Committee Notes for the Week of 9/26/22

Hello neighbors! 

We're back with a committee week this week and one that will be dominated by discussion of the library project. 

Municipal Services Committee

Monday 4:30 p.m. - Our Municipal Services Committee has a fairly light agenda. It includes a couple of street design projects for next year, none of which are in District 15 for this round of projects, a driveway extension request that is back before us after being referred back from the council meeting last week, and a contract for downtown sidewalk snow removal.

One of the information items for our agenda is related to the parking utility and its monthly revenue report. This is something that has been concerning for several years now as August shows another revenue deficit, this time of $286,000. 

Finance Committee

Monday 5:30 p.m. - The main item on this committee agenda is the library project and a request from the mayor/staff to put the project on hold, after bids for the library project came in extremely high and some parts of the project were not even bid on at all. 

As a recap, the city's commitment to the library project is slated to be $26.4 million, with an additional $2 million the council voted to set aside in ARPA funds for broadband service at the library. The Friends of the Appleton Public Library planned to raise an additional $12 million in private donations to support the library project. To date, we do not know how much of that has been raised. In total the proposed budget for the project sits at $40.4 million. 

Proposed exterior of the Appleton Public Library - by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

There were 38 separate bid packages put out for the library project. Bids were received for 32 of those packages. The estimate for those bids received was expected to be about $29 million, but came in at $45 million. 

To say this is disappointing is an understatement. There are a lot of questions that need to be answered about what went wrong in this process and the decision-making timeline by staff. Certainly COVID and supply chain issues have played an impact, but I don't think that is an acceptable excuse for the entirety of an overage this large. Those were known issues and we are not the only entity trying to build a project in the last few years. In my mind, city leadership needs to have accounted for these things. There are also a lot of questions to be answered about what comes next, how much it will cost and where that money comes from.

I am frustrated at the decision that was made to move the library out of the current site before a design and bids was approved. We're now sitting on an empty building we own, while we pay rent at $12,500 a month through next August, at which time we will have to extend the lease or possibly move back into our current space, depending on what happens next with this project. 

I also have questions about the request to put this project on hold and what that actually accomplishes. Nothing has been presented to council for us to vote on, so in effect, the project is on hold without us even needing to vote on it. 

It is possible there could be some legal reasons we want to hold the project with a vote by council, but until that is clarified, I would rather us leave this open, so we can get figured out what went wrong and how we are going to rectify this and get this project back on track to be finished on, or under budget. 

Fox Cities Transit Commission

Tuesday 3 p.m. - The Transit Commission agenda includes an approval of payments and a request to approve a contract for scheduling software focused on automating drivers scheduling and various other tasks.

City Plan Commission 

Wednesday 3:30 p.m. - The lone action item for the Plan Commission is to approve a certified survey map to combine several parcels in Southpoint Commerce Park for a third phase of a development there.

Community & Economic Development Committee 

Wednesday 4:30 p.m. - The lone agenda item for CEDC is to approve a grant application on behalf of the owners of a proposed development behind the City Center. The $250,000 matching grant would assist Merge Urban Development with funding for its Urbane 115 LLC project, a proposed five-story, mixed-use building. The city's role is simply administering the grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, if the grant is awarded. 

Safety and Licensing Committee 

Wednesday 5:30 p.m. - The S&L Committee has some beer/liquor license requests to review and a couple of grants for the fire department to discuss. There is also a resolution, introduced last week at the council meeting, related to expressing support for the City Clerk and election workers. 

There is no real action associated with this resolution, which in reality means it should be a proclamation rather than a resolution, but we've been down this road before with this council debating whether or not we should be spending time on resolutions that have no practical application for the city. 

It was introduced by aldermen Fenton, Meltzer and Schultz and, ironically, one of the authors of this resolution is also one of the council members who last week spoke about how we should be careful not to waste the valuable time of council and staff, yet here we are doing it again. 

A resolution submitted by Aldermen Fenton, Meltzer and Schultz

To be clear, I fully support our City Clerk, her team and the election workers and volunteers in our city who help make our elections run smoothly. Our City Clerk's integrity is beyond reproach and elections here run smoothly and efficiently. 

In my view, this resolution, like others introduced by members of this current council, is more political in nature and includes some unnecessary paragraphs that bring politics into the discussion and distracts from the focus of the resolution, which I believe is meant to praise the staff in how they handle the elections.

If praising the staff is indeed the goal, this resolution could use some editing to take the political rhetoric out, and shorten it to just a few paragraphs. 

Get In Touch

I am always available to answer questions at district15@appleton.org or (920) 419-1360. As always, agendas can be found on the agenda and meetings page of the city website. Meetings can be viewed live on the website or watched at a later date. Meetings are also open for anyone to attend in person and all meetings take place in the Common Council chambers on the 6th floor of City Hall, unless otherwise noted. 

Also connect with me on social media on Facebook and Twitter.