City Council - workshop

I pulled my CPT.

07:30, we're gonna go ahead and get started. I'd like to call this meeting to order. This is a duly notice workshop meeting of Hudson City Council held in accordance with the Sunshine Laws of the State of Ohio, section 121.22 in the City Of Hudson Charter, Article three, section 3.02 for Tuesday, 03/10/2026. It is 07:30 p. M. Per ordinance two two zero point zero three one titled workshop meetings and item c. I would now like to turn the meeting over to council president Byrd so as to continue through the remaining workshop agenda items. Council President Byrd, the floor and workshop meeting is yours. Okay, thank you mayor.

The first thing on the agenda is under 3A, I'm sorry, correspondence and council comments. Anybody have anything that hasn't been mentioned already? I was

at the Veterans Board meeting on the fourth. They discussed some potential funding options for their goals for the year so some of the things that they've discussed are things like a monument on Veterans Way, some social meetups for veterans, potentially a veteran service day and work with schools, and a couple other things. I was also at planning commission, last night on the ninth. Public comments were District eleven. So three members of the community showed up to, talk about District eleven emphasizing the importance of the comprehensive plan, the emphasis that should be on income generating purpose of this area and not retail that would compete with historic downtown.

The Planning Commission also considered an application from Western Reserve to expand the Wang Innovation Center and a concept plan for a new daycare facility. The Planning Commission also District eleven themselves and discussed some frustration around council not having more conversation around their recommendation to move the housing density from 20 units per acre to 15 units per acre and then discuss some frustration around housing being in there not matching with the comprehensive plan and not wanting to move forward on District 11.

Yes,

last week I attended the HGTV advisory committee. They appointed a new chair and vice chair that is Patrick Miller and Gary Veyer respectively, those were appointed by unanimous decision. Some discussion on various topics, one interesting one, HGTV is in need of a new GPS clock and Velocity Broadband also needs one with their expansion so there was going to be they're going to purchase one of those in tandem, it's a bit of a cost savings from those two teaming up. Additionally, some very cool statistics were shared just on number of live views and number of views on GraniteCast of the hosted videos. Over 8,000 live views on the October 9 football game last year, so very very well watched activity.

Plenty of other events on there with many many thousands of viewers, so ACTV continues to be a great asset to the community.

Just a couple quick things for myself. Myself and staff met last week with representatives from the Young Entrepreneur Institute and we are working to potentially showcase a few Hudson students in the visitor center on a rotating basis with regards to their products and services. So stay tuned for more information. I do wanna also thank everyone who came out to the Hudson PTO sixty ninth pancake breakfast which was held in the high school commons this past weekend. 2,393 plates were served which I understand is just about two dozen shy of the record, So next year, the seventieth, we're gonna beat the record.

And next week, our meeting will be a dual meeting. So there'll be a regular council meeting followed by a workshop and we will be on recess the following week, March 25, which is spring break here in Hudson. And last quick note, we did have our home meeting which is the Hudson officials for mutual endeavors this past week. We believe we had all members there from council, myself, Mr. Sheridan, city manager, representative from the library, the parks board and several of the Hudson City School Board officials. We talked about a lot

of the different city projects that are mutual interest to

the city and several other initiatives around that topic. So we did take that over. We alternate with the schools from a location standpoint. So this was back at City Hall to start this year and Council President Byrd remind me, Mr. White was nominated as the He

was nominated and confirmed as the Chair going forward this year.

Correct and we do rotate that every year so that's all I had, thank you.

Thank you for doing the Home Committee for me.

Patricia? Just want to remind everybody that this weekend, the middle school is having a musical, the High School Musical Junior Edition. I think it starts

I think so.

Okay, just They all do a great job, our drama clubs, middle school and high school, so go out and support them.

Anybody else? So we'll close number two and move on to discussion items 3A, the police department overview twenty six-sixteen. Chief Perry Tabak scheduled to update the council on police department's 2026 operational status and respond to formal inquiries regarding the department performance. Chief, welcome.

Good evening. Thanks for having me. I sent or asked to be sent, basic synopsis of kind of what I was going to talk about tonight as talking points, but obviously that's a basic overview of PD operations, which I'll go through here briefly, then if you have any questions for me, I'd be more than happy to answer them if I can I'll get you the information and get back to you. And I think this will be informative to anybody that's either in the audience or at home. They may not understand how the police department is structured.

Currently, Hudson Police Department employs approximately 50 employees. Forty, forty one are full time employees, the rest are part timers, and the part timers can vary, you know, depending on needs and availability of the part time staff. We have 33 full time officers, 10 dispatchers, which seven are full time, three are part timers. One thing that council and maybe people at home may not realize, we also administer the crossing guard program. So, do the hiring support for our school crossing guards here in town.

We currently have five crossing guards. The department's structured into two divisions. So, we have your patrol division, or operations is what we call it, and that's what most people think of when they think of the police department. It's kind the forward facing side of the police department. It's our uniform patrol division.

So those are the men and women that are out in uniform in police cars on a daily basis. Our officers work twelve hour shifts, so they're essentially on a yearly basis. They're assigned to the same team for the whole year, same days off, same days on, so they get pretty tight working group, get to know each other pretty well, and then every year they bid out by seniority, so if somebody, you know, moves up and they want to try and get days, or maybe they want to go nights, they bid out that way, and so the team stays together though for the entire year. So we essentially have two teams for days and two teams for nights, and then they alternate days off and days on. What a lot of people don't see is what we consider special operations, and that's basically anything that's not covered under the patrol division is covered under special operations.

And special operations includes dispatch, our training bureau, our SROs, and our detective bureau, as well as like the crossing guards and some ancillary things that they handle. And together they communicate very well, but again, a lot of people don't get to see the special operations side of things. There's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes to keep the department functioning and running, it's like long term investigations and stuff like that that's conducted by our detective bureau. We handle about 26,000 calls for service a year at the police department, that sometimes surprises people. We're a fairly busy police department for a small department, but those calls consist of both calls for service and criminal calls.

They're not just all criminal calls, and we're a very service oriented police department. So we do a lot of things that maybe other police departments, if you called, would go, yeah, we don't handle that. So there's lot of service calls mixed in there as well as the criminal stuff. Hudson police officers handle anything that an Akron police officer would handle, a Cuyahoga Falls police officer. Fortunately, you know, on the criminal side, they're fewer and far between from some other cities or other agencies, but they do handle anything that any other police department would handle and staff is, I'll talk about that in a minute, but staff is what I would consider probably one of our greatest assets here in Hudson.

On the dispatch side of things, one thing that I wanted to mention is that our dispatch center is also a great asset. Ohio requires 99% of nine eleven calls to be answered within fifteen seconds. The Hudson Communications Dispatch Center averages three seconds, so that's pretty significant. And again, that's not just a one year number, that's our average number for multiple years. So that's pretty significant and that attests to our staff skills as well.

Operational strengths, highly trained, educated, dedicated officers, strong supervisory structure, specialized units supporting investigations, schools, traffic and special operations. We have excellent equipment, technology and city support, which is huge, and that makes a difference. But personnel is by far the most important thing. Councils, city administration has always been very supportive of the police department as far

as

equipment and gear and technology, things that we need to use to do our job. However, if you don't have the right people in place to use that equipment or drive the cars, it doesn't matter. And so again, I focus on staffing, the the most important aspect of our police department. On that note, and this isn't in the handout that I sent you, I wanted to highlight, what I think is, again, the greatest asset to our department, which

is

personnel, but it's also probably one of our most significant challenges in law enforcement, and it's not just Hudson, so I wanna make that clear. It's across the nation, is a shortage of highly qualified applicants in the police profession. In Hudson's, we've done pretty well over the years, you know, stealing officers from other departments, know, I get ribbed by other chiefs and stuff like that, but we're not immune to it. Matter of fact, a lot of apartments over the last few years have really stepped it up. Mean, they're offering signing bonuses, take home cards, anything they can do to incentivize people to apply and take the best of the best.

