The Folsom City Council held a special meeting at 5:00 PM for closed session, followed by a regular meeting at 6:30 PM on November 9, 2021. The regular meeting included a proclamation, a financial update, adoption of the consent calendar, and several new business items. Key decisions included the appointment of a utility commissioner, introduction of three ordinances, and continuation of a fiber network agreement to a future meeting.
All right, thank you for your patience. Um, we are actually going to return to closed session at the conclusion of this meeting, so we're not going to do any report out from the closed session right now. We have a bunch of topics that deserve a little bit more conversation, so we're going to continue that after this meeting, and then we'll report out after we conclude those discussions. So I am going to call to order the regular meeting of the Folsom City Council for November 9th, 2021. Will the clerk please call the roll? Council members Aquino. Here, Challench. Here Powell, Rodriguez, here, and Kozlowski. Here, and if everybody will please stand and join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. The United States of America. And to the Republic, for which it stands. One nation. Indivisible with liberty and justice crawl. All right. Do we have any agenda updates? You have one agenda update this evening, Mr. Mayor. Item number 14 has additional information provided by staff. This has been given to the city council members and is available to the public at the table in the back of the room. All right, fantastic. Okay, so we'll do business from from the floor first. That is an opportunity for anybody that's here in the audience or on the phone to comment on items that are not on the agenda. And I believe we have a couple of speaker cards turned in already. So we're gonna call those. And if anybody else would like to comment, please fill out a blue speaker card and bring it up. So your first speaker this evening is Bashkar Vampati. Come on up. Respected city mayor, council members, Folsom City Management and staff. My name is Baskar Vempati, the president of Indian Association of Sacramento. I want to thank the Folsom City Council and the staff management for working hard to make the city safest and best city to live in. We are in uh Indian a lot of Indians, Hindu Indians are celebrating Diwali over the globe. I want to thank Folsom City to allow the Indian community to do firecrackers during the Diwali time. Diwali is the festival of lights. It symbolizes a victory of good over evil, sharp intellect over the spiritual darkness, and knowledge over the ignorance. We all come together, celebrate, and also help the needy during this time. Regarding the uh we have over 60,000 Indians in the greater Sacramento, and it's no wonder 15,000 cities live in Folsom because it's uh safest. Indian Association is an umbrella organization of 15 plus regional organizations, and we all bring the diverse Indian culture to single platform to showcase it to Indian local community as well as the future generations of Indians. It's an IAS not only cultural organization, it's a non-profit organization. We have every year we select local charity and Indian charity, and we supported over 30 plus charities with uh 200 200,000 contribution. This year I'm very glad to let you know that we selected Folsom Hope, our local charity, and we are going to donate 7,500 on November 11th. To thank everyone, the Folsom City. We distributed gift baskets to Folsom police station, all the five fire stations uh earlier this week. And IAS also do a lot of initiatives, including women empowerment, mental wellness seminar, and youth development, and also participate in MLK Walk Veterans Day Parade. We also, whenever there are challenges, like fires, floods, uh the COVID Indian Association always come forward and help the community. We have a 15 plus organizations, our partnering organization, Hindus Vahim Seybook is raising like a lot of food items during the Diwali time, and we donated to all the local food banks and uh needy shelters. We raised over 300 3,000 pounds in a greater settlement area last year and the 300,000 pounds over the United States. We are going to perform showcase our cultural performance after my speech. Thank you all. Thank you very much. Thank you.