The Raleigh City Council held its regular meeting on May 20, 2025, at 1:00 PM in the City Council Chamber. The meeting included a consent agenda, public comments, planning commission reports, a special items vote, the city manager's proposed FY2026 budget presentation, public hearings on nuisance abatements, annexations, rezonings, and a text change, committee reports, council member reports, appointments, and a closed session. Councilmember Silver was excused.
Note: The meeting was adjourned after closed session. Councilmember Silver was absent.
Oh no, I'm not sure. Let's go to the cake thing. To the city council meeting. We will call it to order. As first, I will say that uh Council Silver is out of town and has an excused absence, and uh we will say the Pledge of Allegiance, and I'm gonna see if Councillor Patton will lead us to my United States of America. One nation, under God, individual liberty and justice for all. Right. Next we have the consent agenda, and I don't believe anything was pulled, so uh I would entertain a motion. Move for approval of consent agenda. Any other discussion? If not, all in favor of the motion, aye. All opposed, nay. All right. So that passes, and we then move on to public comment. Um as all of y'all know, this is uh your chance to address counsel, so we won't necessarily uh respond to this, but uh and each each speaker has uh three minutes, and the first uh speaker is Nikki W. Um, good afternoon. I pray all are well and getting there. If I may first direct your attention toward the screen, well, hold on. Um I had a presentation, but if it's not here, it's okay, yeah. We don't have visual presentations anymore, but you can send them to us and we can see them, you know, and I said something. Okay, it's in our agenda. Yeah. It's in your agenda. Oh, okay. I apologize you can't see, but what it said was um, so I set up a sign-up genius for because there are um I'm asking for assistance to supply food and water for the unhouse. And even though there's a thought there's thought that there is an up being done in City, there's not, I can attest to this personally. And so I set up a sign-up genius, and if you go on there and scroll down to search email, you can put in the T H E 5252 Good G-O-O-D Shepherds, S-H-E-P-E-R-D-S.com, and sign up for a date and time and for more information. Thank you. Next, I like to make mention that Juneteenth is coming up. June 19th was made a federal holiday back in 2021. Please keep in mind, prayer um President Biden a prayer. It commemorates the day, as you know, in 65 that the last slaves in Texas became aware that they had been freed two and a half years prior in January 1963. Raleigh always celebrates at Dorothy Adicts Park. This year it will be five days early on June 19th from 12 to 6. Um, as it recognizes the day the last African Americans were slay uh freed, it recognizes a day that all U.S. citizens were officially free. Amen. So I ask that in the future we might also consider parade down Fayeville Street, maybe to bring awareness and morale. And in thinking about uh a prolonged freedom, I am reminded of my own journey. Some of you may remember me speaking about blockades to assistance with housing due to my refusal to consent to be in place in HMIS uh share systems specifically for the unhoused. This is a case for many others as well, resulting in years without housing and sometimes death. You may also have heard about ICE targeting and writing homeless shelters in search of undocumented persons disclosed or revealed by HMIS. Though presented as a system to present to prevent redundancy, it was always meant to be a tracking system, monitoring the actions and movements of marginalized people in basis to many who have done no wrong and to those who have served their time. But homelessness is not a crime. Unhoused people are not convicts. They should not be subject to surrendering their personal, most personal and private information to a slew of people they don't know and receive no services from, and my opportunity to take advantage of that. So why then it is required to make it over available to a stranger somewhere within the state who you've never met. So signatures vow and privacy rights and laws seem to mean nothing right now, so we can't trust that. So I asked the city, county, and community to join me in a fight to remove blocks to save me uh life-saving assistance such as housing. One prefers to exercise their rights to safeguard that information.