Welcome, everyone, to Midday Magazine for this February 8th, 2024.
Have your host, James Jamel, off here.
At 330, we're going to welcome in our good friend, Laura Huber,
for H Educator with UW Extension Madison.
Talk a little for H with Laura.
Right now, we have in with us,
Merrill Candidate, Matt Zacker.
Matt, good to have you with us.
Thank you, James.
Thanks for having me.
Got a couple of questions for you, Matt.
And they are going to be the same questions
that we asked our other candidates.
For those that don't know, we have a primary being held
on February 20th and narrow down the field to two candidates
for our Wisconsin Rabbids mayor.
We have four possible candidates.
This will get down to two after February 20th.
Mayor Blazer and I have sat down many times
and talked about this.
And one of the things that is noteworthy
and is going to be a little different for you, Matt,
than our other candidates is that you got an endorsement
from currently sitting Mayor Blazer.
So I'm curious, before we go too deep into things, Matt,
what that endorsement means for you
and did you handle things any differently
with the campaign?
No.
The campaign is I'm going to run a full-on campaign.
And I have told many people that's already like,
let's just say I get elected.
And if I make through the two-year term,
if I run again and nobody runs against me,
I'm going to run the same full-on campaign
because I'm not going to take the residents and voters
for granted.
Run on.
With Shane.
Shane and I knew each other from when our kids
were in karate and just learned about what we were doing
and helped each other through business ideas
and just bouncing ideas off each other.
And over the years, we've just grown in that sense.
And when there was an opening to run for council,
he kind of talked to me about it.
And I was interested.
And my wife was interested.
She knew I was kind of gearing up towards that kind of thing.
And I worked towards it.
So I appreciate the fact that Shane is putting the trust
in me to take the reins again.
And I'm definitely going to bust my tail
to make sure that I don't let him down.
Or if you, I have a few other endorsements
I'd like to throw out there.
Our previous mayor, Jerry Bach, has endorsed me.
Our previous mayor, Mary Joel Carson, has endorsed me.
Our sheriff, Sean Becker, has endorsed me.
Kurt Hoyer, who I respect greatly for the work he's done
in the community has endorsed me.
I've had older men, current older men
that are working with me through these things.
And a lot of businesses are really reaching out
and helping me learn the ropes here.
When it comes to that, not talking to the politician
Matt, talking to the human being Matt,
what does that mean to you to get those endorsements?
Well, I'm just a human Indian.
I'm a guy that grew up from being a kid.
And you always want to work hard and get some recognition
for what you do.
But in the end, there is a time when I came to the understanding
that that's not always going to be there readily.
It's not what I would say in America.
It's not necessarily how we work hard.
And you just do it because that's what you do.
But then I was talking with my wife, Jenny, the other day.
And she says, well, wouldn't you think
that all of these people are saying, hey, good job.
It's got to be pretty humbling.
We trust you.
Yeah.
And it's very humbling.
And I appreciate that from everybody.
Let's get to know you a little bit, Matt.
Tell us a little bit of your background
where you're from, some of that.
So I was born in Milwaukee, but moved to New Berlin.
Outside of Milwaukee, grew up in New Berlin,
went to Wachshaw Catholic Memorial for high school.
After high school, I joined the military
and it up in 101st Airborne.
Did a little under two years in Desert Storm.
After that, I pretty quickly was
able to get out a little bit early after the Desert Storm
and started at UW-Milwaukee.
I finished my master's degree in social work juvenile
corrections in about five years and started
working different jobs as a correctional officer.
And then went into a couple of different programs there.
We did an awesome one in Utah where
took kids out into the wilderness
and was a different alternative to go into the institution.
Because I'd been in the institution,
certainly it's hard to reach them when they're in there.
And then I ended up traveling overseas for a little bit
doing some backpack in there because I had the time to do it.
When I got back, I took a job at Messmer Preparatory
Catholic School in Milwaukee.
That's where Jenny and I met back up.
She was in the Peace Corps for three years.
