Remarks by Brett Kell
62 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 2 of 3
I've thought about it because just yesterday, or Sunday, excuse me, the thought that came to me is what our teachers are dealing with, with safety in the classroom right now, and how teachers and other students are constantly being victimized by having students get sent out of the room and get sent right back. And the student may throw a chair across the room, hit two students and a teacher in this scenario. They go to the officer right back. There's nothing out there that helps the teacher. And there are scenarios out there right now in real life where a teacher breaks up a fight and they've…
So I'd like to make that formal amendment on line 81 to do the sex trafficking slash child sex abuse amendment.
To me, that almost highlights just the human trafficking. If someone's just skimming the document, I think it needs to highlight both.
How many cameras does the city actually operate within the city limits total?
Or just of like that works with a real-time crime center?
Okay. So just trying to point out something here, like going to finding flock.com, it says we have 126 in the city limit. So that would be untrue, correct?
Do you know anything about the cameras that were placed on 470 and I-70 about the time of the World Cup that they went up on the highways? At first, I thought they were just traffic cameras trying to work the flow of the World Cup, but they've been up since then. So I think there's one right off Gage, just east of Gage. It's a temporary camera right there. And they're all up now on I-70. Now, when it comes to the AI aspect, one thing that I learned going through one of the citizens academy, a lot of the AI aspect is more for like traffic, and Jason may be able to talk more about this, but to…
I thought it was tied into the real-time center. The utility part of it, the street start.
All right. Thank you. How many of our LPRs or any of those cameras helped solve crimes? Like, let's say, for instance, was one used in the Noto shooting a couple weeks ago?
And that's kind of the point I wanted to bring up and kind of lead you into was how the positives of this, how everyone wants to look at the negatives, but there's great positives in this. Yes, it's not 100% accurate. There's been issues where maybe a department didn't go through the proper investigations and just – said someone did something and didn't do it, but that's not here in Topeka as far as I know of. But I kind of want to lead you in the positives because everyone's, to me, all the emails and everything, it's this big brother mentality right now, but you don't realize, no one's…
I know you mentioned a little extra work. I think if we actually do this the right way, that extra work will already be done before that date when we have both plans to give to the public to show them what our options are going to be. When it comes to cuts, we've done a lot of cutting already. If we cut any more, we're going to be hurting our citizens and we're going to be hurting our staff. We're going to have overworked firefighters that are going to have an accident on the job trying to do something because they're stressed and tired and overworked. We're going to have an officer possibly…
Well, I would have broken down kind of almost maybe like every $25,000 for a house value so people can understand what their house is. And then break it down, and I just broke down some numbers when this first started here, just looking at using U.S. Census and then a couple different grocery tracking websites. that we're looking at based on household size, I think it's 2.21. We're looking at about $1.60 a month per person per household that a sales tax would cost. So I'd like to see how much 10 mils would cost a household of $100,000 and be able to break that down and show people. what the…
So in essence, people outside the city could vote to shut this down so they don't have to pay it. But we as citizens have to pay more because we have to increase the mill levy. So that's something to look at long term because that right can be taken out of our hands as citizens and allow people that aren't citizens to vote on what we have in our city on a tax. I think we just need to look long and hard at this and look at the numbers and be very transparent and open to the public about this. Thank you.
