By Ben Rodgers
Editor
SUAMICO – Village Administrator Steve Kubacki will stay busy in retirement, so much that he picked up two part-time jobs in fields he has always enjoyed.
The man who is retiring from day-to-day operations for the Village of Suamico will get paid to measure fish and help out a small city in the Northwoods, his original stomping grounds.
“I wanted to be a game warden,” Kubacki said of his dream job when younger. “When I had my first interview with the DNR, I was one of 800 applicants for four positions back in 1979, and I didn’t get the job. Forty years later I finally got my DNR job.”
Kubacki who has expertise in debt service and Tax Incremental Financing districts, will start in June as a fisheries technician with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources near Boulder Junction.
Kubacki and his wife Cheryl have a cabin near Mercer, and he is originally from Hurley.
An outdoor enthusiast, Kubacki enjoys biking, fishing and pheasant and grouse hunting in South Dakota.
A summer of fun jobs has him looking forward to his official last day in Suamico on May 31, but he still may be called on to help the new guy learn the ropes.
Kubacki will be replaced by Alex Kaker, a Wisconsin native who is coming to Suamico from Upper Gwynedd Township near Philadelphia. Kaker will start in June.
“Whatever I can do to help Alex and the community I will assuredly do,” Kubacki said. “The community has been good to me, so I want to be good to the community.”
Kubacki has also held administrative roles in Brillion, Germantown, Chippewa County and Ashwaubenon.
His second part-time job is closer to what his professional career has been for the past 40 years – an interim city administrator for Park Falls.
“I’ve been through the first steps, the preliminary steps in putting an administrative form of government together that works for municipalities,” Kubacki said.
In Ashwaubenon, where Kubacki worked for 15 years, he was part of the team that developed one of the most successful TIF districts Wisconsin has ever seen.
A TIF district is where taxes raised from development are able go toward paying off debt for the infrastructure improvements instead of having to be split among the various taxing entities.
TIF No. 2 in Ashwaubenon went offline and returned to the general tax rolls in 2008. It contained much of the development surrounding Bay Park Square Mall.
When all was said and done, it put nearly $440 million back on the tax rolls for Ashwaubenon, Kubacki said.
“We called it ‘the octopus’ it had so many arms,” he said of TIF No. 2. “It went through the village. We were able to fund things like water towers, utilities, a lot of street reconstruction. We really tapped into new development to pay for infrastructure that benefited the whole community.”
But Suamico is a different animal than Ashwaubenon.
In Suamico, most of the new tax base is coming from home construction, whereas in Ashwaubenon it is from commercial and industrial development.
Suamico has two successful TIF districts, No. 2, which is the Vickery Village area, and No. 4, which is the Urban Edge Towne Centre.
Both were established when Kubacki came on board in 2011 as administrator.
Kubacki said the work he is most proud of in Suamico is setting the village up for future financial success.
“One of the biggest things we undertook here was getting our debt service down,” he said. “We were borrowing for things like roads, and with the guidance of the village board we reduced our debt service from 42 percent to 29 percent by doing some real solid budgeting over the years.”
Debt service is the portion of the budget that goes to paying back existing debt.
He said ideally it should be around 20 percent.
“We’re able to include road reconstruction within our annual budget programs, and (debt service) has allowed us to undertake some projects that are currently underway, such as Fire Station No. 1, improvements coming up in the future, the White Pine roundabout. We should be able to purchase another salt (storage) shed and we should have adequate funding for Lineville Road when that goes from two lanes to four lanes in 2024.”
As a former youth soccer coach, Kubacki is also proud of the quality of parks in Suamico and what that means for residents.
“In the last seven years working with the parks and recreation and the village board, they’ve pumped in a couple-hundred-thousand dollars into our parks and properties and that has helped the quality-of-life issue in our community.”
You might see Kubacki roaming the soccer sidelines again, because his grandson Kam has taken up the sport.
He and his wife Cheryl still call Ashwaubenon home, and after this summer, they plan to settle back down here with their new puppy, Roo, an English setter and bird dog in training.
“My wife has been very supportive, she’s had many great jobs that I take her away from and with that she’s moved and she’s always found satisfying employment,” Kubacki said. “But with night meetings and other things, job responsibilities and this and that type of thing, she’s been very, very supportive. She’s done a great job of raising the kids without me and we’ve very proud of our kids and grandchildren.”