Hello world. Welcome to WFHR's rapid support. Probably brought to you by
Crockett Septick for this July 23rd, 2025. Have your host James with you. We're
joined today by Wood County Board Chairman Lance Plymouth. Lance, always good to
see you. Thanks for being here. Thanks James. I appreciate it to be here as well. We
also want to say a big shout out to Taylor and our friends over at Wisconsin
Ravits Community Media being here. We always appreciate you guys. Do yourself a
favor, go to YouTube, type in your search bar, Wisconsin Ravits Community Media,
subscribe to that page and keep up the date and all the cool things that they
are doing in the community. A lot of great new stuff that you guys have been
doing too. I've really appreciated getting that inside look that I personally
love. A lot of the camera angles have been amazing too. You guys have been doing
some great work over there. Check that out. Everybody get on over there today.
Lance, I know how busy you are so I can only imagine how much we have to talk
about today, but I want to keep you all day. So we'll kind of limit this a little
bit. I want to get into some meetings that are coming up and some of that. We've
got a lot of local things happening. Let's rewind a little bit first. We just got
done with the biggest watersky show tournament in the world that we get to
host for 59 years, 59th annual it was. Next year is going to be a big one with 60
of course, but just looking at this one, talking to, you know, a lot of local
leaders, talking to people in the community, seemed like a good one, seemed like
everything went really well. I know our local teams did pretty good too.
Yeah, you know, having been there not for the first tournament, but I've been
going to the tournament since the late 70s. You know, it's a remarkable event. I've seen
that expand, you know, from a couple of days and some people on the beach and a
little bit of enforcement to a really tapnatch tournament. It's really cool to be able to see the
growth. And to see the growth and I was just talking
Taylor to see the municipality, the city and the county, being featured on some of
the different media outlets they have, visit Central Florida comes in and they always
had a camera. We were just talking about this. They had a production trailer in.
They were running multiple cameras, multiple angles in between every show. They were,
all they were doing was talking about the community. What a great place it is to live.
You know, not only the watersky capital kind of of Wisconsin, the world, the biggest
watersky tournament in the world of any kind, but the largest producer of cranberries,
a great place to live in. I couldn't have bought that advertising for hundreds of
thousands of dollars. And it was free. And I think what it really points out is we have a real
lot to offer here that people don't even think about. You know, it amazes me. We've talked,
when I hear people say, there's nothing to do this weekend. I said, really, if I tried to go
to everything this weekend, there's no way in the world I could make it. And then like I said,
we have the largest watersky tournament in the world, a free event to the public, free event.
And I'm amazed at them a lot of people I'll talk to in town say, I didn't even know that was
going on. And I'm going, well, I don't know if that's our fault or if you need to pay a little
bit more attention. But, you know, nobody had a problem spending 30 bucks to go to, you know,
a timey Bartlett or a SeaWorld or some show. And yet you have those shows on steroids right at
your own lake in your neighborhood. And that's just a start of it. You know, powers bluff,
well, you know, with the bike races we've had up there, bringing the competitors from all over.
I understand we have the national BMX championships coming into Wisconsin,
there's something all the time every weekend.
Our area has a lot to offer and we've been able to promote and show that more and more over
the years. And I think that the area has stayed pretty consistent regarding that is also something
that a lot of people have brought a lot of people to the area in that not only businesses as we've
seen in recent years and more and more businesses popping up, but just individually people come into
town and being more and more of that. James, and you bring it into focus. I mean, you're
interrupting, but you know, I'm looking at I'm looking at James across the desk for those of you
watching us at public access. You know, and it says locally grown radio. Yeah, that local news,
that local flavor. I mean, that makes such a difference in the world. So you know what's going
on and you guys certainly help bring that to the forefront. One of the things that I also wanted to
get into and again, real quick, congratulations to everybody involved with the Water Seashore tournament.
Yeah, the Aqua skiers, by the way, local, I'll give them a shout out. You know, with a relatively
small team from a number of competitors, finished second, remarkable. So I mean, almost perfect.
I mean, it was an incredible performance on their part, kudos to them in the tournament as a whole.
