[The meeting covered routine consent agenda items, public hearings on fee waivers and a bicycle lane MOU, and impassioned public comments from residents about a severe crash on South Jefferson Street. All votes were 4-0 with Alderman McShane absent.]
No, it's not tonight. Good evening and welcome to the mayor and board of Alderman public meeting for the first of February. We begin with the Pledge of Allegiance. One individual with the liberty and justice. We have minutes to approve January 4th, 2024. So moved. Second. Motion by Alderman Shackleberg, second by Alderman Kazemchek. All those in favor. That is 4-0 with Alderman McShane not present. Mayor's comments. None at this time, other than to wish everyone a uh happy Black History Month. I think uh use the next 29 days since this is a leap year, you get an extra one to learn something. I think that's really what Black History Month is all about. Aldermanic business and comments. Alderwoman Ash. Yes, thank you, Mayor. Um so I'm gonna use my comments tonight to just briefly talk about an issue that we've been working through or a series of issues that we've been working through, and that's the charter review process. Um it's a bit a long process coming. We have a fantastic committee that the mayor appointed that dedicated a lot of their time and their energy over the course of last year. They came up with 19 recommendations. Um in November ish, I penned a it was like late November, I pinned a letter sort of outlining some of the things that I thought we would need because I was the sort of quasi-leese on I attended a lot of the meetings to try to understand like what okay, what what are we going to need as a as a group to make decisions from here? And some of those things were like making sure that the NACs were involved, making sure that you know we had a we budgeted for the upcoming year, all that good stuff. And then about a month ago, we sat up here, the board did, and we laid out a schedule for the upcoming sort of roughly from February now to May to figure out okay, like how were we going to review our process. So I'm just sort of using my time here and my comments to hopefully get to a place where um we did get a workshop schedule that looks like we're gonna have a workshop at the end of the month of February, that is. And hopefully, at that workshop, we will have full staff analysis. Staff was present at each meeting of the Charter Review Committee last um last year. And so we we know that staff had plenty of time to take a look at these items. We're hoping to get full staff analysis to implement for 2025. And if we can't implement for 2025, the election, tell us why. What are those what are those barriers? We need that information to make our decisions going forward. We need to know you know how does the mayor feel about things. We need we need this information. So I'm using this comments to just say hopefully we will have that information, including a full communications plan for the public at the end of the month. Thank you very much. Thank you. Alderman Russell. Just uh wish everybody a happy groundhog day and remind you that this weekend is fire and ice with uh downtown Frederick Partnership. They've made it a two-day event now because it's so popular. So uh I would encourage you if you want to attend, attend, but also know that there are going to be some traffic disruptions. So uh if you're gonna be around downtown, that's what's that's what's going on. Um I have thank you. Thank you, Alderman Shackleford. Yes, February is Black History Month, and currently right now, just a block away at the Wanberg Center is a recognition and celebration for African Americans of excellence. And I'd like to highlight Mr. Bernard Brown, Mr. Seton Gordon, Ms. Mary Harris, Mr. Ted Luck, Ms.