December 21, 2017 at 12:56 p.m.
Mike Timmons needs to be held accountable
Mike Timmons needs to be held accountable
These supervisors, elected usually in low-turnout elections, spend millions of our tax dollars. It ain't chump change.
What's more, the decisions they make aren't often widely publicized; some are even made inappropriately behind closed doors. This newspaper covers as many meetings as we possibly can, but nothing can replace the scrutiny of town officials and boards by local citizens.
Without question, there's a lot of error and misconduct going on. Sometimes local officials just don't know what they are doing or what they can and can't do; other times, it's more nefarious, with officials knowing there aren't any real penalties for breaking the law and gambling that they can get away with misbehavior simply because the public isn't paying attention.
In Oneida County, district attorney Michael Schiek makes that attitude even worse by repeatedly letting public officials off the hook for violations of their public responsibilities. So there's certainly a lot of scrutiny needed from citizens, and not just in Boulder Junction.
This past month, for example, Woodruff town chairman Mike Timmons took a vote he most certainly should not have taken, a vote on a health-insurance package whose benefits he receives as the town chairman.
That's a conflict of interest and, arguably, a violation of the state's ethics code for local officials. The Wisconsin Towns Association called the propriety of Timmons's vote "a fine line."
A couple of points need to be made. First, thanks to the vague language of the state statute, Timmons may not have crossed that fine line legally.
According to the statute, no local public official may take any official action substantially affecting a matter in which the official has a substantial financial interest. Timmons certainly has an interest in the matter of his health insurance.
On the other hand, the statute continues, nothing in the foregoing language prohibits a local public official from taking any action concerning the lawful payment of salaries or employee benefits, or prohibits a local public official from taking official action with respect to any proposal to modify a county or municipal ordinance.
Most likely a vote on the health insurance package would fall under "any action" concerning the lawful payment of benefits - an action to change those benefits - and compensation falls under the town's code of ordinances, so the law would appear to allow the chairman to vote on an otherwise proper motion to modify the compensation.
The law appears most focused on preventing votes that would disburse monies or benefits to family members or to outside businesses or organizations in which the official has a financial interest, rather than on those actions deciding compensation and other routine town business, but it can be argued either way.
What's more, whether the vote crossed the fine line or not, the town board revisited the issue and voted again, this time with Timmons not participating, thereby removing Timmons's potential legal jeopardy.
All that said, Timmons needs to be called out for his initial vote. For whatever its legal status, Timmons blatantly violated the spirit of the ethics law by voting on a matter in which he had a financial interest.
It's even more egregious than that. While some may argue that the first vote, which was 3-1 to increase the health insurance, would have passed anyway, that's not necessarily the case. That's because Timmons not only voted on the motion but seconded it, allowing the vote to proceed in the first place.
We will never know whether someone else would have seconded the motion had Timmons not done so, but without Timmons's second, the vote might never have happened and the whole chain of events concerning benefits altered.
So Timmons, with both the second of the motion and the vote, is doubly guilty of an ethics infraction, if not of the letter of the law then at least of the spirit of it.
He deserves to be called out even more because he is a seasoned veteran who should know better. To his credit, he told our reporter when the conflict-of-interest question was raised that he probably shouldn't have voted on it, but we believe that is too little, too late.
A town chairman with as much experience as he has should know better than to vote on - and, for crying out loud, to second -a matter affecting his financial interest.
Most troubling to us, as we have reported, Timmons has been careful to recuse himself from votes or discussions about replacing a fire truck, citing his position as the town's fire chief. In those matters, we feel he has every right to vote since he has nothing personal to gain from those decisions, and, as fire chief, he is actually in a position to know what is good or bad for the town.
So he has acted out of an abundance, or overabundance, of caution in those matters, but then, when his own financial interest comes before the board, he suddenly throws caution to the wind.
That really doesn't pass the smell test.
So Timmons needs to be held accountable by the public, and to be especially scrutinized going forward. We remind our readers that, in the past, Timmons has been part of the county's public safety committee, which has refused to hold the sheriff's department accountable for its own reckless behavior, from trying to cover up an allegation of rape against an officer, abetting underage drinking, out-of-control out-of-town training sessions, a selective policy of DUI enforcement, and on and on, and that still abdicates its responsibility.
Simply put, the public safety committee and Timmons have chosen to exercise no oversight over the sheriff's department, and that is indicative of good-old-boy behavior that also doesn't pass the smell test.
So there's need for scrutiny in Woodruff and there needs to be accountability in other small towns, too, and especially in Oneida County, where district attorney Michael Schiek has made a habit of not exacting consequences when local officials break the public records or meetings laws or otherwise engage in misconduct.
Over in Vilas County, there is a different model these days. There, district attorney Martha Milanowski enforces the law and demands and achieves accountability. In Boulder Junction, she lowered the boom on an open-meetings violation and had the courts void an inappropriate and illegal payment made to the clerk/treasurer.
We don't know if that by itself will bring the Boulder Junction crowd into line, but we know for a fact that other towns in Vilas County have taken notice of the district attorney's tough stance and are taking steps to avoid breaking the law themselves.
That's what accountability is and that is what it does. It serves as a deterrent to violating ethical and legal standards. It bolsters good government rather than fostering bad government, which the Schiek model so obviously does.
At the end of the day, the multitude of violations and missteps being reported at the local level represents a disturbing new trend of misconduct in a state where local governments wield a lot of power and spend a lot of tax money.
This misconduct poses a direct threat both to our liberty and to our pocketbooks. It's time to reform the way local governments do business and to curb the powers they have, and the first step in reform is for citizens to hold all town officials accountable for their actions.
We must demand - with our ballots if we must - that they uphold the spirit as well as the letter of the law. And the days when an official can get away with misconduct by saying, 'Well, I probably shouldn't have done that,' need to be a thing of the past.
The public needs to say, 'Well, no you shouldn't have done that, and here are the very real consequences you are going to face.'
If that happens, we bet things will shape up really fast.
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