 Order the 12th regular meeting of the Sheboygan Common Council. The clerk, please read the quote for the day. The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see. Thank you. Next, we'll go on to roll call. There are 15 present. Alderman Van Akron is excused. And next, please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. To the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Next, we'll go on to the approval of the minutes from our last meeting. Alderman Hammond. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and move to approve. Thank you for the motion and support. Is there any discussion on the minutes? Seeing none, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. The next item on our agenda is the election of a Board of Water Works commissioner. We will now have the election for that office. Alderman Hammond. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I moved to open the floor for nominations for a member of the Board of Water Commissioners. Thank you for that motion and support. Alderman Hammond. Thank you. Again, I'd like to nominate Ray Han. OK, we have candidate Ray Han. Ray, do you accept that nomination? Are there any other nominations? Are there any other nominations? Are there any other nominations? Alderman Hammond. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I moved that nominations be closed in unanimous ballot be cast for Ray Han. Thank you for that motion. We have a second. All in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. Congratulations, Ray, and thank you for your service on the Board of Water Commissioners in the past and look forward to working with you in the future. The next item on the agenda is a presentation by our public library director for an update. Garrett Erickson, would you please come forward? Hello. My name is Garrett Erickson. I've been a library director since June of 2013. I do have some handouts. That's why I've got a bag here. I just wanted to start today by talking about a library and its purpose in the community is a lot of people, I should say, occasionally I hear from people that wonder what the purpose is at this point in American society. And so I thought I'd just start with that. And it's really, libraries are a place in the community where people come to learn about whatever they want to learn about. It's a place where they can connect and share ideas. And really it's the ultimate place where people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they're down on their lock. There's many ways people can learn by reading books, newspapers, journals, listening to and watching CDs and DVDs and podcasts and videos and the internet and all those different things. And that's what the library provides. The library exists to provide information for people, learning opportunities to all members of the community regardless of their backgrounds and regardless of how and where the information is found. And so as these formats change and people talk about, you know, this new technology is coming or books are out of date and so on, it doesn't mean the library needs to go away. It means that the library needs to adapt and we need to be there to help people to be able to access information as well and be there to teach them how to use it. And that's what we see our role is. So I hope that at least moving forward that people understand that we're a little bit bigger than just books or just the internet. We're there to help the community adapt to changes in technologies. The library just changed its mission statement actually to say the Meade Public Library provides quality services, resources and lifelong learning opportunities to meet the needs and interests of our diverse community. So I think it says it pretty well. Some of the, I wanted to give you guys some numbers and some statistics about some of our services. First, we actually had over, excuse me, 316,000 visits last year. That's actually increasing slightly in 2014. We've actually gone up a little bit. That's about 100 people coming through the doors on average per hour. That's a lot of people. We have 30,000 card holders in the city of Sheboygan and about 10,000 in surrounding communities that don't have libraries. And the way we consider them, whether they're active or not is whether they've used either checked out a library item or used a computer in the last three years. And so that's fairly recent activity. Last year we checked out 700,000 items, physical items, including books, CDs, magazines, DVDs. In this we have seen a slow decline in usage of our physical items. Something we're trying to address, but again, overall nationally, those numbers are going down slightly. However, we have seen a big increase in our e-content usage. So that's up 35% just over last year. In fact, we're thinking we'll hit about 40,000 checkouts on Overdrive this year, which is our service that provides e-books. It's part of a statewide service. We also now subscribe to an e-magazine service called Zinio, and it's about the top 100 magazines and journals. You can use it with Android, Apple, Kindle, PC and Mac devices. We're up to about 1,300 checkouts with that for so far this year, so that's growing as well. So the e-content's really taken off for us, and we're starting to put more and more resources towards those items. The library's always provided access to the internet. That's