Washington County weekly updates from Administrator Joshua Schoemann

·         STH 60 Truck Reliever Route – Another week, another series of meetings regarding this exciting regional project.  This week either Scott Schmidt and/or I met with representatives from the City of Hartford, HADC and SEWRPC.  The aim of these meetings has been to continue to get local and State stakeholders up to speed and on board with the project.  Additionally, these meetings have been aimed at rejuvenating the decade old Phase 1 Final Report, including narrowing the scope of the project to a Northern Route and working toward a finalized and agreed upon route. We hope to receive a proposal in the coming weeks from SEWRPC for us to enlist their services in this effort.  Finally, I am working to get meetings scheduled with likely affected Village and Town leaders to begin a dialogue about their perspectives.

·         Fair Park Stage – This week we put out a letter of intent to Design 2 Construct (D2C) out of Jackson, WI indicating that we are awarding them the bid for construction of the stage.  We received eight (8) bids in all, although even Design 2 Construct, the apparent low bidder, was slightly above our initial budget. As such, we continue to work with D2C to employ some “Value Engineering” techniques to get closer to budget.  I will continue to provide updates as we get shop drawings and some more firm budget numbers following “Value Engineering.”

·         City County Manager Association Meeting – On Wednesday, we hosted city and county managers from Washington and Ozaukee Counties for WCMA’s Region 6 meeting and presented regarding the County’s Priority Based Budgeting initiative.  The meeting also included a good discussion regarding area projects and challenges facing local municipalities.  Special thanks to Jay Shambeau for coordinating this opportunity to showcase Washington County!

·         Governor’s Listening Session – On Thursday I had the opportunity, along with Chairman Tennies, Supervisors Sorce, Meyers, Hartwig, Michalak and Heidtke (sorry if I missed someone), and probably 30+ citizens of Washington County, to be part of one of Governor Walker’s “Listening Sessions”.  The session was very much like a strategic planning session with outstanding input from a variety of Washington County citizens. In the next several weeks we are supposed to get a report of the results of the session, and possible next steps. Special thanks to Governor Walker and his Staff for hosting this unique event!

·         Scanning Project – The Clerk of Courts and Register in Probate have concluded the conversion of microfilm to a digital format. Although the final numbers have not been tallied, the county saved approximately $120,000 doing the project in-house instead of outsourcing. The features in the software made illegible images remarkably legible, allowed for indexing, and the images can be viewed and printed from each desktop.  Special thank you to Kris Endlich and Jo Barth who reviewed over 1.25 million images dating back to 1862 and Carol Schraufnagel for coordinating and supervising the project!

·         Highway Shared Services – This afternoon Scott Schmidt and I have a meeting with Tom Meaux and John Edgren of Ozaukee County about potential opportunities for collaboration between our departments.  Being our first meeting we intend to get a feel for one another’s operations and identify areas worth exploring.  No decisions will be made at this meeting, but I will keep you apprised of developments in the coming weeks and months.

·         Health Department Merger – On Tuesday afternoon we pulled together key decision makers from both counties to begin to finalize the details of this landmark Intergovernmental Agreement.  Ozaukee County Administrator Meaux, Assistant Administrator Dzwinel, Finance Director Andy Lamb, along with Washington County Finance Director Hamers, Attorney Nass, HR Director Scott and I met to go through the important details of implementation under the facilitation of Washington Ozaukee Public Health Director Kirsten Johnson.  This was an extremely productive meeting, and I continue to be confident in Kirsten’s leadership, the new department’s capability and the positive outcome for the citizens and taxpayers of our County!  Also, we received the results of the network assessment that was done to provide recommendations for information services systems.  While we still have many details to work through, the results of this study recommended that a separate Active Directory domain be built for the new organization, hosted at Washington County. Special thanks to Kirsten Johnson for her continued leadership on this groundbreaking innovative collaboration!