You are 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 Wednesday September 23rd Thank you for joining me Lance to bring the community an update from the County Board
Thank you very much for having us here.
We look forward to this every month
Well, let's start with an exciting event that just took place what?
for us yesterday, but it happened on September 22nd.
The Safe Haven Baby Box blessing took place at the Wisconsin Rapids Fire Station number two on 17th Avenue.
This is the 473rd baby box in the country, but only the eighth here in Wisconsin.
And it was a very nice ceremony.
We were both there.
And let's just talk about this a little bit.
It was.
And I believe this is, I believe the next closest is in Reisburg, Wisconsin.
So I
mean, it's a little bit of ways.
So this was a monumental effort by many, many people to bring this to fruition.
There were some people, I almost hate to start.
List of names because I'm going to leave somebody out.
But, you know, from a county's perspective, you know, you had Linda Casper, Jeff Penskover, who wears two hats.
Yes.
County and as an alderman in the city.
John Holkamp, you know, who worked on this from the start of former county board supervisor, as well as our health department, Sue Smith and the whole the whole department, our sheriff's department, who agreed to step in if there's a manpower issue over there
because fire
departments are out.
So everybody involved, you know, Ben Goodrow at the fire department.
I mean,
So many moving pieces the mayors are everybody had to come together to get this done and Like most things it tends to take longer than you'd like it to when it involves government But it got done and I think you know, it protects, you know, the most innocent the most precious Provides an opportunity Really for survival
for those
people who are torn as to you know, what they may do and it may not be
you know, advantageous to the life of a child.
So I mean, this is a great opportunity.
I was thrilled to be there.
I made it back about a minute to spare from another event, but it was a good event.
It was well done.
Extremely pleased to see the outcome.
Yes.
And then just to have that option for parents who are struggling and don't have a place to turn or think they don't have a place to turn, the thing that I appreciated when I learned about these baby boxes is that
when they open the door, there's a packet of materials that falls out, that is for them, that gives them options, that gives them counseling options, gives them the option to give the baby in person to another person, like a hand to hand off, or to surrender the baby in the box where the baby will be safe.
I believe the lady who was there said,
the longest a baby has ever been in one of those boxes is under three minutes.
Yeah, it was really quick response.
And like I said, it's just another tool in the toolbox.
And you hate to say, you hope it gets used a lot, but it's there in those crisis situations.
And I believe, and certainly correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they said, was it up to 30 days?
After birth
yes that the safe haven law in Wisconsin was recently changed to extend it from I believe 72 hours to 30 days
So I mean another another great thing and you know in Wisconsin rapids
something
that took a long time to get done And it took a lot of people with a lot of effort.
Yeah
Well, another thing that's been in the works for for quite some time Let's dive into data center conversation the planning commission unanimously recommended to deny the conditional use permit for the PNK group data center proposal on the old craft mail site at their meeting on September 16th So the city is working on a moratorium to pause to or potentially to pause applications from other data center companies while they review the city ordinance Is there anything happening at the county level?
according
According to reporting by Shelley Pittman, 21 Wisconsin counties have implemented a moratorium on data centers.
With another handful talking about passing them this fall, is the Wood County Board looking at any kind of data center moratorium?
All right, so this is a great question.
If I was running my own radio show, this is what I'd be talking about today.
First of all, the county has no oversight on the data center.
Counties, even if they enacted comprehensive county-wide zoning, have no authority over cities.
Ever.
Period, you know, that's kind of the end of the day What's been difficult for counties to some extent is we often don't hear of these projects or any large project until after they are already underway and so the county the county's association in cooperation with our county and others drafted in ordinance that provides for any of those larger developments
notify us prior to commencement of that development.
You say, well, since you don't have any oversight from zoning, what would that do?
Well, it does a couple of things.
First of all, it doesn't typically just affect the municipality in which it's built.
In talking to different communities where data centers have been built or large projects, law enforcement comes into place.
And not that these companies haven't typically paid for or helped provide, but how many people do we need?
How are we going to deploy them?
You know, you bring two to five thousand workers, depends which one we're talking about, into a community.
That creates problems, much of which is even just traffic, believe it or not.
And then there's human service issues that go along with that.
The surrounding towns are affected, you know, their roads are impacted during the construction period anyway.
So this gives us an effect, although we have no say on.
if they build, but we do have an opportunity to sit down and go, there are other considerations that need to come into play before we do that.
So it's interesting in that respect.
The other part of this is there are counties that have adopted some to some extent moratoriums or other rules because they have comprehensive county zoning.
And I've been asked, well, why don't you have comprehensive county zoning?
It's because we can't just zone a town.
They have to come to us and request that.