another big thing that we do for people. We've had desktops and laptops and tablets for many years, and that is also, just going up slightly, only about 1% though, over 213 numbers. However, we were recently able to start tracking our wireless usage, and we've had that wireless service for quite some time now, and the schools also started distributing iPads and Chromebooks to their kids, so we think our numbers are going crazy because of this, but we are able to track that. We found that wireless users now outnumber people using the library's equipment. We're up to over 8,000 internet sessions, just in August alone. So we've got a tremendous amount of service that we're providing the community through our internet usage. We also provide a lot of programming, and so to go into that a little bit, so far this year we've had almost 300 programs with about 7,500 people attending. By far the biggest number of programs are in the youth area, and we've got a number of different programs there. We have 1,000 books before kindergarten. It's for our youngest community members, and our hope there is that we have parents who start reading to the kids early on. It helps them in school later on if they've gotten a lot of reading done to them over the years. We also provide lots of resources when kids do get into school, such as homework helpers like BrainFuse in addition to the books that we've always provided. Each summer we promote the summer reading programs for our teens and for the younger kids. If you think about an athlete that takes three months off every year, and they come back in the fall, they're gonna be down compared to their peers who continue to train. Same thing mentally for the kids that take three months off. They're gonna be behind the kids that have parents that push them during the summer. And so if you think about that over the course of several years, by the time those kids get to middle school, they're gonna be way behind if they're not doing anything. So the library partners with several local businesses such as the DQ and Culver's Acuity, sponsors our teen program, and we try to get as many kids involved in reading during the summer as we can. Last year we had 1,500 youth and 600 teens involved in our teen reading program. Speaking of our teens, one thing that I noticed is when I got to Meade is that we had some great spaces upstairs. We just redesigned our third floor. It's a beautiful area if you haven't been there. But we didn't have a lot for the kids to do so. There's a lot of socialization, a lot of goofing around, things like that going on. So one of the first things we started talking about is how can we give them something useful to be working on. And so we purchased a bunch of technology kits just so you can see what one looks like. This is called an Arduino kit. This costs a little bit more than a hard-covered book. It's only the Arduino board started about 35 bucks and we actually get this funded through our friends and foundation. But this allows the kids to check these items out. Now normally you don't think about books, just about books being checked out at a library. We've got things like this that we're starting to try and check out thinking it's a learning center. Kids, these young teens can learn about schematics and electronic circuitry. They can learn about Java programming which is how you make this thing work. And we're trying to get them to actually have an interest in STEM careers is really the hope. If we can seed some of that interest in a young teen and perhaps they'll get into that down the road which will help our community as well as our nation because we're certainly short of people in those fields. The next thing we're trying to do is actually fund a media lab which would allow the kids to try and learn about how to create podcasts and learn about making videos on YouTube and things like that. So again, seeding and interested in these things and we want to get into all kinds of different things but that's the concept and at the end I'll hand out for all those of you that haven't gotten it our strategic plan that talks about some of these things. Finally in the adult programming area some things that we've done is in the past librarians really were pretty careful about who they led into the library and taught and so on and they were really protective. And we taught mostly about literature which was what the area that they were best at. And over the last few years then we started incorporating technology classes. In fact this fall we've got a bunch of Google classes a series of Google classes on everything Google you could want to know about. But since the library board passed our new strategic plan we started opening this up. Our goal is to try and get everybody in the community to start working as experts in the community and talk about whatever their expertise might be. And so they can come in and teach the class the library and just sets it up and like for a local business owner this means he's got a chance now as a local person to start to develop leads and to show their expertise in the community and grow we don't have to do the work we don't have a lot of staff to do that kind of work. And again the person that's participating in the class gets to learn about a new skill or learn about whatever they have an interest in. And so it's a win for everybody