Oneida County reorganization: The same, just more of it

News Analysis

When Oneida County board chairman Scott Holewinski spearheaded an effort to look at the possibility of reorganizing the way the county operates day-to-day — including hiring a consultant to perform an assessment of potential opportunities — he envisioned bringing accountability to what he sees as a sprawling government that lacks uniformity.

That would likely mean the hiring of an administrative coordinator to facilitate day-to-day operations, replacing the current model, in which the human resources director doubles as the administrative coordinator. Over time the coordinator’s position has devolved into a name-only affair.

At an administration committee meeting last week, at which potential reorganization was discussed, Holewinski said he wanted to have someone who would have eyes on the whole government and help facilitate a common mission and consistency.

“The goal, the original goal was to have somebody who could oversee the operation,” Holewinski told the administration committee. “One person who oversees it, who does the budgeting work, those kinds of things.”

Based on last week’s committee meeting — as well as on the committee’s meeting last January 15 — it doesn’t look like Holewinski’s vision is going to come to pass. During a long discussion, which ended with no real decision but with another meeting and more talks scheduled, human resources director Lisa Charbarneau presented a plan based on discussions she had with administration committee chairman Billy Fried and supervisor Ted Cushing, a member of that committee.

Their plan, building on the prevailing sentiments at the committee on January 15, would scuttle bringing on a coordinator but would instead keep the current model, albeit in a fortified form that Fried and Charbarneau said would eliminate current shortcomings and build on its strong points. That would entail a tighter and more detailed job description for the coordinator role, which is now lacking.

The administration committee had ended up with the task of formulating a recommendation for the county board after the board sent the consultants’ report to the committee for evaluation and recommendation. The consulting team of Allyson Brunette and Karen Harkness had performed a so-called Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis, and provided options for a potential restructuring. 

During discussion this week, Fried said supervisors only considered two of their three options to ever have been viable, hiring a full-time coordinator or tweaking the current hybrid model. A third option, hiring a county administrator, was nixed early on. 

Essentially, a county administrator would have far more power, supervising staff and with hiring and firing powers, while a county coordinator’s role would be facilitation and coordination of the various aspects of government, bringing those activities under one umbrella.

So the question was, stick with the hybrid model that is not full-time or switch to a full-time coordinator?

During last week’s discussion, Fried said he and Cushing and Charbarneau had basically decided to move forward as is but specifically addressed the duties that a coordinator would have to perform. They had called for strengthening the role of the current county coordinator and “maximizing and taking advantage of the current role.” 

“The second option would be to go to hire an outside person to be a county coordinator,” Fried said. “That would be requiring staff. But what we’re saying from what Ted [Cushing] and I and Lisa [Charbarneau] talked about, we understood that we would probably be making a recommendation to not hire a new staff. Let’s take the existing model, see what the weaknesses are, strengthen those and address the things in the SWOT analysis and give it a try.”

Holewinski: Report failure

At the meeting, Holewinski, who observed that he had just received the report the Friday before the Monday morning meeting, said it did not accomplish what he expected reorganization to accomplish.

“What I intended this to do is not what’s in this document right now,” he said. “… There’s not enough uniformity. The [labor relations] committee does this. Administration does that. We pay this person and then we find out we’ve got to pay some more people. Somebody who knows the whole structure who works on those specific things [is needed], but this doesn’t answer it.”

Holewinski also took issue with some of the specific assumptions in Charbarneau’s report. For instance, Charbarneau estimated that the cost for an administrative coordinator or for a county administrator would be about the same, which she estimated to be in the neighborhood of $250,000, a number she said calculated by looking at surrounding salaries and fringe benefits.

Holewinski took issue that a coordinator would cost the county as much as an administrator.

“I would assume that an administrator would cost a lot more than a county coordinator, my own opinion,” he said.

It may have been his opinion, but the consultants, in their report to the county board, also implied a big differentiation between the two positions based on the professional qualifications and experience needed for a county administrator. Brunette told the board an administrator would cost the county more than $200,000 but she did not include that figure in her assessment of a coordinator’s cost.

Indeed, Brunette told supervisors that the difference between an administrator and a coordinator was the difference between supervision and coordination: “The coordinator coordinates and manages but does not supervise, so they’re not their boss, but they need to work together functionally to coordinate and run county operations effectively,” she said.

Under the coordinator scenario, Brunette said, department heads are coordinated by the administrative coordinator, and the administrative coordinator is the go-to point of contact for both county board members that have questions about department operations and for department heads to the county board.

But, Brunette told supervisors, a county administrator does more.

“The county administrator would manage hiring and firing, which is a large shift from the current balance of power,” she said. “They would also assume the role of public information officer in an emergency, a role which is sort of not on paper but operationally jointly shared between the county board chair and the sheriff.”

The administrator would have chief duties in hiring and firing as well as performance evaluations, but the coordinator would not.

“The administrative coordinator would have a leadership and organizational development function in succession planning, mentoring and strengthening the team of leaders,” she said. “The administrative coordinator would take some things off the county board chair’s plate without the chair relinquishing their strong leadership role.”

At this week’s meeting, Holewinski also observed that keeping the current model would cost the county nothing in Charbarneau’s analysis, though he observed that she said a half-time clerk might be needed.

“You say zero cost, but you’re going to add a half-time position,” he said. “It’s not going to cost us nothing to add a halftime position.”

