Good evening, and now call to order the Wednesday, September 17th, 2025 meeting of the Apple and Common Council.

Please rise for the invocation, which will be delivered by Alder Smith.

This is the first week of the new academic year at Lawrence University.

Campus is again filled with students, many of them arriving for their first year.

Appleton will be their home for four years.

It's not just students, but also faculty and staff who are back.

And we often haven't seen each other since the start of summer.

But we feel a heaviness this year as well, since during the summer we lost a beloved colleague, Garth Bond, who died at far too young of an age, lost a cancer.

Garth taught in the English department.

He was our resident expert in Shakespeare and Chaucer.

He was a delightful conversationalist on every conceivable topic.

He was also a neighbor and along with his wife and daughter, an active member of our Appleton community.

So I and many others who knew him begin this academic year conscious of a great loss.

For his memorial service two Saturdays back, another colleague in the English department, Austin Seagris, wrote a short poem.

The title of the poem is Paradise Lost, which came from the circumstance that when Garth had to take a medical leave in the middle of the last spring term, Austin took over the teaching of his course on Milton and Paradise Loss.

This meant guiding students along the syllabus and pathway that Garth had earlier laid out, and the difficulty of trying to follow someone else's thoughts is part of this memorial poem.

To understand the last two lines, it's a very short poem, and I'll read it in just a moment, but to understand the last two lines should know that Garth always wore a suit and tie, which is not so common these days.

And the other thing to realize is that suit has two meanings.

It's the physical thing a person might wear, but it could also be like a lawsuit or a question pursued in some court.

The goal of Paradise Lost was to justify the ways of God to men, that is, to prove a deeper reason for seemingly census, senseless losses that we experience.

That might be the kind of suit we are to imagine Garth bringing forward in this poem, and a suit that we have all probably wanted to pursue as we live through so many other senseless losses.

Here is the poem.

Paradise Lost in memory of Garth Bond, clapped into the distance, a tasteful retreat.

The country house poem, where the syllabus ends, plotted and enclosed.

We'll never know now how you plan to get us there, what bridge from war, what diversion through nature, what detour around labor to leisure.

But where we've lost you, Pastor, is surely where you've gone.

In which of your dapper suits to make your suit.

Thank you.

Please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Roll call of Alders.

And we'll note for the record, Alder Van Zieland is joining virtually.

Roll call of officers and department heads.

All are represented.

Any discussion of the minutes.

Hearing none, please cast your votes.

Good.

Do we have their friends even?

Let's see.

Oh.

Let's see if we can see all the vansey on.

Okay, there.

There we go.

Okay.

All right, motion passes 13 to zero.

The minutes have been approved.

On a business presented by the mayor, uh, we have uh some folks with us from uh the DAR, daughters of the American Revolution would like to welcome me up.

I'd like to present a proclamation recognizing Constitution Week.

We'll do the game show microphone then.

All right.

Whereas September 17th, 2025 marks the 238th anniversary of the drafting of the Constitution of the United States of America by the Constitutional Convention.

And whereas it is fitting and proper to accord official recognition to this magnificent document and its memorable anniversary, and to the patriotic celebrations, which will commemorate the occasion.

And whereas Public Law 915 guarantees the issuing of a proclamation each year by the President of the United States of America, designating September 17th through 23rd as Constitution Week.

Now, therefore, be it resolved that I, Jacob A.

Woodford, mayor of the city of Appleton, Wisconsin, do hereby proclaim September 17th through the 23rd, 2025 as Constitution Week in Appleton, and encourage our citizens to vigilantly protect the freedoms guaranteed to us by our Constitution, remembering that lost rights may never be regained.

Happy Constitution Week.

And if you didn't see, we had uh Edison here in chambers earlier today, and uh he even held the gavel.

Uh so fortunately, dogs' mouths are said to be cleaner uh than ours.

So uh we're just gonna roll with that.

Uh nice to have Edison with us and Sergeant Duven.

Uh, they're doing great work in the community, and we very much appreciate their efforts.