FDL City Manager Talks Leadership – From Military to City Gov't + More!

Education & Architecture

Adam: And then also just the comfort
of being behind a mic and getting the reps in. So where'd you go to college?

Joe: Virginia Tech.

Adam: What'd you study?

Joe: First go around, I studied
building construction. Then I got a master's in architecture.

Adam: I've said many times, in my next
life I want to be an architect. Just the idea of — we design things very small,
integrated control systems inside of lights, things that are medium-sized like
a light fixture, larger things like a light pole, and now we're designing a
manufacturing facility. It's just cool to see that architecting skill and the
similarities across all the different product sizes.

Joe: No doubt. Yeah, it's really
interesting.

From Military to City Manager

Adam: So — architecture, building
construction, and then you got into the military for many years.

Joe: Actually, the military was right
out of undergrad. I was a junior in high school. I'd gone off to summer camps,
having a good time — some were sports camps, some were academic. But I was
spending the summer on the road. I just loved to see different things and have
different experiences. Along the way that summer, I met an ROTC professor at
one of the universities — I was at a computer camp that summer at that time —
and he talked about an ROTC scholarship. I had really no clue about the
military or anything like that, but he sold something that sounds like fun,
just like you see the ads on TV — see the world, and all of those kinds of
things. So right before my senior year in high school, I filled out an
application, and in those days you just did it with a pencil or pen. I mailed
it, and a few weeks later I got a letter in the mail saying, congrats, you've
been given a four-year scholarship, you can go to any college in the country
you want to go to, and it'll be free. What you have to do in return is stay on
active duty four years after you graduate.

Joe: I thought, four years of college,
I'll go see the world for four years, and then figure out what I'm going to do
after that. Well, I stayed in the military — having been commissioned the day I
graduated — for another 27, almost 28 years. And it was because it was fun. I
saw the world not once, but probably about three times. Met some great people
along the way, had some experiences I would never forget — probably could never
do them again, because they were at the right time of my life, at the right age.
Part of which I was single, part I was married, then part I had kids, and all
of that kind of worked out at all the right times. So I really enjoyed that
run, but did not see it coming when I left a small town in Ohio to go to
college at Virginia Tech.

Adam: And I saw online — you ended up
operating on four different continents over those 25 years or so.

Joe: That sounds right. It's
interesting because, on one hand, that part of my life seems just right around
the corner — like if I looked around, I would see all those people I served
with most recently. And then I realized that was 10 years ago. A lot happens in
10 years. I had little kids 10 years ago; now I've got one who's in grad school
and one who's going to graduate from undergrad in a couple of months. Just as
an example — time flies. A lot of clichés are really true, and that's one of
them.

Adam: And it gets faster at an
accelerated rate. So the last 10 years or so, you've been the city manager here
in Fond du Lac. What are some of the roles and responsibilities in that
position? How did you transition into that from the military? Was it something
you were actively looking for, or did it just kind of happen?

Joe: When I was commissioned, I was
commissioned as an engineer officer in the U.S. Army, meaning Corps of
Engineers. A lot of people would know that symbol, that castle you might see.

Adam: We do a lot with the Army Corps
of Engineers.

Joe: I figured as much. Same here,
because of the water, Lake Winnebago, etc. But along the way in the military,
probably my last 12 to 15 years, I had the opportunity to be base commander
here, base commander there. Those experiences were all overseas. On a military
base overseas, we're essentially U.S. cities that have military missions that
are plugging into the host nation's power and water. Inside that fence is a
city — it's an American city. It's got the streets, the utilities; in those
cases overseas, it's got the schools, the grocery stores, everything.

Joe: Part of the answer to your
question about how Fond du Lac and how city management is answered by the
timing. I had decided quite a few years before I retired from the military that
I would shut it down before my older daughter was old enough to go to high
school. The reason was, after 9/11, people on active duty started to move a
lot. We already moved regularly, but after 9/11, there was quite a demand for
people to be in Iraq and eventually Afghanistan — places that were unpopulated
by the U.S. military previous to 9/11. So the demand on enlisted and officers
in the Army was pretty significant. We moved a lot. I wanted to give my kids
the opportunity — at least a taste of what a hometown was like. The only way to
do that was to settle down.

