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 Wood County Board Chair Lance Plymal on Tuesday, August 25th.
Thank you for joining me, Lance, to bring the community an update from Wood County.
Thank you, Melissa.
It's always a pleasure to be here and hopefully can answer some of the questions that you ask.
Well, we'll try to not throw too
many curveballs at you.
Yeah, it's an open forum.
I just tell, whatever you want to throw at me, let's give it a shot.
Well, first I want to start by recognizing the Wood County employees for their years of devoted and service to Wood County.
You have a, there's, I'll see, one, two, three, four, five, six that all have over 25 years of service to the county.
That's a lot of years of dedicated service.
The long-term employees are the backbone of the workforce.
Two of those that we recognize are our department heads, who've been here a long time, Chad Schooley and Shane Wischofenig.
But all those employees do a great job.
And they're there to not just lead, in some cases, as a department head, but to mentor those that come in.
So we certainly like to see people stay that long.
I think it's kind of an attribute or it shows.
what a good employer the county can be.
And in today's world, you don't see a lot of people that stay at the same job for 25, 35.
And occasionally we recognize 40 or 45 years.
So yeah, it's pretty amazing that we have those people.
They keep us running.
And I hope that every single person working at the county here today is there for 30 to 40 years.
Wouldn't that be nice?
That would be nice.
Low
turnover is helpful for any business.
Yeah, you know, attrition turnover, you know, recruiting is sometimes much harder than retention.
And so you
try to do all those things you can to keep those people, you know, within the county family.
Well, I'll run through them quick because I have them in front of me.
Joanne, you'll have to correct the names if I get them wrong.
Warm it.
25 years in human services.
Chad Schooley, as you mentioned, 25 years in parks.
Miley Tao, 30 years in health.
Crystal Varshow, 30 years at Norwood.
Shane.
Wisher Fennig.
Thank you.
35 years at Land and Water
Conservation.
Land and Water Conservation.
And he actually is the director of that department.
And Jennifer Vettrom, 35 years at Edgewater.
Yeah, remarkable, isn't it?
It is.
And this isn't like we do this just once a year.
I mean,
several times a year we recognize these employees and ironically some of them like to come up and actually be recognized and have a chance to address the board and and about 50% choose to just you know stay in the their particular office in the wings and and just keep providing that service that they
do.
Well, sometimes that's how you get work done.
Keep your head down and just stay dedicated.
Slow through, absolutely.
One thing I want to touch on briefly that I noticed in the meeting minutes for the operations committee, there's an issue potentially with Bug Tussle providing high-speed internet.
There's some things going on in the background, questions that people are having.
Let's address that for a moment.
Yeah, Bug Tussle is a company that we provided some kind of a bonding for.
It started during COVID.
mostly trying to address the issue for providing education in the Pittsville and Auburndale areas, which had no coverage to some extent.
So although, you know, you'd love to run fiber everywhere, some of those are fairly remote to get to those individuals in those homes because obviously they couldn't attend school.
And so we put up an array of towers to provide that service.
Bugtussel in our county, we haven't run into any
real major problems yet, but they've been somewhat non communicative with the number of the counties in the state.
And I understand some of them, they have sought some additional funding to complete some of the things that probably should have been done in the first go round.
So the county, the action that the county took the other way was to retain a tolus law.
as part of a group of counties consortium to address those issues and make sure that that communication stays open.
In Atollis Law, the principal there's Andy Phillips who's
I always say he'd get mad if I said probably is the best public sector attorney in the state of Wisconsin.
When I introduce him as probably, he always goes, no, I am.
But his law firm, incredible in these types of issues, as well as data centers.
Rebecca Roker there is probably the leading attorney in that respect.
So we use a tolus law when we have the opportunity.
Well, we'll look forward to hearing how
that- Hopefully we don't need them.
Hopefully
not.
Hopefully not.
But that's a
possibility.
And then let's touch briefly on ARPA funds.
As of June 30th in 2026, there's roughly 1.89 million remaining.
And most of it looks like it's been slated for use in places.
But all these funds must be expended by the end of 2026.
Yes.
It's all been allocated.
It does now.
have to be spent by the end of the year.
And this sounds funny, but we've done a really good job of spending money.
Hard to believe, right?
All of that except that that last little tranche has to be taken care of.
And that is
directed towards the federally qualified health center that's going to be breaking ground here pretty quick.
And I've been assured by everybody from our own health department to those people building that, that that will be done on time, that money will be expended.
There's no way we want to let the federal government claw that back.
If for some reason, and I don't anticipate that in any way, there's some glitch.
I guarantee we could find some other place to spend that additional money, whether it was be an accelerator road project or something at the courthouse.
I was going to say there's always potholes to fill.
There's always potholes to fill.
Yeah, it's not like it's going to go back.
We've been very judicious in how we spent this.
And one of the things that our county did that I think a number of others across the country didn't, because I listen to those people, is really look at what would the long-term benefit be.
Where will people
20, 30, 40 years from now, look and say, well, that's what they did with the money.
