Board of Health - Regular Meeting

It is now 7 o'clock. We're going to call the meeting of the Board of Health to order. I'd like to thank the Safety and Licensing Committee on behalf of the Board of Health for agreeing to meet here at 7 AM. I know you have another meeting tonight. So on behalf of the Board of Health and all the constituents in Appleton, we thank you for coming to two meetings.

Thank you, Chair Spears. I'll call to order the special meeting of the Safety and Licensing Committee for Wednesday, August 26th. And also thank you, everyone, for coming this early for a committee meeting. We appreciate it. This is not our normal meeting time. It's normally 5.30 on Wednesdays. So we're doing this because we're doing this joint meeting with the Board of Health, who does normally meet at 7 a.m. So please join us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Okay, thank you. We'll take a roll call of membership. We'll start with Safety and Licensing Committee. I'm Chris Crote, the chair of the committee, representative from District 14. Other members of the committee are Alder Fenton, Alder Jones, Alder Hayden, and Alder Lambrick. They are all here. If you want to just introduce yourselves, please.

Denise Fenton, District 6.

Josh Lambrick, District 1.

Patrick Hayden, District 7.

Bye, Jones, District 10.

Thank you.

Thank you, and... I'LL ALSO GIVE THAT OPPORTUNITY TO THE BOARD OF HEALTH MEMBERS. I'M CATHY SPEARS. I WAS AN ALDER PERSON BEFORE I WAS ON THE BOARD OF HEALTH. SO WE HAVE JAKE WOODFORD, WHO IS OUR MAYOR, WHO IS GOING TO BE ABSTAINING TODAY. SO THANK YOU, JAKE. KATHLEEN FUSCH, DEB WORTH, EMMA KANE, VIA JONES, AND VERA MELTZER. SO IF YOU... DR. VOGEL. OH, AND DR. VOGEL. I'M SORRY. Missed you up there, Lee. Sorry about that. So why don't you just go around and say your names so everybody knows in the audience. We'll start with Alderperson Jones. Jones, District 10.

Brad Meltzer, District 2.

Lee Vocal, community member and advisor to the Board of Health.

Deb Worth.

Kathleen Fuchs.

Emma Kane. Again, thank you all. And I especially would like to thank the non-elected people because this is a lot of work that you go through. So on behalf of the city, thank you for volunteering to do this and serve on the Board of Health. Okay, so 260732. I'm seeking a motion to approve the minutes of the May 13th Board of Health meeting. Move to approve. Second. Okay, are there any changes? Comments? All in favor say aye. Aye. Nays? Abstentions, 1. Thank you. Public hearings and appearances, we technically have none. Under action items, we have 260903, resolution 8R26, excessive vehicle noise data collection. I'm going to seek a motion just to get it on the table from either member of either committee. That's the way I normally am.

I should announce it for the Safety and Licensing Committee. So you want to take your motion first, and then I'll announce it.

So I'm seeking a motion from the Board of Health to get it on the table. Motion to approve it to be discussed.

I'll move it for discussion. I'll second.

Okay. All right. And then for the Safety and Licensing.

Thank you, Chair. So the action item listed for Safety and Licensing is a different number. It's 26-0759. It's the same resolution, Resolution 8R26, Excessive Vehicle Noise Data Collection. Is there a motion from the Safety and Licensing Committee? And a second? Alder Fenton?

Moved for discussion.

Is there a second? I'll second. Second from Alder Hayden. Okay. So we have it on the floor for Safety and Licensing as well.

So now I believe let's start with Dr. Siepers to explain the work that the city's done. And then we'll ask Alderperson Smith to give us his reason for bringing it forward. Unless you'd rather do it the other way, Dr. Siepers.

It would make sense to me if the resolution is brought, we might hear that first.

Okay, so then Alderperson Smith, would you like to tell us why we are here today and what you would like to have happen because of this resolution?

Yeah, and just a point of order, when do we get public comment?

After you do, we listen as a committee, and then we'll be asking for any public comment. That's the way normally we run the Board of Health. Okay. I don't know what you guys do at your safety and licensing committee.

We can do the same, Chair.

OK. OK. Well, I guess I'd like to say, first of all, thank you for everybody for being here at 7 AM on end of August day. It means a lot. And I think this is an important issue and worth our time for consideration. I'd also like to thank everybody who's in the audience for coming out. I look forward to hearing the public comment. I've read several, all their opinions online and blogs and so on, so I have a sense that as far as that audience, this resolution is starting from a deficit. And I too would definitely love it if the noise issue went away, but it's not going to go away because it affects so many people in their day-to-day life, not least of whom are residents in my district, which includes east and west of the College Avenue Bridge, But obviously, the noise problem expands beyond that. As I read responses to the idea of better noise enforcement, and by the way, some of what I'm saying will be keyed to kind of the images and graphs chart that I handed out, just so you can sort of see what I'm talking about. As I read responses to the idea of data collection, one tell word about noise is the idea of annoyance. Noise is referred to as a matter of annoyance that people all over the city have to deal with. It may be true that noise is annoying to residents all around the city, but there are parts of the city where noise is inhibiting ordinary life. The excessive noise that we are talking about is not an annoyance, but makes ordinary life difficult. Sleeping, keeping your window open, sitting outside, That is what we are dealing with in my district and likely in other places that you could think of as hot spots around the city. One person I know commented on a Facebook post, had a car with speakers going by the house today, literally rattling the windows for a solid minute. Lots of comments that we've seen. I am asking listeners and especially my fellow alders to put aside their sense that we are talking about a common experience shared by everyone around the city and imagine instead that we have a situation where normal life is at times challenged to the extent that people are considering moving or shutting down a business. This resolution asks for data collection. I've seen comments along the lines of, why collect data about something we already know? It's loud out there, duh. But better data on excessive noise, where and how loud, is essential for crafting a strategy that helps residents and businesses. Right now, we have no strategy. And that is what we need to get. And we can't craft that without decent data. So let me give an example. So this is a reference to number two here, this graph. This is the data on noise enforcement for May. And that is the last month for which I have data. And it's just a spreadsheet list is what we received. But I took that information and plotted it on a graph. So you can see the times and the days. I also used light blue to show weekends. Those are those bars coming down. And then I put a dotted line across to show 8.30 PM. What you see is kind of a mix of warnings and citations. But note how after 8.30 PM, the enforcement goes away. There's three or four exceptions in there the whole month. There are relatively few warnings. This is for the downtown corridor. Relatively few warnings or citations in the late night. If we were to craft a strategy that tried to help residents, I would imagine particularly working on late night stops. The impression here is that enforcement is more or less randomly scattered around daytime hours, 1 PM to 830. The theory behind this approach would seem to be month to month, we hit a basic number of stops. And gradually, the noise will improve over time if we sit on it. If we make a basic showing of enforcement, no one can get too mad. We can always point to our numbers. But this is not a strategy that is attempting to make a difference for people whose quality of life is being harmed by noise. If you turn the page, you'll see another type of graph. This is an example of the type of data I'd like to have come in by means of this resolution. This is, you'll see a scatter there, by the way, scatter of dots. Along the bottom line, the x-axis there, you have 0 to 24. Those are kind of your military hour, your hours, from midnight to midnight, basically. And then the y-axis is the decibel level. And so you get up to 80. And I'll explain what the system does. But the higher it is, the louder the decibel amount. This is the type of data I would like to have come out of this resolution. This is drawn from the data on excessive noise collected by Knoxville, Tennessee, and this is something that they released. Note there's no personal information being collected, and for what it's worth, I've talked to a leader of the DFLOC group, and he's in support of this type of use of data. The goal of this data is to collect incidents of excessive noise, which are incidents that go above 80 decibels. Every time that happens, if there's an incident that's above 80 decibels, the incident is marked for time and noise intensity. And then it can be put onto a graph. Imagine this was the information we got in Appleton, which I'm not actually arguing. I bet ours would have some differences. Knoxville is a bit bigger. It's a bit larger of a downtown. But what would it tell us, say, if this was data that we collected? This in particular would tell us there's a huge problem between 10 AM and 1 AM. Maybe enforcement should target that time. Maybe when people call in to complain about noise during those hours, there should be a response. Maybe we should target that time with targeted enforcement, which is when people are home. That's the time when people are home with family and trying to sleep. That would make a difference in residents' lives. This graph doesn't give information on days, but Knoxville also has graphs that show that. So you can see which days, weekends, et cetera, where you get peaks and troughs as far as noise goes. That would all be data that would help us craft enforcement that made a difference to people. It becomes possible with data like this to develop a goal. This is one criticism of my approach. What does, and this was from a Facebook post yesterday from Alder Van Zeeland, what does success actually look like? What are we trying to reduce? By how much and over what period of time? That's exactly the type of question that could be answered with better data. In some ways, the demand to have a measurable goal is impossible because we don't have data. All we're reduced to saying is, well, we want over time for data to get better. We want to bend the curve of noise. because we don't know where or how much or what times this is. We have zero knowledge. And this has been confirmed to me many times talking to people in the city administration. We have zero knowledge about the overall experience of noise in the problem sections of the city. If we had this level of data, which I'm pointing out here with Knoxville, we could say, all right, here's what's happening. Let's make it a goal to cut down on extreme incidents of noise from 9 PM to midnight. That would be helpful to residents at the time they care about most. It seems to be a time we don't enforce. Let's define extreme incidents as being those above 90 decibels. When I talk to residents, it's especially the window-rattling loud versions of noise that are tough. Let's cut those incidents by half or a third this summer. It'll all depend on the actual data that we get to define those goals. In our state of total noise blindness, about the timing and intensity of noise, it's impossible to set a good goal. That's the whole reason for this data-first approach, is that we would be able to set up goals. I also think this would be helpful to the city. I mean, this is a branch to help the city administration. For example, we would be freed from anecdotal evidence. Even if there were still loud vehicles on occasion, as no doubt will be the case, The city could point residents to good evidence that the problem is lessening. Last month, we had x number of incidents. This month, this summer, we've reduced that by a third. So yes, it's annoying, but we're working at it, and we're using the data to get a handle on this problem. Right now, we cannot say that. LET ME TURN NOW TO THE KNOXVILLE PLAN. SO I DIDN'T PULL THIS OUT OF A HAT, THIS IDEA OF GOING DATA FIRST. I LOOKED AROUND AT WHAT OTHER CITIES HAVE DONE. CITIES FROM NEW YORK CITY TO SMALL CITIES IN IOWA HAVE TAKEN ON THE NOISE PROBLEM. LOTS OF EXAMPLES OF THIS AND HOW IT WORKS. KNOXVILLE I FOUND INTERESTING BECAUSE IT HAD SOME PARALLELS TO US. HERE'S THEIR KIND OF, THIS GOES BACK TO 2022, HERE'S THEIR CITY RELEASE ABOUT THAT. I'D HIGHLIGHT ONE PARAGRAPH, KIND OF IN THE MIDDLE THERE, IN PARTICULAR. SO HERE'S WHAT THE CITY SAYS. RIGHT NOW THE CITY IS LIMITED TO ANECDOTAL COMPLAINTS FROM RESIDENTS AND WHAT PATROL OFFICERS WITNESS, SAID CARTER HALL, THE CITY'S POLICY AND BUSINESS INNOVATION MANAGER. THIS CAMERA On loan from UK-based 24 Acoustics Limited is a promising new tool that can help cities address noise as a quality of life issue. We want to conduct a short-term demonstration project to track the frequency and source of the worst noise issues. That's what Knoxville did. They had a problem. Lots of complaints. lots of anecdotal evidence, lots of people telling stories. They said, OK, let's do some data. We'll figure out what's actually happening down there. And that scatter graph that I showed and a number of other graphs on days is the result of that. And they said, OK, we genuinely do have a problem. Now let's come up with some targeted enforcement that try to crack down on this. And you can read more about that online. That's exactly our position as a city. We have reports. We have a lot of anger. We have an obvious problem, but no way to quantify the time or intensity of the incidents that are most bothersome to residents, that keep them up at night. As it turns out, that data was helpful in demonstrating for Knoxville the extent of the problem. And we could do something similar. Now, this is 2022. Knoxville installed noise monitoring cameras and used the data to have better targeted enforcement. Now, I think we should avoid cameras. This is 2022. It's well before the flock situation. So what I would suggest, and the city resolution, wild, wild, about how much this would cost. Here's the type of thing that I think would work. And this is what I'm asking for. Here's CESPA. There's a number of companies that do things just like this. So it wouldn't have to be this. A lot of the technical details about systems and communication sort of escape me. But there's a number of options that are in this category. You'll note the picture here on the page with number six. Note that there's no camera involved in this. Note that it's a box with then a microphone that goes up above. You'll note with another image, they can be strapped to light poles. And what does the output look like? The output would be it doesn't record audio, it doesn't record video, but it would be set to record incidents that are over a certain amount. So this would be a sample output. Friday, here's the timestamp. Here's the, and I don't understand what all these things mean, but note that the high point here is the 98.7 decibels. The maximum point of this, But this four-second peak is the 103. And then that kind of noise data is what is retained. There's no audio, no video. It's not surveillance. Also, it's nice. Since it's not surveillance, it's cheaper, right? There's no camera. There's no nothing like that. The information that you get from this on incidents could be plotted on graphs. The cost for this CESFA, and this is in line with some, there's this Optimus thing. There's other versions and other companies that are putting these out. And the cost is similar. The cost is about $2249, $2,249 for one of these. My recommendation would be that we get, say, five of these, three for the downtown college and two that could be moved around to sample some other locations and see what some comparisons are. One thing that I see in the city's response is that the idea is this would come from the health budget, and I don't understand why that would be. The health budget is much smaller than the APD. APD does enforcement. APD has a high level of technology interest. In the six-month mid-year review from the APD, they talked about a continued investment in technology to improve the department's technology resources and capabilities. There's all kinds of investment that the APD is making in technology. Also note that it seems like we're not going to have flock next year. So I don't know what exactly our budget is for that, but there does seem to be Some money that we could have for what is all around not a large Investment for getting some actual data on the problem that we have on College Avenue So that is my that you know I I think that is imminently doable and that is my That is my proposal. I've looked at what the the city put forward. I think that the numbers are just wildly imaginative frankly This would have some cost to it for sure, but it is not something that is immense. And there would be a little bit of a learning curve to how to use this. But like I said, we definitely have people who are good at this and who could do this in the city. I want to move on now to the central finding of the city's response.

