Remarks by Sylvia Ortiz
66 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 3 of 3
Well, I wasn't. Just make sure that city manager hears us loud and clear. We need a break. I need a break. I need to go to Chicago real quick, so I don't need that. Nick, it's been a pleasure. Maybe we can do a proviso and bring you back or something. I don't know. It's that gray area, you know, but I appreciate that. Appreciate what you've done. So good luck to you. East Topeka North and South, not this weekend, but the next weekend, September the 26th, is bite the blight, drag it to the curb. There's no kids. You've got to keep your kids. They want all of your unwanted items out there by 7…
Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll be brief. So I have some subsidized housing in my district. And I don't know if this study talks about it, but we've talked about it. It's over 60 years old. When does your study say we just need to tear everything down and start from the ground up? Because in this location, it really needs to be configured. It worked 60 years ago. Our emergency vehicles have a hard time getting through there. And we've talked about that, but nothing's ever happened. Does your study address that?
Thank you. I too want to thank staff for Throwing all this crap at me. Met with them today and I learned something new. How about that? So I don't know if you can do this, Sylvia. If you can give it to Dan over there. That bill. Not my bill. The... You know, I want to thank staff for one thing. They have gone, they have dug deep. They have looked, as we've asked them to, they've looked at a contract. So you know when you get your water bill, you are charged for your refuge and your Recycling. Recycling. And we collect for the county. So when we don't get that, they don't get that. I also…
I couldn't say that like you said that. Thank you. So I want us to remember that. That's not all of us, but we always get blamed for everything at the end of the day. Again, we're paying for postage, which has gone up. And the county, when they don't get their money, we don't get our money when it's out there. And then we also pay for... when we have to go back and take them to court, correct? Correct. Yep. So look at the three things that we don't get paid for. So that's hurting us. What I did ask you, Sylvia, is from my constituents, they don't want that readiness to serve charge, and…
Okay. So again, they want to pay for a service that they use. So they won't have that in there, right?
It used to be called readiness to serve, now it's a base charge.
So you're going to charge me for what I'm using, right? Correct. And I had them bring up my bill, and they showed me in January. I don't know what I did, but I was shooed. I used a lot of water. I didn't water no grass or nothing. That's the other thing. My low to moderate income people, my elderly, they only want to be charged for what they use. And they think, you know, I'm the only one in this household. Why is my bill? Because it used to be you paid from here to here, right? But now we're paying for what we are using. Yes. If we adopt this, correct?
That's no longer the case. Correct. Okay now I'm going to skip to my commercial who I've got the biggest commercial water user in the city of Topeka who's in this year or maybe he was in this there I don't know but he's out there and if we I I I heard the gentleman say well let's just charge them and make them pay blah blah but if we did that his next bill would be eight thousand
Now that we're, when we do projects, they brought up the Huntoon project and we tear all that out and we put our sewer lines and our water lines, is that saving us money? And Nicole said, yes, it is. Because if, when we have to tear out a street, we have to pay to put it back. And so with us working hand in hand on different projects, this saves us an enormous amount of water, right? Or money, right? And so they work hand in hand with the street department. So I could appreciate that. I can appreciate all of the hard work that you guys have done. And I can support this. I can honestly say I…
Nicole, if I look at that list, because I'll go over it, do I just have them go to the Water Department and tell them that they're on that list?
So if you put them on a payment arrangement, that takes them off the list, correct?
So if they make a payment arrangement, they don't have to have it paid in full by September?
Ma'am. A nine-year-old male. CPR is in progress.
Thank you. Thank you for this plan. You know, the city messed up when the Sisters of Charity gave us that property. Should have let the firefighters build a damn shed on it, and we still have it because we didn't fulfill that. I actually asked legal. I said, well, you know, when Mars went in, they were going to give us some money. for a new station out there because they wanted a station out there, and rightly so for their building. I later learned we came back to JADO and said, we don't need this money. So they gave us that money that they were going to set aside for the community to build…
Because you know what? I was going to get some new furniture, but I think I'll keep what I got. And you know, and on a serious note, next month is October, my favorite month, and we need to talk about those smoke detectors. You guys sit up here and you laugh about it, but we need to push those smoke detectors because they do save lives. And in my district and other districts, the wiring's old, the houses are old. We need to help you guys out. They need to help them out.
And I can appreciate that, Chief, but we need to do it before. You know, we all can play a part in this and get those applications out there. You know, because every time I read about a fire, that's the first thing I look to see if they had a working smoke detector. And I cringe because nine times out of ten, they didn't. Where are we missing the boat? Where are we missing the boat? And so we need to push those again. We can't push them enough. Thank you.