Retirement Lost: My Career in Town Politics

After a challenging and rewarding $40\text{-}\text{year}$ career in structural engineering, I retired, anticipating having the time to do projects on the home and acreage that my wife, Debbie, and I had recently purchased in the town of Dekorra, $30\text{miles}$ north of Madison, Wisconsin. I left my intense, technology-focused professional life with the large Midwest architecture/engineering firm of Flad & Associates for the bucolic country life, but the idyll was short-lived.

It came on innocently enough. Rudy, a retired Marine, who was active in town politics, called me one day. He explained that he had heard me speak at one of the town board meetings where I had appeared asking the town to remedy a runoff-erosion problem. He thought I was just the man to help with a problem.

Rudy explained that the town had a caucus system for selecting candidates. At a town caucus, candidate names are brought forth from the floor and the “primary election” takes place live that night among those in attendance. Rudy had caught wind of the impending nomination of an individual who, he believed, would not serve the best interests of the town. The caucus rules are that if only two individuals are nominated, both go on the ballot. If more than two are nominated, they are narrowed down to the two with the most votes by using a folded-notepaper ballot. Rudy was concerned that there might not be more than two names put into nomination for the town chair position. He asked if he could nominate me to make sure that the undesirable candidate did not get onto the ballot.

Attendance at the town caucus is widely varied. Some years as few as 20 people show up. Given that it is typically held on a wintry January weeknight in rural Wisconsin, people don’t go unless they have an agenda. As I discovered, it is a system susceptible to manipulation. Those with agendas bring along supporters. Nobody else comes. In my naiveté, I believed it when Rudy said that all I had to do was attend the caucus and he would line up enough votes for me to keep the undesirable off the ballot and that would be the end of my contribution. The plan was for the incumbent to win. I had great respect for Rudy, and after thinking it over for a week I agreed to the request. The caucus proceeded as planned. Nearly 200 people were there, and although I don’t recall the exact vote count, it was roughly like this: the incumbent got 75 votes, I got 73 votes, and the “undesirable” candidate got about 30 votes. I was on the ballot.

In the car on the ride home, my wife Debbie said, “Fred, you could win this thing.” The incumbent was vulnerable on many fronts. He had been involved in a fracas in a bar a few months before and he usually came to the town board meetings totally unprepared. She thought that all I would need to do was a few yard signs and a brochure to let people know what I had to offer.

I was not at all sure I wanted to “win this thing.” I had spent $10\text{years}$ chairing the plan commission of the town of Mazomanie some years before and knew how much work these positions entailed. Debbie argued that since I was now on the ballot, I needed to at least do some campaigning, or those who had supported me would feel duped. I reluctantly agreed.

Early on election night, as Debbie and I stood on the deck of our home, savoring the spring sunset over Lake Wisconsin, I wondered out loud how it would all turn out. Debbie was convinced that I would win. I had my doubts, but having put in the effort, hoped at least not to be skunked! Much later that night, I looked at the returns posted on the county Web site and I was ahead by a few votes. I went to bed hoping that morning would bring the good new that I had lost. By morning I had increased my lead and was now town of Dekorra chairman-elect!

Having won, I now committed myself to do the best job I could with the position. No sooner had I taken office than the town clerk, who had just won reelection, resigned. She had been going through a divorce, and some in the town were complaining that her performance was being affected. The emotional stress got to her and she quit in frustration. Typically the clerk in a small town is the glue that keeps things running. He or she is the closest thing to a full-time employee and usually spends more time each day on town business than either the town chair or supervisors. In the absence of a clerk, in my second week on the job, I found myself trying to be both clerk and town chairman. It was a portent of things to come.

When an elected clerk resigns, the town board may appoint one. So, we went through a lengthy review process (all in public meetings of course) and finally found a person with the necessary skills who was willing to do the job. It was not an easy task. The person must live in the town and be skilled with computers, possess strong organizational skills, and be willing to work full-time and attend many night meetings, all for less than market wages and no benefits. That clerk lasted about a year before she quit for a better job.