I mean, yet I don't know how many actual skiers hit the water. I've heard there's numbers around
2500 between all the teams. And there wasn't a serious injury when you look at not only how many,
but what they do in how they perform. So you know, right down from our Sheriff's Department,
our Parks Department, you know, rescue squads, the tournament committee themselves,
just a remarkable event to that point as well. All the volunteers, a big thank you to everybody
that helps make that go on. And I think you just to the community period. I haven't gotten to
talk to Sean that closely or anything like that, but from what I could tell, no major incidents,
nothing like that. And that's noteworthy when you're bringing that many amount of people coming
into a town and some of those things. That's wonderful. See another congratulate another successful
year in the books looking ahead. We got some great events coming up as well. Also have some meetings
coming up that I wanted to get to and just let the audience know about it. I'd like to do a better
job of this myself personally when we're hanging out with you Lance and just reminding everybody that
there are these public meetings that are going on. And as we hear more and more everybody's got a
megaphone now. Everybody's got a megaphone. It's called social media or a tic tac there on
Facebook. There you name it. And I am in some ways proud of that of our country and what we have
and the freedoms we have in that ability. And at the same time that comes with a responsibility,
want to be a dog in bark. Okay, maybe know something. Go to these meetings, find out some things,
and I encourage that just as much as I encourage people to voice their opinions and be an adult
when you're voicing it. I encourage that. But at the same time, I also I think that covering these
meetings like they're coming up a little bit later today, you've got or no, you already had your
aging and disability resource center meeting. That was this morning. Yeah, that's a consortium we
put together a number of years ago. I actually chaired that committee when we put that multi-county
consortium together. Yeah, you know, provides a portal to all those services that would be provided,
you know, whether it be on that aging site or the disability side. You know, the whole goal was
to have a number you could call, get steered in the right direction, and then for the different
services they provide. And the interesting part of that is we put that together because the cost
obviously keep increasing with everything. We put that together with the hopes that we would find
some, you know, economic efficiency there. And it has. I think last year was the first time we
increased the county's contribution to that in probably 15 years. And the increasing contribution
from a county's perspective was 5%. And that was, you know, spread over 15 years. So,
tremendous amount of work they do. And again, their number is published. If you have any questions,
I'll steer you to the right places and it's a portal. Tomorrow morning, there will be a conservation,
education, and economic development committee meeting at 8 a.m., other meetings coming up,
Wood County Library Board will be meeting tomorrow at 6 p.m., and some other ones as well. You can
find all of these and more at woodcountywi.gov. Woodcountywi.gov. And if you were not able to attend
meetings in person, they do a great job of notes on these. And you can go, of course, you know,
go to Wisconsin Ravits Community Media. They record most of these meetings. You can catch them there.
It's where I do a lot of my homework for these meetings. And we use too many acronyms everywhere we
go. But tomorrow morning at CED, it's the conservation, education, economic development committee.
And one of the things they're dealing with tomorrow is we have a fair amount of dollars that we
allocate every year to different organizations, sometimes communities, to foster economic development
within the community. And we try to allocate those dollars to places that will, at some point,
have a return on investment. And so one of the things they're doing tomorrow is part of that meeting,
or maybe it's, you know, even after that as a separate meeting, is to start to
determine where some of those dollars are going to go. And it's multi-hundreds of thousands of
dollars that go out to help, you know, fuel some of those projects that might otherwise not happen
in the community. And then you, you know, you're touching on some of things like library boards.
You know, running for election isn't always easy. You tend to get lambasted, get criticized.
You have to have pretty big shoulders to sometimes stand there. But there are opportunities
in places like, you know, some of our wildlife committees, our library committees. There's a
whole bunch of those out there, aging disability resource centers. We don't need to be an elected
official to be appointed to those committees. And so if you're somebody out there in the community
that has interest, I would give me a call, send me an email, shoot me a text, do something because
we are always looking for, you know, not just bodies, but qualified and interested bodies
to serve on those different committees, commissions. Because you do make a difference in the community.
It's a great way to make an impact. And it doesn't, I think, to a lot of people out there might
have realized being on these boards more times than not are not a huge time commitment either.
So a lot of them are an hour a month or two hours a month. I encourage people to do that.
It's a game changer for you, as well as for your community to be a part of.
Lance also wanted to talk a little budget with you. As we just got done, again, another note
as I saw from the website here that there were some budget changes to human services and some of that.
How are as budget talks just in general going? It's such a big question of a wide one.
But how was some of that going in recent meetings?
I'm laughing. It's going good. I hate budget time. Like everybody else, I just hate it.