This past weekend, Saturday night, I was privileged to be a part of the Celebrity Waiter Soiree held by Child Care Aware of Eastern Kansas. Last year and this year they've had me kind of help run the silent auction and the auctions side of things and it's really fun but it's a great organization that helps find child care and do a lot of things with child care but The biggest thing that they do is with the lack of child care, it doesn't just affect the household. It affects businesses. It affects our economy with people not being able to get to work, with people not being able to stay home…
I see a little bit where the market rate is coming from because you're having people move up, which opens up the affordable housing more. But I think we need to focus more on the affordable housing aspect of things. I think that'll be our biggest initiative for the homelessness aspect of things. If we get affordable housing, especially those people that are just coming out of a house because of job losses or that, medical bills, it allows them to kind of work back into the system rather than going to a shelter or on the streets. Like I said, I'd rather focus more on the affordable housing…
I don't expect you to have those numbers for affordable housing, because that's going to be a fluid thing. I mean, we can sit there and say, well, we're going to focus on four bedrooms now. But in three years, that could be our lowest demographic that we need. So I think it's one of those things we need to make it as fluid as possible on that, so that way we know what our needs are versus what the plan is. Because we can plan out forever, but if we're not hitting our needs, then it's kind of a waste. I think this is definitely a learning experience, especially on the half-cent sales tax on…
Just curious, was there a decrease in the number from last week?
that's for a city our size, just looking at average salary, we're probably going to need to bump that up a little bit just to be able to compete to actually get a qualified person.
Council Member Kell. I'm in agreement with Council Member Miller on that. I know the TCALC teaching position, I could see maybe let them just take care of that themselves, but when it comes to the actual SRO officers, until it's It's gone, done for, contracts over, no more negotiating. I'd like to see it stay there because if we're planning for it to be gone and we go back and negotiate, now we've got to find another place. So I'd almost rather keep that in there rather than have to rearrange later.
I get more back to having an inside person helps that relationship happen because sometimes our priorities may not be 501 priorities. A good example right now, we've had a lot of car break-ins and porch thievery and things like that that have been caught on video. They're middle school, high school age kids. We could send that over to the 501 police and say, hey, can you help identify it? If they're like that, well, it's not our problem. Having that inside person there that knows who these students are can sit there and maybe help out even if there is talking to those kids and trying to get…
Well, the count can help you with numbers. I want to say thank you to Nick and to Josh. Great to work with. People I can trust and lean on and get information from. I worked a lot closer and longer with Josh, and I felt like he was my most trusted employee, that when it came from him, it was the truth. And not to knock any other employee, but this was one of those things of, When you're shoving all those numbers around all the time, it's one of those things that they always pinned out the way it was supposed to. All right. As you see, I'm wearing my duck tie, my duck pin. The Sertoma Club of…
Yes. On the sixth slide you had there, it was the 20-year demand, the different types of rental versus purchasing housing. And on the subsidized to the low end of the workforce, it was two-thirds rental. And to me, that's almost – I almost want to flip that for the simple fact of if you have low-end incomes constantly paying rent and not building any equity, then they're not able to move up that scale. So that's where I think it would be more apt to focus on trying to get people into houses that they purchase rather than renting them where they're not – I understand some aspects is they don't…
I understand a little bit what you're talking about, Councilman Hiller, about the number discrepancy is we're living in a different time. A good example, my wife and I, we have our 20-year-old living at home. And you get those from those high school grads to two or three years post-college living at home. And we'd rather say stack up your money And so we have all this pent-up, as he put it, housing need, and we'd rather, like in my case, my wife and I would rather our child stack up that money to be able to go out and afford that rent rather than have to go work two jobs and struggle. And you…
Honestly, I think a forensic audit in any department, you know, we rotated that around to, you know, each department every so many years would be a good idea to know where our money is going. I just know that this is a department that is our livelihood. You know, we need water. And we need to be sure that we're taking care of the stuff that we have and if we're going to cut into any type of general fund or water fund to not raise rates we're going to run into a lot of issues here in the next few years and that is that the one thing that we desperately need is good clean water and things have…
I think I was the only one that was in favor of keeping the base charge or ready to serve, whatever you want to call it. And my point of view on that was if you're hooked to the infrastructure, you pay for the infrastructure. And I did talk to some people afterwards, and I think we did come up with some type of policy that During water volume replacements, if you have been inactive for like five years or whatever, your meter gets taken out. Or if there's a water main break and it's right next to that meter and that person has been inactive for five years or whatever, we yank it. Just because…