So for me, that's probably looking ahead, that's probably one of the biggest challenges to stay on top of that as far as our recruiting, hiring and retention, because we don't want to lose that staff to other agencies. We currently have one opening that we've been trying to fill and I anticipate two more openings, one in the near future and one a little bit further along. Some of the challenges with officers leaving, retiring, is a few years ago, I got with the city manager, and with council's approval, we started hiring ahead of known retirements. It doesn't help if I don't know if somebody's leaving, you know, and you get a short notice, but if we know somebody's leaving, because it can take months to not only identify the best candidate with the testing and and backgrounds and stuff like that, but then just to get them up and running takes months of going through field training officer programs, stuff like that. That's even for laterals, for people with experience.

So what we've done is we've tried to identify if we somebody's leaving, and we'll hire, we'll overfill, we'll hire so that hopefully by the time that we we get somebody hired and they're done with their training, we've got one person retiring, leaving, and we've got another person that's that's available to fill that shift so we don't run into mass shortages, and that's been very helpful for the police department. Again, it doesn't always work because sometimes you don't know, you don't have advance notice, you you may have somebody that goes out on a medical disability or somebody that just gets a job offer that they decide they're gonna leave, but for the planned retirements, that's been very helpful for us. And that's pretty much an overview of the PD. Know it's pretty basic stuff, but I think it's some stuff that a lot of people don't realize and and yet even coming down to the structure of the police department and how we operate. More than happy to answer any questions.

Questions for the chief?

I know you said council always works really well with the police department. Is there anything that you guys, like, looking out the next few years think that you might need updated or anything that is in the forecast for you guys?

See something on tonight's agenda. See not to go into great detail, but you'll see like a body camera legislation coming through and again, that's something that actually did ahead of schedule with council approval. We were budgeted, it was on the five year capital, but with everything society, I really felt it was important to get those things rolled out sooner than later and council actually stepped up and we put them out a year ahead of time. But our lease is up, we've identified a new vendor and what we consider the best product on the market currently and that changes. So you'll see that tonight, things like that are very helpful.

Can tell you if I was an officer working the road these days, I wouldn't want to go out without a camera. I think both the community citizens and the officers.

I have seen your new electric bikes, which are amazing. Are you going to be getting more? Could use them during the wintertime, but the spring and summer and fall would be

Yeah, we currently have four of those, and again, that was we kind of realized the entire bike unit last year, and that was a multi year plan. We had a brand company, a different training for the e bikes, obviously they go 30 miles per hour, so there's some different techniques and stuff you use with them, but we plan on using those quite a bit, hopefully this summer, staff permitting. The nice thing about those is in the past with a regular mountain bike, traditional pedal bike, we were very limited because if you're going across town from the station, you'd have to throw those on a hitch, take them over there, and then you were limited to a certain area, and if a call went out, officers would have to throw those things back on the hitch to get across town to the call, and even if they tried to ride there with a short distance, you're gassed out, riding a bike to a call and then you're trying to deal with whatever the situation is. These e bikes have allowed us a lot more expanded ability to use those because we haven't been throwing them on the car.

They'll ride station, and again, they can kick, you'll see them pedaling, we'll pedal the bikes, but if they need to get somewhere in a hurry, you know, they can actually, the electric portion to facilitate that a lot easier. So, right now no plans to get any more of them, but we

Great, thank you.

Thanks for your time tonight. The dispatch data for 09:11 emergencies versus non emergency, is that broken up just by 09:11 dials versus non emergency line dials or is that kind of determined after the call whether

it's It's dialed or

determined by calls. We can track actual 911 calls that come through the system. So again, you may have some discrepancy and you might have somebody that calls 911, but it's really not, it's an emergency to them, but it's really not what we consider emergency, and then vice versa. We have people that are like, I didn't wanna bother you, call 911, and meanwhile, it's an emergency and they're calling the regular line. So there can be some discrepancies, but the numbers are pretty solid.

So for the most part it represents which line they called? Yes. Okay, thank you. And then you mentioned retention, moving to other departments, at what frequency or if more applicable, the last time that we lost an officer not to retirement, but to go taking another offer?

Over the last five years, and again, we're very fortunate, although we still deal with the overall trends, we generally don't lose officers to other departments, but what we're seeing is we're losing officers, because again, to brag on our staff is, I mean, we have some of the best and brightest, and they have opportunities not even law enforcement. So what you'll see is, you know, an officer that decides they wanna be a fireman. You know, may sound, you know, but they they decide that, you know, I I wanna do this. You know, twenty, thirty years ago, you know, you you took a test, you know, you you got hired, you were competing. When I when I got on Cuyahoga Falls thirty two years ago, there was 350 people that I was competing against, and they hired four of us.

So it was very competitive. When you got on, you were with that department. Was like sports. You were a Pittsburgh Steeler, drafted, that's where you stayed. Now it's like free agents.

And I think society's changed a little bit and people are more mobile and they'll chase an opportunity if they think that I mean you can't blame somebody for doing what's best for, you know, they feel is best for them and their family. So, you know, we've lost a couple officers, one in particular, you know, during my tenure went to a state agency, law enforcement doing investigations. And, you know, an officer that that decided they wanted to be in the a firefighter. Probably gonna be losing another one that is is moving out of state. They wanna move somewhere warmer, they're gonna go to a a department.

They're gonna stay in law enforcement, but they're gonna they're gonna be in a different part of the the the so things like that. So we're not seeing officers necessarily taking laterals to other police departments. However, other police departments are getting pretty, you know, they're coming up with some good incentives to try and steal staff.

Thank you. Have

you noticed any trends in calls over time that are concerning at all?

I think we've discussed this a little bit. I know Doctor. Gatz, we've had some conversation, I was on a community mental health issues. Bottom line, I don't even have to think about it. Number one increase in my career span and it's ever increasing.

One of the issues is there's not a lot of facilities and a lot of organizations that specifically deal with that, so what happens, lot of times it gets pushed to police because again, somebody doesn't know who to call and there's something going on. We're usually the ones that have to go and deal with it. We do a lot of extra training for that and we try and support staff, but it is an ever increasing demand for service in one way or another. Again, it may not be criminal, some of it is, but some of it's also that service aspect, right? Mental health.

I was just curious in the total calls for service slide you had, '23 and '25 had twenty six thousand and '24 was like 22,000. Anomaly and

I went over those numbers before I set those. We actually called the vendor because I was like hey, what's going on here? And it wasn't enough where we noticed throughout the year, but it's an anomaly. So occasionally we'll do like a CAD system update, which is our computer aided dispatch system that kinda tracks all of our calls and stuff like that, and you can have an update that all a sudden maybe there's a glitch and it's not picking up, it's not coded right, it's not picking stuff up. We went through double checks. That was just an odd year because I will tell you, since the last major update in how we track stuff, twenty six thousand, '25 and change, '26 and change has been been consistently like our average, a little bit but that twenty six thousand has been a pretty good average. That was just

an odd year. 2024 was just a touch safer

than other than Hudson's a pretty safe

city in college, but

Yeah, it was just a weird year but I knew somebody was gonna ask that so we double triple checked.

Chief, I just wanted to take the opportunity to thank you and everybody on the department for what you do on a daily basis, thank you. And two just quick comments, I agree with everything you said about the body cameras and on the e bikes, I've seen them in action and not just the officers hanging out at the farmers market. I've been downtown where they've had to go out and run away from I was sitting there talking to one of the officers and the maneuverability and where they can get in and out of places on the e bikes, it's phenomenal. So 30 miles per hour, I mean they can get somewhere quick and they can use really any train and path that they need. So it's like a great benefit.

