This week is very light on city meetings. The next public meeting for the city of Appleton is the meeting of the Task Force on Resiliency, Climate Mitigation and Adaptation on 09/01/2021 at 4:30PM. This appears to be only their second meeting in-person in City Council Chambers without a Virtual Teams component.
The agenda for the Climate Task Force are always a little vague. The minutes also tend to not give much of an idea of what they are discussing, and since the meetings are not recorded the only way for the public to really know what is going on is if they attend the meeting in person.
At any rate, they are working on some kind of “new framework”. I’m not sure if that has anything to do with this section from the 07/21/2021 minutes:
3. Subcommittee reports and spreadsheets – status. Denise: The spreadsheets have been combined and communicated. Items were moved as noted to other sections and duplicates removed, exceptions noted, reference to originating section noted. The spreadsheet is not formatted well for printing. A new section for Water was added, Alex questioned the need for this section if they fit comfortably somewhere else. Heather: indoor, outdoor, and process water are broken up. Views as a guide for homeowners. Alex: Grey water, and rain water were added. Linda: Municipal Codes are a driver [to grouping together].
For industry, this could be a cistern. A lot [of line items] went into Education.
Items to lobby the State are included, such as single use plastics.
Dean: I am working with Water 365, Linda has this information, now in the same format and ready to be merged. There will be ongoing work to merge similar categories, they are close. Linda: will help in merging. RE: Strategies, marked as complete but to include periodic review. If goals are aspirational in nature, need to be marked as such, and will be developed by on-going research. Dean: Review for SMART, specific and time bound, rework and polish. Propose to complete before publishing. Linda: Items such as Greenhouse Gases, can’t complete the goal, need to benchmark first. Do not lose aspirational goals in the details. John: define research deliverables. Linda: Proposing a paragraph explaining aspirational goal next steps and asking for available help from the City and task force. Denise will serve as council contact, Dean is City contact.
We noted greenhouse gases are not included and should have a tab.
Alex: How do we communicate next to residents? Denise: We can add columns to identify residential, commercial, and City. Dean: The Council will decide and communicate. The role of the task force is advisory.
Summary:
a. Linda will merge the taskforce and City spreadsheets
b. It will be an iterative process. Linda will present decisions to taskforce and City to make, and provide recommendations.
c. Goals that are aspirational will either be accompanied by a paragraph explaining the aspirational nature or be further developed by taskforce to add quantity and time.
d. Linda will add tab for Greenhouse Gas Inventory and columns for residential, commercial and City.
None of that makes any sense to me, but it sounds like they’re hard at work on something. I will be reaching out to Committee Chair Heather McCombs to get a better idea of what it is they’re doing.
View committee agendas and minutes here: https://www.appleton.org/government/common-council/committees/taskforce-on-resiliency-climate-mitigation-and-adaptation
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