Another program quietly preventing homelessness
In 2018 Judicare started a mediation program to help prevent civil cases from going to court. That includes evictions, cutting down on homelessness. Now the program is looking to expand.
The Wausonian and other media outlets have for some time reported on the various efforts to help house the unhoused.
But another program that started in Marathon County and is expanding out across Wisconsin is actually preventing some people from becoming homeless in the first place. And on top of that, it’s saving the county money.
Attorney Randy Westgate and Judge Greg Strasser started the mediation program through Judicare in 2018 to help prevent court cases from going through the entire court process. In 2022, Westgate told the county’s Public Safety Committee that the program is working, stopping 80% of civil cases it handles — that includes evictions, small claims, medical debt and others — from getting to court.
The program not only helps people resolve problems while reducing court costs for them, but it also reduces costs for the court. Westgate told The Wausonian that now organizers are attempting to grow the program to 32 counties in the state — and there is support for it, as the cost savings are real.
But besides the savings, it’s also preventing evictions, leading to more people being able to stay in their homes.
Stay at home
Talk to anyone — landlord, tenant, whoever — and they’ll quickly tell you that it’s no fun going through an eviction. For the landlord, it’s a process during which their property isn’t returning anything, while the expenses keep adding up. And for the tenant, it’s incredibly stressful and a potential black mark on their record that’ll make it more difficult to get a place later down the road.
The mediation program is something both parties love, Westgate told The Wausonian. In 2024, there were 388 evictions filed in Marathon County Court. Mediators through the mediation program helped resolve 241 of them.
Not every eviction is so easily resolvable. Many of them are situations in which a tenant got sick or had some other calamity and fell behind on rent. Occasionally there is someone who is not paying and destroying the place. Mediators are responsive to which situation they’re dealing with, and can work out deals in that case too.
That helps everyone involved. It keeps people in their homes while preventing the stigma of an eviction; and it prevents landlords from needing to go through lengthy and costly eviction processes.
Though of course the challenges around homeless go far beyond the population of folks who just fell on hard times, the mediation program helps prevent adding to the homeless population, preserving resources for others who need the help.
But county leaders love the program because it also saves court time — and saving court time means saving money.
Cost savings
County Administrator Lance Leonhard told The Wausonian that resources are stretched thin in the Marathon County Court System (and that’s true of most court systems around the state and country).
So a program that helps save court time is tremendously helpful. Leonhard told The Wausonian:
Because resources are scarce, we need to pursue innovative approaches to keep all lanes in our court system running smoothly, affording timely access to all forms of litigants. The Judicare Mediation program is a great example of such an approach, as it uses non-judicial resources to resolve a variety of cases, thereby freeing up judicial resources to ensure that defendants and victims of crime alike have timely access to our justice system.
Since we’re talking about money, how much? Westgate gave Sawyer County as a good example. Mediators in that county prevent about 36 court hours per year. At an estimated rate of $500 per hour (interpreters alone can cost $200 per hour, Westgate explains), that’s a savings of roughly $18,000 per year. The program costs the county $2,500 per year.
In Marathon County, with more than 1000 cases per year and an 85% success rate of preventing them from going through the court process, the savings get into the six figures.
“They see it, Lance sees it,” Westgate says. “‘This is the best thing since sliced bread, don’t screw with it.’”
Expanding the program
The program started in Marathon County, then expanded to Portage County. Now the program is in 11 counties, and with enough funding they would keep expanding it to more than 30.
That means the program needs about 15 more volunteers. That includes about four to five new mediators in Marathon County.
The best mediators are often retired professionals, and generally not legal professionals. “Lawyers make terrible mediators, in fact,” says Westgate, himself an attorney. Time commitment varies - he says some come in a couple of times per month to pick up cases, others do it almost full time. One person he cites is a retired teacher in the D.C. Everest District who takes two months off to travel to Mexico every winter.
Mediators go through 40 hours of training and then spend some time as a co-mediator learning from someone who is more experienced before going on their own.
This reporter first reported on the Judicare Mediation Program in 2018, and now the program is on the verge of expanding to more than 30 counties total. It was initially funded with foundation money, but now it’s looking for money from counties to help fund the program.
But like paying to have minor roof repairs fixed before they become major, much more expensive repairs, the mediation program has proven that it is saving the court system money.
That will be on county leaders’ minds as they’re in the midst of preparing 2026 budgets.
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