Good afternoon and welcome to Midday magazine for this May 22nd, 2024.
Have your host James J. Mail off here.
In part two today at 330, we're going to talk to our friends at the ODC and in Ashley
who'll be joining us, looking forward to that.
Right now joining us in studio, our friend Lance Plymo Wood County Board Chairman and Lance
always good to have you with us.
Thanks for being here.
James, I really always appreciate the invitation.
It's something.
It really is something I look forward to every month.
Sometimes I wish we could do it every week.
We also want to send a shout out to our friends at Wisconsin Rapids Community Media.
Do yourself a favor, type in your YouTube search bar.
Wisconsin Rapids Community Media, subscribe to their page and keep up to date and all the
great work that they are doing over there.
And speaking of great work, Lance, at the time we're recording this, we are coming out
of a pretty rough night and a pretty lot of storms.
I know that our station here was affected, both of our stations, I should say.
Our engineering team was working literally into the early morning to try to get us back
on the air.
I didn't sleep last night.
It was just one of those nights.
Lot going on in town.
Good place to start feels like today is how we have handled these storms and how our community
comes together.
Those are interesting nights.
People always ask, what do you do?
There's always an agenda.
You kind of have a timetable of what you want to accomplish the next day.
And then life happens and weather is one of those things that comes up no matter what
you had planned the following day, doesn't always happen.
So it's kind of, it's really interesting, obviously, typically with these types of storms,
we have some warning.
It's common and we're getting prepared a little bit ahead of time.
But it's amazing how many of our departments have to come together and how many intergovernmental
relationships have to work to really get through these.
Just to give you an example, and I can touch on all those who go, you have our dispatch
center and you have Nixelmets who are just going out telling people that this is what's
happening.
Or it's occurring.
You have our Sheriff's Department who's got eyes out in the community telling us what
damage has occurred.
You have emergency management trying to coordinate all that.
You have public information officers.
If it's bad enough, you get the highway department out.
Just pushing trees and debris off of highways.
And then you have all the other people that are just affected, you know, ants literally
to the storm itself, you know, some of those are, you know, might be people that are receiving
some of our other services through our, you know, human services needs or health departments.
But it's really just amazing.
I mean, you think when the power goes out at your house, you know, you grab a flashlight,
TV doesn't work.
I always laugh and I always kid my wife.
I said, I don't kid the TV doesn't work or that we don't have electricity, but it bothers
me that cable's out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Where's my internet?
Which is pretty obvious.
But there's some of those things, you know, that you don't think of when you're at home.
For instance, if the power goes out and you had an emergency, for instance, in a jail
and you couldn't open the doors, I mean, you look at some of the liability that occurs.
So I mean, some of the, even the pre-planning, in the time we spent in the dollars that
gets spent making sure that generators work in their fuel.
I mean, we have battery backup and instantaneous switch over some stuff.
But other things, you got to make sure the generators start and those aren't little tiny
generators, you know, like you have around your house.
And you got to make sure that the switch gear works and all that happens, you got to make
sure you have adequate fuel and you don't know how long the power is going to be out.
Because in the event of emergency, let's say in a jail, where you had to vacuum, you
might have to open doors and do those other things.
So there's, whether it's our facilities manager, who's Ruben Van Tassel, whether it's, you
know, Sean Becker was on the phone with me, our sheriff, Sarah Christensen, emergency management
was texting me last night, I'm on the phone with dispatch.
And it isn't just from our perspective as a county, we're talking right down here in
Wisconsin Rapids, but it goes to Marsfield.
And oftentimes what doesn't affect Wisconsin Rapids really affects Marsfield or vice versa.
And so it's a large area, a lot of coordination to bring all this stuff together.
And my first question was going to be how much, certainly you're speaking to our area
here, how much we talk with and interact with other communities that are going through
something similar possibly.
And it sounds like we, that's a pretty common, it's a quick thing that something that happens
on a regular.
