Special Board of Aldermen 06-21-2021 Page 11
Chairman Dowd
Your 3 minutes are up. Do you want to finish with a question?
Mr. Teeboom_ No I'll come back with a question.
Mayor Donchess
| don’t agree with your numbers really. But the reason for segregating the pensions is that we don’t control
that. So we are trying to isolate and look at City controlled cost. | made it pretty clear we are being hit by
$4.4 million and that’s part of the budget, no question about it. And the $29 million dollar pension budget is
part of the budget. So when you add the pension figures in, yeah those departments are going up more
than the figures that look at what the City can control. The reason Public Works would be down under that
scenario is that Public Works is the only group of employees that’s not under the State Pension System.
So their cost didn’t go up equivalent to this $4 million dollars. Mr. Griffin and the whole budget team has
gone over the numbers pretty carefully and | don’t think that some of the numbers you gave were accurate.
Mr. Teeboom They are very accurate (inaudible audio).
Chairman Dowd
Next speaker, name and address for the record please?
Laurie Ortolano — 41 Berkeley Street. | am here and when | come to the microphone | am going to be
addressing positions. | understand your budget increase is small but | really think you have positions in this
budget that need to be removed. And in the Legal Department this Right-to-Know Coordinator has got to
go. It is a $75,000.00 position that did not produce the results we had wanted. | really feel that there
shouldn’t of been a dedicated position for Right-to-Know and | don’t think it is a viable position for you to
fund. You are not going to get an attorney in there who is going to come in as a Right-to-Know Coordinator
and stay. The Attorney you hired punched out after 6 months and it’s going to be a roll out ground for
anyone. It really is a mascaraed position if you just want to add an attorney. In the time that the attorney
was here, we had 3 lawsuits on Right-to-Know largely because of his work. And | can tell you there are
several more that are going to roll in. So | am not a fan of this Right-to-Know Coordinator Legal Position. |
think what you want to fund is a taxpayer’s attorney that is there to serve us. So that when our City wants
to go after us with these frivolous lawsuits, we have some means of being funded so people who can’t
afford lawyers to come in on a Right-to-Know request issue which is standard Right-to-Know, basic Right-
to-Know costs a citizen $5,000.00 to take into Court. That’s not cheap. So instead of using the system to
abuse your citizens, let’s roll it the other way. And | think this Right-to-Know Coordinator should be taken
out of the budget, there’s $100,00.00 savings there, very misguided position. Thank you.
Chairman Dowd
Thank you. Miss Johnson can you just lower the mic a little bit?
Paula Johnson — Good evening Mayor, Members of the Board of Aldermen and members of the City. My
name is Paula Johnson, | am a member of the Board of Education and | ran this by Legal to make sure that
| had the right to speak here tonight as a citizen and a taxpayer of this City. So | am going to speak here
and tell you how outrageous | am about what has gone on in this last year. City Hall was shut down at
taxpayer’s expense. Yes, we had a pandemic. | went to work last June in retail with a mask on to make a
living to be able to put a roof over my head and food on the table although the Governor deemed me non-
essential; how dare he do that. And how dare you keep the citizens out of City Hall but you arrest them but
they can’t go in there. So | am proposing right now that the Mayor’s Office loses his staff because | went
there the other day and | went through City Hall and took pictures of the renovations, great job with
taxpayer’s money, doesn’t matter which pot it comes from, it came from us the taxpayers. And you talk
about people who haven't worked, that’s right. A lot of us lost a job or took deep decreases in salary rather
than increases. | went to your office Mayor and | had this little conversation, you invited me to come into
