The Board of Health is meeting 10/09/2024 at 7AM.
They have one action item on their agenda which is a proposed update to the Municipal Code which would prohibit smoking around Valley Transit and the Public Library.
[A little personal story here. After my grandfather, John Menn of the Menn Law Firm, died my parents, through no desire of their own, ended up owning the old Menn Law Firm building that used to be located just north of the Transit Center. The location was utterly undesirable both to potential buyers and also potential leasers mainly because of all of the loiterers that hung out in the area all day every day. When my mother started utilizing the building to offer tutoring lessons to students with dyslexia, the parents of the students were less than thrilled with the location, again, due to the loiterers.
We talked with the police and the city and ADI about this, but the loiterer issue continued to just be not dealt with in any substantive way. At the time, one of the suggestions I made was to ban smoking in that area with the reasoning that people hung out there all day because they were allowed to smoke so if they weren’t allowed to smoke they would be less inclined to hang out there all day. At the time, this suggestion was totally dismissed for nebulous reasons. Now, 15 years after the fact, I open up the Board of Health agenda packet for this week and see that the city’s Health Officer is making the exact same recommendation that I made back in 2009 that the city dismissed out of hand without any sort of investigation. If they had taken my suggestion seriously back in 2009, our city could have had been on its 15th year of this area being free of smoking loiterers hanging out and making women and children trying to access the library uncomfortable. It’s very frustrating to see how slow moving the city has been on this.]
View full meeting details here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1229833&GUID=A071CA59-05CB-496C-B4EF-92E72EFD87CF
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