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

13 matches · 8 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?
Unidentified speaker 24:11
you know, the city, like, if, if, if you got a truck on Pelletary Avenue, two houses, and your neighbor doesn't care, I'm not gonna break your chops, right? Like, um, it's, it's situation by situation. My officers get worried about that every time they see these laws. So every time you guys propose a law, I bring it to my department, we talk about it. Just ask me, what do you guys think? This is the law we came up with. But these laws, they're, they're just worried about more on our plate, additional duties. Like, okay, now I gotta look for this, now I gotta look for this. And, um, you know what I told them is what I'll tell you guys. I don't look at these things as obligations. I look at them as tools. It's not something that we're going to go around the city scouring for huge vehicles, but if there's something particularly disruptive to a neighborhood or that doesn't look like it's in concert with the neighborhood, then we'll sign. Well, they'd be going there anyways, but in the past they'd be able go, they go there and they say there's nothing they can do about it. Now they can do it, right?
Unidentified speaker 30:45
I did hear your own appointment. That's one of the reasons we got the new software. Um, holes that I've seen in the Codes Department that I've, I've expressed in the past, um, and I've, I've had these concerns forever. I don't know if they're willing to say, but the, the, the, the 3 concerns I've had is a lot of people know when we work. And they do construction after we work, especially in scenic and historic districts, because it's more expensive to do scenic and historic districts. So I've asked for overtime to do on weekends. I've never been given overtime. It's because they're union contracts. I have to pay them overtime. I can't just have them do it. And it's frustrating to me because I get calls from— like, there's in every scenic and historic district, there's like 2 or 3 neighbors that really believe in that stuff. And they call and he put up new siding, he put up a new porch. And we weren't there to stop it. And, um, so the weekends are tough. The other thing that's tough is, um, the, the ride-alongs, like, um, with DPW. I'd like to do that, but then I would need overtime to do that, because if somebody improperly disposes of green waste, DPW can't write them a ticket. So they're just picking up their waste if Codes didn't catch it earlier in the day. Um, so that's a lot of people don't flag is put out after 4:30. And so that's— having guys be able to work those shifts, plus they work better sometimes when they're on their own, it's peaceful, it's office, because I think what a lot of council people or administrative people that I talk to don't understand is how many appointments they have every day. My codes officers will have between 5 and 8 appointments per day. So you want, like, everybody on the council and the mayor and and administrative people always want us to patrol the neighborhoods, but like those appointments are their first obligation. So a guy might have to write up 8 cases and be in 8 different apartments in a day, and then you wanted them to catch the neighbor that put their garbage out improperly on top of that, and, and they always don't have that extra time, you know. Um, so those things. And, uh, the other thing is just the volumes that are coming down. I mean, We're going to amend the vacant housing registry and, you know, right now we're one secretary short in the department and we're going to amend the vacant housing registry. They're looking at a permit for chickens. They're looking at other legislation that could require permits and patrols. And then after a while it's kind of like, you know, you send me tools like this, okay, they're doing the same thing, they can react to it. You send me a new permit or legislation, I got to figure out who's going to do that.
Unidentified speaker 36:45
And a lot of our, properties. I mean, we could talk about them now. We talked about Genesee Towers and staff meeting for like 45 minutes upstairs. Um, a lot of these properties, man, that are these huge buildings, um, we could think, think about something like Jack was talking about, something what happens when the elevator doesn't work, or how can we tweak those laws. But a lot of those properties, we're really good with the staff. We know the staff there, they work there. The problems they're having are from corporate. You know, the boiler broke. You have a maintenance person in there. If they can't fix the boiler, you know, in an apartment like that, it could be $150,000 problem. They got to get $150,000 from Ohio and nobody can get in touch with them.