And then if enough towns request that, we would probably look at, you know, comprehensive countywide zoning.
Conversations prior to this project have been, those conversations have occurred over the past and it's basically been told, you know, we live in these communities.
We live, you know, outside the city so we can.
to some extent do what we want with our property.
And that's where that private property rights versus, you know, the community comes into play.
But in Wood County, the only zoning we have is zoning for our public parks and forestry.
And the whole other rest of the county is zoned, no zoning.
So unless somebody asks you, it's really interesting.
You know, the other part of this is I'm not trying to give a civics lesson, but.
cities, villages, towns operate under home rule.
And what that means from a statutory standpoint is that anything, you can do anything you want that the government at a higher level hasn't told you you can't do.
Okay?
So you can do it if they said no.
At the county level, we can only do it if they've said yes.
So I'll put this in perspective this way.
You've got a teenage son or daughter and they go, I just did that.
And you say, well, mom, dad, you never told me I couldn't.
So if you're the, you know, the municipality, the city, if they didn't tell you you couldn't, you can.
On the other side, from a county's perspective, you have to be specifically explicitly told you can.
So there's a whole different set of rules that come into play.
But we did meet with the Towns Association, our corporation council a week ago, to explain how this might help them in the future.
So no matter what...
what we do at a county level never have any oversight or say on what a city does.
But what has happened in some of these communities is they've needed additional lands to bring these projects to fruition.
So they have annexed the adjacent town property to be able to have the available land mass that they need.
Without zoning, there's no way for those towns typically to preclude that.
So we're looking at, when I say we, we have provided information to the towns as to how they may
proceed down that road in the future.
So that's a long answer to a short question.
But I get amazed, one of our county board supervisors came to me today as well as one of our, not the same person by the way, because there are some that we're both.
Dual roads, yes.
And said, they've been approached by, why doesn't the county just tell the city what to do?
I'm going to make this very clear to anybody listening.
Counties don't tell cities what to do.
Cities don't get to tell counties what to do.
Cities don't tell towns what to do.
Towns Hotel County is what to do.
They're separate units of government that operate
independently.
And we've talked in previous conversations about how well the Wood County Board works with the Wisconsin Rapids local government.
Yeah, it's a hand in glove deal.
I mean, we work with them, you know, daily.
on projects and it's been an exceptionally good relationship.
I mean there's nothing wrong there.
You know something else was brought up a little bit of a segue here quickly but you know I know that one of the things that has concerned communities are non-disclosure agreements, NDAs.
And you say no NDAs makes business development in a community difficult and I'm not speaking in regard necessarily to hyperscale data centers but we recently had a restaurant that's coming into town that had a non-disclosure agreement.
And why did they have a nondisclosure agreement?
Because they didn't want another similar type restaurant to take their idea, find a different piece of property right next door, and build that.
So I guess my question would be when you deal with, I'd call it the unintended consequence.
I think I know what you mean when you say no large, no hyperscale.
You probably didn't intend that to mean a shoe store or restaurant or the others.
But sometimes when you draft those blanket.
you know, rules and regulations, we make statements, it thwarts development in other areas.
And so- What is the definition of large scale?
What's the definition of large scale?
So, you know, so we sit there at that table and those are the things governments tend to think about that sometimes the public might not think about right away, that it doesn't just affect that, it affects others.
So I'm not saying you shouldn't, but I'm saying it's something that you should always think about.
Mm-hmm.
There's a lot to consider.
There's a
lot to consider.
Yeah, it works both ways.
Mm-hmm.
Well, this is a good spot for us to pause for a short moment to hear from our sponsors.
I'm Melissa Kay talking with Wood County Board Chair Lance Plimmel, 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 Plimal and where we left off, we were talking about some of the rules and the differences between what a county can do and what a city can do when it comes to businesses and how cities and counties work together.
You were recently at the Wisconsin Counties Association Annual Conference, which took place on September 20th to the 27th.
Second, in Wisconsin Dells, you were there, right Lance?
Yes, I was there.
I've been the president of the Wisconsin Counties Association, so all those counties for many, many years.
So yeah, I have a fairly large role in those meetings.
So what were some of the conversations that took
place?
basically kind of revolve around all the things you and I talk about.
One of the big issues right now out there obviously is hyperscale data centers,
but
not just the building itself, because I mean, it's a building.
It's what you put in it.
But power, you
know,
transmission lines, how
do you get
there?
What do you do?
Who does the upgrades that are needed?
Yeah, you
know, and, you know, we certainly have disadvantages and in that way, you know, some of them talked about the, you know, building the grid out power we need for other things other than that project,
you know, we have
in many cases a very antiquated electrical grid.
