The Notes: Week of August 9 - August 13, 2021

Neighbors, I want to begin this week with a great big THANK YOU for all of the great feedback I received from you at the Vosters Park National Night Out event last Tuesday.  It was so great to see, meet, and talk with so many of you!  I think this event was a great success and I credit and give thanks to the organizers and to all of the families who were open to spending some time with their neighbors in building alliances and friendships amongst us.

This week is Committee Meetings Week in Appleton city government and, though many meetings are cancelled due to lack of agenda items at this time, there are some very interesting ones on which I will share some tidbits below.

On Monday, 08/09/2021, the Municipal Service Committee will meet at 4:30pm.  They have a rather full agenda with many items to discuss! 

• Street reconstructions of portions of Bartell Drive (to add sidewalks), Morrison Street, and South Summit Street (due to repeated water main breaks) are proposed and will be discussed. 
  
  
• There are a few public right-of-way occupancy permits up for discussion and approval: for Home Burger Bar on College Avenue (small dining area on the beautification strip), a construction area on Roosevelt Street (temporary dumpster), a storage POD on Lawrence Street (extending a temporary permit for the homeowners as their garage reconstruction is taking longer than expected), and the construction/demolition area around the YMCA parking ramp at Oneida/Lawrence/Morrison Streets and Soldier's Square (the plan is to fence off this area from August 26, 2021 through February 18, 2022 for this project) 
  
  
• Once again (for the second time!), the portion of the municipal code which prohibits home owners from certain electrical work in their own homes is back on the table for this committee.  I wrote about this here and here.  The current proposal to be discussed and voted upon is that the verbiage in the municipal code be amended to read: "In the case of installing or replacing service equipment in a single-family dwelling, utility interactive solar photovoltaic installations or electrical work performed on a residential property which is not a single-family owner occupied dwelling, the electrical work shall be performed by a licensed electrical contractor..." This should allow for home owners to install small, non-electric-company-interactive solar panels to their homes without needing a separate electrical contractor.  As I understand it, these are very simple structures that don't require a complex hook-up to a home's electrical service panel...which is much different than a full solar installation which allows the back and forth of electrical power to and from a home to the electrical grid (which, by all rights, should require a licensed electrician).  Hopefully, this action will *finally* make it to a vote of the full council this time!  
  
  
• There is also a new resolution for this committee to discuss regarding the elimination of the "scavenging rule" in our municipal code.  There is currently an ordinance in place that disallows people from picking through others' garbage and recycling for the purposes of discovering new treasures for themselves.  Alderman Mike Smith proposes that the removal of this ordinance will allow folks to once again scavenge with the hopes that this will help to alleviate some people's concerns about the now-reduced bulky item pick-ups in the city.  I look forward to this discussion as I see Alderman Smith's point... but I am also not keen on allowing willy-nilly scavenging through neighborhood garbage and recycling cans.  Perhaps some verbiage can be crafted to allow for what already goes on in our neighborhoods -- "free" signs and items put out with the intent for others to grab them if they so desire -- but to disallow the open rummaging of people through garbage and recycling cans on trash/recycling days.  Let me know your thoughts as we get nearer the discussion on this at this committee meeting and, no doubt, the full council meeting next week.
  
  
• The Department of Public Works (DPW) will also present Standard Street Design Guidelines, a permits summary (hint: the number of construction permits in the city year-to-date is up from 2020), an undated report on the BIRD scooters program, and their mid-year performance report. 

All of the rest of the committee meetings for this week will meet on Wednesday, 08/11/2021

The Board of Health will meet at 7:00am to discuss the following:

• Aldermen Martin, Reed, Doran, and I submitted a resolution last week expressing concern over the mayor and the city enacting an indoor masking policy for all city buildings without a permanent Health Officer in place in the city's Health Department.  The resolution can be read in full here.  The resolution is in no way to fault the city's human resources department for their work in this hiring effort thus far or to fault the city's Health Department and Interim Health Officer, Sonja Jensen, (who, for now, holds both the interim position and her regular position of the city's Public Health Nurse) for their work since the retirement of Health Officer Eggebrecht in June.  Our concern is that this position is of great importance to the city and for the purposes of advising the mayor and city staff on policy surrounding health issues. 
  