Joe: As my daughter's seventh and
eighth grade years approached, I knew my time was going to come to a close in
the military if I was going to keep that promise and settle down. I knew that,
with my experience as a base commander and all those familiarities of city-like
management experience, that transition would be relatively easy and something
that I would want. I really enjoyed the idea of not just serving in the
military but also trying to make people's lives a little bit better — when
people go overseas and bring their spouse and their kids, that's a significant
challenge, right? They're adjusting to a lot of things — being away from home,
new culture, maybe living on their own for the very first time, trying to
manage money, raise young kids, get them in school and help them do well. I
took a lot of satisfaction from helping people be successful, not only in the
military but their families too.

Joe: When I decided that city
management was the right transition profession, and I understood the timing in
terms of my kids and when I wanted to be settled down, then it was a matter of
looking at what was available. I didn't really have any particular desire in
terms of regional locations in the U.S. I'd moved around, so I figured fate
would take care of that for me. I just went for the best opportunity. Ten years
ago, Fond du Lac was looking for a city manager. It was one of the places I was
looking at. I came here for the interview, but I came a few days early —
because at the time I was in Asia, I was a base commander in South Korea. Came
here a few days early, partly to get over the jet lag, because you're halfway
around the world, and the other part was I really wanted to walk the city, get
a feel for it, see if I was going to like it, and also get ready for the
interview.

Joe: I have to say, when I first got
to Fond du Lac, I liked it so much. It reminded me of a big version of the town
I grew up in, in southern Ohio. People were really nice. It was easy to get
around. There was about one of everything — at least one of everything that I
was interested in. I went out to visit the schools, and the people there were
incredibly kind. They didn't know me from Adam. I was just walking in asking
questions, and people were great. So I started to have the idea that, if the
interview went well and the city was interested in me, I was going to be
interested in it. The rest is kind of history. After the interview, a couple
days later, I got back on a plane, flew to Korea — we were 13 or 14 hours ahead
— and the city called me and asked me if I wanted to be the city manager. I
can't remember what time of day it was, but it was the strangest time of day. I
answered my cell phone, and there's a woman's voice on the phone, and I'm
thinking, who in the world is this? Oh yeah, this might be that lady from Fond
du Lac. My wife and I got on a plane a couple weeks later to come back here to
look for a house, and we have thought of Fond du Lac ever since.

Mental Model of Leadership

Adam: Man, that's awesome. As you
transitioned from an individual in the Army, an officer, a colonel, and then a
city manager — how did your mental model of leadership change, where you're
going from executing individual tasks to running a team, or in the business
equivalent a department, and then at a certain point you're running a base,
you're running the city? When did you transition from individual skills that
you had learned to really commanding a larger group of people and then managing
a city?

Joe: Whether we know it or not, we're
greatly influenced by the people around us — how they act, not just what they
say. I was very fortunate as a young officer to be around some exceptional
people. One of the many traits I saw in them is that, obviously, they were
bright people, but what really made a difference with the people I thought were
exceptional was the way they treated their subordinates, their teams. The way
they were open to people expressing ideas that might not have been necessarily
where the conversation started. Maybe the presumption going into
problem-solving was one direction, but after being open to listening to other
smart people contribute — who may have been junior to that person — even
General Petraeus would be a good example of how he operated in that way.
General Schwarzkopf, same. You start to understand, by just watching and
learning, how valuable those things are. And those things aren't necessarily
taught in school — they're the things you pick up if you're paying attention along
the way.

Joe: I try to apply those same lessons
to the way I operate, which is: emphasize listening. I remind myself that I
can't listen if my mouth is moving. So I really try to absorb what people are
expressing — the ideas that they have — and their life experiences and mine are
different, which is great, because they're problem-solving in a different way
than I probably am. I love what Steve Jobs said — I'm paraphrasing — but
essentially his thought was, when you're hiring people, you want to hire the
people closest to you and make sure they're smarter than you are. Because if
you're around people and you feel like you're smarter than everybody around
you, well, you might as well do it yourself. Those are some of the lessons I've
learned along the way and then apply them as I go. Plus, I had good parents
too, and that helps, right? We learn a lot of these lessons in our youth, and
so I had a good foundation in that way too.

“If” by Rudyard Kipling

Adam: I was at the Fondy Future Five
awards a couple months ago, and you had a great speech. I really enjoyed that.
It kind of revolved around one of my favorite poems, and before you even named
the poem or the poet, I knew exactly what it was going to be, just the way you
built it up. The poem is “If” by Rudyard Kipling. I had first heard that
several years ago on Jocko Willink's podcast — I don't know if you've heard of
Jocko, but he's an ex-Navy SEAL, has a business consulting company now.
Unfortunately the poem's been politicized a little bit the last few years, but
the message is great. What are some of the highlights and meanings from that
poem, based on your military experience, your experience as an executive and a
city manager?