I think. So I just wrote down a few of the things that we've had classes in over the last six months we've had gardening, owning a dog, holistic living, financial literacy, acupressure, poetry, knitting, cooking, kayaking, surfing, yoga, playing the harmonica. And so I mean it goes all over and we're still searching for more different things that we can teach on and we're also getting better at trying to ask the people that come in the doors what do they wanna learn about? And so we're getting better at evaluation. But we are opening up what we teach and I think that's important. We want everybody to use the library and be interested in what's going on there. The last service that I wanted to mention is this meeting rooms. Another thing that we've been working on over the last year, when I started we were just building out the rooms in the third floor. We've got a youth area there, we have a teen area and we also got what we call the loft. So now the library has two rooms that are both have a capacity over 100 people. And so we're encouraging people throughout the community to use those rooms. It's the community's rooms nevertheless. So we're hoping people will get in there. Right now I know we're booked almost to the end of the year on our Saturdays and some of our bigger rooms. So they are getting used more and that's what we want. We want people coming through the doors. Some other recent accomplishments. The library did change its table of organization several times. We had the opportunity to make some changes as we had some staff retire recently. And so our team structure went from five internal teams down to three which makes budgeting and training and consistency among how we implement policy and so on. All this is a little bit easier moving forward. From a financial standpoint, the library board did pass a policy last fall stating that we wouldn't use reserves except in the case of like capital projects and emergencies. And I think that was a sticky point with a few people. So I think that was a good thing that we got passed. And another thing is we hired, we had the assistant director retired last year and he was replaced by someone with an accounting background. So to help us try and manage our money, make sure we're doing the right thing with all of our financial processes. So that's been a great upgrade as well. And finally, I have a strategic plan for those of you that haven't seen it that the board passed this February, I believe it was and it's got our roadmap moving forward. So there's a lot of stuff in there that might be different than what you think of a traditional library, a book warehouse or whatever. It's got a lot of things that we're trying to do moving forward really to get the community involved in what we're doing over there. So some challenges moving forward. Of course, budgets are always a challenge. I think every department would say that it's a challenge. We're trying to do what we can with the money we've got. And so that's obviously a big one for us. A conversion to digital collections. We have people in the public that want everything, e everything. Got other ones who could care less. And so it's a struggle with limited resources to figure out where to put the money right now to be quite honest. Something as well as how do you deal with staffing? As you move to a digital collection, you need people that can work with more of an IT function rather than the literature that we traditionally hired. So that's another piece to this is getting people that are technically savvy on staff. And finally, we have an aging workforce. The last time I know we ran this stat, we had the average age of the worker at the library was 56 years old. We know we've got a ton of retirements coming up and that can be seen as an opportunity or a challenge but it's certainly something we're gonna be facing really soon so we have to figure out how to deal with that and where we wanna replace and so on. So in summary, I just wanted to say I know when I moved to the community last year, people will judge a community based on their support of schools, parks and libraries and those services they consider quality of life. These are the barometers of a community and I would ask for your continued strong support of the library and hope that you support us into the future. I think we're doing some great things over there. And if you haven't been to the library in recent times, I'd invite you to come over and I'll give you a tour, personal tour and we'll go through some of the things that we're working on. I think it's just important you as Alderman to see what we're doing over there and to give us any feedback if we can do things better. So I thank you and just I don't know if you do questions or anyone have a question to hear it? I have a handout so I can leave on the corner if anybody wants to see it's our strategic plan, our table of organization and our annual reports. I'll just leave those on the corner if anybody wants those. I just have a question. You said you have approximately 100 people a day come into the library. Per hour. Per hour. What is the age group with those people? You know, that's hard to tell because our gate count just sees people coming through. It's not able to judge that way. We've been trying to dig into our metrics better to understand but we don't have a way to tag I'm knowing who's