2019 to 2023 Gym Use Records

Game Haven opens in Waunakee, creating local space for in-person community and connections.

I had the chance to spend an hour in Kevin Thornberg’s new store, Game Haven, last week. While Thornberg’s interest and talent in sales is obvious upon first meeting him, if he was trying to sell me on anything beyond being a completely positive addition to the local community, I’d be very surprised.

An obvious labor of love, Thornberg’s long-time interest in gaming led him to opening Game Haven, a new retailer of RPGs (role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons), standard board games (think Monopoly, Catan, etc.), card games (Pokemon) and other table-top games (i.e. Warhammer 40K). In addition to providing the community’s new (and only) local option for such hobbies, Game Haven provides the only source for everyone to try out games, meet up with friends to play, and to have space for new experiences in person and in real life, rather than meeting up with friends to game online. The store includes ample space in the former Salt Therapy location next to Papa Murphy’s, the UPS store and Ace Hardware in the Village Mall.

In our current atomized and dissociated communities where isolation is rampant among far too many young people, Kevin spoke of providing an outlet for people to be together, to have fun, and create actual human connections. Not to put too fine of a point on it, this is something that is otherwise completely lacking in the Waunakee community. While there are ample opportunities for athletics, for senior citizens, and for anyone who wants to get drunk, there is effectively nowhere for people to meet new people or to gather with friends in a quasi-public community space that doesn’t involve alcohol or athletics. For all the crusading done by well-intentioned local organizations, I’ve never heard anyone (other than churches) pitch anything to confront social isolation.

Doffing a black fedora, I got the sense that Thornberg has little interest in being anything but completely authentic. No one wearing a fedora in 2024 can truly care overmuch about controlling what other people think of them. From handling impromptu pleas for local athletic fundraisers and local civic groups, to dealing with lawyers, to watching his kids while at the store, and even in taking brief phone calls, he moves through his day to day life with a palpable intent to create positive social space.

Robert Putnam wrote in his foundational work, Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital, that there “is reason to believe that deep-seated technological trends are radically “privatizing” or “individualizing” our use of leisure time and thus disrupting many opportunities for social-capital formation.” When Putnam wrote that in 1995, the technological trend away from social leisure time was pinned on television. Today, the obvious culprit is the internet, with social media, online gaming, and whatever is the latest-greatest dopamine distributor pulling our attention away from in-person interactions.

Thornberg, via Game Haven, expressly intends to give the Waunakee community a place to be with others, without judgment, expectation or exclusion and above-all-else: in person. He doesn’t even have aggressively capitalistic intentions, in that he is not banking his financial well-being on this store and is not intent on extracting immediate profits from the venture. In short, he’s not quitting his day job just to make a business. When he shows he wants to provide valuable social capital to the community, I believe it.

What I find most interesting about the use of gaming to create social capital, lies precisely in what in-person games are at their core: expressions of freedom and power within the confines of specific rules.

“We’re not fuckin’ animals. We live in a society.“

• Jim Jefferies

Take for example my personal favorite role-playing game: Call of Cthluhu, based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. In a standard game, players create a character and pretend to be that individual through the entirety of the game (role-playing). The game, usually a set scenario, is run by a game master (known in Cthulhu as the “Keeper of Arcane Lore” or simply “The Keeper”). The rules are fairly straightforward, in that the players are usually investigating some sort of mystery or event of note, usually ending in some or all of the players’ characters going insane or killed through exposure to eldritch horrors (or are otherwise successful in their quests).

Regardless of the outcomes, what RPGs like Call of Cthluhu (or the far more well-known Dungeons and Dragons) provide is the opportunity to be something beyond yourself while still being social with other people, all with the goal to create amusement, fun and positive experiences. And while I cynically point out these games are owned by corporations that are really seeking your money, from the multi-national Hasbro, to international companies like Games Workshop, to small companies like Chaosium, they are all focused on sales involving human interaction at their core. And they make money by ensuring they keep the fun going.

If you “lose” a board game, you just pick up the pieces and play again. If your RPG character “dies” you can probably find some way to revive them, and if you can’t, you get to create a whole new character. This is no different from the other games offered at Game Haven, from the Pokemon Trading Card Game or standard board games. Game Haven even offers a pathway into deeper hobbies, like the insanely intricate (and expensive) mini universe of Warhammer 40K.

I don’t write much about entirely positive subjects, so I’m thrilled spread a little bit of attention to something that is not only entirely positive, but one that needs the community’s support. If our community values social well-being, and if it wants to be more than simply a bedroom community, it needs people like Thornberg and places like Game Haven.

I wouldn’t have initially thought that a guy like Kevin Thornberg would look like all Waunakee needs, but meeting him and touring Game Haven left me positively considering the possibilities of an expanding community with spaces for everyone.

Study produced for Village of Waunakee proposing dramatic changes to the Waunakee Area Fire District.

Several months ago, the Waunakee Village Board authorized the retention of McMahon Public Safety and Municipal Management to conduct a study of the Waunakee Fire Department/District on the issues of staffing, operational effectiveness, funding, and governing structure.