And those updates take time into some in some cases.
tens of billions of dollars to do so I mean those conversations occur and then there's the typical ones that revolve around environment you know clean water air all of those those typically have breakout sessions roles and responsibilities of elected officials those of not just elected but constitutional officers that's in places rights of individuals as it pertains maybe do
Flak cameras might be a good example right now of one of the things they talk about.
There's a whole myriad of things, but the biggest one at the end of the day probably is levy limits, funding, and how do you run local government when those projects, those programs are mandated by the state?
So when I say they can't tell you what to do, county government is an administrative arm of state government.
That's the way we can only do what they
allow us to do or tell us what to do.
So to tell us what to do is provide many of these human services programs that you see out there.
And I think anybody who's been alive for any period of time says that the number of people that we serve has expanded greatly and yet the revenues have not expanded greatly.
So how do you meet the needs of those people with no more money?
So a lot of the conversation revolves around state mandates and how you handle that.
Although we run a state court system up in the Wood County Courthouse,
Rephrase that we run the state system, but we fund the vast majority of
it
and you know That's a I think last year we received an extra 50 million dollars from the state statewide to help alleviate some of that You know cost it doesn't come close to reimbursing the counties for what we spend on a state court system And that's just a very small example There's a lot of programs like that.
They say they say, you know go to Mars and then we say okay, um
How do we do that?
They say, you figure it out.
Go build the racket, figure out how you can get into space and get it done.
And it takes a lot of thought.
It takes a lot of creativity.
But at the end of the day, even on a $150 million budget, I was a little bigger than that, but $150 million, about $30 million of that is something that we have any real say as to where it goes.
The rest of it is all mandated programs, whether state or federal.
And you say, well, $30 million is a fair amount of money.
But now when you start looking at
law enforcement and parks and forestry and and some of the other and many of the other services we provide and the only thing we're allowed to do from a tax standpoint is use levy from net new construction so if you are north of
generally Dane County.
I could draw a line maybe straight across from La Crosse to Appleton.
There isn't any real net new construction.
So there's a lot of counties at the end of the day.
The additional money they have for the following year's budget is another $100,000 or $200,000 to run the entire operation.
And they know that based on whether it be colas within their personnel.
costs or whether it just be health insurance to provide that is eight or ten percent.
So there's no way to do that without cutting programs, except for some of them we can't cut.
Because they're state mandated.
So
those are the times you go home at night as an elected official and go, not sure how I'm going to sleep tonight.
What program do you cut?
Do you take money away from the veteran who's been wounded in one of our operations?
Or do you take money from the disabled child?
You know, I'm personalized.
But those are the decisions.
The one like, there's a pothole.
Do we fill it?
Yeah, pretty easy.
Send a truck out there and fill it.
But there's those that really create some sleepless nights.
Yeah.
Well, it's not an easy job.
And public service is vital to our communities to exist the way we do.
Yeah.
And you know, there's so many programs.
We need to provide.
There's programs we have to provide.
The difficult part, you know, as an elected official, we're seeing this around the state.
And by the way, there were some sessions that deal with this.
There are less and less people everywhere, much fewer than used to want to engage in any public service.
And they don't want to because the lack of civility out there.
You know, I always tell people the loudest person in the room is not usually the person who you listen to at the end of the day.
People.
typically sit in situations where civility is at the core of those discussions.
So when, you know, you don't walk into the governor's office or into one of our congressional offices and start yelling at people, you need to talk to them.
But those people, you know, whether city council right now or others getting calls at 10, 11 o'clock at night, oftentimes obscenity laced yelling at you.
And then when you offer the opportunity to sit down and talk, the answer is no, I don't want to.
And so civil discourse is huge.
And one of
the things we try to talk about is how do we better engage?
And then maybe how do we help educate the public as to how they can have those conversations in a meaningful way?
Because typically people yelling at you doesn't resonate as well as a small group of people, representatives sitting down in your office saying, these are our concerns.
And here's the data and the metrics.
So here's my lesson today.
Build a relationship.
foremost, most important, come with the data.
You know, bring us the data that supports what you want and then be able to tell the story,
why
we should do it.
So if you build a relationship, you have the data that backs it up, you can tell the story, over time you build trust.
You know, and people often ask me, you know, how do you get to talk to a certain elected official somewhere by just making a phone call?
It's because over the years you build those relationships, you build that trust,
you know,
you're not going to get, they know they're not going to get blindsided or, you know, to some extent,
railroaded and somewhat, you can have a conversation.
So I encourage people out there in the community to look at those opportunities and take advantage of
them.
And that is one thing that I do think I've seen here over the course of the last several months where there's been a lot of public engagement obviously with the data center and there's been encouragement from city officials to say thank you for being involved.
Please be civil.
