i know he's here ok twelve president three  absent members and guests will rise for the pledge of allegiance council member call enough to lead us in the pledge and then afterwards please remain standing for a moment of silence we will now proceed to the public comment period the first speaker steven smith off from the taxi front nothing's been done ok i still see the still see the non medallion taxis moving through the area we still battles with those guys and college students we coming back in a vast two or three months we do need we do need some sort of foresman on this because when the college students come back we're going to lose a lot of money these we are people who have these the hack licenses i have and when i got one for saratoga so that i you know i'm legal i want to be legal and it's just the guys who can't make it you know as you might as well just say ok checker cab you can now work albany you know george george who owns yellow taxi yeah you can let your your guys in every vehicle possible that he has work albany you know capital and i see them running through here every once in a while and even stuff from glens falls are coming in from all from out of town ok please give us some support please it was supposed to be a committee an ad hoc committee going together i haven't heard anything about that in three months it's it's it's it's  the economy is drying up and on that note i don't know who's giving the hack licenses and the debt medallions out to the people who are coming in off of airplanes and boats and wherever from foreign countries but these guys are killing our business they they're they're very aggressive i've have complaints with the police against two of them they they're they're violen t they i've had many complaints about these people they do not know the prices and i have a solution ok on the back of my hack license there's nothing there isn't they don't put anything on there i would suggest a stright or some sort of notation on the back like the date when they start working with a hack license and they have to have a certain amount of time just like you have in new york city and just like you have in london in which you have to learn the city in that time you have to work with a with a radio company you cannot work with anything else and before you can get a medallion these guys are getting medallion say that they're not even in the country  with a green card yet there's they're just working you know with their eight months and there they have a medallion ok what they're doing is they're charging people money that they don't know what they're charging they don't care there's no enforcement nobody's investigating to see if that people are doing a proper job of driving taxi they got my hack license and saratoga when i start working up there i haven't yet it's going to be later on this summer i'm going to go and make sure i got the the prices and everything right but these guys don't you know there's no control over them this is this is like the old west everybody is just working as they want to i mean charging college students ten dollars from the bus station that's wrong at seven dollars and eight dollars a night that's actually seven record eight dollars a quarter ten dollars and i've heard people have been charging up to twenty five dollars ok when you had the black hispanic and asian caucus here there was one of these guys that i you know i i'm not going to mention any names but this guy was charging twenty five dollars a head and with a car six people to go to the con a lodge in rensselaer county i'm going to be working with the people in the assembly to try to set up a a written document like i did with with the the coming council here so that they will know what to expect and what not to expect when they come up from new york city and most people who are on these chinese buses and such they don't know the prices and in new york city it's good it's thirty seconds left ok yes twenty five to fifty dollars to go across the city so if they say to go to to rensselaer from albany or any place else they give these really exorbitant prices they don't know they'll pay them and then when they find out they won't ride with us again it's killing our business we need help that's it thank you mr smith and i think we'll follow up on those concerns good evening members of the council i'm jochen s and the ten girls will street nominee and i also hang around with you guys every once in a while back there recording your meetings for all the community television and now for the public access t v station channel eighteen or channel albany on your desk that nick left you saying to push the button on your microphone when you're speaking that's all that applies to everyone out here not on the diet so that your voice will be put on the recording this recording will probably be the first one that goes live on channel eighteen i don't know if any of you have been looking at channel eighteen lately or not but jo piazza has put together a few promos that have been running continuously in a loop along with a few public service announcements but we have we haven't gone live formally yet we're still waiting for the mayor to come back to work so we can have a press conference and formally open up the studio at the library but things are rolling but most importantly i want you to welcome nick to the fold thank you thank you m and i'm the president of justice forrest the event like i said that our offices are in the city of albany i really come and speak to this body or anybody for that matter i for those who don't know just a the i don't normally come here but i there is an issue that i think is of grave importance to this body that would like to you to address and it's kind of my attention that the albany police department is conducting removals of it during the vacation process for albany housing authority and i first got my first complaint from a client last year who said that they had conducted  truth you know as a lay advocate it's my understanding that the new york state real property and procedures law governs how we've actions are to be conducted from the time of notice initial notice to remove and the section that i think of is city a marshal of city it is someone who is appointed by the mayor they can they cannot have a conduct draw a city pension or city salary and it's it is a designation that usually from my research that used in the city in new york city  it's more alarming once you realize that the law clearly prescribes that the process must be conducted by neutral third party we have a certain thing called the