The current Waunakee Area Fire District is nominally managed by a Fire District Board made up of 5 elected officials, two from Waunakee and three from Vienna, Springfield and Westport (one each). The current representatives on the Fire District are Robert McPherson and Nila Frye from Waunakee, John Cuccia (Westport), Matt Wright (Springfield), and Gary Endres (Vienna). The Fire District contracts with the Waunakee Fire Department (an independent volunteer-run organization) to provide firefighting and other services. Surprisingly, only one employee of the Fire Department is technically employed by the Fire District: Battalion Chief/Fire Inspector Brian Adler.

A brief review of meeting minutes and notes from the previous half decade suggests the Fire District Board, up until recently, has largely abrogated its authority over the Fire Department to the volunteer members of the Waunakee Fire Department, who have effectively run it themselves. By all available accounts, community satisfaction with the Fire Department is high and from a limited external view, the Department appears to be well-run and organized and is described by the report in no terms worse than “adequate”.

The Fire District is governed by an intergovernmental agreement between the four municipalities since the mid 1990s under which each community would pay a proportion of the Fire District’s costs based on equalized land values within each community served. Because of this agreement, which the municipalities entered into during a time in which Waunakee had a much lower population (and lower land values), the Village of Waunakee has, over the course of the last 30 years, grown to now paying over 70% of the Fire District’s costs while having no functional control over the district. Yes, you read that correctly: the adjacent communities hold voting control over Waunakee’s own fire district with their three votes to Waunakee’s two, all while paying less than 30% of its costs.

In an almost absurd outcome, Waunakee controls only 40% of the vote over the district, while paying 71% of the district’s expenses. In contrast, Springfield controls 20%, while paying 5.7% of district costs. Vienna pays only 0.97% of district costs, while maintaining 20% of the district’s voting control.

In summary, Waunakee provides over 70% of funding for Fire District, yet has no functional control over it short of the power to withdraw from the intergovernmental agreement and terminate the fire district (an effective nuclear option). Because of this delineation of control, there has been no functional oversight over the Fire Department by elected officials or any municipal employee in decades.

It is unclear why the Village allowed the Fire District to turn into a runaway train controlled (or ignored) by outside municipalities under former Village Presidents John Laubmeier and Chris Zellner. Under new Village President Kristin Runge, it appears outsider control over the Fire Department will come to a swift end.

Further, given the effective non-governmental status of the Fire Department as a volunteer organization, the Waunakee FD is largely not subject to open records laws or other methods of public oversight. For this and a variety of other reasons, the current structure of the district has been described by sources within the Village as non-viable long-term, and it may currently be outright illegal (or in non-compliance with various state statutes).

The McMahon report explicitly recommends a dramatic reorganization of the Fire District and the Fire Department itself to change this.

Particular recommendations of note:

1. Effectively re-organize the Fire District to confer no less than majority control to the Village of Waunakee.
2. Update the Intergovernmental Agreement to immediately create an independent Fire Commission to appoint the Fire Department’s Fire Chief (currently chosen by members) and to confirm appointment of officers and members (currently chosen by members).
3. Independently audit the Fire District through an independent accountant and present the findings to the Fire Board.
4. Make a variety of large scale changes to prepare the Fire District for eventual 24/7 staffed fire coverage, with a plan towards hiring an entire first shift staff by 2029 and full-time staffing and phase-out of the volunteer department by 2039.

Perhaps the most dire warning by the Report is contained deep in its analysis, noting:

An alternative, if additional board seats or supermajority voting cannot be achieved in the governance, is for the Village of Waunakee to leave the District and create a municipal fire department with the assets it obtains. The Village’s Fire Department could then contract with interested townships for service and ultimately have full control of the financial and operational issues in the fire department. (p 27, Final Report)

In such an event, the Village leaving the Fire District could prove financially catastrophic for Westport, Vienna and Springfield, as the termination of the agreement would mandate those municipalities to buy out their shares in the current fire district assets owned by Waunakee, and in turn then forced into buying fire protection services from Waunakee or other municipalities, such as Middleton or Madison.

The documents in their entirety are as available for download here:

As previously promised, all emails sent to the Waunakee Community School District, published per an open records to the WCSD, completed by Mr. Randy Guttenberg and provided to me today, June 7, 2023.

The records request, dated May 22, 2023, read as follows:

Hi Rebecca:

Can you please forward me copies of all emails the district (just going off of emails rec’d by Ms. Ensign, Mr. May, and Mr. Guttenberg to limit it) has received re: Former Coach Mackenzie in the last two weeks?

I’ve had some people say that only negative stuff gets shared, and I’m going to publish everything on all sides, good, bad, neutral, etc.

Can you please also share or otherwise post the letters the district got back in October 2022? There were a bunch of letters/emails from the 10/24/22 meeting that the minutes said would be available in the extras, but I don’t believe they were ever posted.

Thank you! Hope you are well.

The following PDFs are all emails received by the BOE from October and May regarding Mr. Mackenzie, offered without commentary beyond this:

1. Whoever claimed there were “hundreds” of emails and comments sent to the district was dramatically exaggerating. There are about 25.

2. Ms. Ensign noted that the BOE decision to non-renew Mr. Mackenzie was a unanimous 7-0 vote.
3. Not a single email references anything that the BOE apparently used to make their decision.