The Finance Committee met 04/21/2025. The item they spent the most amount of time discussing was the request to take $107,625 in funds left over from the 2024 Park Pavilion Roof Replacement Project and put it toward hiring a consultant “to create a sustainability and climate action plan for Appleton. The consultant will analyze existing reports, update the reports, and create a masterplan document that will provide a clear pathway for the City to achieve its sustainability and climate goals.”
This item was initially recommended for denial but was then referred back to the committee for further discussion.
The committee again voted to recommend it for denial. The vote was 3-1 with Alderpersons Brad Firkus (District 3), Sheri Hartzheim (District 13), and Chris Croatt (District 14) voting against it and Alderperson Denise Fenton (District 6) voting in favor. The three alderpersons who voted against it were also the three alderpersons who recently voted against the resolution changing the City of Appleton’s emissions goals which the rest of the Council ended up approving. So, it is possible that when this item comes before the Common Council on 05/07/2025 that the end result could be different than the committee’s recommendation.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
Ron Jones a member of the Appleton Sustainability Advisory Panel spoke in favor of approving the carryover request. The panel had identified the areas of city operations most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions but they lacked the depth, expertise, and time to develop a detailed, feasible plan to reduce those emissions. He stressed that climate change was real and that 10 of the last 15 years have been the warmest years on record. He thought using the money to hire a consultant now would allow them to get a year’s jump on the process rather than having to wait until budget time to allocate dollars for 2026.
In an email, John Adams, another member of the panel echoed the need for external resources in order to help the city continue the work of the panel.
Alderperson Vered Meltzer (District 2) pointed out that Steve Schrage the city employee who serves as its climate resiliency specialist only spent 20% of his time on sustainability related things and supported moving forward with a consultant now saying, “I just don’t understand the reason to kick the can down the road if this, you know—if we’re just delaying a conversation, why not just have it today so that we can get that extra lead time to start working on these issues?” Regarding the cost of the consultant, Alderperson Meltzer thought the price could not be compared to the cost of other consultant unless those consultants were in the same field consulting on the same topics, and, beyond that, “I believe our mayor Jake Woodford has an incredibly sustainable debt plan, debt reduction plan that, you know, I don’t see anything unsustainable about using this money in in this way that it’s been requested.”
Alderperson Fenton also supported approving the carryover request, pointing to the migration of pests across North America and the severe flooding that happened in July of 2024 as an example of the consequences of global warming. She thought a consultant could help the city figure out how to address flooding from increased heavy rain events and the potential of new pest species making there way to Appleton.
She believed it was reasonable to hire consultants, saying “[W]e could hire two full time people with—then you take x amount of their salary for benefits, or we could take this money and hire them for a one time project, bring us back things that we can work on to address these.”
She also believed it would be beneficial to move forward with hiring a consultant now saying, “I don’t think we have a year to think about this. If we kick this to the budget in this November, then we’re talking 2026 and another summer of whatever flooding, and then we’re just looking further in the future. So I would urge my colleagues to vote to use this funding and to try to address these problems before we get into million-dollar issues down the road.”
Two members of Appleton Concerned Taxpayers spoke against approving the carryover request.
Walter Blank asked, “do you guys really know what you want to do with this one this money? Do you have a list of goals? I just heard that we have a lot of projects that were proposed, but they lack the ability perhaps to flesh that out. Do you have a definition of what we’re going to call sustainability? Do we know what it’s going to look like when it’s accomplished? Should we build wind turbines? Oh wait, we can’t build wind turbines because we want to save whales and birds now. Are we consulting and coordinating with the surrounding municipalities, the county? Have we researched existing programs and learned lessons? Who knows? In short, have we done our homework and developed metrics that we’re hoping to address and measures of success and failure?”
He believed Appleton hired too many consultants, stating that since 2017 Appleton had spent $635,000 on strategic planning and the city’s comprehensive plan while when he spoke with La Crosse he was told they only spent around $110,000 on those items since 2017.
Additionally, he opposed taking funds that had been borrowed and left over from another project and moving them to something that was so different from their initially intended purpose.
Mike Thomas also thought Appleton hired too many consultants and should be doing more things in-house. He provided multiple examples of situations in which the Outagamie County government had not utilized consultants. He also noted that Kara Homan, Appleton’s Community Development Director, had previously worked for Outagamie County during which time she had completed many projects without the assistance of consultants.