It wasn't used for operations.
It wasn't used for short-term fixes.
It was used for things like powers bluff, where you'll see some of the completion of that in the federally qualified health center, some of the improvements at the courthouse, some of that parking and some of those other things.
So all things that you could actually point to and say, hey, that's what they did with that money.
And we had
between 11 and 12 million dollars was our share of those ARPA funds.
But as you mentioned, using it for projects that will continue on into the future, not for reoccurring expenses because that money is a one-time thing.
Yeah, absolutely.
This is one case where procrastination probably helped a little bit.
There's some people that ran out, decided to spend that money really quickly and then realized over the number of years they had to spend it, there were other needs that probably would have been better to address had they taken the time to really look at that.
And then there's some local government that just had
Immediate needs where it had to be spent.
Yeah, one of the things we did as a county's association At the at the federal level there were some guidelines on this that said this could generally be used for infrastructure such as water and sewer well counties don't generally have
water sewer and those other projects.
So the National Association of Counties along with the Wisconsin Counties Association lobbied hard to take those sideboards off those guardrails and say, there are other infrastructure projects that we need to do that would not be included in that first look at it.
So I think we've done a really good job.
I procrastination is the word I used when I was in Washington, the guy actually called it strategic patients.
So that's what I'm going with now.
I don't procrastinate anymore.
I use strategic patients.
Can
I steal
that?
You can steal that.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I stole.
Might as well.
It's a good one.
You mentioned Powers Bluff.
Let's touch on the parks briefly.
How did the doors look?
Are the doors finally
in at Powers Bluff?
Fantastic.
Yeah, that's another one where people say, why do you spend money on a plan?
Why do you plan?
that project was 20 to 25 years in the making, you know, where we did the study, we ascertained what we needed.
We said some day maybe we'll have the opportunity to fund a project like that and we had to be ready to go.
And so the plans were put in place way back when we got started on this project, you know, basically because we had additional money through ARPA.
That's going to be a fantastic facility.
It takes some of the pressure off those areas that, you know, we had concerns with the Native American community and some of those areas that were sensitive in that respect.
It provides a new building down there that actually has heat that works and cooling, additional parking, and then we have one of the best off-road bike trails tracks, probably in the Midwest.
So if you haven't had a chance to get out there on a bicycle, whether somebody wants to try the real intricate technical stuff, that's there, but so are the nice flat trails that somebody like myself pedals along.
I'd probably go for that as well.
Yeah, so that project,
Looks fantastic.
If you have the opportunity and you're driving out that direction, take a look.
Yeah.
And as the park system as a whole in Wood County, there's so many parks.
The season isn't done yet.
There's still camping options available into the fall months, to my understanding.
Yeah.
Our park system is a real jewel.
I mean, we have tremendous parks.
I'll start and name them and I'll leave them out.
But, you know, if you get over to Dexterville in that area,
fantastic campground up to North Park.
We've done some major improvements up there over the last couple of years.
Many of you get to Lake Wazecha in South Park.
We have some additional construction going on there that's going to further enhance that one.
Lake Nepko, again, great park there, year-round building that's used for events.
Richfield 360, which is not highly used, but a real primitive area, hiking trails.
I think we have some primitive camping there too.
Don't quote me on that.
I still think we do.
But yeah, all of those parks, then we have 38,000 acres of county forest land, which we not only maintain, but provides a large part of our budget for our parks department.
Revenues from that particular, from the county forest program can be somewhere between four and $500,000 a year.
Wow.
And then the newest.
park in the system is Sarah Park.
And the newest park, Sarah Park.
Absolutely.
I did get to see
the sign.
It looks
great.
It looked good, didn't it?
Yeah, you called me.
I sent you a picture one time.
You did, you did.
I'm
still going to get that published.
And we're looking at obviously some further enhancements there.
You know, the first thing to do is kind of bring it up to power, get it operational, fix the things that were broken in or had been somewhat neglected for years as we had all the change in ownership at the at the paper companies.
That being done, now we're looking at how do we continue to improve and expand that park?
Right.
All right.
Well, this is a good spot for us to pause for a short moment to hear from our sponsors.
I'm Melissa K talking with Wood County Board Chair Lance Plimo, 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 Plimmel and where we left off we were talking about the parks and that there's still some time left in this season to enjoy the parks.
And there are some that have opportunities year round with buildings that can be rented out for events and things of that nature.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, those opportunities exist to get out and use those for, you know, whatever event you have, whether that be
retirement parties, showers, weddings, those exist.
The campgrounds are open yet for quite a while.
And one of the beauties of fall is there's a much greater opportunity because there's less people there, to some extent, to get out there during the week and really enjoy some of the beauty of fall and the colors.
It's a little quieter.
It's a really nice
almost a more rural experience if you do that.
So I would highly recommend, you know, especially those people listening to this show that are local, to take that opportunity to get out there during September.
Use those facilities and take advantage of it.
The weather looks like it's going to hold at least for the next 10 to 20 days.