Thank you.

You know, don't if anybody from council here, but personally I've had at least a dozen or so like citizens that have come up or I've had conversations with that have all had really good feedback, so it's nice to roll something out like that that you get overwhelmed feedback as far as a positive thing.

And full support, thank you.

You mentioned some tough calls and I don't know if it's still called the critical incident stress management team or if it's something else now, but can you just describe a little bit about you know, the the officer that's involved in a shooting or witnesses a horrible, you know, child homicide or something like that? What kind of what kind of resources are available to your team members and what can what more and more is there is there more that we could do?

You know, it's it's and I'll do my best. It's a it's a very complicated issue and, you know, it it it goes into mental health in general because police officers are just people. But you know, you know, a lot of people want officers to a standard that's that's really almost impossible to meet at times, but they're just people they do the best that that they can on on the calls they go to, but they witness on on a, you know, any given night that they're witnessing things and over and over too, whether it's a fatal accident, whether it's a domestic, they see the negative side of things that fortunately a lot of people don't have to witness. That can build up over time or it can be one incident that's pretty rough. And so, we have several things in place, and these are kind of newer concepts in law enforcement.

Again, going back years ago, you just dealt with it, you gotta, and you're afraid to even say anything because you didn't want to get taken off the road, or made fun of, and stuff like that, and so, we have a lot of things in place that we didn't before. We'll do critical incident debriefings, we'll offer obviously the standard like EAP type stuff, but there's some organizations that have really popped up or expanded their footprint to help responders, whether it's firefighters, medics, police officers, the safety forces support centers, one of them out of Akron, Bob Denton Support Center is a great organization. They offer a lot of support. Assist seventy seven is another organization and they're affiliated with the Safety Forces Support Center, but they'll come out. We can bring staff out from organizations that will meet with our staff members, and what we do is we facilitate that whether we get a request or not, and it's here's the standing offer, if you wanna show up, show up, bosses aren't there, just peer support.

We also have trained staff now at Hudson PD. We've tried to train staff at every level. So, you know, we have supervisors, dispatchers, and patrol officers so that if somebody feels more comfortable talking to a peer rather than, you know, a supervisor or they'd rather talk to a female, whatever the case may be, we've tried to kind of mix it up a little bit, but they're actually certified, it's confidential, they have to meet certain requirements and go to certain training to keep those certifications as a peer support person. So, we've implemented things like that. My staff knows that if they're having a really bad night for some reason, and they need a set, they can put themselves out on a reset.

Doesn't count against the launch if they leave a call rather than going to another one, if something's happened where maybe they're not in the right state of mind to handle the next call, they can go to the station, they can again take a reset. So we try and encourage stuff like that.

That's great that you're doing all that and you have that expertise. Okay, I think that's good, thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay next up, Jenna's coming up to talk about 3B26-seventeen, adopt a spot in Downtown Hudson.

Good

evening, mayor and council members. Maybe this will load, maybe not.

Counting down. Chief, should we

be worried about this countdown?

Jenna, do you want to put it in this slide up here? There we go. Tom, up.

Don't breathe.

Tom, hold it up and at an angle.

Everyone hold their breath please. Good evening everyone. Community development is excited to introduce a downtown beautification initiative called Adopt A Spot. Downtown Hudson is one of the most cherished assets in our city and maintaining a welcoming appearance is a shared priority amongst the city, our residents, business owners, and many civic organizations. Tonight I'll discuss the proposed adopt a spot program.

It's designed to provide a creative and engaging way for local businesses, nonprofits, residents, and community groups to directly participate in beautifying a high visible area of the 1st And Main District. Through this program participants will have the opportunity to sponsor and care for a designated landscaped area from May to October each year keeping spaces vibrant, well maintained, and free of weeds and debris. To maintain a cohesive and high quality visual aesthetic, the city will coordinate planting concepts, site preparation, and ongoing support through H and M landscaping with collaboration through public works. The goal of this initiative is to enhance the visual appeal of our downtown and provide another meaningful way for residents and organizations to engage and contribute to the charm of Hudson. This evening staff seeks support to move forward with the adopt a spot program and incorporate it into our seasonal downtown beautification efforts for 2026 with an anticipated launch by the March.

So I want to take you through a couple of things that we'll discuss related to adopt a spot. So the map you're looking at on screen are the eight areas that we initially looked at. Our goal was to find high visible areas that would be good for walkable and drivable traffic. So you'll see the four areas six, five, eight and seven are green and four, three, two and one are red. That's the difference between our irrigated beds and our non irrigated beds and those that were recommended for the program and those that were not.

So here is an example of all eight of those beds. These are the current conditions. You'll see one through four are the beds we are not going with and then five, six, seven and eight are the beds we did determine. This is the intersection of 1st Street in Clinton and 1st Street in Village Way. So here are I just thought this was a great, way to compare the two.

So this is current conditions, this is what it could look like. Obviously, we're not going with all eight concepts but this is just a great way to show how adding such a small program could enhance the aesthetic of downtown. So five, six, seven, and eight you'll see in my proposal for the adopt a spot program these areas would be available for organizations to sponsor and, they could pick which area they wanted. The planting recommendations came from a native planting list that another coworker of mine, Emily Fernandez, worked on with support of the Hudson Garden Club and a landscape architect in October 2024. So these were designed for the purpose of our area and we may make small adjustments but for the most part these were the concepts that we determined were appropriate.

So you'll see in the next couple of slides that I have different type of sponsorship levels. So what we'd anticipate is launching this program. There are sponsorship levels and only one or two sponsorships that coordinate that correlate to each one of those sponsors just to keep this pilot program small for the first year. We think that's the best way to launch it, Focus on a few areas, see how it goes, reevaluate at the end of the year, double check that everything is working well on our end and with h and m landscaping. They would primarily be helping with this program throughout the season and are asked to this those who would be seeking a sponsorship is very minimal just to keep this a very manageable, task for those who would be, participating.

So this would be a downtown district partner, it's valued at a thousand dollars. This is, the pricing correlates to the type of plantings and the maintenance that the bed would require. So if you are curious on how the how the prices were determined it correlates to our quote from H and M. There are two locations available at the 900 sponsorship. Location 1 And 2 here, this is right at the exit of the parking garage.

There are three locations available for the $700 example and three different bed examples that that go with this. And then the last would be our $500 sponsorship level and three beds that that accompany this $500 level.

So

from a recognition standpoint, I plan to work with communications recognition for all of these sponsors and depending on the level that they choose they would they would receive a recognition on either our Facebook or website. They would also have a if you look at my staff report, I gave an example of a sponsorship designation for each bed. I think that'd be a great way to see who who has sponsored that area especially if you're walking through our downtown. The the website I'm showing you right now is what I thought out approval from council last August. This is our community engagement tool see my legacy and I thought this would be a perfect time to show you how it's being utilized and on top of that our plan would be to use it for adopt a spot.

So you're looking at the back end side, this is not live yet but I have the adopt a spot program built out in here. You see an overview of the campaign. We provide our guidelines on who can adopt the sponsorship levels, what's the commitment with each with in our expectations for each sponsor. You can choose your level on the right hand side and then it will direct you to this little page that reiterates everything on the previous page and then you hit participate now. It's very easy.

It has been an amazing tool so far. I have launched our recent event browse and bloom in it and the compliments I've received have been exponential in comparison to some of the other tools that we've used. So this has been a wonderful tool for community engagement. But here are here's just another example of all of the areas that we identified in which plantings would correlate to those areas. I'll stop talking and let everyone ask me questions.

Patricia? Some of these spots are in 1st And Main. So are they on Fairmont's property itself and if it is, they're not responsible for plantings?

No, we are, the city is responsible for these areas.