Okay, before you do that, I'm just going to allow people to ask you any questions that they might have of what you're proposing. And my question is, why in your resolution did you just not ask for that? Because your resolution gives us various methods. So you do the fixed decibel monitoring stations, the temporary mobile monitoring equipment citizen reporting agreements, and you don't you never discuss that of what that means in Automated noise detection technologies, so why didn't you just zero in on what you wanted to ask? Safety and licensing in the health department, and I'll just preface this by saying under state statutes that Board of Health is the one that takes care of noise and Variances all the variances for noise in the city go via that that's why it's under the health department's budget So yeah, I was just curious being in a past alder myself Why you didn't just narrow down and come up with that idea after working with staff?

Yeah, so two things I mean let me just hit the thing you say there at the end first I The noise information that we get as safety and licensing, that all comes from the APD, and also the enforcement would also come from APD. So they've been the primary point for the noise. I worked with Director Siepers on the ordinances back in winter of 2025, so I understand that health also has a foot in this. I think it's more clearly in the kind of skill set of the APD, which has a lot of experience with the technology and monitoring, most recently the flock cameras. So that's the first part. The second thing is, I mean, one criticism of this approach. I didn't feel like I was getting much help from the city. But it was clear to me that the city didn't want to move forward with this more work on noise. And so I felt a little bit on my own with this whole thing. And I also felt like one criticism of what I'm doing is that I'm being too, like, this is what you must do, what you have to do. And so I thought I would give basically a softball. What would the city recommend on this project, on this problem? What would be the best form in the city's view of keeping track of gathering data, basic data on noise? I didn't know what the city would think about that. I did this research. because the numbers that you get in the actual city response are massive. I mean, if you start adding those up, it comes out to... Over a million. Yes, huge. And that's just not true. It is untrue. And so I then said, okay, I'm going to have to do it. So I went back and found this CESPA, and it's really not that expensive of a move to do. So that's where that comes from.

Okay. Are there any other questions before we? Okay, you can, oh, Dr. Vogel.

I do have a question. Do you have numbers of complaints that you've received over and over what kind of frequency or time period? Have you summarized that at all in your area for the people that you represent?

I don't have a summary of that. I mean, this moves into anecdotal. Like from, you know, my story, which not everybody has heard, is that, so 2023, I was campaigning And in the winter of 2024, I was campaigning for Alder. And I was knocking doors. And I got an earful about the problem with noise. And I said, OK, that's a great first issue to start working on as an Alder. And I thought, this is one I can't imagine the city not wanting to work on, too. So that's what I started with. I've been working at this for two years. And it's absolutely an innumerable amount of people who I've talked to. I meet people. I still, even in the past couple of months, meet people in the library. And all of a sudden, noise comes up. I'm like, well, you have no idea how much I've worked on that issue. It's something that is constant that I hear. But I haven't quantified that.

CHAIR, IF I MAY, WE DO HAVE THE BREAKDOWN OF NOISE COMPLAINTS YEAR-OVER-YEAR. THAT IS IN THE 2026 DATA BRIEF. DO YOU WANT TO HIGHLIGHT THAT FOR THE AUDIENCE? YES. SO IN THE PACKET, THAT IS PAGE 384. SO THIS IS ALL THREE LAW ENFORCEMENT DISTRICTS. AND SO JUST TO QUALIFY THE TIME PERIOD IN WHICH WE ARE TALKING ABOUT, THIS IS JANUARY 1 TO MAY 31, AND SO THE REASON WHY THAT TIME PERIOD WAS CHOSEN IS THE DATA BRIEF HAD STARTED TO BE WORKED ON IN JUNE. SO THAT WAS THE NEWEST INFORMATION AT THE TIME. So if we look at 2022, for that period of time, 216 noise complaints that were reported to PD. In 2023, it was 182. 2024, it was 219. 2025 was 198. And in 2026, it was 202. And again, that was apples to apples, January to May. there is a breakout of the noise complaints by district. So we can look specifically at the downtown enforcement district. So again, same time period. If we look at year to date, so January to May, for downtown, it's 100. So looking back, that's almost 50%. SO THERE IS A DISPROPORTIONATE DISTRIBUTION OF NOISE COMPLAINTS. FOR 2023 DOWNTOWN WAS I BELIEVE THAT'S 61. 2024 DOWNTOWN WAS 91. FOR 2025, 100, AND 2026, 88. WHILE IT LOOKS LIKE THERE'S SOME VARIANCE THERE, STATISTICALLY SPEAKING, THEY'RE THE SAME. SO THERE IS NOT ENOUGH VARIATION TO INDICATE A SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YEAR-OVER-YEAR THE VEHICLE NOISE COMPLAINTS OR NOISE COMPLAINTS, EXCUSE ME. Can I respond?

Wait a minute, wait a minute. Do you have anything else you want to add to that?

I just want to address that one point that Dr. Vogel had asked.

And thank you. We're going to try to get this so that we can hear what Alderperson Smith wanted. And so just flag me if you want to respond to it, if that's OK with you, Alderperson Smith. Because that helps us in our decision-making process. So, Alderperson Smith, you have the floor again. Thank you. Yes.

And I just want to say that in my view and in the view of many residents, the call-in complaint is not an accurate representation of the actual noise problem. And I think you would, if everyone would just think about themselves and their own experience, you know, there's many reasons why people don't call in. They're upset because it seems like they call in and nothing happens. There's no enforcement, so they give up on that. Someone just kind of goes by, and it's like you call in and they say, well, what was the car? What was the description? What information do you have? Well, I don't have any information. It just rocks my house. There's many reasons why people don't call in. So call-ins give us an interesting window onto spaces in the city that are problematic. They don't tell us. information about where, about the intensity or the overall problem that we have. So that is, I don't believe that that is, I think that information is being misused. You want me to go on? I can go on. I'll finish what I got here. So this is the central finding of this memo. I also reproduced this in the images. And I want to really take issue with one thing here. And this is a big piece of the city's response. The second sentence, under Wisconsin state law, vehicular noise from an unmodified exhaust system is lawful at any decibel level and cannot be regulated by ordinance. And if you go on and read in the city's response, that is a major point. The city is saying it doesn't matter what your noise data is because Even if there's stuff coming through at 90 or 100, it doesn't matter because it might be legal. And so there's no point in gathering data about how loud things are. And I think that leaves residents in a real pickle, a real problem. Because they're being told by the city that there is no upper limit on noise. It could be absolutely legal to drive through at 100 decibels. That's what this is saying.

But we also, if I may, I was on the Board of Health when we changed the ordinance to allow citations to be written if in the estimation of the police officer there was an excessive noise happening. And that's where they were able to say it was larger than I believe it was. And correct me if I'm wrong, Dr. Seepers, because this is my old memory. It was like louder than a lawnmower. Is that correct? So we did take action as a Board of Health to give the police the ability to, if they heard it and they had the time, to stop and write a citation. Am I misunderstanding what we voted on?

THE LANGUAGE SOUNDS FAMILIAR. I DO NOT HAVE THE CODE IN FRONT OF ME. I WOULD DEFER TO CITY ATTORNEY BARONS.

I REMEMBER GOING THROUGH THAT DISCUSSION HERE. CAN I LET THE CITY ATTORNEY AND THEN WE'LL GO BACK TO YOU. THANKS.

UNREASONABLE NOISE THAT WAS PASSED AS PART OF THE NOISE RESOLUTION. vehicular noise, engine noise that would be unreasonable. If it was a lawful muffler, if it was really vehicle engine noise, that would be unenforceable and applicable towards that because of the state's preemption in that area.

Right. But we did give them latitude to be able to stop and do that if they had the time, correct?

Not for just UNREASONABLE NOISE. OKAY.

SORRY, I THOUGHT THAT.

EVERY OTHER SITUATION EXCEPT ENGINE NOISE.

OKAY. SO GO AHEAD. ALTER PERSON.

THANK YOU. THANK YOU. SINCE WE'RE ON THIS SUBJECT AND WE HAVE THE DEPUTY CITY ATTORNEY THERE, COULD YOU JUST EXPLAIN FOR EVERYONE'S BENEFIT, GENERALLY SPEAKING, STATE STATUTE VERSUS CITY ORDINANCE, WHAT WE CAN DO AS FAR AS MORE OR LESS RESTRICTIVE?

adopt anything that's consistent with state law. And state law is clear about engine noise and muffler requirements. So if the muffler is lawful, any noise that would be associated with that engine noise, you really can't touch that.

So essentially, we can't be more restrictive than state statute. That's what I was getting at. Thanks.

No, but I was trying to make the point that we were giving the latitude. If they wanted to stop them, they could.

