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

28 matches · 9 unidentified

Unidentified speaker 3:00:49

It's going to be short, believe it or not. It doesn't sound like it, but— and I got into this business because it was a great opportunity. Over those— these 30 years, over and over again, New York State has continued to cut the feet off of landlords, pass legislation to make it more and more difficult to do business, and the result, like everything else that New York State does to hinder small business, is that the cost of doing business goes up. And every time a piece of legislation is passed, it makes things more difficult. This good cause eviction is going to make things even that much more difficult than they already are, and it's going to cause the cost of rents to go up, the cost of doing business to go up. So I would ask you members of the Common Council to vote no should this legislation come up, that you vote no. We don't need it. There's already plenty of legislation on the books to protect tenants. There are— Codes Department. To keep landlords in check. We now have a lead registry in New York State to deal with the lead issue. So no, the good cause eviction law is not going to deal with the lead issue. We have a lead registry. So I appreciate your time. Thank you.

3:27:23

Thank you. A resolution to approve and endorse the city's New York Plays application for the MLK Dream Park in Cornhill, whereas Governor Hochul announced the New York Places for Learning, Activity, and Youth Socialization initiative to support design, construction, and renovation of playgrounds that are open to the public and community communities across the state. Whereas New York Place is overseen by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, Historical Preservation, and administered by the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York. Whereas the city is requesting $528,806 in funding with the required 20% match provided by CDBG funding. Now therefore be it resolved that the Common Council of the City of Utica Utica hereby does approve and endorse the submission of a grant request by the City under New York Plays program to fund a new playground in MLK Dream Park in Cornhill. Votes, please.

3:45:07

No parking at all times, Section 216, 360, Schedule D, no parking at all times, Wynn Hospital, 111 Hospital Drive on the Columbia Street side, CNY Cardiology, 601 State Street on the Columbia Street side, along the Southern curb line adjacent CNY Cardiology on Columbia Street from the crosswalk with State Street, 420 feet— 420 feet eastbound to the rear driveway access to CNY Cardiology. Along the northern curb line adjacent to Wynn Hospital on Columbia Street from the crosswalk with State Street, 311 feet eastbound to the driveway access to the Wynn Hospital hospital emergency room.

Unidentified speaker 2:11:02

Well, again, my name is Tim Julian, former Utica Mayor, former Utica Common Council President, and current County Legislator in the 19th Legislative District, and also the County Minority Leader. I'm here tonight to speak out against good cause eviction, which many people on this council may be considering, and I know some people are looking for. I will cut to the chase and go past the point where I state that landlords are small businesses and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and pump hundreds of thousands of dollars into the economy each and every year. I'm just going to talk quickly about the eviction process as my time here is limited. And as you know, we already endure several-step process to evict someone, a process that takes months and costs us hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in service fees, legal costs— and we pay our own lawyers, not free legal aid attorneys— and lost income due to failure to pay rent. Most times after an eviction is finalized, we walk into an apartment that is no longer habitable and requires thousands of dollars of repairs. Good cause eviction will add to this time period and stretch the eviction process out longer, costing landlords, uh, small business owners tens of thousands of dollars each year. A quick example: I was in court on May 26th for an eviction of a person that has only rented since February of this year. He has threatened the lives of my employees. He has threatened to destroy the property. He has used racial slurs against his ethnic neighbors. He has thrown lighter fluid on police officers. He has threatened suicide, amongst other things. I started the eviction process on March 16th of this year, and when I go to court on May 26th, I was told he wanted to stay until June 30th. I stated I wanted him out on the 15th. I was then told, told if I could not agree to his demands, I would have to have a hearing with him, and the soonest date for a hearing was September 2nd. So I had to go along with this request or lose 2 more months of rent at the very least. As I stated the last time I spoke, no landlord wants to evict a tenant that is good, and being a good tenant is not a high bar. Pay your rent, keep your space clean, and don't be a nuisance to your neighbors. That's it. As a landlord, I can reasonably say most of my tenants don't know how to turn a screw. That's fine because not everyone should be a homeowner. For that, they pay landlords a fee to live worry-free knowing their needs will be met. Enacting good cause eviction will force more landlords to go out of business and further exacerbate the housing crisis that you state this law will solve. I'll stop there. Thank you.

2:25:43

We represent the tenants in Utica. We've heard from a lot of landlords here today, but Utica is a city with over 50% tenants and we're here to speak for them. What Good Cause does is simply say that if you follow your lease and follow the rules of the lease, you have a right to remain in your home. You do still have to follow the rules of your lease. Nobody is saying that you can do whatever you want and avoid being evicted. It actually allows for all of the situations that were just listed are still allowed for evictions in that case. We've spoken multiple times about the need for the addressing of the housing crisis, not just here in Utica, but across New York State and across the entire country. What we need to do is fix that. Saying good cause won't create more housing is like saying Medicare won't build more hospitals. We need one thing to fix the overall problems. There are multiple solutions to the problem, and we can be creative about how we do we've seen the evidence of Good Cause Working in multiple upstate cities across the state. We can give you all the data, and I will pass to other people to speak up more. Thank you.

Unidentified speaker 2:46:10

So I got invited by Patrick Johnson to come to one of the call-ins here, I believe it was in this room, with the most dangerous men in Utica. And to my surprise, they were 17 years old and less. So these are the people in the community who are the shooters. And now it's getting even worse where they're trying to recruit younger children to be the shooters because they know that they have a certain type of immunity from prosecution. So instead of having spot shooters, I think we should be investing in the community, having programs for the children, not just in Cornhill, but also on the West Side. There's no programming on the West Side for the children. So that's my first concern. And then secondly, with this technology of the FLOCK, The plates are connected to the people who own the vehicles, and the system can locate when and where these vehicles are. So, you know, for the last 30 days. So it tracks it for 30 days, and then it wipes it out of the system if nobody downloads it for use. So you can, you know, be looking after people in that way. And this new tool offers an unprecedented level of surveillance power. And I believe that's too much power To be trusted within a corrupt power structure that favors corporate interests. And now think about the opioid epidemic. So in the opioid epidemic, we were trusting that these pharmaceutical companies, when they told doctors and they overtook them and were able to say that these are safe, there's nothing wrong, they're not addictive. This is not just something that happens in the pharmaceutical industry. It happens in a pattern throughout throughout our culture. So the contract with FLOCK states that the data will be shared when required to do so by law. And so back in the time in New York State, if people remember, there was a big debate over whether or not we were going to allow fracking in New York State. At that time, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI made people who were opposed to fracking on a watch list.

3:46:33

Second. E&A transfer fiscal year 2025-2026, New York State CHIP funding, New York State CHIP funding, um, $3,920,285.55. Votes, please. 9 days adopted.

Unidentified speaker 31:21

And then we would post the house unsafe to be occupied. But either way, the ultimate remedy is a ticket to city court. And the problems that we have with tickets with city court are so much different than I think everybody else has. It's, you know, we hear about lenient judges and out-of-state landlords. Most of the problems we have in city court are people who show up to city court and say, "I don't have the money to fix the problem you named." You told me I gotta fix my back deck. My back deck, I got 3 estimates. The lowest one is $22,000. I got $400 in my bank. So the court finds them $200 and says, "God love you." Now you got $200.