Utica, New York Common Council Meeting Records

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Common Council Meeting with Committee of the Whole Meeting February 4th, 2026

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Common Council Meeting with Committee of the Whole Meeting February 4th, 2026

11 matches · 6 unidentified
15:53
And I also just took, um, at a couple— just a couple locations, um, of pictures of what I was trying to explain. Uh, they're not the best pictures, but, um, I've talked to each one of you guys, or for the most part, and I believe all of you have the same issues in your district. I know last time when we brought this up they started talking about like tractor-trailer cabs and all that, and which, which would be a nuisance to if somebody was there next door to them. But I wasn't, um, that's not what I was talking about. That's not where my complaints have been. My complaints have been mostly, you can see by the pictures, where you have people operating businesses out of their house, where they have multiple trailers, multiple you know, pay loaders, plows. The one place in North Utica, they actually were next to the woods, and nobody really knows who owned the property. They took it upon themselves to cut trees down and move all the property and move the vehicles over there. And I've had multiple complaints. I talked to Marcus. When codes would go there, they would come back and tell me— Marcus would come back and tell me that there's really nothing that they can do about it. I know like last year on Lorraine Ave, we had a guy bought a bus and it sat there for, I'm pretty sure it's gone now, sat there for almost a year while he was remodeling it. Just stuff like that. I know I talked to you, Joe, you have the same issue. Talked to Bob, you had the issue. So it's just something, and we're not here, Marcus will speak of it too, we're not really here to go— for these codes guys to go out and look for all problems. It's more or less the people that are nuisance when there's a problem, they have something to help us out with. So that's what I'm trying to do. So, Marques, you want to talk on it?
20:24
And the other thing that I talked about last, last time, kind of like when we— when they come in front of the zoning board, 4-foot fence is the minimum. But some people want a 6-foot fence, and they come and give their case. So if there is a complaint, and the guy— let's say, for example, it's summertime, a guy's got a food truck, and there's a complaint, somebody's really complaining, making a big thing— they could come up and we can amend that to give that guy a permit to do that. So again, it's not to try to hurt anybody, it's to try to help these guys. I just got frustrated when you call. And all of you guys probably do the same thing. You call up and they send codes there and you say, what happened? And they say, there's nothing, nothing, it's nothing in there we can do.
Unidentified speaker 50:44
I think you have to keep in mind that first of all, whether you believe it or not, my wife and I were skiers. We used to ski at Woods Valley all the time, and even then it was very expensive. Woods Valley, how they didn't go bankrupt for about 5 summers in a row, or winters. Now last year we had a 1970s winter. This year we have a 1967 winter. 70s winter. I haven't seen this in a long time. And these ski places, they are profit-making. When you set your rates for a municipal opportunity, you don't look to private enterprises who have to make a profit to stay in business. How Woods Valley survived those preceding 5 years, I don't know. So I think you have to keep in mind that your attractiveness of as a city is built upon your facilities. You show me another city that has a ski operation right in the middle of the city. It has swimming pools in the city. It has a golf course in the city that unlike the ski slope, our golf course can stand up with anybody. The ski slope has one hill, really. It used to have what they called the bunny hill for the beginning skier. That was discontinued. A lot of children go there with toboggans and tubes, and they usually go there free. They just come down the hill, that's all. But because it's secure from traffic, it's an attraction. Utica, in fact, just the other day, my wife and I were driving by there and I said, "See, here we are in the middle of January and that ski tow isn't working." And it didn't work last year, as far as I know. What Utica has to offer is so unique, uh, and the people who, uh, go there on that one hill— you got to be a pretty good skier to go down the main hill of Valley View, which is really—
42:37
But, you know, so thank you for answering the questions that you have. I mean, we jumped into another topic, so I didn't want to just ignore the fact that you were here and, you know, we're getting into something else. But I think that if you, if you really look at what it costs, um, to have to travel, because there really isn't something in our, in our area um, to be able to, to be able to ski it. I mean, I know that my son— I know my husband and my son are not going anywhere on winter break because they want to go home. They want to stay home and actually ski there because they did it last year and enjoyed themselves. So just to, just to look at the, the total picture of it, I mean, you know, we've got to look at where we're going and how we're getting there. And, and to be able to have something in our backyard, we've got to make it feasible so that we're not running into the the, the, the picture again of not being able to be able to fulfill skiing in a place that we live in. So just, just, just something.
Unidentified speaker 1:15:42
go ahead. Well, I can just say, I can speak to as to why you're getting it now. Typically this was done up until the last couple years where it kind of fell through the cracks. Typically they were submitted at the same time. When you got the budget, you got legislation to correspond for the sewer rents. It got sent down now so you have it ahead of time and you guys can make your decisions come budget season and not forget that you have to change the rates in accordance with the budget.