us constitution which provides us with the right to due process so the whole point of this process is that the sheriff constable or marshall the city will give you seventy two hours notice informing you that if you do not remove yourself from the unit well that a judge is given a warrant and that if you do not remove yourself from the unit within seventy two hours that you and your belongings will be removed physically by that authority however the albany housing authority employs certain officers for security purposes so they cannot be even if they did have the authority to conduct evictions which they do not they could not be considered neutral parties as i see your honor sorry i'm used to being in court the albany police department has repeatedly professed like i told before that they do not execute once eviction under no circumstances and that because the authority in fact does lie with the sheriff's department so you can imagine my surprise when t police officers in full uniform and each driving their own police department vehicle appeared at my client's property on may fifteenth at about twelve forty p m and they instructed her her children and myself that if we did not leave the property that they would physically remove us all of which i videotaped i sent a copy of this event to the chief of police on on may sixteenth to which i within fifteen minutes received a call from atlanta saying that he will look into the matter and call me back today i have not heard anything and i did put up a reminder i sent my reminder e mail  now there are others several other procedural defects anyone who knows me knows that you know i'm a stickler for process especially seconds ok but it makes no sense for us to talk about the proper way for the albany police department to conduct evictions when they're not supposed to conduct them at all the most shameful thing is that about these events that the army housing authority and the police department are preying on an already distressed marginalized population knowing full well that they may not have the access to the appropriate information to protect protect themselves from this injustice i was told by another quite a story there is gentlemen this is happening every in every albany house majority property throughout the city and as many of you may know they commandeer once a month they commandeer this room to do mass evacuations so think of how many families and individuals on a monthly basis are being affected by these processes i respectfully ask you to formally investigate you have subpoena power you have you've investigated issues in the past i personally feel being an advocate for the poor that this is one that you know you need to look into i am only one person i phone my organization myself and i have clients one by one  every you know like i said the client the const everyone here vowed yes everyone here about to uphold the constitution and i believe the army police department is well within your jurisdiction to make sure that that they are in closing i heard the speaker before me say that it's like the the old west you know and i wrote that down because the process that i saw happen that day on may fifteenth was was resident of that get your stuff get out we don't care if we're wrong because clearly i told them that their dismay would be a flawed process and i hope that this body will bring some justice to i find i'm missing marlon anderson this evening good evening i want to comment on a couple of ordinances and then talk a little bit about public health disparities that i can get to tonight  has introduced legislation to ban styrofoam packaging from albany i was part of a band effort in berkeley in the early ninety's and we won that one and in fact we also want  non recyclable unnecessary and ugly material and i wanted to just congratulate and ancona for taking that on and i hope we passed that as fast as possible join join the  green america there are also a couple of ordinances that i believe are problematic in terms of unequal administration of law and those are youth  curfew banning of implements of graffiti and sidewalk furniture in those proposed ordinances would unfairly impact low income communities they would allow  and frivolous seizures in searches of young people and anybody who could be accused of being young who got locked out of their house at night or whatever maybe they didn't have a parent with a van to take them home from work their tournament or whatever it is that just would be an unfair burden upon that individual to be stopped in so i would urge us to not even go there with constitutional law and by lation of the of the bill of rights so i'm hoping those will be sort of disregarded so with that i had a couple of things to say tonight and one of them is that there is a growing global move to look at public health disparities based on over funded adequately funded and underfunded districts around the world and certain things have been commonalities in that and i'm here in albany i think it would really be to our benefit to do some of the simple public health studies that we could do for example the c d c has very good statistics on reportable diseases it would be really nice to see  how those diseases are represented in the different wards of albany similarly the o h has some good information and i think we could target things such as lead levels as much certainly cardiac disease is something that we like to look at auto immune diseases that are both stress and toxicity related can be looked at hepatitis c certainly hiv a low birth weight babies is a big one you want to look and see how it's just amongst our wards because when we look at that kind of data i think we can becomes obvious to us what our public trust demands that we do around on equal conditions in different parts of our city when you have a part of a city that permits substandard housing and allows the population to be used as a reserve labor force that will work for less than the rest of the city for a variety of social and economic reasons you've created a condition that's really known globally as colonialism and there's a there are people who've studied this and one of them is jake thomas and he was a teacher with an unusual distribution of native people in the canadian presence and he said that his understanding of that is that when there is an unfair burden of grief on a particular population it's going to under times of stress erup as rage and that is going to happen to any people in that situation anywhere in the world as a public health consequences of those conditions and when we look at