So temperature wise, I didn't see anything below freezing yet, although we're approaching that pretty quick.
Yeah, but then you get to put on sweaters at night and it's cozy and sit around a campfire.
I like that.
There's nothing wrong with that.
You can still roast marshmallows, even if it's cold.
Well, and if you roast those marshmallows and you haven't brushed your teeth, then maybe Healthy Smiles is the thing.
Smooth segue, Melissa,
yeah.
But we're getting into fall.
School is going to be starting here very soon.
And Healthy Smiles is a big program that the county does to help with dental care needs for children in schools.
And, you know, and dental care goes far beyond just teeth.
I mean, it's linked and related to a lot of other health problems.
So it's something that, you know, they certainly address is something that we work on.
And actually the federally qualified health center that's going to be started.
being built with those ARPA funds, one of the real concerns there was dental health and the fact that we were a desert to some extent there.
So not only do we have that program, but we look to further expand and be able to provide that because that leads to long-term, whether those be cardiac issues or others, a really important part of your overall
health.
Yeah, and it is, like you said, tied to so many other issues within your health.
Overall
overall health.
Absolutely.
One thing we want to touch briefly on is the Wood County Trans public transportation survey that is out there And just kind of trying to get a read from people in the community on what is needed We don't have a we don't have public transportation in Wisconsin Rapids to my knowledge.
There are some taxi options
There's
not a
lot.
We don't have much.
And in fact, your host, Melissa, said to me, what about this?
I said, we're doing a survey.
So sometimes I'm not paying real close attention, I guess, either.
No, we don't have a lot of public transportation in the area.
There are some special programs where we address some people, you know, demographically based on aging and some of the other situations that involve our human services department and others.
There's also a realization that we have an aging population.
The demographic here is changing.
And the goal over the last 30 to 40 years has been to have people age in place in their homes.
And we're a fairly rural county, and I'm not just talking the city, but there's a lot of people that are out in those areas, the hinterlands, that need services.
And whether that be medical.
whether that be coming in town to shop, whether that be meals on wheels or wanting to get to a congregate site, that's going to stretch us going into the future.
I think there has to be some realization that although I like to stay in those places, sometimes just based on the number of volunteers and the programs and the dollars, that at some point people may need to move closer to services.
And that's a fact even though we don't want to have to deal with it.
So right now we're trying to ascertain
where those real shortcomings are and is there a way to address it.
It's much more difficult in a rural, semi-rural area than it is in the city because you're not going to have 50 people sitting at the bus stop.
That's just not going to happen.
And then how do you fiscally handle that?
Um, as well.
And, you know, whether it's the cost of, you know, you've gone out at your own home and you bought a new car recently.
Um, you know, I've seen the average price of a car, you know, is well over 40 and pushing $50,000 now and not sure how people do it.
And keeping and maintaining a car is
a huge
expense.
And gas, you know, like if I fill up my pickup truck, which has a fairly large, I can go way over a hundred dollars.
That's crazy.
Um, so those same costs though.
occur at the county level or at the city.
So when we have a squad car out on the road or when we have to run one of our buses to pick up people or to get them rides to places, even if it's volunteers doing it, there's a cost.
And we see less and less volunteers as we move on year to year.
And so I guess if I had one thing I would ask people out there is, consider volunteering somewhere.
Give something back to your community that gave to you.
You know, I get asked every day and it's kind of tongue-in-cheek.
They go, you know, what are you doing today?
And I said, I don't know, trying to make the community a little bit better.
And that little bit better can be, you know, I'm going to go volunteer at the hospital, or I'm going to drive meals for wheels.
Volunteer for wheels on wheels.
I'm going to volunteer somewhere, even if it's just a few hours a week.
I know a McMillan library was looking for volunteers to drive books out places.
You know, sometimes, you know, you look in the mirror and you say, this community has been really good to me.
What can I do?
to give something back.
And most of us could find a few hours a week where we're otherwise not doing something that's overly important, although I was just sharing with Melissa that I haven't done the stuff my wife wanted me to do in May, and we're now pushing September, but we can find time to help those people in our community as we were helped growing
up.
Well, let's talk for a little bit about what's going on down in front of the courthouse.
This has been happening all summer with the construction down there and the demolition of Thumbs.
But they've really made some progress here lately.
It looks a whole lot different than it did two weeks ago.
Yeah kudos to the city.
They're doing a tremendous job on that and It's kind of laughing cuz I said I couldn't get there yesterday, and I know where I'm going You know the amount of dirt that they're moving the construction Today the county was in actually repaving the roundabout there, and they're gonna open first Street back up here to get traffic moving that way while they continue on the Jackson Street and second Street construction, but it's amazing I
I can't really count, but there are a few excavators down there, a number of...
skid steers, some bulldozers, some end loaders.
And there are a lot of people working on this project to get this done.
And it's a huge undertaking.
It will further enhance the downtown area in transportation through that.
And then it'll allow us to continue with the parking and some of the other needs we have at the courthouse for those who have some challenges accessing the building just because of distances.
