City Council Meeting

The parking lot was full at last night's city council meeting. I got there about 8:45 and thought by that time, I'd have missed everything, but no, public comments were still being made. If the half dozen I caught were emblematic of the previous hours worth of comments, the council hear a lot of "The program or position I am speaking about is important, nay vital, to the well-being of Carbondale as a community and eliminating it will lead the city down a dark path, far from the happy shiny place it will remain if you keep the position or program which I am defending." It appears that combining the duties of either the affirmative action or developmental offices into another office sends a very bad message about what sort of community the citizens of Carbondale desire.

You'd think, after a hour and 45 minutes of telling the council how cutting any programs or offices would harm the city, the speakers would want to see the impact of their words. Nope. After citizen comments ended and the council moved on to more mundane topics, fully half the room exited to continue explaining to each other in the hallway why the proposed city budget is bad.

Meanwhile the city moved on to other things, like approving the old Animal Crackers building at the corner of Walnut and Illinois at a cost of $70,000 and demolishing it, after further testing for asbestos, for a further cost of $32,000, handled by May's Trucking, a minority owned company that did a lot of work for the city during the derecho last year. Councilman Hayes did ask the source of the money for the purchase and was told from the parking fund, which apparently has plenty of money for the purchase. The plan is to put a parking lot there to serve the planned intermodal transport station that would serve as a hub for both trains and community buses.

Moving on to council comments, all of the council members noted three things:

1. None of them liked the measures proposed in the budget.
2. All of them were disappointed that the people who spoke didn't stay around to listen to council responses.
3. None of the citizens who spoke addressed where the funding would come from to pay for the program/office they defended. I noticed that as well. I didn't hear any speaker propose a souce of money to save the defneded office with.

All of the council members, with the exception of Hayes, indicated they would likely support the budget as presented. Hayes defended the programs and offices housed at the Eurma Hayes Center and said he would want to come back and look at those programs slated for cutting.

Councilman Fritzler, during his comments, made the only proposal of alternatives to cutting the offices, suggesting that the city transfer money generated from the hotel/motel tax to the general fund, somehting I didn't know you could do. Apparently, since Carbondale is a home rule community, we have the ability to do this written into the city code and Fritzler suggested taking $100,000 from the HM tax fund, since we generated about $600,000 a year in hotel taxes. Fritzlers other suggestion was a favorite of his, cutting the amount spent by the mayor on travel, to which Mayor Cole responded that the new TJ Maxx was coming as a result of the traveling the mayor had done. Somehouw, I don't think Fritzler was convinced.

Councilman Jack commented that he was disappointed in the number of people who had contacted him and the council about the budget before the meeting, noting that he had gotten surprisingly few calls about with, with which Mayor Cole concurred. Jack then left himself wide open by asking how many people had tried to call him. Three hands immediately shot up, saying they had called and left messages which Jack had not returned. Jack immediatly backpedaled saying he would get back to them.

Both Wissmann and Mayor Cole pointed out a contributing factor to the city's financial problems was the recently announced cutting of $500,000 in payments from the state to the city and the lack of action by the state on pensions. The mayor then commented that over a dozen or so positions have been or will be cut in the past year and that several of the programs eyed for elimination wouldn't be needed if the schools worked more closely with the city so the extra educational programs funded in part by the city weren't needed. He then closed the meeting at 10:14.