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County board seat contested

Two running for District 9

By Robert Cloud


Joel Bartel is challenging James Nygaard, the incumbent who represents Supervisory District 9 on the Waupaca County Board.

District 9 includes part of the towns of Farmington, Scandniavia and St. Lawrence, and all of the village of Scandinavia.

The election is Tuesday, April 7.

Nygaard

First elected to the county board in 2016, Nygaard has served on a number of committees, including Agriculture, Extension and Education, Land and Water Conservation, and Planning and Zoning.

Nygaard is also a member of the Executive Committee and Waupaca County’s representative on East Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission.

“I came in with a very limited knowledge as to all the work that is done by the county board and the courthouse staff,” Nygaard said.

He noted that being a county supervisor requires more of a time commitment than attending a monthly meeting.

Nygaard said supervisors have committee assignments that require effort and doing homework.

“Having a larger board means extra knowledge that everyone brings to the table,” Nygaard said. “I have a greater appreciation for the opinions of others, the support of others.”

He appreciates that the Waupaca County Board “operates without personal agendas or ulterior motives.”

“I did not realize how altruistic these people are,” Nygaard said. “They are concerned about their districts and concerned about the county as a whole.”

He said he also believes most of the county staff are “competent, hard-working people.”

As a member of the Land and Water Conservation Committee, Nygaard had a role in an effort to test well water countywide.

“With the money we had, we were able to get at least one private well water sampling in every township,” Nygaard said.

Nygaard said the Land and Water Conservation Department tried to obtain a well water sampling from every square mile, or 640-acre section, of the county.

The project ran for more than two years. Collected samples were sent to the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point for testing.

“We chose seasons of the year when problems were more likely to show up,” Nygaard said.

Contamination can be caused by a poor fitting, a failed casing, a septic failure or nearby farm fields.

“A lot of the problem is people just not knowing if their water is good or bad,” Nygaard said.

Nygaard said he fully supports the county’s decision to build a new highway maintenance facility.

“We had been using a shop building, designed and built in 1936, in what is now a primarily residential neighborhood,” Nygaard said. “The cost to maintain and update the old facility in that location was not a good investment of taxpayer money. The much better option was to build new on a site with ample room for today’s trucks and equipment with quick easy access to the most heavily traveled U.S. and state roads and the hub of county roads that fan out from the Waupaca area to much of the rest of the county.”

Nygaard said the county had an opportunity to build at a time when interest rates were low.

The county has been paying off existing bonds as they came due and did not need to extend or refinance its existing debt.

That “means we as taxpayers are paying less proportional interest and more principal,” Nygaard said.

He said the old maintenance facility was obsolete.

“Some larger pieces of equipment did not fit in the service bay and as a result, it would be worked on with the shop door open as the machine was part inside the building and did not fit fully inside,” Nygaard said. “Working conditions were at times awkward and as a result worker productivity suffered.”

Nygaard said Waupaca County’s road work is now funded by the operating levy, not with borrowed money and charged interest.

“The services Waupaca County provides are intended to make our communities a better place,” Nygaard said. “The new highway maintenance facility will help make that happen.”

Bartel

Bartel said there is a crisis with the deteriorating condition of county roads.

“The main reason I’m running is that I’m worried someone, or someone’s son or daughter. is going to get killed,” Bartel said.

He believes the county’s strategic plan has failed to keep county roads maintained.

“Jim Nygaard has been on the county board for four years and has done nothing to improve our roads for our residents in District 9,” Bartel said. “But he voted for a $30 million county shop as the roads crumbled, which raised our taxes.”

Bartel’s solution to improve county roads is “to scrap the Waupaca County Strategic Road Plan and begin to repave roads without reconstructing the entire roads…. We need to grind them and repave them, instead of reconstructing them.”

Bartel said he believes the new highway facility has pulled tax revenues from needed road projects.

“Residents will pay $1 million in interest payments alone in the next year’s county budget,” Bartel said. “That’s a lot of money. That would have paid for a lot of roads.”

If elected to the county board, Bartel plans to examine the budget and “make appropriate cuts to get our spending in check and transfer some of that money to the roads.”

Bartel also proposes making this a “sanctuary county for gun rights, which will help protect the residents’ Second Amendment rights.”

Sanctuary counties have adopted ordinances that prohibit police from enforcing state and federal gun restrictions deemed unconstitutional, such as bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, red flag laws or universal background checks.

In Wisconsin, Florence, Langlade, Vilas, Washburn and Monroe counties have passed sanctuary resolutions.

This is Bartel’s first bid for the county board, but it is his fourth municipal race.

In 2009, Bartel was elected to the Farmington Town Board, after defeating incumbent Eugene Engebretson.

In 2011, Engebretson defeated Bartel.

In 2017, Bartel ran for town chair, but lost to Caroline Murphy 367-297.

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