Candidates for Village of Weston President share reasons for running and vision for village’s future

WESTON, Wis. (WSAW) - With just a few days before the April 1 election, current Village of Weston President Mark Maloney and challenger Jim Pinsonneault are sharing the reason they’re hoping to be the village’s next leader.

From the biggest challenges facing the village, to how they would tackle budget issues, and the simple question of why they are running.

Below are the full interviews and transcripts with both candidates:

Why are you running for village president?

MM: I think I have a lot to offer yet. I’ve been on the village board or town board for probably 16 to 18 years since I was 30 years old. I’m currently 65 years old. I enjoy serving. I enjoy finding solutions. I enjoy helping people with some issues, and I get a kick out of seeing the village of Weston grow, along with the area municipalities.

JP: I’m running for village president because the 16,000 residents in the village of Wesson, we deserve to know where our tax dollars are spent, have clear communication with that and have good transparency, and those tax dollars need to be spent wisely in an efficient manner so that we maximize, get the most bang for our buck.

What qualifications do you bring?

MM: Well, you know, I want to protect the absent. So, you know, Jim is a current sitting trustee, and I think we get along pretty well. But what I bring to the table is life experiences.

My career has been in customer service—grocery—primarily for about 32 years running grocery stores, managing grocery stores, the operations, everything. In the last 18, 19 years, I’ve been running a produce facility up in the Merrill area, but we’re in five different states, probably have about, I don’t know, 900 to 1,000 customers, and I’m the current director of retail sales for that. So, I think I get along very well with people.

I tend to talk too much. I need to listen more, but I really enjoy it, and I think I’m very qualified. I think I bring people together, communities together, and I think I work with individuals very well.

JP: I’m a Marine Corps veteran, so I’ve been forward deployed in a combat area in Fallujah, Iraq, so I understand what it takes to work under pressure with limited resources and still accomplish the mission. I know what it takes to lead a team, be it a small fire team or a team of 16,000 people to accomplish a mission.

I’m also a successful small business owner in the Village of Weston. I own Patriot Auto Repair, and the leadership style that I have and the team that we have built has been recently recognized. We were voted Small Business of the Year in 2023.

I’ve built both a commercial building and a residence in the Village of Weston, so I know what it takes on both sides, both the, what it takes to pull permits and work with contractors and then on the other side, on the village side, so how did those permits get processed and what are the policies and procedures and checks and balances on both sides. So I have an idea of the challenges that are there and how it could be improved by changing some policies and procedures.

What is the greatest challenge Weston faces, and what is your solution?

MM: I would say, you know, we think it’s growth, we think it’s housing, but really it’s the cost of services, and the solution for that is we need to merge, we need to share more with neighboring municipalities to get these same services done. Do we all need a street sweeper? Do we all need all this equipment?

We have shared services in public safety with fire. Rothschild enjoys Schofield, and Weston is currently with Rib Mountain. I think in the future, those fire departments on the south side here should be one. We have a police department now, the Mountain Bay Metro Police Department, that is now together. It used to be separate, and those shared services bring a stronger, higher quality service to the taxpayers, and I think at a reduced cost. So, I think that’s our biggest one, is money and tax rate.

JP: The greatest challenge Weston faces right now is just a budget shortfall. We’re bumped right up to, and everyone’s property taxes have increased and so the only solution for that is either decreased spending or increased revenue. We can’t increase revenue anymore, and we don’t want to increase revenue; we don’t want to increase tax dollars anymore, so we need to do more with less.

The plan to do more with less involves four things. My campaign slogan is ‘Everyone EATS’: Efficiency, Accountability, Transparency, Sustainability. So those four things have to happen and we have to have some changes in policy and procedure for our staff to carry out and do more with less.

A lot of things in Weston still operate like it’s 1996, we’ve been a village since 1996 and some of that stuff hasn’t changed and some of those policies we’ve adopted in 1996 were from 1982, or 1902, or who knows when, and we need to evolve with that and a fresh set of eyes can help change that and get with the times.

How do you plan to address the challenge of shrinking budgets and increased costs?

MM: It’s just constant communication with our neighboring municipalities.

Keeping our eye on the budget, starting our budget process earlier in the year, not at the end of the year. Getting staff involved, getting the directors involved, the administrator and the entire board involved, and being probably more educated. We have an extremely well-educated, gifted finance director, and I think actually a little bit more education to our board and to the directors would help in the long run too.

The biggest thing is just keeping those communication avenues open with the other municipalities, too. Constantly talking, constantly thinking about better ways of doing things.

JP: We talked about changing policy and procedure, but some of that has to do with maximizing efficiencies by utilizing today’s technology. So we have things that can be done with software that used to be done with multiple people, we have the capability now to track where our personnel are, where equipment is with software, so we don’t have to manually flip through records and see, ‘Hey gosh does this machine need to be serviced?’ and we’re maybe servicing a machine that doesn’t have enough hours on it to reach that service interval, we can look right at a software program that we can implement to track all of those things and be more efficient, spend our dollars more wisely.

What would you like to accomplish as Village President that others before you haven’t?

MM: There’s little daily things, maybe long-term things. We’ve got a building built now that’s going to last us 50 to 70 years in the future. I think one of the biggest things right now is our fire departments. So, I really don’t view them as ‘mine’ or ‘I,’ I view them as ‘we’ and ‘our.’

Together with all the teams involved, working with the residents, truly, the residents are our boss. Sometimes I think people get confused in government, who’s our boss? Who do we listen to? Absolutely 100 percent, it’s the residents, the people paying the bills, keeping the lights on. They’re the people we listen to. That’s the person I answer the phone from first is when a resident calls and needs help.

JP: I really want to increase the transparency and make the citizens of Wesson feel like they have a voice. I think there are definitely some decisions that have been made in the village, some of them very recently, some in the somewhat recent past, from building a building to the formation and combination of police departments. The merger of police departments is a fantastic thing, that’s a way to be efficient.

We can pool resources, work well with our neighbors and lower the overall cost of that service and increase the level of service to our residents and our neighboring communities, but the transparency of those things happening needs to be improved. We need to be able to communicate that better, we need to leverage that technology, we need to use social media, we need to use email, we need to use this stuff, we don’t have to send a letter to everyone’s home that says, ‘Hey we’re doing this thing,’ we need to have the information available though to our citizens so they can get involved.