Common Council - Regular Meeting

If all others and guests could please take their seats, we'll begin momentarily. So we have a couple members of council that are joining remotely and they're having difficulty logging on. So we'll be just a couple more minutes until we can solve those technical difficulties and then we'll begin. We do have a couple more members who will be joining us virtually, but we do have enough for quorum, and so I will gavel us in. Good evening, everyone. The hour of 5 o'clock, having arrived on this Wednesday, September 9th, is my honor to call to order this special council meeting for the State of the City Address for 2026. First item of business before we begin the presentation is the Pledge of Allegiance of the flag. If you could please join as you are able and join me in the pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. President Jorgensen, members of the City Council, and my fellow residents of Racine, thank you for joining me tonight for the 2026 State of the City. We have a great deal to be proud of this year. We have invested in our schools, we have invested in our neighborhoods, we have invested in the safety and well-being of the people who live here. And yet there are dark clouds on the horizon because we are still working to free ourselves from disinvestment and from the constraints placed on us by the state and federal governments. So let me begin with the good news, and it begins where it should always begin, with our kids. This is the time of year when parents rejoice at sending their children back to school. With the school year underway, I would be remiss not to celebrate what our public schools mean to this community. The strength of this city is tied directly to the strength of its public schools. So to the teachers and staff who came back to work this fall, thank you. Your dedication will shape this community's future because you are shaping our most precious resource, our children. I am proud to say that all three of my children attend Case High School in Racine Unified Schools. They are thriving and they will be ready for adulthood because of RUSD, because of its IB program, and because of the teachers who inspire them each and every single day. This fall, many of our students returned to new or renovated classrooms because the voters of this community approved a school referendum. Just before the year began, I was glad to join ribbon cuttings at Case High School, Goodland School, and Waterwood School. And this spring, during one of our clean sweeps, we worked alongside students at the new Red Apple School to plant flowers for neighbors up and down the block. If you ever want proof that voting matters, remember this. A referendum that invests hundreds of millions of dollars in rebuilding and repairing our schools passed by five votes. Not five percent, but literally five votes out of tens of thousands of votes cast. Democracy matters, and every vote counts. Good schools do more than prepare young people to be workers and citizens. They anchor neighborhoods, and they are essential to the revival of this city. Neighborhood reinvestment and repair remain a top priority for us. Alongside the school construction, the city has taken on project after project to strengthen the places our residents call home. We launched our Clean Sweep program, bringing city crews and city resources into one neighborhood at a time to trim trees, repair sidewalks, fill potholes, haul away bulky waste, and hand out smoke detectors. The repairs matter, but what matters more is that the residents of those neighborhoods feel seen and appreciated. Through our home repair and enhancement grants, we have delivered more than 1,100 grants of $10,000 to each homeowner across, each to homeowners across the city. We're using federal funds to build houses with Habitat for Humanity in three neighborhoods, and we launched Racine, Rehab, and Ready, putting a $25,000 grant in place to bring a vacant house up to code and sold to a homeowner. All of it is working. Homeownership in Racine has climbed from approximately 51% to 62%. Pritchard Park Apartments will add 266 new market rate units to the city. We have taken an all of the above approach to housing. Our goal is more homeownership, but our commitment is to every resident at every income level, rich or poor, owner and renter alike. We are especially excited about the Lincoln King neighborhood. A grant from Governor Evers allowed us to build 33 townhomes, which will sell for half of what they cost us to build, putting homeownership within reach in that neighborhood. We rehabilitated eight more homes in that neighborhood, and we are building two other new homes with Habitat for Humanity. As proud as we are of the housing, we may be prouder still of the new King Center, now under construction. It opens early next year and it will offer not only new recreation space, but medical, dental and behavioral health care services. Our public health department will be housed there as well so that we can improve community health from inside the community. It will be the first net zero building in the city, and more than 20% of the hours worked on that site went to Racine residents. This project will be transformative for the neighborhood, for the kids and families at Julian Thomas School right next door, and frankly for the entire city. My thanks to the staff and community members who gave so much to make it real, and to President Biden, Senator Baldwin, and Governor Evers for directing the funding our way. We are continuing to pull unsafe lead service lines out of our drinking water system. More than 1,200 residents have signed off on replacing lines this year, and close to 400 are already complete. My administration made a promise to remove those lines, and with resources from the infrastructure law, we secured a $40 million grant to get there faster. Ride, our bus system, now has a solar array helping to power our bus fleet, thanks to a grant from Senator Baldwin. And then there's passenger rail. Passenger rail has been talked about in southeast Wisconsin for decades. Sometimes they say it's an idea that's so good it cannot go away. When the bipartisan infrastructure law passed a few years ago, it set aside billions of dollars for new rail corridors. To be ready for it, Racine joined Kenosha, Cudahy, and Milwaukee in forming an intergovernmental body, the MARC Rail Commission, to be able to apply for those funds when they become available. It will connect downtown Racine to the airport, to Racine and Kenosha, and to the metro line on to Chicago. If it comes to fruition, it could spark more than a billion dollars in investment and put tens of thousands of residents within reach of a job. At Lakeview Park, we installed new playground equipment. I have not driven past it without seeing children playing. I am glad we could give this community something that has brought so much joy to so many families. And gun violence and homicides are declining as our police solve crime and our Department of Community Safety works upstream to interrupt its causes. Alongside our investment in schools, housing, and community centers, we are investing in people, helping our residents into jobs that can support a family. Our youth employment program, our police and fire cadet program, and our commercial driver's license training have opened city jobs to more city residents. More than half the people we hired this year live in Racine or moved here to take the job. Compare that with the roughly one third of our current workforce who live in the city, and you can measure that progress. I want to single out the police department and the library in particular who made big strides in this regard in the last two years. We also celebrated America's 250th birthday with a wonderful event on July 5th