So Alderperson Smith, that would be the- So we've heard it now from Attorney Glad. There is no way for the city to restrict noise on simply that is too loud. If you come through College Avenue, a residential district, at 90 decibels or 100 decibels, and they don't do unreasonable acceleration, there's no revving, they don't do any of those actions, and they also don't have, it's not an obviously modified muffler, but it's still super loud, 90 or 100. That is bad for people's health. Appleton's city position is that we can't do anything about it, because it's not something that we can ticket. So I also thought, when we passed the noise ordinances, because there is a table about maximum noise in what kinds of districts. But then I got into conversations with Lieutenant McCormick. And I'm like, why isn't people, when they drive by at super loud noise, why can't they be pulled over and sighted? And the answer is that we don't tick it on noise. Unless there's a modified muffler that we can identify, we will not pull it over. So there is no noise limitation. right now in Appleton, unless you can identify it as a modified muffler. And I think that is a key problem. I've been pushing on this behind the scenes. It is a major problem. And it's also one that we have an answer to. I hadn't intended for this issue to really get wrapped up in this resolution, but it did because of the city's response. Their major argument about noise collection is that it doesn't matter. Even if we get a scatter like Knoxville has, there's all these 90 and 100 decibel incidents, it doesn't matter because we probably can't pull any of those people over anyways. But that's not true. And there's two pieces of evidence I would say. First of all is the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau. This was turned in by Representative Lee Snodgrass to, and this is a respected nonpartisan, bipartisan, whatever body giving legal responses. And you'll see that they say, under home rule authority, which grants them, cities, broad powers to regulate, this is the second paragraph, to regulate local affairs as long as their ordinance and actions do not conflict with state law. So that was questioned by Lee's representative Snodgrass's office. What does this mean? And the meaning is exact. I went back and had multiple conversations. I'm like, the city says this isn't true. So help me understand what's going on here. And they said, no, we talked about this. This is what this is about, is that the city has broad powers to regulate noise so long as it doesn't conflict with these muffler and exhaust lines. Now, the city has about six pages in this report and response saying that, well, it would actually, if we're pulling people over for 90 decibels, it would actually a conflict with the fact that we're limited on mufflers. It would be tantamount to overruling this. But I would just point out that we are granted broad powers. And then if you look at other cities, again, I just don't know why we're not doing a little more Googling. Madison. Madison is definitely in Wisconsin. Look what they have in their noise, light motor vehicle noise controls. This includes motorcycles. It includes cars. And there's two points that I highlight here below. 80 decibel noise limit. It shall be unlawful for any person to cause noise levels from the operation of a light motor vehicle in excess of 80 decibels at any location within the corporate limits of the city of Madison. Measurement can be made at any distance greater than or equal to 15 feet from the closest approach to the vehicle. Number five, excessive noise. Notwithstanding the noise limit expressed under subsection 4, it shall be unlawful for any person to operate a light motor vehicle such as to cause excessive noise as a result of a defective or modified exhaust system. So here we have both those things brought into coordination. There is an overall noise limit, 80 decibels. Now, that does not mean we're going to pull everyone over that goes over 80 decibels. It's like a speed limit. But yes, if you get up to 90, you could be pulled over. That's clear from the Madison law. And that is not in conflict with the fact that there's also a muffler limit. And it's not only the great scholars at Madison, but Menominee Falls have found the same thing. If you look onto the next page, they do the same thing. It shall be unlawful for any person to cause noise levels from the operation of a light motor vehicle in excess of 80 decibels at any location within the corporate limits of the village. Measurement can be made at any distance greater than or equal to 15 feet. They probably took that from Madison. But Menominee Falls also feels like we're going to have a noise limit. Once you add that in, a lot of the city's case against this resolution falls apart. Because it is useful. If we had a set of incidents that are over 80 decibels on College Avenue and around the city, those are all illegal incidents. Again, we're not going to ticket everyone, just like we're not ticketing everyone that goes over 30 miles an hour. But that is an important data point, and those should be defined by us as against the law. And also note that Menominee Falls also has a modified muffler rule. We can do this. We're no worse than Menominee Falls. We should say, and be clear as a city, 80 decibels is our limit. That is what we define. If you have a Supermax car that you buy and it's You take it somewhere else. It will be illegal on our streets, especially if you hit one of these hot spots that we're trying to enforce. And so I would challenge. Again, a lot of the city position goes away once you say, this is another point from Alderman Thielen, drawing on the city's position. Loud does not automatically mean illegal. Yes, if it's 90 or 100 decibels, if it's shaking windows, it is illegal. IT ISN'T NOW BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE THIS, BUT WE COULD EASILY ADD THIS UNDER WISCONSIN STATE LAW BECAUSE WE'RE JUST LIKE MADISON, WE'RE JUST LIKE MENOMINEE FALLS, WE COULD DO THIS. SO THAT IS WHAT...

EXCUSE ME, THAT'S NOT WHAT YOU'RE ASKING FOR, MAYOR WOODFORD.

I WOULD JUST LIKE TO PROVIDE SOME ADDITIONAL CONTEXT HERE, WHICH IS I AGREE THAT THE STATUTORY PREEMPTION ON THIS ISSUE DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE, AND WE'VE HAD these conversations among members of council and the community a number of times over the last couple of years, it is absurd that there's a statutory preemption here. But there is a preemption nevertheless. And on the matter of the Legislative Reference Bureau memo, I reached out to the Legislative Reference Bureau to seek clarification, because I wondered, how could it be possible that this highly qualified group of Attorneys out of the Appleton City Attorney's Office could be so wrong on this issue How could how could that be true if the contention is that somehow? Even though these folks who I've worked with for six and a half years now have have have nailed it on so many other issues on this one There's such divergence from what the law says so I reached out to the Legislative Reference Bureau and I received THE FOLLOWING RESPONSE, AND THIS CAME IN YESTERDAY, SO I APOLOGIZE WE DIDN'T HAVE TIME TO INCLUDE IT IN THE MATERIALS, BUT THIS E-MAIL COMES FROM ERIC MUELLER, THE ASSISTANT CHIEF COUNSEL WHO WAS THE AUTHOR OF THE MEMO DATED DECEMBER 8, 2025, WHICH HAS BEEN CITED BY ALTER PERSON SMITH. I'LL READ THE RESPONSE IN FULL. THE MEMO FROM THE CITY OF APPLETON IS LARGELY IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE MEMO I PROVIDED. It goes a little farther in analyzing a specific type of potential noise violation, i.e., where a vehicle that is properly equipped with a functioning muffler that is nonetheless in violation of a city noise ordinance. I believe that the city's proposed approach to the issue is an entirely reasonable interpretation of a set of statutes that interact but do not directly address one another. As explained in the memos, city ordinances may not regulate certain motor vehicle-related matters inconsistently with Wisconsin statutes. Among the statutes is one addressing the functioning of a car's muffler. That statute does not impose any specific volume level, but rather requires an adequate and properly maintained muffler. It is a reasonable reading, perhaps the most reasonable reading of this statute to consider a muffler that meets mandatory federal motor vehicle equipment standards as adequate, and if undamaged and unmodified, properly maintained. AS SUCH, A NOISE ORDINANCE BY THE CITY, EVEN ONE THAT IS GENERALLY APPLICABLE, IS REASONABLY READ TO BE PROHIBITED BY STATE STATUTE FROM IMPOSING A HIGHER DECIMAL STANDARD THAN IMPOSED BY THE FEDERAL STANDARDS. I'LL MAKE SURE THAT THE ENTIRE TEXT OF THIS IS INCLUDED IN THE MINUTES FOR THIS MEETING. I think it's important that we have clarity here about what we're talking about. There is, in fact, a statutory preemption, which was cited in the materials that we prepared in response to the resolution. That is a fact. That is a fact.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you. Do you want to wrap this up, then?

Yes, I'll wrap it up. And I just wondered if I could respond to that, that that means that the Madison legal code is wrong. and Menominee Falls is wrong.

Probably. If that's what I've heard, I would agree with that.

And then I would also say what we lack in this city so far in the city's response is some creativity about how to go about this. I think, for example, from the letter that was just read, what could we work with? What could we do with that? One thing is that there's a reference to federal standards, which are with factory settings for bikes. There are federal for motorcycles. There are federal standards for those. So I've seen other cities craft ordinances where there's a presumption of modified muffler when sound goes up over 85 decibels, say. So that would be a way to, there would be ways to kind of take the stuff that we have here on the table and move it so that we can protect residents from our current situation, which is there is, we will not pull people over no matter how loud, and I think we could do this. I mean, that is what's happening.

All right. So now I'm going to allow either Mayor Woodford or Dr. Siepers, whoever would like to address this first, on the city's stance on this. And then we will open it up for public comment.

Thank you, Chair. I'll start and then can hand it off to colleagues as appropriate. But I think just to back up here a little bit,

And I'd just like to ask, if someone has a question based on something that I would like to get it right out of the way of any member of the committees, just raise your hand, and then the mayor or Dr. Seifers will stop talking, and we will ask that question, just so it flows better today.

Sounds good. So just to back us up a little bit and locate us in the questions, the present, how we got here. We have indeed been having conversations about vehicle noise that actually goes back now to 2021 in the city of Appleton. This has been a long running issue. We saw an uptick in this kind of activity as the pandemic went on and coming out of the pandemic and So this is not a new issue to us by any means. The resolution comes after a lot of conversation over time and talking through the underlying issues that impact our response. And despite the contention that We have no strategy. We, in fact, do. And I've shared that with the Common Council, with the community, with the author of the resolution over time. I think that the central issue here is that the strategy that we're using is not acceptable to some members of the community. And I can certainly appreciate that, absolutely. When we get into the conversation, and we'll dig more deeply into this, but the resolution in its current state seeks to direct staff work. And as we clarified in the memo that we put together, that's not the purview of the Common Council. So the Common Council can make appropriations and establish policy. And so I would invite the Common Council to do exactly that, invite the committee to do exactly that. If you believe that the approach we've taken is not appropriate or proportional, I would encourage the council to do that. The challenge is that when we talk about adding resource to something, we have to take it from somewhere else. And that is the underlying challenge here. That is an issue in terms of whether we're talking about additional technology to gather data, which ultimately is just a pretext for enforcement, which, again, we'll have to reprioritize resources to do. There seems to be a notion that we can just add, or that by reprioritizing, there are no consequences to the reprioritization, but there are. That's just the reality of everything that we do in local government. So to be clear, the administration's position is not that This is great. We support the noise that's happening in the community. We like the degradation of the quality of life in our community. Or we just don't care about quality of life in the community. That is not the position of our administration. We have tried to increase enforcement over time, which our response memo indicates. We can talk a little bit more about, and Chief can talk more about, times of day and the resource allocation issues. There seems to be a cynical view that this is about fixing numbers and that this is some political issue for us, when what this comes down to is We have to prioritize our resources, which are indeed limited. We have to work within the confines of our legal tools. And we talked about statutory preemption already. But we have to work within those confines. And that impacts our ability to respond in the ways that are being sought. So well, the resolution. seeks to direct staff work, we undertook a process of trying to put together some materials for context for the common council, for the committee and common council to consider. And the process of preparing the memo was also clarifying for us in some ways to pull the dates together to look at what the facts tell us about what's happening. And the sources for the information that was included in the materials are cited, and they're included in the packet. So there are so many things that we need to address and talk through. There are comparisons that we need to address and talk through. But I think it would be helpful for us to really drill down on the data portion of this first, which is, And I believe this was most clearly stated in a communication that Alder Smith sent to an email list yesterday. And I think this clarifying point is really important and put succinctly, which is, quote, my belief is that if we had actual data on how bad the noise is in some areas, it would become much harder for the city to be so hands off, end quote. That is the The bottom line, the data is a pretext for increasing enforcement. And it's my view that if ultimately our objective here is to increase enforcement, then let's have that conversation.

Let's talk about that.