But thank you for being involved and stay involved because we need the public to be involved to know what the public is thinking on what some of these decisions are.
You know, absolutely.
You know, you can call any of those representatives individually and have conversations.
And I certainly do every day.
You know, the mayor doing his listening sessions.
I mean, no mayor is required to do that.
But our mayor in Wisconsin Ramp is a sat down on many occasions.
And I've heard.
and he's been there and he's engaged.
And I've heard some of those meetings be very silly and I've heard some that have kind of gotten out of line.
That doesn't go real far in moving your cause forward.
In
relationships and the next issue that comes along.
But like I said, from the perspective...
right here in Southwood County, I think the city council has sat down and given the public ample opportunity to weigh in.
Now, that being said, on every issue, every place, we don't always get exactly what we want, myself included.
I mean, I get one vote.
I lose sometimes.
And then I think to myself, well, they made a better argument.
They were better prepared.
Water over the dam, I better be more informed and more prepared next time around.
Well, and all of our government officials are only human.
And they only know what they know.
And from what I have witnessed, they are open to more information.
The very beginning back in April when all of this started and Charlie Barron's came to town, a lot of government officials, local government officials were at that meeting.
And they took in that information and they were grateful for it from what I heard as far as
feedback.
Absolutely.
And that's when we go back to, I kind of call it even the way government functions.
And those are great opportunities.
I was at a meeting that were, for instance,
Mayor's asked, you know, to pull the older people in attendance as to how they'd vote.
That's illegal.
I mean, you just can't do that,
you
know, and, and you start, you know, cause maybe that way, not as informed as you might be yelling and going, you need to do that.
I'm going, yeah.
And then all of a sudden you're faced with the $2 million lawsuit that.
Frankly, the city, the county, the towns, it's cool.
It has no way to pay.
So now it's to the detriment of all those other things you want done, roads and the others.
So sometimes if you don't get the answer you want, it's because legally, statutorily, you just can't do that.
Well, and you touched on money.
So let's in our last briefly here, let's talk about budgets quickly.
Your departments are working hard to get those ready.
When is the culmination of all the budget
work?
All of the departments have submitted their budgets to this point.
Some of those are within the parameters that we ask for.
Some are a little outside that.
Some are actually below.
There's actually been a reduction in budget year over year.
So at the end of the day, after all of those committees put all their budgets together, all those departments, they then come to the operations committee.
So it's like a giant puzzle.
We take all of those pieces.
We start to put them together.
And we say at the end of the day, where are we going to be at with the money that we have to spend?
Deficit spending isn't allowed.
We have to operate within a budget.
We don't get to print money.
So at times you have to make cuts that you don't want to make.
Sometimes I have somebody say, well, they had a 10% cut in their budget.
I'm going, I know, but that's a department of two people.
And a department that employs 150 people has a 6% increase.
That's a much bigger effect on the budget than the other one on saving dollars.
But we take all that information, we put it together by.
pretty close to the end of October.
We have to have everything completely done because it has to be published.
And then the county board will meet the second Tuesday in November.
And at that point, we have to set the budget.
There's a public hearing prior to.
And then at that point, we set the budget.
So the budget gets set, the mill rate then will follow.
And you'll kind of know what your taxes are next year.
So I'm going to segue real quick, though.
Power is bluff.
One of those things, 20 plus years of planning.
People ask, why do you plan?
20 years of planning.
Finally had the opportunity to get this done.
And I guess what I want to get
out real quick is there's a ribbon cutting out there and if you haven't had the opportunity to get out to power's bluff and see what's done out there it's Wednesday September 30th so next Wednesday at 1 30
and when you're hearing this it'll be this Wednesday this Wednesday that's
why use the date probably
I never know when
we're in the air on the 30th you know take the opportunity to get out there we had the other day there's a biking event out there
You know, it's kind of that off-road, if I'm generally speaking, off-road type trail bike racing.
We had over a thousand participants.
Wow.
Going all
around the state, thousands of people when you're rolling the spectator.
So a tremendous opportunity to get out there and see what we built.
Wonderful.
And that ribbon cutting is at powers bluff on the 30th.
What time?
1.30.
All right.
And to encourage you, it says on the fly, I mean, cookies and light refreshments will be provided.
Well, it sounds like a good time and a culmination of a lot of years of work to get that done.
20
years of planning.
Mm-hmm.
Well, I appreciate you coming in today, Lance.
I'm Melissa Kay speaking with Wood County Board Chair Lance Plymouth.
Again, thank you for taking the time, Lance.
Thank you, Melissa.
Appreciate it.
And thank you to listeners joining us for news in our community.
On perspective, 1320 AM, 97.5 FM WFHR.