and a time capsule to mark the occasion. We added a new sister city of Brantford, Ontario, and we welcome visits from our sister city mayors in Mexico and France. All in all, there is much to be proud of in the progress that this city is making. The most serious threats we face come from outside these walls. But before I turn to them, there are two matters here at home that I hope this council will address. The first, very recently we discussed, which is flock cameras and their security around it. Let me be clear. I said yesterday, I will not include funding for fog cameras in the budget that I produce on October 5th. Serious concerns have been raised by residents of this city, by more than two, two dozen Wisconsin law enforcement agencies that have already terminated their flock contracts and by a growing number of jurisdictions across the country. We should end this relationship now. Give her police time. that they need to close pending investigations, but do not wait until the end of the year. Every week we wait diminishes the community's trust and confidence in its own city. On Tuesday, the Council faces a choice. Stand with the residents and their legitimate privacy concerns, or flock? I hope this Council stands with the community. The second is the pace at which the Council hands out liquor licenses. Our community survey told us plainly what residents want in our comprehensive plans. They want fewer bars, fewer liquor stores, fewer pawn shops, and fewer payday lenders. And yet we go on handing out liquor licenses like they're jelly beans. You can buy alcohol in every neighborhood in this city. This is not about prohibition. It's about concentration. Licenses clustered in low-income neighborhoods, next door to homeless services, down the street from schools. No community in America has ever revitalized itself with an abundance of liquor stores in neighborhoods that were once redlined. Not a single one. What those neighborhoods need is decent housing, good jobs, human services, strong schools, and public safety. And it is not only how many licenses we grant, it is how slowly we hold bad ones accountable. Some establishments drain substantial police resources month after month and degrade the quality of life for everyone living around them. For the good of this city, I am asking the council to take a harder look at the license holders we already have and a more skeptical look at every new application that comes before you. Now to the threats from beyond our borders. So I'm going to start by saying I am proud of what this administration, our staff, our partners, and our community members have accomplished this year. But make no mistake, if our relationship with the state and federal government does not change, the city is in for a dire future. For more than two decades, the state legislature has squeezed cities financially while forbidding us from acting on our own behalf. That is not an accident. It's the product of 20 years of Republican dominance in Madison. As state funding fell, the cost of city services shifted onto property taxpayers. Our state aid was cut or held flat for nearly all of that time until the last two years. Consider this. Had funding to Racine simply kept pace with inflation over those two decades, this city would have received more than $300 million more than it did. Imagine what that would mean for this city. for the services we could provide, for the buildings that need to be rebuilt, and for the property tax bill of every family in this room. President Biden's American Rescue Plan brought this city many benefits, and chief amongst them was help in closing our structural deficit with the American Rescue Plan. This is the last year we can use those dollars. Going forward, we will need partners in the legislature who understand what is at stake when local government is starved. And alongside the defunding has come the assault on local control. More than 100 bills have been signed into the law to strip authority from communities like ours. Housing, raising the minimum wage, rules for landlords, inspections of our rental units, labor standards, public health standards, infrastructure, environmental protection. On subject after subject, we are preempted, prohibited, or banned. Local control was once a Wisconsin virtue. It gave communities the freedom to govern themselves. It let municipalities be laboratories of democracy, testing ideas, learning what works, and sharing what we learned with one another. Again, here are just a few things that we can't even consider. We are not allowed to consider raising the minimum wage. We can't further regulating rental housing any further than we already do. We're not allowed to inspect group homes. We can't set building code standards that exceed the state standard regardless of our safety concerns. We can't set labor standards for any of the projects that we have here beyond a certain point. In this semi-quincentennial year, there are many ways the state could honor the American experiment. The best of them would be to give cities back the freedom to govern themselves. Of all the concerns I have raised tonight, it is the federal government that worries me the most. And that is because what is under assault there is not simply our budget, it's our values. Racine is a diverse community, home to many immigrant groups, races, and ethnicities. That is one of our greatest strengths. But we now find ourselves in distress, watching an assault on our democratic values that comes not from some foreign adversary, but from our own federal government. The climate of fear that ICE has created in our immigrant community has done irreparable harm. Unfair trade tariffs are raising prices here at home and alienating allies we have stood beside for generations. Food assistance and health care benefits have been cut for our most vulnerable neighbors. Efforts to open city jobs and programs to underrepresented people are being dismantled, along with diversity, equity, and inclusion work of every kind. Currently, interference with mail-in ballots puts free and fair elections themselves in jeopardy. That's a short list drawn from a long one. These actions do not merely wound us as a matter of policy, they offend our most basic values. President Trump has been one of the most negative and disruptive forces of my lifetime. But he is one man, and in a little more than two years, he will be out of office. What must not leave with him is our principles. We must summon the strength to hold fast to opportunity, to fairness, and justice for all Americans, whatever their background. Because if the state of the city is to be strong, we have to come through the next two years with our principles intact. Sometimes showing up for America means having the resolve to stand up to America when it is acting unjustly. That is why in this 250th year, I still hold enormous hope for our future as a city and as a country. And it is why I will end with this. The way to fix what is wrong with us is to embrace what is right about us. And I can think of no clearer act of fidelity to what is right about this country than to exercise your right to vote. Whether you agree with everything I said here tonight or none of it, I hope every person listening will show fidelity to the country I believe we all love by voting in a free and fair election. In two days, we will mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Let us remember the sacrifice of those we lost, and let us recommit ourselves to this project of ours, the longest-serving democracy of the world. Thank you. God bless each and every one of you. God bless Racine. And God bless the United States of America. Good night. At this time, I would entertain a motion to adjourn. So motion to adjourn in multiple seconds. All those in favor, please say aye. Opposed?