Wausau Pilot & Review
Wausau Dist. 3 Alder Tom Kilian, an often outspoken critic of the city’s action on development deals, environmental action and lack of public participation in key decisions, will not seek a third term on the City Council.
Kilian, early Monday, submitted his papers for notification of non-candidacy. Kilian told Wausau Pilot nearly a year ago that if he successfully delivered on the major policy and platform issues that he ran on since 2020 that he was not planning to seek reelection in 2024.
Kilian was a reform candidate with blowout victories in 2020 and 2022. In 2020, he defeated the district’s five-term incumbent with 71% of the vote. Although heavily targeted in the 2022 election for his positions on addressing industrial contamination and his vocal opposition to funding high-end private developments with taxpayer dollars, Kilian still received, by a hair, the highest percentage of votes for any contested city council race in Wausau.
In the last five years, his civic efforts were recognized both inside and outside of Wausau. Examples include Wausau’s People of the Year, Marathon County Citizen of the Year, and the statewide Bill Iwen Environmental Award. Kilian was featured in a CHEJ national webinar series on community leaders, and he was personally named when Citizens for a Clean Wausau received a watchdog award from the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council. Most of Kilian’s efforts have related, in some way, to working- and middle- class neighborhoods challenging entrenched power and moneyed interests.
Riverside Park, Thomas Street, and 1300 Cleveland Avenue
Kilian and District 3, in conjunction with neighboring District 10 and its Alderperson Lou Larson, worked for years on the southwest side to address longstanding contamination, an ongoing lack of adequate pubic participation, and what Kilian criticized as “publicly-funded gentrification schemes.” While success on any one of the individual issues or sites appeared highly improbable just a few years ago, each underwent historic citizen-driven shifts since then.
Although it was notified of dioxin soil contamination in Riverside Park in 2008, city leaders in Wausau made little effort to address it for over a decade, even after repeated requests from community members. In the summer of 2023, hundreds of tons of contaminated soil were finally excavated and removed from the park. Kilian continues to advocate for concerned constituents on River Street who want residential yards tested that were only a few feet away from soil dioxin levels in the park that exceeded DNR standards.
In the face of another development for Thomas Street east of Cleveland Avenue, Kilian had run in 2020 on his call for additional environmental testing and holding public participation processes to drive future redevelopment decisions, stating: “What you are dealing with on Thomas Street is not a chop shop, it is a neighborhood…It is not intended to be exploited, demolished, and monetized.” Kilian and Larson held foundational public participation meetings on the southwest side which overwhelmingly indicated in 2020 the desire to have truly affordable single-family homes instead, in part, to replace the affordable housing that was demolished during the unpopular Thomas Street Project. The City of Wausau has applied for DNR assessment monies to environmentally test all related parcels, and possible designs for affordable single-family homes on the Thomas Street parcels are being provided by the City’s Economic Development staff later this week to seek public feedback on them.
On the southwest side, Alders Kilian and Larson also both worked for years to effectively address a large portion of the former Connor Forest Industries property, 1300 Cleveland Ave., which is now owned by the city. Decades after the purchase, environmental testing is finally underway under the oversight of the DNR. Now, the property will undergo comprehensive remediation.
The Cleveland Avenue property is currently zoned residential, and Kilian and Larson vigorously represented the high volume of public feedback that they and the City received indicating a desire for thorough remediation and no more industrial expansion or use on the property, whether it was the City, 3M Company, or another outfit. After one city council member suggested that the City of Wausau would do the right thing on the property’s contamination without a formal council vote, Kilian pushed back.
“We should take this discussion to the maternity ward at a hospital so that you can find someone who was born yesterday,” he said.
Kilian will hold upcoming public listening sessions on the property’s remediation and redevelopment in the near future, and Community Development reportedly interfaced with a UniverCity program participant recently to generate one possible concept that includes affordable single-family homes on the property.
Kilian spearheaded the first adopted municipal-level Environmental Justice resolution in the history of the state of Wisconsin. He has served as one of the 14 members of the statewide advisory committee for the new environmental mapping tool being developed by the Wisconsin DNR, DHS, DOA, and WEDC. As an alder, Kilian has also collaborated with DNR personnel on public participation processes in the district to strengthen opportunities for citizen feedback on contaminated sites, such as the Wauleco site – formerly the Crestline and SNE property.
Fiscal voting record and other policy reforms, positions
Quantitatively, in terms of Wausau’s debt, borrowing, and taxpayer subsidies to private upscale development, Kilian has the cleanest voting record on the city council. Last year, the 2023 budget passed 10-1 with Kilian as the lone no vote. Early on, he and Larson pushed for eliminating the once-frequent practice of selling City-owned property to developers for $1.
In 2022, State lawmakers killed what was labeled by the media as a “secret Wausau TIF expansion bill” after Kilian learned of it, alerted the public, and told legislators that, if need be, he would drive down to Madison to testify against the bill personally.
In 2023, the developer of the former mall property attempted to stop Alders Kilian and Gary Gisselman (and later Larson) from continuing to vote on the project, after they vocally opposed the luxury apartment development that is to be funded with $10.8 million in taxpayer dollars. It stopped none of them. Kilian later wrote a guest column criticizing Wausau’s “Good Ol’ Boys” culture that included a reference to the WOZ mall redevelopment.
In order to significantly reduce rising water rates, Kilian led the attempt to eliminate the PILOT that the water utility pays the City, which has been called “a hidden water tax” by others in the past.
He submitted an amendment during a council meeting to reduce the city council’s and mayor’s pay by 3% until they could better establish and hit performance metrics.
Kilian has been a strong advocate on matters related to the unhoused, mental health services, and for expanded alcohol and drug treatment programs for the community. He was an outspoken critic of fencing out the unhoused from public areas like underneath downtown bridges. Jointly, he and Alder Gisselman called for a Committee of the Whole meeting to address homelessness, in which they proposed new city-led health and human service offerings to be established outside of the realm of the police department. Kilian advocated for providing Narcan and fentanyl strips years before it was finally realized. He unsuccessfully advocated for establishing an “Angel Program” in Wausau like those in other geographies and a local needle exchange program to improve safety and reduce the number of discarded needles on the streets and grounds of neighborhoods.
“It has been, and continues to be, a tremendous honor to serve the great residents and neighborhoods on both sides of the river in District 3,” Kilian told Wausau Pilot & Review. “Through their participation and perseverance, they have achieved impressive results on multiple policy fronts, and I have no doubt that the residents, together, will continue to pursue benevolent outcomes for our town and its people.”
