The Notes: Week of December 15 - December 19, 2025

Hello, Neighbors!  It's a pretty busy Full Council Meeting Week this week in City of Appleton government.  Besides the council meeting, there are four others scheduled.  See below for your regular rundown for the week:

Tuesday, 12/16/2025

Library Board - Appleton Public Library Cornerstone Conference Room - 5pm  A new board member will be introduced to start this meeting.  After that, the board will look to approve the November bill register for the library, a few small budget amendments, the 2026 budget for the library (which was approved by the council but also needs to be approved by this board), and a request for the library to solicit a strategic plan consultant for 2026.  The funding for the latter will apparently be coming from a Friends of the Appleton Public Library grant.     

Wednesday, 12/17/2025

Appleton Redevelopment Authority (ARA) - 8:30am  There are no action items for this committee.  They will start by reviewing a financial summary (YTD to November 2025) for the Authority.  The current balance in their account is ~$207,000.  The information item to follow is a summary on how the ARA can perhaps use these funds to help support the city's sub-area plans (portions of the recently approved Comprehensive Plan) for Wisconsin Avenue, Oneida Street, and Northland & Richmond Streets area.  You can view a chart of where the city believes that the ARA can contribute at these links: Northland/Richmond, Oneida, Wisconsin.  And since the ARA is a partial owner of the Fox Cities Exhibition Center (FCEC), there will also be an update provided on the most recent meeting regarding the FCEC management agreement (new or renewal).  (In short: There is no new management in place as yet and one is still being actively negotiated.)  

Finance Committee - Special Meeting - 5:15pm  As you know if you're a regular reader of this blog, when there are items for a committee to approve just before those same items are up for approval by the full council, there's a special committee meeting earlier in the evening.  Here we are with the first of two of those special meetings.  The one item on this committee's agenda is a request for a contract change order amounting to ~$93,000 to address a serious and dangerous "flash-over" issue between two generators at the Appleton Water Treatment Plant.  This issue was found during testing of recent replacements to the generator controls but of course necessitates a correction.  I'm grateful that the issue was found in testing before the replacement controls went live.  But this issue -- which was determined to be a grounding issue that was a remnant from the original plant construction -- will be costly to correct.  According to the request memo, the funding is to come from an underbudget water chemical systems upgrade project.  

Utilities Committee - Special Meeting - 5:30pm  There are four items on this committee's agenda for this special meeting.  It looks as though the committee meeting should have taken place last week as per usual but was cancelled last week for some reason.  Anyway... There are requests for two separate contracts for stormwater plan review consultants for 2026.  All of the year's stormwater plan review work will be split between these two consultants.  The third item up for approval by this committee was already approved last week by the Finance Committee.  The Department of Public Works (DPW) is looking for additional approval of receipt of $65,000 of grant money from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) for outreach regarding private homeowners' lead water service supply lines (mentioned here).  

Last on the agenda is a request to approve a 20-year contract between the city and a renewable natural gas company for them to purchase methane (bio-gas) expelled at the Appleton Wastewater Treatment Plant (AWWTP).  The proposal includes an investment requirement of the city -- approximately $75,000 for new boiler equipment to support the transfer of the sold bio-gas -- but is expected to yield a net income of approximately $150,000 annually from these bio-gas sales.  While I'm excited about this potential, I have some concern over the length of this contract.  Technology changes so quickly these days that I am concerned that the purchaser will either not be around for the whole 20 years or that their desire for purchase of this bio-gas will wane before the contract period concludes.  I guess the good news is that they are "on the hook" for it anyway should a contract be executed.  But the long term is still a concern.  What do you think?   

City of Appleton Common Council - 7pm  Finally we get to the main meeting for the week!  The mayor will start us off with the awarding of this year's Downtown Appleton Christmas Parade awards.  Then we'll be asked to approve the 2026 slate of elections inspectors (poll workers) for the city and the appointment of a new citizen member of the Community Development Block Grant Advisory Committee.  Then of course, the council will move on to approval of (or in some cases denial of) the items that passed through last week's committee meetings and the special meetings mentioned above.  Here are the highlights:

• From the Municipal Services Committee:  The new garbage cart rates for 2026 were approved by this committee (as was expected since the new rates were used for 2026 budget purposes).  Get a refresher of what you can expect to see on your 2026 city services bills for your garbage cart here.  Note that this committee also approved an item that will allow homeowners to make a swap to a smaller garbage cart for no fee.  (A swap to a larger or "newer" garbage cart results in a $100 fee for the homeowner unless the cart is unintentionally damaged.)
  
  
• From the Safety and Licensing Committee:  As you may have read in the news, this committee denied two license applications for electronic gaming devices due to the potential for illegal gambling (as defined by State of Wisconsin statutes).  Since the applicants could not affirm that they would not issue cash award winnings for the use of these machines and because these machines were found to be borderline "games of chance" instead of requiring player skill, the licenses are now up for final denial by the full council.  (Note that games of skill are considered legal in the state provided there is no cash payout and games of chance with cash payouts are considered illegal gambling machines.)  What are your thoughts on these kinds of games and the potential for illegal cash payouts in the city?     
  
  
• From the Human Resources and Information Technology Committee:  A request to add one patrol officer position to the Appleton Police Department (APD) was approved by this committee and will be up for full approval tonight.  I still have concerns about adding this ~$117,000 annual salary to the city budget despite the fact that in 2026 there are a number of APD officers who will be away from the city on active duty military assignments leaving those salary dollars available to pay for this additional officer position.  But the mere fact that those officers will be unavailable for work for the city due to their military commitments means that this new officer position really is needed.  I see no way around this at this time.  We will have to cross the future budget years bridge when we get there.  Do you agree?

On what above items do you have questions or concerns?  Do you have any other questions, comments, or feedback for me regarding anything else city-government-related?  Please reach out to me and let me know!  I am always pleased to get your feedback. 

If we're lucky, things will warm up a bit for us in the coming days.  I know I'm not the only one who's always feeling like I can't warm up these days.  Until next week when we meet here again (I hope!) I wish you a great week!  Thanks for tuning in today.