I am going to call the April 13th meeting of the Ordnance and License Committee to order.

Alderman Wateska was not able to be here this evening, asked me to chair the meeting in his uh stead.

Um, all other members of the committee are present, so we do have a quorum.

And uh we will move on to item two, which is public comment.

Are there any members of the public that were here to make a comment other than on the items that you may have before the committee specifically?

Seeing none, we'll move on to item three, which is approval of minutes from our last meeting of March 23rd, 2026.

Are there any changes or corrections needed to those minutes?

Okay.

Is there any objection to approving those by unanimous consent?

Hearing and seeing no objection, those will be approved by unanimous consent.

I do see that that passed.

Okay.

Um we did have a request to uh move our agenda around a little bit, and the committee had no objection, so we're gonna jump down on our agenda to item five, which is discussion and recommendation items.

Um we have one item tonight, which is revisions to municipal code chapter 11 regarding adopting certain crimes into the municipal code, setting penalties for illegal dumping, adding vaping to the definition of smoking, and the unlawful use of 911 calls.

Brian, do you want to walk us through what we're looking at here?

Yes, thank you.

This is a number of revisions to our uh municipal code chapter 11 at the request of the police department, and the reason for that is that they've encountered these offenses but have not had a municipal ordinance upon which to issue citations.

So the uh the idea behind this is to create uh municipal code violations so that municipal citations can be issued for these offenses.

The first two sections have to do with adopting state statutes into our municipal code.

As you know, we already have uh a large number of state statutes that have been adopted into our code.

Again, for the purpose of being able to issue a municipal citation that will be heard in municipal court as opposed to a state citation, which goes over to the DA's office and circuit court, where it may or may not get uh the immediate attention that is available in our municipal court.

And as you will note in looking at uh if you're looking at the draft of the ordinance, uh a number of these have to do with prostitution, and that is becoming a focus for us because of the increase of uh prostitution activity uh within certain uh business establishments around town.

So, as part of our effort to combat that, we want to get these sections into our municipal code again to allow us to take it into our municipal court.

Um included in there is the state offense of battery and the state offense of unlawful assemblies and their suppression, um, not related to prostitution, but also not currently adopted into our municipal code.

Um if you are uh looking over the list of offenses, you might see 944 33, which is titled pandering.

Um that's probably more commonly known as pimping.

Umlawful assemblies and their suppression.

We have uh if you read 94706, the state statute, it begins by stating that police officers, sheriffs, and other officers of the peace have a duty to address unlawful assemblies and their suppression.

So this just allows our local police to be able to issue a municipal citation.

Once again, I I know I keep repeating myself, but that's really the point here.

All of these already are offenses.

We're not creating any new offenses here.

Section two expands the table of the forfeitures.

You'll recognize the numbers in the right-hand column correspond to what's already in our table of forfeitures.

It's a wide range.

Section three amends section 1101 sub-10A to increase the maximum penalty for the possession of a controlled substance.

And this is just a one-liner from the table.

Sets a forfeiture of anywhere from 50 to 1,500 dollars.

So it differs slightly from the amounts in the table above, which are mostly 50 to 250.

Section 4 creates a new municipal code section which addresses the practice of illegal dumping.

And we currently do not have an ordinance that specifically addresses that.

We've got a littering ordinance, and we've got a number of other ordinances having to do with nuisance and so on that kind of address it in an indirect way.

The littering ordinance is generally referring to smaller amounts, whereas this dumping ordinance is targeted at large amounts, which is happening more frequently around the town.

What we're finding is that the end of cul-de-sacks and dead ends and so on, people will dispose of stuff by just backing a truck up and dumping it.

So this would create a penalty for that in our municipal code with a forfeiture of between 500 to 1500 dollars for doing that.

The difficulty, well, I shouldn't say difficulty, but one of the technicalities that we dealt with in drafting this is to draw a distinction between littering and dumping.

So we finally settled on dumping is a dump of material greater than five pounds or a volume greater than one cubic foot.

This this kind of creates a distinction for a greater amount.

Section five is a follow-on from the creation of that dumping ordinance, and it amends uh section 1206, which is in the nuisance section of the code.

Uh, what we are trying to head off here is if a nuisance exists on somebody's property because somebody came up and illegally dumped on their property, we still want that nuisance abated.

And what this says is it adds uh a line at the end of the section that it's not a defense to enforcement of this nuisance section, that the nuisance exists as a result of the actions of someone other than the owner or occupant.

Somebody backs up and dumps a bunch of stuff onto your property, um, we expect that you will clean it up.

And if you don't, it could still fall under the definition of a nuisance.

So that's what that's about.

Section six just adds electronic vaping devices to our definitions section because sections, section eight creates section 11.096 of the municipal code, which is created to prohibit the purchase and possession of electronic vaping devices that are not otherwise regulated by Wisconsin statute section 25492.

So it's kind of filling in a gap in that section and saying that the electronic vapor vaping device, which is defined in section 1109 sub-1, um, no person under 21 years of age can purchase, attempt to purchase, or possess an electronic vaping device except as follows.

And then there are a couple of exceptions there.

This kind of tracks the state statute again, adopting it into our municipal code.

But uh vaping devices, of course, over the last I don't know what, 15-20 years have become much more of a problem, and particularly among younger people.

So to overuse an old expression, this puts another tool in the toolbox for our officers to enforce that.