Yeah, you know, there's some places, just on services, there's intergovernmental agreements
and there's other stuff I just call, it's a courtesy and it, to some extent, it's done
just to make communities function because although there's borders with, you know, cities,
villages, towns, you know, all those municipalities and local units of government, frankly, if you're
driving down the highway and you're just a resident, you don't necessarily know when you
came to the end of the city and the start of the town.
And as a matter of fact, the road has to get cleared or you don't get to work.
And I know I spoke to several people this morning that, you know, had to have some trees
removed prior to getting down the road or some of them have somewhat remote driveways,
in a situation so they're late.
And if there are county employees and they, you know, are in one of those, they're all
critical employees.
But if they're one really critical, you're a, you know, a forward facing somebody who
meets the public and you're trapped at your house and now you scramble to fill that position.
So, and there's, you know, 600 plus of us, you know, that work for the county, all work
in an coordinated effort to make sure that these things work.
And then you look at all the damage that occurs and then you have to clean those up.
You know, we have parks all over, those have campers in them, you know, you want to make
sure they're safe, which will, I know you're going to ask me another question, but Segway
is right into, we're building a safe house out at Lake Wazicha specifically for these
instances.
A number of years ago, some of you remember we had, it was like a thousand trees down just
at Wazicha, you know, in that campground.
Some laying on chires, we've had a couple big storms out there on top of campers.
And you know, where do you go if you're in a camp or a tent?
So it was a somewhat extraordinarily expensive project, the vast majority of it funded by,
you know, federal or and or state grants, but we're going to have a safe house out there
where we can evacuate those people in the event we have those warnings in a storm like
last night.
What is the time table on that?
Well, that's a really good question.
It's up, you know, completely enclosed.
I was in there about a week ago, you know, and there's still some interior finish that
needs to be done.
But they were pulling all the electrical lines.
My hope would be that I should have either our parks or emergency management office really
coordinated this, but I'm guessing that by mid-summer, this should be complete.
That would be my hope.
Lance, we, a couple of years back, we, I think most local residents that were here, remember
the storm that hit us, the really bad one.
And it's all I got to say.
I don't even have to give you a date or anything.
Most people know that.
We've had some storm since, and of course, the one we had last night.
Thinking of that first one that I'm mentioning there with that big storm, how much do we,
we learn from these when they happen?
We've got great people that you mentioned, it gave us a great rundown there of the things
that go on overnight or happening when a lot of people are sleeping or is going on right
now even in our community.
I appreciate that rundown and how prepared we are as a community for this.
But what do we learn from these situations as well that we can maybe improve on?
Or hey, this is working really good.
You learn a lot.
And that's the reason we have some of these tabletop exercises there, and then we have some
actual live things.
You'll see occasionally, you're probably a little inconvenience because we shut the
roads down.
We have those victims, so to speak.
We use our emergency responders and how to handle this, but there's a lot you learn.
And the thing I've learned the most, you know, I have the opportunity occasionally when
I wear my other hat at the state level to meet with FEMA or the national security agencies
around the country.
And the one thing they'll tell you in these is no matter how prepared you are, you're
never totally prepared.
And if you test your systems and you go all is good, you didn't test them enough.
So the one thing I get from those people and the one thing we try to expound upon and
bring forth to our different department heads is when we run those exercises, the goal
is to test it till it breaks.
And so if you test it till it breaks, you kind of know where they have weak spot made.
And then you try to shore that up and make it better for the next time.
Communication is key to a lot of this.
You know, we're really lucky.
I was in a meeting about a month ago down in Madison, and I was with the executive directors
of the Towns Association and the League of Minus Palettes and some of these others.
And it's amazing to me in how many counties where those local units of government don't
speak.
And I said they were having a conversation about that lack of cooperation.
And I said, I already have a question for you guys.
I said, how prevalent is that thought?
