The Notes: Week of January 27 - January 31, 2024

Welcome to Fifth Week in City of Appleton government, Neighbors!  This is the week in which there are no meetings scheduled due to the four-week regular meetings schedules (every other week of full council meetings and the opposite weeks of committee meetings).  So when a Fifth Week shows up on the calendar, there's nothing.... wait.  Wait a minute.  

There are actually two boards which have "ruined" this meeting-less Fifth Week!  See below for a quick summary of what will be discussed in those meetings:

Tuesday, 01/28/2025

CDBG Advisory Board - 11am  CDBG stands for "Community Development Block Grant" and is a city-run program that is funded by federal dollars received by the city each year.  And each year, this board meets to discuss and either amend or affirm the recommendations that city staff in the Community Development Department have made for the distribution of those funds.  This board is asked to do a lot of homework ahead of this meeting -- reading all of the grant applications materials in order to best ask critical questions of whether the department's recommendations are appropriate for the city.  Public participation is also solicited at this meeting so if you have an interest or a question regarding the proposed distribution plans, please plan to attend or email me your comments beforehand so that I can share them with this board.  

Below is a summary of the city staff recommendations for the CDBG funds publicly available to "community partners" (as grants) for 2025.  A full breakdown of how staff arrived at these recommendations can be found in the agenda for this board meeting.  

Please let me know if you have any questions in this regard.  This year's availability of funds for community partners is lower than it has been in previous years due to more internal (city) spending on things such as rebuilding the city's housing rehabilitation loan program, funding a Community Resource Navigator position (embedded in the Appleton Police Department and created to help homeless and other disadvantaged folks meet their immediate needs by connecting them with the myriad of public resources and private support groups available in the community) and once again helping to fund the Appleton Housing Authority and the Neighborhood Grant Program.  

Thursday, 01/30/2025

Library Board (Special Meeting) - 9am  The information on this meeting shows a meeting place of the Appleton Public Library so the place must be very nearly ready to reopen to the public.  The only action item on the agenda is the potential approval of the Named Spaces in the new library.  Below is a snapshot of what is proposed to be named for donors to the library remodel project.  I suspect that this meeting and the vote on naming these spaces is a formality that will be used for publicity.  But we should all be very grateful to these private donors for all that they've done to offset the taxpayer costs of the project. 

And speaking of library funding... last week in the Finance Committee meeting, your alderman voted against the acceptance of the "non-state" grant for the library... not because grant funds are not important and valued by this city for this project... but because there was no attempt in the city's receipt of these grant funds to lower or offset the taxpayer dollar contribution to the library project.  I attempted to amend the action item to receive these funds with a caveat that these funds would not add to the expense of the library project and instead lower the amount of monies paid out of the taxpayers' pockets.  But the rest of the Finance Committee members defeated the amendment.  This item will be on the agenda for the full council next week.  So you'll hear about it again in next week's blog post.  If you have questions, comments, or concerns in this regard, please reach out to me and let me know. 

And after that Thursday special meeting, we can resume our regularly scheduled Fifth Week.  I hope yours -- *all* of your Fifth Week, not just after Thursday! -- is a great one and that we all have a pleasant end to our January 2025.  I hope you'll join me back here next week for another alderman blog post.