City, county leader loss seen across state

COVID-19, ‘spicy’ atmosphere are causes
By: 
David Wilhelms
Correspondent

The county public health officer has resigned. Shawano County’s administrative coordinator Brent Miller’s last day on the job was Oct. 16.

Shawano’s city police chief is leaving at year’s end. The Shawano mayor is leaving at the end of November. The city’s zoning administrator position is vacant. The city of Shawano has hired a private law firm for its legal services after Katie Sloma, the previous city attorney, was appointed to a judgeship.

Is this a set of coincidences? Is Shawano County part of a trend in losing key officials in a time when the country is facing a pandemic and uncertainty?

“You’re not alone. Shawano County is not alone. Certainly, the city of Shawano isn’t alone. There’s a lot of this going on across the state and across the country,” Mark O’Connell, executive director, Wisconsin Counties Association, said Oct. 14.

WCA, a nonprofit organization, is primarily a lobbying group but also serves counties with legal, educational, procurement and other services, according to its website.

“That’s an interesting question,” Jerry Deschane, executive director, League of Wisconsin Municipalities, said Oct. 13, speaking from a statewide perspective.

“Anecdotally, we’re seeing larger than usual turnover” in municipal positions, Deschane said, adding he couldn’t answer the question “mathematically.”

LWM is a nonprofit and nonpartisan association of cities and villages that provides legal and training services, as well as lobbies the state government.

There are no statistics easily available on turnover in public positions, said Dale Knapp, WCA director of research and analytics. His organization doesn’t track the data, and he wasn’t aware of any other group in the state that does.

O’Connell said there is a mass exodus from public service positions.

Among that exodus are public health officials. O’Connell said they’re leaving the public sector in many cases because of the frustration of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Significant pressure has been put on these individuals, O’Connell said, in what he called a “kind of spicy” atmosphere in many county working relationships.

“We’re asking them to be more than public health officials. We’re asking them to be public relations officials, and that’s something they didn’t sign up for,” O’Connell said.

Deschane disagreed with O’Connell, saying most are choosing to stay in public service.

“We’re living in a very stressful and uncertain time. There are no black-and-white answers in this COVID pandemic,” Deschane added.

Where there’s conflict in a government structure, it impacts both officials and employees, Deschane said, “but then you add the pandemic on top of it. Where there’s already conflict, that only adds to the stress.”

The result is that people look for better opportunities, Deschane added.

Deschane said LWM had identified conflict management within a government structure as a top association priority. It has contracted with a service to provide conflict management resources and training to its members.

O’Connell said another complication is that the pandemic has persuaded many baby boomers — or those born from 1946-1954 — to leave the frustrations of public service while they still have a number of years to offer private employers.

The WCA executive director added these employees and others have developed management skill sets during their public service tenures and that is attractive to private employers.

The pandemic has masked an underlying problem in Wisconsin, O’Connell said, saying the state is already at the “daybreak of a tremendous worker shortage.”