This public hearing is relative to the annual estimate of the city of Syracuse and the City Syracuse City School District for the fiscal year 2020 25 through 26.

Thank you.

Before we continue, uh we have some people that would like to speak.

We're gonna give every each person three minutes to state your uh to speak, and then uh we you will be you will hear the phone ring and that'll be the end of your statement.

Okay.

So let's try and keep up with that.

And with that said, we would like to invite Evan Loving to the podium to open our meeting.

Good evening, counselors, Evan Loving Budget Director.

Um, thanks for the opportunity to just say a few words as we get started with public hearing.

Um, as you know before you for your consideration is the FY27 proposed budget.

It is a 354.5 million dollar general fund uh that includes ten million dollars in anticipated new state aid, modest increases in sales and property tax with no property tax rate increase, a four percent proposed water rate increase, and a budgeted use of fund balance of 20 uh 23.9 million dollars.

As you know, we've historically overperformed uh compared to our budgeted fund balance, and our anticipated fund balance at the end of FY26 is expected to be around 120 million dollars.

Funding for departments is relatively flat, aligning with uh inflation costs, increased costs are primarily with key priorities, including housing, plan review, and a proposed re-evaluation.

During this process, we sought to be proactive and engage departments, council uh as much and as often as we could.

Hopefully, that's been successful.

We will continue to work on incremental improvements to both the budget book and the budget process in the next few years, including my hope for a year-long budget process starting in July, where we can work on trying to find structural solutions to our structural challenges.

Um, I just want to thank you again for all your time.

I want to thank all the departments, my staff, and the mayor for her leadership.

And for anyone who doesn't know, the budget is available on our website at our budget page, and there is a copy on the back table for reference.

Thank you.

Thank you, Evan.

Avan uh has done a phenomenal job in putting this budget together for us to be able to view and review during the hearings that uh transpired all throughout these last months.

So thank you for your hard work and all of the department heads that had a handy night.

Thank you.

Also, we want to uh thank Kristen to be here with us.

She will be our stenographer today.

Um we move on into um okay.

The hearing.

So um the first speaker, Cliff Ryan Jr.

And Zay Zain Garnier.

Oh, okay.

I said that right.

Good evening.

Ryan R Y A N Jr.

J R Zane Z-A-I-M.

G-H-A-N-I-M.

Okay.

And I'll think thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.

I stand before you to introduce a powerful opportunity for our city, an opportunity that supports local businesses, strengthens nonprofit organizations, and creates a sustainable economic cycle within our community.

The opportunity is Cavline.

A new digital advertising platform designed to help businesses and nonprofits increase visibility, attract customers, and most importantly, recycle dollars back into the local economy.

Businesses can no longer rely solely on foot traffic or word of mouth to compete.

Digital advertising has become one of the most essential tools for economic growth.

Yet for many small businesses and nonprofits in our city, effective advertising remains financially out of reach.

The cost of major ad platforms often drains resources away from the very organizations that need the most.

Cavline changes that.

Cavline is more than an advertising platform.

It is an economic support system.

It provides local businesses and nonprofits with affordable digital advertising solutions that helps them reach customers where attention lives today, online, on mobile devices, and through targeted digital engagement.

When our small businesses grow, they hire more people.

When nonprofits reach more supporters, they serve more families.

When local organizations increase revenue, those dollars stay circulating right here in our city.

That means stronger neighborhoods, that means more jobs, that means a healthy local economy.

This is what I mean by recycling finances within the community instead of watching local dollars leave our neighborhoods through outside corporations and advertising giants.

Cavline helps keep resources working for the people and institutions right here at home.

This is not just about promotion, it's about economic empowerment.

And um, let my guy finish.

Yeah.

Um, what we're seeking here today is as a partnership with the city.

Um, as a contractor, Cavline uh helps expand um access to digital marketing for underserved businesses, that's the main key.

Um, and minority-owned enterprises, grassroots organizations, and nonprofits that are often overlooked by um uh but are essential to our city's uh vitality.

Imagine a city where small businesses are given affordable tools to compete.

That's our main mission.

We want our small businesses and mid-sized businesses to be able to compete with enterprise, to have long campaigns, to sustain long campaigns, to have a device that works for them, that creates this marketing budget um continuously.

Um we're seeking uh the opportunity to work with the city as a contractor to help implement this mission to bring businesses and nonprofits into a digital space where growth is affordable.

Um we thank you for your time and and uh we appreciate this opportunity.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Awesome.

Okay.

Our next speaker will be Kim Cameron.

C A M E R O N Good evening.

Thank you very much for letting me come and speak this evening.

My name is Kim Cameron, and I am president of the League of Women Voters in Cortland County, and I also represent the League of Women Voters of New York State tonight.

I'm also a volunteer speaker for Beyond Plastics, an organization that is trying to eliminate single-use plastic.

I come to speak to you tonight asking for support for the bigger better bottle bill, a bill which, if passed, could save the city of New of Syracuse taxpayers as much as 190,000 annually.

This bill would increase the bottle deposit, the bottle return deposit fee to 10 cents and expand the type of bottles that would have a deposit.

I believe you were all sent a draft memo of support at the end of last week.

In 2023, New York had a 68.3% returnable bottle rate.

That percentage has been declining for years.

But in states that have boosted their deposit from five cents to 10 cents, the rate has increased to as high as 90%.

Increasing that rate would reduce the cost of garbage and recycling, collection, and increase the cost of running the material recovery facility.

But even that increased cost, the net savings to Syracuse residents would be anywhere from $90,000 to $200,000 annually.

On top of that, when we burn trash, we release carbon dioxide and toxins to the atmosphere.

