The Waukesha Water Commission met on Thursday, August 20, 2026 at 6:00 PM in open session. The meeting covered approval of prior minutes, several action items including demolition contracts, lease renewals, a lien claim payment, a financial report, and updates on the new operations center and utility performance. A closed session was held to discuss the General Manager position, after which the commission directed staff to extend an offer to the final candidate. All votes in open session were unanimous.
The meeting adjourned after the closed session vote.
All right, everybody, we are live. All right, welcome. I'd like to call this meeting to order. It is Thursday, August 20th, 6 p.m. This is a regularly scheduled city of Waukeshaw Walkawater Utility Commission meeting. Um I would like to announce uh before roll call that uh we intend to uh uh make a motion to convene in closed session pursuant to Wisconsin statute 19.85 sub one sub C to consider unemployment promotion compensation or performance evaluation data of the general manner position over which the governmental body has jurisdiction or exercises responsibility. A motion may therefore thereafter be made to reconvene an open session pursuant to Wisconsin statute 19.05 sub two, whereupon action may be taken on matters discussed in closed session. All right, now that that announcements made, we'll move on to roll call Commissioner Francour here, Commissioner Fowl, absent commissioner curry here, Commissioner Pyatt here, Commissioner Matthews here, Commissioner Bartels here, Commissioner Helvin Slayben Absent. Okay, that moves us on. All right, excellent, thank you. Moves this to public comment. Um there's nobody from the city here tonight. Any emails from folks that no, I don't have anything. Okay, all right. That moves us into approval of minutes. Second uh Curry Frank Core motion and second all said that we're okay. Any questions or comments about the minutes from uh July. Hearing none, all in favor say aye. Aye aye. Opposed abstain. Pass unanimously. All right, thank you. All right, that moves us into uh action items. Action item 5A approved payments from the general fund and the improvement fund. So move Curry second second uh Matthews. Um I do have one comment on here, just uh a note. It's actually the last voucher um list. Um there are a couple of voided checks you'll see at the very bottom there. Um one is Dan, he lost his check, but the other um it does say fraud on there. So we had um two ten thousand dollar checks uh stolen from the mail. And basically what they did was um signature, check number, amount, everything was the same, but they uh whitewashed or washed out the name and put a different name in the pay to. And the bank actually caught it because um the check stock didn't look the same. Um so as a result of that, um, and we also had a fraud call um like two Fridays ago. So um, as a result of that, um, we are implementing or we have implemented something called positive pay, and this is basically uh a tool that is going to help prevent this because had these checks gone through, um, we would be out that money, and so that's that's a lot of money. And so um this is a fee that would be about $50 a month. I did get them down to $30 a month. Um, so we basically give them a listing of all of our checks, and it kind of goes against those, and then if they see anything out of the ordinary or doesn't match, or if you know something gets triggered, we get an email that's both for ACH and checks. So then we'll get an email that I have to go in and approve each day. It has to be done before 11 o'clock every day. Um, in order there's some rules on that. Um, but um, so that that is a new thing that we put into place just because those are large checks, and we obviously um don't want that to happen again if they can just pull stuff out of the mail. So awesome. Is that positive pay insurance then? Like one happens to sneak through. Uh are we still liable or uh we we um well uh we are in the end still liable, yes, but I don't think it will just because we give them that listing, and so anything that's on there should and again, like I said, ACH is another one that um this will protect us from Courtney. What do you think that's gonna take as far as time management? Um it will take a little extra time. It will um they are going to it, so right now um the state banks uh online system is a little harder to use. They are going to a new system mid-September, and so I'm hoping that um that it will be easier to use like on our phones or anything like that, um, just because we obviously don't want anything, anything that we we missed that 11 o'clock date, it's gonna automatically not allow them to cash that check. So we we don't want that to happen, so that so it will take some time to do that, and we just have to make sure that we're on it and are checking those over, but um, I think it's a good protection, and it's actually something that um insurance company had also mentioned and things like that.