all right wanna call someone from operations to order please first up we have mr wands for the i love new york revocable permit his son's first birthday is today we wanna get him in and out so what do you have in front of you is a application for a local permit for i love new york pizza what they would like to do is replace their deck that they currently have the deck has been there for quite some time condition in disrepair i'd like to repair the deck three feet of that deck the deck goes to the back of the sidewalk however the property line as in most cases is not the back of the sidewalk so three feet of the deck is in the right of way coast will be inspecting the deck the city has no objection to this being in the right of way as long as they are granted this permit questions comments someone should take care of the sidewalk this is not gonna change the sidewalk at all the sidewalk right now is i believe there is a two foot utility strip and then there's a five foot sidewalk and then they have stairs that are internal they're not external so they're stairs that are internal to the deck and it's a flush back they're not gonna be coming out at all any farther i believe this deck is original from ben and jerry's so i don't know it's been for quite some time and we're gonna be able to maintain at least five feet of clear space all in favor to give permit i move to approve second all in favor thank you very much we'll have pictures of dates go get your party hat on okay uniform rental and laundry service mr howard so this is for the uniform rental that we'd like to enter an agreement with unifirst corporation which just went out last year for bid we've had two respondents to the bid one did not meet the qualifications and the other came through with everything so we'd like to enter into that contract for one year and then next year we would reach out even further and try to get more bidders to come aboard questions comments it talks about all the uniforms and lab coats and all this so every one these people are wearing some type of uniform everyone has a certain either uniform or laundry service that is provided for by unifirst whether it be uniforms whether it be towels mop heads things like that so we're all affected you know between facilities fire sewer street wastewater treatment plant water department and between the pump station so yeah everybody has a little piece correct okay how does this price compare to last year chairman last year they are right on the same numbers as what we had last year they've held us to the same numbers so there was really no increase at all so they've been a very reliable vendor for us none of our departments have had an issue with them and the products that they supply to us so that's why we really feel that unifirst is one of the better quality people that you can go through that is twenty five thousand five hundred yes sir and that's culmination all the departments all the departments listed here okay i'd like to move this any other business to be brought up for operating okay so second all in favor thank you i'm gonna call order city development and planning first item on the agenda concerns the land bank and mr hoffman is here to talk to us about that good evening everyone good evening as you have on your request form this exciting time for land banks to revitalization it's connectivity but it's time to get down to the nitty gritty we have to put our application into the attorney general for the funding that we're requesting a million dollars and maybe more for the land bank for amsterdam the county and the city and in order to put that application in the way we have it planned right now are gonna be asking for approximately thirty one properties in eastern island neighborhood and maybe some others but we need a resolution of support and a commitment to transfer the property so that when we put the application in the city and from the county and from amsterdam go along with the application so that's the basics of it i'll answer any questions you have about it raise here to answer any questions thank you for assisting us in this as a city we're talking about the twenty one properties not just on the street but in the neighborhoods in the back there the city owns some vacant lots and some other properties we wanna do as throughout a job in that neighborhood as we can yes we hop to demolish and to rehab and some of them were vacant now we hope to clean them up maybe do a property next door maybe do a community garden and we also have a facade program going in eastern avenue neighborhood right now where homeowners can apply to the land bank for five thousand in assistance to help with the outside of the properly this million dollars is coming to where it's connected the land bank is what amsterdam the county and the city okay so part of the three million they pretty much said they're is three million's available it needs a land bank we may ask for a little more because amsterdam has some things going and you know the county has a couple things that we may wanna ask for too but we said we wanna get the three million for the land bank it will all go to the city we're hoping the lion share of to two and a half two and a quarter we're gonna ask for a little more you know with specific projects in mind we're calculating all that getting the application ready so all the properties that you're talking about i believe someone when we're in the most recent round of foreclosures i'm not quite sure how that is but thank you ma'am just a couple of comments here and a question again wonderful partnership with the land bank with metroplex sir and ida for working in our neighborhoods we've been talking about the metroparks not getting into the neighbors for a long time we know they've been doing a great work with downtown and again my theory is the city of schenectady the heart is the