Because we can burn money on studies and data collection, or we can get to what it is we're trying to accomplish. If that's really what our objective is, let's talk about that. But then let's talk about what it will take to do that and what it will pull from. Let's have that conversation. I want to address a couple of things, and I'll invite my colleagues to talk about some of this too. First, I'd like to talk about Knoxville, Tennessee. So Knoxville is indeed a very interesting case, and a couple of, now about a month, month and a half ago, I actually reached out to the mayor's office in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was referred to the the folks on that team who are responsible for their camera program, for their noise enforcement program, and had a great conversation with them, got some good context. So it is very interesting and I think compelling in a lot of ways. But I think it's worth noting that Tennessee operates under a different statutory framework. So that right out of the gates. The Knoxville program, where they partnered with UK-based 24 Acoustics was super interesting, because Knoxville was working on this problem and looking for ways to monitor. They wanted a camera system that could monitor, because camera enforcement in Tennessee is legal. So what they were looking for was a system that ultimately they could build to add to their camera enforcement regimen, which already included speed and red light cameras. So 24 Acoustics did a pilot where they loaned them the technology because they were trying to field test it and prove the camera technology in the field, which they did. And that allowed them to then have a data set for where they were going to place their enforcement cameras ultimately. And that was the basis of it. So what happened then is they got through their pilot with 24 Acoustics. And it was time for them to go out to RFP for their red light and speed camera contract. So they contract out for those services. And then the cameras are paid for by the ticket revenue that's generated off of the cameras. So there is no cost to Knoxville in that case, because there's a revenue stream that supports the cameras. So when they went out to RFP, they included the noise enforcement camera system in their request for proposals. So they said, OK, vendors, we're looking for a vendor for red light and speed cameras for enforcement. We also want a vendor to do our noise enforcement. And so as I understand it from them, 24 Acoustics actually partnered with one of the vendors that ultimately won the bid for the Knoxville contract. And that allowed them to then put these cameras into the field. And that's where this noise data comes from. So that's the sort of longer story about what happened with Knoxville. And I think it's really interesting and compelling. Now, in the conversation that I had with them, It was still unclear as to whether their approach was making a big difference. But they were optimistic because they were, at the time I spoke with them, I think they were maybe a month into actually being live on the citation system. So it's possible, if not likely, that this will make a difference for Knoxville over time. But again, Tennessee operates under a different statutory framework. We can't use camera enforcement in Wisconsin yet. And so that's a limiting factor. But that's also where the revenue stream comes from. And I think that's important for us to keep this in mind. We're talking about resources and moving resources to accomplish different objectives. And in the case of these cameras in Tennessee, they had a revenue stream in the form of tickets. So when they sighted people, that funded the camera program, which included the noise monitoring equipment. So that was Knoxville. Dr. Sievers can talk about the research that we conducted on sort of standalone equipment. This equipment is very expensive. I don't know what and Knoxville really couldn't tell me, what would this actually cost if you were going to do this as your own sort of standalone without a supporting revenue stream? But the technology is indeed expensive. We run into this, I'll just say as an aside, we run into these kinds of conversations on a fairly routine basis when it comes to city procurement. I recall a couple of years ago, and members of council might remember this, there was a CEA budget line item for a lawnmower. And a member of council came to the budget discussion and said, I found a lawnmower that costs less than half of what you've specified here in the CEA budget. And why wouldn't we buy the cheaper one? We can do it for half. not considering any of the specifications or requirements of this particular application for us. So this happens from time to time. And I understand. I mean, this is an absolutely valid thing. But we have to ground our decision making in fact. And that's important. So when we're evaluating different technology or tools, there may be different ways to accomplish it. And we're certainly open to those kinds of discussions. I come back to the point that if the data collection is to create a pretext for enforcement, we don't need that. We do not need that. We know where it's loud in the city of Appleton. We do know, in fact. We know what the experience is in the community. I personally know. I live in Aldersmith's district just below the College Avenue Bridge. I am personally familiar with the the noise in the community. We also know when the peak volumes are. We know these things. The challenge is, again, that we have law enforcement resources that are required across the city for a variety of issues. And Chief Olson can speak to that. Chief Olson can also speak to what's happening during those peak times. I think that's important for us to talk about, too. So this is not for a lack of care or understanding. We are not, in fact, stupid. We are dealing with a challenging resource allocation issue and a matter of prioritization as a city. And that's why I'm glad that the council is taking this up and having this broader conversation. I'D LIKE TO GO BACK AND ASK MY COLLEAGUES TO WEIGH IN. AND BEFORE I DO, THOUGH, I WANT TO AGAIN QUOTE FROM THE E-MAIL THAT WAS SENT BY ELDER SMITH TO HIS LIST YESTERDAY. QUOTE, THE CITY LINE HAS BEEN NEGATIVE AND THERE'S BEEN A BARRAGE OF POSTS FROM THE CITY UNDERMINING THE IDEA OF NEEDING TO DO MORE, END QUOTE. And I want to be very clear that our presentation of the situation, of the facts, of the complicated resource allocation challenge that we deal with as a community is, again, not to say that this is not an important issue or that we don't care. In fact, we've increased our enforcement efforts because we recognize that this is an issue that affects our community. But we also have to locate that in the broader set of issues that our community faces and the demands on our police department. So with that, I'd like to first start off with deferring to Chief Olson just to talk about the matter of enforcement times based on the data. So Chief Olson, if you wouldn't mind.

And thank you, Chief Olson, for your service to our community. I know you have done a tremendous job, so I'd just like to start by saying that.

Thank you. So yes, I'd love to address a few of the issues that have been brought up this morning during this meeting, one of which is the prioritization of our resources, especially during the times that Alder Smith has mentioned that you see a decline In our traffic enforcement. And I think the folks that are here that live in the downtown know firsthand the thriving downtown business district, the entertainment district, the bars, and many of the establishments across the city, not just in the downtown, that serve alcohol. And these... do take priority for us, especially on the weekends from an enforcement perspective. Our officers are deployed to do OWI enforcement, impaired driving. Obviously, we know the devastation that drunk driving can cause in our community. They also frequently are responding to disturbances, fights, domestics, calls of that type of nature that predominantly happen after 8 p.m., not just on the weekends, but I would argue all seven days of the week. Our staffing situation has remained relatively stagnant in the 25 years that, almost 26 years that I have been here. As Mayor mentioned, the desire that many have and have had over the years and have worked hard to increase our staffing still face the challenges of coming up with a funding source and understanding that in order to Fund the police department with additional resources requires a cut in services across the other departments. That's a fact. That's one that, as a police chief, I have struggled with in terms of how do you prioritize resources, understanding that simply increasing staffing is not an option. And quite frankly, given the fact that the city of Appleton repeatedly is able to maintain its position as one of the safest cities in America, especially for mid-sized cities, is something that we take a lot of pride in. If you look at comparatively, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time, I know there was a recent staffing study, but I think we can all agree that From a staffing perspective, a per capita basis, the city of Appleton Police Department is one of the lowest staffed police departments in the state of Wisconsin. And that's regardless of looking at it being in the top 10 for city size and department size. And yet, given all of those, we are able to keep this community and the quality of life, for the most part, outside of some of the issues that have been brought up today. And I'm not trying to minimize the impacts that noise have on people. However, for the most part, people feel safe when they walk through the downtown. And they feel safe when they come here to visit and to work. And that, for us, is our number one priority. I also would like to just briefly address the comments that were made about the city of Appleton, or excuse me, the city of Madison and some of the changes or some of the the ordinances that they have around noise and how that's different from us. And just a quick Google search while I was sitting here, I learned that despite the fact that there is that ordinance in Madison, that it's very, very, very rarely enforced due to the lack of resources available to the City of Madison Police Department. And I think that's important because This notion that by passing this ordinance will somehow change the landscape of how enforcement takes place, I think we need to manage our expectations around that. If it was simply a matter of having a tool like that available to change the impact that noise has on the community members, then I would be all for looking at a way or a creative solution, as has been mentioned, to find a path forward in that regard. But that by itself is not going to have a measurable impact on noise in this community, in my opinion. I think that's all I have for now, unless there's another question that I can address, or I'd be happy to speak on another issue or another question if one is brought up. Does anyone have a question for Chief Olson?

Chair, I'd like to, if we can, I'd like to ask Health Officer Siepers to talk about the development of the response materials with a particular focus on the cost estimation for the technology, because that That seems to be a point of concern. So if we may.

Yeah, definitely. I just wanted to give the chief a chance to ask those questions.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Thank you, Chair. Yeah, so in the contestation, really drawing THE FOCUS OF THE RESPONSE TO THE RESOLUTION TO THE ITEMS THAT WERE PRESENT, RIGHT? SO JUST TAKING IT AT ITS FACE. SO LOOKING AT THE FOUR STRATEGIES THAT WERE CALLED OUT, FIXED DECIBLE MONITORING STATIONS, TEMPORARY MOBILE MONITORING EQUIPMENT, CITIZEN REPORTING AGREEMENTS, AND AUTOMATED NOISE DETECTION TECHNOLOGIES. having some understanding that enforcement is the goal that was that was the lens in which I look through this you know assuming that the resolution was amended for us to be able to take action upon so taking that into consideration I went through REALLY STRATEGY BY STRATEGY AND WENT A LITTLE BIT FURTHER THAN JUST IDENTIFYING, OKAY, IS THIS WHAT IS THE COST OF THIS? But I tried to present enough context in which these bodies could consider an ROI. So obviously, if we look at the spectrum, citizen reporting is a much more inexpensive methodology than automated noise detection technologies or flock cameras or enhanced flock cameras. I'm not sure. exactly what the strategy is called for there, but tried to interpret that as it were. And so that was the context in which began the costing of this. So if we go through, we talk about the complexity of measurement. Everyone's favorite, ISO 1996. So fixed decibel monitoring stations. So again, talking about the design strength and then looking at the limitations, right? Central finding, of course, being that the statutory framework prohibits this. But just walking us through this. The data for the sensor costs, although I think there's some issue taken with how these were developed. So for the fixed monitoring stations and the automated noise detection technologies, these were actually based on DOT contracts. So these were federal contracts that were awarded and reimbursed. As Alder Smith had done, a quick Google search will produce a number of different technologies. But I wanted to understand, if we were to actually fund this, what is, and if external funds were to be there, WHAT WOULD WE EXPECT TO HAVE TO DO TO INSTALL THIS FROM THE GROUND UP, NOT STARTING FROM RED LIGHT CAMERAS OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT. SO THOSE ARE THE DATA, THE DOT COSTING DATA FOR THE REIMBURSEMENTS THAT WENT THROUGH AND THERE WAS SOME EXTRAPOLATION, A LOT OF EXTRAPOLATION IN THE AUTOMATED AS IT RELATES TO REAL COSTS IN NEW YORK CITY. A LITTLE BIT AS IT SOUNDS CRAZY, A LITTLE BIT IS A VERY CLOSE REGULATORY FRAMEWORK BECAUSE THEY DO HAVE TO UNDERSTAND IS THAT A LAWFUL NOISE, RIGHT? SO THEREFORE THE CAMERAS ARE NEEDED. They have to understand point source. These are all the things that we would have to overcome if we were to consider the limiting statutory framework that we work in. So while it does seem as if these are very large numbers in the costing, I can assure the Board of Health and Safety and Licensing Committee that there was a considerable amount of care taken in the development of these numbers. I didn't make them up. It wasn't done via Google search. Our team spent about 150 hours producing this document. to just demonstrate the sort of thoroughness that was taken to develop these materials.

Thank you, Dr. Seepers. Does anyone from the committee have a question for Dr. Seepers on that? And thank you. How much does that equate to monetarily in your budget?

Chair, I...

I'm teasing.

No, and I will say... We never want to discourage members of council from exploring issues or engaging with staff on research projects. That is important and valuable. It's a service that we provide as a city. So we don't put a dollar amount, but I think The point being an enormous amount of time and effort to try and respond comprehensively so that we're talking about the issue holistically. Because we did not come to the prioritization and strategy that we've come to out of nowhere. And so to open that up and provide information to be transparent with the community about what it is we're looking at as we're determining what's our approach and strategy going to be. we want to make sure that that's available to everybody. And that's the reason for the extensive packet of materials and the time that was spent assembling them.

