Board of Aldermen 12-23-2019 Page 19
Alderman Lopez
| just want to express my sympathy for Mayor Donchess for having to take the position that he is taking. |
appreciate that you are doing your job and you are looking at the whole City. | am sure you love being
Scrooge tonight and telling people that no you don’t think the money that they want is there. | know you
don’t necessarily want to take that position because you do appreciate Fire and Police. It is a tough job to
be in but | mean at the end of the day, so is theirs. So | think both sides have made very good points; both
sides have advocated very strongly for their constitutes. And | think as Board of Aldermen we are going to
have to take a hit on this when it comes to budget season because it is going to have to come out of
somewhere.
Alderman Laws
| couldn’t agree more. | think Police is certainly a Division of City Government that you want to be able to
hire at their leisure and not out of desperation and this is something that we are absolutely going to need to
do to make it so they can staff with good officers, which we have. We can’t put a feather in our cap about
how great the Police Department and then not support them when they are coming to us for help. So |
support this.
Alderman Dowd
I'll start out by saying that | am going to support this but | did have an extensive conversation with the
Mayor and | understand his concerns relative to these costs and health costs. | have asked the Mayor right
after the first of the year to have us sit down with the health insurance people and give us a full explanation
on what is going on and possible ways we can mitigate some of this going forward. Also, we need to have
a discussion as a full group on the budget pressures for this upcoming year and look at what we might have
to do as a group going forward to ensure that the tax rate doesn’t get out of hand. | look forward to having
those discussions after the New Year.
Alderman Lopez
Mayor if you are visited by three ghosts this evening, you should call the Police and see what they can do.
A viva voce roll call was taken which resulted as follows:
Yea: Ald. O’Brien, Ald. Gidge, Ald. Harriott-Gathright, Ald. Dowd
Ald. Klee, Ald. Laws, Ald. Lopez, Ald. Caron, Ald. Kelly,
Ald. Jette, Ald. Melizzi-Golja, Ald. Tencza, Ald. Schmidt, Ald. Clemons
Ald. Wilshire 15
Nay: 0
MOTION CARRIED
Resolution R-19-194 declared duly adopted.