You are 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 Wednesday September 23rd Thank you for joining me Lance to bring the community an update from the County Board
Thank you very much for having us here.
We look forward to this every month
Well, let's start with an exciting event that just took place what?
for us yesterday, but it happened on September 22nd.
The Safe Haven Baby Box blessing took place at the Wisconsin Rapids Fire Station number two on 17th Avenue.
This is the 473rd baby box in the country, but only the eighth here in Wisconsin.
And it was a very nice ceremony.
We were both there.
And let's just talk about this a little bit.
It was.
And I believe this is, I believe the next closest is in Reisburg, Wisconsin.
So I
mean, it's a little bit of ways.
So this was a monumental effort by many, many people to bring this to fruition.
There were some people, I almost hate to start.
List of names because I'm going to leave somebody out.
But, you know, from a county's perspective, you know, you had Linda Casper, Jeff Penskover, who wears two hats.
Yes.
County and as an alderman in the city.
John Holkamp, you know, who worked on this from the start of former county board supervisor, as well as our health department, Sue Smith and the whole the whole department, our sheriff's department, who agreed to step in if there's a manpower issue over there
because fire
departments are out.
So everybody involved, you know, Ben Goodrow at the fire department.
I mean,
So many moving pieces the mayors are everybody had to come together to get this done and Like most things it tends to take longer than you'd like it to when it involves government But it got done and I think you know, it protects, you know, the most innocent the most precious Provides an opportunity Really for survival
for those
people who are torn as to you know, what they may do and it may not be
you know, advantageous to the life of a child.
So I mean, this is a great opportunity.
I was thrilled to be there.
I made it back about a minute to spare from another event, but it was a good event.
It was well done.
Extremely pleased to see the outcome.
Yes.
And then just to have that option for parents who are struggling and don't have a place to turn or think they don't have a place to turn, the thing that I appreciated when I learned about these baby boxes is that
when they open the door, there's a packet of materials that falls out, that is for them, that gives them options, that gives them counseling options, gives them the option to give the baby in person to another person, like a hand to hand off, or to surrender the baby in the box where the baby will be safe.
I believe the lady who was there said,
the longest a baby has ever been in one of those boxes is under three minutes.
Yeah, it was really quick response.
And like I said, it's just another tool in the toolbox.
And you hate to say, you hope it gets used a lot, but it's there in those crisis situations.
And I believe, and certainly correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they said, was it up to 30 days?
After birth
yes that the safe haven law in Wisconsin was recently changed to extend it from I believe 72 hours to 30 days
So I mean another another great thing and you know in Wisconsin rapids
something
that took a long time to get done And it took a lot of people with a lot of effort.
Yeah
Well, another thing that's been in the works for for quite some time Let's dive into data center conversation the planning commission unanimously recommended to deny the conditional use permit for the PNK group data center proposal on the old craft mail site at their meeting on September 16th So the city is working on a moratorium to pause to or potentially to pause applications from other data center companies while they review the city ordinance Is there anything happening at the county level?
according
According to reporting by Shelley Pittman, 21 Wisconsin counties have implemented a moratorium on data centers.
With another handful talking about passing them this fall, is the Wood County Board looking at any kind of data center moratorium?
All right, so this is a great question.
If I was running my own radio show, this is what I'd be talking about today.
First of all, the county has no oversight on the data center.
Counties, even if they enacted comprehensive county-wide zoning, have no authority over cities.
Ever.
Period, you know, that's kind of the end of the day What's been difficult for counties to some extent is we often don't hear of these projects or any large project until after they are already underway and so the county the county's association in cooperation with our county and others drafted in ordinance that provides for any of those larger developments
notify us prior to commencement of that development.
You say, well, since you don't have any oversight from zoning, what would that do?
Well, it does a couple of things.
First of all, it doesn't typically just affect the municipality in which it's built.
In talking to different communities where data centers have been built or large projects, law enforcement comes into place.
And not that these companies haven't typically paid for or helped provide, but how many people do we need?
How are we going to deploy them?
You know, you bring two to five thousand workers, depends which one we're talking about, into a community.
That creates problems, much of which is even just traffic, believe it or not.
And then there's human service issues that go along with that.
The surrounding towns are affected, you know, their roads are impacted during the construction period anyway.
So this gives us an effect, although we have no say on.
if they build, but we do have an opportunity to sit down and go, there are other considerations that need to come into play before we do that.
So it's interesting in that respect.
The other part of this is there are counties that have adopted some to some extent moratoriums or other rules because they have comprehensive county zoning.
And I've been asked, well, why don't you have comprehensive county zoning?
It's because we can't just zone a town.
They have to come to us and request that.
