i to call the city council caucus meeting to order for july twenty eighth twenty fourteen we have no public hearing so we'll move right into the items for original consideration the clerk would read number one i don't number one under original consideration a resolution roll call ok right i don't number four i am number four a resolution calling for a public hearing regarding changes to or one eighty six of the code regarding steinman's park fees again discussed in committee without objection on consent item number don't number five a resolution amending resolution twenty fourteen dash one six zero three disc corrections to that so without objection on consent item number six i am number six the resolution amending resolution twenty fourteen dash one six one again in dealing with some corrections to something we had passed earlier without objection on consent item number seven i mean number seven a resolution authorizing the settlement of a ta order for july twenty eighth twenty fourteen and ask the for the invocation by the reverend moon hawk river i would like to respectfully knowledge the recent supreme court decision for our sister brother new yorkers regarding prayer before public meetings and the well grounded decision by the court that think that inclusive it into versity is of paramount importance and in keeping with our founders vision of america whether we call it prayer with the setting of loving intentions for our meeting is to call upon the energy the life force that binds us all is one that all that matters i would like to honor greece new york count city council's decision to have an atheist deliver the opening invocation and dedicate this evening's prayer to them as well as to all of you here this evening let us gather as one of our heads calling each of us to our personal faith our personal belief of how we in the world with love humility compassion respect we welcome the presence of all that is and know that we are all one from one source regardless of how we call that source to us bless us as we gather today here bless us as we need to serve our community intent upon doing good work bless us as we seek to represent fairly well those who have given us this task and to represent all members of our community with respect and equality as we gaze upon about this meeting place and see the incredible diversity of person opinion station and cause may be many who come to speak with one voice we seek blessings on the task before us plus our efforts with clear insight our deliberations with wisdom plus our work with clarity and accuracy bless our decisions with impartiality we recognize our responsibility to the past and to the future and the rights and needs of both individuals and community and act with wisdom and care in our personal faiths and beliefs give us strength to act honestly justly and well in all matters before us may we act with grace and humility may love switched at the end so vorse and i live in the city i'm here speaking against resolution number three i don't agree that schenectady should enter any contracts at this time but misc i think there  everybody on both sides of this line are in extreme financial distress assessments here have been a problem for a long time they are huge even so was their school district their school district is in chaos the same as schenectady schools district is still in chaos  there was a time when mayor councilman he was also an investigator for profit for schenectady county he was also a member of the metroplex board i remember him telling mayor stratton not to ha communications with me at this time metroplex is a mess on state street they have overspent it should look beautiful because it's new it's way over budget the property on the southeast corner of broadway and stay excuse me southwest has been redone twice and is now vacant the property next door to it is v has never had any occupancy the d o t building on the north east side is a ghost town and getting progressively worse on the northwest side of that corner there has been a lot of  those buildings have clinton and state those buildings have never been filled storefronts at street level have some minor can see the building  and i think when it comes to the mayor he's never left his group they party together and at this point they're walking their baby back home how much means now the school district now the county and now the city is going to be out of whack of paying back all that money over payments i mean you know we need a reassessment within the city and just given it to corporations developer municipality that doesn't give sufficient notice to the public of what it is you have item number three which was not even discussed last week if it was it's probably that one that you missed which is the interim agreement with the town a student  their radios or done a good bye and not going to say which were their regular radios and i'm assuming that these radio said he's asking for either radios that we talked about so i was really disturbed when i saw this because i'd like to know what he did but all that money i may think of any president this agreement they were voting on here this evening is certainly one of the things that governor cuomo has been talking about in his latest budgets where minutes apparently these towns and villages are working together to share services to cut costs and most importantly effectively using their money and resources wisely and i think it's a great partnership or that we have a town and i look forward to many many more and i know we've been in contact with a s county hopefully our church since he will be bringing the group of us together to talk about this on a county wide basis how we can do shared services and again it's all going to some tax cuts that are projected to from the governor's office in two thousand and fifteen so i think we're headed in the right know i don't disagree with that at all but my question with this this is barber offered his services to the city on a as needed basis so i don't know why we're not going to use someone that's already familiar with our system he's been here for almost a year and i think his cost per hour would be less than the eighty six dollars and a two hour minimum that we're going to pay to the town in th and plus mileage going back and forth so my problem with it is why not use mr barber he just doesn't want to do this full time anymore he never did he only was supposed to be here for eight weeks and a wound up being almost a year but he did offer from what he told me he offered the mayor that he would come as a consultant and look over any problems that they have once or twice a week as as needed so because of that reason i think something and families associated with those stones are responsible for putting them back if they want them put back and i just want you to know that it's out there it's in the paper and contact bale if you think you belong and if your name might be there and let's get it done even if we have to