Common Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening and welcome to the Ithaca Common Council meeting in committee of the whole. It is February 11th and we will call this meeting to order. We have all of our council members present this evening. And while we have a fairly packed gallery of what I imagine is at least some students. Um I'm going to read the emergency evacuation notice just so everyone knows what to do in case of an emergency. We are to take one of two doors. Uh one that most of you came through or the one over my left shoulder here and we are to wait by the trees on the same side of the street as South Cuga and Green. We do not cross Green Street unless it is strictly necessary. Those with restricted mobility, in the event of an emergency, it is best to move to one of the stairwells, and first responders will arrive to aid you. In the event of other emergencies, you will be notified on how to proceed at that time. We want everyone to be aware of their surroundings and offer help when it is not to your own detriment, as you are your own best advocate. Agenda review. Any additions, deletions of the agenda? Seeing none, may I have someone please move for consideration the January 14th minutes? That's moved by Mr. Shapiro, seconded by Mr. Trumbull. All those in favor of approving those minutes, that carries unanimously. At this time, I will turn the floor over to the deputy city manager to welcome our special guest this evening, our presentation from the Bonado Group. So, y'all may come join us up at this table here. Please uh press your microphone so that it is illuminated green so that council, the public, and the folks watching on YouTube can hear you.

Thank you, Mayor. Uh yeah, I'm delighted that our um consultant team from the Bonado group are joining us this evening. Uh council received a memo in January related to the work that Bonado is carrying out on behalf of the city to help get us audit ready. Uh they have hit the ground running and um there's not much more I can say that they won't be able to give you more eloquently and in detail. So I'll turn it over to uh Jacob and Keley to give an update to you.

Great. Thank you, Dominic. Um, good evening everyone. Um, as Dominic said, I'm Keely Hines. I'm a partner with the Bonado Group out of the Syracuse office. I have Jacob Scville with me this evening. He is a principal um and is managing the day-to-day of the um consulting engagement uh that we have with you folks. Um so the purpose of our visit um this evening is to give you a sense for um our focus uh what we've um tried to accomplish thus far, give you a sense for where we are at big picture. Um so again uh referencing back to uh the memo that Dominic had shared with all of you. Um our purpose and the role that we are playing here is to work with uh city personnel to get you all audit ready. Um as you know the most recent audit that you received from an independent auditor was 1231 2021. Um so we are working on um the necessary reconciliations um going through uh record records prioritizing critical items um determining maybe some of those uh financial reporting elements that are not critical and necessary at this moment um so that you can hopefully get up to speed and ready to engage an audit firm um as quickly as possible. Um so at this juncture uh what we've accomplished um for the primarily over the last probably uh five or so weeks, six weeks or so um we have uh deepened our understanding of those transactions that are happening uh within your uh general ledger system referred to as MUN if you've heard that term uh versus those that are happening outside of Munis. So, anything that's being tracked um in manual subsidiary ledgers, spreadsheets, things of that nature, and

working to really big picture accumulate all of that data in one place um so that there's uh proper documentation and trial balances for all funds that can be again um handed over to an external auditor. Um thus far in uh particular we have been um building out rec uh reconciliations in details to agree back to those December 31 uh 2021 audited financial statements. Um going through and identifying all bank accounts and uh reconciliations to agree back to that 12312021 audited financial statements so that um activity can be rolled forward. um taking a look at the fund balances that are on record at the city versus where you were left off again from that last uh financial statement. We've been able to get some of those uh to agree out. We still have um additional uh differences that are uh pending based upon uh the work that we're getting through. Um we're spending some time looking at your capital projects. that's a a significant area that you folks have been maintaining uh manually in Excel spreadsheets. So again, we're working to assemble that, reconcile that back uh to your audited financial statements and um we'll uh take a look going forward yearbyear uh for the uh expenditures that are being incurred on any of those current projects. Um coming up on deck, we'll be taking a look at inner fund activity. So again, because of some of the activity being maintained off Ledger and outside of Munis, it's made it difficult to uh perform the necessary reconciliations uh between either uh transfers between funds um in departments or uh temporary due to due from so balances that might be owed

between the funds. So, we'll work on ensuring that we're picking up with where your prior auditor left off. Um, and then uh near future priority items, working our way through the remaining balance sheet accounts again, which will help probably um in tandem identify some of those remaining differences with your fund balance and taking a look at uh the treatment of um or excuse me, the uh accounting around the treatment facility. Um, a couple of the other things that we are focusing on is because of our uh position in terms of working with your consultant and um, for lack of better terms kind of back office, we are no longer independent uh, from the city. So we our firm would not be able to act as your independent external auditors. Um so with that said uh with Dominic's permission we are working through um the the soft solicitation of firms that practice in this space that specialize in government audits to determine if they would be interested um in picking you folks up as an audit client. To be clear, I am not at all suggesting that we don't go through the competitive purchasing uh competitive purchasing process. However, I think given your current circumstances, it would be beneficial um for us to speak the same language that another audit firm would be in saying here's here's where they are. here's, you know, where we're trying to go, what we're trying to accomplish, and laying out um a a reasonable timeline and knowing that we can kind of help shepherd uh that engagement because it's quite possible that without that context, a firm, you know, may say, I don't know that I'm interested in trying to get, you know, the city up and and running, what's going on. Um, so I think that us having some conversations with firms that practice in that space and then helping management put out that

request for proposal um can increase uh interest and responses and really allow for a collaborative effort for um going forward. Um please also understand that that does not mean that we are at the point and ready for somebody to start a 2022 audit. Um, however, I I think it would be beneficial again um to try to get that request for proposal out in the coming weeks um so that we can set a timeline and be on the radar of a firm so that they can plan ahead. They can have you folks on on the docket. I I don't want to wait until everything is done and ready and then, you know, start the solicitation. So, um, we're going to, you know, kind of take those types of actions to the best of our ability to take a couple steps forward while we may also still be taking a step back and and resolving some other matters. Um, we are planning to continue to touch base um with uh Dominic probably opposite of these meetings. So um closer to end of months going forward and continued continuing um conversations as necessary um throughout we have scheduled at minimum weekly conversations um with Wendy. We will um look for you folks to let us know what you are looking for for updates uh from us. And um at this point I really want to give you folks an opportunity to you know express any questions um anything that you know you you're hoping to get from me at this juncture. You know to be clear we're we're just getting started but I'm happy to take any questions that this group has.

Thank you very much. Um I'll go ahead and preempt one of the questions that I'm imagining someone will ask you which is uh what's the rough timeline on the work? Yeah I know. Um, I would love to, uh, we're we're Ithaca, you can give us the most liberal answer, but

um, I like that. Um, so, you know, I I think my anticipation is over the next 45 days or so, I can have a better sense for what that looks like. Um, I it's difficult for me to nail that down in this moment. There's a a lot more pieces that we would at least like to touch and and get our hands on. Um Jacob will actually be here all day on site tomorrow. Uh working with Wendy to just gather some more information. Um so I I would like to say that you know maybe at the next point that we talk that I I can start to have maybe a more reasonable answer on that.

Thank you colleagues. Mr. Shapiro. Hi. Thank you. I've uh casually been in organizations that have worked with your group before and it's always been stellar work. So appreciate having you on board here or helping us through. Um I just want to understand something that you said um and ultimately connecting to when we can kind of think about our audits next. Um you talked about working backwards so that you can tie everything back to what has been audited back to 123121. Yep. Um, so at some point we bring in an audit firm that's going to look at um the next year 2022. Correct.

Is there a likelihood or that they would then find something within your work that would then cause a cascading effect that would slow down the other audits or do you think once you've reconciled back to 1231 that's kind of even though it's unodudited at that point? I mean um should we expect those to be like complete numbers that we can like know that the audits will then kind of like work through quickly after that? Sorry for the confusing.

No, no, no. That's okay. Um so I think you know to be clear right that when we get to this point where we think okay we're we're comfortable with saying here are complete records all funds pulled together here is a trial balance for every fund of the city. those will be quote un audited, right? Our goal is to get to the point where we feel, okay, there might be some things in here um that are not exactly correct, but that we our hope would be that you're not going to be looking at significant material misstatements. So meaning if the auditor comes in and they have to maybe propose some adjustments based upon their more expansive testing, the hope would be that for one, it's not necessarily going to hold things up because they're going to be at a point where we've we've combed through one 2022, which is essentially where you left off at 12:31 2021, and that they would be able to make um those uh adjust investments and we would be able to keep moving forward. And the goal would be too that we don't need to complete our work all the way up say through 1231 2025 for them to start auditing. So my goal is to see some of these actions happening in tandem at some point when we can get there to get you folks caught up. And our goal is too that once we've gotten kind of a system in place on on our part, also leveraging Wendy and the new folks joining her office and trying to say, "Okay, here are things and roles that they can play to also reduce our hours, but also speed things up um that we will be working as quickly to get current while they're trailing behind us completing those

audits." Okay. So then as this is happening and then let's say there is now a controller in in in uh employed by the city and you know we're now six months down they it's we're in 23 or 24 um and they do find some adjustments that have to be made. What would you envision your role would be in interacting with the controller at that point?

Yeah. So you know depending upon what your needs are. going to respond and and dial up or or dial down in terms of what our role needs to look like. But our goal is to work collaboratively um with you know the the controllers's office and hopefully too help and aid in setting up systems and getting records into Munice and setting you folks up for success for being more independent in being able to to complete that financial reporting, you know, timely and accurately. Um, so you know to I apologize that's not a very specific answer but um our goal will be to you know with each passing quote year the completion of each year that hopefully that there's things that we're kind of bouncing back and saying okay here's what what you folks can do and that we're pulling our role back as we're seeing more success on the inside.

Okay thank you. I just have one more question. I just got a little excited and threw in that second question there. Um, but um, when you were talking about you said you just started getting into it um, but that a lot of our capital projects or some of what you're finding is are within the manual entries. They're on spreadsheets or whatnot. Can you describe any of the um, anything that you found as a result of that? Are there, you know, or the risk that can be associated with having um, those kept on a manual sheet? Yeah. So, there's definitely overall uh anytime that there's the manual sheets in place, um it really hampers that consistent reconciliation process because there isn't one source of numbers coming out of the accounting software that can be produced and ensure that bank reconciliations happen etc. um in looking at improving that that is part of the long-term goal of getting those in place. Um because the other piece of that is that's really an area that is slowing down processes. All all of those extra manual things happening are a large source of um the time it takes to wrap up that financial reporting process. Um so it's kind of playing directly into those delays and anytime there are those delays of course um there's more risk involved. Are you sorry just one quick followup um then I'll be done. Um are you tying in those manual entries to whatever um I'm sure a lot of these capital projects were through grants that we've received. is part of your work also like um reconciling those manual entries to what um whatever we submitted or received from a grant.

Yeah, that's uh something that we'll be looking more in this kind of next phase going forward as we dive deeper into those. But of course that will be part of that same process of um when we're looking at the ins and outs of those accounts. The the grant pieces are large pieces of that. Okay. Thank you very much. older person for Ritzio.

Thank you. Hi. Thanks so much for being here and thank you for helping us. Um I'm really I feel like we're in really good hands. Um and that's a huge it's a huge relief. I love the proactive approach that you know that you're taking and that you really um get the urgency of us fasttracking this as much as we possibly can. And I also just want to thank you for the training that you're going to be doing and also um the work that you'll be doing to ensure that we have systems in place that will hopefully help prevent this from from happening to us again. Um so I don't I don't have any really specific questions. I just want to say thank you so much for taking us on and also for looking for an auditor for us and being being proactive in that way. That's that sounds like that will be hugely helpful. So thank you.

Pleasure, Mr. tool. Uh, you may have already answered this kind of, but it sounds like part of your role is um migrating everything into Munis basically. Okay. Thanks, Mr. W. Uh, thanks. I have the same question. And, uh, as to that, are you also helping our staff kind of conform to best practices um, accounting practices for the modern age? Yeah. Do you want to touch on that?

Yeah. And same with uh the munus piece as well. Um both of those are kind of that that phase two. Uh phase one is ensuring that we build out what the accurate financial reporting looks like and get that caught up. And then as soon as that happens, we can assist the controllers's office in uh that process of ensuring that Munis is fully capturing all of that. And then on an ongoing basis, uh we're discussing any areas that are issues um so that we can provide recommendations. Some of those things are really easy like 5 10 minute conversation and we're able to identify something to help and then when we get down the line and we see what that more integration looks like um we can provide more detailed processes and things like that.

Thank you. And are you also working on the integration with open gov as well? Is there a component of that in your work? Yeah, the the open gov piece we haven't touched specifically yet. Um we'll of course discuss that at that time. The next phase will be the munice first of ensuring that the the system is capturing uh the information. And lastly, do you find that munis is like a reasonable software to use? Um do you have recommendations on that front?

We we do have uh other government clients um we know that work with it. Um accounting software for municipalities in general. Uh there is not a silver bullet out there. Um they all uh it's it's complex accounting uh particularly around capital projects. Um, so we're still looking for that that perfect system we've seen, but uh, Munis, we do have clients that use it. Um, so we're not immediately concerned with that.

And in terms of, um, expanding on our experience and expertise in that area, um, on our team employed at Bonado is a former city uh, controller who worked in Munice. So, as we get deeper into things, we'll really be able to leverage that um expertise from somebody that had actually, you know, sat at the desk doing that too versus, you know, merely consulting or auditing. That's great. Really appreciate your work. Mr. Defendy,

uh thank you guys for being here. I really appreciate all the help that you guys are going to be providing us with over uh the foreseeable future. Uh a question I have and this might be a combination question for acting city manager and for you all. Uh as inconsistencies are um discovered um with our reporting processes um can you anticipate what type of implications depending on the inconsistency we could expect and how we will be you know brought up to speed on that as a as a council compared to you know within the within the department. How you guys want to tackle uh that it's my question. Yeah. And I I think if I'm hearing your concern, you know, you're saying, you know, if you're finding something, how quickly can I be aware because what if it impacts decisions that I'm trying to make, right? And you know, unfortunately too, because of the significant um time lag that we're looking at at the moment, um it it's difficult to say that when we're looking at the 2022 records and if we find an issue with um an expense that you know should have been captured in 23 and it's being captured in 2022, you know what the impact of that is at this point on you folks is probably minimal because so much time has elapsed. Um I know that one of the things that you know Dominic had come to us to talk about in particular is you folks and your desire to know what fund balances right which is you know you're smiling because you're all saying yeah where where are we? Um unfortunately because fund balance is the effect of closing out each of these years. It's very difficult to say with any level of assurance from my perspective or from management's perspective. Here's where we are with fund balance because we we just we just don't know. Um so with that

in mind you know our recommendation would be that you know you should be looking at decisions that you're making and budgeting that you're doing based upon the known revenues that you have and adopting as a budget as conservative as possible. meaning, you know, balanced and spending what you know is is coming through the door um at this time until you can get more current with what your available fund balance is. And I I think that's kind of where you were trying to go with that. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Kirby.

Is there anything that you guys need from us specifically at this point? And is there any kind of routine problems that maybe we could get out in front of to make your jobs easier?

Do you want to speak to that? I was just gonna say not nothing at this point in time, but as something as we're going through this process, we're obviously starting on the 2022 fiscal year, but everything we're doing, we're thinking towards what's the quickest way to get to the year 2026. So, in having these discussions, when we're looking at those years, we're going to be looking ahead to that point in time and trying to identify if there's any roadblocks and things like that because there's certain things that 2022 we look and they don't require cleanup. There might be certain things that need a little more effort going forward when we get to the 23, 24, 25 year. Um, so nothing from my end at this point in time, but something that we're thinking about certainly.

Great. Thank you. And thank you guys so much for the work you're doing. Before I take any uh repeat hands, is there anyone who's not spoken? Mr. Shapiro.

Thank you. Um um All right. Thanks. you made me remember one of the um one of I think the outputs that we were discussing receiving from you in addition to all the work that you've described already um was helping to um or helping the staff to get a handle on what a monthly financial reporting to the board like might look like. Is that something that we would have to um get through to 2026 before we could start showing some sort of monthly report or is there something like even if because we know what's happening this year. So is there like some smaller you know a bridged version that we can we can see I don't know.

Yeah. Um and again it's it's difficult to say we we can very quickly say here are five things that we think you should give the the common council on a monthly basis. Um but at the same time would it be appropriate to necessarily rely on it or say okay I can make decisions based upon this if I don't have the necessary historical cleanup and that's that becomes the problem. Um so I think that when that information can become more valuable is is when we get you current. Um, and you know, I think that these timely updates from us can sort of help that and maybe in the coming months we can find something that we say, "Okay, here's something that we can provide you folks." But at this point, I I would be hesitant to try to suggest focusing and taking time in providing you something. Although, yes, I know that that's what you want and that that that's valuable and important. Um, but I think that there's more work to happen first.

But just to also be clear, there's like there's two levels of current. There's current with our audits and there's current with unodudited numbers that would enable you to provide a monthly report at that point in time. Is that true? Um, correct. Yeah. I I'm I would not necessarily suggest that all of your audits have to be completed before you start receiving some regular financial reporting. um it would be very you know clear that it's okay these are not audited they have not been fully um tested but I would think that we would be able to get you to a place where you're receiving information be well before those audits are complete and current. Yes. Okay. Thank you for clarifying.

All right. Seeing no further comments. Thank you very much for your presentation for the work you do on behalf of the city and we look forward to hearing from you soon. Thank you. All right, council. We will turn now to our conversation this evening with uh the planning and development department uh who are providing an overview of their department um before their substantive agenda items later in the evening. So um just preempting the excitement, let's bound those questions for the appropriate spots on the agenda. And Lisa and Megan, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you. Um, I was going to say the same thing. Uh, very pleased to be here to give you an overview of the Oh, sorry. Very pleased to be here to give you an overview of the department, especially on a night when we have so many things on the agenda. So, I have a little I do have a presentation. Amen. I'm not sure. I'm I've been promoted to I don't Okay. Yep. Thank Oh, sharing is not turned on. Sorry. Okay. So, first you're going to have to see my email and then I'm gonna show you this. All right. So, thanks for your time this evening. As I said, I'm Lisa Nicholas. I'm the director of planning and development.

