The Common Council met 05/15/2025. One of the items they separated out and took up individuals was Resolution 11-R-23 regarding allowing overnight on street parking. It ended up being voted down by a vote of 8-4.
The resolution was prompted by parking issues experienced by residents in the older, denser areas of the city where it is more common for garages to be small and driveways short. This has led to difficulty in finding places to park overnight for households that have multiple adults living in the same house or for residents in homes that had been turned into apartments.
The resolution has been discussed multiple times at the Municipal Services Committee since it was first introduced back in November of 2023. During the last Municipal Services Committee meeting, the committee had considered amending the resolution to allow a one-year trial of overnight on-street parking on alternating sides of the street, excluding winter months during which overnight parking would remain prohibited. The idea of conducting a one-year city-wide trial met with pushback. Additionally, there were costs associated with the proposal because staff believed it would require more robust enforcement in order to be successful, and that would entail hiring additional staff and purchasing a parking enforcement vehicle. The committee ended up rejecting that amendment and voting down the resolution.
At the Common Council meeting, Alderperson Brad Firkus (District 3) revived that proposal but removed the language about conducting a one-year trial. He believed that while the proposal was not perfect it was a step in the right direction and would allow the city to “fail forward.” He said, “[T]hat first step is going to be the hardest. I don’t think we’re going to solve parking in one fell swoop. I think it’s going to be incremental. I think no matter what we’re going to do, we’re going to have to make changes, and we’re probably gonna have to go back to the drawing board and make changes again and again until we work out all the kinks.”
This amendment ended up being voted down by a vote of 5-7, and then this unamended resolution was voted down by a vote of 4-8. Per Council rules, a similar resolution would not be able to be taken up again until April 2025 when the new Council year starts. Alderperson William Siebers (District 1) the author of the resolution, indicated that he would continue to work on finding a solution to the parking issues.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
There seemed to be a general acceptance of the idea that some areas of the city had parking issues and could benefit from residents being allowed to park on-street during the overnight hours. The concerns about moving forward with that remained that changes would negatively impact the city’s ability to carry out its DNR-required street sweeping responsibilities.
City staff believed that changing the parking rules to allow overnight on-street parking on alternating sides of the street would require more rigorous enforcement in order to be successful. Currently no Parking Utility personnel work overnight, and overnight parking enforcement is not a priority for the Police Department. Director of Public Works Danielle Block told the Council that they would need two full-time parking enforcement positions to cover the overnight hours seven days a week which would have an annual cost of $165,000. They would also need to purchase an additional parking enforcement vehicle at an estimated cost of $30,000 plus annual costs for fuel, maintenance, and insurance.
The alderpersons who opposed the changes were concerned about those increased costs. The alderpersons who supported changing the rules were not convinced such enforcement measures were necessary for the success of the program.
Additionally, it was touched on that any parking changes would only apply during the non-winter months, and these changes would not help during the winter when on-street overnight parking would still be prohibited.
Alderperson Sheri Hartzheim (District 13) several times stated that she believed the city should form a task force to look more closely at this issue and brainstorm solutions for the parking problems being experienced in some of the city’s older neighborhoods. Alderperson Patrick Hayden (District 7) expressed support for that idea saying, “I like the idea of a taskforce so it can find a solution that is a multi-pronged solution instead of this one size fits all that is more of a solution for our dense parts of the city but causes more issues in the suburbs.”
Alderperson Siebers opened the discussion up recognizing that the resolution was most likely going to be voted down but stressing that the problem was going to continue and he hoped that the Council would continue working on it. He said:
When we submit a resolution sometimes the outcome is not what we had hoped for, and the mistake we often make is that after the defeat of the resolution, we walk away from the issue a resolution tries to address. However, the important thing we must not do is walk away from the lessons we hopefully have learned from the discussion we have had. And with those lessons, we must move forward to the next opportunity given to us, once again attempting to address our issue we deem important to resolve.
The vast majority of those who participated in discussions on this resolution agreed that there is a problem, and how to address it is the question we can’t agree on. But we know the problem is not going to go away, and at some point in time we’ll need to discuss it again. Hopefully when that time comes, we will remember the lessons learned.”
Alderperson Siebers finished the discussion by expressing the intention to continue working on finding solutions and was going to investigate how other communities handled the logistics associated with overnight on-street parking. “[B]eing blessed with retirement, I am going to take a suggestion. […] I made the statement to our public works director as well as to others that seven out of 10 communities our size have on street parking. I don’t know how they do it. I thought that maybe we should find out. So I’m going to take alder—Director Block said she’d be interested in what their parking utility is like. So I’m going to do a little traveling in the next few months to find out what other cities’ parking utility is like. And who knows, I may come back with a resolution changing the parking utility in the city of Appleton. But I just want you to know that I’m going to go forward in finding out what other communities are doing.”
The resolution ended up being voted down by a vote of 4 in favor and 8 against.
[I have two thoughts. One, I really respect the dedication and conscientiousness with which Alderperson Siebers carries out his responsibilities as an elected official. I hear people sometimes state that Council positions needs to be more accessible to younger people and more diverse people as if youth and diversity are characteristics that inherently will make someone a good alderperson. But, I believe a person’s age and appearance has nothing to do with whether they are a good alderperson. Rather, it is a person’s individual qualities that determine if they will make a good public servant, and Alderperson Siebers is a good public servant.
Secondly, this whole overnight parking situation illustrates just how surprisingly complicated things related to government and the public welfare can be. Over the years, the Common Council has brought forward several resolutions that speak about big-picture items that have little to do with Appleton as a city. It can be quite easy to pass a resolution that involves legal and constitutional questions that you don’t have to wrestle with such as, for example, the resolution that called for the US to ratify the UN’s Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, but it’s quite another thing to pass a resolution that deals with a local problems in which you have to actually wrestle with the legal and practical implications of a proposed change. I think it’s good to keep in mind that if, time and time again, small local changes prove to have endless complications, state-level and federal-level changes are most likely at least as complicated if not more so even if we aren’t aware of what the many complications are.]
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1182539&GUID=BC6AD851-EF73-4BFA-ABAA-D71B1E45A504
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