Editorial: A 2025 Festivus for the rest of us
The airing of grievances (Stevens Point and beyond)
By Brandi Makuski and Patrick Lynn
Festivus is the season for honesty, reflection, and saying the quiet part out loud.
So let’s talk about 2025 — a year when local government tested patience, clarity, and the public’s ability to decode official information. And while not every grievance traces back to City Hall, plenty of them pass through it.
No allegations. No scandals. Just patterns — and an aluminum pole.
Communication breakdown (or: the media policy that was shaken awake)
For much of 2025, city communication was inconsistent but informal. Notices sometimes went out to the press. Sometimes they didn’t. There was confusion, but no formal system enforcing it.
Then came October.
That’s when the city’s media policy — a document roughly five years old — was suddenly dusted off and put to work. The policy itself wasn’t new. It was originally created after a former council member was unhappy about learning of a controversy involving a former police chief the same way the public did: from the press, not the mayor.
The issue wasn’t the controversy. It was who heard about it first.
For years, the policy mostly gathered dust.
Until it didn’t.
Its resurrection coincided neatly with a scheduled meeting between the press and the public works director to dig into the details of the Business 51 rebuild — a complicated, disruptive project with a lot of public interest and even more questions.
That meeting was canceled by the mayor.
Instead, routine communication suddenly became centralized. Well, sort of. Department heads who had long spoken openly about their work were no longer allowed to do so without clearance. What had once been a direct conversation became a relay race — and the baton didn’t always get passed.
And when messages from the mayor’s office did arrive in our inboxes, they often looked like they skipped the second draft. Typos, grammatical errors, and sentences that wandered off mid-thought became familiar. For official city business, proofreading appeared optional.
Which makes the whole thing especially puzzling, because City Hall already has a built-in solution: the city clerk. An elected office whose job is to issue official notices, maintain records, and communicate clearly and consistently with the public and the press. One person. One process. Every time.
Instead, 2025 delivered centralized control with decentralized results.
Festivus irony: a policy created because someone didn’t like learning news from the press was ultimately used to make sure fewer people could talk to the press at all — while the office designed to handle official communication sat largely on the sidelines.
When oversight became a problem (or: how the Police and Fire Commission will survive)
August brought a reminder that asking questions is fine — until someone asks them out loud.
After a July presentation on a proposed joint fire department with Park Ridge, Mayor Mike Wiza appeared before the Police and Fire Commission (a body over which he has no authority) to explain why the commission’s reaction had upset him. The presentation, he said, was only an introduction. The commission, unaware it was supposed to quietly absorb three slides and stop, began asking questions almost immediately.
That did not go over well.
The mayor admitted he was angry, told commissioners to “stay in your lane,” and singled out one member by name — despite similar questions coming from others.
Which is notable, because independent oversight is the commission’s lane. That independent oversight is even protected by state law.
Festivus observation: when an oversight body asks hard questions and gets scolded for it, the problem isn’t the questions — it’s the reaction.
When the mayor subtweeted the public — out loud
October delivered one of the year’s more surreal moments, when a Common Council meeting opened not with routine business, but with a prewritten, sarcastic monologue defending the mayor’s own social media behavior.
Minutes later, residents stepped to the podium to raise concerns about the very behavior the mayor had just preemptively dismissed, including fears of retaliation and questions about professionalism and standards.
The council did not respond. The meeting moved on.
Festivus observation: when residents come prepared to speak and the mayor opens by mocking the topic before they reach the microphone, that’s not engagement — it’s preemption.
When “no” became the county’s favorite answer (or: how the Village of Plover is being pushed aside)
June brought a reminder that Festivus grievances aren’t limited to City Hall.
That month, the Village of Plover tried to replace its liaison to the Portage County Solid Waste Board — a routine move that should have taken minutes, not meetings.
Village leaders asked to replace Sara Luchini with Al Haga, a longtime village trustee and former county board member. The reason was simple: they wanted someone who would reliably report back.
The county said no.
Then no again.
Executive Operations Committee Chairman Vincent Miresse said only that Haga would be “counterproductive to progress.” He did not point out that he and Haga had a long history of tension and disagreements. And Miresse has since announced he would not seek another term, wanting instead to focus on his newly elected role in the Wisconsin State Assembly.
Festivus irony: a liaison meant to represent a municipality was overruled for trying to choose its own representative.
The police blotter, or: guess what happened today
In early 2022, local law enforcement agencies switched to a new reporting system. Anyone who has ever changed software knows what follows: bugs, customization delays, and a long list of things that matter more than perfect formatting on Day One.
To be fair, the sheriff’s office has spent the last few years doing just about everything short of standing on its head to make its daily blotter as clear and informative as legally and practically possible. Plover’s limitations are largely a matter of staffing and capacity.
But the Stevens Point Police Department’s blotter has become something else entirely.
Calls are forced into a rigid set of pre-determined labels that often don’t fit the reality of what actually happened. A call marked “disturbance” might contain no details at all — even though that same label could describe anything from a genuinely minor complaint to something that had half a neighborhood rubbernecking.
In Stevens Point, “disturbance” is a mystery box.
Sometimes entries contain rich detail. Sometimes they contain almost nothing. There is no visible logic to which calls get context and which are reduced to a time, a location, and a shrug.
Redactions follow the same choose-your-own-adventure model. School-related calls are sometimes fully scrubbed. Other times, similar calls are not. The same type of incident may be treated one way on Monday and another way on Thursday, with no explanation as to why.
In at least one case, the press had to reverse-engineer what happened — tracing a real-world incident back to a vague blotter entry, requesting the report, and then being told the entire report was denied due to mental-health considerations. When the city attorney was asked to review that denial, the decision was reversed, and the report was deemed releasable without redactions.
Go figure.
Festivus takeaway: when a daily police blotter requires investigative reporting just to figure out what the entry refers to, it has failed at the one thing it’s supposed to do — tell the public what happened.
Closing Festivus thought
No one here is accused of breaking the law. This isn’t about scandal. It’s about patterns — of control without consistency, policies without clarity, and systems that make simple things harder than they need to be.
Festivus ends with feats of strength. In 2026, local government might aim for something more modest:
clear notices, consistent processes, and fewer riddles disguised as transparency.
The pole comes down tomorrow.
The expectations remain.