like why would some communities have more grief than other communities why i want to just give you an example my block one day two years ago i came home from war and everybody was kind of in an uproar and i tried figure out why and the word came down turned out there was a little girl who lived down the block and she had a chronic disability not even sure which one it is but she had been to the hospital quite often in her young life and she about four or five now actually my my landlord knew her better than me because she had lived there long time and i didn't really know her real well but turned out she'd gone into breathing distress and they called the empties and it took a while to come which is fairly common where i live and i  tell you that's disparate or not but i do know that when a taxi came and this african american family in a very poor neighborhood with boarded up buildings went to the taxi driver and said look we don't have cash but take us to the hospital and he refused that child died and these kinds of conditions that the reader out in books you know you think maybe during the civil rights era maybe in the fifty's certain populations couldn't get to the hospital or given an equal medical service but i'm telling you here in albany we have serious concerns about unequal conditions that would preclude any kind of basic justice that might imply equal health outcomes for populations and i think that that's a source of grief and it may result in certain conditions a keep a cycle of poverty and tragedy going in albany and we really need to look at that so i hope we'll get that public health data take a look at it and i'm thank you very much  i fancy and i had parked arc of my mother's car in the park on june first two thousand and twelve and apparently there was an event on june second two thousand and twelve that there was no notice or i know i've noticed that in the past for the big events in the park when the park is closed down we've had flyers in the park and i mean in at our house and  large tree and stuff like that so the people don't park in the park you know so you did your car doesn't get to it but apparently that day fifty to seventy cars were towed and my ours was one of them and we would have never parked in the park that day let me tell you why because it was my son's first birthday party the next day and everything was in the car his birthday his birthday paper i mean everything like the chips the soda we had all the stationwagon everything i went out to go get the wrapping paper and it was gone i was in hysterics and i just i just want to say that there were some signs but they were very sparse and they were  not they were on trees and they were only one side of a tree so maybe like one person could see the sign but the other five people wouldn't so we did not see the sign than we paid the telling c n n we do have the ticket here with us  and i would just like to say is there something we can do about that maybe more notice because i thought it seems very inconsistent to have noticed or one of and not for another event you know we don't have the curl the to see something done with more notice for big events in the practice like that for people who live on mars gee in your life gee it would be i really and i think that you thank you thank you to make an effort to make it a little bit more clear what happened with the whole parking situation is we live on the corner of lark and hudson so normally we try and park on hudson avenue and so the night that we had borrowed her mother's car we i i personally actually drove the car into the park veering to the right hand side from the hudson avenue sun street and i i actually took some photos if you care to look at them once the there was only two signs before i parked my car in the next one was probably over one hundred feet away from there and it was at night one of the signs was on a tree about seven to ten feet away from the curb and at night it was completely knocked on and this is not visible from the side of the street and the spruce sign is actually waist high wrapped around the pole so tightly that you wouldn't even be able to tell was a sign was it was the middle of the day to begin with and that this  situation where we got our car towed i feel as if you know putting up a sign in the giant bacon area where there was no street signs warning about the occasional next day maybe there could have been a wooden stake with like a street sign hammered into the grass i don't know if that would have damaged the park too badly and on top of that people in the neighborhood should probably get a better notice of vents happening in the park so they know whether or not to park their car there the only reason why i wound up parking there was because i checked morris avenue first and that was filled up that's where i normally park i can't park on hudson so when that was filled up i drove off the hudson into the park not seeing the street signs and not being notified of the fry hoffer's run and it caused us to have to pay one hundred eight dollars in tax plus tax for retrieving our vehicle and plus this ticket that i have that i'm going to have to pay as well that's basically it i mean if you could give people in the neighborhood better notification of parking i know the signs were supposed to be invisible locations but they weren't from that certain area where i actually wound up parking and if i had been driving more often and had my own vehicle maybe i would have seen the signs that were there earlier on the week during the day but unfortunately i didn't so i mean that's about it thanks for listening if you want to see the photos i away so there must be another there must be a lot of idiots in albany because there were about sixty cars total way that morning ok let's see i called up the towing garage and i was told this happens just about before every event so i think there's a problem with communication between albany city its police and the citizens and it was a it's a very cruel thing to have a car towed away you know happenstance really saturday was s a t day can you imagine of somebody walked outside to take their kid to the high school for an essay to examine a car was gone or a woman was in labor or there was another emergency and they needed their car most people will not park if they know that the thing's going to be towed away the next morning and i really believe that the city is taking advantage good evening i'm david andrews i'm a resident of the city and i also want to express my concerns about the situation at washington park when there are events we