And the great amount of paper and time. We've had to read this twice now. So at this time, is there anyone from either committee that has a question for staff before we open this up for public comment? Sure. Alderperson Schultz, I'm sorry.

Thank you, Chair.

I was going to call you by your first name, and I want to not do that. Appreciate it.

I realize I'm not on committee, but thanks for the deference in allowing me to ask a couple of general questions and make some statements really quickly. First, I understand what we're trying to get at, at least what the resolution is trying to get at, and trying to get some better data collection. Thank you. Sorry. I'll get a little closer. There we go. I just said I appreciate the intent of the resolution and what the author is trying to get at to gather some additional data on a problem that, at least anecdotally, is increasing annually. The only data that we have right now is what's been presented and is essentially based on call-ins and then action on those call-ins, either a warning or a citation. I don't think that data is sufficient. And I think that's essentially why we're trying to find another methodology. Because if you think about when we passed the NOMO ordinance, there was an expectation that once we allowed residents to grow their grass, in excess of eight inches, that the weed complaints would skyrocket. And the opposite actually happened. Complaints leveled. There was a slight increased level. And they were actually down on the third year of that ordinance. So the fact that a thing exists does not mean, if there's no citations or no call-ins, doesn't mean that the phenomenon does not exist. In fact, there was far more lawns with high grass And the complaints didn't reflect that. And so this, I think, is a similar situation where the actual phenomenon of loud noise and the increase that, at least anecdotally, we're all feeling and our residents are reporting to council saying this is becoming an increasingly difficult problem. As well as other traffic-related things, the erratic behaviors and the e-bikes, these are all things that are affecting our quality of life in the downtown district. They are on the rise, and we all, I think, instinctually know that, but we just don't have With this data set that we are able to Analyze we can't really assess What that level increase is and so I appreciate that comment? It's worth recognizing if you look at page 388 of this report all of the things that the city has done today to try and address the noise I mean We have made some significant progress in the enforcement side and trying to give ourselves some additional tools particularly the towing or the towing ordinance update which has given us capacity to control some of the repeated behaviors but we're even with all of these exceptional efforts by staff to go above and beyond what basically they are required we are still in this situation and doesn't seem like those erratic behaviors are abating and so the conversation I think is Very valid, and we're not going to get there today, but I think we have to have a really rich conversation about how do we tackle this. We have got to tackle this, because the quality of life of our citizens in these core districts is directly affected by this erratic behavior which is on the rise. And it feels like this conversation, at least today, has gone from sort of that large quality of life question down into this very specific, we can't enforce a stock muffler if it's producing noise over 80 decibels. And that feels like a very small cohort of the people that are doing things that are outside the the zone of acceptable behavior. So I would suggest that most of the noise that's being generated and that people are having adverse reactions to are muffler modifications, are vehicular modifications, are erratic behaviors. And I don't think they fall into this very specific question about whether we can enforce a stock vehicle's muffler if it meets standards of production. And so that, I guess, is a bigger question. So I want to get past that enforcement. debate about whether we can do this statutorily or not. We need to have a larger conversation about this quality of life. But those are a couple of comments. And I just want to make sure that we sort of commend staff for what they have done today, because there have been a lot of efforts to address this over the last few years. Essentially, since COVID, we've seen this rise, and staff has responded. Unfortunately, we're still in this position where those behaviors are, we just can't get our hands around it. So that's, I think, a bigger conversation, and I'm glad we're starting here, but I do hope this continues and we can have a more robust conversation about how we address this.

Thank you very much. At this time, is there, oh, Chief Olsen.

Thank you. I would just like to make a few comments, especially following Alder Schultz. I think he's made some exceptional points here that I wholeheartedly agree with, that these behaviors are, in fact, increasing not just in the city of Appleton and not just across the state of Wisconsin, but across this country. And I see many of my colleagues, chiefs across the country, that have increasing frustration over how to effectively address not only noise and the driving behaviors of people, but in fact, the e-bikes and some of the other dangerous behaviors that we continue to witness out in our communities. Some of the things that we have done over the last eight months following the staffing study that the city invested in last year was made some adjustments to how we're allocating our resources. And when we did a deep dive into where we were seeing a spike in our calls for service and a diminished ability for the officers to do any self-initiated work outside of just responding to calls of service, We realized that we needed to shift our resources from a minimum staffing perspective to earlier in the day. We see a peak call for service generally between 4 PM and 6 PM in the city. That's when we see the most traffic out on the roadways. We see the most crashes But that's that's technically from a calls-for-service perspective generally our busiest time of the day but in order to do that that means that we needed to shift some of our nighttime staffing to earlier in the day which means that we have less staffing happening and after 8 p.m., which I did not mention previously. The other thing we needed to do in order to accomplish this was and to be able to address the need to do increased traffic enforcement. was taking our four canine assigned officers and moving them off of the call rotation. So what they do out there now is all self-initiated activity. So responding with their canines for those types of calls for service where they're required. And then in addition to that, they do traffic enforcement. So they act as a quasi-traffic officer. They also take crash calls from patrol district officers so that frees them up to take other calls for service and do other self-initiated activities some of the feedback we've had over the summer has been exceedingly positive around our increased presence in the parks and ensuring that our parks are safer and that there's an increased presence of law enforcement and our community service officers in the parks And that, again, as I mentioned earlier, safety is a priority for our police department and for this community. But I also felt it was important for those present today to hear that despite the messaging that continues to be sent about this being a lack of priority for the police chief and for the mayor, that in fact there were significant changes made that have impacted my staff in the sense that because minimum staffing has changed, they have a reduced ability to use their vacation time and their time off. They have been asked to increase their enforcement activities, and actually face discipline if they fail to do these things. We've been holding officers to a higher standard, increased accountability, and feel that we are at a point where there is nothing else additional we can do at the police department to change how we're delivering these services, unless we would get additional resources.

I remember that discussion in 2012. I'll tell you how we did it later on. Okay, are there any other questions or comments from any of the committee members before we open it up to the public? Okay, we're gonna now listen to the public on it at the time that your name is called. If you wanna step up to the microphone, And again, repeat your name and your address for the committees and for all present here. So at this time, Larry Ruff. If I mispronounce your name, I'm sorry. So you can come up. And again, we're asking you, because it is 821, this meeting's usually done at 8 o'clock. So if you can be concise and brief, we want to hear from you. But we ask you all to consider what's been said before as well. Thank you.

As the chair, I need to ask, how much time do I have?

About a minute to two minutes, I would say, would be a nice thing to do since there are seven people signed up.

I understand. There's a lot of people here that want to speak, that want to tell the story as it happens every day, every night. I happen to live in Lawrence Court in the condos. You could enforce... the normal standard of muffler decibels under the federal DOT. But if you drive a car underneath the Oneida Bridge and just seriatim you and your buddies wrap off for 10 or 15 minutes, it's going to produce excessive noise. And let's not forget, that's the standard. The state has said, and nobody agrees, MORE THAN I DO THAT THE CITY NEEDS TO HAVE AN INTERPRETATION OF POLICY, BUT THIS IS A STATUTE AND IT SAYS EXCESSIVE NOISE. THAT IS WHAT NEEDS TO BE ENFORCED. I'M ENCOURAGED AND I WANTED TO SAY MORE ABOUT THE FACT I CAN UNDERSTAND MORE FROM ATTENDING TODAY, BUT THE PROBLEM IS NOT GOING AWAY AND I HOPE WHATEVER SOLUTION YOU COME UP WITH IS EFFECTIVE BECAUSE It's destroying our peace of mind. That's a mental health issue. I think it falls within this committee, and you should consider that in addressing the proposed resolution.

Thank you, Larry. Steve McKnight. Again, your name and address for the record officially.

Good morning. My name is Steve McKnight. I live in Richmond Terrace. That's 400 North Richmond Street. We've lived in Appleton for about 30 years, been in Richmond Terrace for about 11. And our windows face Packard Street, so obviously everybody knows Packard, Franklin, Richmond Street. I'm on the HOA Board of Richmond Terrace, so we have these kind of discussions on a monthly basis with our residents. Josh has been kind enough to visit us at meetings twice a year, and we have discussed this. I'm a big believer in collecting data. If you think you have an issue, if you think you have a problem, you need to collect data on it first. It gets beyond the anecdotes. It gets beyond the preconceived ideas and those kinds of things and zeroes down. You mentioned a couple other towns. We don't live in those towns. We live in Appleton. This is an issue here in Appleton. I also believe when you recognize a problem and you want to try to change it, collecting that data and understanding what the problem is specifically, you also need to start the plan with the goal in mind. That's a great idea. What I would argue is the goal isn't enforcement. The goal is a good or better quality of life. That's what I think we are being affected by on this noise issue. So I really appreciate what you did in terms of your research. I understand the constraints and resources, but you gotta decide, is this an issue that is gonna just require resources or is it something that's gonna benefit, albeit subjective, to the quality of life of the people who live here? Thank you.

Thank you for your time. John Adams.

Hello, everyone. My name is John Adams. I live on Green Bay Court off of North Green Bay. And I live in the Peabody Park section of Appleton. It's a beautiful historical part of Appleton, as everyone knows. But I'm here today to relay my observation of vehicular noise pollution in Appleton. My chief observation is there is a clear and apparent demonstration of speed behaviors on the part of motorists that are performed repeatedly and disproportionately high rates in the East College Avenue bridge area corridor and to a lesser extent along the South Water Avenue and the East Newberry Street corridor. Characteristics of these activities is the temporal correlation. It aligns with warm weather, the day of the week, and escalates in a predictable fashion. My observations show a clear correlation from the time of the week, suggesting the lead-up to the weekend, the driving behavior is the primary driver of the disturbance. Here in Apple, excuse me, Here in Appleton, I will propose that there is a preponderance of where excessive vehicular noise occurs. This is not a prejudiced statement, but rather an observationally verifiable social behavioral phenomena here in Appleton. Certain places repeatedly produce excess noise behavior. For example, the entrance into and out of the Appleton INTO APPLETON FROM THE EAST COLLEGE AVENUE CORRIDOR IS A CHIEF LOCATION WHERE EXCESSIVE VEHICLE NOISE COMES FROM. THE LOCATION OF THE BRIDGE CREATES A FUNNEL EFFECT FOR THE NOISE AND IMPACTS THE RESIDENTIAL AREAS AND PARKS DIRECTLY.

SO HERE'S A MAP RIGHT HERE OF OUR AREA. RIGHT HERE IS THE EAST COLLEGE BRIDGE.

There is Galula Park, there is Peabody Park. But anyways, what you can kind of imagine here are little stars with a sense of noise that come off the bridge and here along this very cold, warm, soft water. And so this noise comes down from here.

And so I just wanted to give a locational kind of

setting where we experience this noise. So I believe the city's health department and the city's report in response to the resolution does not really reflect the concerns of the residents of Appleton about vehicular noise pollution problem. While the present resolution, there are legitimate concerns about the expense and effectiveness of automated instrumental methods for roadway sound monitoring and enforcement. The city and the Apland Police Department assert that the efforts to date are adequate. It's totally insufficient. I've lived here in Apland three years, so I don't really know anything about the history or things like that. I can say I have a lot of experience living in very practiced urban areas where noise pollution has been dealt with. But what I can say is on this area I'm talking about here on East College Avenue, I have not seen one enforcement. I've not seen one enforcement action that I would recognize as a response to dangerous driving, the need of youth to demonstrate speed in their vehicles. I've not seen one. So again, I just want to be really clear. I mean, again, we understand that you can't stop a car on a bridge, but there are adjacent areas where you would see this. I haven't seen one, but I do respect these values of instance where there has been citations and so forth that are happening. It's just I don't see them in our neighborhood. The response to vehicle noise problem is either too complex or too expensive to understand. It's a disservice. I do not accept the argument that vehicle noise is not able to be regulated solely on the basis of the presence of an OEM. The overriding factor that governs noise pollution that we experience is due to driver behavior and driver behavior alone.