And then if enough towns request that, we would probably look at, you know, comprehensive countywide zoning.
Conversations prior to this project have been, those conversations have occurred over the past and it's basically been told, you know, we live in these communities.
We live, you know, outside the city so we can.
to some extent do what we want with our property.
And that's where that private property rights versus, you know, the community comes into play.
But in Wood County, the only zoning we have is zoning for our public parks and forestry.
And the whole other rest of the county is zoned, no zoning.
So unless somebody asks you, it's really interesting.
You know, the other part of this is I'm not trying to give a civics lesson, but.
cities, villages, towns operate under home rule.
And what that means from a statutory standpoint is that anything, you can do anything you want that the government at a higher level hasn't told you you can't do.
Okay?
So you can do it if they said no.
At the county level, we can only do it if they've said yes.
So I'll put this in perspective this way.
You've got a teenage son or daughter and they go, I just did that.
And you say, well, mom, dad, you never told me I couldn't.
So if you're the, you know, the municipality, the city, if they didn't tell you you couldn't, you can.
On the other side, from a county's perspective, you have to be specifically explicitly told you can.
So there's a whole different set of rules that come into play.
But we did meet with the Towns Association, our corporation council a week ago, to explain how this might help them in the future.
So no matter what...
what we do at a county level never have any oversight or say on what a city does.
But what has happened in some of these communities is they've needed additional lands to bring these projects to fruition.
So they have annexed the adjacent town property to be able to have the available land mass that they need.
Without zoning, there's no way for those towns typically to preclude that.
So we're looking at, when I say we, we have provided information to the towns as to how they may
proceed down that road in the future.
So that's a long answer to a short question.
But I get amazed, one of our county board supervisors came to me today as well as one of our, not the same person by the way, because there are some that we're both.
Dual roads, yes.
And said, they've been approached by, why doesn't the county just tell the city what to do?
I'm going to make this very clear to anybody listening.
Counties don't tell cities what to do.
Cities don't get to tell counties what to do.
Cities don't tell towns what to do.
Towns Hotel County is what to do.
They're separate units of government that operate
independently.
And we've talked in previous conversations about how well the Wood County Board works with the Wisconsin Rapids local government.
Yeah, it's a hand in glove deal.
I mean, we work with them, you know, daily.
on projects and it's been an exceptionally good relationship.
I mean there's nothing wrong there.
You know something else was brought up a little bit of a segue here quickly but you know I know that one of the things that has concerned communities are non-disclosure agreements, NDAs.
And you say no NDAs makes business development in a community difficult and I'm not speaking in regard necessarily to hyperscale data centers but we recently had a restaurant that's coming into town that had a non-disclosure agreement.
And why did they have a nondisclosure agreement?
Because they didn't want another similar type restaurant to take their idea, find a different piece of property right next door, and build that.
So I guess my question would be when you deal with, I'd call it the unintended consequence.
I think I know what you mean when you say no large, no hyperscale.
You probably didn't intend that to mean a shoe store or restaurant or the others.
But sometimes when you draft those blanket.
you know, rules and regulations, we make statements, it thwarts development in other areas.
And so- What is the definition of large scale?
What's the definition of large scale?
So, you know, so we sit there at that table and those are the things governments tend to think about that sometimes the public might not think about right away, that it doesn't just affect that, it affects others.
So I'm not saying you shouldn't, but I'm saying it's something that you should always think about.
Mm-hmm.
There's a lot to consider.
There's a
lot to consider.
Yeah, it works both ways.
Mm-hmm.
Well, this is a good spot for us to pause for a short moment to hear from our sponsors.
I'm Melissa Kay talking with Wood County Board Chair Lance Plimmel, 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 Plimal and where we left off, we were talking about some of the rules and the differences between what a county can do and what a city can do when it comes to businesses and how cities and counties work together.
You were recently at the Wisconsin Counties Association Annual Conference, which took place on September 20th to the 27th.
Second, in Wisconsin Dells, you were there, right Lance?
Yes, I was there.
I've been the president of the Wisconsin Counties Association, so all those counties for many, many years.
So yeah, I have a fairly large role in those meetings.
So what were some of the conversations that took
place?
basically kind of revolve around all the things you and I talk about.
One of the big issues right now out there obviously is hyperscale data centers,
but
not just the building itself, because I mean, it's a building.
It's what you put in it.
But power, you
know,
transmission lines, how
do you get
there?
What do you do?
Who does the upgrades that are needed?
Yeah, you
know, and, you know, we certainly have disadvantages and in that way, you know, some of them talked about the, you know, building the grid out power we need for other things other than that project,
you know, we have
in many cases a very antiquated electrical grid.
