EDITORIAL: The good citizen

Some nice words were said about John Sigwart in praise of his service to the city at his final meeting as a member of Port Washington’s Common Council last week. He earned those well deserved accolades as an alderman for eight years and as Port’s city engineer and public works director for six years. Yet his work in those official capacities is only a piece of what he has done for the community that has been his home for 53 years.

Sigwart couldn’t resist the urge to go to work for just about any local cause that came along, not just as a volunteer worker, but often as a recruiter and leader of volunteers who accomplished remarkable things for the city. His fingerprints are on some of the most successful citizen-driven initiatives seen in Port.

If a single title could describe his role in the community it would be “good citizen.” Which makes the shabby treatment Sigwart was given during his last year as alderman by the current mayor all the more difficult to rationalize, much less justify.

Sixteen years before he was removed from every one of his city government committee positions last fall in a punitive affront by Mayor Ted Neitzke, Sigwart was working as a citizen volunteer with then Mayor Scott Huebner organizing the newly created Port Washington Main Street. Huebner, in his mission to energize the downtown economy, had won approval for Port to join the state Main Street program. He appointed Sigwart to find and lead the volunteers needed to sustain the effort.

Sigwart’s corps of Port residents eager to pitch in on behalf of their city became the driving force for Main Street events, culminating in the Maritime Heritage Festivals that for a number years celebrated the city’s nautical heritage and brought crowds downtown to see tall ships and other displays of seafaring history. At the last Maritime Heritage Festival in 2013, Sigwart and 48 volunteers worked at the festival site.

As a Kiwanis member, he chaired and worked as a volunteer for numerous community fundraising efforts. He served customers at the Kiwanis Fish Day stand for 20 years, and recalls frying fish and chips there beside his friend Port Mayor James Stacker in the 1970s.

Sigwart’s work with the current mayor of Port Washington took place mainly at City Hall, and the relationship became progressively less friendly. Sigwart’s views on a number of issues were contrary to the mayor’s. In one notable conflict, Sigwart argued that the $33.5 million public safety building championed by Neitzke was too costly for taxpayers to bear.

It was not hard to see that from the mayor’s

viewpoint Sigwart was an irritation. Besides his opposition on some issues, his questions at meetings—often verbose and detailed (he was an engineer after all)—were no doubt annoying. The mayor’s annoyance finally morphed into what was described as the “last straw.”

The last straw, the act by Sigwart that triggered the mayor’s retribution, was his refusal to keep quiet about the result of a closed meeting involving the controversial microchip production facility proposed for land to be annexed to the city (the same land that is now the likely site of a data center).

Common Council members had been summoned to City Hall last summer to be briefed on the development. Before the group meeting, the aldermen were instructed to meet with the developer’s representative in pairs—two at a time in private.

The awkward arrangement, monitored by former City Attorney Eric Eberhardt, was an evasion of the Wisconsin Open Meetings Law, which would have required a meeting to be open to the public if attended by a quorum of the council. The point of this insult to the principle of transparency in government was obvious—to prevent the public from knowing what went on.

What went on was that the council members were informed they would have to sign nondisclosure agreements if they wanted to learn more about the microchip development plans.

When it was his turn, Sigwart said, he had qualms about signing but didn’t want to be excluded from critical information about an issue that at some point he would have to vote on.

Sigwart signed, as did every council member, but he rebelled at the requirement, which was implicit in the skirting of the Open Meetings Law, that the public not be told their representatives had agreed to withhold information.

In an interview with an Ozaukee Press reporter, Sigwart revealed that NDAs had been signed. The mayor read about it in the Press.

Neitzke informed Sigwart he had been kicked off city committees, not with a phone call or face-to-face meeting, but in a certified letter, return receipt required, mailed to his home. Sigwart, who has pancreatic cancer and did not run for re-election, said he remains humiliated by the stripping of his committee assignments.

He shouldn’t. He earned the mayor’s disdain, displayed in a petty act of spite, by doing the right thing in refusing to keep the public in the dark about the nondisclosure agreements.

Call it one more service in the long list of services by John Sigwart to his community.