The Cleveland Heights City Council convened for a meeting focused on approving routine municipal resolutions, addressing a significant emergency regarding snow removal capabilities, and listening to extensive public testimony primarily advocating for the funding of legal representation for immigrants facing deportation. The atmosphere was marked by strong community advocacy for immigrant rights and a collaborative but cautious administrative response to both the immediate snow crisis and long-term policy proposals.
Okay, I'd like to call this Cleveland Heights City Council meeting to order. It is what is it? January 20th at 840, 740. Eddie, would you call the role? CUDA. Here. Cohen. Here. Do it for Posh? Here. Larson. Yeah. Cobb. Here. All right. Any amendments to the agenda? None. We'll move on to approval of the minutes from January 7th and January 12th. Any problem with the agenda with the minutes from those two agendas. Okay, good. And then we'll go to communications from the mayor. Thank you, Mr. President. Just wanted to cover two things this evening. So one, I've had a chance to meet with mom most members from city council, and my goal is to include at least one goal from every council member in our work plan for the year. Um the current state of the facilities and the work of a lot of the folks in the administration. I also wanted to talk about snow removal for a moment. So I have seen all of the comments on social media. I've received a lot of emails, and I hear them. And I agree that we need to do better. I have been out there looking at streets myself. I've been going through our nearby suburbs and looking at their streets, talking with folks in other cities' administrations to learn about their best practices. Some folks may have heard we uh had uh assault shortage, and we are able to locate 150 tons that was transported to Cleveland Heights over the weekend to get us through until our next delivery on Wednesday. Um I have arranged meetings with the public works and parks and recreation departments so that we can begin to go through every single facet of uh the snow removal process. So today we are talking about staffing, we're talking about shifts, we're talking about equipment, equipment that's in need of repair. Um, we're even talking about getting recalibrated the devices on the back of the trucks that spread the salt. So those meetings are ongoing, and we hope to have a specific list of improvements that we're going to make to be able to present to council and to the public. Um the next snowfall is forecasted for Wednesday. Um we should have enough salt on hand, but again, we are still working through a lot of the structural issues that I think in the long term will help us to deliver uh better quality snow removal. But I ask people to be patient. I will Wednesday night be out on trucks myself so that I can observe for myself how uh things work, and I look forward to, like I said, sharing updates to council and to the public on uh the improvements that we plan to make. But you're not gonna be driving the truck now. Not until I get a CDL. So keep everybody safe. All right. So we have no departmental reports, so we'll go to um report of the council clerk. Nothing to report. Not a thing. All right. Uh in that case, we'll go to public comment.