All right. So, um we have many people in the department who work from many different professional lenses and areas of expertise. And so, this is kind of how we think about it. um advancing the community's vision of a vibrant and livable city through all of our different expertise, building code enforcement, um increasing housing opportunities, sustainability, historic preservation, all our areas of different areas of practice. Um this is our management team. As I said, I'm Lisa. Um I have been with the city about 20 years. I've been in this position since 2021. Have with me um Megan Wilson, our deputy director. You've also been here about 20 years, right? 18 19. Yeah. Um she helps oversee the department with me and uh is has done a lot zoning administration and um and came through as a planner. Uh Robert Feldwell is our director of code enforcement and Rebecca Evans is the director of sustainability who you know and we'll see tonight again as well. Um this is an organizational chart. Don't try to read it too much. which I will send you the slides in case you're interested. But just to kind of show you the overview of the department, we have 31 positions. Um, three current vacancies in the planning side. All the way over to the right is uh the building division. Uh we have uh housing inspectors, code inspectors, exterior property maintenance, um plumbing and electrical inspectors on that side. Um in over in the planning side we have um historic preserv we have folks that specialize in historic preservation, sustainability, economic development and planners some of whom specialize in particular areas. Um and as uh I said we are we currently have three vacancies which we hope to fill soon. And I think important to notice also is that the ITHA IURA um IT urban renewal agency which is the agency that administers our

HUD fund entitlement money is nested in our department and we work very collaboratively with them and um and closely. Here are some examples of what we do. I will not go through all of them um but please contact me if you're interested in learning more about any of these things. Um and you'll hear about some of them tonight. But um just in general, we do, you know, long-term planning, um zoning, uh do a fair amount of uh development review and staffing of quasi judicial boards. That takes some we have some core duties that take about three and a half to four FTE staff to um just complete our core duties. And then we do special projects in addition to that. Sustainability, you'll hear a lot about that this evening. We have economic development. Um we do do flood plane administration and this was a big year or last year was a big year for that because we adopted the new FEMA maps and um did a lot of public outreach and education around that. Um and of course we do special projects some of which you'll hear about tonight. Um the building division does um construction permitting, housing standards and through housing inspections, exterior property maintenance. They do the short-term rental enforcement. Um you'll hear about short-term rentals tonight too. Um they enforce the Ithaca energy code and electrical and plumbing permitting and licensing. And then we do work with other departments on organizationwide projects like capital projects, facilities planning, and sometimes work with outside agencies too. Here are some of the things that we did uh last year, some of the highlights. Um, and again, I won't go through all of them here tonight, but um, but these are some of the the things we did. And, uh, we'll be talking a little bit later about the housing dashboard, which uh,

was a really fun project. We were happy to um, to present last year. This is part of our work plan for this year or the highlights of our work plan. As I said, we do have fair amount of staff time that is um, taken with core duties. So uh this is what we have sort of planned to accomplish and of course with your input uh we can adjust things to a certain extent but you will hear about many of these projects um this evening. I thought it would also be interesting for you to know um uh the con new construction of housing that's anticipated this year. So I just put the biggest pro projects down at the bottom but you can also find those on our housing dashboard which I'll show you later. Uh we do have uh several quasi judicial boards that we staff out of our department. These are board independent boards that may binding uh decisions. Uh the ones on the left, the planning and development board, board of zoning appeals, and IT landmarks preservation commission meet monthly. Yes, you're familiar with that. Um and again they have a staff that's assigned to um to uh staff those um meeting as needed are the ones on the right that are out of the building division. They don't meet very often but only as needed. And of course uh the sustainability and climate justice commission which is advisory. They don't make binding decisions but they're advisory to common council. And of course they are a great um avenue to collect uh public feedback and talk about some um of the work that sustainability is doing before it comes to you so they can bring to you um a more um vetted uh a more vetted um proposal. Uh planning and development board is also advisory to common council. You will notice that they will

be they send you recommendations for any legislation you're adopting or any plans you're adopting. That's part of their duties. Um so you will see that they also advise the board too or recommend things to the board. Anything else you would like to add? Uh we do collect um some fees um and revenues over the year. This is these are the fees from um 2022. the average fees from 2022 to 2024 and this these were big construction years so I can't say that every year will be like this but just to give you sort of a flavor of the fees that we collect and where they come from they primarily come from construction permits so that's build you know building permits and new construction um site plan approvals which are primarily done uh by the planning board those fees can be quite large and we collect um some revenue from that and then the other fees but just to show that we you know fees that we collect and where what the source of those um fees are. Um as I said we have um many people in different professional capacity in the department and we really think of it as kind of a system of everybody comes with their lens to projects and and brings together um their expertise to result in some long-term um community benefits like growth of the tax base, increased housing supply, improving quality of life for residents. So here's just kind of our thinking about how that happens. You know, long-term planning kind and zoning kind of set the stage for development. ED and planning can promote development, find um find um you know, funding and help like a developer find a a suitable site or a suitable location for their business. Um sustainability policies uh make sure that development

that happens meets energy code. And then of course when things actually go to construction, uh they are built safely and monitored throughout their life for safety through our housing inspection program and our and our code inspection program. Uh and this is just sort of an illustration of how that might work hypothetically for um in within the department. So here's a hypothetical project. 10-story apartment building, ground floor restaurant, 100 apartments. Um, and so through, you know, the approval process and then the long term of the project, you can see on the bottom the revenues that are generated over the life of the project, but then the other folks in the department have brought together their expertise to provide long-term benefits such as, you know, the building would net zero. Maybe it would have affordable housing. We would make sure through our laws and um activities that it has street activation and maybe appropriately uh located business and of course sales tax and property tax um that it would generate through its lifetime. So thank you. Um I'm happy to answer any questions and provide you with the slides. If you uh have any would like to ask me questions now that's great or I can welcome to contact me anytime. I'm happy to go over projects.

Thank you very much. And with good humor, I will amend what uh the director said to she welcomes any questions about the overview and not the items that are later on the agenda which we will discuss later. Mr. Shapiro,

thank you. I um I don't well certainly I I intended to keep my questions very general. I appreciate having um both of you here. We don't have get a lot of opportunities to do this. So, thank you. Um and um I just had um maybe two questions that I that I think are very general. Um but as you were going through some of the um discussion about um the different coders we have and the different fees you had um one of the things that occurred to me is um I'm I am not a builder by trade, but I've been involved in lots of capital projects and this might be an uninformed opinion, so please correct me if I'm wrong. Um but what a lot of um builders talk about is that it costs more to build in Itha than it cost in like the town or the Dryen or Newfield etc etc. Can you just speak at all to that and and cor like I said correct me if that's a a misstatement?

Well um I mean it costs more to build in a dense urban environment than it does in an undeveloped area. I mean that you're you're dealing with a lot of construction coordination and problem with deliveries and how it you know that these other projects like other towns don't have massive crane. They don't build the same amount that we do. So I think those construction projects will just be more expensive uh to begin with. I think our if you're talking about the fees I think our fees are in line with other communities. They may just not have as big a projects as we do. Okay. Yeah. I always got the sense they were talking about like permitting fees and things like that, but again I don't I'm not in the trade, so uh I just thought I'd take the chance to ask.

Um I have one other question though. It's totally unrelated, but it and it might be a reason to have a different conversation at a later point in time, but you guys have you talked about it in the beginning. There's like 20 and 20 plus and almost 20 years of experience. That's freaking fantastic. Um, one of the areas that's kind of sporadically been brought to our attention and I know um, former elder person Clyde Letterman actually um, was interested in the topic, but I'm curious if you could just speak to what the benefit is of having uh, historic preservation areas. And again, that might be a topic for that might be a bigger topic. So, I'm welcome to hear that as an answer also.

Yeah. Well, I'm not the historic preservation specialist. Actually, Megan has that role and one of the many roles that she's been in. Um uh and it would be great if Brian could come and talk to you about that because he could really go into depth about historic preservation and the economic benefit to a community. Um I mean first of all we have um you know we have a law that uh has protects our historic resources. Historic resources provide um character to the community and a sense of place to the community. often these buildings, you know, buildings that are already built are the most sustainable buildings, right? So, um, preserving them really gives Ithaca something special and then, um, through our historic preservation program, there are many, um, financial incentives for people who want to improve their properties that Brian could give you a ton of information about. Um and uh he's there through that program we've helped a lot of people uh uh save taxes on their impro the improvements to their properties.

Do you have anything to add Megan? Um, I would just say that, you know, it is a very technical field um that someone has to have very specific expertise to review um the projects and improvements to ensure that you're actually meeting those objectives of the the law that's passed, making sure um members of the community remain eligible for the tax um tax abatements and other options that are there. Um, and so it's not it's something that does require very specialized expertise.

I just I'll finish my thoughts, but then I'll just say to Dom or to the mayor, I think this has been a recurring kind of thing that people have brought to us over the last year. It's not always the same person. It's not hundreds of people by any stretch, but we have heard from several people over the last year who continue to ask us to look into what the area is and and and concerns about costs related to those areas. So, I'll just leave that as there and thank you for your time. Thank you, Mr. Win. Can you put that on our next agenda for the housing group? Thank you. Um, next speaker is Mr. Defendini.

Hello. Hi, Lisa. Good to see you guys again. Um, thank you for this incredible presentation and I'll definitely be following up for um some more conversations, but um I'm particularly interested in housing quality and and habitability. Uh I'm wondering if on the presentation we could go to the page dedicated to the uh the fees annually we've collected. Thank you. Um uh am I correct in assuming that would it be other either under housing inspections or other fees uh for the fees the the punitive fees associated with habitability violations where those would be categorized under? So the those would not be fees those would be prosecutions and those would be in a different category. Got it.

And I don't have access to that, but that wouldn't be part of this. This is just the revenue that we do. Got it. Okay. Thank you. Uh and then I guess a question I uh I have in terms of around habitability. And um do does the enforcement of of uh of the standards that we have for buildings uh fall to the housing inspectors or is it specific code inspectors? How many do we currently have on staff? And then my third sort of sub question is how often are we doing uh those inspections?

So we have five housing inspection inspectors. Um anybody who and many all the code inspectors are trained in housing in housing code. So they could also do it. Um but we have five people who job is housing inspection and enforcing the housing code um or housing standards. Um there is a there is a schedule for inspections and it's for rental housing as you know. So um smaller properties it's every five years. Larger properties most larger properties over three or four units it's every three years.

Okay. Um and then my my last question will be um uh do you know of uh what the any of the costs associated with uh the inspections and how um uh we've been managing to to go about doing them? What the I guess that's more of a maybe a long quter term question uh uh the cost associated with doing the inspections themselves for the department.

Uh the cost there we do have a fee schedule that I'm very happy to provide for you. It is, you know, a an inspection isn't that expensive, but if there's a violation and then the and the inspector has to come back, the fees escalate. And of course, any fees that uh we charge are completely whatever repairs the property owner has to make to to come into compliance. Of course, that's not part of the fee. So, sometimes, you know, that people may perceive that that's part of the fee, but that is just the compliance. I'd be very interested in that. uh fee schedule. So, I'd love to get that and thank you so much for this. I appreciate it. Older person for Pritzio.

Yeah, thanks so much. Um just I'll go off the fee schedule again since we were just talking about that. Um was there any plan to do um to take any closer look again at the fees that we are doing with regard to cost recovery? um we had a big discussion about that last year and then there was the fee study and I'm not really sure where we're at with that with regard to to the planning department which is the place that brings in the most fees. So I'm most curious about that.

So we did revise and maybe Dom can speak to that. I don't know. They did make recommendations about uh fees. The planning department wasn't um one of the major areas for cost recovery. Um, and we certainly, but we do do cost recoveries built into building permits and site plan review fees because it's based on the cost of construction. So, you're recovering the cost. Um, the other fees, uh, we would take the recommendations as they're implemented from that study. So, but the study the staff actually needed, it didn't sound like the consultant actually went in and and looked and did the math. So that actual part of the study, my understanding was that it was going to come from the staff. So I guess what I'm asking is is there a plan for the department to engage in that?

Yes, we certainly will. Okay. And then I was wondering about the planning board. This has always been a little bit of a mystery for me. Um I guess I'm wondering about the interface between the department and the planning board and with regard to guidelines and how does the planning board um stay in sync with our goals as a city and the goals for the department? Um do we have design guidelines? Like how how is that working? Because it it can often seem a bit subjective. So, I'm wondering where would I find our guidelines for new development for new construction?

Thank you. Um, that's a great question. Um, so, uh, the the planning board when they're doing development review, they are basically implementing the site plan review ordinance and in the site plan review ordinance, there's a very long list of the things that they have to take into consideration as um, they are looking at a project. everything from aesthetics to traffic impacts. Um and so there is a lot of discretion but they use the guidance they use are we have sets of design guidelines for college town the waterfront and downtown. However, they can be applied in other places as well and they certainly are although that's where we get most of our development. Um they also use the comprehensive plan um and what and and all the comprehensive plans. So yeah and that's how they that that that's how they make their decisions. The BL the board is also composed of um people who are prof uh professional design professionals partially. So they bring architecture landscape architecture um expertise to looking at projects.

Would um would I be able to easily find the design guidelines and also the site plan site plan review ordinance? Are they on your on your web page? site plan review ordinance is in the code. Um, site plan review ordinance is in the code. Okay. Um, and the design guidelines are they're on the website, but on your trouble finding on your page. Uh, they're on the links on our page. Okay. Um, then I wanted to ask about um since it's winter and I walk person, let me just interrupt you. Uh, chapter 276. Okay. City code.

Thank you. I'll check that out. Um, I just want to ask since it's winter and everybody's walking around and concerned about icy sidewalks, etc., and and wondering um how we're doing with regard to ticketing um and if you could clarify, I think for for everyone what the process is for with concerns about sidewalks that are unshoveled. Um how how we're doing that, how people um can get those complaints in. um how we're doing with regard to actually managing those concerns, right? Because I know that we only have one person um who is out there writing tickets and and so the other part of my question is is there capacity um with some of the other inspectors or other people like community service? Do we still have community service officers? Is that what we call them?

They're not in my department. Right. Not in your department. But I guess that's part of my point is I'm wondering if there's any sort of cross-dep departmental capacities that we might be able to tap to increase um you know how much we can manage of of that sort of um surveillance and ticketing.

I'll just quickly I'll you're welcome to answer. I'll just quickly interject with um I've worked with the city manager. We're going to have a uh debrief on snow and ice maintenance writ large next month. Um and I think that many of the specifics of your question are better addressed in that forum. Uh especially because we will have the appropriate uh and cognizant departments uh for that. Um you're more than welcome to address anything that you feel appropriate. But um I do think that that the scope of that question is better suited to uh public works. Well, let me just let me just like ask about the capacity within your within your department all the person.

It's not a function handled by the planning department. So, we're not going to go down that line of they they don't have jurisdiction over that that piece of it, right? Like that's not a function of their office. So, I think sidewalks, you're which you're welcome to address specifically, but I think the broader snow and ice conversation, we're going to we're going to punt the mark. Right. No, I was asking specifically about sidewalks and how and how we're dealing with surveilling those and ticketing those etc. and what our capacity is if we have any increased you see any increased capacity for being able to have more than one person try to manage the entire city.

Yes. So um that's a great question and we do get asked that a lot of as you know we have one exterior property m person who is charged with exterior property maintenance. He um he makes rounds around the city but also responds to complaints. So if there's a complaint, it gets responded to. Uh with all the construction and um housing inspection we have to do, we don't have a lot of additional capacity for other people who have other positions to do additional. But there are times and occasions where it makes sense. And for instance, um our exterior property maintenance person is had to take some time off. So some the building inspectors responded to complaints for the last two weeks and issue tickets for sidewalk specifically. I mean they would respond to anything, but the complaints were all about snow removal as you can imagine because the snow's not leaving. It usually does. Um so um when when we need to we can pull in that.

Yeah. And are we can you just um for everyone how how do people make complaints about sidewalks that are unshoveled? Uh they can I think there's they can use cclick fix. They can call the building click fix for sidewalks. I think they can. Yeah. I don't click fix.

I think so. Sorry if you mind. Uh cclick fix uh is something someone may submit that type of complaint but that's not what we invite people to submit via cclick fix. Specifically something related to a cityowned property defect. Yes. Someone should be submit that via cclick fix. Anything related to the exterior property maintenance we prefer that that go through the building division which currently is calling or emailing calling or you can also open gov. We get a lot of complaints through open gov. So, okay. Thank you.

Any further comments or questions on the overview of the department? All right. Well, thank you both for joining us and we'll see you again in a few minutes. Um, I would now like to invite up Chief Kelly. And I don't think I see anyone else from the department here, but if there are, I'm not omitting you on purpose. Chief, is there anybody else with you tonight? Okay. Well, welcome. Thank you for joining us and um we are happy to hear the overview of uh what IPD is working on and uh I am going to guess that you're going to have some questions at the end of your presentation.