coming through the door. We could do that with checkouts and I'm trying to get the staff to look into that right now. You're saying 800 people a day? It would be that much, yeah, it is. On certain days it's much more than that. So it would depend. I can tell you early in the week it's much heavier than towards the end of the week and Saturdays are also busy of course because a lot of people can't make it during the week. So yes, I'd encourage you to come through sometime. After about four o'clock it's crazy and so we have our issues with security sometimes and it gets crazy in there and so and other times it is quiet so it's really kind of dependent on the day. So the day of the week matters a lot. Other questions? Okay, well thank you very much. Jared, thank you very much for the great work you're doing at the Mead Library. Thank you. Is there anyone registered for the public forum? I'm sorry, no, not this evening. Thank you. Under Mayor's announcements I just want to remind everybody about the Committee of the Whole Meeting planned for tomorrow at six o'clock right here in these chambers and the next item would be a hearing. This is a hearing regarding the special assessments for water main replacements in Wheaton Creek Road from South Taylor Drive to the railroad approximately 1,600 feet westerly. Is there anyone wishing to be heard? Is there anyone wishing to be heard? Is there anyone wishing to be heard? Alderman Hammond. Thank you Mr. Mayor, move to close the hearing. Second. Thank you for the motion and support. Any discussion? Seeing none. All those in favor of closing the hearing please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. Next we'll go on to the consent agenda. Alderman Hammond. Thank you Mr. Mayor, I move to file, or accept and file all ROs, accept and adopt all RCs and put all resolutions upon their passage. Second. Thank you for that motion and support. Alderman Vanderwheel. Thank you Mr. Mayor, I ask that on item 3.5 that we would refer license number 0537 back to committee. Second. Okay, we have an amendment to the motion to re-refer license 0537 to the Law and Licensing Committee. Any discussion on that amendment? Seeing none, all those in favor please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. Now we're back to the main motion as amended. Any other discussion on any of the consent items? Would the clerk please call the roll? 15 ayes. Motion passes. Under reports of officers, item 4.1 will lie over. Items 4.2 through 4.6 will be referred to various committees. Next we'll move on to resolutions. Items 5.1 through 5.3 will begin re-refer to various committees. Next we'll move on to reports of committees. Item 6.1 is a reported committee by law and licensing recommending denying a beverage operator's license number 0506 based on his failure to accurate reveal all relevant convictions on his application, his record of violations related to the license to activity, his record as a repeat law offender and his failure to cooperate with the committee. Alderman Vanderweel. Thank you, I ask that we can refer this back to committee. Second. We have a motion and a second to refer back to committee. Is there any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. That'll be re-referred to law and licensing. Item 6.2 is an RC by salary and grievances to whom was referred general ordinance number 27 of 1415 by Alderman Donahue repealing chapter 29 of the 1975 municipal code and repealing and recreating chapter 82 of the Sheboyga municipal code relating to personnel regulations and benefits and recommends that the attached substitute ordinance be passed. Alderman Donahue. Thank you, Mayor. I would move that the reported committee be accepted and adopted and that the attached substitute ordinance be put upon its passage. Second. Thank you for that motion and support. Do that documents before us? Are there any questions? Seeing none, will the clerk please call the roll for passage? 15 ayes. Motion passes. Next, we'll go on to other matters. City attorney. 7.1 is an RO by the city clerk submitting various license applications for the period ending December 31, 2014, and June 30, 2016. That'll be referred to the law and licensing committee. Next is a motion to go into closed session. Alderman Hammond. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I move to convene in closed session under the exemption provided in section 19.851E, Wisconsin Statutes for the purpose of deliberating the selling of public property where competitive and bargaining reasons require a closed session. Second. Thank you for that motion and support. That motion is before us. Will the clerk please call the roll? 15 ayes. We'll take a five-minute recess and reconvene. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I move to put the resolution extending the contract start date till 1 March, 2015 for the property known as the I-43 Wheaton Creek parcel between the city of Sheboygan and Becnell Industries. Second. Thank you for that motion and support. Is there any other discussion on the motion? Seeing none, will the clerk please call the roll for passage? Okay. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. Alderman Hammond. Move to adjourn. Second. Thank you for that motion and support. All those in favor of adjourning, please signify by saying aye. Aye. We stand adjourned. Thank you very much.