Board of Aldermen 07-13-2021 Page 15
President Wilshire
Alderman Lopez?
Alderman Lopez
| want to echo some of what my colleague said. | don’t consider the number to be arbitrary | appreciate Mayor
Donchess trying to keep the tax rate down and trying to apply a fair number to programs across the City but |
think as we said in the previous meeting it is not necessarily — equity doesn’t equal equality. So the Fire
Department and the Police Department may have greater needs, they are much more essential services, we
can’t afford to cut back on them. None of that has changed from our last meeting. | mean we don’t have
enough ice creams to call the alarm whenever a fire kicks in, so we need our fire department to be well
equipped, capable of responding. We need our firefighters to be well-trained and up-to-date on all of the
procedures that they need and we need to make sure that their equipment is not out-of-date as well.
With regards to the position the Mayor is in | definitely empathize because | feel like he’s getting both sides of
the stick here where his opponents will say that he needs to cut back on the Fire and the Police but they are
also lobbying pretty heavily to not do anything about the Police Commission who make decisions about how to
spend money and what their policies are. It seems like he’s in a position where people will blame him for
decisions for budgetary reasons that are out of his control. | think it is pretty well understood that the State has
increased our costs and the portion of our budget that is dedicated to their decrees and the money came from
somewhere. So as Alderman Dowd said, the impact to the taxpayer being around approximately $1.00 per
taxpayer, | think the risk of having an impacted response or a minimal response is much greater than the cost
of paying of $1.00 and | continue to support the budget that we passed.
President Wilshire
Alderman Clemons?
Alderman Clemons
Thank you Madam President, forgive my voice this evening, | am a bit under the weather so | will try to keep
this brief. | agree with everything that Alderman Dowd had said; | agree with some of what Alderman Lopez
said. | will be supporting overriding the Mayor's veto because | have never voted for a budget nor will | ever
vote for a budget that simultaneously raises taxes and cuts service. | don’t think that that’s right, | don’t think
that’s what people pay their property taxes for. | think we should always be at least trying to maintain what we
have and by overriding the veto that’s what we will be doing. So thank you.
President Wilshire
Anyone else? Alderman Jette?
Alderman Jette
Thank you Madam President. So just to put things into perspective, | was on the Budget Committee and | was
at every meeting and | listened to the presentations by especially the Fire Department and the Police
Department which we were left with hopefully after tonight we will be done with the budget, until next year. But
you have to remember that the Police, their budget is $35 million dollars. And the Fire Department is $28
million dollars. And what the Mayor had asked them to do was to in the Police Department’s case reduce their
ask by $241,000 plus dollars. And the Fire Department $495,000.00 plus dollars which are compared to their
overall budgets is not all that much money. They refused and they argued, they made very good arguments as
to why the money that they requested should be given to them. And | understand when the Police Chief or the
Deputy Chief come and make their case and the Fire Chief and his Deputy come and the Commissioners for
both organizations. | understand, they are advocating for their departments and so they are making arguments
that are to their credit they are well-designed to hit us where it hurts.
