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HomeMy WebLinkAbout01.12.24 AttachmentComments to Senate Committee on Transportation and Local Government on SB 691 Mark Rohloff, City Manager City of Oshkosh MRohloff@Oshkoshwi.gov; (920) 236-5002 • I have 40 years of experience in local government, including 12 as a town administrator • I understand the growth needs of urban towns, and also understand the growth management needs of surrounding cities. My experience is that providing opportunities for collaboration creates the best circumstances for strong, orderly growth that serves our economic interests. • Currently, only one of the towns surrounding Oshkosh qualifies as an urban town from a size perspective, and we have an excellent working relationship with them. We have successfully adopted border agreements with several of our surrounding towns, and have also created Extraterritorial Zoning collaboration. In fact, Council just adopted an extraterritorial zoning request last evening for a property that is in the city’s growth area and is not due to be attached to the city for another 19 years. The ETZ provisions enable a city and town to do advance planning so that our respective growth areas are well planned. • Regarding utilities, our concern is that the management discretion of our utility’s growth will be subject to another entity that is not accountable to the city of Oshkosh. We have successfully negotiated terms in our sanitary sewer contracts through partnership and cooperation, ensuring the infrastructure can be funded and maintained to municipal standards. • SB 691 mandates that cities must serve and can only deny service if it does not have sufficient capacity to serve the requestor. • The term “sufficient capacity” is vague and subject to interpretation. • Oshkosh is currently negotiating the renewal of our agreement to provide regional sanitary sewer treatment services to our surrounding towns and their sanitary districts. One sanitary district in particular, does not want us to meter sewage flows to even gauge their volume impact on our system. The vagueness of the term “capacity” would limit our ability to stop such a transfer, instead relying solely on plant capacity. • This same district is refusing to provide us with verifiable information regarding concentrations of their sewage, which is more concerning than the actual volume capacity. This town has significant concentrations of BOD, phosphorus, and radon, and we need to monitor this to determine the sources of contaminants entering our system. SB 691 would only rely on treatment system capacity, putting our system at risk and transferring responsibility for this pollution to city residents rather than the sanitary district actually causing the pollution. • In addition to the utility concerns, SB 691 effectively eliminates years of rational land use by allowing one unit of government to ignore decades of land use plans and public/private investments. It seems as though some urban towns and adjoining cities or villages may have some issues, but they should be encouraged to cooperate with each other, or alternatively, the towns may adopt village powers, or incorporate into a city or village. Urban towns have a multitude of options available to them. • SB 691 will create disincentives for cities, villages, and towns to negotiate in good faith to jointly plan for the benefit of our regions. Please encourage continued good faith collaboration and not reverse those efforts with the adoption of this legislation.