Editorial: City department heads should be allowed to speak for themselves
By Brandi Makuski
For months, Mayor Mike Wiza has made it clear that at least some Stevens Point department heads are not to speak directly with the Metro Wire. This week showed just how absurd that restriction has become.
We’re talking about picnic tables.
Several tables that had long occupied a public gathering space near the downtown bus stop disappeared, so we emailed Parks Director Dan Kremer with two routine questions: Where did they go, and why were they removed?
Kremer did not respond. Wiza did.
We hadn’t emailed the mayor. We hadn’t copied him. We had asked the city’s parks director a question about city parks.
If this were an isolated incident, it wouldn’t be worth an editorial. Emails get forwarded. Department heads get busy. But this isn’t an isolated incident.
Just days earlier, the Metro Wire emailed Public Works Director Scott Beduhn and City Engineer Joe Skibinski with questions about the Business 51 construction schedule. Neither responded directly. Wiza did, even though he again had not been included on the email.
There is no mystery about why this keeps happening. Wiza has already told us.
Last fall, after the mayor canceled a scheduled Metro Wire interview with Beduhn about Business 51, Wiza was asked directly why Beduhn was no longer being allowed to speak with us.
“I’m not allowing that,” Wiza said.
He went further: “I will answer all of your questions. If I can’t, I’ll get Scott to give me the answers.”
That exchange was the subject of an editorial we published in January. At the time, we argued that the issue was not the city’s media policy but the mayor’s use of it. Eight months later, the same problem is playing out in real time.
And now we’re talking about picnic tables.
Not the Pentagon Papers. Not classified information from a closed-session meeting. Picnic tables.
If a reporter cannot ask the city’s parks director a routine question about picnic tables without the answer being routed through the mayor, it is difficult to imagine a more basic example of how unnecessarily restrictive this has become.
The city’s written media policy does not require that. While it designates the mayor as the city’s public information officer, it also identifies department directors and employees with expertise on a particular issue as authorized spokespeople.
That makes sense. Kremer knows parks. Beduhn knows public works. Skibinski knows engineering. They were hired because of that expertise, and taxpayers pay them to use it.
For years, Metro Wire reporters routinely spoke directly with city department heads. Those conversations produced detailed stories about roads, utilities, parks, development, and multimillion-dollar public projects. It was ordinary newsgathering, and it worked.
What Wiza has imposed instead is a bottleneck. A reporter asks the subject-matter expert a question, the information travels elsewhere, and an answer comes back through the mayor. Nuance can be lost. Follow-up questions become more difficult. Information is delayed. Most importantly, the public loses the ability to hear directly from the people responsible for the work.
That is not better communication. It is message control.
We don’t like bullies. We never have. And we have no interest in getting into a pissing match with one simply for the sake of having a fight.
But there is a difference between refusing to engage in a personality battle and staying silent while someone throws his weight around. At some point, the public needs to know when its mayor is stepping on the necks of at least some department heads and deciding when they may speak about their own work.
This is not about whether Wiza will speak to the Metro Wire. He does. Nor is it about demanding special access. We want the same thing any reporter should want: the ability to ask questions of the public officials who actually know the answers.
The Common Council also bears responsibility for allowing this to continue.
The issue was laid out publicly before the council last October, when its members were asked to review or clarify the media policy. In January, Policy and General Government Committee Chair Ginger Keymer said putting the matter on a future agenda “seems like a reasonable request.”
It is now the end of August. Nothing has changed.
Instead, the examples keep piling up: the blocked streets garage tour, the canceled Business 51 interview, questions to public works and engineering answered by the mayor, and now a parks director who did not answer a question about picnic tables while the mayor did.
Wiza has every right to speak for his administration. He is the mayor, and his answers are part of the public record, too.
But he should not need to be the human switchboard for information coming out of Stevens Point City Hall.
Department heads are trusted to manage multimillion-dollar operations, supervise employees and make decisions affecting thousands of residents. They can answer questions about the departments they run.
And if City Hall believes they cannot, the Common Council needs to explain why — and decide whether that’s really the kind of government it wants.
Because if a parks director cannot answer a question about picnic tables without the mayor stepping in, Stevens Point has a much bigger problem than missing picnic tables.