Sunday, June 9, 2013

What you may not know: Week of June 10

It's a committee week for the Appleton Common Council, so let's get right to the highlights:

City Plan Commission

The City Plan Commission will meet on Monday at 4 pm and their lone action item pertains to District 13: a request for the city to annex a roughly 9.5 acre parcel of land along Evergreen Drive. With apologies for my lack of artistic ability, the chunk of land we're talking about is circled in red here:
The proposed annexation says there is no current plan to develop the land being annexed, and as such the property is likely to be zoned "temporary agricultural," with the exception of a small portion in the area of Apple Creek that will be zoned as a Nature Conservatory District, consistent with other areas near the Apple Creek Trail.

Assuming all goes as planned here, this will appear before the Common Council on June 19, July 24 and finally on August 7 before final approval.

Utilities

The Utilities Committee will meet Tuesday at 4:30 to start a process that may not draw a lot of attention in the short term, but could have a significant impact on the future of the Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Recent regulation changes for outputs into the Fox River have created a situation where the city needs to consider options to significantly lower the volume of phosphorus in water leaving the treatment facility. The plant is normally allowed to discharge one milligram of phosphorus for every liter of output, but by fall of 2015 they'll need to reduce that to .2 milligrams. That's not something the plant, as currently constructed, is equipped to handle. Fortunately, there are several options available for handling the change.

On Tuesday staff will ask the Utilities Committee to accept a bid over $200,000 for an evaluation of the situation and a recommendation regarding how to proceed. The fact that we're approving spending that much money simply to study the problem really shows the magnitude of the situation. 

Finance

The Finance Committee will meet Wednesday at 4:30 and a public hearing is scheduled for that time to allow a pair of CPAs from Baker Tilly Virchow Krause, LLP to present the city's Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for 2012. 

Budgeting isn't always the most fun part of an alderperson's job, but it may be the single most important thing we do and looking at how previous budgets have turned out is a key preliminary step in the effort to prepare for 2014.

You can see all of this week's agendas on the city's new Legistar page. This will be our first time using the new system for committee meetings, so bear with us if things don't go exactly as planned.

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.

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