So really looking forward to this.
And then I think eventually that riverfront area will be much
which is city property, but much further enhanced for use going forward.
But yeah, kudos to them.
They're doing a heck of a job.
And it's a big, that's a big area they're working on.
It's not just like one street.
And then I was driving down here to the station.
They're working along the river here too, just south of the expressway.
So yeah, they've got a lot of people out working.
And you know, some people say to me, how can they work on all these roads at once?
Well, I want you to think of construction season in Wisconsin does not occur when you're shoveling snow.
No.
And that happens usually.
mid to end of October when we see the first flakes.
And it's not all done by city crews, either.
There are some contractors.
Private contractors.
The people
putting in the sewer, the new sewer lining here along the river, that's a contractor.
Absolutely.
It was really difficult to get from here to Marshfield this summer.
With the Pittsville.
Yeah, the roundabout at Pittsville, so you had the 7380 corridor was shut down, 1334.
Pass Rudolph was shut down.
If you're a local, you kind of could work your way around probably if you're not driving a truck.
But you could do that.
But the roundabout, I'm thinking, will be open by next week.
It's very close to completion.
They're waiting for some lighting and some striping.
That was pretty well done.
Are you talking
about the Pittsville
one?
I'm talking the Pittsville roundabout, yeah.
The one on H over there, the eight corners is the local.
That one's not close to done yet.
1334, that's moving along.
And then the one that everybody complains to us about at the county is Highway 54 from Wisconsin-Ramford to Stevens Point.
That is not a county project.
That's a state project.
And they actually, instead of having that one done as early as they thought, there was more sections that needed to be replaced than initially anticipated.
And now they're talking, that's a November completion.
So.
Just hope they get that done before winter before the snow flies.
Yeah
Well, and then here right by our station gainer is closed going towards Rams in the zoo and and there is a but the detour is pretty easy It's straightforward.
You just head down 17th to KC to 29th and you get back on gainer
Yeah, I'm gonna just you know a lot more time, you know, especially with our road crews out there Yeah, I mean these people are out there, you know
To some extent, putting their lives on the line.
I mean, traffic's zipping by, you know, get off the cell phone, slow down, be cognizant of the fact they're out there.
Pay attention.
Yeah, I drove back.
I was up in Marinette last week, helping their county out a little bit.
And I came back, it's normally about, it's a 170 mile trip, and it normally is about a two and a half hour trip.
It took me four hours.
Wow.
Because I would guess of that 170 miles, minimally, 100 miles of that is under construction.
So I guess the good part of that is there's adequate
Dollars somewhere in budgets to repair those and get things that hadn't been done for years and years right the
infrastructure Repairs are needed
are needed and it's a short window to do them.
Mm-hmm, but because of that everything So
allow yourself extra
time allow yourself some extra time and especially in those work zones.
I mean really be careful there
And if you're heading up to Marshfield this weekend for the Central Wisconsin State Fair or the Wood County Fair, there's a lot going on with that.
That is a big deal.
It is.
It's branded as a Central Wisconsin State Fair.
It is the Wood County Fair.
It's one of the bigger county fairs in the state.
I think last year we had in excess or close to 60,000 people in attendance.
Wow.
They've got a great entertainment lineup.
The midways.
Great.
The animals, the kids, the junior fair, all of those are market sales.
The pig and
duck races are
my favorite.
Yeah, are fun.
Yeah, I went to the pig races last year.
Yeah, it's a great event and it's a great facility.
You know, you've got detours, obviously, a few of those to work around.
Use ways.
Check your map.
Figure out how to get there.
You know, if you know your way around from one county, you're probably going to take five more minutes than it would have taken before.
But I'll take the opportunity because it really is a great fair.
And I was sharing earlier that I don't remember what I ate for lunch yesterday.
In fact, I actually forgot I ate lunch until I saw that I still had a crinkled up McDonald's bag in my car.
And I had.
But.
The one thing I do remember as a kid is those weekends, you know, growing up where I spent with my grandparents, where he had, you know, the sights and the sounds of the fair.
It's one of those things.
Yeah.
The food there.
You got it.
I got to have a Euro.
I got to have the mini donuts.
And if possible, cotton candy.
Yeah, I was going to say the smells too.
And I don't mean in the barns.
I mean, you know, out at the, you know, at the vendors and the food areas.
Depends on
what the wind
is blowing.
But great opportunity to get up there, take advantage of it.
You know, you got.
It begins tomorrow, you know, you run through Sunday, take advantage of it, take the kids, spend the day, or multiple days.
Yes.
And as people listen to this, it will have already happened.
So hopefully you did get there and got to enjoy it.
But that's all the time we have.
I'm Melissa Kay with Wood County Board Chair Lance Plimal.
Thank you for talking with me today, Lance.
Thank
you for
having us.
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 a.m.
97 5 fm.
I'm Melissa K bringing you news in our community during this interview I'm talking with Wood County Board Chair Lance Plymouth on Tuesday August 25th Thank you for joining me Lance bring the community an update from Wood County
Thank You Melissa.