Excuse me. You've now talked over your time.

I've abbreviated my thing here.

Right, but we hear you. It'll be about a minute. You're well over the time. I'm sorry. I'm sorry there's other people that need to speak. Thank you very much for your time.

I'm speaking for a lot of people. I understand, but we still have other people on. I mean, time is valuable, but I'm making a salient point here. So if you'll allow me just that.

Okay, you have one minute.

Sure, thank you. OK, so driver behavior alone. Behaviors can be changed, and a better quality of life in an airplane can be achieved. Let's do a little thought experiment very shortly. What is the vehicular sound of a compliant vehicle at a constant velocity of 25 to 30 miles an hour? What is the level of sound of a compliant vehicle making a lawful constant acceleration or a controlled easel There are quieting techniques that are possible.

What would strict enforcement of speed limits along East College corridor look like?

What if the Apton Police Department did enforce restrictions against demonstration of speed and reckless driving behaviors fully? The last one I wanted to make here was... Okay, I'm sorry. Now, I'm sorry. I'm going to turn off your microphone. I will offer you the opportunity... One point, one point. Okay.

So... No, I'm going to offer you the opportunity to submit your entire... um statement no please give it to this area because i want the that that and i thank you for your time but there's still other people that want to speak no you can't right now i'd like to have bob monitor come up to the podium i'd like to Thank you, sir Thank you for your time and again We will be happy to put your entire statement into the record of the minutes so then City Council can listen to it a monitor welcome Please try to keep your Comments brief and to the point check your mic chair.

Oh yep Thank you condominium associate downtown, and I chastise myself for failing to do diligence before I move there I Had I looked at some of the consequences that I'm involved with today, I would never move there. I'm discouraging my friends to move, any of my friends that are retiring, to move downtown. They're asking about living downtown. I said, don't come downtown unless you're going to accept a fair amount of noise downtown. So I'll pass that. I had a written script, but I threw that out after I heard some of the comments. I would like to comment, I'd like to hear, the main concern I'd like to see is not necessarily going after the Camaros with the stock mufflers. It's the Hyundai Sonata with these modified mufflers that look like the size of a can of beer on the back. And they're not legal. And I met with Chief Olson prior to her. I think she was the community liaison officer. And she stated that any muffler that didn't come from the factory or was installed by a legitimate source, such as a Midas muffler, was considered illegal, is not acceptable. Why can't we just enforce the ones with the illegal mufflers? We know that now they can put these computer chips in these cars that actually encourage backfires. You know, a Hyundai Sonata did not come off the factory line with a muffler that I can hear four or five blocks away. And the other thing I want to say is I can hear these cars shift from gear to gear to gear. They're not going 25 miles an hour. By the time they hit College Avenue to East College Avenue, they're probably going 40, 45. And this happens during the day. If we can't enforce it at night, let's enforce it during the day at least. I mean, I'll applaud the city officers and the police for having done some more enforcement. But I still feel, from what I heard from Mayor Woodford, our hands are tied. I'm glad there was nobody here today that is part of the community that has all these vehicles. Because they would say, man, we've got a holiday here. We can do whatever we want right now. That's what we feel. The Wisconsin statute that Lee Snodgrass had provided, year 6604111, expressly permits cities and other municipalities to adopt and enforce ordinance prohibiting excessive noise from sound producing devices. Why are we so afraid? YOU KNOW, TALK TO THE CITY ATTORNEY, BUT WHY ARE WE SO AFRAID OF ENFORCING SOME KIND OF STANDARD AND AT LEAST TRY IT AND THEN MAYBE GET OUR HANDS SLAPPED FOR HAVING IT BEING ILLEGAL AND REMODIFY IT. IT'S RIDICULOUS. WHAT I HEARD TODAY, I'M READY TO MOVE OUT OF APPLETON. NOT NECESSARILY DOWNTOWN, BUT APPLETON.

OK. OK.

Sorry about that.

That's OK. Thank you very much for your time. We appreciate your time.

I'm exasperated. I'm sorry.

That's OK. And I understand that. But we do want to hear from you. Ronna Swift, name and address for the record.

50 years later, Ronna Swift, 230 West Seymour Street, and hundreds of times here in front of the mic. To all the dedicated citizens that are behind me, stay involved. It takes time. To all of you who have given hours and hours of your life, like Kathy, stay involved. In fact, I have a little wooden spoon here that a friend gave to me. It says, just here to stir the pot. I want to remind people that it takes time. In the 70s, No one in Wisconsin had an ambulance ordinance. We had a screaming, no trained slab service and I had little kids. I went to the city, within a week, that's the first time and the only time, it only took that short time, we got the ambulance ordinance enforced. And then the EMT program at the Tech came out of that. In the 80s, we had 441. I have a used S10 sign in my front yard on Seymour Street between St. E's and Memorial Drive. I went to the city. I worked with the city. They brought involved the police department. They ran an origin destination study, which I worked with the citizens. And then the East Central Regional Planning Commission did it. A truck sign was off the next year, and it helped get the middle section of 441. It takes time, folks, and this is much more complicated than just noise. It's how we are treating each other, and it starts at the top. And if we can start here in Appleton, by making sure everybody is treated with respect. It'll be very important. And to those of you behind me, keep getting involved. The city has made great improvements on how. You can meet the mayor every month. If you can't meet him during the day, call. He will go out of his way to try to work with you. Ask for help. Don't go in telling people how to do things. Thank you. Thank you, Ronna. This issue is going to keep going.

You were right on time, too, so thank you. And I know how important that, how much time it took you to figure out how to do that, so thank you. All right, Robin Jansen. Or is it Johnson? I'm sorry, it's a way then. Thank you.

Robin Jansen, 1048 East Eldorado Street, Appleton. So also sort of in that Peabody Park neighborhood. I think just I have a couple comments. One is when we talk about You know, people who've been agitating on this issue. It's not about not caring. It's not that we assume you guys aren't caring or not prioritizing. I think it's really about effectiveness. And for us, that's all we can go on. Is it effective? Is the strategy effective? Is whatever you're doing effective? What I really like about what Alderman Smith has proposed is it would give us some peace of mind. That's something we can track. We can follow. We can be patient, as Ronna talked about, and believe that someone has a measure that we can sense and that things are improving. Because right now, it feels very chaotic, kind of like a middle school classroom where a bunch of kids have taken over, and the well-meaning teacher has has lost control. And that's what I experience every night. And I'm not really in the safety zone of I'm three blocks off, but I experience Appleton as feeling that way now. And just a quick, I'm OK, two paragraphs from talking about safety here since the health department's here. One of the women shared this with me from New York Times article about noise and safety. When researchers analyze, I'm just going to read two paragraphs. When researchers analyze the brain scans and health records of hundreds of people at Massachusetts General Hospital, They made a stunning discovery. This is about exposure to noise. Those who lived in areas with high levels of transportation noise were more likely to have highly activated amygdalas, arterial inflammation, and within five years, major cardiac events. The association remained even after the researchers adjusted for other environmental and behavior factors that could contribute to poor cardiac health. like air pollution, socioeconomic factors, and smoking. So this is a long article. I'm happy to share it. Very direct evidence of exposure to noise, sudden noise being the worst, really messing with our health.

Thank you for your comments and your time. Let's bring this back to the both committees. Does anyone on either committee want to make a statement? Oh, sorry.

You've got more.

Oh, I'm sorry. I was going off our list. So at this time, yes, you can come up, state your name and address for the record. Don't worry, Jen, I saw you.

I did not put my name on it.

That's OK. That's OK. That's OK. We were just going off of what typically happens at council. So thank you.

So my name is Lisa Tremblay. I live at 921 East College Avenue. And I want to say one thing about the data collection. So I have called in noise complaints. If I wanted to, you guys, I could call in every night. But I'm a hassle to the police department. If I call in, they're like, thank you. We are aware of the problem. Well, I am not going to be that excessive person. And I know that people in my neighborhood do the same thing. The antiquated data collection of complaints, you guys, where a car is going to go by at a screaming level, and you're going to call in and say, well, a car just went by at 55 miles an hour, and it was excessive. Well, he's gone. So the complaints, you guys, that's not working. The calling complaints, absolutely not. So I'm all in for the data collection. And I have to say, I'm very nervous. I'm sitting here, and I see him fighting this whole group. 150 hours, which could be allocated of lawyer fees to something else, could be allocated for police force. Why do we have 150 hours where we have this guy fighting to find solutions, and I see this entire side not? I just, you guys.

Something has to be done.

And I'd like to see more people fighting to find something where we have this guy looking across saying, hey, Knoxville has an idea. Hey, Madison. But then these guys are over here saying, well, you know, we've researched it. We spent 150 lawyer hours, which could go to the police force, to find something different. So that's my takeaway in this crowd is unequal. One man coming up with ideas and nobody else does. So thank you.

Thank you very much for your time.

All right.

I know, I know. Thank you.

Jennifer Stefani, I'm the executive director of Appleton Downtown Incorporated. I appreciate the opportunity to be here to learn more today about all of this. This is, of course, been an ongoing discussion for downtown Appleton, for our board, for our residents, for our business owners, for a lot of years. We hear often about the excessive noise, this vanity noise, Motorists want to be seen and heard in downtown Appleton. The buildings provide this acoustic, I don't know, drama for those motorists. The data collection that we're talking about I know, we know where the noise is. We know when the peak times are.

It's not January through May, unfortunately.

It is mostly the summer. So I don't think the data that was shared from the health department on the number of calls is necessarily clear or accurate for what we see in the summertime. So we do know that those are definitely increased. We do know that there is a cost to getting this data. We've heard very conflicting numbers on that. I know there's a lot of time that's put into those numbers. So we have to balance that out. Does it make sense to spend the money to collect the data that we kind of already know? I think we need to have that conversation.

Does this make sense for our community to invest in?

If it's able to be done at an affordable cost, if there are sources that can help us get that data and make it affordable, then we should continue this conversation. If not, the ask is really continue to work with all of the departments to find better solutions to help the problem. And I think that's all we all want right now. So thank you.

Thank you, Jen. Is there anyone else that wishes to address the committees? OK. You spoke already. You already spoke. I'm sorry. You've had your opportunity. Thank you. It's not that we're not hearing you. Now we have another discussion to go through. So at this time, are there any comments, questions? Alderperson Benton. I wanted to see.

