Note: The meeting minutes and transcript indicate the meeting occurred on February 4, 2025, but the provided instructions specify using the date February 13, 2025. The summary below reflects the content from the February 4 meeting.
The Racine Common Council convened on the stated date at 6:00 PM in City Hall, Room 205, with Mayor Mason presiding. Twelve aldermen were present (Coe, Turquoise-Davis, Maack, Kaprelian, Weidner, Horton, McCarthy, Peete, Land, Perez, Kelly, Sebastian), one absent (Esqueda), and two excused (Jones, Harmon). The meeting included public comments, referrals to committees, committee reports, a consent agenda, and announcements. The meeting adjourned at 7:35 PM.
If members of the public and alders could please take their seats, we will begin momentarily. Good evening, everyone. The hour of six o'clock now having arrived on this fourth of February 2025. It is my honor to call to order. The city of Racine Common Council. The first order of business after we come to order is the Pledge of Allegiance. If you could please rise as you are able and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, the first order of business is uh before we begin is to record any excused absences. Uh President McCarthy, do we have excused absences for this evening? Uh yes, Mr. Mayor. Alder Jones is asked to be excused, and Alder Harmon was uncertain about her status. Okay. Do we note it? Uh and then we'll move on to the approval of the general council proceedings or minutes from January 21st. Uh Alder Courton, would you like to make a motion regarding the minutes? Uh move to approve. There's a motion and a second to approve the minutes of January 21st. Any discussion on said minutes. Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That motion carries. We'll now move on to public comments. I'll ask the clerk to please uh read the rules and the commentary of public comments. And just so people know people get three minutes to speak when your three minutes are up. Uh the microphone is turned off. It's not a commentary on or response on the commentary that you're giving, but just treating everybody equally. City clerk. The public comment segment is an opportunity for citizens to speak directly to the common council. Speakers will limit their remarks to three minutes. There shall be no dialogue or interaction between the speaker and elected officials or staff. This time is not intended to be a debate or discussion. The common council shall not hear personal complaints or attacks against any city employee or elected official or any matter related to an individual claim, citation, appeal, or lawsuit. Profane, disruptive, threatening, or conduct that other otherwise impedes the safe, orderly, and effective conduct of the common council meeting is equally unacceptable during the public comment period as it is during all other portions of city meetings. When a group of people representing one viewpoint wishes to address the council, one person should be appointed, should be appointed. The designated speaker for the group. Topic federal grants. And before you proceed, you need to put everything on pause because all the rules have changed. So anything that you knew two weeks ago is no longer valid due to the EOs that have been dropped. So if you don't know about these, I'll go through them real quick because this impacts all of us and it impacts the city. So we did a whole series of EOs that repealed everything that was done during the Biden years. So any guidance during the Biden years is automatically thrown out. But there's also other things. The DEI, for example, they won't give federal funds to any place that supports DEI. Under their definitions, banned words include female, pregnant, indigenous Americans, Hispanics, people of color. These are all banned words. They are now cleaning out the federal databases, removing all references to that. Climate change, environmental justice, social justice.