06-22-15 Common Council Meeting Minutes

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REGULAR MEETING JUNE 22, 2015 Valerie Mora, 4207 Norton Dr., South Bend — At the end of the day the numbers have to add up. The one thing that I am most frustrated about is the numbers never seem to be the same from day to day and they're never substantiated. The Mayor's people don't understand, they did get 30% increases. If you did a market study on those, they were being paid lead market positions, when most of South Bend, like Mr. Davis was talking about, or in the lag the market position. So how can they even relate to what people in South Bend are going through? If you want to talk about the County, the County employee medical benefits blow away what they are giving to their employees. It's ridiculous. I had a huge house in the County, I could afford to run it better than this tiny house in the city. Why, because the taxes are high, the water bill doubled my electric bill doubled.. I went from 4,000 to 1,400 sq. ft. and I lost two people in the process you have to look at the cost of living here and your very real salaries. Look how you are treating your average employee whether it is a city employee or your average person on the street, and the kind of jobs that you are negotiating in this town then you can talk about it. The Mayors numbers simply don't add up. So he needs to come up. The people making proposals she be able to have spreadsheets with plan A. In plan A here is the bottom line, here's the cost, here's the benefit, this is the strength of this, and here is the weakness and so on. So you guys can make a good decision. The little time that I've been watching they keep coming back with their hands out, their numbers have changed, and their spreadsheets have changed, how can you guys make a decision? I wouldn't be able to do that, good luck. I wish you good luck as you're representing me. You almost have to be a magician to figure it out around here. Thank you. Jesse Davis, P.O. Box 10205, South Bend —Not only does everything seem to always increase, increase, you are never going to be able to draw people here if they can't afford to live here. Pretty soon you will have competition here. Mishawaka is starting to put up hotels and a convention center in downtown Mishawaka. I will be watching real close to see how many conventions and people sign up over in Mishawaka that don't sign up over here that you keep dumping the tax dollars into. Everybody is talking about fiscal responsibility, this woman had it right, no numbers match. I brought documents in last week and showed you where Mr. Horvath's numbers that were handed to the committee meeting earlier today, and also numbers that were handed to a judge in a court case under a signed affidavit of law did not match the numbers the Mayor walked in here with and handed to all the people in this room on the sewer insurance program. How much money are we spending on replacing vehicles because we want to change over to CNG gas? That we were making a deal with Transpo to set up a pumping station. Who is in charge of the CNG gas, who's making money on that? As a lot of these vehicles being replaced are being replaced just on the fact that they were on CNG gas. There are some hidden agendas here. I've seen some trash trucks that were out, and now they're being replaced with new ones, they didn't look all that bad. I would be curious to see maintenance records. There are a ton of equipment purchases going on in this city and how much has to do with CNG gas. Samuel Brown, 222 E. Navarre St., South Bend— I represent Citizens United for a Better Government a watchdog group on wasteful spending. He put $30 million in to our Smart Streets, round -a- bouts, but we need our equipment and different things. Maybe we shouldn't do this yet, as we need to take care of that. It's called priorities. You can't go out and buy a new car if you have a roof to repair. I'm glad to see a lot of people coming to the council and getting upset. They are going to get more upset as time goes on. There is a lot of wasteful spending and we need to be more accountable for our money. The citizens are finally stepping up. I like to hear everybody come up and question some of this spending. Christopher Huff, 1831 College St., South Bend — Just to be blunt I am neither here speaking in opposition nor in favor I do have several comments. The first two, thank you Councilmember Oliver Davis for asking what the percentage increase in the proposal is, as it was failed to be mentioned by our Department Director in his presentation. Thank you Councilmember Dieter for asking the actual dollar figure for the increase, as that also was failed to be mentioned by our Department Director to those of us in the audience during Council. You may have heard about this during committee meetings but we didn't know about it. I want to ask, Mishawaka has a provision to pick up all, to take all not just what's in the dumpster. Is that a part of what is in our service? Does this Council receive a capital improvement program annually for a five (5) year and one (1) year time period for this and other Public Works projects, if not you should be. The 23