Charbarneau clarified that a cost would come only if the half-time position was needed, something her office was going to try to avoid.

“If we don’t add a half-time position now, it’ll stay as no cost,” she said. “… We’re going to try and absorb that workload.”

Schreier voices skepticism

Throughout the meeting, supervisor Steven Schreier voiced skepticism about the need for a coordinator, suggesting that competent department heads and a board focused on policy decisions rather than micromanaging was not only sound but likely better.

Schreier had also expressed support last month for sticking with the current model, though with a better description of what the job would entail. 

During discussion, there was extended talk about the need for the ongoing training of supervisors and connecting supervisors to the Wisconsin Counties Association (WCA) and other resources — many tasks that county clerk Tracy Hartman apparently does now but is not required to do, and which Holewinski observed another clerk might not perform.

But even if that were the case, a supervisor’s education should be a matter of personal responsibility, Schreier said, and he said he retrieved most of his resources himself from the WCA.

“They provide webinars,” Schreier said. “They provide in-person trainings, all this stuff is available. Really all you’d be asking the clerk to coordinate is when those become available to us and make sure we’re made aware of it.”

Schreier said he did not think the county could mandate training.

“So it is a nice thing to recognize, but ultimately it’s our responsibility as board members to educate ourselves on what our jobs are,” he said. “It’s not her (Hartman’s) job to do that. I don’t believe it’s the coordinator’s job to do that.”

Another big issue in reorganization discussions has been the idea that a coordinator could help facilitate uniformity and consistency in budgeting, but Schreier said he liked the county’s budget process. Schreier said that, under the full-time coordinator proposal, the coordinator and the finance department, in conjunction with the various departments, puts together a budget.

“Then the administration committee really has no job,” he said. “I mean they’ll put that all together and just bring it before the county board and we vote on it.”

Schreier said the current process offers more involvement by more supervisors.

“We get more direct information, more involvement,” he said. “I don’t think it falls into the area of micromanaging in any way, but it allows it to be more like a hearing and they bring it before the administration committee and it seems to work pretty well as far as I’m concerned.”

The impact of a county coordinator might be just the opposite, Schreier said.

“We’d be putting one person in charge, bringing it all together and then you’ll have 21 people who really didn’t have hardly any involvement except at their committee levels and then that’s still very segmented because you only got five people at the most on each one that understands their part of the budget and everyone else is taking it at face value,” he said.

There were other budget issues relating to the interactions between a county coordinator and the finance department, as well as with department heads, especially about long-range forecasting, but the committee reached no conclusions about what that all meant. In fact, Fried punted the discussion to another meeting because of so many different perspectives.

“As far as the coordinator working with the finance director, everyone’s perceiving it a lot different than what I intended, and I think even Lisa and I are on a different page with that,” Fried said.

Looking through different lenses

There was the question of contracts. Corporation counsel Mike Fugle acknowledged that all contracts needing to be signed came through his office, but Holewinski said the issue of contracts was more than mere legalities, and involved decisions a coordinator should become involved in.

“Mike, when you review contracts, you are reviewing them to see if they’re legal,” he said. “You’re not reviewing them to see if this is the best deal out there. Are we paying too much? Like when we got quotes for the glass and it came in underneath, if we would have went with the first contract, it would’ve been legal but would it be the best deal? So who’s reviewing to make sure it’s the best deal?”

Fugle said it would be the committee’s and the department head’s responsibility, and Schreier said that was part of a department head’s job.

“Let’s be honest,” Schreier said. “If you’ve got a department head who was bringing you contracts and you find out over time they’re not really going out and checking to see if it’s a good deal or not, they’re just putting it in front of you and you’re signing off on it, then probably they shouldn’t be running that department, right? I mean they’re not doing their due diligence.”

That’s their responsibility, Schreier said. 

“It is not the committee’s responsibility,” he said. “We have people on our committees going out and doing the work of the department heads. … It’s great that they know these things and it’s lovely that they’re being responsible, but that’s not their job. They should not be doing that. The department head should be doing that.”

Ultimately, Schreier said, it comes down to what’s the responsibility of the department and it should be spelled out not only in their job description but in the code.

“I think we forget our only job in this body is to create policy and to legislate what gets done in the county,” he said. “That’s it. We’re not here to micromanage the departments, we’re not here to create workflows or any of that. It should be spelled out in our language that governs the county. It’s that simple… I don’t think you need a third party to develop workflow.”

Ultimately, Schreier said he had a different take on the whole issue.

“To me, this is about empowering the person that you currently have in place, which you have an administrative coordinator,” he said. “We’re acting to some degree almost like we don’t have this position filled, but we do.”

That said, Schreier the county could not just dump responsibilities and job duties back into the in-name-only position.

“If you were telling someone for a number of years, no, this is only what’s expected of you and now we’re going to tell you we want to bring it all back in and we’re going to just dump it in your lap and expect it to happen overnight isn’t really going to be very productive is my guess,” he said. “I think you’ve got to be very reasoned about what it is and you’re going to have to redo a job description in my opinion.”

All of which led to discussion about the cost to strengthen the role — or lack thereof — and questions about whether additional duties in a strengthened job description would mean more pay for the human resources director/administrative coordinator. That position already was bumped upward when the coordination role was assigned.

That discussion will no doubt continue. The committee scheduled a February 27 meeting to review the matter again.

Richard Moore is the author of “Dark State” and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.