Note: The meeting agenda and transcript indicate the meeting occurred on August 5, 2025, but the provided date is August 8, 2025. This summary uses the provided date. The meeting combined the Committee-of-the-Whole (COW) and regular City Council sessions.
Good evening, everyone. I'll call our meeting to order here in Chambers at 6 p.m. Roll call, please. Honor Person Murphy. Present. Masias. President. Rosak. Timmy and President. Bench. President McNeil. Present. Castro. President Schmidt. All right. I don't believe we have remote electronic attendance. Do we have public comment, Chief? Oh yeah, Francis Williams. Got three minutes. Thank you. Good evening, Mayor, Administrator, City Council members. I'm Francis Williams, the executive director of Mercava on 5th. I wanted to take this opportunity. I know we're on the agenda to speak about some items, but I wanted to take an opportunity to come and formally thank everybody at the city for an incredible season that we're having at Mercado and for your flexibility. You know, we've had some changes and challenges that we've had to adjust to, and you guys have been very um accommodating, and I want to acknowledge that. So tonight acknowledged as part of that. I also wanted to share some highlights of our season. We've had um an incredible experience continuing some very um key events like Lucha Libre, um, which a Centra Credit Union sponsors, so we're very grateful for that, as well as Sabor de Marcado, which is a food competition which was very successful. Bob, I saw you there even though I didn't get a chance to say hello. It's true. We heard that from a lot of people. Um it's been a beautiful, beautiful year, some great highlights, but that said it's not without its challenges. Um I've been doing some data analysis, and our attendance is significantly lower over compared to last year. We're down about 37%, and a lot of that has to do with um a lot of fear in our Hispanic community right now. So I just, if you weren't already aware, I wanted to bring that to your awareness and let you know that we are seeing that affecting our attendance numbers at Mercado on 5th. Um so we are going to be making some some updates, doing some rollbacks, looking at you know how do we um make efficiencies and create um you know better cost cutting with what we're doing. Um, and that's normal, like we usually see a slowdown of the second half of the season, anyways. Um but that said, we're still very committed to being able to put on our night markets, um, continue to show off the beauty of the quad cities and particularly Moline and what we're doing. And I also wanted to acknowledge that we've been partnering in other ways, particularly with the Moline Police Department. We just last night finished a five-week uh Citizens Academy or police academy that was given in all Spanish, which was incredible, and the feedback um I'm gonna be documenting and sharing uh in a letter to the chief of of police so that um he has that and my hope is that we can continue that programming and hopefully write some grants to continue to support that work because it is really important. And people left feeling much more relieved and relaxed with the people that they met from the police department. So I'm very happy with that out those outcomes. Um given that the climate that we are in and the challenges that we are having this season, um I also wanted to formally uh ask that we not have a closure of 12th Street for September 12th. Um it is a huge Mexican Independence Day celebration, um, but we're gonna be utilizing our North Lot to expand that space because we don't anticipate large numbers for that particular night. So um we can you know I'll send an email to Macy to document that later, but um just wanted to share that formally and again um thank you for all your support and we're gonna continue to be here now more than ever for our community and celebrating all that is beautiful about our Hispanic culture here in the Quad Cities. Thank you very much. Uh just a quick question for council, then because in the agreement that's on the agenda, it does include that item. It does not think I'm sorry, is it about the closure of 12th? Yeah, yeah. Is it part of what's in here?