I was getting that impressions. Uh yeah, so Chief Thomas Kelly Police Department, I've uh put together just a brief kind of overview of uh our introduction for the police department. I know I had the opportunity recently uh to meet with a number of the members of the council at some reality based training uh that the department had hosted. uh kind of just to give a little bit of a an overview or presentation of the type of training uh and experiences that that officers have. And also coming off of the the tail end of an extensive uh active killer training uh that we had set up for departments around the county including the county, Ithaca College, Cornell University uh in coordination with Ithaca Fire Department and Bangs Ambulance. kind of the first of its kind in this area to bring together all these different agencies uh highlighted off of recent events that happened around the country including Canada uh Brown University. Um but just to jump right in here uh the department including civilian uh is 80 uh full-time positions. Now that includes the school crossing guards, admin coordinators, uh other uh administrative assistants, financial clerk, the police records, uh support staff, and our crime analyst. Uh the on the law enforcement side, we have myself, two deputy chiefs, four lieutenants, uh 10 police sergeants, and uh we're uh budgeted for 50 uh police officers currently with uh six vacancies. Now, that includes uh one that is in the academy and uh two

laterals that are in training and another recent graduate from the academy that's also in in field training. Uh we are broken up into three three divisions. We have our patrol division, our investigations and then our professional standards. Uh we have the uh traditional uh focus of part one crimes including murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assaults and burglaries, lararsenies, motor vehicle thefts and then a lot of other uh areas part two crimes and other uh services that we provide including uh traffic crime scene investigation, our K9, our special response team and crisis negotiation team that are partnered uh they're multi-jurisdictional and include uh the sheriff's department and our uh our recruitment team and our LGBT uh TQ liaison. Uh we meet regularly uh starting well regularly throughout the year our unit uh heads meet but in uh November of each year we get together and we start to work on what are our goals of objectives for the coming year. We review previous goals and objectives throughout the year. Uh and we uh look at you know what what are the trends and what are should we really be focused on and we do that in a lens of our mission which is to enhance community safety. Uh you'll see that in our building uh throughout the building. It's regularly talked about in interviews, promotions, uh, with staff and their day-to-day interpretation of policies, procedures, and law. How are we enhancing community safety? And also our our vision to provide service with honor, integrity, and professionalism. And that's something that you'll see on the vehicles, you see also in the building as well. And another piece of of that

message, uh something that's that's near uh and dear to me as as a an instructor is to practice uh principal policing. And that means when we're we're interacting with the community, giving people a voice, and being neutral in our decisions, showing respect uh even if we're not getting it, and uh and being trustworthy. And again, that is something that is the focus of conversations from the briefings to uh promotions to interviews uh and in the community. And a big piece of what we've been working on in the last years is that continued community engagement and that continued community healing and trust building. And so you'll hear officers that at different events talk about these talk about how they are they are affecting or how they're guiding uh the department. And one of the big things and and I wanted to to talk about most or spend some time on is our partnership with the community justice center. uh and how how important that's been uh for the last several years uh and in my arrival and getting to know the city, getting to know the community uh and getting to know the officers. We've had a number of relationships built with uh REACH, Second Wind Cottages, Tomkins County Act, uh the Children's Advocacy Group. So, so many more relationships that that have been established in how we do our job and how we respond and meet the community where they're at. Uh, and a big focus has been the care team and our our care team clinicians. Uh, well, Christristen and and hopefully soon our our second clinician that was was budgeted for and is moving through the county process. the lead program. Uh our new uh violence interrupter has been

very successful and most recently uh we are doing overdose response and recovery where we respond to 15 overdoses a month and half of those overdoses will go to the hospital, half of them will have an ARAM and refuse. And what we're now doing is partnering with the different agencies o cars and uh and reach to get their uh contact with their peers. So there's followup within that 24 to 48 hours to try to encourage somebody to seek uh treatment for that. So we've continued to put this emphasis, we're looking forward uh soon to our work with the roots program and continuing that that hub model approach and bringing the different you know experience and different uh expertise to the table to try to provide services uh to our most vulnerable population. I think one of the things that's been great working with the CJC and working with Dom over over the last year is really getting immersed and seeing seeing the issues that we are working on, seeing the challenges that we face. Um, some of the people that we work with have all the opportunities in the world and all of the different people rooting for them, but they don't take that help uh and continue to struggle. But you know what I really want to emphasize, you know, for for the council is that the police department is working on that relationship building with the community and we're working on building that trust and working on um providing whole whole service and doing our best to meet people where they are and deflect people from from the law enforcement system when we can. I could go on and and talk, but it's definitely open to to questions. We do have a year-end report that'll be coming out probably the beginning of uh March. We have our dashboard that is up and

operational that you can go and you can look at by year, by quarter, and kind of see what the crimes are, where they are, how many officers we have responding. Uh as of uh last year, uh we had 22,476 calls for service. That number has been increasing. Uh, and one of the things it's increasing, but we also see violent crime continuing to trend down. And I think what's that what that's attributed to, what I believe it's attributed to is the trust that you're seeing in people reporting where they might not have reported before. Thank you, Chief. Mr. Shapiro, you're first.

Hi. The first is more a comment for you, Mr. mayor because I know you have a lot of connections throughout the state, but the the way you're talking about all the collaborations that you have with organizations and there we're essentially talking about peers that are responding in these various different ways and we're talking about developing an unarmed responder program that similarly is going to have folks that are reaching out in the community that um in some way have that peer relationship and how that can be successful. I just am reminded of a colleague of mine that wrote something on social media about how disgusting it is that the salaries that peer specialists work for throughout uh New York State. And I I don't expect anybody to really um hear that to make a difference, but I do know you have connections in Albany and if they ever talk about like peer specialists, you know, and and how we can fund those types of programs better, I think those people are just doing they do the work because it's in their heart. Um, but they deserve to be paid a a good wage as well. Um, I do have a question for you though, um, Chief. Um, and I always appreciate you having you here, so thank you. Um, some of our colleagues that are newer to, um, newer to the council, they they may or may not know that we purchased a bowling alley last year. And while that bowling alley is uh, unassigned in in any real sense, there was some thought behind it that perhaps it could be used for a future police site. I don't want need to ask you about that, but I am just curious um can you describe for us like how the space limitations in your current um site are impacting your ability to perform your your operation in an effective way or you can answer that in a little more broadly if if I if I was too specific in the way I phrase that.

No, not at not at all. Yeah, our our building is quite antiquated and the previous council had been for a tour through the building. So, some of the members h have seen it. Uh the lack of facilities, lack of space, uh it's not handicap accessible. Uh our female locker room is at capacity. Uh and it's a little embarrassing. We're hiring or potentially hiring a female officer in the near future and we have to figure out where that how that locker space is is going to work. Uh and then for how we've we've changed department and restructured with the addition of the care team uh and other programs we're limited on on worksp space for the community and and bringing people in. Uh we have had uh conversations continued conversations around you know I hope to be re revisiting that soon. Uh congressman uh had expressed interest in providing support uh to start that ball rolling uh for the building. So I am definitely open to beginning that conversation again soon.

So if somebody is in a wheelchair and they want to file a report in the police station, how do they how do they enter?

So they can we we can uh come through the front door. Uh but it is it is not the three-foot. It's it's it's tight. And if they're going down into the patrol uh area, they'd have to come around the back of the building through the carport. Uh the elevator has been operational most recently, but at times similar to this building, when it goes down, they have to make the parts. Uh it did when it warmed up a little bit and all the snow was on a roof. Uh and it hasn't warmed up in a while, but I don't know when was it's been a little while. My office started raining. Uh so that was that was interesting to come home and or yeah, come home. I feel like I'm my home at the station, but uh to to come in the office and see a very wet mess and computer uh underwater. just might be part of our strategic planning at some point in the next year or two while, you know, during this set of council that we revisit the bowling alley and think about why we purchased that and if and if uh and perhaps do another tour of the police department so folks that haven't been there might have a better understanding of why there might be uh needs for for a new space.

Thank you.

Thank you, M. Steven. Hey Chief, good to see you again. Um, thank thank you for your presentation and for being here. uh a question I have and totally fine if there's no uh answer for it right away, but I know that one of the things that was discussed during the re-imagining public safety process in terms of a workable recommendation uh for both the city and the county to think of was um reimagining uh how the uh the city and county uh joint owned uh uh SWAT truck uh the beast as I think it's been nicknamed uh can be purposed um for the community as a for more of a public use beyond just as a mobile command center. And I want to be clear, I am aware that does serve a use as a tactical mobile headquarters when needed for different events and I don't think it needs to be completely uh taken away for that, but I do know that was one of the recommendations and I'm curious if that's on your guys' radar at all as something to work on.

So, it has been used for a number of community events. Uh and I I will say yes, it is more of a command post than a uh tactical uh response uh vehicle. And uh so it it has served in in in that sense. I mean they they had repainted it and redesigned the graphics and I I actually had somebody recently asked me like what happened to it. I was like what's still here? It's painted white. Uh so one of the things that's that's come up recently is that some of the equipment, some of the electronic equipment, computers, dispatch is is starting to to fail. It's been repaired and replaced, but it's getting cost prohibited. And u our our tactical team and the way they function and the work that they do is for serious critical instance where there is a real threat to the community. uh we should start exploring uh some type of a emergency response vehicle that is armored. Uh not to uh go out and do anything different than what they do, but to provide proper protection for the community and for the officers that working in that vehicle. Uh a lot of what they do now is what you would call a surrounding call out. Like they're they're not doing dynamic entries per se. So, if you're outside of a house and you've now have a tactical team, well, similar to recently, uh, our team was utilized, Courtland had a homicide suspect to pick up in the northern part of Tomkins County and we had to reach out to Syracuse and ask them to send equipment down so we could communicate outside the house and the officers were protected. And it it ended uh very uh non-remarkable, peacefully. The the suspect came out of the house. Uh but you we have to have that equipment for the officers for that worst case scenario if somebody is uh not willing to come out and willing to to cause harm to the community.

Mr. Drumul,

thank you, Mr. Mayor. Um and thank you, Chief Kelly, for coming today. Um I was talking with you earlier today and um brief we briefly touched on this but um as far as the roots program capacity to offer tickets is that something that we could still work on and empower them to do? We had talked briefly about like the idea of like parking meter enforcements as sort of quasi peace officers. Um but from what I understand from our conversation earlier right now the three roots officers won't be allowed to offer any tickets. Um, which I think would be a shame for beats like 207 where I think, you know, they could in their off time do a lot of work on like parking violations and other kind of nuisance stuff in College Town especially, it would be a massive help. Um, so I guess it's kind of a two-part question in that one, is that something we could still try to work through? And two, if that was something that we could do, Chief Kelly, um, would you appreciate that kind of assistance for lower level crimes, which I think in the initial convos at RPS was kind of one of the initial missions and um, intentions. Just before you answer really quick, Chief, I'll just I assume the older person meant for uh lower level offenses rather than crimes. Sorry. Yep. Yep. Thank you.

Yeah, I think there's we're so early in this conversation of how this uh position is going to unfold. I know one of the things that was expressed uh by Lieutenant was the relationships that they're looking to build. Like I I I have officers that can make an arrest and that person will thank them and but that relationship doesn't always happen. We don't always get thanked for the the arrest or the ticket or the summon. So what type of relationship do you want roots to have with the community if they're seen as a ticket writer? Uh where the the community service officers that were created that became parking attendants that are now I think living in DPW. uh they initially had a community role that was developed and then they became parking enforcement. Uh so I I I think it's a conversation we need to have and what is the best best role the most you know effective role for what the needs of the community are.

Well the person forio thanks chief for being here. Um, so couple questions just kind of a little bit all over the place with regard to um space. I was just wondering um are you all actively using the um the West End satellite space for anything? We are. We actually have increased use uh updated some uh computers in there, made it a satellite space for officers to have people come that don't have to come down to the station.

Yeah. Okay, good. Um, and in addition to, you know, a new building, um, an emergency and an emergency response vehicle, can you give us any sense of like what's ahead in terms of like big ticket items or like absolute needs, the essentials that we've been putting off or anything deferred or whatever that we're not thinking about? I know budget time will capture some of those things, but just curious.

Yes. And we're actually, you know, we're looking for grants that that are out there to fund some of these different programs like the violence interrupter was was started with seed money from the give program. Uh and there is a an an office of victim services grant that we're just starting to talk about and how can we fund uh somebody to to coordinate all of the the outreach and services that are provided and make sure that we're you know people aren't slipping through the cracks. Uh technology is something that is ever expanding uh for good and for bad. Uh but we don't we don't have incar video in the cars. We have body cameras but we don't have that incar video in the vehicles. And some of the technology that's coming out now and some of the uh reading I've been doing on on AI is starting to come into everything from medical, law, uh police, all types of services and it's going to be a part of our lives in the very near future whether we like it or not. So there's there's things that we need to explore there whether it's assistance with uh uh draft report writing uh which the DA's office is going to start adopting to help prosecute cases

AI yeah AI in the very in the very near future uh discovery uh all the video and electronic evidence uh that is now uh has to be stored and kept for many many years for retention clause so there's I I could actually probably put together a better list and and itemize it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I didn't mean to put you on the on the spot for that. No, no, not at all.

Um I'm assuming I mean I I know you're looking hard for these kinds of things. I'm sure there's there other staff as well. Are do does the is the department working closely with our grants coordinator also to ensure that you know your wish list is people are watching out for your wish list with regard to any state or federal money that might be available.

Yes. Yes. So, that was part of our our recent meeting with with Congressman Riley was around, you know, different things that we're going to be applying for uh the different grants that are coming in. We're we're meeting with our grants coordinator uh next week to talk about that grant. Some of the grants like the the tactical grant uh recently that we were uh were awarded is a yearly grant for the accreditation of of the special response team or I'm sorry a yearly uh grant. Uh the give grant is easier to manage in house because of all the stats reporting. It would probably take away the grants coordinator from a lot of other work she could be doing when we have all those numbers at at our fingertips.

Well, once you all start using AI more, that'll help a lot, I'm sure. But um so you said that we have 50 um officers, we have six vacancies. Are the four there's one ina in the academy, there are two laterals, and you said one in field training. Are is does that mean that we have just two um two vacancies from what we funded? I mean essentially once these people get into No, they're they're included in Yeah. in that number. So it is six six vac six vacancies still

and we have four people that we're processing now. The test is scheduled for May. Uh it is posted. So we are doing a rolling test every six months. And uh we uh yeah we have a group now that we're we're processing it. But I also know I have two retirements coming up this year too. Right. Yeah, it's a it's an ongoing challenge. Three steps forward, two steps.

Exactly. Um so with regard to that, I this is my last question. Um you know, I'm just sort of it's another capacity question. um like I had for the planning department and I'm just wondering if I know that there are limitations with regard to what peace officers can do versus police officers, but I'm just wondering if there's in any way that you can envision a larger role for um CUPD or for IC. I know that last summer with IC having um an academic building on the commons now there there was some presence with IC um officers and I'm just wondering with regard to you know things like noise violations in College Town and just you know other like those kinds of obvious things that are very um student oriented if there might be a larger role um that could help sort of fill the gaps that we will always have probably within our departments. we have done uh I can say over the last uh two years a lot of collaboration you know I I can't say enough uh about our sheriff uh and you know Derek Osborne uh Misha up at uh Troop C IA state police and uh and and our college relationships. I mean, Scott Garen has has been a great uh connection. Uh our new our new chief because we stole the other chief from

right Cornell uh

has been has been great. I mean they came down and have assisted us in staffing events and festivals. Um they have coordinated training with us. They both participated in in the active killer reality based training that we've done uh recently. And we are uh doing a college down college down town detail again where we are partnering with Cornell and doing patrol on uh the weekend nights uh up in uh in Cornell and they've always been responsive for the big house parties and different events that are involved in the college campus. uh many many of the kids we deal with the ticket is not an issue for them but if the college is involved that becomes an issue so they come down and support us.

Um would that be for housing that's not Cornell owned because it's always been my understanding that Cornell police only respond to um buildings that are either on Cornell property or owned by Cornell. They cannot respond uh preemptively, but if we request them, they are able to assist. Uh and when in some of bigger incidents within a city where police have been occupied, they they will come and assist with calls on on that type of need. Okay. Thank you so much, Mr. Keel.

Uh thank you, Mr. Mayor, and thank you, Chief, for being here. Um, I just want to touch briefly on a conversation I heard you already had with Robin earlier today. Um, we've been hearing from a lot of uh, constituents in the College District um, about significant increases in package theft. Um, and I just wanted to hear if you had any thoughts about ways that um, you're thinking about addressing that with the department or things that you're thinking about. I know there's lots of uh, difficult factors that come into play there. Um, but we have been getting huge amounts of complaints about package theft in College Town.

Yeah. Now, I I talked to Robin uh earlier today about that which we had heard uh and actually DC Bellamy had heard from somebody uh up there and I think we had actually talked about this uh one of the property owners had who is actually taking steps to help their residents get packages by providing a place for packages to be delivered. Uh but then residents weren't picking packages up when they were delivered. Uh we've noticed overall and we were talking about this around Christmas time with a decrease uh with package tests because a lot of the services now we'll send you a picture and tell you exactly when your package is left at the door. So we definitely when we do get called for those, we do take it serious. Robin had brought an issue up with me where they thought somebody had been identified and arrest hadn't been made. I I encourage those arrests to happen because many of those offenders are not just stealing one package. They're doing many packages. Um there's a building in the city that we recover a lot of stolen property from. Uh that you know they're they're going and stealing those packages. So there's there's a two-prong approach here and we just had this conversation today. It's going to be really looking at what's happening, what's being reported, making sure that we are following up where we're able and then the education component because that it is I mean the techn technology uh these days I mean you get a picture right away when it's delivered and people work they have jobs but boy have you know that's coming call your neighbor like set something up uh to because we do see other situations where people get the package boxes and those are tampered with as Well, so as soon as people can use the technology that's available and get packages picked up and in a safe place or have them delivered somewhere where somebody can recover them for them, uh we want to do our best

to minimize because if the opportunity is not there, then people, you know, they won't do it. It's a cr it's a crime of opportunity when when things are left out there like that.

Just a followup. Um yeah, you know, we've I heard from um one property owner a couple months ago that uh he's actually had people who do food delivery kind of access the building because of the food delivery option and then take packages and it's happened multiple times. And um so I think I think you're absolutely correct that that there's things that uh private property owners can do and that the people who are ordering patches can do, but I also think that there's this this added component of um people finding ways to kind of skirt the system when you do have locked doors and different things. Um the other thing I was going to say, which is not necessarily a question, but um I just wanted to put this out there. Um we were talking earlier today about how um when we have an IPD officer in college town um which is almost all the time um you see a significant decrease in the amount of people double parking on the 400 block of college a and that as soon as there's not that visibility um you can't get through the 400 block anymore. And so just I think really making sure that there's enforcement on the 400 block. Um that people are getting hit with with um with fines when they are double parked. It like really shuts down the entire corridor um when people are doing that. And it's dangerous too. You know, you have so many pedestrians there. And um hopefully one day we'll get the 400 block redesign done. Um but at the same time um currently you know you have a lot of pedestrians in the street because there's not enough space on the sidewalks. Um and so when you have people double parking you've got people running out between cars and people swerving around and um it just gets it gets super dicey up there. Um so I'm I'm a big believer that if we're up on that and and ticketing people when they are double parked as quickly as we can that eventually those things will kind of permeate through the system and people will stop doing it as much. Um, but thank you for all the work that you're doing. Um, thank you for for thinking

about us up on the hill and um, I look forward to further conversations. Thank you, Mr. Kirby.

Chief, thank you for being here and uh, you know, I want to say I'm really appreciative of all the work you're doing from the community policing standpoint and kind of all that encompasses. Um, obviously a lot of your kind of report to us was on based on building trust within the community and kind of the hot button issue of our day and particularly in our community is the flock cameras. Um, and I think it more relates to what I'm going to describe as an untrustworthiness with that particular company, not necessarily IPD or our community. Um, but as one of your goals being to build trust within the community, are you finding that the benefits of the flock cameras to IPD both from crime prevention and crime solving in the sense of but for the flock camera, you guys would not have been able to solve that crime uh is worth it to a potential erosion of trust between the community and um our officers. I'll try to be brief.

