“spearheaded a change in hiring practices based on merit”
But the seeds of Mattes’ crusade to expose wrongdoing in government were planted not in sunny Florida, but in wintry Madison.
As the new Bunker Crew/MSW Media podcast“Lawyers Guns and Money” chronicles, the Connecticut-born Mattes attended school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late ‘60s and joined the antiwar movement there. In the 1970s, while still a student radical, Mattes was elected to the Dane County Board and later the Madison City Council.
“We were in a bar, and my friend said, ‘One of us ought to run for county supervisor and throw these bums out,’” Mattes recounts on the first episode of the six-episode podcast, which is available on iTunes, Spotify and other podcast apps. “We flipped a coin and I lost, so I had to run. Somehow I won.”
While serving on the county board, Mattes said he conducted a yearlong investigation into nepotism in county hiring and spearheaded a change in hiring practices based on merit. “That was really the first time I ever used my research skills to make something happen in government.”
Mattes later became a city alderman, and he said there was talk about him running for mayor. Instead, he left politics in 1981 to attend law school in Florida.