Joe: He wrote it for his son — he was
trying to impart a lesson. I think that regardless of the role you're in, but
especially in the way he was communicating to his son through that poem, it was
one of: you've got to be willing to persevere. You've got to have integrity —
that's really important. And you don't necessarily move in the direction that
the wind's blowing. You're going to have good days and bad, and you need to be
able to just remember that. No good day should be so great that you think
you've got the world beaten, and no day should be so bad that you don't feel
like you can have any success at all.

Lessons From the Poem

Joe: Those lessons are what I try to
apply as I'm conversing with peers, subordinates, people that I support. If
you're having a tough time, we'll get you through it, because you've got the
talent, you've got the skills and education that we want to preserve and
improve upon. We want to create the conditions for you to really succeed. As an
executive, you've got to have that humility to meet people where they are. What
I've found over the years is that people in charge are susceptible to being
told what their team thinks they want to hear. So you've got to sort of pry
through that. But I think if you do it with that sense of humility, coming back
to Kipling's poem, you can have that conversation in a way that's not
threatening.

Joe: Another one — part of the theme
that runs throughout — is really a simple thing: do your best. Martin Luther
King Jr., I think just a few months before he was killed, was with some
elementary school kids in Philadelphia, and he told them the story of a street
sweeper. His point was: kids, you might think of a street sweeper as kind of
the lowest level of a job that you could ever aspire to be. But his point was,
hey, if that's your destiny and you're going to be a street sweeper, be the
best one. So that when your legacy is being described, people will say that's
the best street sweeper I ever saw. That connects a little bit to what Kipling
was talking about in that poem. I try to impart that kind of lesson too to all
of our people. An organization like ours — we've got a wide variety of skill
sets. No one's better than the other. It's important to just maximize the gifts
we've been given.

Uncertainty & The Last Two Years

Adam: Absolutely. The last couple
years have been challenging for a lot of people. I've actually referenced that
poem multiple times. There's been some uncertainty, especially early on —
running a business and, you know, are they going to keep the economy going? Are
they going to shut down certain parts of our supply chain? Will parts show up?
Every single week for a while, there were challenges. What I really get out of
that poem is: expect rough waters, but don't always hyper-react to everything
that's happening. Also, don't expect other people to understand the situation
that everybody is experiencing. Hold yourself to high standards, hold others to
high standards, but also give space — space is sometimes needed to let the dust
settle. But I really appreciate when you read that and went through it at the
event a few weeks ago. It's really a great poem for any time.

Joe: There's a lot of pragmatism in
that poem. It's dense, too — every line, there's a lesson. It's so well
crafted. You might remember that I took what I thought was kind of a risky
tactic in tying some other people into that poem — people that we'd know, like
Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., etc. I wondered if people would let me get
away with that, because there's a lot going on in that poem. But those were all
quotes that are part of my foundation that I really believe in.

State of Emergency & Staying Open

Joe: What you said about the last two
years — since March of 2020, we're just past the two-year anniversary of when
the governor declared a state of emergency. I decided early on that we were
going to remain open, that we just had too many commitments to serve the
community — everything from making sure that water's pure when you want it to
come out of the faucet, to the fact it's being treated before we put it back in
the lake, picking up people's trash, enforcing the law, ambulances responding
to 911. No way to declare anybody non-essential. But I could tell, over the
course of the two years, people were dealing with some intense stress.

Joe: I found that the routine of being
at work — if they could be, if they wanted or needed to be remote or at home,
that was fine with us, because we've got some jobs that are transferable in
that way. But I found that, especially in 2020, when people's social lives were
so disrupted, because there were so many places that were off-limits where you
would normally run into people, or to be able to sit together and just converse
— all that went away for a while. But being able to be at the office, there was
a social aspect to that that I thought was pretty healthy. I didn't realize it
at the time, but over the course of time I did come to really appreciate that,
because going to a restaurant for a while was not in the cards, going out for
the evening, going to a movie, sporting events — all put on the shelf. Being at
the office turned out to be a blessing on many a day.

Policy Perspective During COVID

Adam: Absolutely. The video
conferences don't solve everything. There is just something about being in
person — the vibes that people are giving off, the non-verbal communication —
that was definitely lost. We tried to take a similar approach at the company level:
allow individuals to make as many of their own decisions as possible, people
have different takes on what was happening, meet them where they're at as much
as possible, but also not lose sight of the fact that we are a manufacturer —
things have to get made. We appreciate the way a lot of it was handled in the
city, to really take things extremely seriously but allow people, whether at
the business level or other organizations, to make some of the decisions based
on their knowledge of their operation.