take a collection i want to talk that's some other things regarding the because the other day tractor trailer barreled down liberty street and got caught under the underpass the amtrak underpass and the driver released his cab and took off i don't know where he went i never did see him but the trailer was stuck having been three to four inches higher than the overpass and there was a sign there ten foot is it was called they took pictures i have yet to see anything in the newspaper notifying people of what had happened there i have a level of concern about going under there now i've been on route ninety one through connecticut after they repaired it because pavement fell out from underneath that was maybe twenty years ago but it happened because of things situations like  a daily basis whenever available and there are too many too many violations for hiring officers and include this when you do yours assessments don't just over micromanage everything and put it to the people that are left in the middle you know it's the guys in the bottom that don't ever pay anything and it's the guys on the top to take discounts for having provided services and all to where nobody pays house and i believe you guys set aside somewhere between one hundred thousand dollars to do the reassessment for the whole entire city that is just a scare tactic of the reason why you don't want to do a reassessment  know we offered another solution to it which is to do twenty percent of the city and do a five year period and then recycle again so every five years reassessment is done that way you could do it in house and everything else dollars more what we actually need is qualified people and they suspect if we have qualified people we hired people we could do it in house and if we do it at twenty percent of the city and do it each one of the years it won't cost us three million dollars we would have the assessment and we don't start with downtown is to first want to do a reassessment we start with the lowest neighborhood and we work our way all the way back from the weakest to the strongest thing so that way the people who have been hit the hardest which is the home owners in the city for the last three four years under claims that you've been reducing assessments they would start receiving some of that tax reduction you know we need a  housing even the even reported nearly three four months back in a report that this is one of the worst counties for affordable and accessible housing and you know like i said two weeks ago i just said the m example of fourteen hundred dollars and some change which is a good buy for mortgage and taxes nearly seventy percent of the people in this city can't even afford qualify for  of officials and so far assemblyman tim to desk and constant has shown positive action i support their efforts completely i think that the dangerous dog alert is something that people should have the right to know what's going on in their city how it can affect them they can make their own choices about where they go and what they did i don't think that property values will diminish because there are other registries like the sex offender registry that on do not affect property values but ensure the safety of your citizens who are devastated by it it's very important to it's the city that you people have that you're in control and that in the beginning when they opened up they were open on sunday then they were mr mayor a council president and member city members of city council thank you this evening i'm here to talk about lawn parking to think some people and some local organizations just want to first think off the and he's just been really great me answering all of our questions and working with us they've been working in the park to install pavilion that has basically breed even more new life into woodland park so we're very pleased with the work on that it's basically going to be a twenty by thirty foot span expansion to the footprint of the park it was part of the old pole doing corner of a non usable part of the building that was taken down they've added new facade new concrete to areas that needed shoring up new doors new facade and they're going to be painting the out the new facade this week in adding the roof on top of the pavilion so we really appreciate all the work that powell and his staff have done for that and we just want to recognize also the pride in the work that they've done and we've had our volunteers go over there they've just you know have been really pleased with the work and the staff and really taken the extra time to make sure they've done things right  we've just had a clean up a couple saturdays ago and one of the cement workers actually on a saturday morning just came over to check out how the heck cured so that just speaks to you know the the amount of pride the city workers have in their work so thank you to the city for all that  we also recently added a summer youth program and i also want to thank councilman ed kosher for his assistance with that through his work through the it's going to the county york bureau is a pilot program it's the first year of the park seen anything in over a decade so we really appreciate that it's run by the boys and girls club and their midway through their six week program and they're doing a fabulous job there's free lunches through the inner city ministry ministry program that's provided and the turnout of the summer program has been really great so another great thing for the recent development of woodland park the program runs tuesdays wednesdays and thursdays on from eleven a m till five p m through august fourteenth and we're looking to cap out that program with the movie nights for august august sixteenth so more news to come on that also i'm a member of the neighborhood association we have our annual cookout with our recent change in meeting locations we did a new location for our summer cookout it's wednesday august thirteenth from five thirty to seven thirty residents of webinar asked you know to come and join join us on that evening as well as city and county and local neighborhood leaders on residents are asked to bring a small dish to pass and food were provided through our partnership with king's were a community providing hamburgers hot dogs and some salad so please come out again it's august thirteenth from five thirty seven thirty get more information on our neighborhood website run neighborhood dot org thank you thank you and thanks for all the work you've put into that dark hour frank w bring this back up on the agenda for discussion whether needs legislation or not because mr follett take was going to contact with assemblyman to disclose office but i think schenectady should be a leader on this and we shouldn't have to wait for state legislation to get information on the website to make schenectady safer because i think it's going to be just the opposite that i heard that maybe it's going to bring property values down i don't think so i think it's  