Remarks by John B. Roberts
16 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 1 of 1
Thank you. And can I ask the finance director why we're giving them a, or Vicki, go ahead, Vicki.
Okay, I just find this interesting because I think we are setting a precedent because we very seldomly have done this in the past and there's been extremely good reasons for doing it in the past. It worries me. That's all I'm going to say is it worries me. I've paid enough of these fines over the years that I know that we're very thorough about tracking them now, or at least we try to be. it just it's difficult for me first of all it's in my ward but the home so you know of course i would want if it was a homeowner probably give them a break but it is a rental property for one thing uh... i'm…
So, you know, I used to have some people.
Thank you very much. I'd like to make a motion to direct staff to bring forward a more thorough document on AI usage for the city. Would that work, Karla? Okay. And then I'd like to hold the floor for a minute, because I have a few comments.
Thank you very much and I wanted to reach out to Jordan and say thank you for stopping today. Jordan was my first ward councilmate when I got elected to the city council 15 years ago. I very much enjoyed sitting with him and I very much enjoy having a resource like Jordan for AI and everything computer related. So I just want to thank you for coming forward and speaking on this Jordan.
Not quoted here: it may name a member of the public. Hear it at the meeting.
Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Well, we could sit and beat our heads against the wall all day long to figure out how to make this never happen again, and it will still happen again. The biggest problem that we have as a city, and the reason that it got to this point now, is because we've only got one option. They start getting behind, we turn off their water. Do you want to turn off the water to 300 residents? That's impossible to do. I've had this and I've been beating my head against the wall on this on a property in my ward for a decade. They get behind, they get behind, they get behind, then we…
Well, good. We've got more money now. So I'd like to make a motion to add an FTE to community development. What would that cost us, Daniel? They haven't had a new employee in 20 years. We are moving to finance director Ainsley. I would say just a planner.
Well that will be my motion since I don't believe they've had a new FTE in 20 years. Armstrong, I seconded that motion.
Thank you very much. And I will have to agree with with my two colleagues here about marketing. It's very interesting considering we pay one group over a million dollars a year to do marketing for us and then we pay other groups to do marketing for us. And I really don't think internally we really have to do that much. I think that we've got good entities outside that are doing that for us. I don't think that we have to do it inside of the mayor's office. I know that recently I was speaking to a couple of former mayors, and they were a little bit appalled at how many people are actually in…
Councilor Roberts. Thank you very much. So I'm going to support this reduction. And the reason I'm going to is I think that having this 4th of July celebration is a great thing. I think that we've got you know, a lot more time than we had when we planned the 250. So we can start planning the 251, which is going to be nowhere as big as the 250 because it's the 251. But I think that we can also, in this time, we can raise money from the private sector to offset some of that money or all of that money if they want to have it that big. Historically, we've only spent $50,000 a year on fireworks in…
Not quoted here: it may name a member of the public. Hear it at the meeting.
Thank you. Councillor Roberts. I'm going to make a motion to approve that. And I just want to hold the floor for one second, if I can get a second.
And then I want to ask the finance director a question. So all three of these are being funded from undesignated cash, because we never put that into any of them. So that was just my question. Thank you.
Thank you very much. I just got a quick question for the city attorney. So my question is, with these changes, can we vote on the first reading tonight? Because one of the changes is adding a tax to it.
My big concern is because we're making these changes to it and we're not giving the public the opportunity to, so don't we have an obligation to post this?