No, no. Um, so yeah, I I had this conversation earlier today with someone and and the delicate balance between technology and the role technology plays in public safety. And as technologies continue to just skyrocket, public safety, even though we we have these incidents that happen and we have violence that still happens, public safety has continued to trend down and continue trend down continue to get safer and safer like the risk of death uh has just steadily decreased. But there is a delicate balance between u what someone will sacrifice for that safety versus their personal freedom or their their expectation of privacy. Um I know there's been a correlation drawn between flock and the federal government and things that have that have been happening out in in the Midwest. Uh which is is is unfortunate. you know, all the trust and I know Chief Brian O'Hara from Minneapolis, all the work that they've done to now be in the situation that they're in. Uh, for us and we have continued to dial back uh flock and what we use it for and who we share it with. most recently like we limit sharing to New York State. New York State uh Kathy Hokll the governor and the attorney general Leticia James have been very vocal about and against departments and they want to pass legislation to make it legal for departments to work uh with ICE. So we trust that you know the information that we provide to them is safe and then to just the departments within Hopkins County uh and that includes Ithaca College, Cornell, Graten, Trumanburg, uh Cuga Cuga Heights, the sheriff's department uh to really narrow down and

focus on who is going to access that that data that that Flock uh collects in the city. And like I said, there's a number of cases that I'm familiar with where flock has been come in very very useful homicide in Courtland. Uh we were notified of it and the vehicle had come into Tomkins County and was picked up on a on a flat camera and located missing people, missing cars, stolen vehicles. Um Cornell recently uh just gave one of their uh detectives some recognition. It was uh they had somebody was going around stealing uh equipment from different properties within Cornell. They didn't have a vehicle license plate. They only had a vehicle description. They were able to locate a vehicle based on that search of that vehicle description and develop a lead. They went to that person that owned the vehicle and that person actually was not their suspect. He had lent his vehicle out to somebody who they went and found who had a lot of stolen property. U I think it was a couple $10,000 worth of stolen property that he had been taken. So the tool is an investigative tool. It doesn't it helps us uh develop information to where say a couple years back we were having a lot of shots fired, a lot of shooting incidents. Last year we were down to two. Uh, but you have a a a vehicle, say it's a white, you know, Honda Civic that's involved, and everybody says, "Yeah, it's a white Honda Civic that's shooting, and we go to Flock and say, "We're looking for white Honda Civics in the area." Well, now we have a vehicle to actually look at versus stopping everybody happens to be driving a white Honda Civic in the area. Uh, so there's a lot of a lot of pros and cons and benefits to it. my experience and I I heard Ruth share it during the council meeting last week.

First homicide case that I had uh supervised uh was a mother of seven. Uh there were four shooters shooting at another group and the first person the only person that got shot was a mother of seven. within 5 hours with the use of license plate readers uh and other technology we were able to send out a bolo to Middberg uh police department and uh Bingington and they pulled over the vehicles with those shooters and within 5 hours we had people in custody that we were interviewing and we were solving this homicide. Uh so there yeah it's it is a balance but we don't just go out and say hey let's see what so and so is doing today. We don't just randomly have access to search all the vehicles that travel through the city. It's very specific criteria where you need an incident number. You need uh a legal reason to be searching that. You can't search it because you're mad at your uh wife or you're mad at your girlfriend or you're looking to uh find out who's coming to the state to get an abortion. Um, so there's a lot of things that we don't share with the federal government and agencies that have lost the privileges to use that device because they have broken that trust. So I I expect that we'll have a lot more conversation. That was my short answer. Chief,

I see mult I see recurrent hands. However, alter person Moss has not yet spoken, so I am recognizing her.

Thank you, mayor. Um, hi, Chief. Going back to what you just said regarding um random searches not happening and referring to the public comment that did happen last week. Uh a public commenter did refer to flock data records that they were able to access and did say that as of in January of this year there was searches performed with no keywords in that. Could you explain that a little bit or at least explain when criteria started getting implemented for needing incident numbers so on and so forth? So that criteria was was implemented last year and I haven't fully gone through all of the comments, but we do a monthly audit and I don't have any cases that weren't that reasons for uh searches weren't entered in for. So I' I've yet to find that. I'd be happy if she has specific information to to look at. I know that a number of the people that had come in to speak were very nice. They shared some literature with me. Uh there's a website that I have not gone to yet that I do fully intend to to go to.

Then my next speaker is uh Mr. Shapiro. Thanks. Um I appreciate the conversation. Um but I was going to take it elsewhere. I don't know. I'd seed my time if other people want to keep talking about flock and keep you on the list. My next speaker was Miss Fitzio. Well, then Mr. Shapiro, the floor is still yours.

Um, well, I still appreciated the conversation. Um, my question relates back to um when older person Trumbull was speaking. He used a term that I'm unfamiliar with. Um, and we've been I wasn't part of the RPS meetings, but we have been a part of two years worth of discussing the unarmed responders now now that we now refer to as roots. Um I I've but I but my point is we've been talking for two plus years about this term unarmed responders and then he talked about um roots officer

roots officer and that word officer was never something that I'd heard within the context of the conversation and I'm wondering if you can just speak to that that to me those two terms just mean drastically different things an underarmmed responder versus a roots officer. I'm going to first recognize the city manager.

Thank you. Um I will say nowhere in any of the documentation that we've prepared on any unarmed responder have we used the term officer. Um and not intending to. One of the next steps that we are taking after that resolution that was submitted and we'll be doing this in concert with HR and IPD and some other internal departments before seeking community feedback is around those job descriptions which will include the title the specific title. Uh the working title right now is community responder. Um so nothing in the in the current plans that uses the word officer. I just wanted to clarify that. Thanks for the question. It's a good one. Okay. Thank you. That's all I have. Uh and then Mr. Britz Hill.

Thanks. I just wanted to sort of piggyback um on Patrick's remarks about ticketing um in College Town. I just wanted to ask again because we're in winter and snow removal. I just want to ask about the coordination um with the department and with a odd even parking. So, the coordination with DPW with regard to clearing of streets. I I know I spoke with um some people who were trying to move a bunch of snow off Lind Street not so many days ago and you know they said the problem is um if cars are not getting ticketed then the cars are just staying there and and it's sort of slowing down the whole process and so I'm just wondering what the um coordination is like for that. So, we do we do coordinate uh with the uh community service officers, the parking attendants. Uh oftentimes we'll cover uh parking enforcement when there's complaints and they're not working and vice versa. Sometimes they do call for us to assist. Uh I know the some of the main roads I've seen that they have cleared vehicles. So, that might be something that coordinating with DPW uh if they want to. We used to go out and I say we in my previous life, previous department, we would go bullhorn and like literally go down the street, hit the siren, hit the horn, hey, move your vehicles, plows coming. Uh, and most cars would move and then a couple that didn't, you know, we we would end up towing. Uh, so that's something we certainly the CSOS moved to uh DPW. I believe that was a previous uh police chief. Uh, I thought it was something that was moved as part of reimagine, but I don't believe that was the case. Might be something to consider bringing bringing that back under the the realm of public safety. So, there is more coordination.

That was going to be my next next question actually. What the C who the CSOS um uh report to, how many do we have, and what the coordination is with the with IPD. So right now I believe we have four now and Lisa Spurger is the supervisor uh for that unit and I don't believe who specifically they answer to under DPW. It's currently the um manager of parking and common operations Todd Land that they report to and Lisa is the supervisor of the four that uh chief is referencing and that Todd reports uh up through Adam the superintendent of public works. Thank you. It would be great to um to get I think some assistance in that area. Thank you.

Seeing no further comments. Thank you very much, Chief, for joining us this evening. Thank you. Have a good night.

And I will now invite up Chief Moody. This will be our third departmental overview for the evening, at which point I will entertain a motion for a brief recess, but I will do that after this following presentation so that the chief does not need to stay here any longer than he already has. Chief Moody, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. The floor is yours. one chief after another. I'm reminded of maybe too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Um, good evening. Thank you for having me here to um give you a brief overview of the fire department operations. Um, pretty much what I'm going to give you is a real quick recap of what I presented in the 2025 annual report. Um, and then I want to talk a little bit about strategic planning. um something that was one of our primary goals for 2026. Um the idea behind strategic planning is to give the department the opportunity to set ourselves up for success for um many years to come. Um it's something that I don't think has been done in a while in the department. So we're we're taking a deeper dive into that. Um so first of all the brief overview of the department. As you know we're a career fire department. Um currently we have 69 uniform firefighters including myself as chief. Um we have two civilians in our administrative um wing of our department. We have an admin coordinator and an administrative assistant. Um we're an all hazards fire department within the city and town of Ithaca. We provide fire suppression, emergency medical services, technical rescue, um which includes rope rescue, water rescue, both swift, um ICE, and

then also lake emergencies, uh confined space, vehicle rescue, trench and structural collapse rescue, and we are the hazardous materials response team for Tomkins County. So, we do a lot of things with um some very talented people. Um I'm extremely proud of the firefighters in our in our department. They're highly trained, highly motivated um individuals who take their responsibility of serving the community very seriously. Um the 2000 2025 annual report provided an array of specific details about um our various divisions that we have. Um obviously our response division which includes all of our emergency response. We have a fire prevention bureau um who does um permitting of things like um propane permits um food truck inspections. They do code enforcement inspections for the fire prevention side of existing buildings. We do plan review and inspections of new systems including pre-alerting systems, sprinkler systems, um standpipe systems in new buildings. Um, we also have I spoke about our administrative branch. Um, again I like my primary thing I would like to talk about is strategic planning because it is one of our major initiatives. Um, I'll be perfectly honest and upfront. Um, strategic planning sometimes involves some difficult conversation and some difficult things to think about. um especially when it works around things like um futurep proofing your department and looking at what budgets look like and things like that. But I want to be perfectly clear before I start. I am in no way advocating um that any of these initiatives that I talk about tonight be addressed immediately. Um I just think

that um it's important to start the discussion in the planning process and to keep council in the loop on what we're doing with that. So, the first item that we we've addressed three primary items in our strategic planning discussion. The first one is our increased call volume. In 2025, um for the first time ever, we broke the record of over 6,000 calls. Um just for comparison, in 2020, just 5 years ago, the fire department responded to 4,271 calls. And that represents between 20 and 25. That's a 41% increase overall and that averages about 7.1% per year. So if you project that out to three three and a half years um we're going to touch 7,000 calls. Um, so that's obviously something we're looking at uh very closely uh because as our call volume goes up, as our um the type of events we respond to expands, um it's it's becoming a sign a significant challenge. Uh the second item that's on our radar is growth and high-rise development. Um the city obviously anyone who is familiar with the city and ride rides around and takes a look in the city there's we've experienced significant increase in in density and uh vertical development. Um there's a many current and future um multi-story residential and mixeduse buildings that are either here or in the planning stages. Um, I just would like to point out that, you know, for people that are not well-versed in firefighting, high-rise firefighting is fundamentally very different than, uh, structural firefighting in a single family home. Um, high-rise firefighting is very labor

intensive, staffing intensive, and also resource intensive. uh the National Fire Protection Association, which writes national standards for the fire service, uh they define a high-rise as any a building 70 ft or higher, um or approximately seven stories or more. Um the NFPA recommends a minimum of 43 onduty personnel to be assembled on scene to fight a working structure fire in a high-rise. The Ithaca Fire Department has 11 on duty personnel as our minimum staffing at any time. So, we are definitely underststaffed um for the type of buildings that we're seeing expand in the city. Um considering our current staffing levels, we've struggled with the fact that if we ever do have a significant event in a high-rise, we are going to have to make a choice between search and rescue of residents or extinguishing the fire. um we can't do both at the same time. So um that's definitely something um that we're working on and you know the the national fire protection standards for the first responding personnel to a high-rise fire that is assuming that the building is pre-alarmed and has a sprinkler system. Chief, just quick interruption because I think a lot of folks watching at home can just rewind and underscore the number you said, but uh current levels versus uh NFP

NFPA, thank you. Standards uh what's the what are we at? What are the NFP st NFPA standards? And then what's the delta between those? I mean, I guess we can we can all do that arithmetic, but you just you just said some numbers about Yeah. Um Sure. Um so NFPA recommends for first response assembled um firefighting personnel on a high working high-rise structure fire they recommend 43 personnel. Um our current minimum staffing on duty on any given day at in Ithaca is 11.

Leave to the attorney, right? Um, definitionally, uh, high-rise is starting. High-rise is a building 70 ft or greater or approximately seven stories. In a commercial building, you you estimate 10 ft for every story. Thank you.

You're welcome. Um the other item, the third item that we have is also related um in a roundabout way, well not really a roundabout way, in a direct way to um building and development is our fire prevention bureau and the backlog that they have right now. Um as I said earlier, one of the functions of the fire prevention bureau is they do plan review for new buildings specific to fire prevention um systems. Um when a new building is built, there's various steps of construction that all of those systems, the um fire alarm system, the fire suppression system, the standpipe system, they all have to be inspected at various stages of construction. Um so that takes a considerable amount of time, but at the same time, all of our current existing buildings still need to be inspected on a regular basis for fire code compliance. We currently right now I checked today um with our firerevention bureau we're approximately 200 inspections behind in the city um because we just cannot get to them. Um, the other thing this does is during construction season, it backlogs the inspection of buildings under construction, which is, you can imagine, very frustrating for contractors because, as they remind us all the time, um, time is money. Um, so the thing I want to focus on and keep in mind about fire prevention is it's not only about productivity. I know I talked a lot about being backlogged and behind on inspections, but it also directly relates more importantly to the safety of our community. Um, our fire prevention.

Did you arrange for that in advance?

Thank you. I did not tell them to they're going they're going to a fire alarm. So, um um our fire prevention bureau takes enforcement of the New York State Fire Code very seriously and um that prevention work is critical and one of the reasons for that is because of the staffing levels I've talked about. Um you know, the safest fire is the fire that never happens and the way to prevent fires from happening is to have um strict code enforcement. So again, as I said, I'm I want to be very clear. I'm not here to talk about increased staffing. I just think that um as the city plans growth, the fire department should be part of that long-term planning conversation. Um I'd like to recommend four items that we've defined so far in our work as um things that should be kept in mind for long-term development. Uh, one is evaluating operational staffing models when we consider high-rise growth and development. Two, assessing fire prevention bureau staffing to keep pace with development and provide efficient response to our developers. Um, three, reviewing annual response data, our call volume to be sure that we're maintaining safe and effective emergency response for our community. and then consider how density and vertical expansion um impact emergency services operations. Um so again, that's pretty much a brief overview and it's a look at what our um strategic planning has covered so far at this point. Um I'm going to wrap it up with that and thank you again for the opportunity to speak to you and talk about the fire department. I'm very proud of our fire department. Um and I look at one of my primary responsibilities as a fire chief is to

set the department up for success um through strategic through strategic planning so that we can operate effectively and efficiently for the next 5 10 15 even 20 years. Thank you chief for I have uh all the persons defendini and trumble type of response that's driving it.

I'm sorry. What specifically do you mean the increase the increase in call volume? Oh, okay. Um, it's a combination of both. It's it's really it's seen across the board nationally. There's just more calls for service. Um, there's various reasons you can look into demographics. Certain demographics in the community require more emergency services. Um, we have obviously goes without saying we have a large college population here. Um, sometimes they don't make the best choices. I'm sure we're all familiar with that from our days in college. Um, but that that is a significant part of our um of our call volume, but um, you know, we do I don't have the stats in front of me now, but we do we do a s significant number of structured fires a year. Um, the reason that a lot of people don't see or hear about those is they're not front page news because they're not big fires because they may start out as a kitchen fire and then because we're a career department, um, our response is, you know, we have a one minute out the door response to a structure fire. Um, we're on scene and we extinguish a fire when it's small before it turns into a big fire. Um, but it's really across the board. Medical emergencies are definitely driving a lot of the call volume. We're doing more and more medical um every year, but um to put my finger on one thing and say that's specifically the cause, it's it's really across the board. We will go some summers with two gorge rescues and other summers we'll do two a week for the whole summer. It just kind of depends on how things how things happen.

Mr. Defenditi, the president took my question. Thank you, Mr. Trumble. Same answer.

Um, thank you, Chief Moody, for being here. Um, first off, I just want to shout this out cuz I didn't do it earlier. I think it's really cool that you guys are starting to do these joint trainings across departments. Um, we talked a little bit about that during our meeting. Um, but that is awesome and I think the the public should look into it if they haven't already. Um, and this maybe isn't the place to talk about this, but one thing you and me had discussed that I thought was the coolest thing I took away from our conversation was the long-term idea of potentially trying to prop up a fire district um, which would maybe take some of the burden away from this weird um, relationship between the town and the city. Is that something you'd feel comfortable sharing with my colleagues here right now or is this maybe just not the time or place? irrespective of the answer, I would just remind the council member that you've asked the question in public on TV. So, it's sort of it's sort of moot whether the

I meant more so like do you feel comfortable like talking about you know the super in-depth nuances of it rather? Thank you.

Um I think that's a that's a large discussion. I I appreciate the question and and I it is something that that I've brought to the table as is a suggestion both to the city and the town. Um, as far as getting deep into the weeds on that, that's a huge conversation that will in involve um, leadership from the city, from the town, and lots and lots of attorneys. Um, because the forming of a fire district is a pretty complicated legal process. Um but um I think there's merit there and the the the high level overview of that is the fact that it would replace um the contract with the city and the town. It would spread basically in my opinion even distribution of the cost of a fire district um throughout the people we serve. Um, fire districts open up all sorts of grant opportunities that fire departments and municipalities don't have. Um, and then part of the bigger discussion is that um there are a lot of smaller volunteer departments who are experiencing what volunteer departments across the entire nation are is volunteerism is down. So, as that continues to take place, we're going to be we meaning the IT fire department is going to be called on more and more for mutual aid. Um, responding into other communities to help when they don't have people to respond. Um, and that's eventually going to bring up the question of why are our fire engines going to other communities to put out fires? And it's because we're part of the mutual aid system throughout the state. We have to be. Um, and again, if a fire district was formed, and as I said in my previous statements, I'm talking like not next year, not five years from now, but 20 years down the

road, if some of our neighboring departments could no longer respond, they can just become part of the fire district. Um, so I just think there's long-term strategic long-term reasons for starting to talk about it. Um, in keeping in mind it's a pretty complicated subject and it it would take a considerable amount of time to pull it together. Thank you. They're also welcome to become part of the city if they can't provide municipal services to their residents.

All the person ke um thank you chief for being here. um when your predecessor was here um I don't even know how long ago um one of the things that I tried to make clear to him um was that I think we have a lot of community members who would like to see the Ithaca Fire Department responding to more low-level EMS calls. Um we obviously have some very vocal voices who come to council meetings but also I hear that from other community members as well as uh people working in the emergency services sector. Um, I said this then and I'll say it again now. I would really like um the fire department and I'm happy to put something before council if it needs to be more of a directive um to tell us what it would take to get there and whatever that looks like. I mean it's if it's 20 more staff like that's a decision we can make and maybe we'll say no that's not worth it. Um but I think that it would be good to know what it would take to get there.

