JUNEAU — The Dodge County Finance Committee held a meeting Monday night which included a presentation outlining the current state of the county’s finances.
Titled “Dodge County’s Results of Current Financial Plan,” the presentation was meant to give an overview of how Dodge County compared to other Wisconsin counties, and ways that the county could improve going forward.
The presentation was given by the Interim Dodge County Finance Director Dr. Bo DeDeker, an Assistant Professor of Accounting at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, who was appointed to fill the position last April.
While the presentation did include a number of graphs visualizing trends in Dodge County and other comparable Wisconsin counties, it did not go into detail about how new initiatives may impact those numbers. The presentation defined comparable counties as having a population between 30,000 and 100,000, of which Dodge County currently has approximately 89,000 according to the most recent census.
The provided packet also only provided statistics between the year 2000 and 2020, leaving the last two and a half years up to the imagination. Most of the graphs showed generally consistent trends in both Dodge and comparable counties.
DeDeker also pointed out a large gap between the spending of Dodge and comparable counties on cultural, educational, parks, and recreational facilities and programs, with Dodge County lagging far behind other comparable counties. It was also pointed out that highway construction expenditures spiked every few years due to large maintenance projects being done in spurts, and not in consistent timeframes.
All presented revenue and expense graphs were compiled by the UW Madison Department of Extension.
Following the graphs was a “strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats” analysis which were generated through the use of “Artificial Intelligence” predictive text models.
The AI generated analyses explored the various strengths and weaknesses of Dodge County, as well as highlighting a number of issues and opportunities for the county.
While still a valuable tool in quickly generating large amounts of text, text prediction models are not true artificial intelligence due to how they work. The generations are made through a vast database of written works—such as books, news articles, and social media—and reacts to prompts based on what would most likely come next in a sentence or paragraph.
Following the meeting, WPN was able to ask Dr. DeDeker a few questions about the plan.
“Dodge County has a lot of opportunity ahead of itself,” DeDeker said. “I think it needs to do a better job of looking at a longer term vision, and try to come up with some ways to solve some problems that happen within the county.”
DeDeker went on to elaborate on the current vision that Dodge County has going forward, headed by County Administrator Cameron Clapper.
“One of the initiatives [Clapper] wants to do is take a look at trying to develop a comprehensive plan to try to bring the economy forward and look at economic development with communities,” he said.
The primary issue that DeDeker highlighted was the limited economic diversity in the county, with agriculture dominating the local economy. DeDeker suggested that finding ways to diversify the economy and bring more industries into the county would highly benefit the local area.
Due to Dodge County’s close proximity to Madison and Milwaukee, being both less than an hour away and right on several major highways, DeDeker believes that Dodge County could become appealing to investors and homeowners.
“We’re close enough to Madison and close enough to Milwaukee, and we have cheaper land than Madison and Milwaukee, so that’s an opportunity for us to try to bring some larger, either manufacturing, or something like Epic out of Madison that would bring higher paying jobs for the community,” he said.
When asked how Waupun fits into this plan, DeDeker said that the city wasn’t a specific focus of the plan, but that the County would assist local communities in future developments.
“Cameron’s vision is to work with the communities, and to help communities bring economic development forward,” DeDeker said. “We want to get with Waupun and do what we can do to help reduce barriers for them and maybe even match grants.”
The meeting also covered the County’s year-to-date budget reports for June and July and an overview of the 2022 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report as compiled by accounting firm Baker Tilly US, LLC.
The Dodge County government operates out of the Dodge County Administration Building in downtown Juneau.
