April 13, 2023 at 11:22 a.m.
River News: Our View
Progress, but miles to go before they sleep
Then, we'll nicely nudge supervisors on some areas that still need to be worked on. This is what we call a Smiley Face Our View.
Let's start with the budget. One of the worst things the county did - and they did it for years - was dip into the general fund to pay for ongoing operating expenses. That is to say, they used non-recurring funds to pay for recurring expenses.
That's a big no-no, but it was a signature of Dave Hintz's disastrous tenure as county board chairman. The man was in way over his head, and, worse, he was tone deaf, refusing to listen to what people told him but bowing and pandering in the very presence of then corporation counsel Brian Desmond.
They don't call it boot licking for nothing.
OK, back to Smiley. Since then we have a new board chairman, Scott Holewinski, and a new budget approach, significant if only for the fact that it stopped that highly unwarranted practice. That at least provides a foundation for sustainable, fiscally responsible budgeting in the future.
Along with Mr. Holewinski is a capable board of supervisors, which, by and large, is more conservative than predecessor boards. Maybe that's why the budget was fiscally sound for once.
Also notable has been the election of four women to the board, and especially conservatives such as Diana Harris and Debbie Condado, who have put their own imprints on policy. Condado, to cite just one example, led a successful and important effort last year to block the use of ARPA funds to promote the Covid vaccination of children.
Not that Mr. Holewinski is without flaws, as when he tried to get county voters to approve a million-dollar tax hike for highways. But one must judge a person by his whole record, not the one morning he fell off the porch and hit his head, and the board in total, and Mr. Holewinski in particular, are standing up for property owners and citizens in a departure from the persistent pattern of the past, which was to stay beholden to the state and to special institutional and identity group interests.
This shows most of all in Mr. Holewinski's effort to oppose the state from taking control of ever more private land in the county, including the Pelican River Forest easement, which would condemn generations in the north to poverty and stagnancy.
Beyond that, Mr. Holewinski and the county zoning committee have fashioned a package of progressive zoning amendments to streamline permitting and allow property owners reasonable use of their property, all the while maintaining important safeguards for our natural resources.
None of these are insignificant. As we move toward another budget year, too, we are told that Mr. Holewinski, administration committee chairman Billy Fried, and finance director Tina Smigielski have some creative ideas for reforming the budget process, which likely would be a step forward.
Speaking of bureaucrats, of which Ms. Smigielski is one, our readers know we are not too fond of many of them. Nothing personal, of course, just their position in life. But we must say that the cadre of bureaucrats in the Rhinelander courthouse has improved tremendously.
Ms. Smigielski seems to be a rock-solid and positive force there, and the improvement in the corporation counsel's office is like night and day. While we do not always agree with corporation counsel Mike Fugle, he is always open to dialogue and accessible and his open records responses have been a gift from Heaven compared to those of Brian Desmond, whose automatic response to an open records request was to drown every record in a sea of redaction.
Of course, there are the long-time mainstays of good and open government - sheriff Grady Hartman, zoning director Karl Jennrich, social services director Mary Rideout - who, again, while we may not agree with them all the time, approach their jobs honestly and openly.
We've probably left somebody out, apologies if so, but the gist of this is that, since the last board election, the trend in Oneida County government is a positive one. We urge voters to let them know that, and also attend meetings when they can to lend support in a time when out-of-county special interests attempt to hijack the process by sending the same 30 people to meeting after meeting and proclaiming that they speak for all the county.
Now just a few areas where the board can improve things - you know we couldn't resist.
First, let's take a look at that budget. In today's edition, we report on concerns aired at the administration committee about the sudden appearance of "must-have" capital improvement projects that never appeared in a five-year plan. As supervisor Steven Schreier observed, that is disruptive to long-term planning and it's costly to taxpayers in the long run. That ship needs to be tightened up.
On another budget matter, the very fact that property taxes rose by almost half a million dollars in the last budget is a red flag. An even redder flag is that the number of county employees rose.
It wasn't by much - from 295.98 full-time equivalent employees to 296.63 - but that it grew at all is the wrong direction. One of the curses of Oneida County has been an unwillingness to cut non-core programs the government has no business being involved in, and this is why the staff is bloated.
The UW Extension is an absolute dinosaur, for instance, a parasitic agency that duplicates other county programs and creates make-work for itself. Land conservation is another useless agency. It is statutorily required, but the county could gut it to its most skeletal elements, in other words sitting one person in a corner somewhere with some make-work to fulfill the statutory requirement.
And then, most important, there is public health with its 25.65 positions, or 8.6 percent of all county employees. Now before anybody gets all roiled up, we are not advocating that any of these positions be eliminated. Not yet. We recognize that public health provides important services to underserved populations in our communities.
But we also recognize that public health departments fail to address critical needs in our communities, such as autism and special needs, and that around the nation they are gigantic propaganda machines for the federal government's decidedly unscientific and partisan health agenda. We have no illusions that the Oneida County public health department isn't engaged in that very same kind of deception - a deception that does not present any argument but the government's side, at grave peril to ourselves, our children, and our families.
So what we are advocating for is a thorough vetting at budget time of this department's every line item. County supervisors need to compel our public health officials to defend every penny they spend, and they need to scour every one of its programs and activities to root out leftist propaganda.
By cutting that massive machine down to size, and by ending outdated, duplicative and unnecessary programs (the North Central Regional Planning Commission, for example; membership in the Wisconsin Counties Association), the county could lower property taxes and still fully fund the core services of law enforcement, highways, and social services.
Lastly, it's important to observe that we elect county board supervisors - and they, the county board chairperson - as our representatives to the state. They are in charge of enforcing the laws and policies of the state as an administrative arm of the state, but they are also charged, as our elected representatives, to challenge those policies - to lobby for us - when they hurt our interests.
In the past, with such figureheads as Dave Hintz, the board engaged in virtually no lobbying at all for the people, but instead deferred to lobbyists at the Wisconsin Counties Association. The problem with that is, the WCA does not represent the people; rather, it respects the institutional interests of the government itself, and so often ends up lobbying for things - like ending levy limits or raising taxes - that are decidedly not in the people's best interests, or are at least things the people should debate.
With Mr. Holewinski at the helm, that has changed as he has taken a forceful role in lobbying our lawmakers for our interests. That by itself is a refreshing turn of events.
One may or may not agree with those positions, but at least an elected official, not a paid institutional lobbyist, is representing us, and we hope that this trend toward real grassroots democracy in Oneida County continues.
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