Trustee Candidate Says He'll Bring a Young Perspective to Local Government

• Editor's Note: This is the first of four profiles on the candidates running for Village Board in the April 5 election.

Village trustee candidate Michael Sauer says he wants to help bring more residents to the village and would approach the village’s sewer issue differently if elected.

Sauer, 29, is the youngest on the Shorewood Village Board.

A Shorewood resident for more than three years, Sauer said he is running because he has a vested stake in the community, loves the area and believes he can bring a lot to the board.

He received his undergraduate degree in consumer affairs and business administration from Eastern Illinois University, and then obtained a master’s degree in project management from Illinois State University.

After finishing up school, he moved from Illinois to Wisconsin several years ago and later settled into Shorewood. He is a project manager at Assurant Health, a national insurance company. His wife, Beth Sauer,  is employed by the Great Lakes Water Institute as a research specialist.

Sauer said his recent experiences with cuts and changes in regulation in the health insurance industry would serve him well as a trustee.

“I think that the experiences I have had in that industry will be very helpful with what we are going to be going through as a village because of the budget cuts,” he said. “We have been very creative in the insurance industry… we have found a way to survive, we have found a way to stay profitable.”

He said in light of budget cuts, the village needs to start slicing the issues up into different projects and prioritizing them.

“We need to start looking at what we can afford now, and not leverage our future as a village,” he said.

Sauer added the village should have addressed sewers 10 years ago and should look at fixing leaky laterals as the first step toward looking at Shorewood’s sewer issues.

Sauer said the village should consider consolidation more than ever and would support a merger of the Shorewood and Whitefish Bay police departments.

“There are places were we can share those services, and still ensure that it is great,” he said. “We are such a tied community… I see the Whitefish Bay police cars go by just as much as I see the Shorewood police cars."

There is a lot more the village can do to bring more residents to Shorewood to drive up the school district’s resident enrollment and drive more traffic to local businesses.

“There is so much that this town has to offer that I don’t think people see,” Sauer said. “I think I have a lot of good ideas on how we can reach out to those people and make it more attractive.”

Highlighting the walkablitity of the village and the great business district is important to increasing Shorewood’s population, he said.

He said he will bring a younger prescriptive to the Village Board and believes he knows what young families are looking for in a community.

Sauer and his wife enjoy biking, canoeing, cross country skiing and volunteering his website says.

Incumbent Michael Maher, and newcomers Don Ford and Chris Piotrowski are also on the April ballot, vying for two seats on the Village Board.