Special Board of Aldermen 06-21-2021 Page 25
clarification on numbers specific requirements given our current circumstances. Once | have the
information |’ll update you and this was June 15".
Chairman Dowd
30 seconds.
Ms. Johnson | complained about it before and | think all of you as Aldermen should really take a look at
making sure that your constituents who have a walking disability are able to be able to park downtown and
visit downtown. If you want to build it then you have to give the parking for the people who are disabled.
Thank you.
Mayor Donchess
Well we will check that. Now my understanding is we have the same number of handicap spaces as we did
before, but we will check that if it’s not correct. You are right we should have enough.
Laurie Ortolano 41 Berkeley Street. | want to address a reduction in the Assessing Budget. | believe all of
the commercial activities and business should be subcontracted out. We continue to have some really big
issues in our commercial side and you know that there is an assessor over there that under performs
consistently. And I’ve grown really tired of it. We are in abatement season, we have abatements, we are
going to hit the deem deny date on June 30" and this assessor once again has not delivered a single
abatement to the table. | had two property owners email me this week that told me he was on vacation. It is
absurd. Why are commercial assessors not able to handle the mom and pop businesses and get us
through them in 4 months? We do not have the horsepower on the commercial side to handle this aspect
of our City business. And we are probably paying $300,000.00 or $400,000.00 grand into that. | really think
you should look at subcontracting out the commercial side and getting people who really know what they
are doing with that part of the business.
Secondly, that Assessing Office should have had a lot of furloughed workers during COVID. They could
not do inspections, they were not doing permits and they were not doing their work. And we kept them on
with full salaries despite that. That was not fair to the taxpayers. It’s not like Public Works that had to go
out there and do the job. Assessing did not and they did not do the job. And we paid full boat for that. If |
have time — IT. You really need to restore your IT Director. | am very concerned that you fired the IT
Director and you are leaving the position blank. The City is too large and has too much stuff going on in the
digital world to not have a director. You are doing all these digital upgrades. You know, you have a big
email problem. And | just filed a law suit yesterday pro se, over emails. | would way prefer not to do that. |
would love to have a discussion with the City about what’s going on with emails, but | can’t. The only way
you can do it is through a lawsuit. | asked for 2 months of emails, January and February, for Assess help. |
didn’t really get January’s. | asked in March, it took 25 days for you to recognize the Right-to-Know and
then you failed to deliver January’s records. What are you doing with the emails? Why are they all
missing?
Chairman Dowd
30 seconds.
Ms. Ortolano Those are official documents for the furtherance of City business. And in there were my
emails with the abatement applications that | had done for senior citizens that | came to City Hall on the
22™ on the 17" — the 22™ to get stamped and ended up 28 days later arrested. You didn’t get my email on
the 17", you didn’t get my email on the 20", they weren’t in there and apparently you didn’t get my phone
call. What is going on with our data.
Chairman Dowd
Time has expired.
