Appleton Common Council District 6 Update for June 4, 2025

Greetings District 6 Neighbors,
Although the calendar won’t make it official for a couple of weeks, I think summer is officially here. Friday is the last day of school for AASD (although FVL and Xavier schools are already done), the pools officially open this weekend, the first Thursday night concert at Jones Park is Thursday evening, the first downtown farm market is this Saturday, and the Brewers have gotten hot.
We have a short-ish agenda for the Common Council this week due to the Memorial Day cancellation of Monday committee meetings.
In addition to Wednesday evening’s council meeting, the Public Arts Committee met this morning (Wednesday, June 4) to discuss a request from the Trout Museum and artist Neo Medina (who has been involved in many of the murals around the city) to paint a mural inside the Red Ramp downtown. The work would be completed by students in the Trout Museum Spray Camp program, supervised by the artist.
We also have a special Safety and License Committee meeting at 6:00 p.m. this evening preceding the Common Council meeting to discuss the alcohol license renewal application for Tandem Wine and Beer. The renewal has been recommended for denial by the Appleton Police Department based on the OWI convictions of a member of the LLC which owns the establishment. (three convictions, the latest in March of this year) The owner is appealing the denial, so a hearing will be held at this meeting.
The full council meeting will start with a number of proclamations:
  • CPR & AED Awareness Week
  • Gun Violence Awareness Day
  • Juneteenth Celebration Day
  • Make Music Day Appleton
  • Pollinator Week
  • Pride Month
  • Refugee Day
  • Scleroderma Awareness Month
I would expect that if any items are separated for individual discussions and votes, they would be the alcohol license renewal discussed above, and an item from last week’s Safety and Licensing Committee meeting – the special event application for the WI United Football Club Summer Shootout at the USA Youth Sports Complex. The application was filed six days late (39 days vs the 45 required in the special events policy), resulting in an automatic denial. The applicants appeared before the Safety and Licensing committee and presented what I believed was a sincere case for approval of the application. The new special events policy adopted last year has a much more comprehensive application, and it was clear to me (and to the rest of the committee who voted to recommend approval of the application) that the event sponsors were sincere in their efforts to comply with the new policy. City staff had recommended approval as well. When we enacted the special events policy, there was general agreement among city staff and council members that we would work with special event applicants through the transition process.
As I mentioned at the beginning, with school ending and the pools opening, those of us around Erb Park need to be especially careful watching for young folks on bikes and on foot as we’re driving around the neighborhood – they’re sometimes a lot more focused on getting to the park/pool than they are on traffic. I’m hoping to get some movement on improving the crossing at Glendale or Parkway and Oneida, but as of right now, those intersections are not in the top priority areas.
Have a great rest of the week – it looks like we might get a break from the smoke and haze after today.


Denise

 

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