Joe: You made reference to what we in
the city were doing from a policy perspective. I'll admit — one thing I
struggled with was the idea of law enforcement and perhaps medical necessity to
take certain risk mitigations. That was quite the struggle to sort through,
because I wondered about the enforceability of things, the reasonableness of
the enforceability of certain things. Should a police officer be asked to go
into a restaurant to figure out if tables are far enough apart, if people are
in the right — gloves, masks? Remember in the summer of 2020, there was a lot
of that, before we even got into masks and vaccinations. It was all physical
mitigations, where we were talking about washing our hands and physical
distancing. And by the way, all these terms I didn't even think about before —
social distancing, I thought, what's that? And then all of a sudden it's in the
lexicon daily.

When Is It Okay to Say “I Don’t Know”?

Adam: When do you think, from a
leadership standpoint, when is it okay to say, “I don't know”? I think that was
the other experience that I had — everybody's always looking for answers to
things that not a lot of people had the exact perfect way to respond to. One of
the approaches we took was, it's not perfectly clear what needs to be done,
what do they feel is best — certainly providing guidelines, but also not trying
to create this perception that one or two people have all the answers to every
situation. You allow people, empower them to make decisions. From your
perspective, when is it okay to say I don't know?

Joe: I think it's always okay, until
you have to make the decision. As a leader, you have the responsibility that
when you have all the facts that you can have — and that doesn't mean all the
facts that ever existed, it just means all the facts that bear on the problem
that you can acquire, all the input from those really brilliant people you've
surrounded yourself with — at that point, the burden shifts to you to make a
decision. Prior to that, the burden is to acquire that information and to be
open to exploring the pros and the cons equally, so you can understand
advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes the advantages and disadvantages have
different weights — some things are really important to consider, some things
less so.

Joe: I might not say to folks often,
“I don't know.” I might say, “I need to know.” But it's still gathering
information.

Adam: Absolutely. And people can see
through it if you don't know, but you are posing as if you do, because your
rationale — if asked, “Why are we doing it that way?” or “How did you come to
that conclusion?” — if you haven't really collaborated much to acquire that
buy-in, and also that information from people, you're not going to be able to
answer the question. I think maybe that's what I was driving at — just making a
decision so you appear as though you're making a decision is not necessarily
better than acquiring more information, staying open-minded, and buying
yourself a little time. There are certain things that are mission-critical in
the minute, in the day, in the hour, in the month. But it was just interesting,
you know, through the last two years, every hour there was something new
popping up.

Joe: One thing that weighed heavily on
me is the idea — at least I thought at the time, two years ago — that some of
these decisions were potentially life-altering decisions. I heard the word
“pandemic.” I had been through a couple, in a couple of different parts of the
world, but not like the threat I thought we were facing then. You're reluctant
sometimes to make decisions that could really put people in grave danger,
because you don't have all the information, and yet that's all the information
you can get.

The Racing Analogy

Adam: An analogy I think about a lot —
I actually do some road racing over at Road America in Elkhart Lake. One of the
things I've noticed is that if your car gets out of sorts and you're about to
spin, you're about to go off the track, one of the worst things you can do is
provide too much input into the car. Sometimes you just have to let the car
settle, let the car sort itself out before you start to hyper-correct and
hyper-react. I think there was a lot of that happening because of the unknowns.

The Fond du Lac Economy

Adam: If you think about the Fond du
Lac economy — it's heavy engineering, heavy manufacturing — or if colleagues
ask you to describe it, how would you describe it?

Joe: In one word? Right now, it's
booming. And it really maintained that throughout the last two years. If you
think about the last seven years or so, 2015 was when I thought the remnants of
the mortgage crisis from essentially '08–'09 had really worn off, because we
saw values in real property — residential and manufacturing/commercial
properties — really coming back in Fond du Lac. From about '15 until now,
businesses across the city of all sectors — heavy manufacturing, light
manufacturing, engineering, commercial businesses — have been thriving and
hiring.

Joe: We had, at the end of December,
the fewest people registered unemployed in the city of Fond du Lac at any time
since 1990. I went back and looked at every monthly period since 1990, over the
last 31 years, and December had the lowest. And that's in a city that's grown
by thousands since the 90s. That struck me as a real signal that, number one,
the pressure that employers feel to grow, and the absence of adequate labor
availability, is real. And the other is that people are still growing and are
trying to drive growth.