Any questions? Jeff? I like

the sponsorship sign. I like that aspect of engaging the community. I like the program. I guess on a similar adjacency, was walking through 1st And Main this past weekend and I messaged you. I know it's still wintertime, but how do we expand this further?

Not from a program standpoint, but what is the responsibility of the city in helping to keep other aspects beautiful and clean? And again, I know it's still wintertime, there's a lot of salt everywhere, there's some litter and debris. Do we engage with the businesses to kind of help do that as well to further this whole beautification process? What happens in that sense? And I know it's not specific to this program but it is similar thing that we're trying to all get to.

Absolutely I can speak on this somewhat. Katie and I have a regular meeting with Fairmount Properties every month. We address these types of issues if it's an immediate issue that obviously gets addressed as soon as we are aware of it. But I think we can always improve our communication with businesses especially if some of this is their responsibility. But we do try to keep those lines of communication open to address as much as we can.

Sure. Thank you. I'm in support of this program. Thank you.

Thank you.

Nicole. I know it's not a ton of money with this first pilot program identified but what would be the use of the funds from the sponsorships?

So essentially the funds are covering the plantings itself and that was all broken down by H and M for us so that's how we identified the sponsorship. It would also pay for the signs that are in the beds and it would pay for some of the maintenance. So it is significantly offsetting the cost of the program which is fairly aligned with other municipalities and how they operate. And actually in some cities they require a sponsorship commitment and the sponsor to provide the plantings. So we're kind of providing an all inclusive program here so it's easy to manage and oversee and the commitment is very small upfront.

Welcome.

Anybody else? Oh, same.

It's just a

one time cost? Let's see. And you can't get the sign and then So our intention would be that this is an annual program so this would be an annual sponsorship for the year so May to October. Same people that just try to keep wanting to do it or not Yeah. The sponsor the sponsorship sign itself isn't a huge dollar item so even if we are changing hands that's not a huge huge dollar amount. I think they're about anywhere between 30 and $75 apiece. So really the program, the cost associated with it is more for the maintenance component I of think it's great.

So do you anticipate any challenges in getting all these sponsored or and if so would you open it up to individuals or you don't anticipate any trouble?

I honestly don't anticipate any trouble. We've already had people express interest in the program and it really hasn't been discussed or rolled out anywhere And I I think that we will get plenty of buy in for especially from some of those businesses in the downtown district. We anticipate residents being as well and I don't think there's any reason to restrict this. I think we'll fill all nine areas pretty quickly.

Well thank you for your work on this.

Thank you.

All right, up next is CTMP-eight 528, an ordinance amending Chapter eight seventy six short term rental operations.

Doctor. Berg, I'll take this and tee it up. On February 14, Doctor. Goetz and I met with some residents over on the Elm Street area with some concerns about a short term rental that had just gone up on their street. We listened to their input, we haven't really had any feedback on short term rentals since we instituted it, so it was a good educational experience to find out what the residents thought about it.

So Doctor. Goetz and I put our notes together, I passed those along to the Community Development Department and asked them to take a look at each of the items that we had brought up and Greg's here to talk about that. But before I turn it over to Greg, I just wanted to see if Doctor. Goetz wanted to comment on anything when we met with the Elm Street residents.

Just that they were very passionate about this.

And professional, they Yes, were very yes.

They were concerned that there was a sign up, but, you know, so what? The sign just tells them it's coming, they have no ability to say, hey, we don't want it in our neighborhood, which was what they actually wanted. But I think it would be helpful if Greg went through some of the things that we had listed here and then we can discuss it as a group should we make some changes to this ordinance.

Yes, I'm glad to give a brief orientation and then help with any questions that you have. Maybe I'll ask Brian. Brian, if you wouldn't mind, maybe it'd be helpful to show the chart of peer communities. That might have the most relevant information. A quick snapshot, we've had the short term rental program operational for several years.

Each year it's grown a little bit, but the last several years we've been right around the 16 to 18 sites across the community. Have ability under the current regulations to utilize a short term rental property throughout the full year as a full time short term rental. You do have to have an emergency contact within close proximity. We have requirements on occupancy and parking. We also do inspections by the fire and community development departments on an annual basis.

And Doctor. Goeth mentioned the sign that is a little bit confusing to the community at times. Our code requires a notice to the community by posting a sign and we can receive comments that might be relevant to our review to determine compliance with the code. But it's not like you might see a planning commission where there's a public hearing and there's no one receiving testimony. But council at the time requested that that sign be utilized.

So at least there's some awareness so that the neighbor just out of the blue doesn't see that the short term rental has commenced. One item that we did recently, Mary Radek in our office did an updated spreadsheet of a lot of peer cities on how they regulate and some key standards and we thought that might be helpful if council sees how some other cities are regulating their short term rentals and if there's any amendments or new things that you'd like to see us add to the short term rental program. I was just going to highlight a couple brief things from the chart. Of note, several cities do collect a bed tax on these similar to how a hotel might do the same. We do not do that at this time.

Dublin was the only city that had a regulation that limited the number of weeks per year that short term rental could be occupied. Uniquely theirs is only two weeks a year, which really surprised me at first but in essence you could rent your own home out for two weeks a year but you really can't run a year round short term rental in Dublin. Of all the other cities, they do not have restrictions on percent per year that you have to be in the dwelling. One note for Medina is that they only permit short term rentals within their inner historic neighborhood. So they have a set dimension, I think it's 4,000 feet from their downtown is the only area where they're allowed.

Peninsula has a few different tiers of regulations for owner occupied versus full time short term rentals and then they also have caps on the number of units that can be permitted within various districts of the city. And as I noted, we have the signposting on the property and we were the only city that we could find that had something of that nature. And then a few brief specific items that have come up and I think Doctor. Getschy would help note a couple of these. Regarding the signage, we have recently updated some of the website information so that when a resident hits the QR code on that sign it gives them more relevant information rather than just static information about our program.

It's hey, did a sign pop up in your neighborhood and we're going to look at some changes to the signs. We got some feedback that those are a little bit confusing as to what it's trying to note. There's also some discussion regarding permanent occupant. There is text within our regulations that describe who can be a host and a host can be the property owner or the permanent occupant. And that's a little bit confusing because the permanent occupant is someone that's at the property 51% of the year.

We had worked with the legal department quite a few years ago with a previous solicitor on this text and that primary occupant allowance is limited in nature and is acknowledging that a long term tenant, resident or family member might have the right to apply with the authorization of that homeowner. It's not capping a percent per year that a property can be used as a short term rental. A couple other items of note, of all the sites that are actively short term rentals, they are regulated under a current zoning I'm sorry, our current regulations. This regulation was put into place several years ago. We do not have any grandfathered properties, they're all under our current regulations.

And I know some things that council may be curious about is geographic restrictions. I did mention that Medina and Peninsula do have geographic restrictions on zoning districts, dimensional boundaries, setbacks to schools, allowances or restrictions to historic neighborhoods, those are things that could be looked at. And then as I noted, Peninsula also has caps on the number within an area or district. And I think we also had one comment regarding insurance and if that should be increased. I looked at that briefly, that insurance is a liability insurance.

But that is that would be worthwhile for us to verify if that's still relevant at the $300,000 threshold. I know that's just kind of a brief snapshot on our peer cities as well as the basis of our regulations, but glad to answer questions or to receive any feedback on other tools you might want to see within the program.

Just for everybody's, I went through of the, I think there's just 17, you said 18, but you did one of them twice. 12 of the 17 are in Ward 1. Two are in Ward 2, one is in Ward 3, and two are in Ward 4. So, they all are in the downtown. That was one of the things that many of the residents were concerned about was that there are so many there.