And it's kind of funny because years ago, you know, we counted pencils, paper clips, you know,
stuff like that. You know, my bigger picture is, is the number black or is it red?
Do we need to increase the levy? Don't we need to do that? And so one of the things we do at
county board meetings, and I find it kind of almost laugh at it at times, we have a number of
budget amendments that occurred during the year. And the budget amendment typically isn't necessarily,
it doesn't affect your tax rate, your tax levy, but it's additional dollars that come from the
state or federal government that are earmarked and allocated for certain projects. We actually have
it. We actually have to amend our budget to accept the dollars. So it always amazes me. So we have
to talk about taking 200 grand to run the program. I would get if we had to come up with 200 grand,
but we still have to do that. So, you know, that's part of that amendment reconciliation process,
but we are in that budget process. And I think we're looking pretty good this year. The interesting
part is, you know, nobody wants a tax increase myself, you know, included in that group. But when
you look at, you know, I just look at my service here over the years, the cost to put a truck,
a highway truck on the road, you know, bare bones right now is a quarter of a million dollars.
You can be close to a half a million dollars before you, you know, fit it with all the equipment
that they need to have out there. That's substantial. You know, what it costs to pave just overlay,
a half a mile a road is just unbelievable. And, you know, we try to hold those rates now. And I assume
we're going to be very similar this year, you know, the last year in that respect. We try to never
increase our budget ever more than 3%. But I think if you look at the cost you've had at
home with inflation and some of the others, it's far exceeded that. So it's always a difficult
process. The committees right now are putting together their budgets. When they come up with what they
kind of identify as their greatest needs, it will eventually end up at our operations committee,
which takes all of those different committee budgets, looks at inputs to puzzle together and then
you kind of say, what can we do, what can't we do? Because we also work under some restrictions as
to where our tax rates and levies can go, which isn't bad. But it still makes it difficult
sometimes. Yeah. Appreciate that insight, Lance. It's one of the things that we started this
conversation talking about what a great city we have, how people want to come here, visit,
maybe move here and stuff. That costs money. I don't know how much more I blunt. I could be about
this. I don't know what is going through some people's heads sometimes when it comes to paying taxes
or any of these things. This is the world we live in. This is how things work. Part of what brings
people to this area is the money we have spent on this area, including our roads and some of the
programs we have and some of these things. It costs money. To me, not only do I want to remind
everybody you can't take it with you, but that's what this is all about. This game that we're playing,
this thing of life is about advancing life, making life better for each other, making like
better as a whole, working together among these things. It's not who has the most toys at the end.
It's not who save the most money on their taxes or who's paying the least amount of taxes.
Anybody that every person out there, it's a road that they're driving on right now that is
frustrating them. And you also have a road that is awfully nice. And you know the difference of
these things. That's tax dollars. It's just one tiny example. Yeah. And we look at, you know,
efficiencies. How do we cooperate? Whether it be, you know, the city, Wisconsin Rapids,
the villages, the towns, you know, a great example would be, I'm just using this example. That
doesn't necessarily even exist. But, you know, if Port Edwards bought a woodchipper and the
town of Grand Rapids bought a bucket truck, neither one of those uses those 365 days a year.
Do both of them need to have both of those pieces of equipment? And by the way, this,
that doesn't mean they even have those as you just as an example. But why not share those? And you
can bill out the hours you use those. And so, you know, we look at that. How do we make that happen
across the board? If two communities have a bike trail that doesn't connect and there's a quarter
of a mile between them, how do we bring that together? How do we find dollars to make that
that whole thing come together? Which benefits and enhances the quality of life in our area.
So we look at those quality of life issues. And when we have people come to town, they go,
you know, where's your pool? Where's your skate park? Where's your BMX track? Where's your,
you know, what do you have out at the lake? Besides the things like education and transportation,
I can tell you our highway department's done a remarkable job on that. If you see a road that
needs improvement in the area, it's probably not one under our jurisdiction. It's usually a state
highway. And it's kind of funny right now. The other day, I actually tried to drive up 73 from
Rapids to Marsfield. Don't try it. I went around the first two barricades kind of seeing what they
were doing. Don't do that either. But I got to the third when you're going anywhere. So the point is,
you know, those just as an overlay, you can be in excess of a half a million dollars a mile.
