Mayor Sullivan's Final Thoughts
On Tuesday April 20 th I sat down with then Mayor, Maury Sullivan and asked him to reflect on his past six years as the Mayor of Oconomowoc. The Mayor reflected on a number of his accomplishments, most notably he feels he is leaving the office with a city that is in good shape from a fiscal perspective and from a staffing function. According to the Mayor, when he first took office the city was spending $100,000-$135,000 on street repairs. This past year the city allocated over $3M for street repairs.
When asked what stands out most to the Mayor as an accomplishment he listed the road upgrades while conceding that there is much work to be done there. The new growth in development within the city which he quotes from State reports that the city has benefited from $559 million in new construction within the city over the past six years. Other projects have been stalled due to financing, most notably the Rockwell project in the downtown area and the Pabst Farms development. City finances are the Mayor’s third area of accomplishment. “During this last six years there has been a relatively low increase in levy, this last year there was no increase. The levy for the city is the fifth lowest of 190 cities in Wisconsin.” said Mayor Sullivan.
Prior to his election as the Mayor of Oconomowoc, Sullivan was the Town Chairman for the Town of Summit, soon to be the Village of Summit. During those litigious years the City and Town were at odds over a border agreement. This past December roughly 4500 acres merged into the city as part of the 10 year border agreement between the two municipalities. Over 32 lawsuits were filed as a result of the announcement of the Target Distribution Center. “I felt that quite frankly this was foolishness and I advocated with the Town Board to negotiate and they had tried litigating, but that had mixed limited success and started negotiating with the boundary agreement in 1999.” We no longer have litigation…I wasn’t thinking of this as an accomplishment while I was Mayor. Clearly Sullivan’s involvement as Town Chairman and his 3 term tenure as Mayor of Oconomowoc has had an impact on the relations between Summit and Oconomowoc.
When I asked the Mayor to look forward as he leaves office, he sees that most of the issues that the city will face are issues related to development, growth in the city and the hot topic of impact fees. When I asked Sullivan about the impact fees, he stated, “I think they will not be changed, because the impact of having residents pay for development impact fees would be so substantial that I don’t think that the taxpayers would agree to that.” The bigger issues facing Oconomowoc are the downtown areas and the Pabst Farms Development. A good deal of concern about the future of the Pabst development is still on many minds in the community while DDR continues to bring forth plans for the new mall, most have realized that the plans once promised to the city with high end retailers such as Nordstroms will not materialize.
The biggest hurdle for the new mayor is a balancing what Pabst would like to develop with the public’s perception of what they were promised. The demographics don’t tend to support the higher end retailers for our area and of course the recession has not helped the plans for the new mall. Optimistic and upbeat about the future of the city the former mayor has no plans to drift into the sunset. Sullivan would not rule out a run for this office or any other office at the moment. For now he plans on enjoying time off with his wife Ann in our great city.
Posted by: 
Glenn Hanon
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