were surprised to find out from the towing company that  this is a regular thing for them whenever there's an event they seem to have big business from the from towing for the event and it seems pretty obvious to me that if that's the case it's a clear sign that the city isn't adequately showing that there's a parking issue with signs that are back in ten fifteen feet from the street or seven to ten feet under a tree our car was parked there at night after nine o'clock so what was dark signs on a tree ten or fifteen feet back are pretty hard to see at night maybe they can be seen during the day and a large street there are posts by the road and it's easy to see that there's no parking but in the park it's not so i don't know whether cones would to for people to come down the next day from their apartments the car was parked there from like one thirty nine one thirty at night until i don't know what time in the morning the next day but we got a call  by ten o'clock that the car's gone my stepdaughter was in tears she didn't know what to do so it took us four hours to retrieve the car and get it back to them we had a son taking the s so we had him to the s a t we had more shopping to do for a birthday party for our grandson who just turned one and to us she had more preparing to do for the party and she was up first thing in the morning to go down and take the car and go and  it wasn't there first thing in the morning it just it was so it just didn't seem right no notice and then when we did get the car out of tel they gave us a ticket it wasn't even a police officer giving us a ticket it was the the towing company oh by the way this is the long stay you two it was really a shock and i think that it was not adequate notification it wasn't adequate posting of information saying that you can't park here that's what i needed to tell you thank you thank  report all the reports of standing committees just for my own the council operations committee met last thursday to consider recommendations for appointment to the reapportionment commission and i suspect we would bring names york adopted june fourth two thousand and twelve authorizing the refunding of all or a portion of the ten thousand two hundred ten million two hundred forty thousand dollars outstanding principle balance of the general obligation bonds two thousand and three originally issued by the city in the arrogant principal amount of twenty one million nine hundred eight thousand two hundred eighteen dollars and the three million one hundred fifty five thousand outstanding principal balance of the general obligation bonds two thousand and four a originally issued by the city and an aggregate principal amount fourteen million two hundred sixty two thousand three hundred thirty eight dollars stating the plan of refunding appropriating an approximate aggregate amount of thirteen million five hundred thirty five thousand dollars therefore authorizing the issuance of approximately thirteen million five hundred thirty five thousand dollars to the city of albany general obligation refunding bonds series two thousand and twelve to finance said appropriations of the cost relating there to authorizing the execution and delivery of various documents and under a portion of the capitol hill's golf course in the city of albany new york mr herring on the ass of mr commit read the title in ordinance authorizing and directing the grant of a permanent easement to national grid over upon under a portion of rap road landfill in the city of albany now proceed to ordinances held  items of forty five forty six rights forty nine through fifty nine mister thank you mr president withdrawing ordinances twenty one twenty two ten and twenty two twenty two ten certain projects by the city of albany new york at a maximum estimated cost of two hundred thousand dollars and authorizing the issuance of two hundred thousand dollars serial bonds of said city to pay the cost there a discussion  ordinance five twenty one twelve the move for its passage a roll call vote there on and that's amended an ordinance authorizing certain projects by the city of albany new york at a maximum estimated cost of three hundred thousand dollars  an ordinance authorizing certain projects by the city of albany new york at a maximum estimated cost of five hundred thousand dollars and authorizing the issuance of five hundred thousand dollars cereal bonds said city to cost the to pay the cost there of a discussion mr bailey mr councillor mr conti yes mr paine mr freeman mr herring mr i go mr cona one twelve a move for its passage in a roll call vote there on  this quickly once again two hundred thousand dollars was also appropriated in two thousand and ten and went and spent and we clarified why that occurred and that there seemed to be a snafu between engineering and parks since that time i guess the lessons learned is to make sure you get your homework done before you come in and ask for the money and now they've learned they're now in engineering studies being done ahead of time and then the money's being asked for so this summer we should see four hundred thousand dollars worth of improvements to various courts throughout the city largely at washington park which was a two thousand and ten appropriation and lincoln park which makes up the bulk of the two thousand and twelve appropriation any further discussion  execution of a payment in lieu of tax agreement with south and associates the third lp in a albany housing authority south and housing development fund corp any i just wanted to comment on the individuals who spoke about the posting of the no parking notices i have come across this myself with people and it costs residents an extraordinary amount of money when you consider the ticket and the telling charge and i think we have to look long and hard at possibly changing the procedures so that people have a much longer period of time to become aware that you know this is going to be a no and the movie discussion following it and i mean a math used to be there was in the movie and it is the violence interrupted fighting cease fire and i would hope as many council members and can make it and please get the word out to people in the community about this important movie especially in light of the very recent and very numerous incidences of gun violence and and knife islands and the city of albany i think the message really needs to go out loud and clear and that this movie would be very the movie and i hope the whole program around the movie would be very informative for the members of the community thank you in any other further