Carolyn Fath Ashby
Sharon Corrigan, elected board chair in 2014, is just the second woman to hold the top post.
Does nobody dislike this woman?
Sharon Corrigan has been chair of the Dane County Board for six years. It’s a role in which a politician has to make some hard decisions. A county board chair makes committee assignments and not every supervisor can get the plum spots. And the board chair needs to represent the legislative branch in its relationship, and inevitable clashes, with the county executive.
Yet as she prepares to leave the board after serving as a supervisor representing Middleton for a decade, County Executive Joe Parisi has nothing but praise.
“Sharon and I teamed on several county budget processes that resulted in important advances,” says Parisi. He singled out her work in the areas of water quality, mental health, equity, and social justice. And he said she has been key in moving forward with the discussion about the future of the Alliant Energy Center, a topic on which Parisi and the board have clashed in the past.
“She leaves behind a board that’s better engaged in the community and ready to keep working on what people here truly care about,” Parisi says.
Her predecessor as county board chair is Scott McDonell, who now serves as Dane County clerk and is credited with building the progressive supermajority among the 37-member board. “Sharon Corrigan is one of the most competent, honest and effective people I have ever met, and she was a great county board chair,” says McDonell.
“She was unafraid to tackle the difficult structural issues that face the county from a dangerously deteriorating jail to a financially hemorrhaging Alliant Energy Center,” he adds. “She will be greatly missed.”
And there’s this from Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney. “Sharon is one of the best county board chairs I have seen in my 40 years with the county.” He compliments Corrigan on her ability to work with department heads and to “groom and teach and coach” new supervisors.
“To build a cohesive county board is quite a feat, especially with 37 members,” says Mahoney. “It takes a special person.”
Corrigan’s tenure was not without controversy, however. She shepherded the $148 million jail expansion, the largest project in county history, which was approved over fierce opposition from criminal justice activists. Although unpopular, many county officials believed they had little choice. The high security jail facilities on top of the City County Building are widely regarded as dangerous and antiquated.
When a new tower is built next to the Public Safety Building, the county will have fewer jail beds but more medical and mental health services for inmates.
And blogger Brenda Konkel recently called out Corrigan for initiating unnoticed informal meetings of committee chairs. The meetings were apparently designed to prepare Corrigan for any questions or issues that might arise at the next full board meeting. The county’s lead attorney Marcia MacKenzie says the meetings did not violate the open meetings law because the group was not a formal body and no decisions were made there.
Corrigan is particularly proud of the fact that, after three special elections this year, 19 of those members are now women, the first time in Dane County history that a majority of the board has been female. In fact, according to data provided by the Wisconsin Counties Association, only about 20 percent of all county supervisors among the 72 counties are women. Only one other county, Menominee, has a majority of women on its board of supervisors.
Well before she ran for office herself Corrigan helped found the state chapter of Emerge, a nonprofit committed to encouraging women to run for office and to give them the tools they need to succeed. When she was elected chair of the Dane County Board in April 2014, she was just the second woman to hold the position (Mary Louise Symon was board chair from 1974 to 1980).
Corrigan is an Illinois transplant. She moved here in 2005 with her husband, Dan Burkhalter, who had taken a job as executive director of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state teachers union. Burkhalter left that job several years ago. Corrigan decided not to run for reelection in April because she and Burkhalter are returning to the Chicago area for his work.
If she had stayed on the board, Corrigan says she would have continued to work on the Alliant Center and on mental health issues, racial equity, criminal justice reform and community engagement.
Corrigan believes that last topic is crucial because the county, relative to other levels of government, tends to “fly below the radar a little bit.” And yet, she says, “the county engages in interesting work that helps people lead successful lives.”
She points to the potential improvements at the Alliant Center as an example of a project that has tremendous potential to impact Madison’s south side, but she says that special care needs to be taken to make sure that those neighborhoods are heard from. A new position to promote community engagement was created in the board office this year.
“This could be a transformative project,” she says, pointing to the 1,700 jobs supported by the current facility and the 164 acres it occupies in south Madison. She says that if done right, another 1,300 jobs could be added. “This can be a benefit to south Madison, but we have to do it in a way that doesn’t push people out.”
The exposition center has gotten media attention because it has generated some controversy, but Corrigan expresses frustration that the county is often ignored by reporters. She suggests that the greater level of collaboration on the board doesn’t generate the fireworks that create headlines.
She points to a new system for redistricting in which a nonpartisan citizens group will present the board with a choice of three maps. “It’s redistricting done by people who don’t have a dog in the fight,” she says. “It’s an amazing achievement” that has been little noticed.
Corrigan says that the many evening meetings took their toll, but that she will miss the county board staff and her fellow supervisors. “We’ve developed a trust level on the board and we’ve been able to achieve a lot together,” she says. “We’ve developed a camaraderie.”
Did she ever think about taking on the county’s top job? “I wouldn’t have challenged the current county executive,” she says flatly. But if Parisi had stepped down? “When you’re a woman telling other women to run for office, you never say never.”
[Editor's note: This story was corrected to note that Corrigan decided not to run for reelection in the upcoming spring election; she did not make that decision in April 2019.]
