Fireworks at the Brown County Supervisors Board Meeting on 9/17/25
Angry residents of Schmitt Park and employees of the 911 call center confronted the Board.
Going to a County Board meeting is a bit, okay a lot, like going to an evangelical church service. Each meeting opens with an invocation. Today’s prayer was offered by the Vice Chair, Dave Kaster. He requested a moment of silence for the victims of school shootings and for … you guessed it, Charlie Kirk.
After prayer there was a pledge of allegiance, an opening roll call, a quick adoption of the agenda, and then on to agenda item seven, “Announcements by Supervisors,” which felt like the “Prayers and Praises” part of a church service. There were requests for prayers, expressions of gratitude, and some congratulations. Supervisor Dixon Wolfe used his time to speak fondly of his mentor, Charlie Kirk. He mentioned that Charlie often told him how proud he was that Wolfe became a County Supervisor at such a young age. Wolfe briefly thanked both sides of the aisle for their condolences, but went on to say that such condolences “ring hollow if we continue to poison each other with vitriol.” He said he feels dehumanized, and sees the rhetoric as corrosive to the possibility of civil debate. “Boldness and civility can co-exist,” he said, “and I will stand firm in my own right wing convictions with courtesy.” I don’t know what the percentage of Supervisors that lean right may be, but it certainly feels slanted in that direction.
Congratulations went out to Brown County and to the Village of Denmark for receiving such bumps in their equalized values recently issued by the WI Dept of Revenue. Real property within the County is now valued at $39.9B, up 7% from last year. The Village of Denmark was especially applauded for an increase in valuation of 39% from last year.
It was also mentioned that the County Courts have a huge backlog and need to hire additional investigators to help with the case load. This issue came up again in the report of the County Executive, Troy Streckenbach. He identified a new budget shortfall that will need to be factored into the 2026 budget. State level inefficiency was blamed for the rising cost of health insurance for inmates at the Brown County Jail. Streckenbach claimed that the County currently has over 200 individuals who have been incarcerated for more than two years awaiting a hearing.
The fireworks began with the Report of the Public Safety Committee. Supervisor Patrick Evans chided the Board for failing to adequately address the concerns of the employees at the 911 call center. He said that if employees have to keep coming back to the Board with concerns, there is clearly an issue that needs to be addressed. He then asked to suspend the normal rules and give floor time to the more than two dozen employees of the call center who were present at the meeting. He went back and forth with Corporate Counsel regarding the advisability of such a move. In the end it was decided to hold their comments until the Public Comments section of the meeting. Evans once again voiced his objections to putting Public Comments at the end of the meeting, making the public wait through the rest of the agenda to air their concerns. Another Supervisor snapped back that Public Comments would arrive more quickly if “people” stopped wasting so much time on “side issues.”
When the public comments section began there were two large groups who had come to the Board meeting to air their grievances. The first was a group of residents from the Schmitt Park neighborhood of Green Bay. They are very concerned about a veterans housing project under construction. They objected to the fact the the Brown County Board gifted the land for the project to Veterans First, the organization leading the project, especially in light of a $1M budget shortfall the County is facing due to rising health care costs for inmates at the county jail. Their concerns ranged from a recent murder, to threatening behavior from a homeless man encamped in nearby woods, to lack of adequate oversight for mentally ill veterans who they allege will be “self-supervised.” One resident took the Board to task for not communicating to neighborhood residents when they were making decisions about gifting the land and approving the project. A representative of Veterans First stepped up to the microphone near the end of public comments to refute many of the residents’ claims.
The second group voicing their frustration to the Board was the 911 Call Center employees. A former County Supervisor, Randy Schultz, stepped up to the microphone to advocate for them. He mentioned that when the group approached the Board two years ago they were making between $5-$11 per hour less than comparable workers in nearby counties. He explained that after two years they are still underpaid by $5 per hour when comps are examined. He mentioned that Field Training Officers in nearby counties are being paid a $2.58 bonus for training hours, but Brown County is struggling to fill those roles. He concluded with, “We need to care. And we need to fix this.” Employees then followed with statements about the severe understaffing they face, the better than 50% turnover for new hires, the 14-16 hour shifts they are pulling without a day off in two weeks, forced attendance on scheduled days off, and the general stress and burnout affecting all of them. They cited concerns about response time, and the safety of first responders in the current environment.
As remarks were wrapping up with the rebuttal from the Veterans First group, one Schmitt Park resident began yelling at the representative and was ejected from the meeting, which was adjourned shortly thereafter. I was packing up my belongings to leave when a heated argument began between the Veterans First rep and a different resident. Good luck, folks.
Featured photo by Kristian Løvstad on Unsplash