It's always a pleasure to be here and hopefully can answer some of the questions that you ask
Well, we'll try to not throw too many curveballs at you.
Yeah,
it's an open forum.
I just tell whatever you want to throw at me.
Let's give it a shot.
Well, first I want to start by recognizing the Wood County employees for their years of devoted and service to Wood County.
You have a there's I'll see one, two, three, four, five, six that all have over 25 years of service to the county.
That's a lot of years of dedicated service.
the long-term employees are the backbone of the workforce.
Two of those that we recognize are our department heads who've been here a long time, Chad Schooley and Shane Wischofenig.
But all those employees do a great job and they're there to not just lead in some cases as a department head, but to mentor those that come in.
So we certainly like to see people stay that long.
I think it's kind of an attribute or it shows
what a good employer the county can be.
And in today's world, you don't see a lot of people that stay at the same job for 25, 35.
And occasionally we recognize 40 or 45 years.
So yeah, it's pretty amazing that we have those people.
They keep us running.
And I hope that every single person working at the county here today is there for 30 to 40 years.
Wouldn't that be nice?
That would be nice.
Love turnover is helpful for any business.
Yeah, you know, attrition turnover.
Recruiting is sometimes much harder than retention.
And so you try to do all those things you can to keep those people within the county family.
Well, I'll run through them quick because I have them in front of me.
Joanne, you'll have to correct the names if I get them wrong.
Warm it?
25 years in human services, Chad Shuley, as you mentioned, 25 years in parks, Miley Tau, 30 years in health, Crystal Varshow, 30 years at Norwood, Shane.
Washer Fennig.
Thank you.
35 years at Land and Water Conservation.
Land and Water
Conservation, and he actually is the director of that department.
And Jennifer Vetrom, 35 years at Edgewater.
Yeah, remarkable, isn't it?
It
is.
And this isn't like we do this just once a year.
I mean,
several times a year we recognize these employees and ironically some of them like to come up and actually be recognized and have a chance to address the board and and about 50% choose to just you know stay in the their
particular office in the
wings and and just keep providing that service that they
do.
Well, sometimes that's how you get work done.
Keep your head down and just stay dedicated.
Slow
through, absolutely.
One thing I want to touch on briefly that I noticed in the meeting minutes for the operations committee, there's an issue potentially with Bug Tussle providing high-speed internet.
There's some things going on in the background, questions that people are having.
Let's address that for a moment.
Yeah, Bug Tussle is a company that we provided some kind of a bonding for.
It started during COVID.
mostly trying to address the issue for providing education in the Pittsville and Auburn Dale areas, which had no coverage
to
some extent.
So although, you know, you'd love to run fiber everywhere, some of those are fairly remote to get to those individuals in those homes, because obviously they couldn't attend school.
And so we put up an array of towers to provide that service.
Bugtussel in our county, we haven't run into any
real major problems yet, but they've been somewhat non communicative with the number of the counties in the state.
And I understand some of them, they have sought some additional funding to complete some of the things that probably should have been done in the first go round.
So the county, the action that the county took the other way is to retain a tolus law as part of a group.
of counties, consortium, to address those issues and make sure that communication stays open.
And Atollis Law, the principal there's Andy Phillips, who's, I always say probably, he'd get mad if I said probably, is the best public sector attorney in the state of Wisconsin.
When I introduce him as probably, he always goes, no.
I am.
But his law firm, incredible in these types of issues, as well as data centers.
Rebecca Roker there is probably the leading attorney in that respect.
So we use a tolus law when we have the opportunity.
Well, we'll look forward to hearing how that- Hopefully we don't need them.
Hopefully not.
Hopefully not.
But that's a
possibility.
And then let's touch briefly on ARPA funds.
As of June 30th in 2026, there's roughly 1.89 million remaining.
And most of it looks like it's been slated for use in places.
But all these funds must be expended by the end of 2026.
Yes.
It's all been allocated.
It does now.
have to be spent
by the
end of the year.
And this sounds funny, but we've done a really good job of spending money.
Hard to believe,
right?
All of that except that last little tranche has to be taken care of.
And that is...
directed towards the federally qualified health center that's going to be breaking ground here pretty quick.
And I've been assured by everybody from our own health department to those people building that, that that will be done on time, that money will be expended.
There's no way we want to let the federal government claw that back.
If for some reason, and I don't anticipate that in any way, there's some glitch.
I guarantee we could find some other place to spend that additional money, whether it was be an accelerator road project or something at the courthouse.
There's always potholes to fill.
There's
always potholes to fill.
Yeah, it's not like it's going to go back.
You know, we've been very judicious in how we spent this.
And one of the things that our county did that I think a number of others across the country didn't, because I listen to those people, is really look at what would the long term benefit be.
Where will people
20 30 40 years from now look and say well, that's what they did with the money It wasn't used for operations.