So, that's one of the things I think we should talk about. Should we restrict the number per ward? The second thing was, I know that a number of the Western Reserve Academy parents come and maybe they are there for thirty days, but do we wanna keep it at thirty days like Medina, two weeks. One of the things they brought up is that it's number of people in the house is based on the number of bedrooms, but you can have a very small house that has four bedrooms and would have a lot of people there, whereas if it's a 3,000 square foot house, that's very different with four bedrooms, so their suggestion was that it'd be based on square footage, not based on number of bedrooms. The other thing that they talked about was should we make it that the houses that our Airbnb's need to be, have so that we don't have outside investors buying a house and then using it year round as an Airbnb.

The reason they brought that up is it's so important to have neighborhood connections and people and that's the thing people love about Hudson, and so if we have too many of these, are we diluting? If it is owner owned by someone in Hudson, then we know that a person that's part of our community. The last thing they brought up, and I guess there's probably nothing we can do about this, but there was concern about having any of these a certain distance from schools because you could have a registered sex offender come in, you wouldn't know that they're there. So, I don't know, we would never know. Tell me what the rest of you

have a question. Appreciate hearing from the residents. Are there other issues that have come up with housing maintenance or noise complaints or are there other issues that have come up with these short term rentals?

As a whole, we've had very little. We often receive a good number of phone calls when the sign goes up, which is helpful. We can talk to the neighbors and explain the regulations and note that if you see issues during operations to please contact us. We have had one or two phone calls with concerns of parking or I think we had one concern of brush piles or debris in the backyard. As a whole, I would say we've had very little phone calls during operations.

Are any of the properties inspected over time?

Yeah, inspected every year. The fire department and community development do on-site inspection.

And Greg, I don't know if you mentioned it, but they have to renew their permit every year.

Yes, that's a good point. It is an annual permit. We have a pretty strong penalty clause and the ability to pull that as needed and I should have mentioned this, but these regulations are treated as a business license. It is not in the zoning code. If it was in the zoning code, there'd be opportunities for variances and appeals and much more rights given to that property owner. This keeps much more control on the city end by having it be a license based.

Hadn't there been a party and that was before we had this ordinance

that had

a huge number of people?

Yeah, was a significant party, significant police concerns, neighborhood concerns and that helped trigger getting into this ordinance.

First off, what does anybody think about a bed tax?

I vary for that. I mean what you described is there are some clear negative effects on neighbors for this happening. A very efficient way to deal with that clear negative fact that the neighbors have suggested is to tax this negative thing. And by taxing this negative thing, the funds could actually then also be used to unify downtown that the neighbors use in Ward 1. And it seems like other areas do it, I don't and it seems like that would be in line with what others do it and it seems like that would be an efficient way to acknowledge that there's a cost to the neighborhood and potentially address that.

Any comments? Like the text too. I think that our numbers are so small that probably the administrative burden setting it up is going to be greater than the revenue we get. I mean it could help. I guess I like the idea of limiting in some way per, so many 100 feet per, somehow that we do have a

Like a local winner one too, sorry.

We know this obviously this shows cities around us and here in Ohio what they have done. Are there any restrictions from the state government on what we cannot do to prevent?

My understanding at this time there is not. I exchanged notes briefly with our solicitor because there are some House and Senate bills being proposed that would impose state requirements that would be supportive to short term rentals and take that out of municipal control. Just swapping a brief note with Mr. Pitchford, it seems like that hasn't gotten very far, but it's hard to know. So we could do some updates, but at some point in the future the state could start to regulate this.

Do you know how many of the existing are local owners?

I'm not sure offhand, but I would guess maybe half. An appreciable amount are out of town owners.

I have to imagine, sorry, didn't quite finish. I have to imagine to Doctor. Weinstein's point on the out of town, even if we put some sort of requirement that they must be Hudson residents, etcetera, those who are already operating would be grandfathered in or would we be able to at their next renewal deny them based off legislation?

I think logical transition might be to activate something for next year's program and then they would no longer be eligible. I'll need to confirm that with our solicitor but that is one of the intents of this being license based that we're not establishing grandfathered properties.

Mr. Sutton, you were on the council when this ordinance came in.

I

was not just on it, was the sponsor of the original bill. It's the result of as noted a party that happened in Ward 3 that got out of hand. I'm supportive of a lot of the ideas that are proposed, some of them not so much but initially I wanted something firmer when this was proposed and I think we actually had started with something firmer. Hal Dessesor was very firm that he not want it regulated in the zoning code. So we sort of backed off and that's how we ended up with the compromise state, guess you could call it, that we have right now where it's a administrative license instead of a zoning code.

We have bed and breakfast as a regulated use in our zoning code. And my original thought was to fold these under the bed and breakfast use which currently it requires somebody to be on-site and that would be the sticky bit is that some of these properties are being rented out as as a whole house instead of just a room. My discussion with the residents at the time was that many of them would be supportive of a room being rented out but not so much a house. The idea being that we wanted to incentivize if you're gonna do a short term rental that somebody is present on the property, somebody's responsible, somebody's there Both for the upkeep of the property as well as to prevent parties like what happened initially. So I'd be okay with pushing this into the zoning code and taking it out of a licensing situation.

I'd be okay with limiting distance to another one. You can only have one short term rental every X number of feet or something like that. I don't think ward is an appropriate limitation on uses. Uses. If you're gonna do that, should be looking at zoning district.

Again, think if we go back to the original intent of what this was is that folks who move into a residential area expect that their neighbors are long term tenants and not transient tenants for a day or a week. And that was my vision originally was to figure out not necessarily how to ban it, but how to tighten those uses up. Capacity by bedroom versus square footage. Bedroom has support by existing court case law and that's why that was used. It's frequently used in other zoning things.

In fact Kent is being sued over one right now because they didn't use bedroom, they used some other criteria. Think it's, you may know Greg, is it family members?

I'm not sure, I'll have take a look.

I think, or no, it's number of people who live there I think irrespective of bedrooms. I think that's the case. So that's why bedroom was picked for the original. That's it.

Any other comments? Thank you, Mr. Stutton. I'm sorry but I did not see on draft legislation that said exhibit A, I did not see that.

There's no draft yet. Sitting here as a placeholder.

We can

move quickly into some draft amendments if council would wish. I can confirm what I noted. We discussed the bed tax, so we can research that and see how we could administer that. We talked about limiting the total number per neighborhood or ward, finding some method, Mr. Sutton mentioned setback between each other.

I think those two together we could use to look at some way to ease concentrations, council is comfortable. Local ownership, I'm not sure quite how we could regulate that, but let me see if I can find some model. And then I think a bigger one would be relocating to the zoning code just to understand where council collectively feels on that. Medina, I think was the one city that had it within their zoning code. We can certainly do that.

Although I do anticipate if we made them in the zoning code conditional use, I sense they would be very challenging to get approved. We can still do it, it keeps that high bar or if you get to that point, you might want to revisit it. Do you want to you want to allow these? Or do you just want a very small program like Mr. Sutton noted of maybe they're only allowed as partial units, right, so it's not a full. If the council has collected feedback on the zoning code, that would help us.

On what Mr. Sutton mentioned about the renting out a room, do we have regulations on that for owner occupied?

There's not a carve out within the short term rental.

Okay.

We also want to talk about the permit fee, raising that. We're lower than Akron, lower than Peninsula.

Something that's in line with our peers.

What

is currently the enforcement mechanism for out of compliance if somebody just posted something on Airbnb, they hadn't applied for the license. One, how do we find out about it? Do we actively try to prevent

that or

do we just rely on the community? And then two is what is kind of the penalty?

We rely on the community but we also regularly search Vrbo and Airbnb, just do searches without dates, see what comes up and see if they match our active permits. Provided they immediately remove their postings, we will give them a notice provided they stop the advertisements and then allow them to apply. And then there is a penalty clause within the back portion that gives us a tiered notice where they can work towards I think it's a one year and then a permanent penalty for future consideration.