And decided to get married and bought a house there
and started having children.
And that's when we found a place up here
because we were out growing that area.
We had Martin at the time, Lydia and the way Simon came soon
after and Vivian came four years later.
We moved up here.
I was at first looking for work in social work,
probably at the county level.
But I also had the opportunity to join Express Recycling,
which was in its early stages about five months in.
And in reality, that's what I wanted to do.
But at the same time, I wanted to buy my time
to be able to do it properly.
What I did was able to join with my father-in-law, Joe Kazeki,
who and mother-in-law, Pekazeki, who started the business.
And they were nice enough to allow us to join and kind of
buy in over time.
And then we were able to buy them out
when they wanted to retire again.
Now it's me and my brother who are married to Jenny and Anne
who are their daughters.
Right, that's awesome.
Keeping that circle pretty bright.
That's pretty cool.
And then we, from there, that's 18 years ago.
So we've been growing that business ever since.
We're up to 12 people.
These guys and girls are phenomenal.
And they're the ones that are allowing me
to do it to run for mayor and take the chance
and the risk with their support.
Let's go write a piggyback off of that.
Why run for mayor?
So yeah, again, I went to each one of the folks
in that business and express recycling aside.
If you guys say no, if you don't want me to lose that time
with you guys and they all said, yes, we got it.
We'll take care of it.
So they are running the show and taking care of the people
properly.
It's all express recycling is taking a step back,
looking at the credentials and the things that I've done.
I never really made a decision in my life
that I would do service work for my career path.
But in the end, most of it is.
And even outside of having a for-profit business,
but that business really revolves around service
for the community and reaching out, taking care of people,
building relationships.
And we did expand into Steven's point.
And then we built a processing center across from Skate
sitting at 36th Street.
And it's been great.
And that's where we're able to bring these people in.
And it takes a while to find the right people.
But we found the past people we could possibly
be so thankful for.
What makes you qualified for the position?
What do you feel you can bring to the position?
Well, I would say just by the nature of how God built me,
I've always been a person that strives for integrity,
I guess.
And through that, it's driving for integrity people,
ultimately trust you.
And in business, you got to be trustworthy
and social work, you have to be trustworthy.
If you want to make any progress.
And then getting into being an older man,
I did do some time with the Chamber of Commerce,
being on their board and chair of the board for a couple of years.
We also, from 2010 to 2020, Dean Vanemann and Mike
Urminski and myself started a non-profit 501C
through called Sustainable Operations and Recycling.
We did a lot of great things,
never blew up into anything huge,
but we were able to do some things outside of the for-profit realm.
And I certainly learning about how a non-profit runs
and what it takes to do that.
And so all these things have been built on relationships.
And I see that running the city, for three years,
being an older man, being in the committees,
being the chair of the Finance and Property Committee
for the last two years, it's all about building relationships.
People don't trust you, they're not going to talk to you.
And I feel like there's been some stuff
said lately, again, social media is what it is.
It's you got to keep it at arm's length.
But at the same time, it's out there.
And depending on who's listening to it,
they could either be learning good stuff
or they can be learning a lot of stuff that's not even true.
But they don't know any different because it's social media.
But at the same time, there's been stuff
that's out about special interests.
And I think what's being portrayed
is that I'm some kind of a special interest kind of person.
And I'm like, well, that's interesting.
Because in the end, I'm just a guy.
And I built relationships with my family
with the people that work for us so that they trust enough
to keep everything going while I'm doing this.
You work with the other older men, you work with the mayor,
you work with all the department ads,
you work with the businesses in the community,
whether they're bigger, small, doesn't really matter.
All the residents, it's a huge responsibility.
I do feel like it's above and beyond what I've done
up to this point, but at the same time,
everything I've done has uniquely qualified me
to take on this role at this point in time.
And I look forward to the effort.
It's 230 employees, $42 million budget.
It's bigger than what I've done before,
but I'm willing to take it on.
And I think that for sure, I'm the guy
that's gonna do it and do it well.
