Committee looks at how to spend compact funds

County eyes spending $82K from Ho-Chunk on park improvements in Wittenberg, Tigerton
By: 
Lee Pulaski
City Editor

The Shawano County Tribal Affairs Committee could get a chance to have a say in what capital projects get funded with gaming compact money the county gets from the Ho-Chunk Nation.

Annually, the county gets $82,500 from the tribe as part of its compact with the state, accounting for the amount of land the tribe occupies within the county’s borders. The money has gone toward capital improvement projects, but the committee, which is responsible for maintaining relations between the county and the area tribes, has not had a voice in determining which projects get funded with the compact money.

“In the past, we’ve never had a say with the Ho-Chunk’s money,” said Supervisor Kathy Luebke at the committee’s May 6 meeting.

The committee is looking at asking for some of the funds to be applied toward projects at the parks on the western portion of the county, including Hayman Falls County Park near Tigerton and Wilson Lake County Park in Wittenberg. According to Keith Marquardt, county parks director, the county has already been making strides with setting up campsites at the two parks — six at Hayman Falls and four at Wilson Lake. Self-registration posts are being added this month, and the sites include fire pits and picnic tables.

“There’s some leveling we have to do with our tractors at Wilson Lake,” Marquardt said, noting that a county conservation grant was used to pay for constructing the campsites. “They should be up and running by next week at the latest.”

The committee asked Rep. Larry Walker Jr. of the Ho-Chunk Tribal Legislature if the tribe had any preferences for where the money went, but Walker said it was something the legislature hadn’t really discussed.

“The concentration of our Ho-Chunks (for Shawano County) are in the Wittenberg area, so any projects would be appropriate in that vicinity,” Walker said.

Marquardt said some projects that the parks department is considering putting in a walking trail at Wilson Lake, and in order to make a full-mile loop, a boardwalk would need to be constructed to get over wetland areas. Also, there are plans to clean up the beach area around the lake, with Marquardt noting the area has become “overgrown” with weeds.

“The lake level has gone up, so there’s not really a beach area,” Marquardt said.

There are also preliminary plans to bring electricity to the campsites, according to Marquardt.

“Campsites are a little more popular when there’s electricity available,” he said.

Other suggestions included cross-country ski trails on the west side of the county and improving Wi-Fi at the libraries in Wittenberg, Birnamwood, Tigerton and Mattoon.

Marquardt noted he has not done any official number crunching or filled out a capital project request. Any capital project requests for 2022 need to be completed by mid-June.

Supervisor William Switalla, who lives out in Wittenberg, suggested an extension of the existing fishing dock as a potential improvement at Wilson Lake.

“Because of the way things are overgrown, it’s hard to shore fish out there,” Switalla said. “If we could maybe extend that further.”

Administrative Coordinator James Davel suggested that it might be possible to fund some of the suggested projects with money coming in from the American Recovery Act. The only problem, he said, is that the federal government has not provided any guidance or boundaries on what can and cannot be paid for with the funding.

“We have to use those funds by 2024,” Davel said. “They’ve got to be gone. They can’t go into a bank account.”

Davel said he’d spoken with state Sen. Robert Cowles and Rep. Gary Tauchen when they were in Shawano a week earlier, and they both told him that the state has not received any input from the federal government, either.

“It’s stuck in the bureaucracy in D.C. right now, because they said, ‘We’re going to give this money, blah, blah, blah,’ and they passed it, but the people who execute that, the workers, they’re like, ‘Wait a minute. We’ve got to put the rules on it,’” Davel said. “It’s really nuts.”

Regardless of the status of the American Recovery Act funds, Luebke made it clear she wanted the committee to weigh in on projects using tribal compact funds.

“I don’t want another year to go by and the tribal (affairs) committee not being able to submit something (to the capital improvement projects committee),” Luebke said.

Supervisor Deb Noffke recommended that the committee look at consulting the tribes more on capital projects that utilize their compact money and see if they have any needs that the county could fulfill.

“There are real community needs, and it would be nice to take the money and apply it to something more meaningful,” Noffke said.


lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com