The Council Bluffs City Council held a study session and regular meeting on July 13, 2026, addressing a wide range of topics including civil rights ordinance changes, police and fire supervisory wages, data center regulations, and various administrative items. Key discussions centered on maintaining the pay gap for police supervisors, a 90-day zoning audit for data centers, and amendments to city council rules.
Good afternoon, everybody. All right. We have just two things on our study session. The first is to review the agenda. So is there any questions from the consent agenda? I just had one question on 4E. Be more of a public works question, I think, for Matt, maybe or Mark. You know, that project that Carly did on state orchard, and I remember seeing it in planning. We stopped it at Cedar Lane. And we didn't go up to the other, I'll call the other Cedar Lane. Is that called Cedar Lane as well? Was there any is there any plan to finish that or would we just we're just gonna hold off on that completely? Right now there isn't a plan to move forward with that. We're stopping where we're at for now. Okay. Um we're always looking at the CIP though. Understood. Okay, thank you. Any other questions on the consent agenda? Okay, we're gonna have uh one public hearing tonight. 5A this to uh approve the additional concrete uh construction at the council boss recycling center. Um as we spoke last time, we just have been putting it in the operating budget to continue paving down there so we can improve the the facility, make it uh a little more user-friendly for all the people that visit there and and just make it easier for us to maintain long term. Okay. Any questions? All right, six A and B. Whitney, I believe these are yours. They are mine, and they are one or the other. So you do not want to do both. Um, you want to do one or the other. So really um the main distinction, and I know that I provided a sort of lengthy council communication to outline the changes to the law. Um, the legislature decided that it wanted to make significant changes to the Civil Rights Act in the state of Iowa. Some of those changes we need to implement, some of them the Civil Rights Commission is asking that you not implement. And so the big distinction between the two different versions of the ordinance is taking out the word gender identity. Gender identity has been a protected class in the council bluffs municipal code since 2008, um, which was previously allowed because the civil rights um state level law had been a floor and not a ceiling. And this year they decided to change that and make it a ceiling so that no city or uh municipal government could offer additional classes of protection other than those allowed by state law. And so they passed a law, I believe it was in March, the date is in your information, basically saying that we couldn't enact any further legislation saying that you know we would have any other provisions going forward, and then they changed it the last session to say enact or enforce. So we had already met as a civil rights commission prior to that time, and the civil rights commissioners, given how long it has been part of our ordinance, and in hopes that the spirit of the legislature would change going forward in a desire to protect as many citizens as possible, um, via protected classes wish to keep gender identity in. So I am in a position as the director of the civil rights commission to say that it is their wish that you continue to have gender identity in the ordinance. However, as an attorney in your city attorney's office, I think that that um has the potential to create confusion because we are not allowed to enforce that. And so our ordinance would then be doing something that lawfully it would say that we're protecting gender identity, even though we could not enforce it. So it's still tricky because usually when they say that you're not gonna be able to enforce something, they say that you have to remove it from the law, right? And they didn't do that, so we can leave it there as a dormant unenforceable provision, but again, typically the city attorney's office would not recommend that because it creates confusion and it is keeping our ordinance in a manner that is not actually enforceable. But I said I would pass on the wishes of the commission. I understand where they are coming from. They're hoping if the law then changed again and they made it a floor instead of a ceiling, that that would go right back into effect without the need for further passing of ordinances, and that was their wishes. So obviously, more sections need to be changed if we're taking out gender identity, and that's why there's significantly more sections to amend in the second version. So any questions? And so they did after the law passed, they sent to every local civil rights commission. They sent a letter saying, please you know, turn over any cases you have that are more than 12 months old. We didn't have any.