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To the Honorable Katherine Roseberg, Mayor of Wausau, here are 535 words on why we need to hear from our mayor.
Over the past few months, we have had a number of troubling headlines. The city has spent tens of millions of dollars on a new water treatment facility, and we are now not sure whether the finished project can address PFAs levels—a problem we knew about before the plant got started. In a knee-jerk reaction, city government started whipping up panic by passing out bottled water and filters. Meanwhile, we learn that senior staff was secretly lobbying our state legislators for special legislation to allow Wausau to borrow more money. And, at the same time, that same staff was deleting any mention of the new water and sewer project borrowing from the city budget to make it look like the city had plenty of room for more debt. From the outside, it looks like chaos. It looks like nobody is in charge.
You are the city’s CEO. What do you think the problems are and how are they going to get fixed? Please respond with an op-ed of your own.
The practice of referring all questions to department heads to answer for you needs to stop. We elected you. We need to hear from you.
It would not be hard for the casual observer to get the impression that you are surrounded by people who think that resolutions and proclaimations and cleverly-named task forces and articles in the New York Times are all that matters. But this is city government. The vast majority of people just want municipal services delivered at a reasonable cost with no fanfare.
Costs matter as well as competence. Over the last decade, the City of Wausau has raised its mill rate 20%. During the same period, the Wausau School District, Marathon County and Northcentral Technical College all lowered their rates. In 2010, Wausau took 34% of a homeowner’s property taxes. Today, it consumes 41%. We are now one of only a handful of communities in Wisconsin were the municipality demands a greater share of the property taxes than the K-12 schools. How is that justified? We need to hear from you.
We have a number of fine and dedicated city workers who do a great job serving the public. A lot of them look at city hall and shake their heads about what goes on there. You are their leader. They are looking to you for answers.
Please accept this invitation to speak. Don’t try and sell us on the notion that the headlines are wrong; everyone knows better. Be the mayor for all and not just for the resolutions/proclamations groupies. Give us an honest assessment of city hall and tell us how you plan to make things better. It shouldn’t take much more than a week to respond—unless you have no ideas.
The op-ed is really the perfect forum for this. It gives you the time to collect your thoughts, put them on paper, sleep on them, and come back to them with fresh eyes. It is a golden opportunity to develop a cogent thesis and to put your best foot forward. I urge you to do it.
Keene Winters, Wausau