Thank you, Chair. I have a lot of thoughts. So if I indulge me, Chair, could I ask the police chief one question? Sure. So she just had to step out for a moment Maybe somebody else could answer the question But I will ask chief Olson so for the past several months in safety and licensing committee which I am here as a member of We get this focused report from the police department and it lists the warnings and the citations of For various offenses, there's a checkmark for whether they occurred in the downtown area. My specific question was in terms of the definition of the focused report, so I can defer if the chief is coming back for that. But for the person who mentioned East College and never seeing anything, on the July report, East College, John Street, those appear numerous times. And I just did some little tick marks. And I counted on that July report, 18, which was the majority of the warnings and citations issued, were for things like illegal mufflers, squealing tires, unnecessary acceleration. Enforcement is happening. So I want to go back. And I represent a district that does not include the downtown area. We are north of downtown. And I will get to that specific in just a second. So my first concern with this resolution is separation of powers. So I am chair of the Finance Committee. I'm going to run the budget meeting in November. We have authority as council people to make amendments to the budget that the mayor presents us. We have the authority to vote yea or nay on items that city departments present to us for construction. However, as the chair of the Finance Committee, I am not authorized to tell the finance director that she needs to switch from an accrual-based accounting method with the Governmental Accounting Standards Bureau to a cash-based accounting. I don't have the authority to do that. And I think that by having a resolution that directs the department to take certain action, I think that violates the, and that was noted in the city's response to that. Nonetheless, as Dr. Seepers has told us, the city, even before the resolution passed, spent 150 person hours whether we agreed that that was a good use of time or not, they provided us some valuable information. And the other thing I want to talk about monitoring, and I'm grateful to the mayor for explaining the Knoxville situation in that, and I know that some of us have actually gotten tickets from traffic cameras in other states that mailed to us, and we can't do that in Wisconsin. We are in the middle of a very heated discussion in our community about the privacy concerns for traffic automatic license plate reader cameras. I've personally, when I tried to come up with a solution, I and some of my colleagues have been called fairly vile names on social media for our failure to completely ban technologies like this. So the methods that have been presented to us for measuring noise would have to be unattended. So yes, we could know that there are noise. The specific camera that Alderperson Smith mentioned, the specific technology, it can tell you if you exceed decibel levels of 80 decibels, which, by the way, I think a garbage truck is 100. but it can't isolate it to a specific vehicle. So what we would get from spending that money and the argument over whether we're going to spend a million dollars or a few tens of thousands, what we're going to know from that is that certain areas of the street are very, very noisy. OK, we know that. So then we enact an ordinance that says we already have illegal mufflers are already You can get a ticket for that. You can get a ticket for behavior like squealing tires, revving, racing. You can get a ticket for that. I want to point out a lot of calls I get in the summertime are about fireworks and why can't we do something about that. Fireworks are illegal in the city of Appleton. The fact that they are illegal does not make our dogs any less psychotic when everybody is shooting off fireworks all night. So now I'm going to move back to speaking as the representative for District 6 downtown and partially as the chair of the finance committee when I know that we are going to be faced with a very difficult budget year. And as the chief pointed out, our police staffing has been static for years. The staffing study that they did actually recommended that we hire more officers. We didn't have the ability to do that. So the police department worked. They moved. They've got more enforcement. We're getting this focused report. However, the residents of my district don't want to be left out. We don't want to move our enforcement from the south side, from the north side, where we all have the people on the north side, Alder Hayden's district. They hear I-41. My district hears Richmond. The people on the south side have traffic from Calumet. But what we're looking at here, and everyone who has spoke is specifically talking about the downtown area. I do not want my constituents to be less safe from property crimes, violent crimes, by diverting financial resources. And remember, if we spend money, all of the taxpayers pay for that. If we increase the budget to add resources, to add officers, to add equipment, We're not just focusing on the area that's using it. Every taxpayer will see that. And my district will feel less safe if we divert resources. The chief mentioned putting the officers in the park. Alder Crote and I, our park is in his district, but it is the neighborhood park for my district. We had a shooting there a couple of years ago. And the people have felt much safer by there being an increased law enforcement presence there. So I am not going to vote for the expenditure, the diversion of resources. It's horrible. I hate the noise. I swear when I'm downtown and one of these cars goes by.

But the bottom line is that, yes, it affects health.

But it doesn't affect our ultimate safety. And I think what we, with limited resources, we need to focus on safety. Thank you, chairs. Thank you. If I may?

Yes, you may. OK. You're chair.

Thank you, Alder Fenton. I share almost all of your concerns and comments regarding this issue. I have a number of things I want to state. And I came into this meeting with a very open mind and just really wanted to understand this better. I have been following it. I did read the 300-plus page report. I just wanted to start with an appreciation for Alder Smith and his work. One of our roles as an elected official is to listen to our constituents and bring forward matters that are important to them. So I really appreciate the work that you did before you were an Alder, during your campaign, and now during your tenure. I also want to say that I'm not pro-noise, although I appreciate Mr. Molitor's comment about the owner of a Camaro with stock exhaust. I have one. And I am not anti-enforcement. I think enforcement is a very, very important and big piece of this, and I'm going to get to my final comment on that in a minute here. But I'm a big, usually a very big believer in collecting data and making decisions based on having data. More data is usually better and great. But I think it's pretty clear that we have, I know it's anecdotal, but we have pretty clear data that there are issues. And there are issues in certain areas. And I think the mayor's office and the APD and the administration know exactly where those are. Which takes me to my, you know, towards my final comment here on enforcement. And I also wanted to add that I share the comment of Alder Fenton that noise is not just downtown, it's all over. My district is the ThetaCare Hospital area. I live a block away from the hospital and I hear a lot of people screaming down Meade Street, I hear motorcycles on Northland, and this is from my patio in my backyard. So it's all over, it's an issue in our community for sure. I did also want to mention that 150 hours invested in this is a bit of a concern for me because that's a lot of staff time that has been taken away from doing other work. And it does come with a cost. And just to clarify, I think the comment was made that it was lawyer or attorney hours. It wasn't. It was maybe partly, but it was mainly Department of Health hours, correct?

Correct.

Okay. Yeah, so lastly, I would encourage, and I'm gonna vote for defeating this resolution, although I appreciate it and the spirit of it, but I would encourage anyone that is really interested in finding a solution on this. We are about 60 days away from deliberating the mayor's budget, which we haven't seen yet. We don't know what it's going to contain for changes. It's a very challenging budget year like they all are as a member of the Finance Committee and Alder Fenton's the chair. Every single year the budgets are a challenge and it has a lot to do with state shared revenue and limitations as far as levy limits. But if you're interested in finding a solution to this, I don't think it would be investing in getting more data. I think it would be finding a way to invest in more resources for our police department. The bottom line is enforcement is the is the I know the goal was stated quality of life Yep, I get that but really to get there We need to have more enforcement and to get more enforcement it's very clear to me as chair of the safety licensing committee that the Appleton Police Department is is basically maxed out they've been at a Incredibly low number per capita since I've been on council and that's been a long time and And they've always crushed it with that smaller staff, keeping our community safe. The numbers support all of that comment. But lastly, again, if you're interested in finding a solution, I would look forward to, if it's not in the mayor's budget, I would look forward to budget amendments that would support giving the police department more resources. The challenge there is finding the funding. You either have to come up with a funding mechanism, or you have to take it from somewhere else. And that's going to be the big challenge for anyone that's going to add one, two, three, or more officers to the TO for the police department. That's it. Thank you.

Cheers. Okay. First off, I'll let Alderperson Fenton say. You wanted your question with Chief Olson. Yes.

Now that Chief Olson is back. Since she's here. Okay. So, Chief Olson, what I had asked is that focused enforcement report that we see in safety and licensing. Can you just describe the parameters around that a little bit?

Thank you. Yes, I sure can. So this report is generated monthly, and it basically just drills down the traffic stops that are made in particular involving noise. So the modified exhaust, the unnecessary acceleration, things of that nature. And then it also includes it citywide. However, there is a checkbox on the far right-hand corner. If the box is checked, that is supposed to be enforcement that's happening in the corridor of the downtown area. So that's basically taking a look at College Avenue. And then if you go basically one block north and one block south, as well as the College Avenue bridge to about Badger. That's what we consider the downtown corridor. Now, the downtown district, because that can be confusing, is actually from the river to Wisconsin Avenue. So two very different things. Since I have the microphone, though, real quick, because I asked my crime analyst to pull up the data on traffic stops. particular to the area surrounding the College Avenue Bridge. I'm still looking at the data, but I wanted just to make a point to the committee that, well, two things. One, when you look at our traffic stop data, you have to keep in mind that the violation might be happening in one place, but it might take several blocks for the officer to actually initiate the traffic stop. And so when we call out a traffic stop that might be, say, at Oneida and Pacific, the violation very well could have occurred in the downtown area. So it's very difficult sometimes when you're looking at traffic-related data to really drill down, like, where are the violations happening? Because there is the lag time that happens when you look at trying to initiate the traffic stop. You get them to pull over. it might take some time for that to happen, or the officer might be looking for a safe place to initiate the stop. It's very difficult to do traffic stops in the downtown area. When you're looking at the lane configurations the way they are, it creates an unsafe situation many times when an officer is pulled to the side On College Avenue, so we try to do the stops in the in the you know feeder streets that come off of College Avenue For safety purposes, so we might wait a little bit before we actually make the stop And I just wanted to point that out but the other that I think one of our gentlemen that had a few words to say about enforcement around the College Avenue Bridge, I've got literally hundreds of stops that have happened just looking between Law Street and Tallulah Avenue in that particular stretch over the last five years. And I would really challenge him, if he would like that data, To say that he's never seen a stop in that area is I think a gross misstatement Thank you.

Thank you chief Thank you chair Spears It's nine o'clock and we're at the two-hour mark if we maybe want to consider a break at this point And maybe try to wrap up after that Okay, that's fine with me.

Let's take because it is that's typically our role so or council rules so at this time. We'll take a Five minute. Five minute recess. Well, why don't we make it 10 just because, I don't know, bathroom space might be limited.

I won't argue that.

Okay. All in favor of a recess say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? We are in recess.

Not at once. Folks, we're going to get started here. So if you could take your seats. Trying to maybe wrap this up by 10 o'clock today. Sir, hang on one second. Just make sure everybody gets back to their seats and we can be started. Are you wanting to speak as a member of the public? Briefly. I would allow that if you're okay with that. Okay, that's okay with me.

If you stick to the briefly part. Two minutes. My name is Mike. I live over on Briarcliff Drive.

What's your actual address?

1421 North Briarcliff Drive. Thank you. What I'm hearing and why I think the community is hearing a lot and just being at this meeting, I'm hearing reasons not to address the problem. And that's what I think the community is hearing. And it's disappointing to hear that. This is a simple resolution to collect data so we know how to better allocate our resources most efficiently to address the problem. And I keep hearing all these reasons not to take action. And it's frustrating. If Madison can do it, if Menominee Falls can do it, and they're not being legally challenged with what they're doing, why can't we do similar things? Thank you.

Thank you for your time and your comments. Okay. I have Alderperson Hayden, Alderperson Lambert, Alderperson Meltzer, is there anyone from the Board of Health that wishes to talk? We're on committee now, Alderperson Smith. So is there anybody from Board of Health that wants to speak to this issue? Because I'm making a list.

I'll speak briefly.

Okay. Anyone else? All right. Then we're going to go to Alderperson Hayden. Thank you, Chair.

And I'll keep it brief because Alder Finning covered a lot of points that I had. But first, I do want to thank Alder Smith for raising these concerns, because I do think this is an important issue. Unfortunately, we're kind of constrained by some challenges within the city. When I look at my district, one of the challenges I see with enforcement is we're constantly working with the police on dealing with noise complaints coming from Memorial Park. I know it's actually in our district, but some of the neighbors are actually in my district. And there's a lot of people who do burnouts and wheelies and drive fast along the street there. And my concern is by doing the enforcement focusing downtown, it pulls the resources that we're asking for people to kind of look at those things in my district. At the same time, when I was looking at the report that Dr. Sievers put together. I saw the numbers from my district, and it was noise complaints. And I don't think it's a very accurate picture of issues with cars, because when I think of noise complaints coming from my district, a lot of them are around an air conditioner at a school in my district that people are frequently calling in about. So it's not consistent with the problem that we're trying to solve here. And lastly, one of the challenges I saw when I was looking at Madison and Menominee Falls ordinance there, and I would actually like to see how many citations they've issued, not just the ordinance itself, but it talks about... It has to be made, I'm sorry, I misread that. But effectively, we'd have to have all the police officers equipped with some sort of device to monitor decibel volume. And it's not just finding the resources police officers wise, but we'd also have to equip them to gauge the volume and be able to determine where it's originating from. And that itself seems like a very tall task as well. Thank you, Chair.