And those updates take time into some in some cases.
tens of billions of dollars to do so I mean those conversations occur and then there's the typical ones that revolve around environment you know clean water air all of those those typically have breakout sessions roles and responsibilities of elected officials those of not just elected but constitutional officers that's in places rights of individuals as it pertains maybe do
Flak cameras might be a good example right now of one of the things they talk about.
There's a whole myriad of things, but the biggest one at the end of the day probably is levy limits, funding, and how do you run local government when those projects, those programs are mandated by the state?
So when I say they can't tell you what to do, county government is an administrative arm of state government.
That's the way we can only do what they
allow us to do or tell us what to do.
So to tell us what to do is provide many of these human services programs that you see out there.
And I think anybody who's been alive for any period of time says that the number of people that we serve has expanded greatly and yet the revenues have not expanded greatly.
So how do you meet the needs of those people with no more money?
So a lot of the conversation revolves around state mandates and how you handle that.
Although we run a state court system up in the Wood County Courthouse,
Rephrase that we run the state system, but we fund the vast majority of
it
and you know That's a I think last year we received an extra 50 million dollars from the state statewide to help alleviate some of that You know cost it doesn't come close to reimbursing the counties for what we spend on a state court system And that's just a very small example There's a lot of programs like that.
They say they say, you know go to Mars and then we say okay, um
How do we do that?
They say, you figure it out.
Go build the racket, figure out how you can get into space and get it done.
And it takes a lot of thought.
It takes a lot of creativity.
But at the end of the day, even on a $150 million budget, I was a little bigger than that, but $150 million, about $30 million of that is something that we have any real say as to where it goes.
The rest of it is all mandated programs, whether state or federal.
And you say, well, $30 million is a fair amount of money.
But now when you start looking at
law enforcement and parks and forestry and and some of the other and many of the other services we provide and the only thing we're allowed to do from a tax standpoint is use levy from net new construction so if you are north of
generally Dane County.
I could draw a line maybe straight across from La Crosse to Appleton.
There isn't any real net new construction.
So there's a lot of counties at the end of the day.
The additional money they have for the following year's budget is another $100,000 or $200,000 to run the entire operation.
And they know that based on whether it be colas within their personnel.
costs or whether it just be health insurance to provide that is eight or ten percent.
So there's no way to do that without cutting programs, except for some of them we can't cut.
Because they're state mandated.
So
those are the times you go home at night as an elected official and go, not sure how I'm going to sleep tonight.
What program do you cut?
Do you take money away from the veteran who's been wounded in one of our operations?
Or do you take money from the disabled child?
You know, I'm personalized.
But those are the decisions.
The one like, there's a pothole.
Do we fill it?
Yeah, pretty easy.
Send a truck out there and fill it.
But there's those that really create some sleepless nights.
Yeah.
Well, it's not an easy job.
And public service is vital to our communities to exist the way we do.
Yeah.
And you know, there's so many programs.
We need to provide.
There's programs we have to provide.
The difficult part, you know, as an elected official, we're seeing this around the state.
And by the way, there were some sessions that deal with this.
There are less and less people everywhere, much fewer than used to want to engage in any public service.
And they don't want to because the lack of civility out there.
You know, I always tell people the loudest person in the room is not usually the person who you listen to at the end of the day.
People.
typically sit in situations where civility is at the core of those discussions.
So when, you know, you don't walk into the governor's office or into one of our congressional offices and start yelling at people, you need to talk to them.
But those people, you know, whether city council right now or others getting calls at 10, 11 o'clock at night, oftentimes obscenity laced yelling at you.
And then when you offer the opportunity to sit down and talk, the answer is no, I don't want to.
And so civil discourse is huge.
And one of
the things we try to talk about is how do we better engage?
And then maybe how do we help educate the public as to how they can have those conversations in a meaningful way?
Because typically people yelling at you doesn't resonate as well as a small group of people, representatives sitting down in your office saying, these are our concerns.
And here's the data and the metrics.
So here's my lesson today.
Build a relationship.
foremost, most important, come with the data.
You know, bring us the data that supports what you want and then be able to tell the story,
why
we should do it.
So if you build a relationship, you have the data that backs it up, you can tell the story, over time you build trust.
You know, and people often ask me, you know, how do you get to talk to a certain elected official somewhere by just making a phone call?
It's because over the years you build those relationships, you build that trust,
you know,
you're not going to get, they know they're not going to get blindsided or, you know, to some extent,
railroaded and somewhat, you can have a conversation.
So I encourage people out there in the community to look at those opportunities and take advantage of
them.
And that is one thing that I do think I've seen here over the course of the last several months where there's been a lot of public engagement obviously with the data center and there's been encouragement from city officials to say thank you for being involved.
