A regular meeting of the Board of Aldermen was held Tuesday, November 26, 2019, at 7:30 p.m. in the
Aldermanic Chamber.
President Lori Wilshire presided; City Clerk Susan K. Lovering recorded.
Prayer was offered by City Clerk Susan K. Lovering; Alderwoman Mary Ann Melizzi-Golja led in the
Pledge to the Flag.
The roll call was taken with 14 members of the Board of Aldermen present; Alderman-at-Large Ben
Clemons arrived after roll call.
Mayor James W. Donchess and Assistant Corporation Counsel Dorie Clarke were also in attendance.
REMARKS BY THE MAYOR
Mayor Donchess
Of course we all understand that we have an affordable housing issue in the City. Vacancies are very
low; rents have gone up as have housing prices, but we still have some very good landlords and one of
them | visited today that is offering, on their own initiative, affordable housing right in Crown Hill on
Harbor Ave. The couple of Kyle and Erin Worth have bought a building at the corner of Harbor and
Otterson, formerly a commercial building on the first floor with residences above. They are completely
rehabbing this into 15 units; 10 units on the second floor, five on the first and are offering rents starting
in the $700.00’s in the smaller units and going up a little higher for the units downstairs that are up to
two bedrooms. But they both work in the social service industry, they are very committed to affordable
housing and they have undertaken this project in order to offer very high quality, but affordable housing
in one of our neighborhoods, Crown Hill. | want to invite any of you to visit there and | want to thank
them for their contribution to the affordable housing issue that we have.
Madam President there are a couple of issues on the Agenda that | want to mention. One is R-19-189,
this was recommended by the Budget Committee last night and would authorize us to do two things.
Most importantly, purchase a backup server for our computer system. We have seen, across the
nation, a number of cities have been hacked and then have been blackmailed by the hackers. This has
happened in | think Baltimore, Atlanta and smaller places. Some of the communities have paid
significant ransoms and have then realized some restoration of their systems, but not complete. The
IT Department here has been very diligent in developing many different security measures including
trial phishing with City employees to try to make sure that they do not respond to anything suspicious
but this is an additional step that will enable us to secure our system even more; which is to locate a
server off-site. It is a group of servers really but put on those servers all of the City data so that if we
were ever breached for any reason, we would be able to restore the data from off-site. So this is a
security measure that in my opinion is highly important. The Budget Committee of course
recommended it.
The same Resolution authorizes the purchase of the City’s first electric car. |, and this would be a used
Leaf, costing about $12,500.00. |, as the Mayor, have been driving for a long time a Public Works as |
did before. That would be used by someone else, | would use the Leaf and charge it at the charging
station right over on Elm Street. Again | think this should be the first of other city vehicles that we
acquire that are greener than the vehicles we have now. Again, this is a used vehicle, nothing very
luxurious, but certainly a vehicle that has a good range for in-city use.
| did want to mention, Madam President, the new version of the Collective Bargaining Agreement for
the civilian employees in the Police Department. We can certainly discuss this in more detail in the
Committee. This is a more expensive version than the one that was tabled last time. So we will
discuss the details, but at least see significant problems.