downtown and without the arteries we are now gonna move into the arteries and start working into the neighborhoods eastern avenue is certainly an area of need and again there's many of those buildings that you have said are vacant and just completely need to be taken down the other question is how often does this application come forward from the state is this something that's a yearly basis or with land banking funding they've announced it last year they announced the first gate pins about another one so then they announced another one this year and they've also indicated they're more unlikely there will be a third round next year and the reason i ask that is as you're well aware with this many city school districts reorganize every district the buildings two thousand and sixteen over alvern avenue school is slated to be closed i'd really like to see a triplex and then the land bank and continue to work on that eastern avenue corner and what the school does perhaps maybe turn that vacant building into some housing for seniors or for veterans as we're talking about some of the other neighborhoods and i think it just be a wonderful way to partner with the school rather than to wait for a building to burn down like we did on brandywine for so many years so again if we can keep that in the back of our minds you know the long range plan to work with partner with the school district on the next one hundred and eighty and then take a look at that utilize it for some potential housing the land banks have generated a lot of credibility around the state and not only the attorney general but some of the other funding sources we hope it will be coming forward as the attorney general settles with the large foreclosing banks settles their you know the lawsuits with them that's the funding and they wanna make sure that it's used for revitalization in areas where those foreclosures took place so they don't wanna get let us get too far off the dime there but they had indicated that there will be continual funding for land banks at least into two thousand and fifteen thank you any other questions mr gellen did you wanna add anything yeah just an interesting point bank data we were thrilled to the attorney general stipend and it's connecting with the mayor of amsterdam and many of you were there we really appreciate it and we put to good use the one hundred and fifty thousand that you provided us last year leveraged it with metro bikes dollars and ida dollars to see real gains and progress take place one eastern it's a great opportunity they're said to acquire for three million dollars this state funding that is available is all money that's bearing very well at the event is all money that he won in legal actions against these large foreclosing banks so it is not taxpayer money it is money that he won for the efforts and legal actions on foreclosure cases so it's in effect found money from the state and we're working very closely with the land bank and the mayor and his team to try to bring home this next win if you will and this next allocation of dollars and we're really appreciative of your support you need to send forward a strong resolution for the city say that we want this money we have had some other discussions with the school district on that school a great idea to do conversion to housing we've had very preliminary discussions at this point there's more intake thank you any other questions or comments if not i'll entertain the motion we really set a solid foundation to work off of and it's exciting to see it starting to really fall into motion but at a critical time of being wellorganized to move forward not just willy nilly so i'm thrilled the second point is porterfield all in favor aye okay thank you all right second item on the agenda was ceremonial resolution for paraikus they just had their hundredth anniversary second by porterfield all in favor aye all right there's nothing else to come before city dealt development and planning i'll entertain a motion to adjourn second all in favor aye okay public safety dog holding facility assistant chief good evening good evening good evening everybody knows where we came from and the challenges that we've had in the past with exorbitant amount of dogs that we take into custody every year then with that we built a facility the facility is in nice shape it's brand new it's kept clean and neat and the temperature is fine and adequate for the dogs we tried to adopt many dogs or transfer the ownership to them we evaluate all the dogs prior to transfer and hopefully in hopes of having the transfer dog as opposed to euthanizing do you have any questions i mean i'm not quite sure what are some of the issues we know that the city works on a tight budget we know that all the city workers are super busy so i think what came out to me strongest was how can we leverage people who have this as their passion not necessarily their job right because we certainly saw that there's people that wanna come into the facility that wanna help take care of the dogs we walk them they're certainly already donating food and toys so how can we safely leverage that because to me it's just like we encourage our neighborhood associations to get into the parks and you have you know litter and you know maintain a healthier city atmosphere overall how can we use that leverage that volunteer we do work with a lot of other agency and have and still do as far as some guidance because let's face it this is relatively new to us and we've been searching out guidance and we've been attending training sessions to educate ourselves and learn on best means and best ways to handle situations like this i think some of the questions that you have regarding some other volunteers coming in to me i see that as a legal issue that probably would sit better with corporation counsel but certainly we're not opposed to that