Tosa council members have varying records of attending meetings

When the Wauwatosa Common Council members took their seats for their last meeting of the year, on Dec. 16, it was an unusual moment — for a reason that had nothing to do with the agenda or the discussion that would follow.

All 16 members of the council were present. It was the first and only full council meeting of 2025 with zero absences.

In general, the council had a good year of meeting attendance. At most meetings, all but one or two members were present. The lowest-attended meeting was on Aug. 26, when five of the 16 members were absent.

Some members missed more meetings than others, while a few members posted exemplary attendance, missing few or no meetings of either the full council or its committees.

With one week left until the city’s Jan. 6 deadline for filing to run in the next council election, Tosa Forward News compiled 2025 attendance records for each of the 16 current members, including regular council meetings, "committee of the whole" meetings and meetings of the council's four committees.

That data indicate that the two most frequent members absent from full council meetings were Andrew Meindl and Jason Wilke, with five absences from the year's 14 full council meetings. Meindl and Wilke also missed the most committee meetings. Neither is running for the council again in April 2026.

Nine of the other members were absent one to three times from the 14 full council meetings. The remaining five council members had perfect attendance at those meetings: James Moldenhauer, Brad Foley, Ernst Franzen, Rob Gustafson and Melissa Dolan.

Foley and Franzen also had perfect attendance at their committee meetings, as did Mike Morgan. Moldenhauer attended every committee meeting but missed one of the year's four committee of the whole meetings, which are special meeting of the full council for presentations but no votes.

MORE: Tosa Election Tracker

Tosa Forward News reviewed the official minutes of each of the 14 meetings of the full council, the four committee of the whole meetings, the 18 meetings of the Financial Affairs Committee, the 16 meetings of the Government Affairs Committee, the nine meetings of the Transportation Affairs Committee and the eight meetings of the Community Affairs Committee.

In the table below, each of the current council members was given a percentage attendance rate for council meetings and a separate rate for committee meetings.

Each member of the council serves on two committees, which are indicated in the table. Because the committees met different numbers of times in 2025, attendance at those meetings does not allow for perfect comparisons between council members. For example, a member of the Financial Affairs Committee may have a higher attendance rate despite missing more meetings than a Transportation Affairs Committee member, because Financial Affairs met twice as many times. The percentage rate, however, still provides a general assessment of each members' attendance.

In a few cases, members were allowed to attend certain meetings remotely. Those were counted as attended meetings.

Minutes from each of the meetings, including attendance, are available to the public through the city's meeting portal here. More information on the Common Council and its current members is available here.

Key: TRANS, Transportation Affairs Committee; COMM, Community Affairs Committee; FIN, Financial Affairs Committee; GOV, Governmental Affairs Committee.