The Common Council met 12/21/2022. One of the items separated out for an individual vote was the Environmental Health Fee Schedule Proposal. If I understood correctly, these are the fees that business are charged for the licensing inspections they undergo. The proposal increased the fees in order to more adequately cover program expenses and cover the cost of hiring an additional inspector.
After discussion, the Common Council ended up approving the fee recommendation without any changes by a vote of 11-3 with Alderpersons Siebers, Alex Schultz (District 9) and Nate Wolff (District 12) voting against it.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the full discussion for your downloading pleasure:
The fee proposal had been recommended for approval by the Board of Health with minimal discussion; however, Alderperson William Siebers (District 1) asked for the item to be separated out at the Common Council meeting because he was concerned about the amount of increases for some of the fees.
Some examples:
- Retail Food – Serving Meals – Moderate – went from $272 to $600
- Retail Food – Serving Meals – Complex – went from $311 to $750
- Hotel – 30 Rooms or Less – went from $145 to $350
- Hotel – 31-99 Rooms – went from $194 to $450
- Hotel – 100-199 Rooms – went from $209.50 to $550
Health Officer Charles Sepers explained that the Health Department had consulted with the Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection (DATCP) regarding the fees. By law, the city was allowed to charge for the amount it takes to service the program; Appleton, however, was currently not charging that much and was using taxpayer dollars from the general fund to supplement the cost of running the program.
DATCP had a also recommended that the city add an additional fulltime employee. The current 3 employees were not enough for the city to service its current contract, so the city was not in compliance. While the city was using grant funding, initially, to add that employee, the fee schedule increases were necessary in order to make the long term addition of a 4th employee sustainable.
Alderperson Schultz was concerned about the steep increases to some of the fee and felt that, while a 100% or 200% increase might be acceptable, a 300% or 400% increase was onerous. He pointed out the retail food serving meals fees and wondered if it would be possible to not have those fees increase by as much or, perhaps, to increase them incrementally.
Health Officer Sepers said those two categories were the primary bulk of all their licensures which was why most of the costs the city was trying to recoup were in those two categories. He also noted that Appleton’s fees had historically been markedly low.
He also said that they consulted with other health departments about doing one large increase over several incremental increases and the advice they received was that there would be less disruption by doing a single increase.
Alderperson Kristin Alfheim (District 11) said that, as a business person, any increase that high would get her attention; however, if she was aware that if she had been underpaying for a long time as compared to neighboring communities, she would consider herself to have been lucky for the time she had been paying those low rates.
Alderperson Chad Doran (District 15) was supportive of the increase in fees given the context around them. He also in general supported fee increases because they directly targeted the users versus taxpayers in general who don’t necessarily use that service.
The updated fee schedule was approved by a vote of 11-3 with Alderpersons Siebers, Schultz, and Wolff voting against it.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1064885&GUID=23157F67-0079-435B-BD93-2236F2BF0F43
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