and again we have been working with other organizations or associations to help us with the dogs there's something there are things we can do we can study it's mostly just our support groups wanna come in do we can evaluate what things are possible what things aren't what is the policy right now when a dog is brought in as far as what are they fed how many times are they fed a day they're fed they're watered everyday there's water they're fed we kind of changed that a little bit because we were feeding them twice a day and what happens here of course is you feed them twice a day then they excrete twice a day so we've scaled that back to feed a once a day but they're also giving treats throughout the day as well whose job is that to do that the animal control officers we have two fulltime and one parttime we just lost one and i just received four applications hopefully this week i'll be conducting interviews to hire i'd like to hire a couple more and fortunately it looks like i have some good applicants so i'm going to hire hopefully two maybe more i don't know but i have a budget obviously we work with it and i'm not worried about that budget for spending it i think we can live within and without within your budget would it be possible to hire someone to be there because from what i understand i don't think twenty four hours is acceptable i thought it's supposed to be twelve hours well especially for water it's recommended that they always have water and we check on them five days a week they're checked on there's somebody working two shifts and then on sundays we have a parttimer come in we have one coming in on saturdays of course she resigned about three weeks ago and yeah some days like sundays and mondays could be a stretch a period of time where there's no one there but we make sure we check on them and make sure they have water so this is a manpower issue then at times it is and hopefully soon that would be resolved in what way by hiring more parttimers do we have money in the budget to do better absolutely because it seems to me like the biggest complaint too was interaction i know this is a shortterm facility i understand that but sometimes it's turning into a longterm facility for some of these dogs but that's rare i understand but they don't have any real human interaction as far as somebody to take them out mrs parasso brought up you know if we have people that are willing to do this the dogs are the ones that are manageable they're exercised they're taken out on walks the dangerous dogs are a different story that is rough by the animal control officers yes however we had a meeting recently with the mayor and one of our humane societies that is willing to help us out some more they already do work with us on a daily basis and they wanna help us some more and we're looking at possible outside run for the dogs we can let them run outside they can't stay caged in there so we're researching that now just one other question and i know it's come up other times with all the things we ask of volunteers is this gonna be a human work problem if volunteers come in again that's to me that's a legal question it would depend on what is exactly wrong here could you be more specific as to if they came to walk the dogs is that helpful not helpful right now giving the specifics of different situations i wanna sit down on track and hear what exactly people get a case by case answer how can we set it up so that the animal control officer's position defaults to another position because i mean how are we protecting to make sure that one of our fulltime animal control officers steps out of the street and gets run over by a bus god forbid right how are we protecting that defaults somewhere else can we have a fail safe method right in other words if somebody needs to go on a vacation if we lose a parttime person or whatever and that can we have a backup person that's always available or a backup position that always defaults to ensure that that's constant exactly and that's one of the challenges right now especially in the losing one of the parttimers so we've been managing we've been taking care of it but more that's why i requested permission to hire possibly a couple extra parttimers but instead of hiring additional staff that would tax the budget if we have a default person so you know whatever you know i don't know who and that's something else i looked into today i spoke to carl olson the guy getting some help and he said whatever i can do for you let me know again we're checking all options all options i just feel like it's up to us to work as hard as we can possibly work to make sure this happens as fast as it can possibly happen and that we're better you know not to say it was bad but we're better absolutely because we can always be better you know and especially for this vulnerable population you know even if it is a temporary situation and again i would love to see the passionate people who love animals i would love to see them be able to have the ability to assist the city because we have some wonderful programs with our city that will give eagerly of their time and effort i don't see why we incorporate that in this part of the city too sure absolutely yeah absolutely is there any way within the budget we have to look cause we're coming to a actual facility with a person there at least on a regular basis so we to don't have to worry about somebody's on vacation at least on a five day basis and somebody can fill in on the weekend that would be the best thing or somebody looking for a dog and they know where to come or they lost their pet is that a possibility yeah i mean if there's enough money that's always the question could we hire a professional somebody that is familiar with this type of facility and managing that would be ideal another piece that really jumped out at me that i thought was a very strong