Stealth Policy Changes

A comment by City Administrator Marc Nevinski at the end of the April 27, 2026 council meeting caught many folks’ attention. He stated that due to a city code change, Shorewood was no longer assessing properties for water improvements. As regular readers know, SCA carefully monitors activities at the City of Shorewood and that statement surprised even us. After a little research, this is what we found:

At the 11/24/2025 council meeting, a public hearing was held and a vote for multiple code updates in one bundle took place. Planning Director Jake Griffiths’ memo told the council:

“The intent of the update is to modernize the code, enhance user-friendliness, ensure code consistency with local, state, and federal requirements and court rulings, and incorporate municipal best practices.”

In reality, as part of this bulk action, the existing ordinance regarding municipal water was completely replaced, including the key provision for how to pay for these extremely expensive water infrastructure projects. Griffiths’ opinion in the summary describes that provision as:

“Outdated water improvement and assessment requirements.”

What appeared to be a benign bureaucratic housekeeping item resulted in a major policy change. This policy change was one of 23 proposed changes on multiple topics buried within the proposed update, so it’s not clear that it was obvious to council members what they were approving.

The genesis of the changes to the water policies was a 3.5 hour (!) discussion about municipal water on June 9, 2025. There were 19 policy concepts that the city staff dumped in front of the council to discuss. The goal was to determine which of these concepts might eventually get majority approval. Keep in mind, the council didn’t formally approve any of these topics at that meeting.

At the June 9th meeting, Option 16 was the concept to implement an assessment policy to partially fund infrastructure. What the documentation for that discussion did not include was that the ordinance in effect at that time already had a provision for assessing water infrastructure improvements.

In short, it appears that on November 24, Jake Griffiths and the city staff presented the council with incomplete and selective information in a confusing, opaque and overwhelming manner to get the outcome the staff wanted.

Unfortunately, due to the seemingly stealthy manner that city staff orchestrated these changes, SCA recently published an article with incorrect information: Mill Street Mire: Will You Pay for the Water Main?

During our research, we relied on the published Code of Ordinances that is linked from the City’s website that includes water improvement processes. Apparently, this is only updated and republished on an annual basis, leaving anyone reliant on it unsure as to what ordinances are truly in effect at any given time. To date, the Code of Ordinances still has not been updated with the approved changes.

So far, water policy discussion is not on future council agendas. SCA believes resident input is important because of its potential significant financial impact on residents.

Sources:

City Council Meeting • Shorewood Agendas & Minutes • CivicClerk
Summary of proposed ordinance changes
Step 1 Creating a Vision for City Water Funding & Expansion