Speaking with a mayoral candidate, Matt Sacker
and Matt, just one last question for you.
What is or is there anything specific
or any specific actions you would like to take
to improve the city going forward?
Or is that something that you're kind of gonna wait
and see, you have to kind of be in the job to do,
to find out?
Well, there's a few platform things that I wanna,
that I can go across.
And again, these are things that I've just always been there.
And things that I've actually worked on
through the chamber and in other ways,
trying to work with different groups in the city.
But the first one is be able to take a deep dive
on the departments without micromanaging again.
It comes down to relationships.
I'm not here to, I think everybody means well.
And everybody works hard to do the best they can
in that position.
So when I say take a deep dive,
I'm just very fiscally conservative.
I've always been that way.
Ultimately, I think everybody should be that way.
I think our community needs to be as financially sound
as possible as we move into these next decades
because I have no idea what's coming from the top down.
So I'm gonna do that and we're gonna find out
what we can do to get our new road construction
inside the operation budget and see if we can expand that
so that we can get more of these roads done.
Keeping in mind for everybody listening,
there are state roads that are out there
that are not necessarily a responsibility.
But, and they're in rough shape,
but we do what we can to make sure
that people can keep driving on them
until the state takes action on those,
which will come in the future at some point in time.
Any final thoughts, Matt, before we let you go?
Yeah, just to say what we,
there's a few other things.
One is that I want to bring together the people
of the community and the people working in the city.
There's a divide in there and not everybody realizes it,
but the closer we can come together and say,
we are working on the same page.
Like, we all need to be understanding each other
and learning what needs to be done
and then working together.
So we're not badmouthing each other
behind the scenes and all those things.
The third thing that I want to really dive into
is how to bring the schools, the MSTC,
the Chamber of Commerce, the city,
the foundations that are in town
and bring the right people together
to build a more comprehensive entrepreneurial program
for young people, you know, and adults
that we need to know how to handle our finances,
we need to know how to look at the world
and go after things that are bigger
than just Wisconsin Rapids,
because it ultimately is a one world right now
and we can have jobs here and build our, you know,
our income based, you know, for the people here
while working outside of the community.
And the third, the fourth thing would be to just stay
in touch with, and like pleasantly be pleasantly assertive
in the whole realm of what's going on with the mills
because we do not want to be stuck with empty buildings
and when it's all said and done.
Again, it's outside of our realm to the most part,
but if you can just kind of assert yourself
and be involved in the conversation,
you hope, you know, you have a better chance
at making things turn out to be good.
The primary for Wisconsin Rapids mayor
will be held February 20th, you can find out more
and the information you need to vote get out there
and vote, be informed and vote everybody go
to wirapids.org for more information
to find out where you're pulling places
and plenty more at wirapids.org.
Matt, thank you again for the time.
Thank you for the time James, nice to meet you.
Good to meet you too.
We'll be back more midday magazine coming up right here
at WFHR, locally grown radio.
Good afternoon, I'm Melissa Kay,
and this is an interview where I spoke with Nikki Lucht,
community health planner for the Wood County Health Department.
We're discussing the community health assessment survey results.
This survey took place in Wood County
between September and December of 2023.
We spoke on February 1st,
and here is the interview.
So the collection process,
you said you received more the most responses ever.
And why do you think that the responses increased
so much this time?
Did you use a different process?
Did you have it on different platforms?
How did that play out?
So I think the big difference this time around is we,
well, we set a huge goal for ourselves.
We set a goal of 3000, which was a super lofty goal.
But my supervisor is always the one reaching for the stars.
And I was like, oh my goodness,
I don't know if we're gonna get that.
And we did, we exceeded that.
But I think two of the big things,
we reached out to a lot of community partners
who then sent something email out to their list serves
or put flyers out.
We even did some of our staff almost
in canvassing in a way.
They would go to different businesses,
see if they would have some flyers that they would set out.
And then we have community health workers
through a grant right now.
And those are folks that typically live within the community
and have a relationship with a lot of people in the community.
