Sheila Palinkas Resident- Town of Oakland

05/19/2026

Town Board meeting tonight at 6:30 p.m. Despite having three advisory resolutions directing the Town Board to reconsider going back to the Cambridge Fire & EMS Intergovernmental agreement. Please watch this and take whatever action you can. The phone numbers and emails are posted on this page.

urging town of Oakland Jefferson County, Wisconsin residents to let their board members know that they want the town of Oakland to reconsider moving services...

05/18/2026

https://files.heygov.com/oaklandtown.com/meetings/me_01krp7avjbgphcg3hj4ghgjtyp/05-19-agenda-5-15.docx

Interestingly, not one of the discussion points and items we voted on at the annual meeting in April is on this agenda.

05/06/2026

Here are the email addresses for the town of Oakland board members except for the newest one. You might want to let them know your thoughts about the firing EMS situation.

05/05/2026

Just in case you'd like to let your Oakland board members know how you feel about the Fire & EMS arrangement (or anything else), their email addresses are listed below.

On Sunday, I emailed the Town Clerk and requested that the Oakland board supervisors and chairperson emails be put on the website to make it easier for people to contact them. Presently the site lists their phone numbers (personal). She was kind enough to promptly reply and said she would have the deputy clerk do later that day. Not long after that she wrote back to say she was told there is a policy against that. I wrote to the chairperson and this is the response I received from the town chairperson, Laura Payne:
"A policy was put in place to not include the board members email on the website prior to my tenure on the board. The reasoning is to minimize spam and potential security breaches. Residents may contact the town hall through Contact Us on our website via this link: https://oaklandtown.com/contact-us/ The clerks monitor this general email box daily and will forward emails to the appropriate person"
Below are the official email addresses for the town board except for newest member, Joan McGowen-Merlin.

Oakland Town Board Supervisors
Jim Degidio
[email protected]

Joy Graffin
[email protected]

David Drews
[email protected]

Joan-McGowen-Merlin (no email available yet)
Oakland Town Chairperson

Laura Payne
[email protected]

Town Information Mailing Address:N4450 County Road ACambridge, WI 53523 Office Hours:Monday – ...

04/22/2026

This is the Oakland board meeting and annual meeting of the electors from April 21st. 2026. If you are concerned in particularly about The status of emergency services for the town of Oakland I urge you to please listen to this video. Motions that were passed were passed unanimously. It was stressed multiple times by the town clerk that the motions which were passed are advisory. Only. The board has the option to refuse to deal with it. Why is that important? This is our opportunity to follow up with the board and stay engaged and remind them that the majority of the people in attendance at that meeting voted to approve these things. And by the way, these meetings are not typically that well attended.

Later in the video representative, Joan Fitzgerald comments that she was happy to see so many people in attendance, but said that so many left after the electors portion of the meeting. I tend to agree with her. However, perhaps what we need to be more concerned about is people feel that their voices do not matter, why they feel that their time is wasted attending these meetings. It's not just the town of Oakland. It's all over the country.

1 like. "Oakland Board, April 21, 2026"

02/13/2026

Tonight's Specials

12/29/2025

There is an opening on the Oakland town board. Nomination papers can be picked up at the office. I believe the deadline to file is January 4th

10/08/2025

Attention Town of Oakland residents: there is an important joint meeting of the remaining four municipalities who operate the Cambridge area Fire and EMS. It will be at Christiana tonight at 6:30. They will be discussing important issues facing the Fire and EMS Services. For those of you that are not aware, there has been a lot of progress made in terms of board turnover and staff turnover, which is the primary reason why we experienced so many problems to begin with in the last 3 years. There is an entirely new board with the exception of one member who is definitely on board with trying to clean this operation up and make it more efficient and dependable. The fire commission has reached out to the town of Oakland board more than once in recent months with no response. They had written a letter asking for a conversation about the potential of rejoining the intergovernmental agreement. Crickets, that's it! Crickets. Meanwhile, the town of Oakland is divvying up our services between Fort Atkinson or Lake Mills and Jefferson. This was never intended to be the long-term solution to the issue. It was intended to force change and it did. Now under current leadership our board is refusing to revisit this crucial time when new policy will be set. New agreements will be forged and long-range services will be determined. We are being short-changed of an opportunity to reunite us with our local fire and EMS Services. Many of those firefighters and even possibly some of the EMS people live in Oakland. They deserve to have an opportunity to have the case heard about the potential of revisiting the agreement. I will leave it there for now. If you are able to attend this meeting tonight at 6:30 in Christiana please do so. If you are able to post in the Oakland community page, please do so. I have been blocked again by page management which of course is no surprise since they don't agree and want to control the narrative.

06/30/2025

06/28/2025

Short-term rentals around Lake Ripley.

This topic has come up a few times in the last couple years. Unfortunately, it is tough to get on a town board agenda.

In research Joy Graffin and I have learned an awful lot about short-term rentals in our area. Some people might be surprised to find out that this amounts to nearly a million dollars in revenue on an annual basis. It could even be higher depending on how many properties are actually involved. So far I've found 21 just around Lake Ripley.

If you have any thoughts on this topic, I would appreciate hearing them so that we can record them and make sure that at some point they are heard by the town board. It would also be helpful if people would come to a town board meeting and make public comment. A few people have already, but it would be better if more people took the time to do it..

This is not to say that short-term rentals are a bad thing at all. However, they do present challenges to local residents and they also add to the wear and tear if you will, on our natural resources.

In the state of Wisconsin there is a statute which addresses short-term rentals. Thus far, Joy has learned that there are only three currently registered.