The Legislative Committee convened on December 19, 2025, to align city priorities with the Mayor's legislative agenda in preparation for state capital submissions. Council members and Mr. Ken Newberger (Bastillion Strategies) discussed critical issues including blight, public safety jurisdiction, infrastructure funding, and the need for a unified "Jackson Package" to present to state legislators.
All right, good morning. I'm calling to order the legislative committee meeting of the Jackson City Council. Today's date is December 19th, and the time is approximately 9.04 a.m. Colleagues, this is just basically a discussion to not only hear more from the administration in terms of what the mayor's legislative acts will be, but also to express the council's legislative uh request uh what our priorities should be. Uh we do know that this is a dual governing body. And so um from what I heard during my conversation with Mr. Newberger initially, the mayor has some things that are kind of in line with what we also uh have been asking about for the past year or so, but we want to make sure that we're all getting everything on the record to make sure that by the time we vote this out of committee and send it up to the state capitol that we're all on the same page. Okay. So I will start with Ward 1, Mr. Foot. Um, because I know that you and Mr. Hartley both interact a lot more than the rest of us with uh though the delegation at the state capitol, and so um I'm giving you the floor to kind of talk about things that you find priority and what you would like to see. Okay, thank you, Ms. President. The um I do think it's a really fortunate time that we need to make sure and take advantage of uh with the new administration and uh uh uh the ISIS thawed between at least it looks that way to me, between city government and state government, and we certainly have a lot to ask, and and um the um blight obviously is one of them. Uh one of the other things I think that's constructive is that the speaker of the house a year ago set up this um select committee on revitalizing a capital city. So you know, they've already uh made uh made an effort to embrace the idea of revitalizing Jackson and okay, is the brownie some coffee or something? Great brownie. So Brandon, you ain't trying to get him with okay. Who made this bounty? Sabrina it is Sabrina You know, she always gives us good treats, but we want to make sure you ain't choking over there. Right. So one of the things that as I've um gone in gotten deep in the weeds on the blight issue uh with abandoned properties and some of them at the state house and then commercial properties or the secretary state and then commercial properties blight. Um the there might be some help that they can do just on the state ordinance level or state statute level regarding the issue um of squatters, and and what I've come to realize over the past year is the um the squatters really make our job a lot more difficult and also more expensive. And the the what I would use as an example would be the Virginia College building, which is not an old building. But what happened was squatters got into the building. I'm just calling them squatters, they're got the people they got into the building uh while it was booked, it was closed, boarded up, they got snuck in, and then they do all this damage because they feel free to just tear out copper and wreck the HV, uh HVAC system and and set up, you know, set up fires during the winter that you know get smoke and other things and have the potential to burn the building down, uh, and old mattresses, and it just becomes a wreck on the inside, even though you can't see it from the outside. So, even in this case, the Virginia College building, at one point the owner was in Louisiana, and I think they sold it to another real estate investment plate uh outfit that was down in Fort Lauderdale or Miami or someplace, and they assumed they had a property and they were trying to find somebody to move into it or whatever. And so you had you had both lenders that were lending the money that had had bought had debt on it, and then you had the owners. Well, it finally sort of came to a head. Some people here around the around the city were trying to do some cleanup work, and they reached out to them and and you know, got a contract to clean up the outside of the Virginia College. Well, to make a long story short, it got to the court system, and and the lenders and the borrowers, or you see the owners and the lenders sent an event uh an inspection team in to inspect the the whole building, and they came to the conclusion that it was not worth their trouble to even salvage it. They just basically threw in that they went to the the um receiver uh at the chancery court with within the can't chancery court system and just said we're walking away from it. So now the city has and the state, I think the first step will be go to the state, but somebody's gonna pay to get the building either demolished or fixed up. And so instead of the the owners trying to come up with money or us being able to, you know, get them to give us money or the lenders putting up money, since they've walked away, we end up saying who's gonna pay the 250 or 500,000 to either take the building down or try to fix it. It's it's a real dilemma. But so my my getting back to the squatter issue. We normally are sort of, I think the normal practice is we've run them off, we board up the building, but they go off and then they squat in some other building or some house somewhere. There's a you know, a terrible situation off Old Canton Road where a house they went inside it and wrecked it, basically tore it up. And the owner was living in Belgium or something like this. So we we can't just say that that they're homeless people or treat them as, and there's different titles for this, but we can't just treat them as homeless people and let them go and hopefully they'll find you know some better spot to live because they're gonna go destroy other somebody else's house or somebody's other commercial building. There have to be account, they have to be held accountable in some way. We have to have laws that hold them accountable for trespassing and do and destroying property. I mean, if they went into the Best Buy and stole walked out with the TV or something like that, you would arrest them. But we can't just say, oh, you've got 24 hours to leave. I think that's what the current law is. Well, that's that's not understanding the problem. That law is not if it says you got 24 hours to leave, that's not the way you treat somebody who's wrecking your your home or your building. So we have to come up with the the the and whether it's we need a different title than squatters or whatever it is, but um this is a really serious issue that is destroying the city from the end, you know, with with um in a way that that we're not I just don't think the laws uh are protecting the buildings and properties and in the city of Jackson in the way they should. We can't just treat them as if they were just sitting there trying to stay warm in the cold because they're going in there and actually wrecking the value of these properties.