The Avondale City Council met on October 15, 2025, to discuss a range of items including employee introductions, a proclamation for Government Communicators Day, presentations from the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) on two major freeway projects, a new property beautification program, opioid prevention grants, a public hearing on annexation, the annual comprehensive financial report, and proposed utility rate increases. The meeting also featured extensive public comments regarding social media posts by Councilmember Garcia, with both support and criticism voiced.
Paneda. Here. And Councilmember White. Thank you. Okay, thank you so much. Ron, next item, please. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and Council. Up first is we have our employee introductions. Uh Jody Novak, your director of Delaware and Services is going first. Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Council members. I am happy to introduce to you our new employee in the development services department, Alex Rodriguez. He is a building inspector in our building inspection team in the building services division. He started with us on January 6th. He had moved out here from Texas where he has a wealth of experience in building safety as well as fire services. And if you have any questions for him, please let us know. Yeah, so the first question I have to ask is it the cowboys? Are they your favorite team or okay? I didn't want to I didn't want to assume, but you never know from Texas. So now that you've been here uh a little over a month going on uh a little longer than a month, what are some of the things that you've learned about this city uh as compared to other places that you've worked that uh let you know that this is the place to be? A lot more structured, a lot more uh the uh my team is a lot more uh it's more of a team than I was just a bottom other municipality. Uh of course a lot bigger, but um this is a little more like what I was doing, not in Ron Walk, Texas. Okay. I'm very comfortable here. I'm very happy with the team that I've chosen. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you, and thank you for joining the team, and we appreciate you being here with all of your experience. Thank you. Next we have uh uh proclamation who uh Pierre, our director of marketing public relations will start us off with um honoring our marketing and public relations staff. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Thank you very much. I'm Pierre Sameri. I'm your director of marketing and public relations, and I'm joined here by my team from the NPR department. Um we wanted to be here today to uh acknowledge uh government communicators day, which was celebrated on February twenty-first uh this this year. Um as you know it's commonplace to um to recognize various professions in government. So you have things like engineering week, which you um acknowledge at your last council meeting, you have parts and recreation month, you have law enforcement month, and so on and so forth. And now you have government communicators day. In this case, we only get one day. So the purpose of government communicated stays to recognize the vital role of public communications in local government. Um this time I'd like to point out that it isn't just my department that's involved in communications. We do have various um employees throughout the city who help their departments in the communications functions from public safety to public works and park parts and rec. So um they are folks that are going above and beyond um behind the scenes doing their best to um highlight the contributions of this essential city function. These are just a quick overview of some of the many, many things we do. It's a diverse range of duties that we have within our department. So we are essentially the communications hub for media relations, digital media, graphic design and marketing, and branding services in Avondale. I want to take a moment to uh just highlight some of our successes. Uh we are uh the marketing and PR department is one of the smaller departments in the city. We are essentially just seven people handling everything from graphic design to photography to all your media releases, uh, as well as the merchandise that you see in our um visitor and visitor center. So last year we responded to about 1,500 projects for our departments. Our departments are really busy, so they keep us busy, which is job security there.