River News: Our View

That huge rustling suspiration everybody in the Northwoods heard this past week can now be explained: It was a collective sigh of relief upon hearing the news that former Oneida County corporation counsel Michael Fugle had resigned.

We’re tempted to use a little ditty from The Wizard of Oz that starts with “Ding Dong,” but we have better places to use that.

Anyway, the departure of Fugle from the county courthouse is another good step forward for the county, whether Fugle was pushed into resigning or not. The past few years have seen significant improvements both in elected leadership and in the bureaucracy, especially in the years since Scott Holewinski became board chairman.

There is still work to do, but the future of Oneida County government seems brighter than it has in a long, long time. There’s a slow changing of the guard, and the new guard is more responsive to the people. Let’s do a little recap, though we don’t mean this to be exhaustive.

First, there’s Holewinski’s election as chairman. The difference between Holewinski and the previous chairman, Dave Hintz, is like night and day. Hintz had absolutely no respect for open government, and let the notorious previous corporation counsel, Brian Desmond — who equally hated open government — run the show when it came to records requests.

We would literally get documents “responding” to our requests for open records with every word blacked out — even the date! Holewinski has ushered in an era of openness and accessibility and public participation that was previously lacking.

Here’s another difference. Hintz had no real respect for property rights, and under his stewardship there was no respect for property owners. Under Holewinski, the protection of private property rights is newly enshrined in the county’s just-passed comprehensive plan, and an all-important assertion of the county’s right to coordinate with other government entities to stop or mitigate their plans to confiscate property in perpetuity is in there, too.

Maybe Hintz was just tone deaf, but he did not understand the communities he represented, and it showed. It’s not that our leaders must be lifelong residents of the Northwoods, or even to have lived here all that long. It’s that all our leaders, no matter how long they have lived here, must try to assimilate into the fabric of their communities so that they may understand and respect the people with whom they live. 

We don’t need “leaders” who try to overlay their own value system on top of a community and force it down their throats. 

Here’s a perfect example. We have watched as Holewinski, in various policy ventures, has reached out to other local elected leaders and to the elected chairpersons of other counties to build coalitions of the elected — officials who been actually elected by the people. This was true particularly in the Pelican River easement raw deal.

It was also true when he successfully fought the building of a new highway department, thereby preventing Oneida County from suffering the same fate as so many other counties — populated by towns awash in dilapidation, abandonment, and poverty, with the only gleaming new buildings in town being shiny, new government offices.

Not that we won’t and haven’t disagreed with Holewinski, and sometimes vociferously. His hare-brained scheme to tax us for a decade for highways was one lapse, but even in disagreement, the transparency and accessibility was there.

Hintz was the opposite. He liked to hang around with the likes of the Wisconsin Counties Association, a special interest institution designed to represent the institutionalized interests of government rather than of the people. That’s why the association often advocates for higher taxes — more money for the bureaucracies and the bureaucrats, taken from the people. 

Again, it showed. The former Exxon executive’s desire to follow institutionalized special interests betrayed the interests of the people he was supposed to lead. On the other hand, leaders actually lead, and the tone saturates the rest of government, and slowly but surely that’s what is happening in Oneida County.

There have been other developments besides the chairmanship, the most significant of which is dissolution of the Human Service Center and the enfolding of its programs and services into a single Human Service Department. Most people probably don’t realize how significant that is, but it truly is a game-changer for a core government service.

For years, the Human Service Center was a morass of dysfunction. As a vendor of services for the county, it had its own board, which through time had become a fiefdom unto itself, not transparent and not accountable. Nobody is still really sure what all went on over there, but the guard changed there, too, and now all social and human services are in safer hands.

On that account, we will allow that we were not happy about one changing of the guard: the retirement of Mary Rideout as the head of the Human Service Department. For years leading social services, she proved to be an efficient and creative public servant. 

It’s too early to know how the new department head, Beth Hoerchler, will perform, and she certainly has big shoes to fill, but so far, so good. It seems Rideout has left behind a capable staff to carry on one of the county’s most important service areas, and to do so with transparency and accountability.

Another good changing of the guard was the retirement of Lisa Charbarneau, who accumulated way too much power in her years leading the human resources department, and wielded it when she wanted to. Again, it’s too early to know just how her replacement will do, but the critical mission here is to drain the office of its outsized influence.

The elevation of county clerk Tracy Hartman to county administrator (along with her clerk’s role) will likely accomplish that task. Like Rideout, Hartman has proved to be a capable administrator and now we are likely to see more listening to people outside the walls of the courthouse than to cliques inside its nooks and crannies.

She will be aided by the county’s finance director, Tina Smigielski, who is carrying on a tradition of solidity and competence in that office.

Of course there’s a lot of work yet to be done, and there are still guards out there that need to change. There’s no need for us to re-litigate all that is terrible about the public health department, but that’s one agency that needs to get in step with the people.

Then there’s zoning. In this case, we don’t mean to pick on zoning director Karl Jennrich so much as we do the mountain of regulations he is charged with enforcing. Jennrich also remains a transparent and committed public servant; it’s just that he presides over a department that, in an ideal world, shouldn’t exist.

Overall, if we add up any good things zoning has done, and then subtract all the bad things — killing economic growth in the false name of the environment being the biggest — we are already in negative territory. Zoning is designed to erect invisible walls that divide people by race or class or wealth; its very existence is defined by the forced segregation of people and the assertion of government control.

Zoning turns people into fenced-in cattle; and you know what happens to fenced-in cattle.

Zoning will never go away, of course, but this county’s thicket of regulations should be pared significantly, and the county needs to reform zoning now if it ever hopes to have enough affordable housing — as Eau Claire has done, for example — moving to more by-right zoning and less conditional use zoning, more flexibility inside singe-family zoning districts, the abolition of parking requirements, and more. 

Not to mention a stiff challenge to elitist shoreland zoning rules, legally if necessary.

All of which brings us back to the corporation counsel. Fugle was not as nefarious as Desmond, but that doesn’t mean he was a defender of open government. Reforms by the county board forced changes in the way open records requests were handled, but Fugle kept the spirit of darkness alive as much as he could.

The corporation counsel was never known to be the brightest bulb in the room, either, a potential time bomb for the county every time he stepped into a courtroom or advised a county committee on procedure. His competence was a major issue.

Whatever direction the county decides to take next in legal representation, there is a list of musts for that person or persons giving the county legal advice: They must believe in and be committed to transparency and open government; they must focus on performing their assigned tasks rather than trying to manipulate their responsibilities for ideological gain.

And the most ‘must’ must of all: They must always listen to the people and their express wishes, not to special interests at the counties’ association or to disconnected identity groups who trance their way into courthouse meetings fancying themselves as “the people.”

As the guard continues to change at the courthouse, those are the pretty simple guidelines for success.