If we're going to start ramping up the cost of doing this and restrictions on it, might have to start beefing up the penalties as well.

Just to clarify Greg, said there haven't been much complaints. Have we actually solicited comments from neighbors or we hear any good or bad from neighbors?

We hadn't solicited comments from any neighbors.

Out there and have people give comments about

They might experience Airbnb that are quiet obviously like most of us probably do.

Or they want to stay before they buy a house and looking to live in the area.

Alright, so we'll get you additional comments. You'll put something together and we'll

take That sounds fine with that feedback we'll work towards some amendments.

One of the big things Doctor. Getz I had heard that day was the 51%. I didn't know where we landed on that. A lot of them wanted to see the people live there. So if they're, and again, Mr. Sutton's mentioning a room, but currently right now we have whole houses and that was another concern they had was, should we limit it to a room? Guess I just want to know we're gonna bring you guys a red line of the amended ordinance for your review at next week's meeting. Would you like us to look at the 51% on there and would you like us to say no houses, just rooms?

I do like what Peninsula does with at least with their that there's like some incentive to have it owner occupied or you have a lower permit for owner occupied, higher permit when it's not owner occupied.

Fifty one percent's gonna be hard to regulate? That's why maybe having it, again, that it has to be owned by a Hudson resident makes it more somebody that's here.

But are you saying they live here?

No, just owned by it.

Okay. So they can live in Colorado but they own the house here?

Well sorry I don't want to speak for you. So they have to be a resident of Hudson, so they live here, this is where they pay their taxes and everything and they own potentially another house and could rent it out.

Okay, that's what I wanted to know. We'll draft this up. We're not in any hurry. I think we wanted just to bring this to council and see what your thoughts are and this was a good chance to more or less look at our short term rentals. So we haven't looked at them because we haven't really heard anything over all the years.

I'll just add on, I like the Hudson resident because if you have someone you know, if it's a neighbor, if it's someone that you see in the grocery store and there's a complaint, you can talk to them face to face and say hey look, this is what's going on in your house, can you deal with it? I think the more that we can deal with it face to face and at the lowest level helps.

Is there any kind of feedback you get from we've mentioned Western Reserve, any big customers that we think that didn't have something like this.

Thank you, thank you.

Thanks a lot. Okay next up is the proposed consent agenda for 03/17/2026 council meeting and we've we're gonna use about every letter in the alphabet on this one so we'll try to move quickly so get my attention if you need to pause and talk about any of this first one for a tmp Dash8554 motion to acknowledge the timely receipt of the February 2026 monthly financial report.

Sure, I just wanted to point out in case you didn't see it on the front page there, the report, the year to date status, we have the green, yellow and red. The income tax as it was in January is red. Overall through the February, we were about 8.6% below estimate, which is why it is flagged at the January, we were 9.3% below estimates. So as I mentioned, it's still very early in the year. We're trending in the right direction.

We've received our first settlement We received two settlements per month from RIDA. We received the first one and it's dropped year over year to 4.3% below last year. So again, we're trending in the right direction. We also have the advantage of interest. Our interest income continues to exceed our estimate.

The Fed hasn't as I think I mentioned at the last meeting, we're kind of vulnerable, if you will, to the Fed interest rates and they haven't we anticipated when we did the estimate, we anticipated them cutting rates this year and they haven't. So we do have that offset to the decrease in the income tax. Just wanted to point that still very early in the year, but we're trending in the right direction. And again, we'll continue to obviously monitor this every month.

Comments for? Number A, item A. Okay, next, thank you, Jeff. Item B, TMP-eight 522 resolution authorizing the city manager entering a professional service contract with Sunni and Benicci Inc. For the preparation of the city's 2025 annual financial statements.

I can comment on it. Yes, this is something we have to do every year. This is required by the state. Just as a point of reference, last year the estimate was $45,400 This year it's a little bit less. The estimate is $43,000 So they were able to reduce and that's because there were some additional time required for implementation of the GASB, Governmental Accounting Standard Board, a new standard that was put out. It's actually a reduced cost.

Okay, C, thank you. TMP-eight 524 resolution authorizing advances of local taxes. This is just a assessed this previously, right?

I'll keep going. So this one, this was when we the one we passed a couple meetings ago was for tax year 2026 collected in 2027. The legislation inadvertently had years the on there. And so this is a correction. And so the one we did two weeks ago will still be applicable but to next year. But this is for tax year 2025 payable on 2026.

Item D, TMP dash 8,513 resolution authorizing the city manager to advertise for bids and to enter into a contract for the Veterans Way retaining wall project. Questions about that? Discussed this at a previous meeting, right?

We did last week in the agenda. Yeah, this has been on the budget since last year and engineering would like to replace it, it's by the sidewalk there and it's a safety issue.

Okay, next E, TMP-eight 511 resolution authorizing the city manager advertise for bids and enter into a contract for the replacement of a 48 inches storm sewer from the North Side Of State Route 303 South to an existing box culvert besides Rosewood Grill and declaring an emergency.

This is a failing pipe under State Route 303 right at College Street downstream from the middle school storm system so we're asking to go out

to bid and replace that.

Brad, is this the only reason you're here? Should we ask you more questions? Any other questions at all, comments? Alright, thanks.

It affects my street directly and so I'm glad that it's getting done. My neighbor had three feet of water in his basement, our last big storm, so this will alleviate that kind of problem, so I appreciate that we're working on it.

We're actually upsizing the pipe at the choke point in the system, so besides it's in poor condition.

Thank you. Next one is TMPF, TMP dash 8,512 resolution authorizing the city manager to enter into a local public agency LPEA federal local Project Agreement with the Ohio Department of Transportation for the Hines Hill Rail Grade Separation Project. Hines Hill Road PID 121034.

So anytime we take federal funds or state funds, we have to enter into this agreement. It's a local let agreement, we're the local in this case. The agreement sets forth the requirements that will spend federal funds, whether it's been the design or right of way acquisition process or construction or construction management. So any ODOT project that if you see, oh we're doing the ODOT number, that's a project ID number, could be the resurfacing project or a sidewalk project that we get federal funds or state funds from, we will enter into one of these LPA agreements. So this is no different.

We have a number of different funding sources for this project. One is from the FRA as noted in the staff memo there, therefore we're entering into the local public agency agreement.

Item G, TMP Dash8550 resolution authorizing city manager enter into agreement with the owner of a property located at Parcel 32 Dash 00750 for the exchange of property located at Parcels 30 Two-eighteen 41 and 30 Two-eighteen 44.

Brad, if you could just give a quick history on this back to when the Veterans Bridge was built.

Yeah, so this is a leftover from our 2003 Veterans Way Roadway construction project. Typically during a road construction project and where we acquire property, we would do that ahead of the work. In this case, there was ongoing negotiations at the time of construction with the property owner, and the transfer of property never occurred. So the owner has recently sold the property and preempted this conversation. In addition, we have the retaining wall construction that's taking place right at this location, so those two things coming together has prompted staff to renew this discussion with the property owner and finally get this rectified.

So this land swap or this property transfer would be a net value of zero and ultimately the footprint of each property would be such that land value is zero. The city would retain easements over any property that we gave up for future storm water access or construction agreements or something like that.

Thanks. Next is item HTMP dash 8,548 resolution authorizing city manager to authorize the lot split and consolidation of city police and fire EMS stations and declaring an emergency.

The other day I got a call from the attorney whose office is right there on the corner of Maple Drive and Oviat, and she said there was a surveyor at the back of her lot and she asked him what was he doing and he wouldn't tell her, so she was very nervous, afraid that it meant somebody was gonna be building there, but from what I imagine is that that surveyor was there surveying for this, for these parcels.

