Parks and Recreation Committee - Regular Meeting

Recorded. Mhmm. Then we're ready to go. Alright. So we're now called to order. Everybody's here. So next up is pledging allegiance. Right? We aren't missing anybody. Right. Bye bye.

Pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Okay. That's me doing roll call of membership out

of order. So that's fine.

We're all here. Alright. So next up on the agenda, number four, approval of minutes from the previous meeting. If we could start with a motion, please.

Move to approve. Marvin Mann. Nancy Sherman second.

When that happens, you get to pick. You get to go. Want me to Choice. You only need one of them,

So don't

be. Any questions, discussions about the media meeting minutes from last month? Hearing none, all in favor of approving the minutes from the previous meeting, please say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? Aye. It's. Next up, public participation. We have new people to meet, community partnership supervisor. Yes. Oh, there you are, Peter. So

Peter is our new community partnership supervisor, and I'll let him introduce himself, but you he is familiar to some of you, I'm sure, already.

To be here. My name is Peter Katarva, as Colleen mentioned, the new community partnership supervisor. I've been at APL for two years already. Prior to this, I was the adult or one of the adult services and engagement librarians. I'm working on a lot of humanities projects in the library and in the city, like sign book poetry and the Appleton Poet Laureates, and as well as the arts in residence program that we have here, and then some other fun programs throughout.

Prior to working in Appleton, I worked in Free Lakes, Wisconsin at the Edward u Demer Memorial Library. It's their public library. I started there as a technical services librarian and libraries manager, and then I moved into the library director role and held that for a period of time. I have my master's in library and information science from UW Milwaukee. While I was completing that, I worked at an elementary school as a library teaching assistant assistant as well. But happy to be in this role now and looking forward to the future. Nice to meet everyone.

Thank you. Alright.

Next up is the introduction of our new administrative support specialist. Caitlin, I didn't warn you.

So Yeah.

Would you like to say anything other

Start here as a volunteer and then work my way up from page to where I'm at today.

Yeah. Been with us for twelve years in Yeah. One way or another. So been a great help to us already. Yeah. And jumping right in. Welcome.

Become very familiar with both of you because we'll see you each month. Yeah. Let's see. And then there's a third announcement. Please. I wanna hear more about the

Martin Luther King. So but in addition to the communications, public communications is last night, I was honored to represent the staff of the Appleton Public Library at the Doctor. Martin Luther King Junior celebration at the chapel, and the staff of the library were awarded the Jane LaChapelle McCarty Community Leader Award. So this is the award that was presented. Quite a beautiful award.

And it was a powerful event as always. If you have not been, I strongly encourage you to attend sometime. It was a really nice night and quite a treat to be there and accept the award on behalf of this amazing group of people.

Hey, Delix. Yeah. Yeah. Does the library still have a relationship with the celebration and accepting like there's like a scholarship, right, or a essay contest? We used to accept essays.

The essay contest, I don't think that is currently ongoing. They did poems last night. So there was one somebody who recited a poem from another poet and then someone who had written their own poem as well. And there was dance and

music as well. So

good memory. Mhmm.

The next item is to establish the order of the day. Did anybody have anything from either of the next two either of the action items that they wanted to discuss in more detail? Any questions about? If there is not, then we could take a motion to put them both on a consent agenda. So moved. Marvin Mann. Second. Martin Smith. All in favor of putting these two items on a consent agenda, please say aye. Aye. Now we approve both items together, starting again with a motion to approve the consent agenda.

Nancy Sherwin, motion to approve.

Brian Berger, second.

So all in favor then of approving the consent agenda, please say aye. Aye. Is anyone opposed? That takes us on into our information items starting with the admin report hiring process.

Yes. So what happens when you hire some one of your amazing staff members to be a supervisor is you get an opening. So we have just completed accepting applications for the adult services and engagement librarian, Peter's previous position. We are doing interviews for that position on the coming Monday, and we had over 90 applicants for that position, which is wonderful news for us. So

Next step then is a strategic planning, please.

Yeah. So not a ton, but just to kind of bring you all into the loop after last month's board meeting where you authorized proceeding with a request for proposal. We issued that request for proposal on January 5, so that is posted. It is on our website. It is also on the city of Appleton's website.

It's it's it's a very rigid process. This is something that follows very strict rules. So right now, we are receiving questions from consultants. Those questions will then be assembled and published based on the timeline in the RFP. And then we have a deadline of February 12 at noon central time for proposals. And after that, we'll narrow it down to finalists that we will interview and ultimately select with the goal of being ready to go with the kickoff April 1. Any questions about that?

Okay. Next item is the February personal personnel. Yes. It says personal. The personal. Oh, no. It does say personal.

So it's the p and p meeting. And so I will have Caitlin working with the chair and different committee members on scheduling that committee meeting. In February, it'll be the week before that board meeting, which as you may remember is unusual because it happens later in the month. So that board meeting is always the last Tuesday of the month because of the state annual report deadline. So we'll have that personnel policy committee meeting sometime the week of February 16, assuming the stars align and all committee members or at least a quorum will be able to find a time that works.