It wasn't used for short-term fixes It was used for things like powers bluff where you'll see some of the completion of that in the federally qualified health center some of the improvements at the courthouse some of that parking and some of those other things so All things that you could actually point to and say hey, that's what they did with that money and we had
between 11 and 12 million dollars was our share of those ARPA funds.
But it, as you mentioned, using it for projects that will continue on into the future, not for reoccurring expenses because that money is a one time.
one time thing.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, that's this is one case where procrastination probably helped a little bit.
There's some people that ran out decided to spend that money really quickly and then realized over the number of years they had to spend it, there were other needs that probably would have been better to address
had
they taken the time to really look at that.
And then some, you know, there's some local government, they just had
Immediate needs where it had to be spent.
Yeah, one of the things we did is a county's association At the at the federal level there were some guidelines on this that said this could generally be used for infrastructure such as water and sewer well counties don't generally have
water sewer and those other projects.
So
the
National Association of Counties along with the Wisconsin Counties Association lobbied hard to take those sideboards off those guardrails and say, there are other infrastructure projects that we need to do that would not be included in that first look at it.
So I think we've done a really good job.
I procrastination is the word I used when I was in Washington, the guy actually called it strategic patients.
So that's what I'm going with now.
I don't
procrastinate anymore.
I
use strategic
patients.
Can I steal that?
You can
steal that.
Absolutely.
I
stole.
Might as well.
It's a good one.
You mentioned Powers Bluff.
Let's touch on the parks briefly.
How did the doors look?
Are the doors finally in?
Fantastic.
Powers
Bluff.
Yeah, that's another one where people say, why do you spend money on a plan?
Why do you plan?
That project was 20 to 25 years in the making,
you know, where
we did the study, we ascertained what we needed.
We said someday maybe we'll have the opportunity to fund a project like that and we had to be ready to go.
And so the plans were put in place way back when we got started on this project, you know, basically because we had additional money through ARPA.
That's going to be a fantastic facility.
It takes some of the pressure off those areas that, you know, we had concerns with the Native American community and some of those areas that were sensitive in that respect.
It provides a new building down there that actually has heat that works and it and cooling additional parking and then we have you know one of the best Off-road, you know bike trails
tracks
Probably in the Midwest so if you haven't had a chance to get out there on a bicycle whether you somebody wants to try you know the real intricate technical stuff That's there, but so are the nice flat trails that somebody like myself pedals along
I'd probably go for that as well.
Yeah, so
that project
Looks fantastic.
If you have the opportunity and you're driving out that direction, take a look.
Yeah.
And as the park system as a whole in Wood County, there's so many parks.
The season isn't done yet.
There's still camping options available into the fall months, to my understanding.
Yeah.
Our park system is a real jewel.
I mean, we have tremendous parks.
I'll start name them and I'll leave them out.
But if you get over to Dexterville in that area,
fantastic camp ground up to North Park.
We've done some major improvements up there over the last couple of years.
Many of you get to Lake Wasiche in South Park.
We have some additional construction going on there that's going to further enhance that one.
Lake Nepko, again, great park there, year-round building that's used for events.
Richfield 360, which is not highly used, but a real primitive area, hiking trails.
I think we have some primitive camping there too.
Don't quote me on that.
I still think we do.
But yeah, all of those parks, then we have 30,000 acres of county forest land, which we not only maintain, but provides a large part of our budget for our parks department.
Revenues from that particular, from the county forest program can be somewhere between four and $500,000 a year.
Wow.
And then the newest.
park in the system is Sarah Park.
And
the newest park, Sarah Park.
Absolutely.
I did get to see the sign.
It looks great.
It looked good, didn't it?
Yeah, you called me.
I sent
you a picture
one time.
You did.
You did.
I'm still going to get that published.
And we're looking at, obviously, some further enhancements there.
You know, the first thing to do is kind of bring it up to power, get it operational, fix the things that were broken in or had been somewhat neglected for
years
as we had all the change in ownership at the paper companies.
That being done, now we're looking at how do we continue to improve and expand that park.
Right.
All right, well this is a good spot for us to pause for a short moment to hear from our sponsors.
I'm Melissa K talking with Wood County Board Chair Lance Plimo, 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 Wood County Board Chair Lance Plimmel and where we left off, we were talking about the parks and that there's still some time left in this season to enjoy the parks.
And there are some that have opportunities year round with buildings that can be rented out for events and things of that nature.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, those opportunities exist to get out and use those for, you know, whatever event you have, whether that be
retirement parties, showers,
weddings,
those exist.
The campgrounds are open yet for quite a while.
And one of the beauties of fall is there's a much greater opportunity because there's less people there to
some
extent to get out there during the week and really enjoy some of the beauty of fall and the colors.
It's a little quieter.
It's a really nice
almost a more rural experience
if you do
that.
So I would highly recommend, you know, especially those people listening to this show that are local, to take that opportunity to get out there during September.
Use those facilities and take advantage of it.
The weather looks like it's going to hold at least for the next 10 to 20 days.