Now think about that. That's a lot of dollars when you have a road that's 25 miles long. And that's
one. So yeah, the money doesn't go as far as you'd like. Obviously, we try to, you know, use your
dollars as effectively and efficiently as possible. And then people say to me, well, why don't you
save a bunch of money? And then when you have it, spend it later. And I'm going, well, that means
I'd take the money out of your pocket, put it in mine and hold it until I may need it. I'd rather
come and ask you for it when we have a project such as the jail. Right. And you team me up perfectly.
I was trying. Nicely done. Nicely done. For what I was going to say, sometimes you do have to spend
money to save money. And that's not a phrase I think that is common enough. But that's what we
did with our jail, where we spent a good chunk of change here. But we also did it to prevent us from
having to spend, you know, bleeding money, really. Yeah. It just cost about 20 million over the
cost of 20 years. And, you know, for those of you many of you had the opportunity to do that jail.
But what amazes me is obviously we have people in car straight and you see them in cells. But you
don't see is what happens behind the scenes. I mean, the size of the kitchen and that operation
to feed that many people three times a day, 365 days a year is incredible. And then you look at the
laundry. I mean, you think of yourself, there's a cell. And what else have they spent a money on?
And then you start looking at intake and monitoring and the laundry and the food operation. And
it's a huge operation. And yet all that being said with the way we can now monitor prisoners with
the pad situation, we're not transporting. We were looking at, you know, a new facility versus the
upkeep on the other one. The cost savings over that many years was about 20 million dollars. So
that's significant. And leading into that wrapping up with you that is Lance, the Courthouse Project
wanted to touch on that, how that been going. Going well. So there were probably, we got a big HVAC
system upgrade there. So we had boilers in the courthouse from the 50s, way past their life
expectancy. You know, originally that courthouse didn't have air conditioning. They put air conditioning
in. At that point, they sealed the windows. Couldn't open those. But then as that as our HVAC
system, it's been nice to open the windows some days. But that couldn't happen. And so we have
an upgrade going there. And that's about a $3.5 million project to redo that. But those boilers are,
you know, 70 plus years old. And then you have to do all that. And we have a similar situation up
at our Northwood County Health Annex, Norwood. Most of you would know that is where we had an issue
there with piping, some of the old pipes corroding stuff with that. And that's a $3 million project
to take care of that. But again, when you have people housed, you know, 24 hours a day, seven days
a week, 365 days a year, project has to get done. So that's where your text comes. They're going
amongst some of the things you see out there with the parks and some of the other things that
everybody uses. Well, in earlier, you said a line that there was a good comment on, you know, you
couldn't pay for that kind of advertising. What price would you put on safety? What price would
you put on a safer community, a safer safer, safer for our law enforcement, safer for the people
in there, all the above. And then you say something like 20 million, you put a number out there
like that Lance. And that's not just add that's added on top of that. You know, that's that's the
icing on that safety cake I'm talking about. And those are things that I think that most people
can get behind and most people get around to. But I also encourage people that, you know, if you
have questions, if you have thoughts or feelings or anything like that, we always like to talk about
this stuff. That's what we do as a community. Lance, if people have followed questions or one
or no more about some of what we talked about today, how can they reach you? Well, my number is in
the directory. You can go to the Wood County website or you could just Google my name, even but
my numbers at the directory, my phone number, it's my cell number, my home number, my email address,
it's all right there. In the easiest way to find is just use any search engine you want. And I
happen to, I guess I mentioned one by name, but, but if you just type that in, you're going to find
it. Yeah, yeah, it'll pop right up. Wood County, you'll find me. And speaking of, you can go to
woodcountywi.gov to find more of the information of what we were talking about earlier and some other
great information there about meetings and public notices and that be sure to bookmark that web page
woodcountywi.gov along with going to YouTube and subscribing to Wisconsin's Rabbids Community Media's
page. Get on over there. Do that. Check out some of the great videos that they have over there.
It's some really good stuff and really good information. Appreciate your quick counter. Make sure
it's woodcounty Wisconsin. I had some calls last week about woodcounty Texas and woodcounty Ohio
that don't relate to us. No, no, and not nearly as good of a media team. Not nearly as good.
None, none, none against them, but not nearly as good as I was. What are you doing about the
flooding? I'm going, you're in the wrong stage. We appreciate you guys. Thanks for the time.
And thank you, everybody, for joining us for another edition of WFHR's Rapids Report,
proudly brought to you by Crocodceptic here at WFHR, locally grown radio.