So we have two folks in the Mung community
to in the Hispanic Latinx community
and two from the whole chunk community.
So those are populations that we might not have had
a strong relationship before.
But now we have a staff who live within those communities
and are from those communities.
So they have that trust
and we're able to reach out to people
that we may not have reached before.
And then the last thing,
we also did a lot of vaccine clinics
through some funding
and those are at different businesses.
And factories.
So we had our community health workers
bring paper copies to those.
And we got a lot of responses at those as well,
which is really great.
Awesome.
Did you find some reticence to respond to the questionnaire?
Whether it's paper copy or online
with people being worried about sharing information?
No, not really.
We don't really ask much identifying information.
There is a demographic section,
but no way to tie it back to a person.
Honestly, the biggest reluctance was just around
how long it was.
And we really did try to cut it down this time.
But for folks who are filling it out in person,
the paper copies we definitely heard
that it would be better if it was shorter in the future.
So we'll work on that.
Well, it's hard to gather the scope of information
that you're looking for and make it shorter.
Exactly.
Sharing the draft that you did with me,
it's impressive the amount of information that you collected.
Yeah, we do it every three years.
It is a requirement by the state of Wisconsin
through the Department of Health Services.
So health departments have to complete it once every five years
and hospital have to complete it as a requirement
from the IRS and they have to do it over three years.
So we've actually partnered with Marshfield and Aspirus
so that we can all work together
and have a joint effort in doing that survey
instead of all three of us doing our own separate surveys
and over-serving the community.
Trying that to duplicate efforts.
That's smart.
So this is really helpful data that we can then share
with community partners, places like United Way, for example,
and that can help shape some of the programs
that they are offering and see where the needs really are
in the community.
And this is all from folks out in the community,
not just us looking at secondary data
or us just kind of what we see.
It's really getting the voice from the community members
and they know best what concerns they have.
Now, one of the things that you responded in here
that the top concerns, residents should have the strongest voice
when it comes to decision-making.
What do you mean decision-making regarding what?
So decision-making, regarding implementing
and creating our community health improvement plan.
So from this data, we create a community health assessment
report that is really just a compilation
of all of the data, shows kind of the top health issues
and concerns in Wood County.
And then from that, we will develop what's
called a community health improvement plan
or we refer to as a chip.
And that's really our strategic plan
that guides our work for the next three years.
So that's where we create the different objectives
and activities that we as a health department
and then the hospital systems also will work on
in the community for the next three years.
So trying to gather as much info as we can
from the community to know, these are the top issues
and these are the strategies that we think would be helpful.
So looking at some of those top issues,
mental health, suicide, drug use,
job, liable, livable wages.
Now those first two obviously pertain
to the health care community, hospitals,
wood care health departments,
or are you still developing the plan
to tackle some of these issues?
That may mean these ones have been ongoing for decades.
Yeah, mental health and substance use
always rise to the top,
at least they have in our last few cycles of this,
which are big, big issues.
However, there really has been a shift
in the public health world.
And I would say even the health care community
to tackle these bigger determinants of health
that we might have thought of before as impacting health,
but they really do.
So things like the income, jobs with livable wages.
If you don't have a job that's paying you
enough money to cover your basic needs,
you probably aren't worrying about getting to the gym
to get an exercise in.
Or you're not thinking this food is healthier than this one.
You're just thinking like, what can I buy
with the wages that I have this week
so that I still have enough left
to cover the rest of my bills?
So things like transportation, economics,
those bigger things housing have really rose to the top
as more people are realizing the impacts they have on health.
And I think COVID, the pandemic, really
brought that more to light for a lot of people
too when we saw a lot of the struggles
because of those issues.
So do you feel that the, I don't want to say responsibility,
but maybe the scope of what health care means
and what the health care industry does
is going to broaden as some of these things
come more to light?
I think so.
I think it, I mean, it'll be a slow shift likely.
But I know like one thing that we have been trying
to figure out with health care partners
is around transportation.