So
yeah, temperature wise, I didn't see
anything below freezing yet, although we're approaching that pretty quick.
Yeah, but then you get to put on sweaters at night and it's cozy and sit around a campfire.
I like that.
There's nothing wrong with that.
You can still roast marshmallows, even if it's cold.
Well, and if you roast those marshmallows and you haven't brushed your teeth, then maybe Healthy Smiles is the thing.
Smooth segue, Melissa,
yeah.
But we're getting into fall.
School is going to be starting here very soon.
And Healthy Smiles is a big program that the county does to help with dental care needs for children in schools.
And, you know, and dental care goes far beyond just teeth.
I mean,
it's linked and related to a lot of other health problems.
So it's something that, you know, they certainly address is something that we work on.
And actually the federally qualified health center that's going to be started.
being built with those ARPA funds, one of the real concerns there was dental health
and the fact
that we were a desert to some extent there.
So not only do we have that program, but we look to further expand and be able to provide that because
that
leads to long-term, whether those be cardiac issues or others, a really important part of your overall health.
Yeah, and it is, like you said, tied to so many other issues within your health.
Overall overall health.
Absolutely.
One thing we want to touch briefly on is the Wood County Trans public transportation survey that is out there And just kind of trying to get a read from people in the community on what is needed We don't have a we don't have public transportation in Wisconsin Rapids to my knowledge.
There are some taxi options
There's not a lot.
We don't have much.
And
in fact, your host, Melissa, said to me, what about this?
I said, we're doing a survey.
So sometimes I'm not paying real close attention, I guess, either.
No, we don't have a lot of public transportation in the area.
There are some special programs where we address some people demographically based on aging and some of the other situations that involve our human services department and others.
There's also a realization that we have an aging population.
The
demographic here is changing.
And the goal over the last 30 to 40 years has been to have people age in place in their homes.
And we're a fairly rural county, and I'm not just talking the city, but there's a lot of people that are out in those areas, the hinterlands, that need services.
And whether that be medical.
whether that be coming in town to shop, whether that be meals on wheels or wanting to get to a congregate site, that's going to stretch us going into the future.
I think there has to be some realization that although I like to stay in those places, sometimes just based on the number of volunteers and the programs and the dollars, that at some point people may need to move closer to services.
And that's a fact even though we don't want to have to deal with it.
So right now we're trying to ascertain
where those real shortcomings are and is there a way to address it.
It's much more difficult in a rural, semi-rural area than it is in the city because you're not going to have 50 people sitting at the bus stop.
That's just not going to happen.
And then how do you fiscally handle that?
Um, as well.
And,
you know,
whether it's the cost of, you know, you've gone out at your own home and you bought a new car recently.
Um, you know, I've seen the average price of a car, you know, is well over 40 and pushing $50,000 now.
And not
sure how people do it.
Keeping it maintained.
A car is a huge expense.
And gas.
You know,
if I fill up my pickup truck, which has a fairly large, I can go way over $100.
That's crazy.
Um, so those same costs, though.
occur at the county level or at the city.
So, you know, when we have a squad car out on the road or when we have to, you know, run one of our buses to pick up people or to get them rides to places, even if it's volunteers doing it, there's a cost.
And we see less and less volunteers as we, you know, move on year to year.
And so I guess if I had one thing I would ask people out there, you know, consider volunteering somewhere.
Give
something back to your community that gave to you.
You know, I get asked every day and it's kind of tongue-in-cheek.
They go, you know, what are you doing today?
And I said, I don't know, trying to make the community a little bit better.
And that little bit better can be, you know, I'm going to go volunteer at the hospital or I'm going to
drive wheels for wheels.
Volunteer for wheels on wheels.
I'm going to volunteer
somewhere, even if it's just a few hours a week.
I know a McMillan library was looking for volunteers to drive books out
places.
You know, sometimes, you know, you look in the mirror and you say, this community has been really good to me.
What can I do?
to give something back,
and most
of us could find a few hours a week where we're otherwise not doing something that's overly important, although I was just sharing with Melissa that I haven't done the stuff my wife wanted me to do in May, and
we're
now pushing September, but we can find time to help those people in our community as we were helped growing
up.
Well, let's talk for a little bit about what's going on down in front of the courthouse.
This has been happening all summer with the construction down there and the demolition of thumbs, but they've really made some progress here lately.
It looks a whole lot different than it did two weeks ago.
Yeah kudos to the city.
They're doing a tremendous job on that and I was kind of laughing because I said I couldn't get there yesterday and I know where I'm going You know the the amount of dirt that they're moving the construction Today the county was in actually repaving the roundabout there and they're gonna open first Street back up here to get traffic moving that way while they continue on the Jackson Street and second Street construction, but it's amazing I
I can't really count, but there are a few excavators down there, a number of...
skid steers, some bulldozers, some end loaders.
And there are a lot of people working on this project to get this done.
And it's a huge undertaking.
It will further enhance the downtown area
in
transportation through that.
