The Common Council met 03/06/2024. One of the items separated out for an individual vote was the proposed changes to the hours of operation for the city’s two yard waste.
This proposal would have maintained Friday through Monday summer service at the Glendale site while eliminated weekend hours at the Whitman Avenue yard waste site and instead opening Whitman Tuesday through Friday. This would have allowed the city to provide 7 day a week service across both sites.
The proposal would have also cut summer hours of operation from 8am-5:45pm to 8am-5pm. It also would have eliminated weekend hours at the Glendale site during the winter moving instead to week day service. This change was felt to be appropriate by staff because on average, the site only received an average of 13 customers a day in the winter and they expected that number of go down now that the garbage dumpsters at the Glendale site were being eliminated.
The Council was short 3 member so only had 12 alderpersons present. The proposal ended up failing by a vote of 6 to 6 with alderpersons who opposed the measure expressing an unwillingness to reduce weekend hours or have the sites close at 5PM rather than 5:45PM.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
Alderperson Vered Meltzer (District 2) indicated that feedback from District 2 residents indicated that they opposed eliminated weekend hours at the Glendale site during the winter.
Alderperson Alex Schultz (District 9) said that residents in his district opposed eliminated weekend hours during the summer at the Whitman site.
Alderperson Patrick Hayden (District 7) said the biggest issue he had received feedback on was the reduction in hours by having the sites close as 5PM instead of 5:45PM. That did not leave people time to get over to the sites in the evening after getting off of work.
The Common Council voted 6-6 on the proposal which meant it did not pass.
After the vote was taken, Mayor Woodford addressed the council, and told them that not making operational modifications or changes did not make budgetary constraints go away, but rather just meant that sacrifices would need to be made elsewhere in order to continue delivering this particular service. His full remarks are as follows:
I understand the concern about reducing hours or changing levels of service and certainly staff does, but we also have to recognize that we have serious resource constraint as a city, and we are going to have to grapple with—and we are constantly grappling with—that resource constraint. And so, my encouragement to the Council would be that when we have items that come before us that are trying to address that, recognize that it has to come from somewhere. And so, if we prioritize this, then something else will give, and that will always be the cycle that we’re in.
And so, I just want to remind folks that by deciding to not make any modifications or changes does not mean that the budgetary constraints that were driving that conversation in the first place, just go away. They still exist. And we will have to pull resources from other places to continue to deliver that service. So, we will sacrifice other things.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1171629&GUID=0CBC4B2B-520E-4F1A-A9E5-74E43E04D874
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