The Safety and Licensing Committee met 01/22/2025. One of the items they took up was the application for a bartender/operator license for Katherine. The police Department was requesting denial of the application because Katherine has a history of OWI offenses, the most recent of which happened in 2021 with a conviction taking place in 2022.
This item was held at the 01/08/2025 Safety and Licensing Committee meeting in order to give Katherine time to provide evidence of her rehabilitation. Per a memo from the City Attorney’s Office, there are “two forms of evidence which are statutorily required to be considered ‘competent evidence of sufficient rehabilitation,’ and therefore must be accepted by the licensing agency as such.” One of those was “certified documentation of honorable discharge from the US armed forces following the otherwise disqualifying conviction”, the other was “documentation of their release from custody and either completion of probation or release from custody and compliance with all terms and conditions of release, be it extended supervision, probation, or parole.”
Katherine provided a computer printout that seemed to show she had completed probation. It was not precisely the documentation that the committee would have been required to accept as proof of her rehabilitation, but it indicated it was likely that she would be able to get the specific documentation that the committee would be required to accept. Because she did not have the precise document that was needed, the committee technically still had the freedom to deny her application if they so chose. They ended up voting 4-1 to recommend the application for approval with the expectation that she would try to provide fuller documentation prior to the 02/05/2025 Common Council meeting and that the City Attorney’s Office would provide a clearer picture on what the legal requirements were surrounding approval or denial of the application.
Alderperson Chris Croatt (District 14) was the one committee member who voted against approval. He would have preferred to hold the item until the next committee meeting rather than advance it to the Common Council.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
Assistant City Attorney Zak Buruin spoke on the relevance of the documentation that Katherine had provided and told the committee, “So, what’s been provided is documentation from the Department of Corrections. And I should say that I don’t know that this is specifically the documentation contemplated by the statute. So, I think in the most technical sense, this does not necessarily meet the requirement that the committee would be required to recommend approval. Having said that, substantively, this does appear to be equivalent to it and with what information I’ve been able to provide or locate, I have seen no reason to believe that she wouldn’t be able to provide the required documentation if she knew precisely what it was. And the statutory language is a little imprecise.
“So, by way of short cut, I’ll indicate this, this may not require the committee to grant the license or recommend granting the license, but I believe there’s sufficient information here that the committee could, within its discretion, grant it anyway, especially knowing that the documentation that would require the granting of the license almost certainly does exist.”
The documentation that Attorney Buruin believed would fit the statutory requirements as proper evidence of her rehabilitation was discharge documentation from the Department of Correction “when your supervision is discharged at the end of your supervision term, indicating that you’ve successfully completed probation, something that’s more of an official document than a printout.”
Katherine said, “I do know somebody that does do probation (not my probation officer), and they said that they used to send those out when you completed probation, but they don’t do that anymore.”
She also told the committee that she had contact her probation officer via text and voicemail, but it sounded like the probation officer had never responded to her. The computer print out that she provided to the committee was the only thing she was able to get that did not require actual communication with her probation officer.
Attorney Buruin did not know if Katherine’s claim that the Department of Correction no longer provided discharge documents was accurate, but stated, “[I]f that is the case, and this is the best documentation available, then I think this documentation would require the license to be granted.”
Initially, the committee was going to hold the item in order to give time to Katherine to try to get additional documentation and also to give the Attorney’s Office time to research the matter and provide clarification to the committee; however, the item had already been held at the committee once and the next Safety and Licensing Committee meeting would not be for 3 weeks. In an effort to allow the item to proceed more quickly so that the applicant could get her license sooner if she qualified for it, they ended up voting 4-1 to recommend the license for approval so that it could advance to the Common Council and be voted on in two weeks at the 02/05/2025 Council meeting. The expectation of the committee members seemed to be that this would provide enough time for the Attorney’s Office to provide and recommendation and for Katherine to hopefully get official discharge documentation.
Alderperson Alex Schultz (District 9) explicitly encouraged her to get more documentation, saying, “I would also recommend trying to obtain additional documentation in whatever way, shape, or form you can do that. Make some calls, find out if there’s some additional information you can provide us.”
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1237593&GUID=34546250-9397-40C9-977A-B4FFF07828D5
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