What you may not know: Week of April 1

First and foremost, I'll open today with one final reminder that the State of Wisconsin's spring elections are this week. There is a statewide race on the ballot for the Supreme Court, three candidates running for two spots on the Appleton School Board and contested elections for four seats on the Appleton Common Council, including mine.

If you live in District 13, your polling location is Celebration Ministry Center (aka Faith Lutheran Church), located at the corner of Evergreen and Providence. If you live anywhere else in the state of Wisconsin you can find your polling place at myvote.wi.gov. Polls will be open from 7 am-8 pm.

It's been an honor and a privilege to serve on council these last six years, and tomorrow I'll be back on the ballot seeking a fourth term. I'd be honored to have your support to remain in office and continue these updates.

With that said, regardless of what happens on Tuesday the common council will hold its regularly scheduled meeting on Wednesday night. Here are updates on some items we discussed last week:

Special Event Policy

Last week the Finance Committee voted 3-1 to recommend denial of a resolution calling for the city to rewrite its Special Event Policy with the goal of recouping more expenses incurred by the city's various departments related to those events.

I voted against the resolution for a pair of reasons:

• First, it was repetitive of work that has been done very recently. The current policy was adopted in 2017, and fees for special events were increased at that time. That process took several months, involved feedback from many city departments and stakeholder organizations and largely took into consideration the factors cited in this resolution. It's my belief that reopening that process would require repeating a lot of that work but is unlikely to lead to any major change in the policy.
• I think, on the whole, the good these special events do for the community outweighs any small benefit we could bring back by raising their fees for the second time in three years. 

Truancy Ordinance

Last week the Safety & Licensing Committee also voted 3-2 to recommend denial of a resolution by Alderman William Siebers calling for the city to repeal our ordinance related to truancy.

There's a lot of emotion and concern tied up in this discussion as it relates to the publicly reported concerns about the former truancy court practices, a procedure that has since been discontinued. Given those concerns, I understand the desire for the city to take action to ensure that those issues will not resurface.

I voted against this resolution, however, because I do not feel like repealing the truancy ordinance would be a positive step in reforming the process. As the ordinance is written right now the Appleton Police Department (in conjunction with the school district) has the authority to cite students for truancy but rarely does so (recent data shows about 100 citations written per year as compared to over 700 cases of habitual truancy). Truancy citations are issued as a last resort, but other options are pursued first to help us meet the end goal of keeping students in school.

If this ordinance were to be repealed, the Police Department would no longer have the opportunity to prosecute truancy as an ordinance violation. Instead, truancy offenses would be prosecuted as misdemeanors under state statute, a process which takes much longer to resolve and could result in a student ending up with a misdemeanor conviction on their record.

As I said above, I understand the impetus to take some action in response to what we've heard about truancy court in recent months. This proposal, however, would limit our ability to get truant students back in school and could lead to young people with increasingly serious criminal records. I don't think this resolution is the solution we're looking for.

You can see all of this week's meeting agendas 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. Good governance happens in the open, and I remain committed to raising awareness on the issues coming before us.