Remarks by Jon Link
53 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 1 of 3
Councilor Link? Thank you, Mr. President, through you. So first of all, thank you for this presentation. I think that this dashboard's going to be great. I think that it's fantastic that we're publishing more data, we're making it open and accessible. I am excited to see that. I'm curious, like, so, you know, I started, and I literally just went into one tab, so I have not done thorough research, but, like, I was looking at public health, for example, and I noticed that... like for rats and air pollution, it's resident concern about rats, resident concern about air pollution, but not like…
Councillor Link. Thank you, Mr. President. First of all, I want to say thank you to my colleagues for working so hard on this, and especially Councilor Hart, who I attended so many meetings with, but she attended even more beyond what I did. So there was an intense amount of work trying to get this right. So much has been said already, and so much has been said well. I don't feel like I really need to pile on. What I will say, you know, My timeline, I can't remember when the first time I heard about CSOs were. I think it might have been when I went to the Museum of Science with my kids, and…
I would move to approve. I don't know if Council Hart or Councilor Baugh have a different opinion. Sam.
Council Lincoln and Clayton Thank You mr. president Actually a lot of what director said is kind of what I wanted to get at which is that you know, I'm really really happy to see that we're Trying to get ahead of the things that we need to maintain It does feel sometimes like we're just kind of reacting from one bad situation to the next bad situation and spending more money than we need to or should because we've ignored a problem for too long and I'm really really happy to see that that we're we're not ignoring these problems that we're we're cataloging them that we're figuring out how to…
So this ordinance is, I just want to be clear, it's not perfect. And I don't think it ever will be perfect, because I'm not sure that there is a perfect. But we need to figure out as a city what the baseline bare minimum right thing to do is. And we know for certain that AI hallucinations are real and that AI can produce desperate outcomes along lines of race, gender, color, and religion. So what this ordinance proposes is that we should not empower these shortcomings to harm our community. It asks that we ban AI from making decisions about things like eligibility for housing stability…
Anyway, I'll just wing it from here. It also requires an annual report telling us and the world what AI is being used by the city, and it requires also that any content that is made mostly by AI is labeled as such. To kind of wrap that up, if we don't want AI to decide if an artist gets a grant, if a community member goes to prison, or where our next library is built or where the next community center is built, then I think that we need something like this. And I'm very excited to see it go to committee and become a more perfect document than it currently is.
Yeah, could we send that to school buildings, facilities, and maintenance, please?
Thank you, Mr. President. I'll keep this one brief as well. First of all, I wanted to say thank you to Reverend Christopher Hope, who was the person who reached out to me and talked to me a lot about this particular piece of legislation. So this legislation kind of has the same perspective as the ordinance that has been proposed here tonight. And it goes a little bit farther because it can, because this is at the federal level. So what this does is in very, very brief, broad strokes, is it regulates consequential decisions, such as those that impact people's rights, civil liberties,…
Thank you, Mr. President. This is the last of the AI Trio. So this is a resolution just asking for a policy. Common sense policies to be included within the AI policy. One is that since we are a city full of artists and wonderful creative people, if we need creative work for our publicly shared materials, whether that's a flyer or a video, we should use those artists and not AI. And two, that the city should not use AI to replace workers. So no layoffs or closed positions specifically so that they can be filled by some sort of agent, AI agent. So, you know, I'm all for us as a city using AI,…
Thank you, Mr. President. So I was taking a quick look at some of these, and I noticed this one stood out to me because It looks like the work that's going to happen where they're going to be cutting is on the schematic, it doesn't show it, but there is actually a curb cut for a crosswalk right there. So I'm just curious if that's been taken into account, the fact that we need to have a a curb cut fixed and all the work that that might entail.
Just by restored back to condition means that it'll be cement again or that it's gonna be cement with Asphalt Trip hazard right in the middle
Yes Like is it gonna be a patch for a week a month a year?
I'll I just think mr president I just want to say that you know just today I was having a conversation with council Union campen and a few others about how arts at the Army really kind of punches above their weight and I'm just so happy that that we've got this locked in now or that we're about to have it locked in and you know I really hope that we're gonna make sure that we as we keep moving forward that we the the renewal processes are smooth And I assume that now that we've got a wonderful person in there to look it over we we will have that just that Councilman Yeah, thank you.