Because I said, if I have a question, I call the mayor, you know, we have a new mayor,
but you know, Mayor's Eckers, there I'm sure, you know, prior to that, you know, Mayor
Blazer, prior to that, Mayor Vruinc, and I can go back, I can go back a lot of mayors.
I'm getting pretty old.
I'm doing this a lot of time.
But at the end of the day, whether it's those town officials or whether those mayors,
our state representatives, I talked to some or many of them on a daily basis.
And it amazed me and the directors, both of those associations, said, and it may be
a slight exaggeration.
They said, there's about three of those counties in the entire state where you have those
that communication.
I go to counties where they, you know, the board says we don't speak to the sheriff.
The sheriff doesn't speak to the board or they don't, or they don't talk to their legislators.
And, you know, we're lucky.
And you know, a knock on wood on your desk here, which I think is probably more like
Formica.
But at the end of the day, you know, you have the sheriff in here.
He's a great guy.
I mean, you've had our chat school from our parks department in here.
Our emergency management people.
The mayors, you know, this jail project we're doing right now, that wouldn't occurred
without cooperation from the city, where we looked at how do we, you know, build this
contiguous to the current building.
How do we save dollars?
You know, we abandoned the street.
We built over the tap of it.
There were some things that we did for the city, you know, in kind that worked well.
You go to some of these other communities and they don't talk to each other.
And so communications, the key to all of this.
Yeah.
Speaking of Lance Plumblewood County Board Chairman and Lance, with the storms, with what happened
from that, we certainly want to send our thoughts with everybody out there that maybe
without power or anything, we're thinking of you and hoping to hang in there.
You mentioned about planning and how important that is.
And I can't help having my non-us voice in my head.
You want to make God laugh, make plans.
That is one of those simple phrases that we've heard for many years.
There is some truth there to it of the planning part of you.
You're almost planning for the things you can't plan for.
And there's an art to that.
And so much of it comes down to when you can't plan things, you have good communication.
You have, you know the number to call.
You know who's going to be calling you.
Or it isn't introducing yourself in almost wasting time.
It's, they know who you are.
They know, you've already talked with these people.
It's a great note, not only in our community, but I think going forward for other communities,
or even our national government that we could use more of, that it comes back to something
I keep talking about.
And I've been doing for about a good four or five years now that Wisconsin has an opportunity
to be such an example to the rest of the union.
We are such a purple state.
We have so many.
And I'm talking on a national level, but on local levels as well, to the remainder of
the state and even to the, to the union itself of being an example of this, of this is
what happens when you just talk to each other.
Yeah, and it isn't, you know, we talk about units of government often when I'm in here.
It's also school districts and superintendents.
And you know, we have a local emergency planning committee that where we meet with local businesses,
because if the power goes out or if there's a disaster that occurs at one of those, you
know, it could be chemical related, it could be other things.
How do we respond and how do we handle that?
And frankly, you know, in those businesses or in the county itself or in communities,
leadership changes.
So if you think you educated everybody last year, you may have a total change this year.
You know, and I go back and I looked at the, just the unbelievable communication we have
with some of these flooding issues.
Now I can't imagine going back 100 years, but I was in the emergency operations center
a number of years ago.
And you know, you're listening to the radio transmissions.
And by the way, I'm making these numbers up if there's any experts out there.
And I was like, I'm serious, I was like, you know, take the old plane down four inches,
move up, do bay, we can take four more inches, it peat and well, dump some into castle rock.
The dams here are, you know, at crisis levels.
I can't even imagine how you did that 50 years ago or more 100 years ago, because communication
is pretty instant, but those communications happen with not only within our own county
and within our own units government, but county to county.
And then, you know, if we need it to state, and then the federal government eventually
may come in.
But as locals, we need to deliver.
I mean, we're the first ones on the scene.
We're here.
And then it gets further complicated to do a great extent when you bring in, you know,
a national media of something really happens.
And, you know, somebody said the other day, I think we had the, he was the head guy with
the FBI speaking to us and he said, you know, when you have every major network and every
reporter in the country in your community, it's extremely helpful to get the news out,
it's extremely difficult to coordinate.
