The Municipal Services Committee met 06/20/2022. One of the items they took up was the request from Appleton Downtown Inc for a waiver to allow for dumpsters to be placed on the city-owned parking lot without the required dumpster enclosure.
This item was discussed during the 06/06/2022 Municipal Services Committee meeting during which the committee decided to hold it until this meeting in order to give time to get answers from the Parks and Recreation Department to their multiple questions.
Director of Parks, Recreation, and Facilities Dean Gazza submitted a memo to the committee answering the questions that came up and was able to attend the meeting in person to answer any further questions they had. The committee ended up needing to engage in only minimal discussion regarding the issue before voting unanimously to deny the request.
Alderperson William Siebers (District 1) who was the chair of the committee started things out by making a motion to deny the request and was seconded by Alderperson Brad Firkus (District 3).
Alderperson Siebers gave Jennifer Stephany, the Executive Director of Appleton Downtown, Inc. (ADI) an opportunity to speak on the request. She briefly told the committee that they were seeking to place the dumpsters in the parking lot. At this point, they would want to do that for a duration of two months. Doing so would help them save about $4,000. ADI wanted to look at a long-term solution and invest in a dumpster enclosure and had been discussing that with the Parks and Recreation Department. They wanted to build an asset at Jones Park that could be available for everyone using the park in the future.
Alderperson Siebers then asked Director Gazza to speak on the issue. He apologized that, due to other responsibilities, he had not been able to attend the previous meeting. He noted that he had submitted a memo with answers to the questions that had been raised at the previous meeting and then ran through that memo quickly for the committee members.
There was not a dumpster in Jones Park because the park didn’t create enough waste to warrant a dumpster. The waste generated by special events did not factor into that calculation because that was not the city’s responsibility. “The special event policy specifically notes that special events are to take care of their own waste.” That applied to anything from Art in the Park, to the Pierce Park car show, to the Sole Burner. He pointed out that City Park didn’t have a dumpster and they had never had an issue. “It would not be economically feasible for us to have one at every park so that’s why there’s not one at every park. The pickup alone is very expensive.”
He went on to say that dumpster enclosures were expensive. Depending on how they are constructed, they can cost as much as $10,000 to install. In the case of Jones Park specifically, they wouldn’t want something with wood or plastic slats or a chain link fence structure. The city would build one that looked like it belonged in the park.
One of the issues was that there was not a lot of space. The parking lot was small and it was in a unique location because it was going to now serve as the trail head for the Heritage Trailway that would link up and go through Jones Park down through Ellen Kort Park. Taking three stalls away from the parking lot to house a dumpster would remove a significant percentage of the available parking spots.
Additionally, the overall location of the dumpster would be challenging because the first thing people would see when they came into the park would be the dumpsters. Along with them would be smell and spillage. He noted that the workers who empty the dumpsters don’t do a very good job of keeping things nice and clean so the city needs to power wash dumpster areas a couple times a year. There would be an ongoing cost to having permanent dumpsters.
Overall, the reason there were no dumpsters in Jones Park was because the special events policy required even organizers to handle their own waste, the city needed to balance the resources it had, and there was a significant cost to constructing a dumpster enclosure.
Alderperson Siebers asked if any committee members had any questions or comments.
Alderperson Firkus said the request for the dumpsters made sense, but the reason for not allowing it also make sense to him. He thought that given how heavily used Jones Park was for events, it might be worth looking into installing dumpsters and a dumpster enclosure, but if they were going to do that, they should do it correctly which was probably something that they could not do this summer. He was open to continuing conversation about it.
Alderperson Katie Van Zeeland agreed with Alderperson Firkus. She also thought that if the city installed a dumpster enclosure and dumpster that they could look at a way of building the cost for that into the permit fees for future events so that they could recoup their expenses from everyone.
There were no further questions or comments, and the committee voted 5-0 to deny the requestion.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=982990&GUID=61FEF012-A518-471D-A30D-194267107A69
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