Alderperson Hartzheim referenced a letter from Appleton resident Diane Bast who expressed concern that a climate consultant would end up duplicating the work of the sustainability panel and the climate task force. She also thought hiring a consultant with carryover dollars versus having to go through process and discussion at budget time could inappropriately incentivize departments to overestimate how much it needs for a specific project so that, when it comes in underbudget, the leftover money ends up being a slush fund that can be used for other projects that do not go through the proper budget channels. She also was worried departments might be disincentivized from looking at the lowest responsive bids for projects if the savings they achieve end up being given to other departments.
Alderperson Hartzheim disagreed with some of the language in Ms. Bast’s letter and did not think that the savings in this case had purposefully been created with the intention of using it to fund the hiring of a consultant without waiting for budget-time, but she did agree with the concern about creating perverse incentives. She was concerned about spending $100,000 on something when it was not clearly laid out what the consultant would be doing or if they would end up duplicating the efforts of previous groups.
Alderperson Croatt shared some of Alderperson Hartzheim’s concerns. He preferred to see this item brought forward as part of a departmental budget and undergo the robust conversation that takes place in that process.
Alderperson Firkus opposed the carryover request because he had a hard time seeing how putting together a masterplan would help the city in a timely manner. He thought there were ways the money could be used that would provide more immediate results. As an example, he mentioned using the money to install solar panels.
Beyond that he was concerned that after they got the plan back from the consultants they would still need the money and resources to implement their recommendations.
Director of Parks, Recreation, and Facilities Dean Gazza provided feedback on where he and staff were coming from with this request. Essentially, the Council had approved 4 different resolutions related to sustainability and he felt he needed more resources in order to accomplish the will of the Council. “I feel what was happening is I’m given a row boat and told to get across the lake without the row—without the oars. I need the tools to get the job done, or we’re just going to keep going around in circle as I take my arm and try to get across that lake. And the panel can take us to level one. We need greater expertise to take us to level 2, 3, 4, and five.”
He envisioned a consultant being able to provide direction and vision for the City of Appleton organization as a whole. Currently, the city’s climate resiliency specialist only spends 20% of his time (if that) on sustainability issues and, beyond that, he does that only for his own department. Director Gazza explained, “So Steve is part of the Parks and Recreation Department, which also is facilities and construction. We propose projects for our department, so we do air handlers, upgrades, we do insulation, we do things that are pertinent to sustainability for our department. A [master] plan takes it so much further. It’s sustainability for the City of Appleton. It gets everybody involved, every department involved. It gets waste, transportation, air quality, energy conservation, which is us, water, brownfield development, green space, tree canopies, health, and that’s what the plan looks at. It’s comprehensive.
“We don’t look at—our things help health, but we’re not digging into a specific health initiative that we would work with the department head on. We’re not—we talk about brownfield development. We know that’s good for the city, but we would like to see Community Development and get more of a plan to help the department and the city as a whole to become sustainable. Also resiliency, with the flooding, with the heat islands, with the tree and green space.”
The committee ended up voting 3-1 to recommend the item be denied, but it was noted in the meeting that the committee was populated heavily by council members who had voted against the recent resolution updating the city’s emissions reduction goals.
[This is a chart of global emissions since 1750. They have done nothing but increase exponentially since the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution. The tiny little dent at the end of that chart was caused by the pandemic response that also included massive and unsustainable amounts of social and economic upheaval, and, even at that high price, we only experienced an extremely temporary 5% reduction in global emissions. The United States, a country of 330 million people, has been decreasing its emissions steadily since the early 2000s, and that has not made a dent in global emissions.
The idea that the City of Appleton, home to a mere 75,000 people, in a country that is already reducing its emissions with no global effect, could in any real, tangible, or sustained way impact global emissions or climate change by reducing its emissions is utterly and completely outside the realm of anything that is possible in even the smallest degree. Global emissions and global warming will be impacted by Appleton’s hiring of this consultant as much as they would be impacted by Appleton gathering this $107,000 into a pile of $1 bills and lighting it on fire.
It would make much more sense to deposit this money into an interest-bearing account and use it for flood reduction efforts in the Northland Creek and Bellaire watershed area once Brown and Caldwell completes its evaluation of the area and provides mitigation recommendations, but I doubt anything like that is going to happen.]
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1283589&GUID=A9618171-A757-4284-835B-B7C99C938E10
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