Thank you, Mr. President. A question. So not our last finance meeting, but the one before that, we had two grants come up for E911. And both of those, for one reason or another, even though we knew we were applying for a grant, we had to still ask for the money in the budget. We have the grant now, and those grants were for $295,000 and $159,000, which seems like it would more than cover this. So I'm just curious why we need to use wage stabilization funds when it looks like we have in our police operating budget this amount that we need.
Thank you, Mr. President. I am a little worried that we're going to have horses running rampant roughshod over the city, but I'll wait to see. No, I'm really excited to see. I had actually noticed many years ago all the horses, and I'm glad to see that we're going to have some things that don't make sense out of there to make it a lot more digestible for people so that they can actually go through the ordinances and see what's what. And I guess I'm excited to see it. And I guess I just, as one counselor who's not on legislative matters, I'm... Excited and scared because I want to make sure…
Councillor Link. Thank you, Mr. President. Do we want to consider adding a definition section to this?
I just want to commend the Ward 5 Councilor on this one. It's like a very, it's the ideal kind of fix where it's very concise, goes in there, solves the problem. It's fantastic. And, you know, I just also want to call it for anyone watching at home, for this kind of situation, too, it wouldn't necessarily only be your recourses and only the city, because having... I'm certainly not a lawyer, but I've read enough of the tree law things where, you know, there's definitely other civil litigations. So if this ever does happen to you, use every single tool that's available to you, please. Counsel…
Thank you, Mr. President. Once again, thank you to the Ward 5 counselor for bringing this. And on the note of what my counselor at large just said, I guess I'm curious to the administration if this might be like a really good way to pilot some of the ideas where we've been talking about, you know, combining permits and bulk permitting and, you know, it's one small thing and it might be a really easy way to try to help people hit those climate goals without having to go through some sort of onerous process and then we can maybe, if that's successful, bring that success to the rest of our…
Yeah, thank you again. I just keep saying thank you through you to our Ward 5 counselor. You know, as one of the members of the Finance Committee who approved this grant, I've not been totally happy with the reality of where the rubber meets the road, if we can mix in some transportation metaphors. So we're hearing just from community members once again that people are getting stopped in intersections, crossing safely during a pedestrian cycle. We already know that that's If you're yielding to progressions properly, then it's the safest thing that a person on a bike can do rather than staying…
Thank you Mr. President. This is kind of a continuation of the work that Councillor Hart and I have started with the short-term rentals ordinance and have been helped by Councillor Ewan Campin who has some residents in his ward who had a pretty clear and well-defined case of how we could change, make a small change to this ordinance and create actual substantive change. So it's become pretty clear that if we just did this one thing, we'd have, with the good intentions of the ordinance, the overly broad definition of that being of a place being your primary residence the that test it was a…
I don't have much to say, if we could just go send it to Tractor Mark.
Councillor Link. I'll just say real quick, I think we've heard from constituents that our leaf blower ordinance is largely ignored. I'm not sure what the fix is there but the reason that we made the ordinance is because we had acknowledged that it these gas powered leaf blowers create a tremendous amount of noise and air pollution and I'm just saying if we agree that that's a problem we shouldn't be running gas powered leaf blowers around schools during school hours and as person who's very well aware at this point as an Argentine parent of the AIM program that's come to the school. We've got…
Yeah, if we could put that one in the school building facilities and maintenance committee.
Yeah, I mean, sure. Or it could go, I don't have, it doesn't have to go there.
No Mr. President. So I'll just say, I was a little surprised to learn that the, the Ralph and Jenny center was had been closed to the alcoholics anonymous meetings. I learned that recently. And you know, I guess for me, so in my family there is a history of substance use disorder and. I know how important these meetings are for people's recovery so that they can maintain recovery. And I think that as a community, we say we want to see our community taken care of. We want to make sure that we're seeing fewer people who have these issues, and we want to make sure that we see our community being…