And then it'll allow us to continue with the parking and some of the other needs we have at the courthouse for those who have some challenges accessing the building just because of distances.
So really looking forward to this.
And then I think eventually that riverfront area will be much
which is city property, but much further enhanced for use
going forward.
But yeah, kudos to them.
They're doing a heck of a job.
And that's a big area
they're working on.
It's not just like one street.
And then I was driving down here to the station.
They're working along the river here, too, just south of the expressway.
So yeah, they've got a lot of people out working.
And some people say to me, how can they work on all these roads at once?
Well, I want you to think of construction season in Wisconsin.
It does not occur when you're shoveling snow.
No.
And that happens usually.
mid to end of October when we see the first flakes.
And
it's not all done by
city crews,
either.
There are some contractors, like the private
contractors.
The people putting in the sewer, the new sewer lining here along the river, that's a contractor.
Absolutely.
It was really difficult to get from here to Marshfield
this summer.
With the Pittsville.
Yeah, the roundabout at Pittsville, so you had the 7380 corridor was shut down, 1334.
Pass Rudolph was shut down.
If you're a local, you kind of could work your way around probably driving a truck.
But you know, you could do that.
But the roundabout I'm thinking will be open by next week.
It's very close to completion.
They're waiting for some lighting and some striping.
That was pretty well.
Are
you talking about the Pittsville one?
I'm
talking the Pittsville
roundabout,
yeah.
The one on H over there, the eight corners is the local cut.
That one's not close to done yet.
1334, that's moving along and then the one that everybody complains to us about at the county is Highway 54 from Wisconsin-Ramford to Stevens Point.
That is
not a county project, that's a state project.
And they actually, instead of having that one done as early as they thought, there was more sections that needed to be replaced than initially anticipated.
And now they're talking, that's a November completion.
So...
Just hope they get that done before winter
before the snow flies.
Yeah Well, and then here right by our station gainer is closed going towards Rams in the zoo and and there is a but the detour is pretty easy It's straightforward.
You just head down 17th to KC to 29th and you get back on gainer Yeah,
I'm gonna just you know a lot more time, you know, especially with our road cruise out there.
Yeah, I mean these people are out there, you know
To some extent, putting their lights on the line.
I mean, traffic's zipping by, you know, get off the cell phone, slow
down,
be cognizant
of the fact they're out
there.
Yeah, I drove back.
I was up in Marinette last week, helping their county out a little bit.
And I came back, it's normally about, it's a 170 mile trip, and it normally is about a two and a half hour trip.
It took me four hours.
Wow.
Because I would guess of that 170 miles, minimally, a hundred miles of that is under construction.
So I guess the good part of that is there's adequate
Dollars somewhere in
budgets
to repair those and get things that hadn't been done for years and years
right the infrastructure Repairs are needed
are needed and it's a short window to do them.
Mm-hmm, but because of that everything So
allow yourself extra time allow yourself some extra
time and especially in those work zones.
I mean really be careful there
And if you're heading up to Marshfield this weekend for the Central Wisconsin State Fair or the Wood County Fair, there's a lot going on with that.
That is a big deal.
It is, you know, it's branded as a Central Wisconsin State Fair.
It is the Wood County Fair.
It's one of the bigger county fairs in the state.
I think last year we had six in excess or close to 60,000 people in attendance.
They've got a great entertainment lineup.
The midways.
great, the animals, the kids, the junior fair, all of those in market
sales.
The pig and duck races are my favorite.
Yeah, are
fun.
Yeah, I went to the pig races last year.
Yeah, it's a great event and it's a great facility.
So, you know, you've got detours, obviously,
a few of those
to work around.
Use Waze, check your map, figure out how to get there.
You know, if you know your way around from one county, you're probably gonna
take five more minutes than it would have taken before.
But I'll take the opportunity because it really is a great fair.
And I was sharing earlier that I don't remember what I ate for lunch yesterday.
In fact, I actually forgot I ate lunch until I saw that I still had a crinkled up McDonald's bag in my car.
And I had.
But the one thing I do remember as a kid is those weekends.
you know, growing up where I spent with my grandparents, where he had, you know, the sights and the sounds of the fair.
It's one
of those things.
And the tastes.
Yeah, and the tastes.
The food there, you gotta, I gotta have a Euro, I gotta have the mini donuts, and if possible, cotton candy.
Yeah, I was gonna say the smells too, and
I don't
mean in the barns.
I mean, you know, out at the, you know, at the vendors and the food areas.
Depends on where the wind is
blowing.
But great opportunity to get up there, take advantage of it, you know, you got...
It begins tomorrow, you know, you run through Sunday, take advantage of it, take the kids, spend
the day,
or multiple days.
Yes.
And as people listen to this, it will have already happened.
So hopefully you did get there and got to enjoy it.
But that's all the time we have.
I'm Melissa Kay with Wood County Board Chair Lance Plymouth.
Thank you for talking with me today, Lance.
Thank you for having us.
And thank you to listeners joining us for news in our community on Perspective, 1320 AM, 975 FM WFHR.