Board of Aldermen Page 17
September 27, 2016
did in the committee and to instead endorse the Mayor’s version or the original version. We heard from
28 people tonight and they all stated that they wanted the Mayor's version or the original version. To
send it back to committee is wasting their time, wasting their organizations time, it’s wasting our time and
I’m not going to do it. | think we should pass this tonight in one form or another and move it along
because it’s an embarrassment at this point to send it back to the committee. The Mayor's amendment
doesn’t add anything significant to what the original legislation was except for the fact that it adds in the
document that he would be signing to join the initiative. | would suggest that my colleagues pass one
version of this and forget about sending it back to committee.
Alderman Siegel
In response to Alderman Clemons | would say that there are two options and we don’t have to accept the
Mayor’s amendment. If there is a desire to pass something this evening we have two alternatives. We
have either the recommendation by the Personnel/Administrative Affairs Committee to accept the
legislation as amended which we can vote on or failing the amended version before us will be the un-
amended version which we can then vote on. | don’t see that there is a requirement to send it back to
committee if in fact we want to pass something this evening. We have two options before us. My
colleague, Alderman Clemons, has said that there isn’t much material difference between the two so |
would assume that he would be more than content to deal with either one of those. | would suggest that
we debate at the full Board the legislation that has been referred by committee in its present form, accept
it or reject it in that form and then proceed on to the legislation that has originally appeared, if in fact the
amended legislation does not pass.
Alderman Lopez
| just wanted to point out that the changes that the Mayor made were...one of the strategies that was
discussed in the Personnel/Administrative Affairs Committee meeting was one response that we could
have done was to literally just take out everything that mentions the Welcoming America Initiative. | also
suggested in the meeting specifying exactly what we are committing to and | think the Mayor has done
exactly that. | think this is more of a middle ground than any other presentation because the amended
version that came out of the Personnel/Administrative Affairs Committee was in response to the fears
that it was a partisan effort or there were concerns that we didn’t know what the Welcoming America
Initiative was versus the original form which we could have just agreed to in the first place. The same
night that we introduced this resolution and then referred it to committee; we suspended the rules so that
we could congratulate the baseball team on their stunning season. Some virtue signaling is apparently
okay but others are not. We did not suspend that rule because it was important to discuss in committee
anything that was particularly important but we did suspend the rules for the baseball team. | think
sometimes we need to look at the situation that is right in front of us and not follow the process explicitly
every single time when the process that is before us is sufficient.
Alderman Cookson
| would like to thank all of the members of the public who came out this evening to speak to us and share
their thoughts on this piece of legislation. | learned a lot from them this evening. | learned more from
them this evening than the Mayors administration was prepared to present to us at the
Personnel/Administrative Affairs Committee meeting. There were pieces of the Welcoming America
Initiative, their website, the documentation that was presented on that website; and the Mayor and his
staff had absolutely no idea that the city had any obligation to. | appreciate that the Mayor at this point
adding that to the piece of legislation because it was me who identified it to the members of the
committee, again, who had not seen it at all. Alderman McCarthy was searching for it that evening
having no idea that it existed. The chairman of the committee had no idea that it existed. | don’t think
there was one member of that committee that evening that understood that there were obligations that
were set upon the city for it. You can approve it potentially by including it and making everybody aware
of it now. My question would be at this point, what else is there? There is a document that we sign but
