The Parks and Recreation Committee met 06/10/2024. They spent 1 hour and 15 minutes discussing Resolution 4-R-24 which, as originally written, would have banned the use and purchase of certain pesticides by City of Appleton employees and contractors. It also included one sentence requiring the city to “publicly release information regarding the chemical pesticides are used in city-owned property.”
The committee ended up amending the resolution to read as follows:
Parks & Recreation Department will gather information regarding the types of turf management chemical pesticides purchased moving forward, how they were used, and report back to committee at the end of the summer.”
This amended version was approved unanimously by the members of the Parks and Recreation Committee, including Alderperson Alex Schultz (District 9) who was one of the sponsors of the resolution.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
This resolution also came before the Municipal Services Committee. The video and minutes for that meeting have not been posted yet, but it was indicated in the Parks and Recreation Committee meeting that Municipal Services had held the resolution for 2 weeks. I’m not sure how much of the discussion at the Parks and Recreation meeting was a continuation of the discussion that had begun at Municipal Services. At any rate…
Alderperson Schultz started out the conversation at the Parks and Recreation Committee by saying, “I think we need to make it clear that the intent of the resolution is to introduce some transparency into what’s being applied to our public lands. The intent is not to strictly prohibit, or, you know, basically give city no tools for dealing with invasive species or dealing with other situations when they need to apply some of these chemicals. That’s really not the intent. […] There really wasn’t the intent to just strictly get rid of all chemical pesticides, but help push the community forward and by example. The city’s the one always leads these charges with the community and start maybe projecting the fact that we’re taking some of these chemicals seriously and trying to limit them beyond what we already are.”
[I don’t know what to even think about that. The resolution includes 5 “Therefore be it resolved” statements, one of which creates a list of potentially harmful pesticides, two of which ban the purchase and use of the pesticides on that list, and one of which sets up a rudimentary process for staff to request exceptions to the ban. If the purpose of the resolution was not to prohibit the use of these chemicals but rather just promote “transparency,” the authors picked a very strange way to express that.]
The authors of the resolution (former Alderperson Israel Del Toro, Alderperson Schultz, and Alderperson Vered Meltzer (District 2)), all expressed dissatisfaction with the memo that had been put together by staff.
Professor Del Toro stated, “The report itself is purely inadequate. It reads like a bunch of amendments put together and glued together, and does not actually address any of the action items of the resolution itself. So, I think that’s one of the big comments going forward is going through those individual action items and saying, “This is how staff has responded or is responding to the work that’s being proposed here.” Communication is key, and here, transparency is missing.”
He went on to say, “I actually place the entire blame on the Mayor’s Office for doing such a crummy job of compiling all this information and not putting it into a synthetic argument that actually addressed the point. So, my recommendation would be to send this back to the mayor’s office and have them synthesize those 126 pages and specifically how they address each one of those action items associated with this report, not just simply saying, hey, you can’t do it. That’s not—that’s not a real response. That shows that the mayor himself is not valuing the work of the staff in appropriately communicating that to the Council.”
Alderperson Meltzer was disappointed that the staff memo did not include more information about the chemicals that the city was using. Of the 10 chemicals listed in the resolution, only 2 were mentioned in the staff report, and the absence of a list of chemicals the city seemed like a deficiency in the report. “I feel like we’re in a very unfortunate place with this resolution with the staff memo that was provided to us. I think that, you know, we all have the same basic question right now that’s holding us back, which is, we don’t even know if these—if all the chemicals on the list are being used by the city. […] It’s kind of awkward and uncomfortable and embarrassing for me to sit here with this list of chemicals that—this resolution was submitted enough, long enough ago, that I think that this basic question should have been answered in order for us to have a starting point, to have a substantive conversation about the resolution. And I’m not disparaging staff or any of their work at all. I think that in fact, you know, there’s, you know, some low hanging fruit that could have been provided in the report that would really have create—that could have created a narrative and highlighted the work that staff does. And I think that, you know, the memo in response to this resolution really created an unexpected situation of obscureness and a lack of transparency that really kind of blindsided me and leaves me struggling with a sense of what exactly the next step forward should be with this resolution.”
