Utica, New York Common Council Meeting Records

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Common Council Meeting with Committee of the Whole Meeting June 17th, 2026

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Common Council Meeting with Committee of the Whole Meeting June 17th, 2026

12 matches · 3 unidentified
Unidentified speaker 10:31
So first thing, Councilman Betrus called me, told me Rome had a resolution. I have a good relationship with the Commissioner of Codes in Rome. Called him immediately. He answered the phone. And I asked them about their legislation and what they do and how it came about and what happened. Basically what they do, they don't proactively look for trees. They respond to complaints from neighbors about trees of concerns to the neighbors. When they get a complaint from a neighbor about a tree of concern, they send their arborist to evaluate the tree. If the arborist determines that the tree is a danger for a variety of reasons, mostly it's dead. Then they tell the homeowner to remedy. The homeowner doesn't remedy. The city contracts a third party to remedy, cut down the tree, and they bill the homeowner as if we would in an abatement to move what they consider an emergency hazard. Now, the problems with it, with enforcement that I can pick up right away, Law will talk about more from a codes perspective. Kind of easy for us to enforce on those terms, but for the fact that we don't know where property lines are. If there's not a survey, I don't know whose tree that is. I know it looks like it's in the neighbor's yard, I know, so I could end up billing the wrong homeowner. And that would be my biggest fear, or not giving sufficient notice. Sufficient notice to a homeowner that goes. And then, you know, it's not a codes concern, but to some extent it is. It's more DPW. But from a codes standpoint, the right to access, right? Can you trespass on private property? And then if you're bringing trucks and saws and stuff on private property, they go. I asked Mark that, he said it's never come up. It doesn't mean, um, it's not good. The law is relatively recent. He wrote it himself. But he said that he's had success with it and he likes it. But like I said, my fear is the property lines. It's not so much the enforcement, the ability to enforce, because if the arborist is doing all the work, we're just responding to a complaint. So it's not the work, it's the property issues.
46:50
Yeah, it's Councilwoman Betrus speaking. Thank you. Uh, so yeah, I don't feel comfortable. I've said this before, I want the actual fees of what everything already is, and then the council can establish those officially. I don't want to say replace those fees with current rates established by the Parks and Recreation Department because that is giving up our powers from the council to the executive branch, and that's not what we're here to do. So otherwise, I'm I think we're going to be agreeing on a lot of these. So if we can just maintain—