Monday, June 2, 2014

What you may not know: Week of June 2

The Appleton Common Council will hold its first regularly scheduled meeting of June on Wednesday at 7 p.m. Most of the notable items on this week's agenda have been discussed before, but here's a quick update:

City Plan Commission

Over a month ago the City Plan Commission heard a staff recommendation regarding a rezoning and special use permit request for a property along Glenhurst Road, just off Ballard. The request called for an amendment to allow a "Community Living Arrangement" serving 50 persons on the site.

At the Plan Commission back in April we expressed some concerns over the relatively broad definition of what could be allowed in this space in relatively close proximity to North High School. We approved an amendment to narrow the allowed uses a bit, then recommended approval of the amended item. It will come before the full council for approval this week.

Valley Transit

Also about a month ago, we discussed a proposal to raise the fee by a dollar for one of Valley Transit's most popular specialized services, The Connector. The service is largely used to get people to or from work in the early and late hours while Transit isn't operating its full service.

The service had been partially funded by specialized federal grant money until this year, when that grant was rolled into the federal transportation fund. Losing that funding made it difficult for Valley Transit to continue to provide this service, hence the need for a fare increase.

This issue has been discussed at each of the last three Transit Commission meetings, and at last week's meeting it was approved unanimously. Barring a major change, it will likely also pass council without incident this week and the increase will go into effect.

Skate Park

In last week's update we discussed a setback in the efforts to build a skate park in Telulah Park, as bids were opened for the construction and all of them came in significantly over the project's proposed budget. As such, last week the Finance Committee voted unanimously to reject all bids, with the hope to bid the project again later this summer and still get it constructed this year.

The delay on this project is unfortunate, given the volume of work that has gone into getting it to this point. At the end of the day, however, rejecting the bids is the right decision and there's a strong chance it will only lead to a minor delay.

You can see agendas for all of this week's meetings and the full schedule at the city's Legistar page.

Keeping you informed on issues that may impact you around the city is one of my primary goals as an alderman. Making the council's activity as accessible as possible to as many people as are interested is part of my goal to make it easier for more people to get involved with issues that matter to them.

No comments:

Post a Comment