The Municipal Services Committee met 11/22/2021. They had 5 action items on the agenda.
Item 21-1635 was a contract amendment for the 2021 materials testing contract with Westwood Infrastructure. Item 21-1636 was the aware of the 2022 materials testing contract to Westwood Infrastructure. Both of these items passed unanimously with no discussion.
Item number 21-1578 was the proposed changes to the city’s food truck ordinance. This item was referred back to the committee by Alderperson Denise Fenton (District 6). When making the refer back she asked if it was possible to send it to the 12/06/2021 committee meeting, but City Attorney Christopher Behrens said it had to go to the next committee meeting at which point the committee members could vote to hold it until a later meeting. That is what the committee proceeded to do.
The action item that resulted in the most discussion was item 21-1580 which changed the speed limit for the one block section of Washington Street from Story Street to Bennet Street to 15 MPH.
This section of street is in Alderperson Michael Smith’s (District 10) district, and he was the one that referred it back to the committee. He explained to the committee that he did not catch this item until the Common Council meeting the week before. He had some questions for staff which were not able to be answered before the Council meeting. He did eventually get those questions answered, and he completely agreed with reducing the speed of the street; however…
Prompted by this incident, Alderperson Smith was wondering if the city needed to pay attention to how notification letters were sent out. He was concerned that he hadn’t caught this item and he didn’t think he had ever received a courtesy letter letting him know that this trial was going on in his district. When something like this comes up in a district, alderpersons like to knock on doors in the affected area and talk to residents, but he hadn’t had that opportunity in this situation.
Although the memo said that over the 6-month trial period the city had received no feedback or complaints, he still would have liked to have knocked on the doors and gotten that feedback. He wondered if there was a way that alderpersons could be notified about speed limit changes in their districts.
Alderperson Joe Prohaska (District 14) agreed with Alderperson Smith and thought that such a policy would further the transparency between the city and its residents. He knew that people get upset when something happens and they don’t know about it vs being made aware that it is going to happen and having the opportunity to talk to somebody about it.
Traffic Engineer Eric Lom wondered if Alderperson Smith’s lack of knowledge of the 6-month speed limit trial was a result of the trial having been started prior to the election in April. [I don’t see how that would have influenced anything because Alderperson Smith was already an alderperson prior to the recent election; and he’s in an even numbered district so wouldn’t have even been running this spring.]
Traffic Engineer Lom went on the say that there were two pieces to this (a) alderperson being notified and (b) residents being notified. Notifying residents about parking changes has always been straightforward and they send out letters to the adjacent properties of wherever the affected parking spots are. Even that can be tricky, however, because they send them out to the directly affected properties and sometimes prohibiting parking in Area A can result in problems in Area B, but Area B residents never go any notification letters.
Notifying residents of speed limit or intersection control changes becomes murky very quickly. For instance, if they are going to change a stop sign to a yield sign or vice versa, who do they send those notifications to? To just the 4 properties at that intersection, to properties a block in either direction, or to properties within a quarter mile radius?
Additionally, the speed limit change currently before the committee was straightforward because it was just one block, but changing the speed limit for a mile on a more heavily used road was more confusing. Many times, the people who are affected by those sorts of changes are not so much the people who live on the streets but rather the people who drive on those streets.
He did say that they could do whatever the committee wanted them to do.
Director of Public Works Paula Vandehey didn’t see any problem with staff notifying the alderpersons moving forward. She thought the whole idea behind a 6-month trial was that that that was the mechanism by which feedback was gathered and they could see how a neighborhood was impacted, more so that by sending out notifications. But she didn’t think it would be a problem to notify alderpersons of proposed speed limit changes.
Alderperson Brad Firkus agreed that as alderpersons they wanted to do their best to make sure people in affected areas knew about changes. However, these items were all on committee agenda which alderpersons could see and they should have a fairly good idea of which streets were in their districts. He didn’t want to put the alderpersons’ burden of reading the agendas and knowing what was happening in their districts onto city staff.
Traffic Engineer Lom thought of something “probably we definitely” could do better. In this particular case, the 6-month trial period was initiated with committee approval, but many times the Public Works Department implements trials administratively with no committee input. They do this when they do not think there will be any controversy about the change. In those situations, the item does not come before the committee until the end of the trial, so they could start sending courtesy emails to alderpersons regarding administratively implemented trials so that everybody knew what was going on.
Alderperson Prohaska liked that. He didn’t think it was necessary to send letters to every resident about everything, but he didn’t think it would take much time for staff to notify the alderperson of the area affected by a change. He said they were all busy and can’t make it to every meeting and somethings they miss things on agendas. But if something it happening in his district, he would like staff to do everything they could to make sure he had that information.
Alderperson Smith said agendas used to include information items on things that were in progress and wondered what had happened to that.
Traffic Engineer Lom said that around 15 years ago they used to put every trial they did, whether it was parking, speed limits, or intersection control, on the agenda either as an action or information item. He thought that there had been a realization at some point that a lot of that was unnecessary red tape because 95% of those trials did not generate the tiniest bit of controversy, and he felt that they had a pretty good feel for which items would be controversial and which would not, and that they had a good track record for bringing the controversial ones to the committee and handling the other ones administratively. He thought there was room for improvement by making sure that the alderperson of the district knew what they were doing. He finished up by stating that they were really good with handling parking related things, but not so good at dealing with intersection controls.
None of the committee members or alderpersons who were present had any further questions, and the committee unanimously approved the recommendation to reduce the speed along that block of Washington Street from 25 MPH to 15 MPH.
They also took up item 21-1634 which was a request to approve installation of STOP signs on Pine Street at Outagamie Street as a follow up to a 6-month trial period.
Traffic Engineer Lom told the committee that this was a perfect example of what they had just been talking about. This trial had been initiated administratively in response to a citizen complaint and the alderperson of the district [Alderperson Alex Schultz of District 9] was probably unaware of it. He said this was the sort of thing that they would start notifying alderpersons about.
There was no further discussion, and the item was approved 4-0.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=897660&GUID=DBA5022D-E5DF-47F2-85EC-1691027DBA72
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