New state veterans secretary faces fiscal challenges
UW graduate plans to keep helping state
The slogan “It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure” was designed to lure people to join the U.S. Navy. And for Mary Kolar, it worked.
In 1980, Kolar was about to graduate with a degree in marketing from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and was thinking about her future.
Her father, who died when she was 2, had served in the Navy. Her two older brothers were in the Navy and though she had talked to an Army recruiter while still in high school, the Wilton native ultimately decided on the Navy.
She didn’t know her decision almost four decades ago would ultimately lead her to become Wisconsin’s first female Department of Veterans Affairs secretary. A date for Kolar’s confirmation hearings has not yet been set.
Her parents married at the Brooklyn Naval Yard while her father was serving in the Navy. When she was growing up, Kolar often accompanied her mother to Fort McCoy where her mom worked in food service. She also volunteered to sing for veterans at a retirement facility in Tomah.
“Now I know that everything I did in my life was leading to this,” Kolar, 60, said in a phone interview.
Kolar spent 28 years on active duty in the Navy, retiring as a captain in 2008.
Overseeing a department with a $143 million budget and 1,300 employees, most of whom work at the state’s three veterans homes in Chippewa Falls, King and Union Grove, Kolar said she faces fiscal challenges, particularly at the veterans homes.
Finding enough employees is difficult at a time when unemployment rates are low, she said. Plus the number of veterans living at the homes is dropping as the World War II and Korean War generations pass away.
“Being able to adequately compensate the people on the front line with an aging population is something we need to address. Those certified nursing assistants are not paid a lot of money for the great amount of responsibility they have,” said Kolar.
Health care costs are rising and more people are choosing to stay in their homes rather than move into senior living facilities.
“The veterans homes have done well in the past, but with challenges of vacancies in the homes, we’re not generating revenue like we have in the past,” said Kolar.
She plans to continue working on smoothing relations with county veterans service offices. In 2016 county veterans service officers and county administrators sharply criticized efforts by then-Secretary John Scocos to change the way block grants are doled out by the state Department of Veterans Affairs. Kolar’s predecessor, Dan Zimmerman, improved communications with veterans organizations and county veterans service officers.
Kolar served on the Dane County Board for six years and was vice president of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum Foundation’s board.
She plans to continue outreach and recovery efforts for homeless veterans in Wisconsin as well as a program that sends a Wisconsin team to U.S. military bases to encourage service members leaving the military to move to the state.
Kolar disagrees with the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing the Trump administration’s ban on transgender people from serving in the military.
“The military and veterans here in Wisconsin are made up of such a wonderfully diverse group of people. Here at WDVA we appreciate and respect that diversity,” she said.
In the Navy, Kolar served in a number of jobs including deputy commander and executive officer of the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command headquartered in North Chicago, commanding officer of Navy Recruiting District Pittsburgh and two stints at the Navy’s boot camp for recruits. She was executive officer at Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes, in northern Illinois and later spent nearly four years as chief of staff there.
“I had tremendous duty stations throughout my 28 years but the most I’m pleased with was as executive officer at the Navy’s only boot camp,” she said.
“Every week I saw people who six weeks earlier didn’t know what the Navy was and were now sailors.”
After she retired from the Navy she was director of public operations at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art for seven years.
Her husband, Scott, is a Navy veteran; their 31-year-old son, Matthew, is serving on the submarine USS Kentucky; and their 29-year-old son, Jamie, is a Town of Delafield firefighter.