The Common Council held a combined work session and regular meeting on August 18, 2025, at 9:30 a.m. in the Common Council Chamber, with a special daytime session to accommodate senior citizens. The meeting included a presentation on the fire inspection program, discussion of a cannabis micro-business special permit, a logo design preview, consideration of 19 resolutions, and extensive public comment on housing, animal control, and other community issues. The council voted to continue the cannabis public hearing to September 8, 2025, and approved all 19 resolutions on the regular agenda.
Good morning everyone and welcome to our committee of the whole meeting today, August 18th, 2025. As you can tell, we're in a different environment and at a different time. We do this every year for our senior citizen community for our council meeting, which will start at 10 o'clock. Today we have uh a presentation from a building and fire department, a couple of items on the agenda, and then we will go into executive session for discussion of matters concerning the medical financial credit or employment history of a particular person, persons or corporation, or matters leading to the appointment, employment, promotion, demotion, discipline, suspension, dismissal, or removal of a particular person, persons, or corporation, as well as discussion of matters related to proposed acquisition, sale, release of real property. So at this time I will turn this meeting over to our city manager, Mr. Matt Alexander. Okay, good morning. Good morning. We have a special presentation for the council today with our fire department and our uh building inspector about our fire inspection program and fire safety. And so uh at this time I'd like to ask Nick Sasier if he could approach the podium. Good morning. Good morning, good morning, Council. Uh Mr. Alexander. So before I start, I have a question for everybody. Monday morning, you want the answer? No. Okay. Does everybody know what that sound is? Smoke alarm. How about out here? We know what that is. Everybody know what that sound is. Everybody in this room should be saying, Yes, I know what this is. Because if you don't know what it is, or why 59% of New Yorkers do not have smoke detectors in their homes? Wow, this is where you're gonna wind up. Yeah, is that dramatic? Is that mean to say that? Yeah, there's a point to it. Because a lot of people are dying in this state because they don't have smoke detectors because of fires. And that's why I'm here today to discuss our fire safety program that the council approved back in 2022 to make us safer. All right. Right now, I am the building inspector for the city. The person that's gonna do the presentation up there is Chris. He's our fire inspector. Our fire chief is here, our police chief is here. I have one of my assistant building inspectors. We are the people that the council has tasked with providing fire safety protection for this city. And we take that job very seriously. We go out and do inspections every day. All right, people think that we're out there just to be mean or to um make their lives miserable. It's not. And as we go through this presentation, you'll understand why. So the fire safety program is a it's a collaboration between the building department of the city and the fire department. Fire chief has several lieutenants, several uh building safety uh inspectors that we work together and we go out and do uh our inspections. So why do we need this program? The executive law of New York State uh Article 18, Section 370 through 80 383 states that every municipality in New York State has to have a fire safety program. In 2019, when I was hired, we did not have one here. So I worked with the fire chief, I worked with my building inspectors, I worked with the firefighters, I worked with the council, and we came up with the fire safety program, and it was approved on May 23rd, 2022 by the council. I believe it was unanimous.