The April 11, 2016 City Council meeting included on its agenda a resolution:
(COUNCIL PRESIDENT CLARKE II) The Court of Common Council highly encourages the Mayor to negotiate with all collective bargaining units and offers the following additional suggestions for achieving savings and generating more revenue, which suggestions are not intended to be an exhaustive list.
The agenda package, which is the expanded version that few residents see, read as follows:
A replacement for that item was then circulated on April 12, 2016:
If there is to be discussion about what City Council hopes to do, their constituents should see the exact language being used.
The last bullet point on the replacement — “Reduce non-essential Capital Improvement Projects” — is interesting to find, as that agenda also included a proposed resolution supporting “continuing improvements at Keney and Goodwin Golf Course.” This may be time to explain what “non-essential” means.
Bruce Rubenstein
Kerri as you may know, the item concerning the golf courses was passed at the last Council meeting. Which indicates that they felt the golf courses are essential. The CIP allotment initially was for 27M of which about 10M has already been spent,meaning by virtue of their vote the other day,17M more or close to it will be spent on the golf courses in a City financially strapped. As you may also know,the golf courses became in terrible shape due to the negligence of the Segarra administration…there are prior audit reports bearing this out…and but for that negligence, the 27M never needed to be spent. I for one wished the Council would take their foot off the spending auto pedal as the money is running out and the City will run out of money around March.
Jennifer S.
Also interesting that it went from leasing Batterson Park to selling it.
Justin
The parking surcharge is a good idea. However, it would be nice to see increased taxes on parking thought of more systematically, rather than just adding $1 here and there whenever we’re broke (which, it seems, is all the time). The parking lots and how much we tax them should be considered as part of our city’s (non-existent?) overall transportation plan; how much we charge for parking will help nudge folks onto Fastrak and the Express buses that dump suburbanites downtown (and dump me in the suburbs) each day.
Donna Swarr
The one that popped out to me was the sale of Batterson Park to the Pension Fund. Any proceeds from the sale of any park property goes into the Park Trust Fund. We will be stealing from Paul to pay Peter. That isn’t right – I will oppose this, it isn’t that I am against the selling of Batterson, but for the purpose, as it is already stipulated, that it will support the parks which are in constand dire need of support. As it is, the Park Trust Fund can only be used for capital improvement projects, so it doesn’t help with the ongoing maintenance. There are some projects that it doesn’t make any sense to stop midstream and the golf courses are an example.