Through the grapevine

Fox Valley public works network
keeps tabs on construction industry

By Sean Ryan
Daily Reporter Staff

Web posted: July 24, 2001

Ross Buetow City Engineer Appleton

For more than 10 years, Fox Valley municipal public works and engineering staffers have gathered for lunch meetings to shoot the breeze about local concerns and hash through their thoughts on contractors.

"Typically it's more of a casual, one to two hour session around the lunch hour that's an open discussion of topics that come up," said Ross Buetow, Appleton engineer, who has organized the meetings for the past decade. "Rather than just calling people on the phone, I think somebody just got the idea, and it kind of caught on. I think other municipalities saw the benefit in it, too."

Buetow said he holds the monthly meetings in the Simpson's Red Ox restaurant in Appleton to provide an informal setting for the directors to share their experiences dealing with common issues. Sometimes those discussions turn to construction-whether it's reviewing work or talking about unfamiliar contractors.

"It's usually not used as a forum to rate contractors or anything, but it might come up in conversation some problems we've been having," Buetow said. "We won't rely on the information there to prequalify or disqualify contractors, but it might raise some flags in your head when you're working on a project. It at least gives you a heads-up to at least take a closer look at a contractor before you prequalify them."

Keeping tabs

Neenah Public Works Director Tim Hamblin said if attendees have horror stories about past work with a contractor, that builder often finds problems qualifying for work in other Fox Valley cities.

"We've found in many cases if a contractor is not pre-approved in Neenah, they are not pre-approved in other cities in the valley," he said. "It's a good networking system. Just don't screw up in one city because then everyone else in the valley will know about it."

Attendance jumps between two and 20 public works people, depending on the season,

Buetow said. But 50 to 100 people, from cities within an hour's drive of Appleton, are on a mailing list.

Hamblin said meeting topics run the gamut, from building inspection and new construction technology to sewer maintenance and infrastructure work.

"They're very informal, and sometimes there's no scheduled agenda topics," he said. "The big benefit of it is if one city tries something and yeah it works or no it doesn't, then they can share that information with everybody and we don't have to reinvent the wheel."

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