If not, we'll look at the week before.

Questions about that? Does everybody remember if you're on the personal and policy committee? Okay. There we go. Alright. We've got that list of committee assignments, so don't forget to check that in case you're you don't remember for sure. Next up is our trustee training topic on the effective board meetings and trustee participation. Ah. I read over it, and

I was like, oh, wow.

This is nice. Our library handles a lot of construction of the agenda, which I think I appreciate because it it helps things consistent with how the city works. You know? Like, I feel like we're very different. But given what I read in there, it seems like library boards can staff very differently from how other cities do and be kind of inconvenient residents.

We do strive for alignment and consistency with other city committees even though library is a little unusual having a board of trustees and the decision making authority that the library board has. That doesn't mean that our meetings are run much differently. And so you'll see a lot in this very, very nice, quick trustee essentials chapter that is completely in common with what happens with other city committees. You know, something that happens pretty regularly at city council and committee meetings is there's public comments. People come to speak on items that are on the agenda.

And on our meeting agendas, we do have a place for that. We don't often have people coming to comment. However, if we did, we would follow a consistent process similar to what is goes happens with city council. So people who are present and wanna speak on an item that is on the agenda will have five minutes to speak. And so you just looked at me. I said not five minutes. Okay. I think it's five minutes.

Derek. Don't look at me, Derek.

And so and so what's really important is that we we are consistent for for all of our meetings. So we don't wanna have one meeting where, say, we have people that come to speak, and we let them speak for forty five minutes. And then the next meeting, oh, no. You only get to speak for a minute. So we think this is a a good process, what what the consistency with the city and following that process, but also that it has to be an item that's on the agenda.

So we do keep our meetings focused. The other thing that I thought was kinda neat was the sample calendar at the back of the chapter was there were a lot of things that were really in alignment. You know, some things we do at a slightly different time of year, but it looked pretty familiar in a lot of ways to the sample annual board meeting calendar. But, otherwise, I guess, any any questions about anything you've read, any observations, or do you have suggestions of topics that you want to have covered in a future meeting?

Colleen, I do have sort of

a meta question. Forgive me for not remembering this. Are our meeting structures outlined in bylaws anywhere, or is this just sort of done in norms?

The structure of, like, the agenda

Right. And all

of that. It's norms.

Okay. Yeah.

The reason I asked was just thinking about I was thinking about this, and I was thinking about how our meetings run and the role of the board. Knowing that the city is hiring a new parks and recreation director who is in charge of right. Sits above the library. No. Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the structure Yeah. Then. I thought I thought in the high

I thought Yeah. You both

said above me, you're you're Right. You're the line goes from me to you guys.

And And terminates.

Get the misunderstanding of the org chart of the city. I thought the library is under the umbrella of parks and recreation. Does that used

to be the case? No. Nowhere in the state. I think there are states there are states that do it.

He was I mean, the parks and rec department facilities manager was active with the building.

Yes. So from, like, a building standpoint so we do have these kinda little offshoot.

Yeah.

So we do not manage in the within the library all the HR. You know, HR is the HR

department.

But parks and rec, which used to be parks, rec, and facilities management, and it's now just parks and rec, but includes facilities management. Just to clarify for everybody, they they are the experts in the facility. Okay. So they're the ones who do manage the contract. You see one of our largest budget lines in the in the budget is our facility's budget line, and that is to account for the staffing contracts, cleaning service, things like that. So yeah.

So that must be the little seed that grew into my my confusion then.

Okay. Good.

You will find in other states. You'll find departments of leisure, and then they'll have, like, parks and rec and different types of structures, but not in the state of Wisconsin.

That's good. And I think what

I've gathered from visiting with other libraries is that we have a very harmonious relationship because, technically, you report to us. You don't report to the mayor or anybody in the city. But there are other communities where that's still technically the answer, but they get a lot more pressure from the municipality that sort of charge or they even get threatened. So True. I like the met relationship that we have here.

Yeah. And you'll find in some communities that the library director isn't considered part of the leadership team, you know, maybe partially because of a dysfunctional dynamic, that that is something that we have worked really long and hard on here to have even though we don't always do things the same way and sometimes we have to talk about why the library is a little different, it there is mutual respect on both sides. Sometimes there's compromise. Everything isn't, you know, laid out clearly in statute. When there's gray areas, we figure out what makes sense. We have an amazing relationship with our city attorney's office. At least we did until

I told Darren not to look at me and go. And

so they're a resource for us, but it's it's not that way in every municipality.

So thank you.

Any other questions or topics?

These are this is great. I appreciate

these comments. Any topics you want to learn about in the future? And they don't have to be just from people inside this room. If it's a relevant topic, we could bring in folks to speak on a topic that is important to you. Alright. We'll noodle on that and get back to me.

Leads us to children's program updates in this map update section.