You know, a lot of people are missing appointments.
We're not able to get to their appointments
because of the lack of transportation.
So is there a way that we can partner as organizations
and try to improve that?
You know, I think that's probably something
that will come to light in our next cycle.
Like I said, we haven't completed the Community Health
Improvement Plan and that strategic plan yet.
But that is an issue that we have been working on.
I know in large places, you know,
our bigger cities outside of Wisconsin,
but some of those health care systems
have focused on things like economic development
or even housing.
So that's a big thing.
Because affordable housing and safe housing
is hard to come by.
Yeah, absolutely.
That one is another one that rolls to the top
as one of our big issues to here in Wood County.
And as we're having more open conversations
and discussions around mental health
because I do feel like that has really shifted as well.
And maybe the pandemic played a role in that
to some extent, but I think it's just becoming more,
like this is an okay conversation for us to have.
As far as, that's a good first step,
but then trying to get an appointment
to a mental health care provider,
it can take three months or more
before you can even get in.
So how is that to, you know,
are we just gonna hire more mental health providers?
Do we need more people going to school for mental health?
What do you see?
I can't tell you the answer for that one.
I'm not exactly sure.
I can tell you that the data does show
that Wood County has improved and gotten,
so when you look at the ratio of population
to mental health providers,
Wood County has improved in that measure every year,
over like the last 10 years, I believe.
So we are making progress.
It's still not enough.
We still are seeing mental health come to the top,
but we're trying to look at other things outside of
just those individual appointments
that might impact health or your mental health.
Like we have what's called like a storytelling group.
And I don't leave that group,
so I don't know a ton about it,
but I know it talks about how to share your story,
how to talk to other people about mental health.
We try to focus on policies and systems.
So do workplaces have policies
that allow people to take sick time
if they're having a bad mental health day?
Are workplaces supportive of that?
Do they have the EAP or things like that?
So what is EAP?
I believe it's an employee assistance program.
Oh, okay.
So through a lot of those,
you can often get appointments before or until
you're able to get them through your provider.
Okay.
I know through Wood County,
our EAP sends out like monthly newsletters
that have different tips and things like that.
So there's a lot of different small strategies
outside of just going to a provider
that can also have an impact.
There was a part of this survey
that I was surprised by and enjoyed reading
was the best parts of Wood County.
So it was nice to include some very positive in there.
And the top three that I noticed
were the size of community,
being near friends and family
and then the parks, trails, and green spaces.
I thought that that was,
what was the purpose in including,
not obviously it's a positive,
but what was the purpose of including those questions
in the survey?
Yeah, so we call those like our strengths or assets
and trying to think,
we have these are top health issues,
but here's our strengths.
How can we maybe take some of those strengths
and take, combine that with the issues
to help put some energy towards that?
So one that I can think of potentially
would be around obesity.
One of our strengths is the parks and the trails.
How can we capitalize on those to help tackle obesity
for example?
Mm-hmm.
Well, and I know that there are some initiatives
that I've seen more recently,
like the library offering free passes
to state parks and things like that.
Is that kind of, I mean,
I know our parks in the city are free and the trails are free,
but don't you have to pay for like a bike pass
to have ride a bike on the trails?
Yes, you do our bike share program.
We do have different campaigns sometimes
where you can get a free ride,
but yes, there is a price for that.
That would be, we could partner
through some of those local organizations
to offer some more free rides
to even get people to see like,
oh, you know, just ride once and see,
oh, if there's something that they really like
and maybe they'll be willing to pay for it in the future.
Well, is there anything else that you want to share
with me that we didn't cover?
I think the biggest thing would be
if people are interested in following this work
or want to get involved, we have a website.
If you just look up healthy people would county,
you can find us.
We have a Facebook page and Instagram page
and we also have a website,
HealthyPeopleWoodCali.org
and we'd love to have anybody who's interested
in joining, come along.
Great.
Well, I really appreciate you taking the time
to speak with me today.
Yeah, no problem, thanks for having me.