Thank you. ALDER PERSON LAMBRICK.

THANK YOU, CHAIR. I ALSO WANT TO TAKE A MOMENT TO THANK ALDER SMITH. I THINK YOUR RESPONDING TO YOUR CONSTITUENT NEEDS IS COMMENDABLE AND THE WORK THAT YOU'VE DONE, I WOULD SAY, HAS HELPED THIS TO CONTINUE TO BE A TOPIC OF CONVERSATION FOR THE FOLKS THAT ARE FRUSTRATED IN OUR COMMUNITY AND FEEL LIKE THEY'RE NOT BEING HEARD. What I'll also say is I actually in, you know, reviewing the resolution, THIS HAS GIVEN US AN OPPORTUNITY TO SHARE A LOT OF OUR THOUGHTS, FEELINGS, AND BELIEFS, INFORMATION AROUND THE TOPIC. BUT WHEN LOOKING AT THE RESOLUTION AND WHAT IT'S ACTUALLY ASKING FOR, I WOULD ARGUE THAT IT'S ALREADY BEEN SUCCESSFUL IN THE SENSE THAT WHAT THE RESOLUTION ASKS FOR IS NOT FOR ACTUALLY THE MONITORING OF OR THE COLLECTION OF DATA, IT ASKS FOR A STUDY TO BE PRODUCED ABOUT WHAT OUR OPTIONS ARE AND THE COSTS ASSOCIATED WITH THOSE. AND THE CITY HAS BECAUSE OF THIS RESOLUTION TAKEN IT UPON THEMSELVES TO ACTUALLY PROVIDE US WITH THAT STUDY, WITH THAT ESTIMATE OF COST FROM THE BEST INFORMATION THAT THEY'VE HAD AVAILABLE AND ACCESS TO. So whether or not this passes either of the committees today successfully or not, I would argue it has been successful in not only receiving and creating that study, but also providing the public with another opportunity to share their thoughts and perspectives. I THINK IN THE BIG PICTURE, WE'RE GOING TO GET ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO HEAR FROM THE PUBLIC AT THE COMMON COUNCIL MEETING SHOULD THIS PROCEED, YOU KNOW, EITHER SUCCESSFULLY OR WITH NOT A RECOMMENDATION, AND THE COMMITTEE OR THE COMMUNITY WILL ONCE AGAIN HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO COME AND SPEAK ABOUT Their perspectives on noise at our next council meeting at which typically the public is given five minutes so anybody who maybe feels like they did not get a chance to fully share their Perspectives will have another opportunity to do that and I think in listening to a lot of the folks and their comments today they want to be heard right they they have concerns and and Intellectually, I think they all have heard and know that We have this new ordinance and enforcement's going up. That's the messages that maybe the city has been sharing that some of the holders, the police, and those types of things. But it's hard to reconcile that on a day-to-day basis when you are somebody who maybe lives nearby one of these areas that has noise significantly on a regular basis. You can know that the police increased their enforcement by 43%. and that it doesn't seem or feel to that person that it's actually having an impact on their personal experience. And so I think it's important for us to have these conversations for our city staff to speak about the ways in which we are working on this issue and recognizing that there's not an easy solution. But at the end of the day, we at least have more information based upon the work of our Department of Health

Pulling this information together so that we at least have a better sense of what options are whether or not this resolution passes Thank you very much all the personnel sir Thank you This is a very serious issue I hear I get a lot of feedback from my constituents about this and I am grateful for the work that Alder Smith has been doing I also think that city staff and administration are not denying that. I think that the city is very aware of the seriousness of this issue and the amount of time spent on the response, 399 page response to this resolution, reflects just how much staff cares and takes this seriously. I think that also we know where the problems are and we know how bad the problems are. I don't think gathering more data is going to be an impactful solution to addressing this issue. I don't think adopting a new ordinance would be an impactful solution either. We already have ordinances. We already know that the bad behavior that's harming our community is primarily coming from people with illegal vehicles engaging in behavior that is already completely designated as illegal. If we have the funds for this kind of data gathering, then maybe there would be a better way to use those funds to address the resource challenges. Analyzing the problem further when we already know what and where it is isn't going to reduce the amount of noise on our streets. I definitely appreciate the hard work and advocacy that Alder Smith has brought to this issue. Uplifting residents' voices has been very important. And as we navigate dealing with this issue, it is so important to have those voices front and center. We do already know where the issue is as a city, but to know how it is impacting our residents is also very important to keep this conversation alive because the solution to this issue is very difficult, and it's going to require the community to work together to make very difficult decisions. I do not believe that gathering more data will enable APD to find increased resources. I think that's the real issue. People are engaging in behavior that is harmful in our community. We need to address that behavior, that root cause. Madison has an ordinance that they cannot enforce. So we look at Madison. We look at Menominee Falls. We say they have these ordinances. Why can't we follow their example? But are we looking at their noise levels? Are we looking at their quality of life? Because it is a known fact that this quality of life issue is an escalating problem nationwide. And I'm pretty sure that the conversations that people have outside of the cafes on Madison are just as obnoxiously interrupted by vehicular noise as the conversations that we have here in downtown Appleton. This is not a situation where we can look to anyone else providing an example of having solved the problem, no matter what actions we see them taking that are different from our own. I think that's something we really need to keep in mind as we navigate our way forward. So there isn't an example like that that has stopped the modified vehicles, that has stopped the revving of engines, that has stopped the motorcycle races. Ordinances don't. change human behavior. It's only enforcement of those ordinances that does. So we need to have a serious conversation about what we would be willing to cut from other areas, what we would be willing to shift around, how we would reallocate resources in order to put more energy and resources into noise enforcement. That is the heart of this issue. So while this resolution is not, in my opinion, offering a solution to the problem, This is a very important conversation for our community to have. And I hope Alder Smith will continue his advocacy, continue keeping this conversation going, and continue to elevate our residents' voices and give them an opportunity to be heard in these important public forums. Unfortunately, I think approving this resolution would just throw money at the problem without bringing it closer to a solution. And I think we also need to be realistic and acknowledge that a real solution will come with its own price tag, which is probably significantly higher than the price tag associated with this resolution. But if we do want to have a meaningful impact on this problem, that's the environment that we need to acknowledge. Thank you.

Thank you. Dr. Vogel.

I think that what today has demonstrated is that we're all in this together. And this is the noise situation that you brought forward for your constituents and raised the conversation to a level that I think we can take forward. But I'm not so sure that we're going to solve it as the city, regardless of the efforts that have been made. And they aren't efforts to make a we-they or 150 hours versus lesser hours. I imagine your hours are, you could add those up too, as well as the people that were in the room. But this is much bigger than this. I mean, when we think about it, We gather data to quantify a problem or clarify a concern or to monitor an intervention. And I think I'm hearing from everybody that this is an issue. And it's a quality of life issue from day to day. And it's also, as we see the studies indicating, really there are adverse outcomes from noise. There's also adverse outcomes from the root cause of some of that noise, which is not the instrumentation. It's the civility or the lack of it in America, quite frankly, right? The problem is, the challenge is that our responses as individuals or as a community or as a government municipality are limited. And I don't hear the emphasis being limited quite as much by the city's preemptive statute as much as it is by the limited resources and funding. And that you either have to have greater revenue streams, or you have to rearrange what you do with those revenue streams. And otherwise, we're solving the problems on the back of our police department, which is already stretched. This is not dissimilar to what I experience every day in health care. whether it's dealing with an individual who doesn't have health insurance or has lesser health insurance, or we're dealing with the collective group of people that don't have enough health insurance. What's happened is it's become a zero sum game. And then we become pitted against each other because we have finite resources. We're not going to solve this unless we solve it at the legislative level and at the societal level, which I appreciate your conversation because that's what it's about, the societal level, right? But the legislative level is our municipality, Appleton, and the discussion, thank you, Dr. Siepers, for your in-between discussions that we've had. But the legislature means that our municipalities cannot raise sales taxes. You know, how does a city grow and meet its needs as expenses grow? Clearly, we don't. We have a police department that hasn't increased its size. So unless we think beyond Appleton in legislative ways and in community ways, we're not going to solve it. And the other thing we need to recognize is that when we walk away from here, it isn't a we-they. It's an us. and I see nothing but really good people in city government trying to respond not with a rebuttal but with more information and I see good Representation and citizens that are suffering so we build upon that Thank you, and because I asked the public not to repeat anything.

I'll go ditto ditto ditto Thank you all for your comments And I'd like to thank Alderperson Smith for bringing this awareness to it. I'd like to thank all the people that participated today. I'd like to thank both committees for making the time to do this. This is nothing new. The one thing I will say is in 2004 when I first came on council, noise was a factor in my district too. And that was Mason Street in Northland. And I live in the same house and nothing has changed. Some nights I have to close my windows if I want to sleep. So this has been an ongoing problem, and the police force tries to do whatever they can. So at this time, we're going to do a roll call vote. And clerk Molitor is going to call off your names based on your committee. Currently, we're in the motion is to approve for discussion. I believe if you want to say the motion, you can. Sure, the motion would be recommended for approval. And so then an aye vote approves the resolution as written, a nay vote does not.

So we'll do Board of Health first. Chairperson Spears?

Nay.

Member Fuchs?

I'm sorry? So are you voting in favor?

Nay. Nay. Member Cain? Nay. Member Vogel? Nay. Member Wirth? Nay. Mayor Woodford is excused as a Board of Health member, so Alderperson Jones? Nay. And Alderperson Meltzer?

Nay.

All right, that is zero A's, seven A's for Board of Health. For safety and licensing, we are also on a motion to recommend for approval. Chairperson Crote?

Nay.

Alderperson Fenton? Nay. Alderperson Lambrick?

Nay.

Alderperson Hayden. Nay. Alderperson Jones. Nay. All right. That motion also fails. 0 As, 5 Nays.

So I'll make a motion to not approve the resolution as written. Is that the correct? I think that goes back.

Motion to deny.

Motion to deny.

So that's for the Board of Health. Board of Health. She needs a second.

Is there a second from the Board of Health? Second. That was Alderperson Jones.

And from Safety and Licensing, is there a motion?

Motion to deny. Second.

Motion and a second. Hayden, okay.

I just want to get the ball rolling.

It has to come as a positive motion from the committees.

Are we ready to vote right away? All right.

So this is Board of Health, the motion to recommend for denial. Chairperson Spears? Aye. Member Fuchs? Aye. Member Kane?

Aye.

Member Vogel? Aye. Member Wirth? Aye. Alderperson Jones? Aye. And Alderperson Meltzer?

Aye.

All right, that motion passes seven to zero. For safety and licensing, also a motion to recommend for denial. Chairperson Crook?

Aye.

Alderperson Benton? Aye. Alderperson Lambrecht?

Aye.

Alderperson Hayden?

Aye.

Alderperson Jones? Aye. All right, that motion passes 5-0. Okay, thank you very much.

So, safety and licensing does not have anything else on our agenda, including no information items.

Move to adjourn.

Second. Motion and a second to adjourn. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. All opposed? All right, 5-0. Safety and licensing is adjourned. Board of Health can continue their business.

Yep, and thank you for joining our committee today. We appreciate your time.

Thank you.

All right, we're on to 260734, the health department newsletter.

Any comments?

Beautiful again. OK, see no comments. 260735, dangerous animal declaration. That was in our minutes, or in our packet. Is there any comments or questions? Okay, going on to 260733, new noise variances. Any comments or questions? Okay, seeing none, I'll seek a motion to adjourn. Move to adjourn. Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? We are adjourned. Thank you all very much for your time.