The Fifth Week/Budget Saturday Notes: Week of October 28 - November 2, 2024

Hi again, Neighbors!  This week will be an interesting one in City of Appleton government as it is Fifth Week with no meetings scheduled.  But the week ends with the infamous Budget Saturday that occurs once a year around this time.  Budget Saturday is a workshop -- technically a meeting of just the Finance Committee but one that is customarily attended by all council members -- in which every line of the coming year's budget is gone over and amendments to the mayor's proposed budget are presented before it goes to the full council for final review and adoption.  Here is a summary of the next few budget-related meetings at which you, the tax paying public, can make comment on and/or witness the council review of the mayor's proposed Executive Budget:

Saturday, 11/02/2024 - Budget Saturday

City Hall (6th Floor) - 8am to ?? (however long it takes to go through the whole budget!)

Wednesday, 11/06/2024 - Public Hearing on the 2025 Budget 

City Hall (6th Floor) - 6pm

Wednesday, 11/13/2024 - Official Adoption of the 2025 Budget

City Hall (6th Floor) - 6pm

The coming year's budget is not a controversial one as there are very few substantial changes or increases in spending from the current year's budget.  The mayor's proposal calls for an overall increase in spending of 4.2% which is largely due to a proposed 3% pay increase for non-union employees.  The net result of this proposed budget are the following property tax changes which affect you, the city's taxpayers:

• 1.6% decrease for City of Appleton tax for properties in Outagamie County
  
  
• 4.1% decrease for City of Appleton tax for properties in Calumet County
  
  
• 10.5% increase for City of Appleton tax for properties in Winnebago County 

The latter unfortunate increase affects a small number of property owners in the city and is a result of a combined decline in values of properties located in that county (after last year's citywide revaluation by the Assessor's Office) and the repayment of a loan that the city received from the state after the Wisconsin Department of Revenue mistakenly overvalued the city's Tax Incremental District properties in that county last year.

I expect little fanfare or fireworks in the coming council budget discussions.  But I would love your feedback or questions on what you see as important in the mayor's budget proposal (linked above).  Please share your thoughts with me and/or join us at any of the above mentioned meetings/public hearings.  I look forward to hearing from you or seeing you!

In a non-budget-related item, I did receive some feedback and questions from a few of you this week regarding a recent failed vote at council to approve a sweeping change to the municipal code to ban smoking from the entire block surrounding the public library including, of course, the already banned smoking area surrounding the downtown transit center.  Many questioned why I voted against this proposed change.  Below are my thoughts and concerns regarding the proposed expanded ban and why I would have preferred that a more selective application of governmental power.

I voted against the proposal because I think it goes too far.  If it were to include just the area around the new Children's Garden area, I would be ok with it.  But I think the whole city block is too much. 

It was a tough vote for me.  I don't enjoy walking through clouds of secondhand smoke any more than the next person and I don't love the idea of smoking exposure for patrons of the library.  But there is already an ordinance on the books that prohibits smoking on city property, including within 20 feet of any doors/openings to city buildings and within 20 feet of playground areas in Appleton city parks.  As mentioned above, there is also a federal law prohibiting smoking on the Valley Transit center property.  So folks who smoke already congregate near the Yellow parking ramp adjacent to the transit center.  And now some are also starting to cross Washington Street and smoke near the front entrances to the construction adjacent to the City Hall building.  It is already becoming a problem for the owners of adjacent and across-the-streets properties and I am concerned that this expansion of governance (this extended smoking prohibition on the entire block of the library) is just going to make things worse for those surrounding properties.

I am also concerned about what this expanded ordinance might be interpreted as saying about us as a city -- that we're intolerant of certain kinds of individuals and "smokers are not allowed" on the public library property.  I think the ordinance already in place is acceptable, could be modified to include the Children's Garden portion of the library (as an extension of the "playground" portion of the existing code), and should be properly enforced.  

And that's another concern for me.  There really is no enforcement piece to this new ordinance.  It will be enforced on a complaint basis, so it could just mean more complaint calls to the Appleton Police Department (APD) without really solving any problem -- real or invented.  If the Children's Garden area in the new library is open and patrons there are exposed to folks outside of it smoking in the open outdoors, it could be addressed with a few tweaks to the existing ordinance rather than a broad sweeping inclusion of the entire block that the library occupies.  It really comes down to excess governance with, in my opinion, a veiled attempt at keeping certain individuals from being on this public property.  I wish for a better alternative solution to the problem rather than an overreaching governmental prohibition on what people can do in the open air outdoors in this city. 

To those who say "Why didn't you take the advice of the Board of Health (who voted unanimously to recommend approval of the ban on the entire block)?", it should be noted that the Board of Health members discussed this proposal for all of four minutes at their meeting -- most of that time taken by Health Director Sepers explaining the proposal -- and not one board member asked any questions about whether this is excessive governance.  The chairman of that board asked if the ban could or should be expanded, but no one asked if there were a way to pare this back to what is reasonable without banning smoking all the way across the library parking lot as far as to the opposite corner from the Children's Garden. 

I don't love smoking and I don't love secondhand snoke.  But I do love freedom and do not love when the city says that we are accepting of all people... and then proposes an exclusionary broad-stroke change such as this.  Should smoking be prohibited around doorways and the outdoors Children's Garden area?  Yes, of course.  But should it be banned in the middle of the parking lot if a couple of smokers choose to congregate there?  Health Director Sepers said essentially the following at the Board of Health meeting: "To simplify this... rather than waiting for exactly where each path and sidewalk within the parking lot might be laid, staff took the approach to include the entire block in this ban."  I do not understand this as the library plans have been openly and clearly drawn up and shared with all of us.  We DO know exactly where all the paths and sidewalks and what the entire building perimeter and the parking lot layout will be... yet instead of keeping the existing ordinance and perhaps just extending it to include he Children's Garden corner of the block, the decision to include the entire city block was made.  That seems wrong to me.  

It is not as simple as some are making it out to be.  So, I hope that this explanation gives you a little more information on this subject.  I am interested in your honest opinions in this regard now that you've read how I prefer a compromise over the propose board overreaching approach.  So, please reach out and share them with me. 

I hope that you have a lovely last few days of October, folks!  Thank you for reading this week (and always!).  Until we meet again for next week's post... best wishes to you all.