Um and I think it would be beneficial to the community to know that. I think it would also be beneficial to us. Um, and it's just something that I would like to see at least being worked on.

Yeah, that's a great question and thank you for asking it because it's another part of things that we have taken a look at within the fire department that um, I think is critical and I think it's going to have to be talked about and considered. Um, one of the fire departments that we have been compared to is the city of Bingington. Um I don't have the figures in front of me so I'm going to go from memory but city of Bingutan I believe covers nine square miles. Um I believe a resident population of less than 50,000. Um city of Ithka fire department with the city and the town we cover a square mileage district of 32 square miles. When college is in session upwards of probably 90,000 people. Um, Bingington Fire Department has 120 firefighting personnel, uniform personnel. We have 69. Um, so to be very direct and answer your question, what would it take? Um, I would love to, first of all, let me be clear. I would love to be the chief of a fire department that responded to every EMS call that came in. I always use the example of the child that slips on the sidewalk and skins their knee and there's, you know, a little bit of blood showing and mom is very nervous. So, she calls 911 and I have two firefighters show up, evaluate the child, tell mom they are going to be just fine. We can put a band-aid on it with Sparky the fire dog, give them a little plastic fire helmet and say if you would like to bring them by the fire station for a visit, bring them by anytime. That's to me that's just great public service. Um what it would take is probably 20 to 30 more firefighters and probably at least two if not three light rescues. Um because to do that response you have to remember taking care of the child with the skin knee which is very important is tying up resources. If you don't have enough resources it's tying

up resources to take care of the adult in cardiac arrest or the structure fire that broke out. um we already are short of responding to what we need to respond to. So yes, if we had if there was ever a possibility in future strategic planning to get 20 25 more firefighting positions in the Ethica Fire Department and a fleet of light rescues. That would be very achievable. I just have a couple couple follow-up uh questions and and points. Um, one, do you know if the Bingmpington Fire Count I know that the Bingmpington Fire Department operates ambulances. Do you know if the uniform fire count includes those personnel? I

I don't I don't have their demographics. My assumption is it does, but I'm I can't say for certain.

Okay. Um, then the other point I would make is that I think there there is an important distinction between those two types of things. Obviously, the low-level call where someone skins their knee. Um, but I also think that there's this larger kind of financial burden that doesn't get talked about a lot. You know, if if um if uh the private ambulance company which works in the city responds to one of those low-level calls and is a refusal, like let's say somebody uh an elderly person falls out of bed um and they're perfectly fine, but they need help up. They don't have anyone who can come and the private ambulance responds um and they do a refusal, that person gets a bill for those services and often times it's not covered by insurance. And that happens all the time. It happens multiple in some cases multiple times a month to the same person. We're talking about, you know, thousands of dollars of medical debt. Um when the fire department maybe again if if staffed appropriately and with the right resources could do the same thing and not have that financial burden on the person and also have transporting resources available for those cardiac arrests um and things like that. Um, I think there are other facets to that too, but I think it's from my perspective, it it does become more than than, you know, just the community service aspect. There's the the medical financial burden aspect on community members who are paying taxes for our fire department already. Um, and so again, you know, maybe the decision is that we can't support the expansion of the fire department to respond to those calls right now, but I would just like that decision to be something that we make as a council. Um, and we can weigh the cost uh benefit ratio um on that. But um, thank you for being here. It's always great to see you and I think you've been doing a wonderful job since coming in.

Thank you. Appreciate it. All the birds win. I was lucky enough when I joined council um well a few years after joining council there was a thing called fire ops in Albany that I think doesn't happen anymore but I found it very enlightening in the same way that the IPD reality based training was enlightening and so is there are there opportunities like that for the public or council members?

Um we've actually talked about that a little bit. I'm not sure if the um program in Albany is available anymore but we do have a training tower. Um, we cannot put fire in it, but we can put smoke in it and we have lots of gear and anyone that would like to participate in that. If you reached out to me, I'm sure we could arrange something. We also offer ridealongs. Um, if anyone would like to come and do a ride along, there's just some minor paperwork you have to fill out. You can ride on a fire engine for a day and respond to calls with our shifts. Um but yeah, I think um several municipalities have offered that to their city leadership and council members and um most of them have the same feedback as you do that it was very enlightening that um what it's like to be inside a building that's dark and smoke filled and with fire firefighting gear on. So we I certainly would love to work with any of you to try to make that happen in our own training tower. Thank you very much, Chief. Any further questions? President Britzio.

Thanks, Chief. Um, you had said that we have 69 personnel. 69 uniform personnel, counting myself. We we have 11 on duty personnel. Our minimum staffing is 11 on duty per shift for a 24-hour shift. So, if we were to have um a high-rise structure fire, um how many more people would you get from the neighboring jurisdictions through our mutual aid agreement and system?

Um we prefer to use mutual aid if possible um to backfill our station. We prefer to use our personnel on the scene. So we would put out a call for um what we would call a third alarm which would bring our offduty personnel in. Um so we would eventually end up with more people there. Um the problem is that it's bringing people essentially those people become they're in in respect totally to their response. They become like a volunteer department. They're home. It could be weather like we've had the last week where we have snow and cold weather and they have to get a vehicle started and they have to come into the station. They have to get their gear and then they have to respond in an apparatus to the scene. So there's a big time delay there. Um but when we commit all of our resources to a an incident, the rest of the city still needs to be covered. So that's what we use the volunteer departments for is we put them in our central station and then as subsequent calls come in whether it's a fire alarm or a motor vehicle accident or something like that those volunteer departments go out and cover that call for us while all of our staff is working at an incident.

So how many if you called in the other shifts how many people would you have to fight a high-rise fire right now in the city of Ithaca?

We never know that until we call them in. It's it's totally and I know that's not a great answer, but it's totally dependent on a variety of things. Fourth of July weekend, probably no one's coming depending on what they're doing. Um, summer vacation time thing, it's it's very difficult. We you can't there's no way to quantify that until you actually put a call out and see who shows up. So, the the mutual aid system um maybe works better for these communities that are smaller and that have volunteer fire departments, but what you're saying is if we needed mutual aid assistance, those people would not be the first people who would be getting sent to the fire. They would be used as backup for other

they would be used to respond to other calls in the city. Bless you. Mhm. And is there any money from the county that comes into our fire department? I'm just wondering since Yeah. Right. since we are serving 30 You said 33 miles. Well, that's that's the city and the town, right? Um which is covered under the But then there's but then there's the mutual aid agreement. So we're going out to wherever other places. So I'm just wondering, mutual aid does not have a financial reimbursement aspect to it. It's a statewide mutual aid system,

right? So, that might be something that we should be looking at some kind of change on the state level for with regard to help. Um, that's a whole other topic. But I was just going to ask um also about codes, about the emergency response codes. Um, I know that maybe like a year ago or so um I think the department was engaged in reviewing those codes and having those codes reviewed by um local dire department related physician. And I'm just wondering, is that sheet available now? You're talking about EMD codes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, yeah, the EMD coding, I mean, we don't have a sheet per se. We have a code that's um we have a list of EMD codes that we respond to um that is on file with the um dispatch center. So, they know based on how they code a call, what they're sending us to and what we don't go to. Um, as we discussed previously, um, there's over I I don't know the exact numbers without having the information in front of me. There's over 500 EMD codes, right? The Ithaca Fire Department doesn't respond to, I think, 50 or 55 of those codes.

So, of I think those 50 or 55 that we've heard um from the public um that had concerns that we weren't responding to, those were going to be reviewed by I think a medical person. We review them internally with a with a internal fire department committee and then any changes we make have to go to our uh medical director. Any anything that we change with our EMS response has to go and be approved by our medical director. So are those um would you be able to just send those codes so I could or are they available online someplace or they're not available online? I can I can pull the stuff that we added. Um Oh, that would be great. Yeah, sure.

That'd be great. Thank you. Um, and I also wanted to ask about inspections, uh, because I hear what you're saying, how like with this incredible backlog, when we talked about fees and we talked about fee studies, uh, previously, maybe a year ago or so, um, one of the things that I was curious about was the Cornell inspections. um not just the fees but also um in the course of some conversation with with some staff and I can't remember exactly who this was or in what department but somebody said that the state was already inspecting um a huge amount of what was also being inspected at Cornell and I'm just wondering could you clarify that for us

just real quick chief I am going to have this be the final question just because we're two hours in and we have several other presentations to get in the two hours we have remaining.

Yep. Uh New York State um Office of Fire Prevention and Control, their inspection division, they inspect um public assemblies and buildings on college campuses throughout the state. Um we have the option of participating in those inspections with them because ultimately their report because we're the authority having jurisdiction for this area for our response district. Those reports have to come into our fire department and be registered and signed off on. The state performs the inspection. We can sign off on them. Past practice um for various reasons, we've participated um in those inspections with the state. Cornell pays a fee for that to us. Um there are other buildings on Cornell's campus that include um laboratories with hazardous materials. Those buildings we inspect and the state does not. Um, so we took a look last year at the revenue that we receive from doing Cornell inspections and we compared it with if we did not do the same inspections the state did with the state, the increased number of inspections we could do within um other areas of responsibility in the city and that revenue was almost a wash. Um, so short story is for the first time in a long time we're going to on a trial basis not participate with the state in Cornell inspections this summer um and see how it works for the state, how it works for us and where we where we end up.

Then you would be able to instead uh refocus and and on these other things that need to that need to be done. That's the hope we can focus more on some of the development that's going on and some of the inspections that we're behind on and is there I'm sorry all the president I'm going to cut you off here. However, you're welcome to submit any further questions you'd like to public safety committee and or the chief directly if they're brief um or or or if they're not brief. But I just mean if we want another sort of more formal presentation from IFD, let's refer that to the public safety advisory group uh so we can get on with the business of this particular meeting. Thank you very much, Chief. Thank you. Thank you.

Um, council, I'll entertain a motion for a fiveminute recess so that the room can adjust itself if it so desires and so that we can get ready for the uh, presentations for this evening. Moved by Mr. Trumbull, seconded by Mr. Su. All those in favor of a fiveminute recess. I think that carries unanimously. Any objections? We have a fiveminute recess.

who uh our planning leadership to talk about our planned housing strategies. Uh and then following that, a brief update on the um STR policy as it is six months into implementation. So, I'll turn it over to y'all. Well, hello again. Uh, we have some information to share with you tonight. A brief presentation. We're going to go over um the local housing context. We're going to talk about some demographics, local development trends, and the planning and regulatory landscape of housing. Talk about council goals and initiatives and ongoing work and future projects to consider. There's a lot of information in here, too. I'm not going to be able to talk about every single thing that you see on the screen. So I will provide the the um the slides to you afterwards, but I mean what we really would like to do is you know give you information that will begin a dialogue that helps you make the the you know decisions for the most impactful actions you want to take with us. All right. So first we're going to talk about demographics. And you may have seen this from um you know the housing snapshot mentioned this also but one of the challenges we've been I mean we have had a housing boom really for the past 10 years and one of the you know sometimes it feels like we can't keep up and this is one of the challenges. So the impact of shrinking households means that for the same amount of people we have to build 40% more housing. So um I just pulled a little bit of data here. So for instance, our population increased in 10 years from 2014 to 24 by 2415 people. And in 2014 that meant that we would need 1,119 units and in 20 24 that

means we need 1,420 units which is 400 additional units. So that is two asteris or um um Ithac developments. That's about a 200. We don't have many 200 um unit buildings, but those are both 200 unit buildings. So, so when we feel like, you know, it's hard to keep up even though we're building so much, this is part of the issue. I don't have a solution. I just think we need to know this context. Also, you know, you hear this rising costs. So, we know um that land prices have been rising in certain parts of the city for years. Uh we just sold our fire station for $5.5 million. It wasn't even 10,000 square feet. So, um it's these are big, you know, really big numbers that um when a project sponsor buys a piece of property, if they spend that much money on it, they're going to be looking to maximize their uh profits on it. Um cost of construction has been going up a lot. We saw a huge spike about um two years after the beginning of the pandemic. It evened out a little bit, but um we uh but you know, we're seeing with uh tariffs and other market factors, we're seeing those costs continue to rise. And so we we you know there's a lot of data about this, but we just for an example pulled um information about two um they happen to be affordable housing projects that were built about seven years apart. Um uh about the same size, I'm sure. So the so in you know the difference in price was uh to to construct these projects was 38% which worked out to be about $6 million. So if you just kind of put that

in context again with the land prices and construction costs just building buildings is is costing so much more. Um, and you know there are other conditions as you know like interest rates. The new flood maps most of our places where we were would target development are now going to be in the special flood hazard area. That doesn't mean you can't develop there. It just means that it's going to cost more to do so because you're going to have to take um you're going to have to build in a different way. Um, so you know, I think this we get asked a lot about and everybody sees it like why do we only have luxury apartments and affordable apartments? Why are we missing the middle that we're also interested in? And it's partially because, you know, it's a lot because of these factors. It's very hard to make the numbers work with that kind of small development that we would like to see as a as another option. So, you know, luxury, I put student housing in that category of luxury housing. Um, you know, again, you're paying all these costs. You have to maximize it. And then affordable housing has subsidies that they can tap into. So, we're getting both ends of the market. I don't think we're special or unique. It's just very hard to get those smaller make the numbers work on those smaller um projects. So, all right. Now, here's Megan's going to talk about the regulatory and planning context of our market.

Okay. So, our comprehensive plan, which is kind of a two-phase approach with plan IA, which is on the left, is a citywide highlevel vision, and we've been following up with more specific detailed neighborhood plans. So, plan IA is um was adopted by the common council's the comprehensive plan in 2015. And while it's been 10 years since it was adopted, um the housing and land use goals are still good guides for policies and initiatives moving forward, the plan calls for um more housing of various typologies and at different price points. Um the more the majority of new housing is intended to be added as compact mixeduse development um in the urban corridors that have better access to transportation and services. So you're looking at downtown, the waterfront, west end, college town, and the southwest. However, um there is room for infill housing in every neighborhood in the city. Um and the residential density suggested in the council housing policy priorities are very consistent with the goals of the comprehensive plan. So zoning and um I might be presenting too simple information to start here but just as a background um we'll take a step back to review. Zoning is a series of regulations of property's use massing and in some cases as in the southside districts which are shown on the right and as well as in college town are form as well. The property zoning designation sets out how the site can be used, how large the buildings can be, how much parking must be provided, and what the minimum yards are required to be. This directly impacts housing by regulating what types of housing is allowed in each district and as well as how big the building containing those units can be.

Um so for example if you look at the um the map on the left side on West Hill the light yellow um is R1A which allows a single family home is the primary uses. Um duplexes and multiple dwellings are not allowed as of right. On the flip side um the waterfront zones which are shown in like green and teal um do not allow single family homes at all. So, um, it does dictate what type of residential you can see in the different areas throughout the city. Beyond the district regulations, there are other planning tools that can be used to advance our housing goals. So, planned unit developments or PUDs, um, something Lisa mentioned earlier, but you're also going to be talking a little bit more later in the agenda. Um, and we can also consider specific incentives for certain uses or types of buildings and build that into the zoning as a tool. Yep. Okay. So, the comprehensive zoning rewrite. Um, so you may have heard that we are undertaking this initiative this year. So, our current zoning ordinance was adopted as a whole in the mid 1970s and has since been amended more than 50 times. Um, we have more than 50 zoning districts and overlay zones. Um, and the zoning is a real challenge for the community to pick up, read, understand what regulations apply to their property. Um, and can be um, also in for new development, but also in terms of maintaining or enhancing existing properties. So, the city applied for and received um grant funding from the New York State Smart Growth Planning and Zoning Grant to do a complete zoning rewrite that will result in a new modernized code that implements both plan IA and smart growth principles.

So, we believe that a comprehensive look at our zoning regulations is the best approach because many zoning requirements work together. So if you change one without looking at the others, it can sometimes have unintended consequences, create inconsistencies within the code or general confusion. Um, and honestly, that's how we got to where we are now. We just kept making peace meal changes to the document. Um, so that said, our discussions over the past couple of years have really helped identify key areas that we want the new code to address. So among those are off- streetet parking um what's required and where minimum lot size which can also have an impact on the type and number of units on a property particularly in our R3 districts. Street frontage most zones require a minimum width at the street. Um but that does dictate a certain lot size. So we want to look at that to make sure that we're not um reducing housing opportunities but also allowing adequate access for our first responders. And then there's different overlays that we might consider. So for the process and timeline, again, this is a grant-f funed project through New York State Department of State and we will be working closely with them throughout the duration of the project. We have selected a consultant team to assist us with this project or in the process of executing a contract with them. We've established a 15 member zoning advisory committee that will work with staff and the consultant team throughout um the duration of the project as well. The zoning advisory committee will be discussing key issues, supporting public outreach and review draft regulations. Um the committee is going to be holding its initial um kickoff meeting in late February and the project is anticipated to take 18 months from kickoff through adoption with draft regulations um expected around 12 months.

