Meetings and Updates Week of Nov 25

• City Meetings: Common Council
• Thanksgiving Holiday Changes to Trash/Recycling Pick-Up Schedules This Week
• Winter Season Updates: Parking, Plowing, and a New Tool for Maintaining Roads in Bad Winter Conditions
• Your Input Requested: South Stoughton Road Design Alternatives, Online Survey
• Events & Announcements

FYI, City Offices are closed on November 28 and 29. Administrative offices are closed on November 28 and 29, 2024 for Thanksgiving and Ho-Chunk Day. Emergency services will be open; please call 911. Use Report a Problem for non-emergencies.

Boards, Commissions, and Committee Meetings

Note: This is not a complete list of meetings for this upcoming week. All meetings and their details can be found at the Meeting Schedule page.

Common Council

The Common Council meeting will take place on Tuesday, November 26, at 6:30 p.m. in virtual format. Agenda items include:

• Item 4: Staff presentation by the Department of Civil Rights, with the DCR 2023 Annual Report for context.
• Item 18: A resolution authorizing an amendment to the contract between the City and Brown and Caldwell for the Door Creek Watershed Study (I’m the sponsor). The contractor told the City they need more time to complete the study due to staff turnover. This change does not affect the cost of the study.
• Item 48: A resolution awarding nearly $10 million from the Affordable Housing Fund to secure 167 affordable units at four development projects, one on the East Side, one on the West Side, and two on the North Side, as recommended by the Community Development Block Grant and Finance Committees.
• Item 49: The 2024 3rd Quarter Report from MPD Chief Shon Barnes.
• Item 50: A Report on the Body Worn Camera Pilot Program by MPD Chief Shon Barnes. Here is a draft of the report. Here are the highlights from the Chief’s memo and the report:
  • No charges were added when officers reviewed video
  • BWC may aid in building trust, transparency, and legitimacy as one element in a broader plan of community engagement
  • Officers did not change their behavior while wearing a BWC, nor did they change the way they interacted with people
  • Technology issues related to battery life and video uploading were identified early in the experiment and corrected
  • An estimate for staff time to redact video was generated from the experiment and used to calculate future staffing needs.
  • Cost estimate for 450 cameras, accessories, software: $3.2 million to $6.7 million (note: there may be a grant opportunity to offset up to $900k of this cost).
  • Staffing Needs: four new positions on the Operating Budget to manage and examine footage data, total annual cost of $292,000.
  • Chief Barnes intends to include funding for this program in his 2026 City Budget requests, which the Council will take up in fall 2025.
• Item 106 for introduction without debate: a resolution censuring Alder Charles Myadze for conduct unbecoming of an alder. I am a cosponsor of this resolution. I wrote about this situation in last weekend’s updates post. Note that censure does not remove an alder from the Council. The resolution will up for a vote on during the December 10th Council meeting.

Meeting info:

• Meeting Details
• Meeting Agenda
• Register for Public Comment
• Watch Online

If you would like more information about becoming a member of a City board, commission, or committee, please visit the page linked here.

Thanksgiving Holiday Changes to Trash/Recycling Pick-Up Schedules This Week

There will be no Streets Division collections performed on both Thursday, November 28, 2024, and Friday, November 29, 2024, in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday. If your trash and recycling are normally collected on Wednesdays or Thursdays by the Streets Division, you should have your carts to the curb by 6:30am on Wednesday, November 27, 2024. If your trash and recycling are normally collected on Fridays or Mondays by the Streets Division, you should have your carts to the curb by 6:30am on Monday, December 2, 2024.

More information is available in this Streets Division announcement.

Winter Season Updates: Parking, Plowing, and a New Tool for Maintaining Roads in Bad Winter Conditions

Winter Parking Rules: alternate side parking is in effect until March 15, 2025. Sign up for daily alternate side parking reminders by text. 

Image credit: Compas Minerals, the City's supplier for road salt.

This is also the time of year when we need to start planning around possible snow events by driving carefully, leaving more time to go places, and leaving more space between yourself and other cars on the road. While the snow is falling, the City plows all of the salt routes, shown in red on this map of salt routes. Salt routes include Major streets and connections, Metro Transit bus routes, and streets near schools, hospitals, and police and fire stations. After the snowfall stops, the City will plow all streets if more than 3 inches of snow fell.

I'm sure we all remember the very severe snowstorm that dropped 15 inches of snow on January 12-13 of this year, followed by more than a week of subzero temperatures. This year the City purchased 500 tons of salt treated with magnesium for the winter of 2024-25, which will work at colder temperatures than regular road salt. However, we need to be very careful about when this new tool is used: this product is 30% more expensive, not much is available on the supply market, and it is more corrosive (staff say "extremely corrosive") for metal than regular salt. Staff describe this new tool as a "break glass in case of emergency" measure to avoid the very frustrating and unsafe road conditions situation we saw after that severe January 2024 storm. For those who want to learn more about this, here is a link to the relevant section of a recent staff presentation where Streets Superintendent Charlie Romines described the impact and Streets Division staff response to that storm as well as this new measure for salting our roads under more extreme conditions.

Your Input Requested: South Stoughton Road Design Alternatives, Online Survey

If you missed WisDOT’s second public meeting for the US 51 (Stoughton Road) South Study, it’s not too late to provide your input! As a reminder, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation is conducting a corridor study of South Stoughton Road between McFarland and Hwy 30 and is rethinking the number of lanes, speed limits, potential new access points, and intersections. Here is a link to the exhibit boards and visuals that WisDOT staff displayed at the Nov 19th public meeting. As a reminder, this study is to establish design plans and no construction projects are planned or budgeted - that step will depend on the State's process for prioritizing their projects.

Below is an easy-to-follow, 18-minute YouTube video where a presenter talks through the study and five different alternative concepts. Concepts 1 and 2 would preserve a higher-speed, highway feel for Stoughton Road while concepts 4 and 5 present an opportunity for a more neighborhood-friendly Stoughton Road that is less of a hard geographic barrier disconnecting Eastside neighborhoods. 

Here are the links to the survey to provide your own feedback on the design alternatives:

• Survey in English
• Survey in Spanish
• Survey in Hmong

Please take the online survey before December 20.

Events & Announcements

This list is shorter than usual due to the holiday next week.

• Trash & Recycling Collection Schedule for the 2024 Thanksgiving Holiday: There will be no Streets Division collections performed on both Thursday, November 28, 2024, and Friday, November 29, 2024, in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday. [posted November 22, 2024]
• Holiday Fantasy in Lights Monday, November 25 through Sunday, December 1: lighted holiday themed displays set in beautiful Olin Park. Drive through anytime Dusk until Dawn to enjoy this magical light show for free, brought to you by The Electric Group.

Please visit the City news webpage to find additional news and announcements and to subscribe to receive notification of news releases as they are posted. Additional upcoming events can also be found on the City events calendar.