Around 40 people gathered in the Wausau Council Chambers for the Council's meeting on June 15th, 2021 for public comment. (MWC photo by Mike Leischner)
WAUSAU, WI (WSAU) — The Wausau version of the “A Community for All” resolution will get another round in committee before a full council vote.
Tuesday evening the Wausau City Council considered their own version of the “A Community for All” resolution. The Wausau version of the resolution was passed unanimously by the Economic Development Committee and was slightly adapted from the Marathon County version of the resolution that was put together by the Diversity and Affairs Commission.
The County Board version of the resolution has been in the works for over a year but has failed to win enough support among the county Board of Supervisors to pass. The resolution and the division around it have garnered national attention including two recent articles in the New York Times.
While the Council heard over 25 minutes of public comment on the resolution, both for and against its passage, the Council discussion lasted for under 10 minutes. During those 10 minutes, District 7 Alder Lisa Rasmussen talked about her reservations to the current version of the resolution, saying that the process for its approval has been clunky and backward.
One of the issues Rasmussen highlighted was that the resolution wasn’t the City’s work, but that most of it was adopted from the County Board’s work. “That document is not our document. It’s the Diversity Affairs Commissions document. It was created by County Board supervisors, it was not created by any of us. It wasn’t reviewed by our attorneys.
“And for all intents and purposes word for word, while some of us may agree with the sentiment, those aren’t our words. And I think if we want to do this right, we need a statement that we write. That we create. We can’t just adopt someone else’s work product and say this is it, we’re going to go with that.”
Rasmussen, who is a member of the Economic Development Committee, hoped that in referring the resolution back to committee, they could look at other diversity, inclusion, and equality statements like the Greater Wausau Chamber of Commerce. “I feel like 2 days after we approved this item in the committee, the Chamber approved a better one. And we didn’t have access to any of that. But if you go back and read the document that the Chamber and their board and their membership approved, it’s a statement that recognizes that socially and economically we need to be inclusive and diverse.
“We all strive to meet those goals. It talks about business. A statement like that could be adapted to this community in our words. We could figure out what we want to say and how we want to say it without 15 whereas clauses. Without it being a proclamation.
“If we would take a similar statement to what the Chamber adopted, and add things to it like statements about quality of life and belonging and what it means to be included in your society. I think we need to create such a statement because I think what we have here, isn’t the product that we want to stand behind.”
When the motion to send the resolution back to the Economic Development Committee was brought to a vote it passed on a narrow 6-5 margin. The Economic Development Committee’s next meeting is set for July 6th.
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