Another new town board member was a former town board and plan commission chair. A number of people came to me privately after the election and warned me that this “former chair” did not always play fair and had agendas other than what appeared on the surface. He would do everything in his power to stop additional residential development in the town. I decided to keep an open mind and got along well with the “former chair” for several years.

The next major issue was completing the town’s comprehensive plan. A few years earlier the state legislature mandated that any municipality that wanted to continue to be involved in land-use decisions prepare and adopt a “smart growth” plan. The intent of “smart growth” was to better utilize existing resources and infrastructure, to redevelop existing sites, and expand on existing development rather than always initiating new development in untouched areas. The town had sought and received a grant with two other adjoining municipalities and was several years along in the process. Things had bogged down in the plan commission, which was leading the effort. The other town board supervisors wanted me to take charge of the process to make sure that the plan was completed before time ran out on the grant deadline. The result was that the plan commission members were pressured to complete their work and hand it over to the town board. This, unfortunately, resulted in some hurt feelings that took quite some time to sooth.

One of the main goals of the plan was to preserve the rural character and open spaces that the town still had, in spite of growing pressure to be a bedroom community for Madison. Two rather new programs were incorporated: clustering and transfer of development rights (TDR). For some years an individual could buy $35\text{acres}$ of agriculturally zoned land and put a home anywhere on it they chose. At the time the $35\text{-}\text{acre}$ rule was put in place, it was thought that few would want to buy $35\text{acres}$ for a home site. That had not proved to be true. The town board decided that other strategies were necessary to prevent the landscape from being dotted with homes on every $35\text{acres}$ which resulted in loss of scenic views and agriculturally productive land.

Clustering and TDR are tools that allow for areas of dense development to be offset by agricultural and woodland areas that are deed-restricted from development. The town board took the plan commission draft of the plan and increased the incentives for both clustering and TDR. By so doing, the town gave landowners the right to develop more home sites than 1 per $35\text{acres}$ as long as they were smaller acreage and clustered together in the least visually intrusive and least agriculturally productive portion of the property. In exchange for the right to develop, a formula-driven amount of acreage in agricultural and woodland preservation areas would be deed-restricted from development. One additional wrinkle: the county, which controlled zoning, would not allow geographically separated development and restricted lands, so we had to require that the development areas and the deed-restricted areas be contiguous. Clustering and TDR were new and it was somewhat complicated for the average citizen to understand.

The process of plan completion and adoption was long and contentious. Late in the plan-adoption process, a developer came to the town board and asked to be allowed to develop 42 homes on $350\text{acres}$ that he had recently purchased. He promised to make a model TDR development if we would amend the plan to include his $350\text{acres}$ as a TDR area. I opposed the action. This scale of development for a town the size of ours (population 2,500) was not what had been envisioned throughout the planning process. The plan did allow for clustering development in larger acreages, which for his lands would have allowed 20 to 25 home sites. Despite my arguments against the motion, the amendment passed and the acreage in question was designated TDR in the plan. This action would lead to a major battle.

In December of my first year in the town job, the elected county supervisor from our district called to let me know that he was retiring and would not be running for reelection in the spring. He had let many people know of his decision but, to date, had not found anyone willing to run for the position. He was concerned that the seat would be vacant. I agreed to try to find some candidates. I, too, came up empty handed. One of the problems with the county position is that many meetings take place during the day, a commitment that is nearly impossible for most working people. I decided to run rather than have the town unrepresented. I ran, unopposed, and won. My calendar filled up with more meetings.

At the county board, I was assigned to both the Planning and Zoning Committee and Land Information and Records Committee. It was quite interesting to see development proposals from both the town and county perspective. The county was in the midst of developing its own comprehensive plan and I became quite involved in the process. I also became a target of the extremist anti-growth contingent in the town.

Back at the town, we faced a long-standing issue of municipal sewage treatment versus private septic systems. Proposals for sewage treatment facilities to service the densely populated areas along the lake had been controversial and had ultimately been voted down in past years. Our town plan, however, called for commercial development at the interstate interchange area, where County Highway CS intersects with Interstate Highway 39/90/94. A major obstacle facing businesses seeking to locate in the interchange area was lack of municipal waste treatment.