point that we can easily rectify is the amount of information on our website i'm sorry that i don't know but is it the county function or a city functions that it looked like it went to the county but i could be wrong where it says you know who they call if we could have pictures and again if we have i think one of the volunteer services available to us as somebody who was willing to do web work somebody could snap a picture and say found in this spot on this day you know any kind of picture or we can even call because i mean that's i think an important resource and then if we can even link out to like local shelters and things of that nature where the shelter can say okay click here to visit the city's temporary holding and find your dog i mean you know we're in the world of information technology now that's the way everyone navigates and it just seems like that's an easy lift for us we've met with i'm sorry go ahead i had a conversation with steve carrizo we're looking to implement that type of program right after labor day to be able to get photographs of dogs as they come in be able to post them in again the real goal is that we don't have any animals in that facility we've started over the last year is doing the dog licenses so dogs have the tags on that we can identify when they do get loose and we're able to return them to their owner and it also narrows down and group of owners that probably should not have a pet to begin with because they create an environment where the pets and dogs really become vicious or not really conducive to the city at all the pets become victims when it's really the owners that have facilitated that or created an environment that allows it to happen i respect that but i also think there's another contention of people whose dog digs under the fence and takes off you know and they're great owners and i think you know again it's almost no cost to the city to have that website but again if that dog has a tag on it when it gets out underneath the fence it is very quickly identified and able to be reunited with its owner my question is regarding feeding the dogs you said you're down to once a day well that's after consulting with people that are very familiar with dogs they said that's fine so once you have people that are hired part time is that now because you don't have enough staff is that why that there's no one to clean up behind the dogs after they've gone back so there's no one to clean up so once you hired more staff which is what you're talking about will that change will they now be able to be fed more than once a day i don't know i'm not sure i mean that's something that it was recommended to me that you know they only have to eat once a day and i got it from more than one source so i don't find that acceptable myself i mean i'll certainly look into it again and you also mentioned they're going to be creating an outdoor run so the dogs can get out exercise that's yes something that we're looking into i don't have a commitment yet on that but there's some issues with that we have to be conservative and there are diseases and what kind you know is it gonna be grass is it gonna be pavement how do we need to clean it we have to seal it i mean there's issues in how it's gonna be designed so i mean it's early stages that we're looking into that just a lot of questions but obviously there's people have it there's facilities that have it so we'll tap into them and we'll question them just the same way we did when we built this facility we went out in the field and talk to a lot of people went to different facilities and figured out what the best way to do it go with this one is there any way at some point you're partnering with the county to have a county run facility i mean we can look at those options it was put in place because those options were some were just not taking their dogs the cost was so high in terms of running it and transporting them i mean it's a clean facility where we have it you know for what i've seen at the time and of course we're talking about it may be cleaned off if we're not feeding the dogs enough but we'll put that aside it's not even brad shear who said that no matter how my facility is taken care of so i'd like to see maybe at some point we can talk to the county in a partnership you pay towards it with the county to try to combine or maybe have this facility replaced it might be more conducive having volunteers to come in cause that's not the ideal place for anybody to go actually and i know again i understand it's a shortterm facility but i think that place has an issue that's my personal feelings any other questions i was just gonna suggest too we may wanna ask for kind of regular updates as this stuff happens three part time two full time and hopefully three part time well i would like to see cause it's possible for us to do so volunteers safely for the city and police contracts and also where we like to sample control position to another position should we come up in a situation that we're shortstaffed i think those are needed things that we have to look into other things will take time but those were met in i understand the mayor's work in the website and that'll happen after labor day so those would be my three priorities right now in the meantime i'm just gonna be a little looking into the feeding thing cause we couldn't be perfectly in line with that i mean i don't know what the guidelines are but i'm willing to do a little bit of research on that too but those are some things i'd like to see at our next committee agenda and that had this doing here so you're asking for another update to two weeks i would like an update on the possibilities of whether that animal control position can default to and what our legal safety zones are in utilizing volunteers how we might utilize volunteers to work for us two weeks sure thank you well