Board of Aldermen Page 16
September 27, 2016
out in favor of it and not a single comment against it, by the public, is something that galvanizes the city
in a positive way. | am very much in support of this and | hope my fellow Aldermen will consider this.
Alderman Clemons
| just want to echo Alderman Lopez’s statements. | also want to thank the several citizens and
organizations that reached out to me to tell me their opinion on the matter. | certainly will be supporting
the Mayor's amendment.
Alderman Siegel
| came fully prepared to discuss the legislation as amended out of committee. There was a lengthy
discussion in committee. | thought at times it wandered a little bit off track but nonetheless | thought that
it seemed like there was some resolution that made a lot of sense. We now have something before us
which is effectively a different piece of legislation which ignores whatever happened before the
committee and is asking us, the full Board, to basically debate something which should be vetted in
committee. So, if you want to take this piece of legislation as proposed by the Mayor, my suggestion,
well not my suggestion because | won’t vote for it at the full Board, but | would be happy to send it to
committee if that is the desire to vote on that. However, let’s remember that part of the argument was
the “optics” of kicking this thing around. To me, when that showed up in my e-mail, | got to tell you that |
was a little annoyed because if we really cared about the optics and we went through such an effort to
come to some sort of what | thought was a reasonable compromise, it was fine. | personally resent a lot
of the strong man arguments that have been presented like presenting this is somehow against
immigrants and arguing against that as though there was ever any effort to propose that or to say that
was the case. All of the arguments, although some of them | don’t agree with how they were presented,
basically were associated with the particular organization and not the spirit of the legislation. | will be the
first to tell you that | can’t stand virtue signaling legislation. | hate this stuff but, | also know that we are at
a point where we do have to pass something like this because it would look troubling and the Chamber of
Commerce for one, | would certainly understand why they would have a problem or any business, it just
wouldn’t be acceptable, which is fine. Now | don’t have to virtue signal for anyone, | wake up every
morning next to somebody who is an immigrant. My wife fled the Knmer Rouge. She didn’t come under
pleasant circumstances; she came because she found out the night before that her family was going to
be murdered. Her legacy playground was the bodies that you see in the killing fields. That was
her experience. So her diversity is a little bit different than the safe space diversity that we see
infesting our country this day. She really did need a safe space, and this country was that safe
space. And, | do appreciate the perspectives that her point of view coming out of that and her
experiences provide for me. | don’t need anyone to tell me that somehow by not supporting this other
add-on organization that somehow | am rejecting immigrants. That’s ludicrous and it’s insulting to me
and everyone on the Board. Again, if we want to look at the Mayor’s proposal then it’s got to go back to
committee. We don’t debate legislation that hasn’t been vetted before the committee before the full
Board. That’s always been the case. We even called a special meeting to make sure that we didn’t do
the wrong thing over the summer and that was much more straight-forward. You guys just had an over
one hour meeting at the Personnel/Administrative Affairs Committee to discuss this legislation. That’s
going to be ignored and we are going to have something new and pretend that never happened and
that’s not okay. If you really want to support the Mayor's initiative then send it back to committee, don’t
vote for it here.
Alderman Clemons
We did have a long conversation at the committee level about the resolution and many points were
stated. There was a golden rod copy that the committee had come with as an alternative. We could vote
on that alternative if we wanted to, somebody could make a motion to amend the legislation so that it
looks like the golden rod copy, however, there are approximately 100 people in the audience right now
and I’ve gotten several e-mails and phone calls from people asking me to not do the legislation that we
