When friends and neighbors encouraged Pauline Jaske, president of Fairway Transit, Pewaukee, Wis., to run for county supervisor, her husband Bernard “Bud” Jaske said, “Over my dead body.”

“I said: ‘Geez, I wish you wouldn’t have said that,’” Jaske recalls with a grin. “We’ve been married 44 years, so he pretty much knows I’m going to do what I want.”

What Jaske wants is to change the trucking industry and her community for the better. And by all accounts, she’s accomplished her goal. She won a seat on the the Waukesha county board of supervisors handily last year, after being instrumental in preventing the county from widening a local road from two to four lanes to speed travel around the nearby city of Waukesha. “When I started, only four of the 35 county supervisors were against it,” she says. “When we ended, only four were for it.” Proof positive, she says that “you can change things.”

In addition to her duties as a county supervisor, she serves on the board of directors of the Wisconsin Motor Carriers Association, is active in the Wisconsin Road Team and the Wisconsin Truck Driving Championships and serves on the WMCA safety committee. She speaks often before state and national representatives about trucking issues. And she was recently named to the board of directors of the Waukesha County Technical College.

“She’s one of those rare people who’s a doer,” says Tom Howells, WMCA president. “There are a lot of people who talk a good game, but she puts her time and money where her mouth is.”
Currently, Jaske is focusing her efforts on a $5 million project to build a truck driving school in conjunction with the Waukesha County Technical College. To get the project off the ground, Jaske says, the Wisconsin trucking industry will need to raise $1.5 million. “Even though economic times are hard in this industry, I feel like we have to help ourselves if we expect taxpayers to get behind it,” she says.

Business savvy
Whether she’s raising money for a driving school or voicing concern about a proposed regulation, Jaske looks at each situation from a businessperson’s perspective. That’s important, she says, because too often those in government don’t realize the implications of the policies they set. As an example, she points to a law under which as a small business owner she must offer part-time workers the same benefits as full-time employees. The cost of compliance has forced her to stop hiring summer help and eliminate job-sharing. “They make it impossible to be a good person,” she says. “That’s why I’m in government. I want to change things.”

One of the things she most wants to change is the trucking industry’s image. A big step in the right direction was having Susan Hawk, a former Fairway driver, on the Wisconsin Road Team. “It was good for the industry to have a woman,” Jaske says. Hawk went on to become a member of the original cast of the Survivor TV show. Her celebrity status brought people from all over to visit Fairway. “I’m getting myself a T-shirt that says: ‘I survived Survivor,’ and she’s going to autograph it,” Jaske says.