct?
Yeah, and they can reach out to me, you know, my phone number 715 315 2925.
typically I'm going to hear what they say and talk to the alderman anyways because again that's who's going to be doing the voting for those residents in their community or talk to all the alderman and just get them to know that your perspective and point.
Again, they have to represent everybody in their districts and differing opinions and all that stuff.
So it's not an easy position to be in.
Keep in mind, they only get paid a couple hundred dollars a month.
Most of the people in the committees and commissions and boards are not paid at all.
They're volunteers from the community that either have an interest in that area or are just wanting to be a part of the decision-making process of the community.
So you got to give them a lot of credit, especially when that can put you in the hot seat.
you know, unexpected.
Well, in our last minute here, let's just touch briefly on the predictive mobility project that is started to be installed on the railroad crossings in the city of Wisconsin Rapids and the
The purpose of this, which was decided, I want to say more than a year ago now, voted on and decided to go forward with this project, went through that whole process, like we've been talking about this entire show of the committees and the council and it being voted on.
But now it's being installed.
People are a little leery because they look a lot like flock cameras.
But the purpose behind the Predictive Mobility Project is safety and enabling, correct me,
from wrong, but it's to enable EMS personnel and fire responders to get to an emergency scene in the quickest route possible without being blocked by a train.
Yeah.
Keep in mind too, this was being done when we had trains blocking roads for the better part of 45 minutes to an hour sometimes.
And so that was kind of what was in place.
We tried to get the money to build, you know,
separation of, you know, put it building bridges over the train, stuff like that on going on to Grand Avenue.
We've tried to move the track many times just to get it off because it's actually crosses 10 roads from here to Port Edward.
So it would be good to get it out of there, but it does have one spur for a chemical company.
So, but in the end, we decided on this link things, which was a program that said, well, we can set up an app.
And according to the sensors that we have on the railroad tracks,
will you'll be able to be notified at any time where the train is at when it's coming in and and again it's a predictive model so that it starts to understand better when trains are coming days and times and all that kind of stuff because there is some you know that
Scheduling to the whole thing.
So they decided to go with it.
It was a grant program.
So we were paying very little money from the city and what money we were paying was coming out of the downtown TIF district or TID district, but the TIF money account in order to pay for our portion of it.
And that was there to be used for the downtown projects.
I think that it's a good thing.
My understanding is there was sensors, but I do understand now that there is the ability to see on a camera the train.
I understand why people are concerned with that.
on my understanding of it in the beginning was that it was just sensors, but they can't see the train.
So, but the whole goal is to make sure that EMS and fire can get out out from behind the train as fast as possible.
And then we all as residents have the ability to download the app.
and see the train whenever we want to where it's at and be able to go around it in a different direction.
So we're not sitting behind the train waiting.
That was the whole goal behind it.
It does come around at the same time as the flock cameras, but the flock cameras are actually set up right after I became mayor.
Again, I know I've always had concerns with the flock cameras.
understanding that the main goal from the police department is safety when it comes to finding people fleeing crimes or if an elderly person with dementia maybe disappears or if there's an amber alert that they can track down license plates faster.
But I understand all the fears that people have of everything else that they can do when you're allowing them to put cameras on your cars and track license plates and car makes and models, stuff like that.
It's an easy turn into, you know, facial recognition and all those things, even though the police will say it's a contractual thing and nobody can abuse the system.
It's human nature, right?
So, you know, there's right to be concerned and I understand that.
Um, but again, it was something that the council voted on with the best intentions in mind that nobody was saying we want to set up a mass surveillance system on our community.
It was joining a group of people that were working on protecting our communities.
If we want to change it, we need to bring it back to the table and talk to the aldermen and have them take a look at things again.
So talk to your aldermen and get them to write a referral on it.
That's how the system works.
And correct me if I'm wrong.
This is a Wisconsin company, LinkThings.
LinkThings, yep.
Is it Wisconsin?
Yeah.
Or it's at least
Midwest.
We're
at
least in this area.
And then once it's installed completely, the general public can download the apps.
and the safety of the firefighters and they'll have a heads up display in their fire station that shows where the trains are so that they can easily map where they need to go.
Yes, and we will be able to see it on our phones also as residents.
So it is a win for everybody understanding that it is technology that's at play.
Well, we've run out of time today, Matt.
I'm Melissa Kay speaking with Wisconsin Rapids Mayor Matt Zachar.
Thank you for taking the time today.
Thanks, Melissa.
Have a great day.
You too.
And thank you to listeners joining us for News in Our Community on Perspective, 1320 AM, 975 FM WFHR.