It could have been, I don't know who the surveyor was.

But we're not building anything.

At Maple And Oviatt, we're not. We do own that property on the corner there, right where the little pump station was, yeah, we're not building

But even back where the police station starts, we're not adding anything right there, are we?

Not in the back of anywhere along Maple, no, we're not.

Or anywhere along Oviatt. She's on the corner of Oviatt and Maple.

Don't know But of anything to

no, nothing in

the utility. Just want to reassure

her that's

not going to be a big building behind her.

No big buildings.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, just back to this, it was a lot split. Brad, do you want to go into the details why we did this with the fire?

Yeah, with the upcoming outbuilding for the new fire station, for the fire station renovations. Currently, the fire department stores their equipment, a large portion of their equipment outside. So we want to build a new garage to house that equipment. It'll make a much longer life and better atmosphere for those vehicles. So to meet our own land development code requirements, we need to reconfigure the lot splits. So here's an opportunity, or the property lines out there, so here's an opportunity to clean up those parcels out there. There are seven individual parcels right now, this would consolidate those and then redivide them into logical parcels.

So we would maintain the green. We extended the east right of way boundary down College Street all the way to Ravenna Street, and we would basically everything west of that toward 91 would remain a like green. It has the Lincoln Memorial in it, it has all the other things that go over toward the corner. And then that line would separate it from the safety service kind of little campus there with fire, EMS, and police, and they would be everything on the east side of that. So it was a requirement as Brad said as part of the land development code. And we are building an outbuilding garage in the back of that for fire, which has all been budgeted as part of the renovations to their department.

Comments or questions? Okay, thank you. Next one is item I, TMP-eight 549, resolution amending resolution 20 five-four zero to change the purchase price and reauthorize an agreement with Daniel Steitel for the purchase of 14.75 acres of parcel number 30 Two-twenty Six75 75 located on South Main Street and declaring an emergency.

This Doctor. Bird was a property that we had worked to negotiate last year. I believe it was actually February And because of some delays that were with an adjacent property owner, the resident came to me in the end of last year and said, hey, can we reappraise my property? Because it's been a year, he was waiting for the other properties to be purchased. The reason we waited was we didn't want to be landlocked, so we wanted to make sure we bought these in a certain sequence.

But for all the public out there, it's adding about 30 acres to that area by Veterans Park. It will eventually have a trail which we closed on Norfolk Southern's Railroad from Veterans down to Barlow last Friday, right? So we now own that all the way north of the Veterans Bridge about 100 feet. This property is 30 acres, would be also connecting veterans over to Cascade. We hope to have a crossing at that point one day.

So it'll be kind of an oasis in the very heart of our town. So I think it's a really great addition. The appraisal was an increase of 5% and it was done by a certified commercial appraiser that we have locally we have used. So I recommend we approve this.

Questions? I

just like the connectivity between all the parks. I think that's great to offer more opportunities to get from one place to another that doesn't use a car.

Okay, moving on JTMP-eight thousand four and eighty nine resolution authorizing the city manager to retroactively enter into a contract with the Summit County Public Defender's Office and declaring an emergency.

This is something we do every year at the beginning of the year, so it's with Summit County for indigent defendants in the city of Hudson. We recommend counsel approve it.

Next. Just

curiosity for myself, if it's something we do every year, why do we need to declare it a pricing? Should we have had it a little sooner? The last year has expired?

I'll have to ask the clerk. I don't know why it was an emergency but we can look into that.

Next item K, TMP-eight 526 resolution authorizing city manager to revise the professional services contract with virtual data works for the annual Microsoft government community cloud GCC subscription renewal for the citywide use of Microsoft three sixty five and declaring an emergency.

Is the purchase of the Microsoft three sixty five licenses. It's a one year term as it states for about $94,000 for roughly two twenty two licenses.

And it's a cooperative bid, right?

It's through this, the government community cloud subscription. It's below the retail price that Virtual DataWorks was able to offer us.

Questions or any questions at all okay beyond to l tmp dash eight 523 resolution authorizing city manager enter a professional service contract with Hall Public Safety up fitters for the upfitting of two fleet vehicles for police operations and declaring an emergency.

I won't have the Chief come up, but basically that's just the striping and the decals we put on the vehicles, also all the equipment that goes into it. They pretty much got the cars, rewire them and put all the equipment in that the police need to use. It's a common thing that comes with our new cars each year.

MTMPDash8527, a resolution authorizing the city manager to enter into a contract with Axon for the an integrated body worn camera and in car camera system and declaring an emergency. I think the Chief was mentioning that tonight.

Comments? If I can just add the as the Chief said in his letter, there are other ones are out of date. They've gone past their service life or will be going past their service life. We're getting new ones for the next five years or so.

I'm assuming it's in this documentation. I just haven't read it yet, but this amount, sorry, scroll down through this list again, this 328,000. Is this a one time purchase of these cameras? Is this include a subscription or has a recurring cost to it?

Chief, it was one time, right? It's separated into different years, I know.

We actually won't own the equipment with a lot of technology that I look at from the police department with the shelf life and life expectancy on this stuff and the way that technologies increases so rapidly, we're leasing a lot of stuff. So that way, know, at the end of a five year lease, the stuff's obsolete, it really doesn't have value, and we go into the newest, you know, vetted product. So that amount, dollars 328,000, is over five years each year for the lease amount.

Thank you.

Okay, thanks. Item N, TMP-eight 516, ordinance amending the codified ordinance chapter two ninety seven military and veterans commission to comply with the newly created charter section 8.09 and declaring an emergency. So I think what this does is that this aligns what the newly charter amendment did around the Military and Veterans Commission.

That is correct and Marshall drafted it. It's based on the voters approval of that amendment.

It says it can go to seven members with the charter language and with this.

It's only partially related but as you mentioned, this includes going to seven members. Did we ever find out if we have to do something similar for a commission if we are allowing it to shrink if it had previously been seven and we were going to keep it at five?

This is just to align it with the charter.

Okay, I thought we just said There's

a charter in the ordinance and the charter that we as seven but the ordinance before the charter says five so just to make sure they match

up. You.

Yeah, that's it. Okay.

Next item OTMP-eight 502 resolution retroactively authorizing an animal agreement sorry an animal an agreement with the Summit County regarding animal control services and declaring an emergency.

And the reason for this is it's retroactive. That was the reason I was just looking to see if the public defender was also retroactive. Is it? Yes, it is. That was the reason for the emergencies. Thank you. Thanks, Jeff.

This is a contract with Summit County to handle unruly beasts.

Varmints. Did you want us to change that?

No. Yeah, we should start

having funner titles.

Okay, next B P, TMP-eight 503 resolution authorize the city manager or his designee to submit an application for a reworks community assistance recycling grant, also known as a CRAG.

Well Jenna was sitting back there so I thought let her come up and talk about it.

This is actually an annual grant that we seek out. It typically is $22,000 that we receive from our solid waste district authority which is reworks and it typically goes toward our personnel reimbursement for leaf pickup in the fall.

I have a question tangentially related. A resident asked me if there is a potential to expand the program so it's leaf pick up in the fall as well as spring pick up of when you do all your spring outdoor things.

Cleanup?

Yeah, thank you.

We can definitely look into it.

That is a program we have heard over the recent years that and I don't know why, if it's the trees that we have, but the branches just seem to have accumulated. So a lot of people keep asking about a spring cleanup. That's something we can bring back to council.

And if the snow comes down early, then your leaves are still down there when it melts in March. We can explore that then and kind of give us an idea of a cost of a one time, something like that. Right. Any other comments or questions? Q TMP dash eight five zero four resolution authorizing city manager to submit an application to the Ohio Department of Transportation Safe Routes to School grant.