Just north of the interchange, and located in the town of Dekorra, are the state’s two most heavily used interstate rest areas. Expansion of these facilities had been planned by the state Department of Transportation (DOT) for a number of years and this required greatly expanding their waste treatment capacity. A plan to have the town build a treatment plant to service both the state rest areas and municipal needs had been on hold for several years, since the last negative vote by the property owners along the lake. Shortly after I was elected, the project came forward again, this time to service the rest areas and the interchange area. I was skeptical at first, but got on board after determining that the state DOT was serious about paying for two-thirds of the cost of a treatment facility. I decided it was truly a win-win project and went into high gear to make it a reality.

Many problems had to be overcome. A utility district, composed of properties mostly zoned highway interchange, was designated. Some property owners, whose property had been zoned highway interchange for many years and thus designed for eventual commercial development, wanted nothing to do with the project. They did not want to have to pay any of their money to be hooked up. They were quite vocal at the public meetings, screaming out all manner of epithets. Apparently, for some of them, my actions to procure a sanitary sewer system for the town at a rare bargain price qualified me to be called a communist. The board held its ground and the district remained intact.

The town needed to take out bonds for its portion of the treatment plant cost and for that we needed electorate approval. I went on the speaking circuit, talking to such groups as the local Lions Club to elicit their support. A special town meeting was called for the vote—on a weeknight, a la town caucus. Whoever showed up for that hour or two got a vote. Fortunately, enough citizens who saw the value for the town came to the meeting and the matter passed.

Another sticky problem was the site for the plant, which logically would be near the rest areas. At the time the interstate was built, excess farmland that had been purchased for locating the right-of-way was given to the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR). The DOT thought it would be a simple matter to pay them at fair market value for the portion of property needed to site the treatment plant and expand the rest areas. I kept asking how the land deal was going and was assured it would not be a big problem. It turned out to be almost a deal breaker. The DNR was not about to give up any land without a really good deal, in part because of bad feelings about a prior deal. I met with both parties and eventually they came together in a cooperative manner and saved the project. This set the project bidding back by almost a year, just in time for the large petroleum and construction cost increases. By the time we received bids, they came in 50 percent over estimates. We had to ask the electorate for more money, and fortunately the DOT came through with some more funds. This year the plant and collection system became a reality and is now operational.

I also chair the Safety Committee, which is responsible for town ordinances and oversight of the constable, an elected official charged with enforcing the ordinances. With the new plan, many ordinances needed major revision, including the Land Division and Subdivision Ordinance and Erosion Control and Storm Water Management Ordinance. My technical writing ability—gained after many years of crafting engineering specifications—was put to good use. Many hours were invested and the result was worth it.

I completed my first $\text{two}\text{-}\text{year}$ term as town chairman. I was proud of my accomplishments and was still in the midst of many important projects for the town. Despite my initial reluctance about public service, I decided to run for reelection. At that year’s town caucus, about 20 people came and I was the only candidate nominated for chairman. I ran unopposed and was reelected.

One of the interesting features of this Wisconsin town is the annual town meeting. It is usually a reporting of the prior year’s activities, but the state statute lists topics that are powers the citizenry may exercise at the annual meeting, such as raising money, compensating officials, purchasing land and buildings. There is language in the state statutes that says “directives or grants of authority to the town board under this subsection may be general and continuing or may be limited as to purpose, effect or duration.” This year, unlike prior years, had an organized contingent that had in mind using the “directive” power to get their way. I have referred to it since as the “march on the town hall.” They had the votes for directives to eliminate the TDR, clustering, and $50\text{-}\text{acre}$ minimum provisions of the plan and ordinances. I allowed the directives to be made but cautioned that these may not be permissible actions under the state statutes governing town meetings. After the meeting the “former chair,” who was very opposed to the $350\text{-}\text{acre}$ TDR project, came up to me with a big smirking grin and stated “the people have spoken.” No, I thought to myself, “your people” have spoken. Our town attorney confirmed these directives were illegal and were without effect.

