Common Council Meeting Early for Tosa's Night Out

The Wauwatosa Common Council will meet an hour earlier than usual Tuesday night to give the mayor, aldermen and city staff more time to spend at Tosa's Night Out.

The council will meet at 6:30 p.m. at City Hall. Regularly scheduled meetings take place at 7:30 p.m.

Tosa's Night Out begins at 4 p.m. with family activities in and a Tosa Tonight concert at 5:30 p.m.

Given the agenda, citizens can expect to see their public officials arriving at in plenty of time for the Family Flashlight Walk Against Crime at 8 p.m. All items for consideration by the council come with overwhelming recommendations for approval from their respective committees.

Typically, when that is the case, aldermen move for approval of whole blocks of resolutions at once, and usually that occurs without debate. Meetings with no contentious items often are over in 10 minutes or less.

Among the action items the council is expected to approve swiftly Tuesday are three from the Employee Relations Committee. They are the joint repeal of four ordinances covering health insurance payments by all non-union-represented employees; and their replacement under two separate resolutions.

Now that union workers have been put on the same plan with non-union workers, there is no longer a need for separate ordinances, and in the future plan changes will be handled by resolution and detailed in a comprehensive employee handbook instead of in the City Code.

Helping to keep this meeting short is the fact that the only controversial item expected to come to the council ended up being held for more committee debate.

An ordinance to create a new city staff position — a business specialist to assist Paulette Enders, the director and sole employee of the Economic Development Department — could have gone to the Common Council, but members of the Employee Relations Committee wanted further consideration.

The committee failed to forward a recommendation on the hiring after it came to a tie vote, 2-2, in July. Deputy City Clerk Susan Van Hoven said she expected the measure to reach the Common Council sometime in September after the committee reconsiders its earlier vote when one member, Ald. Jill Organ, was absent.

The business specialist postion, which is intended to focus on small business development to free up Enders for "big picture" planning, would come with a base salary in the $50,000 to $70,000 a year range.

Employee Relations Committee members split on whether the city should be creating new positions in a time of shrinking budgets. Two felt it was not the time; two felt that the position could help boost Wauwatosa's tax base to make up for losses in state aid.