A look back at Mayor Diny's first year

In April 2024 we asked Mayor Diny for his priorities for his first year in office; last week we followed up on those priorities, and talked about his first year.

Mayor Doug Diny outside his office at City Hall.

We’ve included the full audio of our interview for paid subscribers below.

In Wausau, the mayor’s seat is often the center of attention regardless of who sits in it. That was the case with Mayor Jim Tipple; with Mayor Bob Mielke; Mayor Katie Rosenberg; and now with Doug Diny.

But even by those standards, it’s been an unusual year for the mayor’s office. Diny has had tension with many on the city council, he’s had vocal supporters and detractors at several meetings, and he’s had his home and office raided by the DOJ. And he’s in the middle of an ethics investigation.

Back in April 2024, The Wausonian sat down with Diny after the election to get a sense of what the next days and years would look like under Diny’s administration, and what his priorities would be.

He laid out five areas to focus on: Improving the roads, holding in-person director meetings again, implementing a six-day rule around getting meeting materials out to the public, adopting zero-based budgeting and improving records request responses.

With this year’s election past, The Wausonian decided to sit down with Diny for a long-form interview and look at how that year has gone in terms of those priorities, and talk about some of the issues that have come up in the first year.

That includes asking him about the ballot box removal. Not to litigate it further - there is currently a DOJ investigation and an ethics board process ongoing that will hash this situation out. But The Wausonian asked him if, from a strategic standpoint, if he regrets his actions regardless of whether or not he thinks he was correct.

The priorities

To start with, The Wausonian asked about the five priorities Diny laid out last year:

Roads: Mayor Diny keeps a map of the city’s roads with their PACER rating, which designates the condition of the city’s roads in a standardized way, outside of his office. A 10 rating is brand new; a 1 is a road that is falling apart at the seams. Diny says to get to all the roads in the city that are below 5 and improve them, it will cost $100 million dollars. That’s a lot of money and will take time, so Diny says the city is funneling unspent money from the salt and plowing budget to perform more surface overlays, which can prevent further road decay until the city can get to those roads and update them. (The leftover money is because Wausau has had two mild winters.) Last year that was $200,000, this year it was an additional $500,000. Diny said the city also used ARPA money to buy asphalting equipment so city crews can do the work themselves versus contracting out, saving the city money.

In-person director meetings: Of the five, it was probably the easiest to implement. Diny says he started holding director meetings in person again once he took office. Getting everyone in the room is important, he says, and it’s led to better ideas and collaboration. “We've been able to get a lot of the things done staff wise, by having those in-person meetings,” Diny says. “You get some good back and forth, real-time exchange of information.”

Six-day rule: One of Diny’s proposals was that the city ought to get meeting materials out to council members and the public within six days. I told him I thought so far that has been the case more often than not, but that it wasn’t perfect, and Diny said he agreed with that assessment. Diny says staff stumbled with that early on because it took some time to get everyone used to the new process, but since then staff members have gotten into the routine and the city has been doing a pretty good job of getting those materials out. Diny says this is important because he didn’t think it was fair to release a 200-page packet for a meeting on a Friday afternoon, which meant members would have to scramble to get themselves up to speed for the upcoming meeting on Tuesday. Diny said the city declared in January that 2025 was the year of the six-day rule to give the city clerk credit and to acknowledge that the city has come a long way.

Records requests: Diny said getting timely records requests out to the public and media is something he wanted to see improved. I told him of the areas I thought his administration fell short on, this was one. Records responsiveness hasn’t been great, though recently has improved. Diny says he gives his administration a C on this issue, and says he expects a more robust response going forward.

Foundry on Third: This kind of became a non-issue shortly after our 2024 issue. I had asked him how he expected to hold T. Wall Enterprises accountable if they once again missed a deadline for building the first mall redevelopment project. That was put to bed in May when T. Wall broke ground on the mall site. But Diny said it ran right down to the wire on their deadline.

The budget: Diny in our first interview said he was focusing on zero-based budgeting. That’s not exactly the approach he ended up taking; instead, he asked directors to put forward some cuts from their departments or other ways to save money. Some of those were adopted, but later Diny challenged the city’s Finance Committee to make further cuts (or revenue increases) to get the levy increase to under 2.5%, which it did. That included a fee for ticketed events in the city that require police and/or public works involvement, and even eliminating the warning tickets the city would give out to first-time parking offenders.

The budget process: I’ve told every city leader I can bend the ear of for years that Wausau’s budget process is handled in a more confusing way than other municipalities. Most have been similar to how the county handles the budget - County Administrator Lance Leonhard goes to each committee and presents a preliminary budget summary that takes about ten minutes with all the important highlights. In the city, the whole thing and that pertinent information is spread out over three long sessions. Most people care about the mill rate change (ie how much you will be taxed), what is being cut, what is being added, and any other big surprises that impact the budget. Diny said he appreciated the feedback and that he had alders also request similar information upfront. He also said they had a couple of issues with new budget software and with a wildly fluctuating medical insurance number that led to some uncertainty.

Next year: Diny says last budget cycle they focused on the parks department with something of a zero-based budgeting approach but he says that didn’t really constitute a fully zero-based approach (zero-based budgeting is where you start from scratch and build the budget up to what you need, versus taking what’s already in place and cutting or adding). That was complicated because it’s a county and city department. Diny says they will take a zero-based approach with another department for next year’s budget.

Other questions about Diny’s first year

The ballot incident: One thing I wanted to ask Diny about - not whether he thinks he was in the right when it comes to the ballot box situation since that is currently being adjudicated in two different venues (depending on what happens with the DOJ investigation); but I wanted to ask him, did he regret it from a strategic standpoint? In other words, whether or not he felt he was in the right, did he think the juice was worth the squeeze?

Diny replied that he still thinks he did the right thing, but he says he underestimated the political blowback that would come with it. “I wouldn’t have had my 15 minutes of fame, which is not all that it is cracked up to be,” Diny says. “And it would have been a distraction we wouldn’t have had to deal with the past seven, eight months.” Diny said he is default aggressive, so if he sees a problem he works to correct it.

Tensions with the city council: Anyone who has watched a Wausau City Council Meeting lately has seen the tension between several council members and the mayor. Lately there have been debates even over Diny’s communication agenda item. It seems to have started with committee assignments. Diny says he felt some people dominated committee chairmanships and he wanted to split things up more evenly, but the move led to consternation between Diny and the council. Diny said he ran on doing things differently and not necessarily sticking to the status quo, and so he feels that is going to ruffle some feathers. Diny returns to his default aggressive stance and cites author, podcaster and former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink.

Looking ahead: Diny says he thinks the next three years will be smoother than his first year. Diny believes the ballot box situation will be in the rearview mirror, and there are no elections on the horizon. Diny says he’s spoken to former mayors Bob and Katie and that it’s hard not to take things personally, but he tends to leave it at the office and that he generally sleeps well at night. Diny concludes the interview with the belief that good things, including new construction, are coming to the city.

Below is the audio from the interview. It is available for paid subscribers of The Wausonian, which helps support this work. Consider becoming a paid subscriber today!