So here are some of the council priorities that have been shared with us. I know they're still in development, but I wanted to acknowledge them and um and and talk about how we um can marry these with some of the things that we're going to talk about, work that's already been done and how to look at work that could be considered in the future. So, one of the things that we observe about these um priorities um they're all great and I think we can, you know, fit them into our different projects, but they're they're all about production, which is very important. Um and as again, as we go through the future considerations, let's think about and continue to refine how we can marry these with u the projects that we you all consider and that we recommend. So, the great thing is now that we we have this great tool to track some of your priorities, which is housing production. So, um I don't know if you've had a chance to look at the housing dashboard, but I thought this might be a good opportunity to just pull it up and walk you through it a little bit. Um it has um we're going to update it quarterly. That's our idea. It has, you know, four sections. The first is our overall housing inventory. And this is really interesting because it has the inventory and the and the number of buildings. But on the right, the graph shows how many buildings we have of each size. So most of our stock is in smaller buildings, but we are starting to as we get much bigger buildings, we don't have a lot of them. We only have 15 that are 100 units or more. Um, you know, that the growth becomes exponential. We're very pleased that we finally did an inventory of all the affordable housing um in the city and uh and all of

these maps with uh any project you can hover over the dots um and they'll give you information. And so these are these are keyed to the size of the building. But these are existing affordable housing and um and I don't know what I just did but but you know you will see that over you know a fair we have 10% of our housing is affordable which is great. We need more but that is not bad. Um this is the housing pipeline. So these are things that are under construction or pending construction. So you can always go here and look at that and you can get information. And the brown is what's currently under construction. Again, you can get information about any um particular project by hovering over the dot. And then finally, city approvals. So this is um and by approvals we mean development approvals. So project comes in, they have to go through the planning and development board for their entitlement. Sometimes they have to go to the BCA, sometimes they have to go to the ILPC. But these this really is tracking the appro the planning and development board approvals. So, it shows you um the projects that have been completed, the projects under construction, but this adds in what projects are currently under review, and also adds in um some projects that have never been built, which is kind of interesting um to look at. So, now you have a way of um of being able to helpful to track u to track your housing goals. Um, if you do have any comments or suggestions on this, we do still consider it a pilot. So, we would like to consider continue to refine it. So, please don't hesitate. All right. So I'd like to So the way um we've been thinking about this and trying to organize our thoughts and trying to

organize the information about all the initiatives that have happened is preservation, protection and production. So production is building more units. We all want more units. We all want increased options for units. But we also have to think about preserving our existing housing stock and protecting um and protecting tenants. So those are kind of the three the three areas we're going to look at for work different work that has been done and could be done. So again these are tables that uh we put together. They're not exhaustive. They're not planning all of them are not planning projects. Some of them are outside agencies. Some of them are other departments. Um, so this could continue to be uh elaborated on and I won't go through everything that's happened but I think it's important for to understand the work that has already been done. So this is on production. So this is supply. What have we done as far as we could go back and think of for to increase supply and I put you know some of the things on here um like expanding ministerial approvals. There are three ministerial approvals for zoning permit, sign waiverss, and we just um you just voted to expand ministerial approvals for site plan review. Um you did specifically have a goal on um your priorities to continue to streamline the development process, which we are always looking for ways to do. um um uh short-term rental legislation, you know, that put 300 or so units right back on the market without having to build anything. Um uh planned unit development. We'll talk about that later on. Um that has been a relatively successful program. Um but there has been a fair amount done to

um to increase production. Um the things that are underway, as you know, um there's a comprehensive zoning reform. Um we're going to talk about a city-wide proposal to expand the PUD district citywide and in order to continue to implement accessory dwelling units, which you approved last year. We are going we are in the process of doing pre-approved designs and we'll bring forward a proposal to opt into a state program to for tax exemption. And you know, I really again I want to point out we did put dates beside a lot of these and you did a lot in the last few years. A lot has been accomplished. So good for you. Okay. Preservation. So how are we how should we preserve our housing start? What has been what actions have been taken to preserve it? So the design of the flood mitigation infrastructure which is underway and that was in response to um the the flood maps changing. It's project that's been underway for quite some time. Um this is really important because so much of the housing stock in the flats is going to be in the special flood hazard area and the flood mitigation project will take those projects those that housing back out. So, this is a really important aspect of protecting our housing. Again, short-term rentals that brought hund, you know, few hundred, 300 units back onto the market without building anything. That protects neighborhoods and our existing housing stock and some of the other um things on here. Um, safeguarding tenants, you've also done a lot for that. Um, uh, opted into the IT eviction displacement defense project. um I mean the good cause eviction opt-in um really interesting guaranteed income pilot uh that the

report just came out for in 2025. Um have you city has been uh allocating money to law New York to represent uh tenants in eviction proceedings and these other things. So these are things that have been done so far to um safeguard housing and tenants. So now let's think about where we go from here. So again, this is not meant to be an exhausted an exhaustive list, but these are some of the things that we've identified as um projects that could be done to increase production, preservation, protection. So, and I think I I do really want to highlight um addressing infrastructure barriers to housing. I think you you heard from um Chief Moody that there might be issues with infrastructure capacity that was you know we have talked many times about that about fire um emergency access but there are other issues. You know, we can we can remove barriers, regulatory barriers to housing, but we need to be housing ready to and we haven't looked at the city comprehensively for infrastructure um to make sure our infrastructure is ready for this housing we want to see. One very small example, but I think it kind of shows is that, you know, the W's Edge project, which is a big project on the waterfront that you probably are all familiar with. They came in wanting to build 500 units of housing, but they didn't have a second means of emergency access. Um, so they could only build 200 because that's what fire um code allows. what they need in order to get a second means of access is a railroad crossing at the end of Cascadilla Street. Um that's an example of an infrastructure improvement that could be done. We know about that one.

Um that could be done that could immediately pave the way for additional housing. But there, you know, we need to look at our utilities. We need to um the Rebecca and her team have done um have done u work on the electric grid. we c we need to put this in a package I feel like and really look at how we can be housing ready. So that's our recommendation for a really important project that needs to happen in the future. But there are other things too. So um you know the Senica Street garage may have to be rebuilt. We could include housing in that. Um I one of the goals was um an affordable housing overlay or other incentives. There are many ways you could structure this. Um um and uh you know other things you see we are continuing to streamline the entitlement process. Um again preservation we need once the once the flood mitigation infrastructure project is designed it needs to be implemented. Um and protections there are a list of things maybe that could be done here to um continue protecting tenants and renters. So, and I think as we um think about this list and other lists and what has been done um I think we really need to prioritize what where the impacts are. So I started to this is just an impact and effort matrix and we started to populate it but I think um with some with some some of what our analysis showed but I think that many of the things on this list we haven't done that exercise with. So I think that's a really important part we you know as we have ideas we really have to take the time to analyze what the impact and the effort is. So, you know, on the far um the upper right, we know high impact, high effort, long timeline projects. The zoning rewrite is a great example of that. Implementing the flood mitigation project is a great example of

that. And addressing infrastructure would be a great example of that. Some low high impact, loweffort projects would be potentially um a city-wide putt expansion. That could be something that could be done relatively quickly and if people take advantage of it, it could have a high impact. um and educ one of the ideas was educating tenants and landlords about good cause eviction law. So, we opted into it, but has the education really been done to inform landlords and tenants about it? And then, um, you know, when we think of the lower the left, um, hand lower left hand, you know, I would put let's maybe not have the classic, you know, effort and and impact matrix, but, you know, there are some projects like ADU legislation. So it was it was relatively quick for a project it was five or six months. I mean that's a long time but it still was able to get done. The impacts of that will be over time and maybe they won't be huge for production but they give us something else like they give us another option for housing that we all want. They help preserve neighborhoods. They allow infill. They maybe give people options for staying in their home longer. Um so I think you know looking at that too there are some lower effort lower impact projects that are really important to undertake because they will over time have different kinds of impacts like um increasing our options. So, um I think as we move forward with housing, I I was hoping this in we were hoping this information would be informative to you in looking at what our priorities are and trying to bring them together with um uh with uh your priorities and what our work plan is. U you saw our work plan in uh the in our department overview. We're already undertaking a really big

project. So, Um that's another aspect that we should look into is you know what what kind of capacity and what kind of realistic timeline could we do some of these things. So thank you and um if you'd have any questions be happy to answer them.

Thanks very much. Uh all the person ke you have a hand? Okay. Um I appreciate this overview. Um, I think I'm only going to speak for myself, of course. Um, but I do think from my perspective, I think one of the reasons that my focus has been largely on production is, you know, I do think it's one of the more critical things that we're grappling with. I think your presentation at the beginning, the the sort of uh illustration of the fact that households are much smaller. Um I remember Nikcom two years ago we got a presentation that said New York state and the country uh 74% of households don't have any uh minor children living at home right so like the nature of households are really changing and I know that you know I want to commend again the department's efforts to help facilitate um h housing production in the city uh I think we are the singular reason that the county's um uh recent report wasn't uh worse off than it was. Um but I do I guess I want to dig into like what do we see as the perspective impact of some of those zoning changes, right? Like I I um having recently reviewed the comprehensive plan, I note that there there are vanishingly few zones in the city that are uh projected to remain, you know, low density uh for example. Um, and again, my parochial view of course is that there should be zero. Um, but that's not the case. Uh, but nevertheless, right, we're talking about West Hill, we're talking about Western Cornell Heights, we're talking about, uh, Eastern, South Hill, and we're talking about Bell Sherman. Um, and we are defining that, of course, as fewer than 10 dwelling units per acre. Um, by contrast, north side, Fall Creek, Southside, downtown that is not in the mixeduse area. Western, South Hill, and sort of southern and eastern college town are all in our middle uh density which is 10 to 20. Um

now I recognize this also my next sort of statistic here is inclusive of Parkland, it's inclusive of Cornell. Uh but right looking at our 2020 census data of 32,18 people um looking at the 14,629 that our dashboard has for housing units. Um, and then looking at the 6.07 square miles of Ithaca and converting that into 3,885 acres, we have an even four units per acre in the city at present. So, how do we balance the enormous need for more pro? Like I I'm not I don't mean at all to minimize the the protection and the preservation piece of this, but we have an acute crisis where the demand for housing continues to outpace our ability to supply more and we are, you know, 10 years out well behind what our goals were foreseeing further densification in our city. And a consequence of that will be that we end up displacing folks on the lower end of the income spectrum. Um just by necessity of I mean I know you know my colleague from the from the fifth ward has has talked about taxes extensively and I'm very sympathetic to that. Um as those property values continue to increase because of scarcity we're going to continue to see higher and higher property taxes. So I am all for streamlining and getting let's say let's say like as a initial goal like half the number of zones we have um ideally maybe like a fifth. Um, but I do my contention I guess to the department and to my colleagues would be that production really does need to remain like a major focus because

if we don't move with urgency, I think we're going to see Ithaca continue to become increasingly unaffordable. And I continue to evangelize to the people who are anti-development because they point to well Ithaca's built so much more and it's still expensive. And you try to explain like the sort of you know social science counterfactual of well yes but believe it or not it would be even more unaffordable if we hadn't built the enormous number of units that we have built. So, you know, what how do you see, I guess, the the existing work plan dovetail to with the need per the comp plan to get us to, you know, 10 units per acre in our low residential areas and, you know, 10 to 20 elsewhere and then, you know, I would hope significantly more in the neighborhood represented by my colleagues over here in College Town or in the in the sort of urban corridor at the very center of the city. Bless you. Um, I know I just threw out like a tremendous amount. Um, but I think this is like the central struggle for me. Um, and I do know actually that that reminds me I would I did want to also say I would hope council would support you know me in whatever effort we want to push here to I think I've talked with Lisa and Megan about this. I really want to help do whatever we can on the legislative side to empower, you know, any inter agency efforts to make it really clear, you know, to our fire department, to our DPW as they do infrastructure work like that. We really need to make sure that these efforts are subordinated to the the thing that makes Ithaca a community worth living in, which is like its ability to welcome whomever and be an affordable place to live.

Sorry. Well, I'll start with something and you Yeah. So, I think we all think zoning reform is incredibly important. Um, and but it doesn't guarantee that we're going to get the units that we're It doesn't guarantee. We have some of the areas of the city have been zoned for much higher density for a long time and the market forces haven't collided to make that happen. Others totally different. We upzzoned College Town. the whole thing got transformed in a few years. So I think it's very very important to remove as many barriers as you can and I think we all 100% agree on that. I think that one of the gaps that we see is there has to also be some incentives that will defay this co this incredible cost as well and that gets into some you know maybe overlay zones or puds or some kind of other kind of incentive zone. Um, what would you like to say about this?

Yeah, I would think I just I mean I am very excited about the zoning rewrite probably more than anyone. Um, but I will say that I want to caution from the start that it is not going to be the silver bullet that's going to solve this problem. So, there are plenty of areas in the city right now where the housing production is not being limited by zoning. Um, it is being limited by other factors. So, we're going to need to look beyond our land use controls to see what else can be done to get the housing that you all want to see built. Um, you know, I I get off asked often like, "Oh, what can we do to allow X in this zone?" I'm like, "Well, it's actually already allowed there. It's just we're not seeing it." So, like when you talk about um condos and different homeownership opportunities, it's not that it's not allowed, we're just not seeing it. So changing the zoning might not help that. So we need to look for other things that's going to help support those efforts. Um and there's something else but I'll come back to it because

yeah just a as a quick sort of kod to that before I recognize colleagues. Um certainly rec agree and I know I've had more conversations with two of you than you probably would love to have uh on this this question. uh don't think it should be limited to zoning, but I think to your point, Megan, and I think I'm supportive of what I hear you saying, which is like where there are whether it's city capacity, visav infrastructure, or other regulatory or policy barriers that are not zoning specific, but but are things that like this council can help push. I mean, I I I will let them speak for themselves, but I would hazard a guess that many of them would be willing and eager to knock those barriers down in recognition of the larger problem that we're attempting to help overcome.

Mr. Britzio.

Yeah, thank you um for those comments. Um it does seem like unless we have some changes maybe on the state level, we're not we're not providing a sort of equal kind of incentives for middle inome housing um for that middle middle market. There is no incentive for for developers to do that housing. It's too expensive. You know, it costs so much money. It's not going to be they can build the housing. It's not going to be a what we think of as affordable housing, right? it might be like $500 $600,000 uh housing. Um, so it seems so I guess one of my questions was going to be if we've if we could like or maybe you have looked carefully at public private partnerships um because I'm you know we incentives we need um for that middle housing and I think they need to come from the state and I think we you know they need to also come potentially from a municipality um that might be able to partner. we have land uh that could defay some costs for for developers. You know, I don't know. I haven't like dug into the research on on that, but I'm sure there are models out there. And I guess I'm wondering um you know about looking into that really and understanding what we might be able to do. One of the things we recently talked about was a survey and maybe you know you all have this already just identifying uh vacant lots within the city that are potentially um available for redevelopment and also identifying abandoned houses which would also be ripe for redevelopment and what kinds of incentives that we might be able to provide um on the local level to do that. And then I think we need to go further and work with our state uh legislators and figure out what we could get in place um for incentives, you know, coming from that direction because we're certainly not going to be able to do it all. I mean, I just spoke with a

developer today. It was not specifically about this, but I mean, it was about housing and um yeah, I mean, there just isn't there's a reason why College Town got developed so quickly and you know, those rents are so high. I mean they're recouping their money and making money on those properties in a way that you know you can see what happened with with library place right that said we need um we need housing that is fits that middle and so I think research on public private partnerships and on you know meeting with our legislators at the state level um to see what we can do to to make any progress in those areas. That's what I would like to see.

I can assure you that not a moment goes by where I'm not constantly heranging our state representatives about incentivizing housing production. Mr. Defendini,

thank you guys again for this incredible presentation. I'll add myself to the to the chorus of uh council cheerleaders for letting you guys off the off the off the hook for or off the chain, whatever the verbiage is, to just zone and develop, get us into a position to develop as much as possible. The supply is uh one of the things that we have a lot of control over and pud the city um do everything that we can to uh to get us those units. Uh my first question, I'll come back and be the uh the resident tenant protections gadfly uh for a future set of questions, but my first question is about uh infrastructure. And um I'm wondering if we have an estimated timeline or projected cost or where we're going to get some of the funding uh for some of our flood control infrastructure. Um those are sort of two questions sort of wrapped into one. Um, and I imagine that's a much more involved conversation that we could get a whole presentation on, but uh, just wanted to ask that one up.

As luck may have it, we will be having a flood update. Uh, it's not tonight, but so I'll let them respond, but we'll bracket some of that for the DPW update. Amazing.

The Well, the flood mitigation project is funded. It's got federal funding. TW I think we got $12 million to do it. um it's in the design phase and I think uh it's probably been explained multiple times to you that we are asking for an amendment to the to um the map before we complete the design phase of it to the flood map and that's in the process. We should hear about that soon. So there is funding for that. Um you know costs go up every day so will it be enough? I don't know but um but we'll have to uh look at that. And then your other question was, is there funding for Oh, looking at infrastructure. Is that was that what you said? Okay. Um, I don't have an estimate for that. We could we could get one. Um, I think we could get one. Uh, and we can come back to you with that information. And that would be, you know, one of the things that would be important about it's like a comprehensive planning project. You know, it would involve all the organization which to help everybody look through the lens of increasing housing, not just legislating. I see your hand. I'm going to just see if there's any others who have not spoken yet. All the prison vets, you were next. Sorry.

I would do you want Yeah,

we I mean we have we keep the data. Um but to have it as a dashboard would take some work. Um and to sort it that way would take would take some work. Um we already have you know there already are out there um Cornell keeps um lists of uh housing that has certificates of compliance which is means that it meets housing standards if you go through that process. Um so that already does exist. Uh that is a that is a a project that I feel like needs more research to determine where it fits in effective and um effort. I don't know the answer to that but I don't know where it would fit but that needs a little bit more analysis but I you know it is an idea that has been helpful to other uh municipalities. I would just add too that you while it's not a full dashboard, someone can go to the building division section of the website and put in a property address and see if they have a valid CFC.

Um so that is a good option for people who are investigating housing. Um the other option if if a tenant right now until we get things further along is if um a tenant finds there's a condition that they believe is unsafe and does not meet um the standards uh certainly recommend they can put in a a com a complaint through the um online portal too. So that and that'll get funneled right to a housing inspector to look into further. You

hold the floor. Yeah. Um, so there's a a portal on the city's website. It's called open gov that people can have a log into and submit a um, in this case a complaint and then they will be able to track what's going on with their complaint as it's processed through and investigated. I have repeat hands. There's no first timers. All right. Then hold a person for Britzio and then Dundini before we um pud all over the city, which essentially means like get rid of um zoning everywhere.

That's not what that means.

Okay. Okay. Um before we assume that every single place within the city needs to be denser, let me put it that way. I just want to remind people about other values here as well like yards, gardens, um trees, etc. Um and I think um as we work through this that just needs to be like really clear what that means for some of the densest in particular, I mean for all of the neighborhoods, but for some of the densest neighborhoods within um our community, like what does that actually mean? So I would just I just want to say I hope that it will be very like really super straightforward visual you know some kind of material so that people can understand what we're talking about when we talk about densification of the city uh because not everyone maybe shares as extreme a goal as as as others. Um, and I just want to make sure that it's an inclusive um, conversation, right? Because everybody has, you know, there are a lot of values here um, at play and that would potentially be um, impacted by very serious densification in not every single neighborhood. there there's you know there's more breathing space in in some than others but um yeah I'll leave it at that

Mr. Divinity.

Uh yeah. Uh building on some of the points from Alder Personvetsz regarding protection. Um I just want to say I I completely believe that supply is uh is it is the top paramount uh focus that we need to be having uh for bringing our uh affordability costs for housing into play. But for um I guess an understanding that the planning department operates as a system, how do we feel or how do you all feel about the uh the city's ability to keep pace with our current um compliance with uh with habitability and with the quality of our housing and as we build towards more ambitious um goals, which we all want or I'm going to guess majority of us want. uh what is going to be needed to sort of keep pace with that in terms of building out the building division and other things like that?

