Good evening.

I now call to order the Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024 meeting of the Appleton Common Council.

Tonight's invocation will be delivered by Alder Jones.

We gather together to listen and share, learn and educate, and to be granted wisdom and grace as we move Appleton forward in the best interest of our community.

Please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States.

And all are represented, Alderperson Croat is joining us virtually, and we expect that Alder Person Del Toro will jump on virtually soon too.

Okay.

Roll call of officers and department heads.

All are represented.

Thank you.

Okay, vote's aye, thank you.

I have a slate of board and commission reappointments for your consideration.

Ask for a motion.

Any discussion.

Thank you for approving these appointments and want to thank these members of our community who will be continuing in their volunteer service on various committees, commissions, and boards.

So moving away from the skyscraper globe motif and back to the city seal, which has been used as the city's primary logo in the past, albeit a very long time ago.

But this has the benefit of not requiring an extensive and costly brand design, creating a new logo.

And it's a more traditional look.

So we'll be sharing brand guidelines with the council so you'll have those that pack it, and we'll also be updating some things like council name tags.

So you'll have you'll have some new name tags coming up for members who are continuing.

Our plan with implementation will be to replace things as they're due for replacement.

So as Letterhead gets used up, we'll we'll start ordering in in the new format.

So it'll it'll take a little bit more time, but this is a much more cost-effective way of implementing.

So we're gonna sacrifice a little bit of the wow of a brand new uh motif, but we're also gonna save some money doing it this way.

Uh so this will roll out over time.

You'll start to see that on fleet vehicles as vehicles get replaced, or they're due for uh updates to the um to their vinyl wraps or their um uh uh stickers and logos.

Uh we'll also have some updating to do as we move to a new website URL.

So there may be some ordering that needs to happen for uh incidental things like the Appleton URL that appears on city vehicles, for example.

But that'll that'll happen over time and uh as we're able to get to them.

Uh police and fire will be a separate process, and we'll get going in that process uh in the coming weeks and months here.

Um their situation is a little bit different in that uh because they're a uniform service, we'll need to have a plan for moving to uh new patches for those departments all at once.

So when uh when we get to that uh time, they'll they'll need to update at the same time for their uniforms.

Uh so we'll be getting to that, but that'll take a little bit more time, and we'll work with each department on on their process.

Uh, but but just want to give you all that update, and you'll start to see that uh rolling out here soon.

Uh and since I mentioned the website, we are deep in the website redesign process right now.

Uh departments are starting to outline their their site maps and content for uh each each departmental web page.

Uh so we're we're making good progress on that project plan, which many of you have been updated on just uh by coming to sessions and and getting information uh as we were starting out in that process.

So we're deep in it now and making good headway.

Uh still a couple months out, and we'll have some time for testing uh to make sure that things are functional.

Um, but but just wanted to give you those updates.

And uh I I will want to mention uh we've we've had some issues with power uh on and off uh city hall, and then I'll also talk a little bit more about what's going on in the community.

But uh for purposes of this meeting, uh we we have a piece of switching gear that helps manage all of this technology and keep it running uh usually.

And uh we're we may be on borrowed time with that piece of equipment, so um we we may we may have to move to old school uh with with tallying votes and so on if if we lose that piece of equipment.

But uh we've we've done everything we can to shore it up and get us through the meeting.

Our IT team's been working on that, but uh just wanted to let you know.

So, you know, if something if something changes with the technology tonight, uh that's what's going on.

Uh citywide, we had uh a winter storm move through, as we're all aware, uh some pretty significant effects from that storm.

And I just want to take an opportunity to thank our our city departments for the work that they did in responding, our police department, fire department, utilities, uh, parks rec and facilities, uh, department of public works, a lot of work uh over the last 24 hours responding to issues, uh making sure that systems were were on backups, um, you know, for our utilities department, for example.

They they have to go out physically in the middle of the night and set up uh auxiliary generators at lift stations to make sure that we don't have interruptions of service.

Lots of calls for service for wires down, car accidents, uh, and uh just appreciate the the work and collaboration of our departments uh who really did work together and and uh responded ably to uh what maybe caught some of us off guard a little bit in terms of what's going on.

So uh the power outages around the city uh late this afternoon there were about 2700 reported outages uh via the We Energy's outage tracker.

Uh they've been making headway on that, bringing more resources into the community.

I spoke with the government affairs uh director for We Energies uh this afternoon to get an update.

They're bringing in additional resources to help with uh restoring power.

The challenge with these outages is that many of them are related to wires down just around the city, so it's a little bit random and spread out.

Uh so they're they're more often than not dealing with those ones and twos uh rather than great big swaths of of the community where they fix one thing on the end of a line and a thousand customers get back on online.

Uh that that is not the situation right now.

Uh the city stood up to uh well, we set up one uh emergency charging station so folks who come and recharge uh cell phones, medical equipment, things like that.

And ironically, the power went out at that station uh uh this afternoon.