While the resolution did include an action item stating “the city will publicly release information regarding the chemical pesticides are used in city-owned property,” it was only one out of 5 action statements, and the other 5 action points all pertained in one way or another to restricting the use of pesticides by city staff and contractors. So, perhaps that resulted in some confusion among staff regarding the primary purpose of the resolution which impacted the focus of their memo. Additionally, none of the resolution’s authors met with staff prior to introducing the resolution or sought their feedback while writing the resolution. In fact, the list of chemicals in the resolution were not necessarily even chemicals that the city used but rather just a list of chemicals that Professor Del Toro took from a 1992 EPA publication.
Director of Parks and Recreation Dean Gazza said, “I think that’s where before a resolution is submitted, I always welcome somebody to sit down with me, tell me exactly what you’re looking for, you know. I was not contacted, had no previous meetings specific to this resolution that asked me, where—are you using any of these compounds? What ones are you using? I think that would have went a long way. So, I think just this whole process can, you know, can just remind us that the homework upfront before submitting a resolution pays off, saving time once the resolution is submitted and we have to talk about it at this point.”
Although none of the authors had contacted staff about the resolution per se, Alderperson Schultz had contact staff in an effort to identify what had been sprayed on a certain day at Ellen Kort Peace Park. Staff had told him it was a contractor who did it, but when he contacted the contractor, the contractor was not willing to provide information on what was sprayed, why they were spraying, or how long the chemical would persist in the environment. That experience was what led him to sign on to this resolution.
In discussing that incident with Director Gazza during the meeting, it wasn’t clear if the chemicals that were sprayed even were pesticides, or if it was something pertaining to the installation of the sidewalks in Ellen Kort Peace Park. Director Gazza indicated he would look into it further.
It was also noted throughout the discussion that city staff use chemicals in line with the manufacturers’ specifications so that it was done in a safe manner while serving the needs of the community.
Director Gazza told the committee, “We’re trying to be as safe as possible with every chemical, but yet still meeting them needs to hit them expectations that our that our constituents want. So, I just look at that. […] [T]he resolution talked about getting rid of it, versus just the transparency, you know, and then it kind of went to transpare—but it’s kind of like saying—now this is an analogy—’No more plow trucks. They give off too much exhaust. No more plow trucks. Staff, have a good day.’ But there’s an expectation still to get that snow plowed. Give us give us—what are we supposed to do if that’s the case? So, if we’re going to get rid of glyphosate and we’re not going to be able to use it on fence lines and things like that, what do you want us to do? You—will you give us more staff to cut the weeds and things like that? So, I just want you think about those things from our from our position. But we are trying to be as con—environmentally conscientious, and you know, not only environmentally, but mainly we’re talking about people’s health.”
Ultimately, it sounded like the resolution authors were more interested in getting a list of chemicals the city was using and making that information available to the public rather than banning the use of those pesticides per se. In light of that, Alderperson Katie Van Zeeland (District 5) made a motion to amend the resolution by substitution so that it now read, “Parks & Recreation Department will gather information regarding the types of turf management chemical pesticides purchased moving forward, how they were used, and report back to committee at the end of the summer.”
She believed that gathering that information was a good first step for any future actions the city may want to take to make this information more readily available to the public in the future.
This amended was approved by a vote of 5-0 by the committee members.
The item will go to the Common Council on 06/19/2024 but given that the same resolution is still on hold at the Municipal Services Committee, it’s not clear what the Council will do. They could vote on it or they may perhaps choose to hold it until they receive a recommendation from the Municipal Services Committee as well.
[As a watched this meeting, I really wondered how the resolution and the discussion around it impacted the morale of city staff. If I were a staff member at the city whose job was impacted by this resolution, I could definitely see this being a marker on my journey out of the city. As a one-off thing it probably wouldn’t be a big deal, but if you’re dealing with a lot of other pressures such as not enough employees, increasing inflation causing budgets to shrink, the Public Works Director leaving, departments reorganizing and then on top of that this resolution comes forward that will make your job just a bit more difficult, and then, on top of that, they criticize the memo you put together, I could easily see it being the sort of things that causes someone to start looking for a job elsewhere.]
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1189769&GUID=190BC45E-4D5D-4A1D-9C44-36647EACD604
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