Housing as the Key to Growth

Joe: It's important for somebody in my
position to understand what might be impediments to the labor force itself
expanding, and one of those is housing — the right kinds of housing, the right
choices of housing, the adequacy and the amount of it. What I find is, people
will relocate for a great job, but they also take into account the quality of
housing and the affordability, and schools if they've got kids or if they're
going to have kids. Those things are super important. In Fond du Lac, over the
last few years, our housing stock's really been squeezed. We have added quite a
few residences in the last few years, but much of that's been in the
multi-family realm. I've been very pleased to see that that's become more and
more accepted as part of the overall housing portfolio in the city — those
aren't necessarily looked down upon as lower-quality options. They're
equal-quality options. People just have different needs and different desires.

Joe: Overall in the economy right now,
there are a number of developers that are very interested in the idea of being
near 151 and I-41. We've got some great property along those two highways
that's available and buildable. Right now there's a lot of money at work in
terms of development. I'm very pleased to see that. For example, in our
industrial park near I-41, just south of 151, we've had a lot of interest.

Adam: Yeah, we just about built there.
We were debating between expanding on the current block.

Joe: That business park — it's a great
business park. But you have been part of what I think of as the reimagination
and the re-emergence of Brooke Street, because this street we're on right now
was industrial way back when. Giddings & Lewis. And then you had a number
of other manufacturers up and down — you had a casket manufacturer, you had a
cheese manufacturer, you had a radio parts manufacturer. All these buildings
that were built a hundred years ago, they're built like fortresses. They're not
going to fall down. But if they're vacant, they're going to fall into disrepair
and become blight. And they're not necessarily optimized for modern
manufacturing — multi-levels, built more like an apartment complex than an
industrial facility.

Joe: Just south of here on this street
— your company's taking care of this part of Brooke Street and making it a lot
more vibrant. Just south of here, there's a company that's going to convert
what used to be a casket company and an adjacent building into 62 residences.
Those are going to be incredibly nice places to live.

Adam: Where is that going to be?

Joe: Just south of here, in that
really massive brick building, near Division and Brooke.

Adam: So that's going to be repurposed
into apartments?

Joe: A project like that is wildly
expensive, because you're not only reinvigorating the building, you're
completely reimagining the interior layout. We were really blessed that we had
somebody on the team who wrote a great grant proposal for the state. Governor
Evers came here a couple of weeks ago with one of those big Styrofoam checks
and handed it to us with $3.6 million written on it. Because those projects are
so expensive, there's no return on investment if you're just trying to finance
it yourself in the classic way of financing that kind of development. That got
the project over the finish line. So here we're going to have 62 people living
on a street that nobody would have imagined as a residential area even 20 years
ago or 10 years ago.

Joe: Housing's really important.
Whenever I'm talking to anybody about housing, I'm fully engaged. I really want
to exploit that opportunity, because the most recent development was just
behind Walgreens on East Johnson, and what do we see there? As those townhomes
are being built, they're being leased up immediately. I know the demand's
there, and I know that the city will continue to grow.

Joe: Along that line, I will say this:
in the last census, the one that was just published, it showed that the state
of Wisconsin grew 3.6% between 2010 and 2020. That's not great, but it's
positive. The city of Fond du Lac grew at 3.9%, so we grew at a pace that was
more aggressive than the state. When I look at cities up and down I-41, we grew
faster than they did in terms of the rate of growth. Why is that good? Because
I need to be able to say to employers that our city is growing, that the
region, the county's growing — because they want to know that, if they're
thinking about growing their businesses, that might require more labor. But I
think we need to do better than that, and I think the secret there is with
housing. I keep coming back to that, because that's where I'm landing on
something we want to focus on the next few years.

Manufacturing Opportunities

Adam: I think there's tons of
opportunity for employers in Fond du Lac. I really feel strongly about doubling
down on the engineering and the manufacturing — what really makes this area
great. What we see happening is, there's been a re-routing of supply chains,
really the last four years since some of the Asian tariffs kicked in a few
years ago. There has been more emphasis on local manufacturing, local sourcing.
For us, every single metal component in our products we now source from
Wisconsin. Certainly electronics, semiconductors — that's tough, that's Asia,
China, Taiwan, South Korea, that's where a lot of that stuff comes from,
Mexico. There's more electronic manufacturing happening in North America and
Mexico. But just the importance of being able to manage your supply chain in a
manufacturing environment right now — so much of our time is spent doing that.