  The mayor's action requires masking in all city buildings.  Since the CDC changed their indoor masking recommendations based on a limited data set (469 cases in a Massachusetts town), perhaps the mayor, with advice from the city's Health Department, should have stopped at strongly recommending and urging indoor masking, rather than mandating it.  While cases are on the rise in the city, as expected due to what we know of the Delta variant at this time, the case load is still far lower than it has been and no mention has been made in the city's COVID-19 reporting of hospital capacities or other salient facts in this discussion.  As we all know, the city's policies tend to trickle down to other governing entities like local school boards and local private businesses.  We want the citizens of Appleton, it's business owners, its school administrators, to have the best guidance in these matters and we believe that that begins with the position of Health Officer filled by the most qualified and best suited candidate available to the City of Appleton.   
  
  I hope that there will be a calm, reasoned, fair, and open discussion at this Board of Health meeting and that, perhaps, this resolution be referred to the Human Resources and Information Technology Committee for further discussion on recruitment strategies, etc., for this position.  Share your thoughts with me! 
  
  
• The Board will also review the current COVID-19 case counts, the second quarter status and budget reports of the Health Department, and the noise variances approved since the Board last met. 
  

The Joint Review Board will meet at 1:00pm.  The Board is made up of one representative from each tax jurisdiction (school board, technical college, county, municipality) and one public member.  The Board's purpose is to approve or deny the creation or amendment of a Tax Incremental District (TID).  This board will discuss amendments to TID #3 and TID #12 (removing 13 parcels from TID #3 and adding them to TID #12 and adding some additional parcels to TID #12):

I have lots of questions about the effects of this and I will be contacting the city's Director of Community & Economic Development, Karen Harkness, with my questions before this Wednesday meeting.  If you have questions you want me to pose to her as well, please let me know.  The Board will also review the 2020 annual reports for each of our city's TIDs and the city's 2020 Appleton Growth Report.  If you would like to review these, click here to find the agenda with links to all of the reports. 

The City Plan Commission will meet at 3:30pm to discuss the same things that the Joint Review Board will be discussing beforehand.  Same information, different people.  The City Plan Commission will be voting to recommend (or not) the changes proposed for the two Tax Incremental Districts.

The Community & Economic Development Committee will convene at 4:30pm but instead of talking about amendments to TIDs #3 and #12, they will discuss development of the property referred to as the Conway Hotel lot (demolished in 2013).  This property is on the southeast corner of East Washington Street and North Oneida Street, just north of the "Avenue Mall."  A developer is looking to the city for support of the lesser of 18% of the tax increment value or $1.386M to support the construction work on a mixed use project (including residential units and ground-floor commercial units) there.  I look forward to hearing more about this project as it's been "in the works" for a while now and will hopefully be a great addition to the downtown area... and hopefully worth our TIF dollars!

The Safety & Licensing Committee meets next at 5:30pm.  They will discuss and potentially approval a small slate of liquor licenses and the like.  The Appleton Police Department will also present a modification request to their department's organizational table to add a Crime Analyst while eliminating one Communications Specialist (a one-for-one, no-budget-effect change).

And finishing up the popular Wednesday city government meeting day, the Human Resources and Information Technology Committee meets at 6:30pm.  Here is where the Police Department will request of the committee formal approval of the above-mentioned organizational table change.  There are also two requests for "over hires" from the police department and the fire department.  This means that, for a bit more in salary dollars, both departments will have the ability for existing employees (usually soon-to-retire) to share and transfer their "institutional knowledge" with new hires in those positions.  As long as a department's budget supports these over-hires, I am wholly in favor of them.  

To wrap up the week, the Library Board, which was slated to meet the last two weeks but didn't, will finally try to get together on Thursday, 08/12/2021, at 2:00pm.  Their current agenda has one action item: to select/nominate board president, vice president, and secretary.  There are two new board members so this likely necessitates these nominations.  I'm surprised to see that they have no agenda item discussing the library building project... but perhaps that's due to the project being currently in the hands of the architects and the newly formed Appleton Library Advisory Committee.  According to my sources, the next meeting of that advisory committee will take place at the library on *the most popular Appleton meeting day this week!* Wednesday, 08/11/2021 at 6:00pm.  I'll share more information on this as I receive it.  

Thanks for tuning in again this week, folks!  If you have questions on any of the above or on anything else in Appleton government, please don't hesitate to contact me.  I'm happy to be of service to my neighbors!  Have a great week!  If I make it through Wednesday's meetings, I'll be back here with more! :)