By Keene Winters

From public safety breakdowns to costly management flaws, Wausau keeps confronting issues that demand transparency, yet residents are still waiting for the written reports that should explain what happened and what comes next.

No one likes reading reports. They can be verbose and tedious. However, they are important. Investigations and their findings are integral to transparency and accountability in government. Like them or not, we need them, and the City of Wausau should be producing more of them.

This past summer, citizens were treated to headlines about the arrest of a Wausau Fire Department Battalion Chief for allegedly stealing pain medication from the department’s inventory—and a lot of it. The article highlighted serious control weakness in the fire department’s ordering and inventorying of controlled substances. In sum, one person—and one person alone—was in charge of ordering and accounting for the medications used. Four months later, where is the report?

Should we not have a written document that identifies the procedural weakness that allowed the department’s pain medication inventory to be pilfered for months?

More importantly, should we not have a written set of new protocols and checks and balances that will prevent this from happening again? Would you not expect the Public Health & Safety Committee to have demanded a plan? Would you not have expected the mayor to have ordered the completion of a report?

One excuse that has been floated is that the fire department is waiting for the Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) to complete its investigation of the alleged thief – even though charges have already been filed. Seriously, do you think that is a good reason to wait four, five or six months to put in place procedures to safeguard protect the inventory of controlled substances? Whether the person stole and whether the inventory is vulnerable to theft are two separate issues.

A written plan to address the control weaknesses should have been done immediately.

It has been almost two years since there was a fire at the Central Fire Station. One of the reasons why the fire was not detected earlier is that the smoke detectors were not working. No one had bothered to change their batteries. At the fire department.

It may seem trivial and a bit comical, but in the private sector this would have undoubtedly resulted in a fine from the Occupation Health & Safety Administration (OSHA). Unfortunately, OSHA does not cover local governments. Again, where is the report? Is the Public Health & Safety Committee not just a little curious? Does the Human Resources Committee care about employee safety?

Is there a single study that shows a meaningful return on investment (ROI) or economic impact for any Tax Incremental District (TID) that Wausau has undertaken? Yet, we go forward under the banner of blind faith and shell-out ever more money acting on the unproven assumption that TIDs—no matter how they are managed—do great things. Do you not think that the Economic Development Committee or Finance Committee should want see results and to develop a better understanding of what works and what does not?

In June of 2024, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) flagged Wausau for pumping 17% more water than it was billing for. There was a suggestion that the cause was a lot of faulty meters, and the utility should replace them. Good, but where is the report? How much money did the city lose? What kind of progress has been made? When will all the faulty meters be replaced?

How did the problem get so bad? And, most importantly, what is the plan to make sure this never happens again?

In addition to doing the investigation and making recommendations, the reports have to be made public and recommendations followed. For example, we are just now hearing about the April 2021 Mercury Associates study of the City Motor Pool, describing deficiencies in the management of the city’s vehicle fleet? Did the city fix them? No, they put the report on the shelf and kept on deferring maintenance, deferring purchases, undercharging department for the rolling stock they used, and borrowing money to cover the losses.

Here is a place where the mayor could have impact.

He could give departments written directives to complete reports by dates certain. Make both the directive and the resulting reports public. The first step toward better government is admitting there is a problem. All organization need to learn—learn from their mistakes. Wausau needs to start doing just that. It must begin producing reports and implementing their findings.

Keene Winters is a former Wausau city alderman. He is also a two-time winner of recognition from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association for opinion page content.

Home

Winters: In Wausau government, transparency starts with written reports