You know, I think that sort of comes back to I would almost put that in the bucket of infrastructure analysis. Like if we were to have 4,000 more units, what would we need? Um you know, newer units have fire protection. They're they meet all they come out of the gate meeting all the housing standards. So you're dealing with, you know, generally the housing stock that is the most has the most violations or is the most challenging is the older housing stock. Um, but I think that that should we should think about that. Is it a question?

Okay. Um, I think it would be really great if we if we did some kind of round table with like local developers and just talked about our goals and and tried to get sort of like a realistic read on, you know, what are the what are the obstacles, what are the incentives, what could we do um to to move forward. Groovy. Well, I'll thank you for this half of your conversation and then recognize the fact that you will continue to be sitting here for the short-term rental overview. So, thank you. I'm leaving. Thank you.

Well, then good night, Lisa. Well, then still good night, Lisa, because I might not see you again. But good afternoon, good evening, and good night, I think it is. Yeah. Hi Mora. Just getting up the presentation. Okay. Hello everyone. I'm Mora, if you don't know me, a planner. Um, and Megan will be up here with me today discussing short-term rentals. Um, note that there's more detailed information in the memo and report that was part of your agenda packet. Okay. To start with, I'd like to put us um into context in where we are in short-term rental regulation in the city. So, we passed um the ordinance in May 2024. Later um that year, we started the education outreach to hosts and property owners. The permit application was available to be applied to in January 2025. The first permits were issued shortly after in February. We continued outreach to hosts that spring and then in June 2025, that's when we started full enforcement or full implementation. So, um, we're calling this a year one look back and it's a a year since the permit was available and since the first

permits were issued, but we've only had six months of full implementation. So, it's still relatively um it's still a relatively new policy. Um, and I put on here the short-term rental policy objectives set by Common Council. I won't read them all to you, but I wanted to highlight that the primary objective was to preserve housing affordability and availability in the long-term rental and home ownership markets. Um, a second key objective was to allow residents to generate additional income from their properties. Okay, so now I'll share some key data points from this past year. As far as short-term rentals in the city, we currently have 115. One thing I'll note is these numbers are in flux. Listings go up and down every day. Permits are issued every day. So this is really a snapshot in time. Um, so from about a week ago, there were 115 short-term rentals in the city. 78 of those had a permit. 37 did not have a permit. Some of those are properties that are working to be in compliance with the um with the ordinance. And then um the next set of numbers is about permits. So we have um 101 permits that are pending or issued. Um 87 have been issued and 14 are pending. The pending permits are primarily um the host is working through the certificate of compliance housing inspection process. And then the last data point is the median nightly rate. We can pull this from our compliance software. So in early January, the mean um for permitted short-term rentals in the city, the mean nightly rate was $247. and that um a year prior

when we looked at it in early 2024 it was $267. So it's gone down some over the past year. Okay. So a topic I'm going to spend some time talking about is the short-term rental application process. Um, a lot of the past year has been spent working with host closely to help those who are eligible, you know, work through the application process and get their short-term rental permit. One key thing to note is not all of these pieces of the process are new requirements based on the short-term rental ordinance. Some of these are pre-existing requirements, so I'll make that clear as I go through them. So, the first requirement is a valid certificate of compliance. We've already talked about those. Those are based on um a housing inspection. I put the cost on the screen. I know, um, council looked at these fees last year. Um, of course, the total amount to get your CFC will vary depending on the number of violations and the cost to make repairs. And then it's important to note that certificate of compliance, this is not a new requirement. So since the 1970s, certificate of compliance have been required for all rental housing in the city. So, that's for short-term rentals and long-term rentals. This was a pre-existing requirement, although most short-term rental operators did not have a CFC prior to the short-term rental operating permit process. The second requirement is proof of residency. Um, there's no cost for that. Um, this is a new requirement because council when they passed the short-term rental ordinance included the primary residency requirement. So, um, the host needs to provide that when they apply for the permit. Then the next piece is the um the city's room tax registration which is called a certificate of authority. Wendy signs

these in the controllers's office. There's no cost to apply and what the host gets is a a paper that gives them the authority to collect taxes on behalf of the city. Important to note this is also not a new requirement. So, the city passed the room the hotel room occupancy local law in 2021 and included short-term rentals as part of that. Um, again, most short-term rental hosts were not registered or remitting taxes prior to the short-term rental permit process. Um, while you don't pay for the certificate of authority, you then have to remit the taxes. So, the city charges a 5% room occupancy tax. So that's 5% of nightly the nightly rate charged. Again, pre-existing requirement. This was part of the 2021 room occupancy law. And then the last requirement is the short-term rental annual operating permit fee. So this is a separate fee. It is annual. Um currently it's set at $400. Um the industry standard is roughly two times the average nightly rate. So, we're a bit under that being that the average nightly raise is about $250. Um, this is a new requirement. Okay. And then our team has spent some time thinking about how well is the ordinance meeting the intended policy aims. Um, again, I'll reiterate, we've only had full enforcement for six months. It's a relatively new policy, but um, we did spend some time thinking about this and um related to long-term housing. So, the number of short-term rentals in the city has decreased. There were roughly 380 in May 2024. As I said earlier, there's about 115 today. Um anecdotal evidence suggests that many

of these are being converted into long-term housing. Uh second goal was to allow residents to generate additional income from their properties. So, of course, those permits represent primary residents who have gotten the permit and are able to earn additional income from their housing to defay their cost of housing. Um, our short-term rental monitoring platform can give us some estimates on what people are earning. And, um, we found that the, um, host of permitted short-term rentals have earned an average of 10 to$15,000 since January of 2025. It's kind of a rough estimate. Um, and then looking at the the last bucket was was balancing the positive and negative aspects of short-term rentals. Two um ways that this policy has met these goals is um increasing the health and safety of short-term rentals. So, our housing and electrical inspectors have reported um a variety of different types of violations that they're finding. Some are minor and some are not minor. they're um you know critical health and safety violations that the host or property owner is addressing. It's making the housing safer for um the people living there long term or short term. Um and then um another benefit has been that the short-term rental operating permit has created a mechanism whereby we can check if hosts are paying their hotel occupancy taxes and ensuring that everyone's equitably paying that required tax. Okay. Sorry. Okay. Um, so I keep reiterating it, the program's relatively new, but we did want to give you some major areas of feedback that

we're hearing, just so you sort of know. We don't recommend any major policy changes at this time since we're still really working to get the current policy off the ground. Um, but we wanted to bring back some feedback that we've received. Um, and there's more details on all of these in the memo, but I'll go through them relatively quickly now. Um, a first major bucket of feedback is that inspections and related costs are more than host expected. Um, it for for some hosts has added up to quite an expensive process. Again, I've said it before, but it's not a new requirement to have a CFC, but many of these hosts did not previously have a CFC. Um a second major bucket of feedback are the taxes and the co cost to operate are um host feel quite high. Um again the tax was not new. Many people weren't paying it. So the host is experiencing the operating permit and the taxes as sort of both new additional burdens that are you know seem to be coming at the same time. Um, we've also heard feedback about the types of properties that are eligible for short-term rentals. Um, currently in multiple dwellings, so any building that's larger than two units, only an owner occupied unit can be rented out as a short-term rental. So, um, we've heard from some property owners that they like the flexibility to rent out more units in these larger buildings. of course, you're balancing increasing an owner's earnings and taking more units potentially off the long-term market. And then lastly, um we have heard requests for non primary resident permits, you know, perhaps by season or for a couple weeks out of the year. Um we did look into this with the initial policy and um

we talked about it then but this type of permit would be very difficult to enforce um and that remains true and um that is all I had now and we can take questions. Thanks very much. Um I think this is a great initial conversation just my first question and I apologize if I missed it. How long typically does the planning department keep a policy in place before doing a re reevaluation?

Yeah, it can vary, but um I would say at this point we haven't gotten through a full cycle. We would at least want to get through a full cycle of the current policy. So, for example, um both planning and building staff have worked very hard to try to achieve voluntary compliance. So, we've really been trying to push off any type of legal enforcement. Um, but so we're just getting to the point now where we might have to proceed that route. So, you know, we've really tried to work with property owners to this point. So, it has been slightly slower, I would say, that cycle than we originally anticipated. That said, I think there's been significant benefits in doing that. But um that is kind of the basis for our recommendation that we not in implement any major changes because we'd like to get through a full cycle of the process to see what all we might need to change.

Great. Thank you. And I'll just I'll start taking a list and I'll just remind colleagues that we have 43 minutes left for our remaining items and three executive sessions. Mr. Shapiro. Well, I saw you first, so I'll question.

Um, I appreciate the comments you just said, uh, mayor. Um, and I also appreciate that when you were talking about, um, some of the, um, some of the feedback. It's like anecdotal feedback right now. And that's really like we're six months in, so there it's hard to have real data. It's it's it's what we have are the anecdotes right now. I I will just say though and you know there's someone in the crowd today who's part of those anecdotes. We've heard from other people. We I've heard anecdotes that are slightly different than the ones that you shared. Some are similar, some are different. Again, it's that we're the first six months in. I would just say like some of what I'm hearing, especially like thinking about like, you know, an owner occupied that might be able to rent two units instead of one or, you know, wherever that wherever that number might land. It does make me think that like you know maybe six months is too quick to reevaluate a proc uh a new program. Maybe maybe there is a year where we you know maybe at a year it does make more sense to reevaluate. But I do I am starting to lean towards the opinion that there's some smoothing around the edges that needs to take place. And I'm not the expert in any of this. Again I've I've heard anecdotes not just from folks in the crowd but we get a lot of emails about this as well. Um, and again, it's just kind of leading me to believe that there's some fine-tuning to take place. Um, I do have a question though about one of your slides though, separate from that. Um, there was one slide you you listed the 380 that were um, short-term and now it's 115 and then next to that you mentioned like 101 people are now collecting um, income. It would seem to me that those 101 people are not new people, right? They're like they're part of the the 380 that's now the 115. So they're not new people that are generating income because of this policy. They're just people that are continuing to generate income through this policy.

That's right. Yes. So it's just, you know, at the end of the day after the policy went enacted, how many primary residents are are are using this and to to earn income? Okay. It just um gentle feedback. It just felt a little misleading. Yeah,

I would say that's true for most of them. we have gotten probably a solid handful of people who realized they were eligible and now saw that as an opportunity for them to enter the market. Um so I would say yes that's correct for most of them but we have also seen um probably you know out of the hundred maybe 10 that are new hosts. Yeah. The other thing I'll just I'm sorry I thought I was done, but I'll just kind of posit one more thing out loud is I'd love to at some point be able to marry this with um what if any impact it's had with tourism revenue. I've heard anecdotes from people that own restaurants and things like that that this has been one of the slowest years they've had. Could be other factors that led to that. Um and I'm sure it is. Um, there's probably lots of factors, but I'd like to know as we track this, how having fewer short-term rentals, what, if any, impact it has on tourism locally. Thank you.

I have uh Mr. Su, Mr. Fitzio, and Mr. Keel. Quick response, no Canadians this year. I mean, that's been hugely impactful on our tourist industry. Um, so question and then probably a followup maybe for council. Uh, someone has asked that the um operating permit is $400. It's an annual fee unlike other operating permits. Um, so what's the rationale for it being an an annual fee as opposed to one that lasts say three years or five years?

So, a couple things. One is um the $400 annual fee helps us keep tracking with the occupancy tax. Um it also there is a lot of change in primary residency whereas your certificate of compliance um will transfer from long-term renter to long-term renter, your short-term rental permit does not. Um so it follows changes in residency. It's a way to help monitor the occupancy tax and ensure um that's being being paid as well. Can you say that second part again? I didn't quite follow that.

Yeah. So it helps us ensure that prop that the hosts are are also um remitting the required occupancy tax. Um so we can do that. We require as someone's renewing their permit now that they have to submit proof of occupancy tax payments so that we're able to confirm that they are continuing to off operate within the parameters of the policy and other laws. Okay. Okay. So, it's more it's more than just it plays a function besides paying for administrative costs. Yes.

Yep. It does. Um, you know, because it I think the primary residency piece of it since that was a goal of council. Um, that is a big piece of having the yearly verification that that is still the primary resident. Somebody didn't obtain this and then move and someone else ran it for three years or that kind of thing.

Okay. Interesting. And then so I guess the followup which would maybe be more for common council because you already addressed that that there's complaints that the tax funds were used for the conference center but that's because of the local law we passed and there may be I I don't have any idea how the funding for the conference center is working or how necessary it is but it might be possible to shift some of those funds you know uh requiring a law change to offset the costs of these annual permits if it doesn't necessarily need to be as high as it is. I'll just quickly respond to that, which is to say, and and actually Megan, if you're more knowledgeable about this, please preempt me, but I am fairly certain that the current sort of uh the the the occupancy tax was authorized, if memory serves, um by the state legislature with like sort of a specific utilization in mind. Is that correct? Yes. Yeah. So, it's it it's not as simple as council changing it. It would be New York State changing it.

Uh, Miss Fitzio, Mr. Keel.

Yep. Thanks so much. Um, I appreciate the idea of waiting for a full year, but I do think that there are some potential tweaks that that we maybe should dig into a little bit that we maybe um would consider doing before the year goes by. One of them has to do with um the rationale with regard to the sizes of the uh buildings. So, and please correct me if I have this wrong, but I think for like a a single family home, an owner or a renter can rent out the unit. For a two family home, the owner can rent out both units. For a multiple dwelling home, the owner can only rent out the unit that they live in. So for I don't know how many multiple family homes we have that have three, four or five apartments. I would be interested in knowing that. But in that situation, if the person that's their primary residence, they live there, but they have three or four other units within their building, I think that we should look at potentially allowing them to be able to rent one or two of these as short-term rentals. Otherwise, it doesn't seem very even-handed to me with regard to um a two family or a single family unit. And I know we don't have time to dig into this too much, so I'm not going to ask for the rationale, but I would just put that out there as something that I would like to get information on and and why um why we we're doing that. Um, another thing that came up for me, um, just really has to do with occasional, um, STRs, and I haven't really read very much about this, but just enough to know that I think they're increasing in towns, um, with like ours with high taxes and with university, uh, you know, seasonality sorts of demands. Um, and I sense one of the goals is really to help people be able to, um, afford to live here and afford to pay their taxes. Um I think and because we have such a a

big shortage during those really high demand weekends, graduation and other weekends, I would like to see us take a look again at the occasional rental models that are that are out there. And um I just looked really quickly. I mean, I I know that there are um you know, um compliance issues or tracking issues with these things, but it also looks like they're peer towns that have created models um for this. Um and I Ann Arbor was one, Madison, Boulder, um Athens, Georgia, Tuscaloosa, St. College, Pennsylvania. So, I'd like to see um what those models are and if we might be able to consider um something for these really shortterm like event driven kinds of things. Um the annual fee, I know we already talked about that a little bit. I don't I I mean I don't know where I what I think too much about this. Um, I understand that we're collecting it to help cover the costs, a lot of the costs of running the um, monitoring uh, aid software that that we're using and company that we're using. But I was wondering, say if an owner were to spend, say, you know, $1,000 or more in the previous calendar year to get their property up to snuff so they so they're able to do it, if we might look at considering some kind of like slightly reduced uh, annual fee for that next year. that would just, you know, recognize their investment that they made. And then I'm almost done. Um, the other thing I was going to bring up is because so many people, it sounds like, have been taken by surprise with regard to what they need to do to get uh, properly inspected and what they need to do to get a certificate of compliance. I'm I'm just curious if we have already

materials or if we might if we don't if we could develop materials to give to people that would outline what the typical costs um are for uh getting a property up to comp to compliance. And I know that that varies so much, but maybe like a list of the most basic inspection requirements so that people have a heads up like, oh, you know, and you know, maybe an article in the, you know, in the paper so that, you know, they see it as a way to potentially make money, but they also need to understand it's a business that they're entering, right? And there's an investment that they need to make. And so maybe that would help um you know, maybe that would help get more people to do it or maybe it would at least help people not be so surprised and taken aback by by the cost for doing this. I think that was kind of everything I wanted to mention.

I'll just in the interest of time I'll say for uh all the person to win again to throw you on the spot. Let's get all the person for Britzio to an upcoming housing group conversation cuz I do think a lot of what you raised are policy with respect to staff. They are implementing the policy that this council voted on and directed them to do. So I think you raise reasonable points that I happen to disagree with but are reasonable about like whether the policy should change. Um but I think that is best directed towards our colleagues about whether or not we agree. Um, and you know, I not to preempt Mora, but I would just say like I think to the point about a lot of the compliance pieces, like these are things that are uh been on the books for longer than I've been alive. So, um, certainly in this context of STRs, that's new, but like it's not new to New York State to have to not run an unlicensed hotel. So, um, anything that you all wanted to respond to before I turn to Mr. Gil. All right, m Mr. Gil.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Um, a couple things. Um, the first is something that I heard about at Nikcom uh two weekends ago, which I'll keep talking about for weeks to come. Um, which was that I'm obviously and and I hope my colleagues know this. Um, but I'm think I hope that my colleagues feel the same way, frankly. um like the more we can do to streamline processes for people, for residents, for businesses so that it's easier to work the city, the better. Um that said, um I learned that we can do partnerships with Airbnb and VBO to remmit taxes directly so that the residents don't have to go through that process. Um that seems like something we should look into um so that there's less paperwork and less things they have to do. Um have you guys thought about doing that? So, we tried with Airbnb several years ago and they declined because the city's so small. Um, VBO is currently

just started just started collecting taxes on behalf of um host using that platform which is a very very small amount in the city. So, Airbnb is the vast majority of the listings. Um, we're working now to ensure that we can take the money from VBO and appropriately apply to the host. So there are some kinks to making sure people get credit for what's paid, but um that's sort of the state of of working with the the large systems. And if I recall correctly, the conversation with Airbnb, you are you are giving us their answer in a very diplomatic uh Yeah,

thank you for that. Um, one of the things which I've also talked about at city council meetings u many times um is the specific instances of um opportunity for short-term rentals in Collegetown. And I know that I heard you during your presentation saying that it was difficult to think about enforcement um with kind of non-owner occupied properties, but like this is something like we really in my opinion like need to figure out. Like we have this huge availability of between two and three months a year of vacant apartments, like thousands of vacant apartments in the city of Ithaca which could go to sport tourism and we're not utilizing them at all. They're literally just like thousands of vacant apartments. Um and you know, I think whether it's the the tenant who wants to to rent that out, uh whether it's the you know, the property owner who wants to rent that out because they're doing 10-month leases, which is which is becoming much more the norm these days. um because they're frankly more competitive uh for students. Um either way, it seems like there has to be a way we could figure out how to do that. Um or create some flexibility. Um and I'm happy to work on that. I've got some ideas about how it could work. Um but I just would love if we thought about that and if we figure out a way to implement that. Um, I would say we certainly have thought about it and I completely understand where you're coming from with that and um, it is very difficult to enforce any type of day limit ors because when can they advertise how many days it there's no right now the system you all have put in place it is something that we can truly implement. Um there are ways to do non-primary resident permits though that is will be far more resource intensive than what we currently have but that is an option but the seasonal is very

challenging because the time you rent might be different from the time you advertise versus so there's there's different ways um there are lots of communities that do have that but if you we've talked with many of them and they can't actually enforce it um including some here locally Um, but if that's something you all value more than the enforcability side of it, that is something that you as can change your policy. I mean, that is a policy decision. So, Mr. Defendini, I'm sorry, Mr. Ke, I'm just going to because we have 27 minutes left and several items including three executive sessions on the books.