Please be civil.
But thank you for being involved and stay involved because we need the public to be involved to know what the public is thinking on what some of these decisions are.
You know, absolutely.
You know, you can call any of those representatives individually and have conversations.
And I certainly do every day.
You know, the mayor doing his listening sessions.
I mean, no mayor is required to do that.
But our mayor in Wisconsin Ramp is a sat down on many occasions.
And I've heard.
and he's been there and he's engaged.
And I've heard some of those meetings be very silly and I've heard some that have kind of gotten out of line.
That doesn't go real far in moving your cause forward.
In
relationships and the next issue that comes along.
But like I said, from the perspective...
right here in Southwood County, I think the city council has sat down and given the public ample opportunity to weigh in.
Now, that being said, on every issue, every place, we don't always get exactly what we want, myself included.
I mean, I get one vote.
I lose sometimes.
And then I think to myself, well, they made a better argument.
They were better prepared.
Water over the dam, I better be more informed and more prepared next time around.
Well, and all of our government officials are only human.
And they only know what they know.
And from what I have witnessed, they are open to more information.
The very beginning back in April when all of this started and Charlie Barron's came to town, a lot of government officials, local government officials were at that meeting.
And they took in that information and they were grateful for it from what I heard as far as
feedback.
Absolutely.
And that's when we go back to, I kind of call it even the way government functions.
And those are great opportunities.
I was at a meeting that were, for instance,
Mayor's asked, you know, to pull the older people in attendance as to how they'd vote.
That's illegal.
I mean, you just can't do that,
you
know, and, and you start, you know, cause maybe that way, not as informed as you might be yelling and going, you need to do that.
I'm going, yeah.
And then all of a sudden you're faced with the $2 million lawsuit that.
Frankly, the city, the county, the towns, it's cool.
It has no way to pay.
So now it's to the detriment of all those other things you want done, roads and the others.
So sometimes if you don't get the answer you want, it's because legally, statutorily, you just can't do that.
Well, and you touched on money.
So let's in our last briefly here, let's talk about budgets quickly.
Your departments are working hard to get those ready.
When is the culmination of all the budget
work?
All of the departments have submitted their budgets to this point.
Some of those are within the parameters that we ask for.
Some are a little outside that.
Some are actually below.
There's actually been a reduction in budget year over year.
So at the end of the day, after all of those committees put all their budgets together, all those departments, they then come to the operations committee.
So it's like a giant puzzle.
We take all of those pieces.
We start to put them together.
And we say at the end of the day, where are we going to be at with the money that we have to spend?
Deficit spending isn't allowed.
We have to operate within a budget.
We don't get to print money.
So at times you have to make cuts that you don't want to make.
Sometimes I have somebody say, well, they had a 10% cut in their budget.
I'm going, I know, but that's a department of two people.
And a department that employs 150 people has a 6% increase.
That's a much bigger effect on the budget than the other one on saving dollars.
But we take all that information, we put it together by.
pretty close to the end of October.
We have to have everything completely done because it has to be published.
And then the county board will meet the second Tuesday in November.
And at that point, we have to set the budget.
There's a public hearing prior to.
And then at that point, we set the budget.
So the budget gets set, the mill rate then will follow.
And you'll kind of know what your taxes are next year.
So I'm going to segue real quick, though.
Power is bluff.
One of those things, 20 plus years of planning.
People ask, why do you plan?
20 years of planning.
Finally had the opportunity to get this done.
And I guess what I want to get
out real quick is there's a ribbon cutting out there and if you haven't had the opportunity to get out to power's bluff and see what's done out there it's Wednesday September 30th so next Wednesday at 1 30
and when you're hearing this it'll be this Wednesday this Wednesday that's
why use the date probably
I never know when
we're in the air on the 30th you know take the opportunity to get out there we had the other day there's a biking event out there
You know, it's kind of that off-road, if I'm generally speaking, off-road type trail bike racing.
We had over a thousand participants.
Wow.
Going all
around the state, thousands of people when you're rolling the spectator.
So a tremendous opportunity to get out there and see what we built.
Wonderful.
And that ribbon cutting is at powers bluff on the 30th.
What time?
1.30.
All right.
And to encourage you, it says on the fly, I mean, cookies and light refreshments will be provided.
Well, it sounds like a good time and a culmination of a lot of years of work to get that done.
20
years of planning.
Mm-hmm.
Well, I appreciate you coming in today, Lance.
I'm Melissa Kay speaking with Wood County Board Chair Lance Plymouth.
Again, thank you for taking the time, Lance.
Thank you, Melissa.
Appreciate it.
And thank you to listeners joining us for news in our community.
On perspective, 1320 AM, 97.5 FM WFHR.