Common Council Update for the week of January 12

Before I get started with this week's update a quick note on our council schedule, which has been shuffled a bit due to the holidays:

Council normally meets on the first and third Wednesdays of the month but did not meet on January 1, instead opting to push our January committee and council meetings back a week. Our boards and commissions are largely meeting on their regular schedule, however, which will leave us out of sync a bit for forwarding recommendations to council. This will only last a few weeks, as our schedule is back to normal in February.

As such, this week would normally be a council week but is instead a partial committee week. Here are some of the highlights:

Municipal Services Committee, Monday, 4:30 pm

This committee meeting has a loaded agenda, including some items we've discussed before:

• The committee will again be asked to make a recommendation regarding "The Collective" sculpture along College Avenue. I continue to be opposed to removing the statue: I recognize that not everyone enjoys this specific piece of art but I don't feel that's a good enough reason to force its removal. Furthermore, it's a temporary installation and will be gone in a year and a half anyway.
• The committee will also get another opportunity to discuss a resolution calling for some or all of the vacant space behind the City Center mall to be turned into surface parking. While I recognize the goal the resolution's author was trying to achieve, I don't think surface parking is the best use of these parcels and even a temporary lot will add another challenge to efforts to redevelop these spaces and get them back on the tax rolls.
• For the first time the committee will be asked to consider a policy allowing the city to demolish nuisance properties provided they meet criteria related to their state of disrepair and inaction by their owner. This furthers a discussion that came up during 2020 budget deliberations last November and would allow staff to proceed with the removal of a small number of properties that have become a safety risk.

Finance Committee, Monday, 5:30 pm

In among a relatively large collection of collection of relatively routine items are a pair of items I wanted to highlight: Staff recommendations to reject bids for a pair of related projects at the Wastewater Treatment Plant. 

As the memo attached to the item notes, the city recently received and opened bids for about $4.4 million in budgeted work (between two projects) at the treatment plant but found in both cases that the low bid was above the budgeted amount. This happens sometimes and usually leads staff to discuss and make one of two recommendations:

1. Find available money elsewhere in the budget to cover the shortfall, often from another project that came in under estimates, or
2. Reject the bids and work to either restructure the project or resubmit it for bids at a more favorable time.

In this case staff and our consulting engineers arrived at the conclusion that it would be best to pursue the latter option and rebid the project later.

Human Resources, Wednesday, 6:30 pm

At our council meeting last week alderpersons Patti Coenen and Cathy Spears co-submitted a resolution to open a discussion about city government structure and possibilities for change in the future. Specifically, their resolution calls for the city to consider creating a city administrator position "in lieu of or in addition to a mayor."

This discussion has come up over the years, including briefly four years ago when the position was last up for election. It's too late for this discussion to change much in the short term: Council has already set the next mayor's salary for their four-year term beginning this April, so any major changes to the position at this point could not include a change in salary. 

With that said, more than half of the members of council have changed over since the last time we had this conversation so at bare minimum it's likely time for a review.

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.