The ODOT Safe Routes to School grant is based upon our recommendations in the approved 2024 STP, which is our school transfer school travel plan. Thank you, Erin. Our school travel plan and one of infrastructure projects was, a connecting x access sidewalk from Franklin Street to Eastwood Intermediate. This was about a little over $400,000 project and it is a requirement for the ODOT Safe Routes to School to have a past resolution.

And this was discussed at the home meeting last week?

Got a grant, Leaf Rouse School, when was the last one?

Sure, it hasn't been paid off then.

Technically the last grant was ODOT paid for our latest school travel plan, so that would have been in 2023. We finished that school travel plan in 2024. Prior to that for infrastructure projects was maybe a sidewalk project on Office Stowe Road. Yeah, it was that Parkview and then some street signs I think we put on North Hayden.

Any other questions? Alright, thank you.

And

lastly on the consent agenda is RTMP-eight 529 resolution authorizing the city manager to enter in a professional services contract with RDL architects for the downtown development concept site plan and declaring an emergency. So this one I would like to recommend that we pull this us a little bit more time to discuss at the meeting and time to comment might delay that a little bit more but since this is kind of a big deal moving forward with Crossing and with a being very move this into legislation.

And the staff has no issue with that.

And just a very brief reminder, this RDL Architects would be assisting the community in establishing the concept plan for Clinton Crossing, the former phase two land, implement the current comprehensive plan and take this through Planning Commission Council for the concept steps, and to find a developer that would implement that plan. So this is a conscious piece here to have the city formally guide and get that approval.

Also gonna assist with meetings and learning sessions, that sort of thing.

Yes, within the scope there would be significant community engagement. Community development departments and project manager Emily Fernandez will lead that effort in partnership with RDL who'll be doing. We anticipate Let's Talk Hudson, some type of community additional community engagement and we'll be kicking that off with some updates to the website within the coming days.

Just for clarification, Council President Byrd, you are requesting to pull this from the March 17 consent and put it on to legislation so that we can go through three readings to have those additional public comment discussions and everything else.

That is correct.

Okay, thank you.

This is, you know, is a A through O consent agenda, Q consent agenda. This is something that I think is important enough to call out rather than throw.

I think it could also be a good way for the public to let us know how they would like to be engaged with if they have any thoughts about what they might think, what they might like to see from this contract in terms of how they can provide feedback. If it's a physical space, if it's online, if it's a combo, if it's whatever it is, it might give them an opportunity to provide feedback there, which would be helpful I think for the contractors to know.

We'll move that to legislation.

Wait, one other question on that. You said that was fine with staff, assuming that that's also fine with the contractor, and whenever we had signed with them.

Yes, when we met with them online, they seem to be receptive to any of the changes we had asked them in their proposal, add ons and things that we wanted them to subtract or whatever. Again, I don't see any issue with this either. So it'll delay it a month.

By moving on to section five, legislation for 03/17/2026 council meeting. A is 20 six-thirty two resolution authorizing city manager advertise for bids and enter into contracts with the lowest and best bidders for the Gazebo legacy project and declaring an emergency.

Can I just, we are putting the underdrains over there currently right now? Public Works has been working on that for two days, so that should help to dry up that corner which has always been holding water And then we have the exhibits of compilation of what council had discussed at the last one.

We have

the architect, we'll be bringing that, we'll bring that next week along with a new estimate options are. And there'll be some views of the banding, Council had asked for, we'll have some pictures of that. So hopefully we incorporated everything that Council wanted into this and we can start to move forward after next week. Thank you.

I'm just excited to move forward, think it's great. I appreciate the engagement we have from the community and I think we got to a spot that the community is happy with and appreciate all the people that took the time to walk the gazebo, look for it for themselves and provide their input after that.

Okay. So that'll be a third reading next week. Five b is 26 dash three three, ordinance amending city council rules to define the role and duties of a council liaison. That is also a third reading for March 17 of note this this version has will have or has have no reference to sitting at the dais, but it does reference that council liaisons would not be would not participate in any appeal of a decision that was made. That's for the third reading. Oh, Skyler. Yes.

That revision is not in the this copy.

It's not in 26 dash three three.

H two b one. Digital copy just has the word appropriate struck out.

Okay. Alright. We will make that fix before next week.

The copy and legislate.

Sorry. Yeah. Pulled in '22 the February version.

Sorry, mister Sutton. I didn't what what are you seeing because I'm I'm seeing it all struck out.

You struck out on my copy.

10 dated copy?

No. The '20

No. One at the bottom.

'33. So maybe we should we should identify that as a as an amendment date.

Yeah. I'll make it more clear.

Check with the partner?

I will. I just wanna make sure if Mr. Sutton's pulling it up, if it's okay the way it's written, or does he need anything It's

still loading. The 2063 copy has it struck out, but the dated copy does not.

But it

I think we should clarify.

So maybe that Yeah. The 2633 should have a date.

Right. Okay.

That was an amendment.

I'll have that date on it.

Okay.

Thank you.

Gotcha. Thank you.

Yep. Thank you.

Next is CTMP-eight 518 Ordinance Amending Codified Ordinance Chapter fourteen forty six Street Banners.

This is just cleaning up the code to make what we actually do align with what's in the code.

It's not a big major

It's street outdated what's in there now, this is just bringing it up to what we our current practices.

Next is DTMP-eight 528 Ordinance Amending Chapter eight seven six short term rental operations do we we might not be ready for that next week it's like super urgency but do you think you'll have a draft for us to?

Do think that'll be challenging.

I think

we'll want to do a little bit of research and check with the solicitor on a couple of the topics.

So let's move this then to April 7?

You want it on a workshop? No, I'm asking. You want we'll re discuss it at a workshop?

Sure.

Yeah. First one in April?

Yeah. Where's the workshop? Fourteenth. Fourteenth? It's

first workshop in April.

The

first one back after the combination. Okay.

Next is E TMP-eight 528 resolution authorizing the City Manager enter new purchase agreement with Kalex for customer equipment for velocity broadband subscribers and declaring an emergency.

Doctor. Byrd, I just want to so I asked this to be pulled from consent agenda because I have to abstain because I have a conflict of interest.

There was on consent, it's pulled.

That's right.

Here it is on legislation.

And So the consent was just getting too long.

Jeff can give you some I

was just gonna say we're also requesting suspension of the rules and passage. There's an eight to ten week lead time on the ordering. So we'd like to get this. We'd like to be able to order it right away, places order right away. There was a delay in getting pricing for such a large vial and we've been velocity broadband, they've been buying in smaller batches and this is a thousand units and they didn't get the pricing in the most timely manner I'll say. So that's the reason for the emergency language. And so we're heading into a busy time with the fiber to the home coming up here. So that's the request.

We can process that request for suspension of the rules and passage on first reading with the emergency language. It does require a super majority just so council knows. I don't think we'll have any issues but we'll process that as needed.

I would greatly appreciate it,

thank you.

So then as as far as that super majority goes, does does Amanda count as attending or not if she abstains?

So she abstains from the vote to suspend the rules. So suspension of the rules requires depending on how many council members are here. So five of five, I believe I've got my notes somewhere, six of seven and I think it's five of six as well. So if there's only five members present, we need all five members to suspend the rules. If councilor Weinstein abstained, my understanding is her abstention would go into account of the other four affirmative assuming we get a four affirmative.

Is that how that's how it was to be recorded. So it my understanding is it would still record as the meeting the five required votes because that one abstention follows the majority of yeas or nays. That's my understanding from Mr. Pitchford.

We'll make sure we review that over the week before we come into next week's meeting.

But if we have six or seven members of council present, we do have the ability for one nay. Okay,

number six items to be added to future agendas. See none. Lastly adjournment is there a move to adjourn?

I move to adjourn.

Second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Meeting adjourned at two thousand one hundred sixteen.