Shortly into my second term as town chairman, the $350\text{-}\text{acre}$ TDR development came to life. The developer submitted a preliminary plat. I was outraged. The deed-restricted lands were not in blocks of property but were rather in strips and pieces of land that remained after the lots were laid out for optimal sale. Because the proposal was in the plan commission review process, I was legally constrained against speaking out publicly. After conferring with the town’s attorney as to what I might do to get a better plan, he advised that I, along with select town consultants, including the town planner and engineer and the plan commission chair, could meet with the developer and try to negotiate a much more acceptable layout. I was not in favor of the development, but since I did not have the votes to stop it, I wanted to make sure that the principles of TDR were met and that the rural character of the town was preserved with unobtrusive site planning.

Before the developer owned it, the wooded, rolling hills that were proposed for development had been open to public hunting and unrestricted use by local residents, because the previous owner had placed the acreage in a state forest management program, with tax benefits. Prior to sale the prior owner took the acreage out of the program. Neighbors of the property strongly (even hostilely) objected to the development. They were joined by a faction in the town—led by the “former chair” working in the background and his wife in the foreground—that had for years done everything in their power to thwart any additional residential development in the town. They rounded up many folks to speak in opposition at the plan commission meetings. They formed a group that spread half-truths and even outright falsehoods about the project and me by an e-mail network. The sad truth of small town politics is that many people do not take the time to understand the issues and engage in a constructive debate. Instead, they tend to construct vicious personal attacks on anyone who does not agree with them and champion their cause.

Another target of their attacks was the plan commission chairman who placed time limits on speakers at the public hearings regarding the development, and after the allotted time he would ask the speaker to “wrap it up.” This is standard practice at the state and national level. It gives everyone who wants to speak a chance without allowing the hearings to turn into a filibuster. A member of the “opposition” asked that the plan commission chair be removed from his position for not allowing citizens to speak. She claimed that he was biased in favor of the project. I pointed out that he had allowed all who wished to speak, and that it was not unreasonable to ask these people to bring their remarks to conclusion in the allotted time. I suggested that her bias against the project was the cause of unhappiness with him. The plan commission chair is a retired businessman who ran a large contracting company and is a strong but fair leader. When I refused to remove him, they further stepped up their e-mail smear campaign on both me and him.

Late one Saturday evening Debbie called my attention to an e-mail from the “former chair,” in the same vein as his wife’s comments. I blew up and sent him a scathing e-mail indicating I would have nothing to do with what amounted to a smear campaign, and suggested they rethink their whole approach to town politics. I also copied the town board members. I should have followed Lincoln’s example and reviewed my comments the next day and then put them aside with a note “not sent.” I apologized to the “former chair” for my intemperate comments.

In the midst of all the controversy over the proposed development, our town clerk quit for a better job, just when she was gaining enough experience to be able to do the job well. Our clerk is housed in the village of Poynette’s municipal building. Poynette lies within the town and has a population of about 2,500—the same as the town. The village had lost a full-time clerical person and of course our clerk immediately learned of it and applied for the vacant position. So there we were, back to square one. We will be trying to convert this to an appointed rather than elected position in the next general election, to give the board more control.

The large $350\text{-}\text{acre}$ TDR development project was eventually approved by the town plan commission and the town board. From there, the approval process moved on to the county, where the big issue was rezoning the home sites from agricultural to residential. The forces of opposition went all out. When the committee and county board members visited the site, picketers were there to greet them, including some up in the trees. One asked to be able to accompany the group on their tour. They were also back at the courthouse picketing before the start of the board meeting, the message being “Say No to Subdivision.” At the hearings of the county Planning and Zoning Committee on which I serve, the “former chair” was there to speak against the project and, at one point, looked at me pointedly while talking about a “snake in the grass.” Later that day, after the county Planning and Zoning Committee recommended approval by the county board, he was heard to remark, “When I get through with him (me) he won’t even get the job as dog-catcher in the town.” About this same time, I received a copy of a letter from the county district attorney regarding the claims of a member of the citizen opposition group, saying that he had found no basis for indicting me on the criminal charges posed by the member of the group.

