WAUPUN — Fond du Lac County Board Supervisor Jon Venhuizen spoke to the Waupun City Council Tuesday night to report on what’s been going on at the Fond du Lac County Board.
Jon Venhuizen was appointed to replace Sam Kaufman as the Waupun area County Board Supervisor after Kaufman was elected County Executive earlier this year. Venhuizen said that the Kaufman administration has been working diligently at maintaining and improving Fond du Lac County.
“Sam’s got a bunch of ideas that he’s looking at, all of which comes to the county board,” Venhuizen said.
Venhuizen outlined how the Kaufman administration has been reevaluating processes in Fond Du Lac county across several departments, including efficiency and cost. As part of this, the County administration recently updated their computer systems to make work more efficient at the county level.
“We’re also going to do a wage study this year. We hear anecdotally that county employees are underpaid compared to the public sector, and that’s probably true with how wages have gone up,” Venhuizen said. “We’re also hearing that we’re not paying as much as other counties, but we don’t know that more than what we get told so we’re going to do the wage study this year to find out.”
Like Waupun, Fond du Lac County received a large amount of ARPA funding for community improvement, of which $11 million remains for the County Board to decide what to do with.
In the last year, Fond du Lac County purchased new Sheriff patrol cars for $1.8 million. Previously the Fond du Lac County Sheriff’s Department only had 40 patrol cars to 65 Sheriff deputies, but were able to complete their fleet so that the County has a one-to-one Sheriff to patrol car ratio. This will allow Sheriffs to keep their patrol cars with them at home to respond to emergencies directly instead of requiring them to drive to the Department to pick one up.
The Waupun Library Board will also have a County Board Supervisor assigned to it as part of a resolution passed in December. So far no one has been appointed, but Venhuizen assured the Council they will be making a decision soon.
Venhuizen also discussed the state of social services in Fond du Lac County, as he is the County Board Supervisor assigned to the Social Services Committee. He stated that the Fond du Lac County Department of Social Services will be combined with the Department of Community Programs.
“They’re two areas of social services; one dealing with different things like ADRC, foster care, and child protection for the Social Service Department, while the Department of Community Programs is more for adult mental health, drug addiction, and acute psychiatric hospital we have in Fond du Lac,” Venhuizen explained about the combination of the two. “That’s going to reduce redundancy and hopefully be more cost effective.” The final merge will occur by the middle of next year.
On Kaufman, Venhuizen said that Fond du Lac County has been making good progress on being more open and upfront as a governing body. In particular he credited Kaufman with ensuring that gifts to Fond du Lac are able to be tracked, using a hypothetical $20,000 gift to a city park as an example.
“We see it as he’s shaking trees and making sure everything is the way it should be,” Venhuizen said. “It comes to the County Board and everything is pretty much unanimous in that it makes sense.”