Incinerators have scrubbers that are designed to catch the worst of the toxins, but there are over 16,000 chemicals associated with plastic.

Scrubbers are not going to remove all of those toxins.

Communities living near the incinerators are the most impacted by those chemicals, and we are all impacted by the increase in carbon dioxide.

And we are all impacted by the increase in carbon dioxide.

Those health costs are hard to quantify, but my motto is burn less.

Help the residents more.

The DC DEC has also clearly stated that our state is running out of landfill space.

Even if we don't have a landfill here, we are all New York State residents.

And we need to work together.

We need to develop an economy that reduces the amount of waste, recycles as much as possible, and reuses products that are discarded before they are discarded.

The bottle bill has been doing that since 1983.

It's now time to modernize that bill.

So we request your support for this legislation.

Thank you very much for your time and attention.

Oh do you want to?

Yeah.

Let's keep going.

All right.

Our next speaker, Andre Andrea Sievers.

Hello, my name is Andrew Seavers.

You may remember me from our previous discussion around good cause.

I am here to encourage you to refocus your energies on the economic disease that we are experiencing here in Syracuse rather than some of these legislative band-aids that are currently in your budget.

The last time you saw me, I was but a lowly tenant.

I appear before you now, a recent homeowner.

Yay me.

And I can tell you, even from my new perspective, that I am sick and tired of hearing about the slum lords of Syracuse and how difficult it is for them to extract money out of the people who are suffering most here.

It is despicable and it is disgusting.

I'm sure you're familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Were you to look at it, you would see at the bottom that shelter is considered by the scientific community a basic human need.

Right next to such luxuries as oh, food and water.

And yet, if you were to look for collecting rent, you would find it nowhere on Maslow's hierarchy of needs because that's a nice to have.

It's not a need.

I can tell you as a former tenant, very few people seek out being a tenant.

They become a tenant because they have to, because we've all but made it illegal to be homeless in this country.

It's not a choice.

Collecting rent is a choice.

You've seen on the federal level what happens when we let he who has the most money make the rules.

It's happening in Syracuse.

Donna, since I'm still one of your constituents, technically for the next 24 hours, let me say publicly, shame on you.

Your wishy-washiness, your flip-flopping makes you an embarrassment to this chamber.

To the rest of you, good cause is a matter of when, not a matter of if.

Get on the right side of history, do the right thing, do the hard thing.

We'll make sure you have everything that you need.

Thank you.

All right, our next uh speaker, Joan Myers.

Good evening.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you.

Just wanted to make sure.

My name is John Barker.

I'm a homeowner and I live over on Park Street.

And I have a neighborhood group, Washington Square Neighborhood Task Force.

And what I want to talk to you about is the budget.

And first of all, the realization that once again you're presented with a deficit budget.

Now it's nice that we're not going to have a tax increase this year, but this is like a ticking time bomb.

You were presented a boilerplate budget.

You presented, even though Alex Marion published a guide.

And Alex is sort of our own, whereas Waldo.

I don't really know.

He pops up everywhere.

I get up from that.

But what we need is a deeper dive and look at this.

And by that I mean there are hidden items in this budget that you don't even get a vote on.

I can think of offhand.

Michael Collins' budget contains a lot of things in it.

And they're buried.

The TNT two years ago, Alex had to fish it out for us, and it took him three people in two days to find it.

And I think the administrative costs there to give away 120,000 if you look at that, is excessive.

Now fifty, sixty thousand dollars here and there extra for something that the counselors could do for free.

You start to mount up.

The first thing is the overall budget.

And I asked one of your members, I won't even say who.

I said, how many total employees does the city surrounds have compared to say two or three years ago?

Because what's happened is for a number of years we've been blessed with buying money for a better use.

And I and I mean that with necessarily I'm a Democrat, so I got no problem with that.

But we had previous counselors kept adding positions without a sunset clause.

So the money goes away from the government, the federal government, and you've got an employee, a human being.

What do you do with them?

You forgot to tell them that if the money goes away, you don't have a job, so you either put them someplace else and pad that area and just keep adding on the costs.

And the highest cost we have is employees.

So I'm asking you, make sure you know the total number of employees and how much we're we're increasing it, because it doesn't seem like on the taxpayer level or the citizen level, we're getting any more services.

We're just having more people do the same thing.

They're not going to be able to do that.

Um a couple of the small things that that we the taxpayer notice is the cost of fleets.

And right now, maybe it's more hyper with the cost of gas, the sum of you can afford, but some of us can't.

So when we send out three employees and three separate trucks to wind up doing at the same job site, can't they carpool?

Because you're gonna come back from us and you're gonna say, oh, this department and that department is out of money because of the cost of the gas.

John, let me let me stop you one second.

Um John is the last speaker.

Is there anybody else that would like to come up and speak on the mic?

Okay, I'll leave you one more minute, and then we have to close.

Okay.

Can I continue or one minute?

Okay.

So I'm asking you to take a look at the fleet consolidation.

One pool, one colored truck for the whole place, have them come there, repair that, use your mechanics, don't repair trucks in three different places.

We don't need trucks setting in one place when another place could use it.

Then come there, get the truck, use the truck, and put it back.

Just consolidate the fleet and look for savings that way.

We trust you, as our elected officials, to be prudent with our money.

It's not a matter of being liberal or conservative, it's being prudent.

You can make these cuts, balance the budget without being a terrible person.

I was gonna say draconian, but we don't have to say that.

We can just say we can balance the budget, make some cuts, account for the tools and equipment of the city, and not hurt people.

We don't have to close the pools.

Okay, this meeting is adjourned.

At five fifty.

Yes.