08-26-13 Common Council Meeting Minutes

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REGULAR MEETING AUGUST 26, 2013 President Dieter that they were going to restore Reports of City Offices and looks forward to having that back on the agenda. This is a great way to bolster communication between the Council and the Administration, and appreciate all the efforts that are going on in that regard. A st few recent things that updated the Council on in the City. First of all on Saturday, we had our 1 City of South Bend Employee Picnic. It was a great day to have it, because if you opened the paper, on Saturday, you saw that there were a couple of letters to the Editor thanking the normally thankless tasks of the Water Works and well as the Police and Fire Departments for different things that they have done benefitting citizens and businesses in our community. So, it was nice to be able to say thank you to our many city employees by holding that event at Coveleski Stadium. He thanked the Parks & Recreation Department as well as the South Bend Silverhawks for making that possible and hoped to continue to do that from year to year because it is a great way to get city team together. He stated that he was somewhat surprised that no Councilmember’s lined up at the dunk tank opportunity. I can tell you that there was unexpectedly deadly aim and upper arm strength in some of the children of our city employees. He stated that they managed to put him in the dunk tank about 10 – 20 times, but it was all for United Way and all in good fun. If you would like to get him wet, he will extend that invitation next year as well. He stated that he believes Councilmember’s would be more than gracious to take their place in the dunk tank. He stated that he had a meeting last week of the Anti-Violence rd Commission, it was the 3 meeting of the commission, open to the public and an opportunity for those members of the commission who participated in a training at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York to share some of the findings and lessons that they learned with the commission. He stated that Councilmember White who is the Council Representative on the Commission is interested in created a more detailed opportunity for us, and could not be here tonight, but want for us to give an update to the Council since the Council has an interest and looking for a way to do that maybe in a committee meeting to come. But just by way of a quick report, that Council which is chaired by Police Chief Teachman and Rev. Eddie Miller has continued to develop the group violence reduction strategy after the pattern of what has been applied in a number of cities through the national network for safe communities. He wanted to stress that routine law enforcement of course is continuing, this is a way to bring a focus strategy following social network analysis of the gang’s and groups most likely to be involved in violence and targeting our resources there. For those most interested in the strategy, he urged to familiarize themselves with the book “Don’t Shoot” which documents a lot of it and the history and strategy and the development of that strategy. He thanked the different community st institutions that have come together to help us bring in some technical support in that 1 stage of the strategy, which include Memorial Hospital, St. Joe Regional Medical Center, the African- American Community Foundation, Notre Dame and the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County. Another important piece of news was the introduction of the Open Data Portal. A big part of how we are trying to advance transparency in South Bend with help of Socrata, a data software company which provides us with our data software for the City and the Code for America fellows who are about half-way through their engagement. He stated that they rolled out data about southbendin.gov He stated that hopefully everyone has had the chance if not he st encouraged everyone to spend some time on the website it’s the very 1 version, it’s 1.0, so right now it has twelve (12) data sets and ten (10) GIS Maps, but that could go up by a factor of 10 and we hope it will. There is an option on the website for members of the public to suggest other data sets that they think would be a good idea. Needless to say, Councilmember’s will have added insight on some data sets that will be productive to put on line. Another goal among other things is to reduce the expense and effort associated with Access to Public Records Requests because so much more of the information is just out there for citizens and journalists to get on their own before they even have to come into our legal department requesting data, so we hope to add more and more information to that. Also, the Council is aware of this but wanted to stress the importance of tomorrow’s public meeting with the EPA that they are going to hold concerning Beck’s Lake. They have been testing and doing some evaluation of the area. He stated that he had asked them to come in earlier this summer to show what they knew so far, but they indicated what they were testing wouldn’t be done until August. So now that August has come we are glad that they are back to reveal to us what they have found and what steps we might need to take to be sure that we are being responsible in terms of environmental and safety concerns and he stated that he will be there as well listening to their presentation at 4:00 p.m. tomorrow at the Charles Black Center. A number of members of the committee were able to be there for the initial presentation on the budget August 14, 2013 focusing on job creation and cutting overall spending by 3.4% while funding our key priorities, re-measuring our streets, 3