any other business before public safety second all in favor aye thank you and recreation the one thousand nine hundred and fifty four anniversary the 60th anniversary world series this august is when i think it's happening some people will be here from saturday second second all in favor aye anything else yes maybe we should discuss some options they did say they could take care of the field they have volunteers to take care of things i think it's sometimes and would that have an announcement that helen recreation will meet this wednesday morning at nine hundred am here in room one hundred and ten recreation will be discussed additionally the affirmative action advisory committee will have their first organizational meeting on august 27th at six hundred and fifteen pm in room two hundred and nine is there anything else for helen recreation committee oh i'm sorry we're in recess second all in favor adjourned so we're adjourned okay call to order public service and utilities energy efficiency and water system improvement project mr johnson good evening good evening any information you have an agreement with johnson control system for the professional development agreement the last couple years we've been looking at our water meters throughout the city we have about one thousand four hundred and fifty after the counts meters range anywhere from one year old to seventy five years old it's a mishmash of meters where we have reiterated below take an actual photograph of the meter it goes back to the office we subtract the last present it's very time consuming and not efficient so professional development agreement is performance contract plays with johnson controls does we recommend doing indepth evaluation of the meters of typing and sizing the revenues gained will pay for the project cost of this is fifty three thousand five hundred it's only paid if the city doesn't enter into an agreement to do the full meter replacement these are automatically read meters so they'll just go through a meter upgrade they get about four thousand meters with johnson controls right along with them five hundred meters in less than an hour they'll be one thousand four hundred and fifty meters in stickiness we've already done some attrition over the last couple years with the meter reader and that's in the office and if we move forward with this project those positions don't have to be we don't move forward with this project and we're gonna need the help because we're not efficient in pulling the guy off the distribution to read the meters and put it in the distribution system if the project moves along with the fifty thousand rolled into the cost of the project and we do have funding set aside the last few years we have replaced in capital funds we have put aside that will come out of there any question you said for the total project so you have an estimated possible no not yet the city doesn't want the meters so one of the problems we have is all those replaced meter meters so if this project moves forward we will take responsibility for the meters especially meters through the meters we're building they're not accurate we're losing revenue every day and we know that there's a number of meters fifty sixty seventy years old they're not accurate anymore and one thing i know is they're doing the sizing of piping when you put a meter in you don't go and just put a meter in it has to be sized it has to be perfect pat is familiar with that and that's something that's very important is extremely pleased with the work that they did we reduced vehicle on the road every day of the week for ten months out of the year to couple of days out of the year just follow up you said that scotia has four thousand meters three thousand seven hundred meters yeah so what statement they did residential or commercial we only have commercial that's not my question so they didn't do residential we're limited to commercial and a few years i think there's was about fourteen fifteen million set aside to do meter upgrade it's an expensive process i'm not sure what but i can actually find out okay that'd be great but again they did almost four thousand meters are there other questions yes yes at around three hundred and thirty just above the break there happened to be yep it's already closed they've already got it open it should be done within a couple of hours and feed of 70yearold pipe the rest of the pipe is about eighty five years old just so i know from campbell to broadway going into the subway they should be done within a few hours typically the crew is there they get in and get out the backup is there they already have the hole opened up they will be working on another plan valve replacement at four or five this morning so that's a plan about yes they're gonna form of health departments when are you gonna start this project this study yes we'll enter it once the professional development agreement is signed after next monday night it's signed by the mayor we'll have them start we've already started getting them some information the way we generally we extract information out of munis meters one thing we realized is the munis system is only going up to six inch meters now right now we have a couple of eight inch meters in the city munis system have enlisted they start with the large meters because we're trying to extract the information for them thank you is there any second i'll second all in favor aye okay anything else thank you all in favor aye we're adjourned area turns out this is part of the paper street didn't have an spl the resolution was great that the council passed it only was for this area because the spl covers the whole area so we would really like to see amended resolution for future reference i'll move it second aye aye right that move will go into executive session second all in favor aye give me an extra second i'm short handed here today