So I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the self directed programs that we're offering from desk. So one of them so self directed program ideas, we kind of curate an experience maybe, but that individuals interact with it on their own. So one of the things we did was put out some information to help kiddos understand AI. So we had some pictures out. We had a lot of information in kind of a flipbook and then some pictures out where they could vote with a sticker on which picture they thought was AI and which one was not. And then we provided the answers the following week. So I brought along last week's answers. And so if you wanna see this week's, you have to stop down with children's. But you you can kinda cover it up a little bit if you want to. So I brought along last week yeah.

Last week's answers for those. And then we have one that's for a little bit older kiddos and one that's for a little bit younger, and we are connecting it with some of our databases and some of our resources. And then the next self directed program, we're going to dive into March Mammal Madness, which is a very fun program that I was just recently learning about. It's out of the Arizona State University. And the basic premise of it is that who will win? Have you seen those kids books? They're real popular, but kind of if you had, you know, a dinosaur and an alligator, who would win? Then the idea is that the kids learn about the animals. Right? How they fight, what their teeth and their claws and stuff do, but that they're they're doing a lot of of learning with them.

And so March Mammal Madness is kind of that on a grand scale. So what the university does is they have a team of scientists who research habitats and all this stuff, and they do, like, probability estimations. And then they have a random number generator so that there is an element of chance. So you can sign up and do the the official bracket. And so there, we're working with conservation engagement specialist with the Northeast Wisconsin Land Trust, and he's gonna bring us some actual paper ones.

So but we're also gonna do some in a similar format to the AI. So here's one that we're gonna be having out. So when So it'll kinda look like that. And then the idea is that the kiddos can do some research, and we'll have some some links and some actual information there, and then they can put their sticker on there. So I brought along a sample of that. And so we'll kinda have that going in February to get Let's participate.

Yes.

Please do. And then one of my my magical humans on my staff was like, and for the littles, we need a cute grack. So this would be the gracket of who is the cutest.

Oh, okay.

This might be a little more subjective. So grab any Larger pictures. So you can really dive into, you know, the size of the ears and the eyes and how soft do you think that fur really is. And then there will also be some fact pages there and some additional some additional information. So no breaths. It's along for fun. And And I think they're all really cute and I would have earlier.

Community partnerships. I'm going to share a few updates in our kind of three areas in community partnerships, local history, teen programming, and then adult programming. For local history, we're continuing presentations with the Appleton Historical Society in 2026. In January, we welcomed Jim Krueger who presented on Presto Products, a company from Appleton or a historic company from Appleton. And in February, we will virtually welcome Appleton native doctor Ann McKeej, and he will share a presentation titled from from football field to the clinic, CTE story and hometown memories.

If you're looking for something to do Wednesday, February 11, 06:30PM, you are to be in. For team programming, yesterday was MLK Day, so ASD students didn't have school. So we provided an afternoon program for them. We brought in local artist Janelle Gents, who presented self care for teens, move your body to quiet your mind. That was well received and great to fill in that gap when students don't have school.

Also, later this month, at the end of the month, Saturday, July 31, we will have our Launchpad team pitch competition. It's open to or it was open to all Fox City students from sixth grade to twelfth grade. There was a registration process, so we know who our pitchers will be. But they will have five minutes to pitch a business, a product, or community focused item to a panel of judges, and then they will decide who is the winner. There are prizes that are funded by the ALA's Library's Build Business Grant Fund.

And for adult programming, a couple of things I want to mention. We have 10 public PC laptops that are available in The US venture coworking space now. I'm working on increasing use in those for those laptops. We have a couple programs that will utilize those new resources. We have motivate with Milanote.

That is going to be facilitated by our library assistant in technology learning and innovation. Milanote is a digital workspace to organize ideas, photos, notes, and things like that. So Maddie will lead folks through the functionality of that resource, and then we'll have laptops available for people to follow along throughout the program. Then later in the month, Kenny, our adult services engagement librarian, will lead a computer basics course, again, using those laptops for folks to follow along. This is a registered program, so we'll keep it limited to the number of laptops that we've got at the moment.

But it's really a whatever questions come up, they address them. The goal is very basic computer skills, but it varies depending on the audience that we have. And then finally, I want to mention that we welcomed our January March artist in residence, Moriah Crocker. If you haven't already, I'd encourage you to go up to the art gallery and check out the the newest exhibition. As a part of that exhibition, Moriah has created these wonderful forging for books.

It's a recipe for moving through the library and discovering new books. It's it's a really meditative experience. You'll see the library in a new way, and it's fun to see the library through an artist's lens as well. While Moriah's here, she'll lead a few programs for us. In February, she'll lead a program called physical practice for wellness, and in March, a program called movement for Parkinson's. That's all for me.

We'll bring us to our last agenda item, adjournment. Do need a motion? So moved.

All

in favor of attorney, please say aye.

Aye. Aye.

Is anyone opposed? Yes. Thanks.