Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Rochester City Council held its regular session on Monday, October 5, 2026, at 6:00 PM in the Government Center Council Chamber. Mayor Norton was absent; all six council members were present. The meeting covered consent items, two public hearings on zone changes, and three major reports including Link BRT business support, the Silver Lake sediment removal and dam modification project, and the Zumbro River siphon replacement. The council also heard a first reading of the 2027 Master Fee Schedule.
Please rise as you're able for the Pledge of Allegiance. Welcome everybody to our October 5th, 2026 Rochester City Council meeting. We begin every city council meeting with our open comment period. This is an opportunity for for anyone from the public to speak on items that we will not be taking public testimony during a public hearing later in the agenda. Each person has up to two minutes to speak. Is that my right? Your left. My left, I'm sorry. And uh because of the limited time, we want to make sure that others have an opportunity to speak. Um I'd also ask participants to limit comments generally to topics that are within the scope and jurisdiction of the council's ability to affect policy. Um if you have materials to share with the council, you may give them to the city clerk, who is to my right to distribute. Um and council members and staff do not respond to your comments during public comment, but will instead follow up with any uh specific requests separately. You will be invited up in the order of which you signed up, and we will start with Mr. West Lund. Thanks again for this opportunity, Council President Schubring. And in meetings past, I asked what it meant to be uh a Bloomberg City and uh have a Bloomberg mayor with um uh graduating from the Bloomberg College of Mayors. I want to get that right. And I asked what what we had um Bloomberg interns for and where they were housed. I don't know if we still have those interns, but a lot of people talked about the influence that President Trump had in our city over the last year, and we saw one of our meetings filibustered by a group of people that came in from I guess it was indivisibles that had rallied here at a meeting in uh February, February 3rd, I think it was, and they had a lot of activists from around the region. But but what it means to have uh billionaires and the you know, talking about millionaires influencing our politics and billionaires when you have people uh taking an interest in Rochester politics, uh, to the extent that they have where they're funding from uh P.O. boxes in Manhattan across the street from uh the uh Grand Central Station from P.O. Box from political action groups that are funded by billionaires, and they're sending out um flyers to residents of Rochester to influence candidates to vote against Republicans. This is in elections past, just a sampling of the amount of money that's been spent to influence politics in Rochester from afar, or if you consider groups like indivisibles that are very well funded and structured and organized. I've got 15 seconds left. It's a big question. But we've seen the No Kings rallies, those are funded by Walton largely. She's twice as wealthy as President Trump, almost twice as rich as President Trump. So if we're concerned about billionaires having influence in our politics, we should take a look at that. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Londa. Next we have Joe Christensen. Uh good evening, City Council. I'm Joe Christensen. Uh we lost another bicyclist here this past week. Uh 63-year-old gentleman, uh, two daughters, two granddaughters, graduate from Mayo High School in 1981. About two months prior to that, I lost my Sunday school teacher to a bicyclist. So I know that we want to try and help the planet by getting everybody to ride bicycles and stuff like that, but I'm concerned about the safety, especially with our children, because we're talking we discussed um transportation for schools, and especially around if you go east from Silver Lake Foods on the way to Jefferson. Um, there's this painted bike path where cars park in the middle of the sidewalk. And so I'm concerned. If I had my kid, I'd say, hey, ride the sidewalk. That's what we used to do in the olden days. You know, and it's like, well, if there's a pedestrian on the sidewalk right around him onto the lawn because a car pedestrian sorry, a vehicle collision with uh a bicycle is much more catastrophic than a bicycle collision with a pedestrian, if that makes sense. And uh the other thing too was that we had another vehicle run into a building. The uh what is it, Goldfish Swim School? About those prior to that, we had a really nice house up on Fow Will Drive get run into.