And to some extent, it hinders a little bit what your response may be.
So, a lack goes into this.
And, you know, we were lucky in this one, you know, my first call to emergency management
last night.
I don't know what time that was.
It was 9 o'clock, 10 o'clock, I, somewhere in that vicinity.
First question always is, is anybody injured that we're aware of?
And obviously we might not be aware of something, but the initial news I got yesterday, both
with emergency management with the Sheriff's Department, was we're not aware of anybody,
any injuries or fatalities or anything to that extent.
So that's the first good part.
And then the property damage, we start to clean up, you know, we assess it, obviously
get out there and clean it up.
And then, looking out the window here at the station, little cloudy right now, but at
some point, I think we're supposed to get some sunshine.
We're hoping for it out a little bit, and that helps the next day.
It is roulette with the weather, that's for sure.
And then there's one other real interesting part in Wood County.
You know, if you're down here in southern Wood County on this side of the river, you know,
everything's sand.
You know, we can get three inches of rain, and tomorrow, you know, you're running irrigation
again.
You get up to the other side of the river towards Marsfield, you get three inches of rain,
and you've got a lot of standing water.
So even the way we deal with flooding issues with drainage, you know, extremely different.
We are speaking with Lance Boulevard County Board Chairman, member.
Lance, you mentioned communication.
You've also mentioned our new mayor.
How is that going, coordinating, working with the new mayor?
Well, you know, I obviously have had, you know, those congratulatory notes back and forth
with the mayor.
He's somebody I haven't known on the periphery for years.
We're trying to get a meeting scheduled here, you know, like in the next week to get together
and really talk about that.
And, you know, one of the things with our new construction project of a jail, our County
board never had a county board rule.
So we're always trying to facilitate our courtroom operations and coordinate those with our
county board meetings and having that with that new facility, there's actually a dedicated
meeting room there.
And that meeting room won't be a courtroom, so to speak, but it's going to be a, you know,
they're a kid in the other day.
They said it'll be a, you know, community room slash County board room and I said, no,
it's a county board room slash community room.
But one of the things we did years and years ago, and I'm going back a long time because
I think probably Mary Jo Carson was probably the mayor.
And Mary Jo would coordinate some meetings in Southernwood County with community leaders
without an agenda just to talk about, you know, what we're doing.
And I've reached out to a number of those leaders recently and said, are you on board if I
start doing that again?
No agenda, no topic I had a time.
Let's just sit down and tell me what you're doing, tell me what challenge is your facing.
And now we're going to have a room here very, very shortly where we can bring all those
people in without going off-site or somewhere else.
So my hope is that we do that because that coordination is imperative just to forget government,
just a good operation.
Yeah.
In fact, I've talked about this with almost everyone of our public leaders, even Senator
Tessin and I were talking about this last Friday.
It's one thing when our high schools play each other, like, you know, there's rivalries
in sports.
We're all for that.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But as far as not working with somebody or not reaching out to somebody or having communication
because you live in a different zip code, those days, I don't know if they ever existed,
but they can't exist anymore.
It's too important nowadays to communicate it with each other.
It's too important nowadays to work together.
We are stronger together.
We see this with our nonprofits.
They get it.
They've understood it.
They understand that if we work together, we can actually do more for our communities.
Our communities, our cities, our city leaders need to understand this too.
And it really doesn't, and I'm actually proud of this.
I think we do do this pretty darn well in this area from everybody I hear from people
like yourself to Sheriff Becker.
It's just something that we have to keep on.
We have to keep doing.
And what a great idea to be able to bring that back.
It's interesting.
I've heard her name a couple of times, Mary Joes.
I've heard a couple of times in just the past month, and it's been noteworthy of the
things that the legacy she had around here.
Yeah, I didn't go back a couple of mirrors ahead of that yet, but you know, it really
is important.
