The Moline City Council met on March 19, 2025, in a combined Committee-of-the-Whole and City Council session. The meeting covered a wide range of items including public comments on the grocery tax and child care needs, the oath of office for a new firefighter/paramedic, board appointments, approval of contracts for water treatment plant improvements, asphalt maintenance, and a special event permit. The major focus was the approval of three property purchases totaling $1,213,500 for a new central fire station, with discussions on site selection and financing. The council also approved several ordinances and resolutions, including a reordering of the meeting agenda to maintain public comment at the beginning of the council meeting.
Good evening, everyone. I'll call our committee of the whole meeting to order here in Council Chambers at 6 p.m. Roll call, please. All our person Murphy. Present. Messias. Present. Rizak. Timmy and Finch. Present McNeil. Present. Castro. President Schmidt. Present. All right. Don't believe we have any remote electronic attendance, so we move to public comment. Two public comment. Um who's first. All right, Emily. Come on up. Oh, I'm no great auditor. However, my name is Arthur Bodenbender. I run and operate Katie's Import Foods on 7th Street Olean. And I do have a few opinions because I am as a food merchant. I am concerned about the food tax. Unfortunately, my opinion to begin is was when a city or government wanted to levy a tax on the populace. This should be headline news. Instead, I feel the city of Moline has taken a soft approach, a very quiet approach to this by not putting the issue on the agenda according to my alderman, my older woman in my case, until just the day before it was to be that's a false statement. I'm sorry, or that's an absolutely false statement, as is that it wasn't front page news, it was a headline news story on the dispatch. But I'm not here to argue with you, I'm here to listen to the next one. No, I'm saying please continue. It should be headline news when it's going to be discussed, not a month or two before ahead. It should be right at the time. And she told me at that time when I called her, it was one or two days before it was discussed in the council, that it is not on the immediate agenda as far as she knew, and then called me back the next day or two and said, Oh, it's just been put on the agenda for the following council, which didn't give me or anybody else a great chance to respond or to come and voice her opinion. Unfortunately, I was out of town for the next two council meetings, so therefore I could not be here. But I'm here tonight to voice my opinion. Uh and I would wager to say that if we took a vote in the city of Moline, they would agree, the majority would agree with me. Number one, taxing food. In my opinion, it's a regressive tax. It's an unfair tax. We need to buy food to eat, to live, and pay taxes. Number two, one percent is not a lot of money, but it is a lot of money to families with a lot of children. It is also a big incentive for city people from the city of Moline to cross our beautiful bridge and spend their food dollars in Iowa when they're buying their gas at a lower tax. Number three, you know, this food tax was a gift from the state of Illinois. It was not enacted by the city, it was enacted by the state of Illinois as a total gift to the cities, to the cities in the state. Now they have decided to drop that, leaving the option up to the cities. Remember, it is it was a gift to begin with. Um it is also a difficult how could I say this? It is unfair to the merchant who will now continue to be an unpaid tax collector. Okay.