Good evening.

I now call to order the Wednesday, August 19th, 2026 meeting of the Appleton Common Council.

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

Good evening.

As part of the celebration of the two, that's scary.

Hold on.

Hold on.

All right, let's try that.

Okay, go ahead.

Good evening again.

As part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I've been volunteering on Saturday mornings at Constitution Square at the History Museum at the Castle, where the League of Women Voters is celebrating 250 years of democracy in the United States by calling attention to the preamble to the Constitution and to the rights and freedoms granted by the Constitution and specifically the Bill of Rights.

We'll be there for two more weeks if you haven't stopped by yet.

In spite of Abigail Adams' admonition to her husband in March of 1776 to remember the ladies as the Continental Congress wrestled with independence and what form a new government might take.

The right to vote was initially limited to white men who were property owners.

Black men were theoretically granted the vote in 1865 by the 14th Amendment, though only the passage of the Voting Rights Act 100 years later allowed them to freely exercise that right.

It took 144 years after the Declaration of Independence and 131 years after the Constitution took effect for women to achieve suffrage.

The citizenship of Indigenous Americans was not recognized until 1924, and it took a number of court cases after that for them to be allowed to vote.

While it is easy to look at this history as a sign that our nation was founded on inequality and that the next 250 years have been a struggle against that foundation, we can also read the preamble as a roadmap, guiding us to that more perfect union.

Article 5 even provides the basis for amending the Constitution to that end.

In the month where we celebrate the Voting Rights Act on August 6th and the 19th Amendment yesterday, I had a chance to visit the Obama Presidential Center, where words from a speech President Obama gave commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights Marches are carved into the building's exterior.

It reads You are America, unconstrained by habit and convention, unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be.

For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken.

There is new ground to cover.

America is not the project of any one person.

The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word we.

So uh looking forward to recognizing uh these important uh moments for our community.

All right, next is the flag day parade awards.

So Vicoria.

We're just gonna use the uh the game show microphone here.

Come on down.

All right.

All right, usually uh thank you for your support, Mr.

Mayor and the common council and all of the department heads.

Uh, usually we do this in July, but this was a very unusual year.

Uh about a year ago uh this day, uh, members of my committee met with the mayor, uh Alder Hartzheim and the chief of police, and we started talking about the flag day parade route, and there were some concerns and issues that we had to work through over several months.

We decided that we had to shorten the route uh for safety reasons.

Our three biggest goals are to honor the flag, obviously.

We need to uh make sure that we put on a good show, uphold the standards that have been set over the previous 74 years, and obviously make sure that everybody goes home safe.

Uh so it was kind of an anxious year going into this, something different.

Uh, we're very familiar with College Avenue and the staging area, but when you have a parade at 2 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon in June, it's very different than a Tuesday night in November, right before Thanksgiving.

So uh we have some wrinkles that we need to iron out before next year, but it really was a great day for Appleton.

The sun came out, the weather was there, and the people came out.

I was a little worried when the flag that was hanging over College Avenue uh got all tangled up about 10 minutes right before the parade started, but peers got their trucks out, pulled the flag down, fixed the flag, and it was beautiful all day long.

Um I do want to tell one quick story.

Uh the mayor said I have about 45 minutes, so it shouldn't take too long.

Um, for it.

Oh, sorry, I'll cut out 90% of it then.

Um anyway, we I was very nervous.

Um it's always chaotic.

We're coming up to the beginning of a parade, and this year was no different.

We also had this uh extra level of anxiety because of the route change, but it started off, the floats came out in order.

That's thanks to the committee.

They do a great job.

Our volunteers worked very hard leading up to the parade, and then that day.

Um, so things were going really well, and I was feeling really good.

We talked about the train being a nuisance, a potential safety hazard.

It actually came through in the middle of the parade, it would have interrupted it had we been in the old route.

But I I was feeling uh really good about all the work that we put in, our decision, and I felt like it was a great day for Appleton.

So I'm walking through at the end of the parade, and this uh older gentleman give me one of these.

Boo.