What you may not know: Week of June 29

Good morning,

This is likely to be a quiet week for the Appleton Common Council, as we have a relatively light agenda for our regularly-scheduled full council meeting on Wednesday. Here are some updates on the items I discussed in last week's post:

Bees

After a bit of discussion and information gathering, last Monday the City Plan Commission voted to refer a resolution calling for expansion of urban beekeeping to the Board of Health. That body is expected to meet on July 8 at 7 am.

I spent a lot of time last week discussing beekeeping with various interested parties, and gathered some of what I learned in this post. In addition, beekeeping is also the topic of my WHBY Viewpoint today.

City government structure

Last week the Human Resources Committee voted 2-1 to delay action on setting a mayoral salary for the 2016-2020 term to allow alderpersons time to consider the possibility of changing the city's management structure and hiring a city manager to take over some of the duties currently performed by the mayor.

As I mentioned last week, I don't support the proposed change. However, if we don't discuss it now before setting the mayor's salary, then it would be very difficult to make any changes before the office's next term is up in 2020.

Council remote participation

Last week the Finance Committee discussed but did not take action on a draft of ordinance language that could allow alderpersons to participate via speaker phone or Skype when they cannot phyiscally attend council meetings. This ordinance could solve some notable concerns about council absences but still needs some tweaking before it's ready for an up or down vote.

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.