The anti-development faction then sat on the doorsteps of enough property owners surrounding the development to get them to sign a petition which required that the rezone pass by a two-thirds vote of the county supervisors rather than a simple majority. I heard from a good source that several people signed the document just to get rid of these people. In the several days prior to the vote by the county board, a member of the opposition group took out a hotmail e-mail address with a slight spelling alteration to my name. Using this fictitious address they sent e-mails to the county supervisors suggesting that I had sold out to the developer for some personal gain.

Their tactic was to force me to defend the project in order to defend myself, clearly in hopes of negative fallout at the next town election if they could defeat the project. I had no problem defending the project as it finally met the town plan and ordinances and was approved by our duly constituted bodies in accordance with all laws. The day for the final county board vote came. Among the many who spoke was the developer. He told the board how upset he was about all I had gone through and if he had known this in advance he would have just divided the property up into nine $35\text{-}\text{acre}$ parcels, but that now he had so much invested in the project he had no choice but to try and go forward. The rezoning passed with a 90 percent margin. Other county board members were outraged by the hotmail campaigns. People in surrounding communities just shook their heads at the antics of the naysayers; they would welcome such a development—40 lots that would not even be visible and $230\text{acres}$ preserved as a conservation amenity. My second term was nearly up and it would have been nice to step down, but I did not want to give the appearance of being forced out by the personal attacks, so I agreed to run again. There was a lot of excitement in the town leading up to the caucus. I fully expected some effort by the opposition to keep me off the ballot. I spent many evenings making calls, asking people to come to the caucus to prevent a rout by the single-issue fanatics.

The event turned out to be a three-ring circus with shouting and name-calling throughout the evening. The first order of business was to elect a caucus chair to run the meeting. I was not eligible to act in this capacity since I was up for reelection. As there are many laws governing the procedures to be followed at the caucus, I prepared a script to be used by the chair and a proposed list of ground rules, which among other things, allowed each nominated candidate, if more than two, to give a brief speech. Two candidates were offered in nomination for the caucus chair, a retiring board supervisor and a member of the opposition group. There was a lot of shouting, and in a voice vote, their person was elected. She had absolutely no clue as to how to run a caucus, and it took more than three hours to work through the process. In the end, three candidates were nominated for town chairman: the “former chair,” a fellow who was not even at the caucus, and me. The absent candidate’s representative read a letter from him saying that he owned a restaurant in the next county that he was trying to sell and that if he were elected and had not yet sold the restaurant he would have to resign his position as town chair. It was ludicrous. All the current board supervisors and a new individual who had chosen to run also got on the ballot.

It was a campaign too much like national politics, with mudslinging by supporters on both sides. I told people supporting me that I wanted no involvement in digging up dirt and spreading it around, even to counteract that against me, so if they chose to do this they would have to be on their own. With the help of my daughter Colleen, who has professional graphic art design and advertising experience, I sent out a mailer, focusing on my record and vision for the town. Supporters helped put up over $150\text{yard}$ signs. The developer even got involved and without any prompting by me send out a letter to all the electorate telling people about the dirty tricks of the opposition and all I had been through. I had some misgivings as to whether this would help or hurt, but after reading his letter I realized he had done an outstanding job of crafting the story. Election day came. I did not know if I would win or lose and had crafted what I thought was a gracious concession speech and call I would make to the opposing candidate in the event he won. However, I beat him handily, 472 to 353, saving me from the ignominy of dog catcher’s assistant. I never received a congratulatory call or anything in person from my opponent. Our slate of candidates all won.

