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

5 matches · 1 unidentified

1:37:38

I would have got the phone call last night. I wouldn't think something was up, but you heard this because I did receive phone calls last night.

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.

22:39

Every day I'm getting a phone call, we're damaging a garbage can, we're driving on their lawn.

1:36:36

I'm kind of taken aback by the group approaching me last night, calling me on the phone, and then today we're talking about raising a flag. And when I told them we might be able to do it next year, if we had more time to think about it. So I'm kind of, 'cause I was gonna vote for this.

3:19:47

Thank you, Mr. President. Um, I'm just going to pick on Deputy or Commissioner Sokolowski, uh, very briefly and just kind of explain the process that you go, go through to clean up encampments. Who do you have to call? What is— and how, how many times a week and so on and so forth do you clean up the same encampments. I think that that's kind of important because I don't think people realize the job that you do, and if they picked up the phone and called you once in a while, they would know.