12-09-19 Council Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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REGULAR MEETING December 9, 2019 Pam Clays, 1106 Belview Street, South Bend, IN spoke in favor of Bill No. 19-88. Mindy Cushing, 51760 White Stable Lane, South Bend, IN spoke in favor or Bill No. 19-88. Councilmember Jake Teshka made a motion to adopt Bill No. 19-88. The motion was seconded by Councilmember Karen White and carried with a voice vote of eight (8) ayes. 19-89 A RESOLUTION OF THE COMMON COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF SOUTH BEND, INDIANA HONORING LOCAL ACTIVISTS FOR THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOUTH BEND COMMUNITY IN THE AREAS OF HOUSING, EDUCATION, AND PEACE BUILDING Bill No. 19-89 was tabled by request of the petitioner. REPORTS OF CITY OFFICES Pete Buttigieg, Mayor of the City of South Bend with offices located on the 141h floor of the County -City Building, South Bend, IN, stated, Thank you to all who are joining us tonight, whether here in the audience or watching online. I address you this evening with a mix of emotions, knowing that this is my eighth (81h) and final opportunity to present to the people of South Bend an account of the state of our City. On one (1) hand, it is difficult to accept that I will not be doing the same thing a year from now. For the better part of this decade, the City of South Bend has been the work of my life. That work has been so rewarding, so demanding, and so absorbing that it is difficult to believe it will end in a few short months. On the other hand, it is also difficult to believe that this really is my eighth (8`h) State of the City address. It feels in many ways as though I just got here; as though, just yesterday, I was knocking on doors on the West Side or in Harter's Heights, introducing myself, explaining how to say my name, and promising a fresh start for the City of South Bend. The passage of time only becomes believable when I reflect on how different the last few years of this decade are from the first (1 s`) few —how much has changed for our community since the snowy New Year's day in 2012 when I took the oath. In those years, streets have changed their course, structures have fallen and risen, entire departments in the City have been created or transformed, a new generation of public servants has brought their talents to help guide our community, and this small City of ours has become a living example of how the industrial Midwest can fashion a new and better life for itself: not through nostalgia or by way of impossible promises to return to the past, but by an insistence that change be made to work for us and a belief in our ability to own the future. Perhaps the most striking set of transformations amid South Bend's comeback has to do with our economy. When I took office, our community had been hit even harder than most by the blows of the Great Recession. Some neighborhoods looked as if they had been in a recession ever since the departure of Studebaker in 1963. We were even characterized (or I should say mischaracterized) as a "dying city" in 2011, a view that is typical of the attitude of the national press toward our part of the country as it saw young people leaving and manufacturing jobs dwindling. Yet by the time that article was published, South Bend had already demonstrated that it had the building blocks of a better future. A data economy was quietly emerging around the fiber infrastructure that lay beneath our feet. Mayor Buttigieg continued, A partnership with the University of Notre Dame was yielding extraordinary results, from the highly visible Eddy Street Commons development opened in 2009 to the far less visible but even more valuable smart sewer technology collaboration that suggested a new way for cities to benefit from research and experimentation on campus. Still, there was a crisis of confidence in our economy. By the time I took office in 2012 there were bitter debates over who should take the blame for the State's economic development arm not having done a major deal here in years, arguments over whether our region could be a good place to do business, and even earnest debates over whether the arrival of Eddy Commons would signal the death knell of any kind of restaurant scene in our downtown. Today we have our answer for whether a community like ours can thrive in the 21" century. Unemployment fell from eleven -point -eight percent (11.8%) to four -point -one percent (4.1 %) percent and, no less importantly, closed in on 5