In order to recognize the concern behind the illegal directives at the annual town meeting I asked the plan commission to review the use of our plan for the last $\text{two}\text{years}$ and see if any amendments were appropriate. Through my position on the county Planning and Zoning Committee I had been lobbying the zoning administrator to change his mind about TDR and allow geographically separated development and restricted areas, which was the theory on which the concept was based. With input from the town’s planning firm and the town’s attorney, we were able to get a decision to go forward as we wished as part of our amendments. The plan commission did a thorough job and offered some good adjustments to the plan, working to anticipate the county plan and coordinate with it. Time for public comment was allotted at all of the meetings. A joint plan commission and town board meeting was held to make sure everyone was in basic agreement. The amended plan was finally sent on to the town board for required formal public hearing and adoption. The usual opposition folks were there and bad-mouthed the TDR program, clustering, and the $50\text{-}\text{acre}$ minimum requirement. To my consternation and dismay, as we considered whether to make any adjustments based on the comments, my board members moved and voted to remove TDR and change the $50\text{-}\text{acre}$ minimum lot size without clustering, back to the $35\text{-}\text{acres}$ . I was furious that they had caved in to these folks, especially after all the effort that had been put in to get the TDR program up to where it should be. But that’s the democratic process.

Now six months into my third term, the most recent excitement has been caused by the property revaluation, which had not been done since 2001. The state department of revenue requires revaluation if the town’s assessment drops below 90 percent of their state-determined equalized values four years in a row. Because a full revaluation costs $50,000, the town waited as many years as it could before making the expenditure. In the intervening years, low interest rates, the real estate boom, and especially the real estate boom for waterfront property had rendered the town’s 2001-based property values obsolete. When the revaluation notices went out in mid-October, people’s property assessments went up an average of 60 percent. Many incorrectly interpreted it as their property taxes “more than doubling.” Since town budget expenditures are limited by state levy limits and the town’s portion of taxes for the school district and county government were already based on state equalized values, the effect of the revaluation is more likely to be a redistribution of taxes within the town. Lakefront property owners are likely to get an increase while others will have modest downward changes. While I have done my best to educate people, the usual naysayers have been spreading rumors that the board engineered this to help pay for the utility district sewer system and that it wouldn’t have happened if my opponent had won.

We are about to have the public hearing on the town’s 2008 budget. It is coming late this year as the state legislature was gridlocked for months on the state budget. Towns have been under a two percent levy limit the last several years and will likely continue. One of my goals for this budget is to address town road repair and maintenance in a substantial way. I sincerely hope that better roads and a more consistent approach to maintaining them will be one of my legacies.

When I took office I realized we were not addressing our town roads repair program in a very efficient way. I discovered that the state DOT had a software system to assist towns in putting together $\text{five}\text{-}\text{year}$ maintenance plans. I gathered the data and input it into the system for Dekorra. Every road was assessed by a rating system, using a form to gather all the key data. This information has been updated annually since I started it on a spring roads tour with the other town supervisors. The system is based on the premise that the key to getting the most out of road budgets is to first maintain the good roads with crack-filling and seal coating. Simple overlays extend life while there is still structural integrity to the existing pavement; pulverizing and reconstructing is done only when there are no other options.

The DOT program showed that we had a huge backlog of road maintenance needs in the town. State levy limits constrain our spending and will not allow us to catch up. We are falling farther and farther behind. An economic engineering analysis indicates that with costs rising at 8 percent per year and loans available at low rates, we would be wise to take out a sizeable loan and get our roads to where we can economically maintain them. Hopefully the electorate will see the wisdom of this.

This is my story. I am proud of what I have been able to achieve. I believe I’ve made a difference in land-use planning, in public safety through appropriate waste treatment, in potential for economic development in the interchange area, in good government through the rewriting of outdated ordinances, and in maintenance of the town roads. I have used my skills as an engineer every day to help make Dekorra a better place. Yes, it has been difficult. I have not sugar coated my story. It has also been an incredible learning experience. Not a week has gone by where I haven’t encountered something new and different and learned by the experience. Engineers are great problem solvers. Local politics is crying out for people who have these skills. We have the capacity to raise the level of debate above personal attacks to the analytical understanding of each issue’s pros and cons. Engineers are needed, not just in the elected positions, but also in appointed commissions and committees such as plan commissions, parks commissions, safety committees, and architectural review committees. All engineers who have been given so much by the opportunities this free county has provided them have an obligation to give back. There is no better way than to serve your community at the local level. Call your elected officials to ask how you can serve. Better yet, run for a local position.