Parks And Recreation Committee Meeting 09/12/2022 – Will Vote On Process Plan For Trout Museum/Ellen Kort Peace Park Discussion

The Parks and Recreation Committee is meeting 09/12/2022 at 6:30PM. They only have a couple action items but both are noteworthy.

The first item, and the one that I would expect has the most interest to the public, is a request to approve a process plan for the proposal to locate the Trout Museum in Ellen Kort Peace Park. If approved, this would lay out the points at which the project would need to be approved by the Common Council before moving forward.

If I’m reading the map correctly, it looks like the Council would have to vote on 4 steps along the process.

1. Approve further discussion with city staff to explore the idea. (This already happened.)
2. Approve a process to further discussions and evaluate proposal. (This seems to be the step before the committee and Common Council now.)
3. Approve a final agreement between Trout Museum and the city
4. Approve a design.

[Honestly, to me it feels like if the committee and Council approve this process they’ll end up approving the entire project just due to sunk time/cost issues. But, beyond that, it’s been over a month since the Council approved holding discussions. It seems like at this point the Trout could at least be presenting a back-of-the-napkin sketch of their vision showing what their basic footprint in the park would be. Instead, this current step is almost a repeat of the previous step which was just asking to talk about the proposal. They already got that permission; now show the public some rough diagrams. A local resident wanting to build a little garage would at least have the wherewithal to go into the city’s online property viewer, pull up their property, and throw down some lines indicating where they plan to build before they head downtown to apply for a building permit. It seems like a sleek museum with a lot of money behind it could do the same. Maybe present a basic diagram, and then ask for approval for a process plan instead of the other way around. That way the Council would have better information to help decide if continued discussions are warranted.]

The second action item of interest on the agenda is the request to suspend planning and design of the WE Energies Trail – Phase One and cancel the acceptance of the grant they received for that project. The estimated cost of construction increased by over 300%, moving from slightly under $1 million to over $3 million. This comes on the heels of the city rejecting 5 bids for various projects due to them coming in much higher than was budgeted for.

Finally, the committee will be review the August revenue and expense report for Reid Golf Course. It looks like Reid’s revenues are running slightly above where they were at the end of August last year.

View full meeting details here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=978113&GUID=9A544F73-EBDA-444B-9FEB-FBD0A4423E03