Adam: Because Fond du Lac is centrally
located between Milwaukee, the Fox Valley, you can get to Madison — we have
extruding companies in Wausau, fabrication companies in Oshkosh, casting
companies down in Racine. It's just such a great junction for a lot of that
stuff. We feel really good about the investments that we're making. I hope that
there is a shift back to manufacturing as a great career for a variety of
people to get into. The last 30–40 years, there's been a shift away from that,
but being in the trenches day to day in manufacturing, that seems to be
changing.

Joe: I think the area is going to
really benefit from that kind of paradigm shift, culturally and economically.
You've heard it and I've heard it, where it's much more — let's say, air
quotes, “socially acceptable” — to talk about those kinds of opportunities in
high school. I think that's really super important for guidance counselors, for
example, to be able to talk to students about those kinds of things, and not
just, “Are you going to college or not?” There's so much more to the story than
that. But I think for at least two or three decades, that college track was
seen as essentially the single road to success and everything else was
“everything else.” I think that conversation's changing, but it still continues
to need to change.

Adam: Yeah, for sure. I went through
that — I was not necessarily college-bound, ended up going to college, and for
me it was definitely beneficial. But a lot of my friends, family members — I
think there are a lot of people that were probably pressured to go that
probably regret it. Part of that has to do with — it's okay to get a great
trades job, manufacturing job, or even if you're not necessarily hands-on,
people that did go to college, got a business degree, an engineering degree —
to get into real manufactured goods. Not everybody — programming, software
engineering, those are important disciplines as well, but mechanical design,
mechanical engineering, process engineering, automation — a lot of these things
that are manufacturing-related, that stuff is really important as well.

Adam: So that's great. It's really
appreciated what you guys are doing at the city to promote that. It's great to
hear the city's growing on a relative basis, quite rapidly. I honestly had no
idea about the housing development down the street. So we'll do our part on
this side, and hopefully there's more and more investment on the south side.

Joe: Yeah, just as an example, just
south of that we've got a construction company where Wells Manufacturing used
to be, before they decamped to a brand-new campus on the other side of 41. That
area benefited — there was growth that was spurred as a result of them building
their campus out there, but it gave a company the opportunity to come to Brooke
Street and essentially relocate their headquarters into an old manufacturing
building and do some pretty interesting architectural things on the inside.
That was certainly a win-win situation for that block, because that was an
entire block that was saved from blight, and those buildings were repurposed.
Great outcome there. And this residential development is going to be a great
outcome between you and them. So between where Wells used to be and where we
are sitting now —

Final Thoughts

Adam: Those buildings end up so cool
when they get turned into residential properties. I'm not sure if you've ever
been to the mills in Appleton, but they took some old paper mills, brick
buildings, turned them into apartments, and every layout's different, which I'm
sure is why the cost ends up being quite high — there's no standardization unit
to unit. But they don't make buildings like that anymore. To be able to
maintain that architecture is very neat.

Joe: The team that bought the Retlaw
about six years ago said exactly what you said — the Retlaw Hotel, that every
room in that building was going to require its own sort of design. There was a
lot of commonality between rooms, but there were a lot of differences too.
Because of such an old building, they decided to bite the bullet and preserve —
at the cost of doing all that very fine work that it required to bring a
building like that back.

Adam: And you understand that, with
your architecture background.

Joe: That's right.

Adam: Anything else you want to touch
on?

Joe: Living here in Fond du Lac's been
great. I think the school systems here are wonderful. They obviously produced
two college-bound kids in our family. I really appreciate all the school
systems here. The opportunities here, especially outdoors, are fantastic. When
we came here, I thought that lake looks really big on the map, and we got here
and it was unimaginably big. There's so many fun things to do. Just the simple
things of life too — going out and having a drink in the evening, where a
five-minute drive from home, you can have a good time and meet up with some
friends. It's great to be on — at least for a while now — this side of the
pandemic, where we're getting back into that. That's been a real pleasure. It's
great to live here, and I love the people here a lot. I'm glad my kids, when
they are asked where they're from — now they've got an answer. Whereas when we
were in the military, it was wherever they were living at the time. So now,
hometown's Fond du Lac, and that's great.

Adam: Well, man, thanks for your
service, and thanks for all you do in Fond du Lac. Come back anytime. We'll
talk about whatever you want, and we'll keep investing in this part of town.
Keep doing what you're doing.

Joe: Great. Thank you very much.