Yard Waste Site Part 2 - the second shoe to drop

 

This is a follow-up post to the previous  post "What a Waste of a Yard Waste Site" found elsewhere on this blogsite.     

  As if the original loss of a great yard waste site wasn't enough, now this news comes out.

   It turns out that even with a left-hand thread, the screw job that the Village got under the "leadership" of (then) President Chris Voll, Village Administrator Richard Downey, and particularly Community Development Director Randy Fifrick, was much worse than we knew.

   It appears that after Kronenwetter's staff-promoted, ill-advised sale of the 29 acre yard waste site property to the neighboring granite pit owner Mitch King for something like $275,000, King has gone ahead to somehow combine it with his 19 acre, somewhat mined-out granite pit and sold the two parcels together for a cool $3.5 million, the way I understand it as posted at the county website. See the following:  

 https://ascent.co.marathon.wi.us/AscentLandRecords/PropertyListing/RealEstateTaxParcel#/Details/47440

https://ascent.co.marathon.wi.us/AscentLandRecords/PropertyListing/RealEstateTaxParcel#/Details/27900

   (Click on "sales history" for both)

   Now, King is a businessman, and that's what business people do, they buy low, sell high. But this news certainly twists the dagger that in my opinion Fifrick & Cohorts stuck in the Village Board's back a few years ago.

   I shouldn't be surprised. This all fits, and in my mind it answers a lot of questions about why Randy Fifrick was so determined and adamant about facilitating the Village sale of this property, and doing so under the radar as much as possible with Voll invoking closed session tactics to accomplish it.

   According to the Public Works Director at the time Chris Johnson, when he voiced questions and opposition about this sale to Fifrick and Downey, Johnson was told to "butt out, it's none of your concern". 

   Likewise, the Public Works crew was perplexed and extremely aggravated as to why this sale was even being considered, since they had put a lot of work into this property and the use of that property was very valuable to their operations. 

   I was later told after the sale, that the employees were instructed by the Village Administrator to not discuss this issue or indicate their discontent with the sale with any of the Village Board members. 

   In hindsight, the sale process was full of red flags:

•    Fifrick/Downey skipped over PIC committee (forerunner of the current CLIPP) review and recommendation of this sale, which normally would be an important part of the process. 
•   Randy Fifrick rebuffed public inquiries about why this land was not being sold on the open market with competitive buyers. 
•   They never got a commercial value appraisal on the property, but instead just estimated the land value based on the value of surrounding residential property. So, based on the recent sale price of about $2-2.5 million for the 29 acre portion of the deal, the failure to get a qualified appraisal likely caused a real time undervaluation of the property by about a million dollars.
•     Fifrick never told the board about the wetlands and the very rough, unsuitable condition of the 8 acre piece (the current yard waste site) that his plan called for using as the new yard waste site, and he never told the Board about the time (several years) and the cost (over $50,000)  it would take to get even a smaller yard waste site up and operating. 
•    Finally, he never ran the sale past Plan Commission for review and approval as required by State statute.

   All of this was unknown to me at the time, because by the time I was elected in 2018, it was all nearly a done deal, with only some back-and-forth haggling over the final price. It never even occurred to me that there had never been any real due diligence done by Fifrick, Downey, or the Board prior to the time I got involved as a trustee.

   It was only after the sale was complete that I started to smell a rat in this deal. I learned of what a loss this was to the Public Works Dept, and that the 8 acres that the Village retained out of the deal was nearly worthless. 

   As a trustee I started to look into this, then as chairman of CLIPP I wanted to investigate the origins and history of this sale, because the deal could still have been reversed by a judge due to the legal failure to obtain the Plan Commission approval of the sale.

    I got intense administrative opposition, lies, and hostility to my inquiries. I got no support from the committee, the Board, or from President Chris Voll, who was closely associated with Downey and Fifrick. The Board had a "what's done is done" attitude after being told that there was nothing we could do about it. Of course, most Board members were not privy to the apparently inside knowledge of what a granite deposit like that was really worth.

    I was never able to get to the bottom of it and eventually had to let the issue go.

   

   Now that we see what kind of money and value was involved here, all of the puzzle pieces fit together and the above described secrecy, conniving, opposition and allegedly withheld information makes perfect sense. To me, anyway.