And local government is supposed to be nonpartisan.
Now I've been really lucky in Wood County.
That's the way we approach business.
And we haven't seen that extreme partisan push from either side in the boardroom.
Now generally speaking, I know where somebody maybe sits politically, but it doesn't come
to fruition in the decisions that we've made in Wood County.
The sad part is the further you get, if I call it up the food chain, you would wish
that or hope that common sense would always prevail.
But there are pressures when you get to those upper levels of government.
They say, that common sense we all agree, but if we agree with them, now we've agreed
and we can't agree, and I'm going, but you really need to agree.
Because at some point, common sense comes into play.
I mean, I think everybody, you know, let's take it down to the lowest common denominator.
If there's a tree laying over the highway and the fire department can't get out down
the road, I don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican or an independent.
We got to move the tree.
And when it comes into, well, how do you feel about immigration or abortion or say, we
would come into the decision if we move the tree is ridiculous.
And you would hope that that common sense would come into all of those other decisions.
It doesn't always.
But so luckily in Wood County, in our local politics, we haven't seen that, but we've seen
it in some of the surrounding counties.
The tree is not a Democrat or a Republican.
No, not a legitimate option.
And I say the same thing about this when it comes to diseases or COVID or anything else.
These things do not have an RID in front of their name while we're bickering their winning,
whether it is a tree in the road or it is cancer or it is any of these other things.
These things continue to win while we continue to bicker.
We need to get over that.
We need to get over our politics.
We really do.
Yeah, and we're pretty lucky.
We have really, I mean, our state representatives here at all levels are really great.
They're fantastic to work with.
And I think we work with the community in mind all the time.
But there are a lot of places that doesn't happen.
I get to deal with one of those other hats around the state and I see it.
But so as I sit in your radio station here today, I say, Wood County residents, you're
in pretty good hands here.
Yeah, yeah.
We're very proud of that.
And we want more and more audience participation when it comes to these things.
And by that, I mean, of course, our community being involved with boards and being up to
date on these even attending meetings.
And as certainly keep in mind that when it comes to our Wood County board, you can find
the agenda, the details from these at woodcountywi.gov.
Woodcountywi.gov is where you can find that information and Lance, whether it is some meetings
that you've been a part of already or some upcoming, is there anything we want to end
on here as far as those board meetings?
Yeah, maybe.
Let me just quickly add to when I talk about the people here, you know, our Sheriff's
Department of South Emergency Management, but we've got, you know, 75,000 sets of eyes
out there.
So if you see something out there in a storm like this, let us know.
You know, we're kind of in this process right now, where we start next year's budget
again.
And that always becomes interesting.
You know, we've had some, I'll call it grace with the ARPA money that came through in
the first, you know, last couple of years.
But we're going to be dealing with, you know, a federally qualified health center that
is likely going to happen in Wisconsin Rapids, which will be a huge benefit to the community.
We're dealing with childcare issues.
We're dealing with a 70-year-old HVAC system in the courthouse that needs to be replaced.
We have water issues.
So it's budget time of the year.
It's, you know, where the rubber meets the road because we don't have a money tree.
If anybody out there has one, get a hold of me.
Yeah, yeah.
In Lance, how can they get a hold of you about that money tree?
Well, I'm really obsessed with my number is on the website.
It's in the guide that comes out to the county.
You can probably look me up at the phone book.
Appreciate the old time, Lance.
Thank you again for joining us.
Thanks, James.
I always appreciate it.
Again, find out more at woodcountywi.gov, woodcountywi.gov, and be sure to, if you haven't done
it already, type in your search bar on YouTube, Wisconsin Rapids Community Media, subscribe
to their page, keep up the date and all the things they are doing over there.
Be sure to follow them on social media as well.
Big thank you to all of our friends over at Wisconsin Rapids Community Media.
We'll take eight time out and have more Midday Magazine coming up for you right here
at 97.5 FM, 13.28 WFHR.
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