to tell people if there's any problem areas just like if there is a deer crossing sign on the road people are aware of that and that's the way it should be so i don't think it's going to i really don't think that's a very good argument that it could bring down property values turn something about this we can't just let it go people can't be annoyed with their plight sound cards being worked on in their driveways you have three or five cars at a time we're down in the street i just i witnessed a guy working on the car mistreated i association for working around the world to have an area for my yard away unveiling at the end of on august twenty seventh but the condition of the little league field i have property so we're going to have to deal with it somehow it's a little they can't get that from a terrace and i think we're going to have to come up with some kind of plan and this prototype maybe we should talk on this and health and rec at some point because it's just these fields can't be left in that can't leave it all for granted like that it's just i was so proud to see that as somebody who was involved with little league organizations and it's just i know it's tough with volunteer organizations but it needs some attention that's for sure and lastly this coming saturday i'm sorry rick from saturday the fifteenth and her perfume of the products sponsored by the preservation incorporated will be held saturday august night from twelve thirty to four thirty p m rain day will be sunday august tenth the residents their families and friends are invited to join the music food and prizes strasser for the children there will be a clown face painting small town spider scared to the fire department child safety registration by schenectady county sheriff's department tony nation from city council it's a difficult decision for me this is a job that i took very seriously very passionate about but there is a lot of you know that i took a new role in new job this january which is time consuming and costly evaluating priorities i've got a growing family and which needs to come first and so with so many irons in the fire  there's only so many hours a day that i've decided that i need to refocus on my career and also my family and spend my time there being a member the council for me is not just showing up on monday it's coming to meetings but a lso spending time in the community doing research you know lots of planning and thinking and communicating and working with people to get things done and it's time consuming if you want to do it right and so  i appreciate working with all of you and i really enjoyed it i think that you know my time on the council has been very educational prior to getting involved in government i wasn't sure what the heck our leaders were doing it seemed they were never making me happy but once you get involved in you learn how government works this is how it's supposed to work we become these meetings we discuss issues we debate we disagree we wrestle a little bit and then we vote and then the day that's that's how government supposed to work and the more people get involved the better it works so keep it somewhat short always for for me and just encourage people from the public to continue in if you're interested to get involved in government participate and that's how you make your community a better place so thank you very much and  tonight will be my last meeting council meeting and that's about it so thank you thank you  school tomorrow at six pm at the high school commons for those parents or anybody who has a city is going to resident she was interested in making going to public comments even sitting on the committee i am a member of the committee as well there's about ten of us that are sitting down there and again this is going to be just a dream for all of the september two thousand and sixteen school season so we've got some time to work on it and again it's important that we get our citizens and residents and most important parents reside in the city to and again as you know the district has been shuffling kids around for the last seven eight nine years closing schools reopening schools and so on but this is going to be a plan that we really hope to hold that firm to work and i get it they may possibly with them  there was a number of we had vendors there are actually located in central park now near chinatown land and we had an issue with a couple of trucks that were making our vegetable oil right down to the pavement we had them running gas generation right next to twenty tiny trout land and the problem is we really we have no regulations and taxes are in force whatever violations these folks around or have or are doing so i'd really like to maybe when you get the  thousand dollars that they need it to carry on their function for the remainder of the year mr erickson on behalf of myself i was surely going to miss you and i wish you all the best and your family thank you thank you on sundays but the pump was broken in so it was closed that one weekend but i'll check into that the water main break ed came through and  alerted everybody we mobilized and they got to taken care of and they didn't get up there at the end of the day but we're supposed to get the road rebuilt today and repave so i think everything is back in order and up and running their bins will follow up on those two places in cleveland ontario are in supposedly taking care of it but they're still operating i don't understand the vicious dog concept that's been floated by dogs already exist within the court system at the state level the state could make that available on a website or on a searchable database that would get this not what i think everybody wants is to have that information out inaccessible to the public in even some of the proposals i don't support just notifying people that there's a dog on a certain block i believe people have to be held accountable for it in the information exists that the individual owns the dog the dog is banned found to be vicious that specific information is there in the ad is what should be made available so that the know what the law department has done specifically in terms of the research but the assets the information the ability to implement that exists at the state level and i would patroon i think is a good thing on the part of the mayor she has certainly contributed a lot to this community and it's very well deserved also had a conversation with mr olson today about the central park pavilion and we just wan make sure people are not concerned that pippin it's clean it's safe we will probably look at putting in a new roof as part of the capital campaign but for the time being it's being used constantly he said there were hundreds of people there this weekend everybody had a good time no issues so people should not be at all concerned about the pavilion it's a set it's being well maintained and lastly carl again i just want to share that was a difficult decision and i just want to thank