WAUSAU, WI (WSAU) — After over 5 months of work the Marathon County Board Size Task Force is ready to make a final recommendation.
Monday afternoon the Marathon County Board Size Task Force held a meeting to create recommendations for the County Executive Committee. The task force was created by the Executive Committee back in May to analyze whether or not the board should reduce its size. The Marathon County Board currently has 38 supervisors making it the largest county board in the country.
Following a public listening session last month and the past few months of research, the task force will be recommending that the county board remain at its current size. Task Force Chair John Robinson says they considered a few different factors when making the final recommendation.
“As one member said if it ain’t broke why are we fixing it? I went in as a long-time supporter of a smaller board. But we reflected on the fact that a larger board gives you more diversity and that diversity has been good. There are different viewpoints and if you make it smaller it will be less diverse. That’s both geographically and points of view. And while there’s some savings, there weren’t a lot of savings with this size.”
Along with those factors Robinson mentioned the public comment the task force received was mostly in favor of the current board size. Out of the 118 responses given to the task force, 78% of those were for keeping the board at 38 supervisors. Robinson says the task force wanted to follow the political will of the county.
“There’s a feeling that at this time making a change would not be well received by the general public. That there’s a distrust of government. What we heard was that they had confidence in the current size and they don’t want that smaller.”
With the recommendations created the task force will hold one final meeting on December 16th to finalize their report to the County Executive Committee. Robinson says the timeline is to present the recommendations and report to the Executive Committee at their January 14th meeting. Following that meeting, the information would be presented to the full county board for their vote of approval in February.