Yeah, I've got data wonky questions I'll save for a follow-up uh conversation. And my two questions I think are yes, no, few word uh answers. Um are we're am I correct in understanding that we're using a firm to help with enforcement for STRs? Yes. Okay. And then uh for the management of uh the you spoke about a platform for STR management or monitoring. Um is that are are we running that or is the firm uh running that?

Yeah, both. Yeah. Um so we work with a third party monitoring compliance that tracks all the listings, pulls all kinds of data and provides a lot of that to us. We have also contracted them with them to do the first couple phases of enforcement. Um it is really a joint venture. They provide the software but our staff has to input a lot of the information and data and that kind of thing. So both maybe awesome. Thank you.

Thank you very much. All right, we'll turn to our next item, which is a I'm going to say brief reaction to the PUD memo and whatever Lisa would like to present to us, which I can't tell from that reaction. Hello. literally took there any kind of presentation because I made I put links to delightful um yes I put links to um the presentation and the slides um in the memo but I'm happy to pull up the boundary map if that's helpful or

well I have no doubt in my mind that everyone on council not only read this memo but followed the links so I don't know that you need to do that um I in the interest of time will res will encourage council to ask sharp questions and recognize that per this memo um with a general sense of approval, the planning department has already articulated that there will be a proposal for comments during the month of March. So, no concrete decisions are being made this evening. Uh you may educate yourselves about the proposal if there are things you were confused about. And if there is hypothetically anyone who has not read the memo, obviously maybe reserve your comments for a question via email. Colleagues, do I have the general sense of this body to convey to staff that there is support for them moving this proposal forward for further conversation and consideration? Any dissent? I I see your hand. I'll recognize you for a question in a moment, but it's just out of curiosity. Is there any disscent? Seeing Mr. Shapiro, you have a question.

Yeah, I guess I'm I'm I'm not really sure because I know the nature of putt is that in order to get approved, you have to be determined to have be providing some sort of community good. And I guess I don't know who makes that determination. We do. Common council does. Okay. So that every pud would come here.

Oh my gosh. It's a Yeah, you have complete discretion on whether or not this place. You haven't. Exactly. And I think you will be doing it. Um, regardless of this, you'll be doing you'll have a PUD coming forward in the next few months. Um, but council, it is a it is basically a zoning change. Council has complete discretion to approve it, to ask for changes. Um, and it becomes a zoning district, its own zoning district. So you determine, you know, we help them develop a package that we feel might um appeal to you, but we but you determine um if the community benefits that our project is offering are is sufficient.

Well, then if if what I heard you say is that we're going to have another meeting to talk about this in greater depth. That's correct. So, so then I'm fine that conditional on council not overwhelmingly objecting this evening uh as as the um the memo suggests just for public edification, right? That there will be a circulated proposal during the month of March and that staff would schedule a public hearing on April Fool's Day. Uh so yeah, we got we got we got plenty of work to do and there's no concrete decisions being made this evening. Thank you. Question from all the person for Britzio. Um did a question? It's a It's kind of Yeah, I can make it a question.

Can you please do because if respectfully all the person I will cut you off if it's not because we do have more business to attend to. So it it it looks like there's a target of 4,300 new homes by 2030. That is the adopted council priority that we adopted. Right. So would um would there be for for the community to um understand this and discuss this? Would there be a way to like I don't want to say itemize but that's kind of what I mean like where are you distribution would there be like a distribution so I will I will come down just because this is orthogonal to the pud question you're asking a question about our the council's priority for getting that certain number of housings no

no I no I was asking for the next step what kind of public information there would be so we understand at least on some kind of map like where we're talking about 43 300 new homes. Well, that's a different that's orthogonal to this proposal. Thank you. Um, so you have no disscent for moving this proposal forward. I would like to ask question. Yeah. Um, so, uh, what we would normally do in this situation, if you want us to move forward, is we would develop it like, you know, develop the ordinance, which would be just a changing of the boundary. It would actually make the ordinance a lot shorter.

Um, and uh, circulate that with a memo to the folks we circulate it to which includes all of you so you can send it out to your list serves and other things. Um if and I guess my question is what would you like to see in addition to that if any we can circulate it we can you know we send a press release and have it in for public outreach. I think that treating this exactly like anything else would be appropriate. So just just following that exact procedure and that I would encourage hypothetically if there are any council members who think that they might have questions that they should direct those to the housing committee and that they will uh provide any further guidance to the planning department as to what additional information might be needed. But again, we are really talking about taking something that already exists and just widening the borders for which to Mr. Shapiro's point, we retain full discretion as to whether or not the council thinks on an on an item by item basis, this is worthy of approval. So, it's an existing program that we have, but with larger boundaries.

Well, that's the proposal. Yeah. So, just Yes, I would say the the draft ordinance and that. Yes. Thank you.

Thank you. Rebecca Evans and uh Siobhan Hall who have been very uh patient not introducing themselves this evening. Uh we have your two items next. Uh one is uh a bond authorization uh for the green hydrogen as a non-while alternative. So there actually is in fact one resolution to summarize and move for inclusion into the March agenda. I would like uh Mr. Trumbull please. Uh, this resolution increases capital project 938 to $1 million. Additional funds will be derived from the issuance of $474,000 municipal bonds to be reimbursed by the Department of Energy as described and planned for the 2024 capital project resolution and authorization.

Thank you, Mr. Rumble. Seconded by Mr. Defendini. All right. uh discussion or any preparatory comments from I know you all are mostly here to talk about the cap but uh any questions for uh staff on this bond authorization. Seeing none uh all those in favor that carries unanimously and is moved to the voting meeting for March for which it cannot be added to consent because we have to bond for it. Right Wendy? This will be a regular voting item. Yes, if you want it.

Great. Thank you. Now, turning it over to Director Evans and uh Miss Hall for the CAP overview. Um just for clarification, I will not be at that voting meeting in March. Correct. Okay, cool. As you have informed council via email, I believe. Yes.

Um okay. Hi. Um, I think you've all met me maybe, but if not, I'm Rebecca. And but we did just hire Siobhan, who you'll hear from in just a second. Um, and are super excited to have Siobhan on board. Um, she is not new to the Green New Deal. She actually served on the Sustainability and Climate Justice Commission for two years um, prior to us hiring her and has been involved in the Green New Deal even prior to that. So, has a long and storied history. Um but she's gonna start us off with just kind of a quick introduction to the Green New Deal and then we'll get into some of the climate action plan stuff.

Great. Yeah. Um as Rebecca said, my name is Siobhan Hull. I just started in January as the sustainability planner. Um but have existing familiarity with the Ithaca Green New Deal programs and am excited to work with Rebecca. Um, so just in broad strokes, we wanted to make sure that council was familiar with the goals of the Ithaca Green New Deal and sort of what the programmatic things we're working on this year are. Um, so generally speaking, we think of the Ithaca Green New Deal as a whole of community effort that extends beyond just the sustainability department to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, build structures for resilience, promote equity, foster community well-being, and create hundreds of stable good paying jobs in the process. So we think of it as a really um broad umbrella that our work falls under. Um, there are specific goals that are contained within the actual resolution of the Ethica Green New Deal. So there are four goals that that enumerates. Um the first one is to achieve communitywide um carbon neutrality by 2030. Um the second one is to do so in an equitable fashion that ensures that benefits are being shared across the whole of community. And then the two slightly more specific goals are to um reduce vehicle fleet emissions by 50% by 2025. Um and to achieve 100% renewable electricity in government operations by 2025. So those are what was contained within the actual resolution of the Green New Deal. Um, we think that it's important to note that because the goals of the Green New Deal are so broad and encompass the entirety of our community that we see this as an approach that really spans community partners, the municipality um, and the the broader ecosystem of residents who live in our community. So, seeing this as a project that really requires buyin from diverse parts of our community and is more than just a municipal project. It's something that

involves a lot of input from other parts of our community. Um so we have lots of programs that are working towards achieving these many goals of the Green New Deal. Um just going to run through them quickly because we are short on time. Um one of the first projects um under the Green New Deal was the adoption of an energy code supplement also called the green building policy. So that established standards for new construction and major renovations made it so that those sort of projects are um greener and reducing emissions. Um we have our sort of flagship program justice 50 that set essentially a framework for ensuring that equity is actually um a part of how we are implementing not just the green new deal but how the city operates as a whole. Um so that set uh requirements for the s the city to um allocate 50% of the total capital project budget towards climate justice communities. It also established a participatory budgeting program that you'll see in our work plan for the year. Um we're in the process of launching a community choice aggregation and distributed energy resources program which we're happy to talk about further um but is a little bit in the weeds for this general overview. Um we're doing workforce development work. Um, community engagement is a big part of what we view of um, ETHA Green New Deal programming and making sure that residents are involved and aware of our efforts and have an active role in that. And we can of course provide more information, but that's a general overview of some of the major programs we have at the moment. Uh, so just wanted to give you a quick snapshot of what funding looks like for the Green New Deal and impact to taxpayers. So this is our total funding since about 2021 which is when a director of sustainability was hired. So this does not include ARPA funds from

the federal government nor does it include inind services. Um but we've managed to bring in you know just over $15 million only 200,000 of which have actually come from the city budget. Um and that was in a capital project from 2025. Is that right? Um everything else has come from outside partners, the federal government, the state but uh state government or uh philanthropic grants. Um so I'm not going to read through all of these but these are our uh quarterly projects. So these are not tasks. These are actually individual projects that we take on for each quarter. Um in addition to the projects that we're carrying over from 2021 through 2025. Um it's ambitious. Um so if we look tired, that is why. Um and we'll move into the climate action plan. I'm going to try and jam through this as fast as possible. I know we're short on time. Um so climate action plan really generally is um basically a roadmap of how are you going to achieve whatever your climate goals are. um they're supposed to be full of data so that people like you elected bodies can um make informed decisions to reach your goals. Um traditional climate action plans have pretty uh continuous sectors that they focus on. So things like energy, transportation, buildings, that sort of thing. um last year or I guess late 2024, we decided to to shift away from that um and take a different approach that was more in line with other things that the city does like the comprehensive plan, the consistent legislative priorities of council um and that was more in line with the values of justice 50, our flagship program. So, we shifted to these other six central uh

focus areas, housing, equity, labor, public health, power, liability, and emergency response. Um, and to some of your points that you've made tonight um through other presentations, this also enables a lot of both intergovernmental and cross departmental partnership to actually implement a lot of the goals that we have. Um, this is a legal note from the DEC. They gave us money. Thank you very much, DEEC. Um, this is a little bit of a dive into the what the document will actually look like. This is obviously an oversimplification, but how we manage to identify risks associated with climate change um within the context of these sectors. So, the this is probably a little hard to read. I'm really sorry. Um the state uh energy research authority NAERTA did a big report about what the entire state can expect because of climate change. So they really broadly identified increased heat, increased precipitation, um the more frequent and severity of storms and flooding. So we took those as kind of our this is what we can expect in Ithaca and then tried to apply those to our individual sectors. So what do we see in housing if we see increased uh temperatures and how does that relate to uh you know economic development goals? How does that relate to individual people's pocketbooks? How does that relate to safety? All of those sort of things. And we did that for each individual sector. It's not going to be exhaustive. And just as a note, and you'll see this plenty of times throughout the climate action plan once you actually get the text, there are a lot of these areas where uh research actually does not exist, not only in Tomkins County or New York State, but anywhere in the world. So there are data points missing. Um and that's very very consistent specifically in labor in the

intersection with climate. Um and so some of the recommendations you will actually see that we recommend partnering with research institutions to try and um do some of that analysis. Um so this is a very very messy uh diagram that I encourage you to look at another time about cascading risk. Um but really what we're trying to tell you is this is why the heck are there things that are seemingly unrelated to climate in the climate action plan? Um, and that's because climate is intersectional with every other thing. And we see climate action or excuse me, climate change as an amplifier to inequity. So, people that are already vulnerable to other social or economic um stressors, all of those things are made worse by climate change. Um so in order to get at the heart of the issues that are um uh creating greenhouse gas emissions, we need to remove the barriers that are preventing us from doing that. And a lot of those exist at levels of government beyond what what we do or that were put in place um by councils way way way way before this council. Um so we need to remove those barriers so that we can actually do this work and we can do it equitably. Um, so that is a very poor uh visualization of a road map trying to get to net zero by removing barriers. Um, this is what it will ultimately look like. Um, sample recommendation. Some of you have seen this before. Um, it's meant to be very very visual. Um, and then there's so you'll see some examples at the bottom. We did um, specifically pull out one of those for you tonight since you were talking about housing. Um, but this is ultimately what your recommendations are going to look like. You want to talk about community?

Um, we did just want to add that there have been multiple opportunities for residents of the city to provide input into the climate action plan. We had a public event at the library where people are invited to review, ask questions, provide input. We had three online surveys um where people were able to look at the recommendations for each of the sectors and provide feedback. We've held a public hearing at our commission meetings. Um, and people are welcome to provide public public comments around the climate action plan at at any of our commission meetings. So, this is something that has undergone review from residents and had multiple opportunities for people to provide feedback. And I know this looks like our last slide, but we have one more thing to show you. Um, so again, some of you have seen this before. This is the matrix that you will ultimately see. And if we had planned better, I would actually have had the mayor walk you through this um because I believe that he has actually used it. Um but this is all of the recommendations all in one place. And the idea is that at any given time you would be able to access this matrix and select the priorities that are important to you or that are important to a funer or um a higher level of government and be able to identify a climate related priority that you would like them to fund or to include in the legislative package. So you can pick things that are particularly important to you like housing and uh equity. Silence kills me. I'm sure it kills you too.

While you're doing that, I'll just embarrass you further and just reiterate because I know I've said this in a bunch of internal meetings, but just how extremely valuable uh formatting option policy options for council uh is in in this type of format. So I want to commend uh you and your team for for producing this in such an intelligible way. Mr. Su I want to move to extend our time to about 10:15. Uh is there a second? Second by all the person Moss. All those in favor believe that's going to carry those pose. Mr. Shapiro that carries 10 to one. Thank you.

Um so you know I just kind of played with some numbers but you can choose you know what kind of impact do you want on resilience greenhouse gas emissions? what's the timeline that you want to play with and then the projected cost to the city and you would get some recommendations for you and there is a very zero to very low cost option don't worry um all the way up to the very expensive option which at some time we will have to deal with but we have plenty of partners that we can always rely on for um for funding um but so this is going to be part of the package that you receive I hope it is helpful it's something new that we're trying um if it is helpful it's great to hear that Um, so we can keep doing stuff like this for for future projects. Um, and we went as fast as we can. So, we're done.

Thank you very much. Council, any comments or Mr. Su?

This is probably for a broader discussion. I think you both are sort of one of the most um effective. I feel like you do a tremendous amount of work and I'm always very uh impressed by the amount of work you do. What I'm concerned about is the scope of the project that you're tackling. And I know that you have framed this in terms of climate justice, but some of the things I see on here like ban the box, I just cannot see that tied to climate in a way that is sufficient to to keep it to make it a priority for this housing. We have a whole department focused on housing. I I would love to have you all focused on climate stuff because the housing department's not concerned about climate. So I I would really like to narrow the scope of what it is that we're look and again this is probably a long larger conversation. I'm not sure who I'd had that with. But but I I am concerned about the range at which this is trying to uh adopt. It's just it's a lot. I think it's too much and I think it goes way beyond the purview of the commission.

Yeah. I mean so just for clarity we are in the the planning department. We're part of that the department that tackles housing. Um so we are very much kind of in sync there and our our vision is is very similar if not identical. Um the idea behind actually taking this this strategy is so that it doesn't live in sustainability that we don't have to take on anything that remotely smells like climate or sustainability because even if we keep it strictly to the traditional sectors it's too much work for two people. So trying to create these pathways for a common vision. That's exactly what we're trying to do by using the same language as the legislative priorities and the comprehensive plan. You know, ban the box is a great example of uh and one that people ask about a lot and I think is act actually very a very good example of of a policy that is very much connected to climate. So, we have a really robust um workforce development program that is not only training people that are that have experiences with the justice system and some of whom were previously imprisoned um but are also very poor or communities of color that are otherwise very vulnerable communities. So, we are putting public funds into these training programs. we and $1.5 million uh most recent actually $3 million including the match. Um we are spending 18 months training people and then they get to a point where they're applying for a job and the barrier is have you ever been accused of a crime or have you ever been convicted of a crime and now that $3 million in 18 months was for nothing. So it is very important and within justice 50 it says that 40% of our workforce training

program will be representative of climate justice communities and if we have something that is if we have a single policy that is standing in the way of that because it's a system that is built to target people of color historically. I think we have an opportunity to change that. So, it may not seem like they're connected, but when it comes to implementation, it is one of those barriers. Thank you. Mr. Defend is withdrawn his hand, so you are all released. Thank you very much. We look forward to uh moving this project forward and appreciate you staying here late this evening and uh opportune moment to say that in addition to uh Siobhan Hall being our new sustainability planner, I am heartbroken because uh she's left the IURRA as an agency member. So if you have constituents that might want to be considered or if you're in the gallery and you might want to be considered uh let me know. Uh thank you very much. Uh with this the public we are going to conclude the public portion of this meeting. We have three executive sessions none of which have voting items coming out of them. So we will appreciate your speedy clearance of the room and uh see you all next time. Uh may I have a motion to enter into executive session to discuss Right. Yes. A matter that may imperil public safety. Mr. Shapiro seconded by Mr. Trumbull. All those in favor that carries unanimously. Well, unanim bless you. Unanimously minus Mr. Kirby who's temporarily out of the room.