The Syracuse City Council met on June 24, 2026, to discuss a variety of topics including a victim advocate report, a pre-application consultation for a development proposal, amendments to building permit practices, a recycling program for multifamily housing, a utility easement vacation, stormwater agreements, park and ride regulations, a just serve city designation, a transportation utility fee, and a senior employee retention plan. Public comment opened with a presentation about a new community art event.
Syracuse Library, we're gonna be having a kind of a hot luck style ART event where uh community members in Syracuse are able to bring up two pieces of their art kind of showcase. That'll be about an hour and a half long or so. Uh like I said, it's all free, and we're hoping to start that up regularly. It's just kind of a way to get people out showing their work. So it's kind of Instagram 2.0 is the idea in real life. So thanks very much for uh anyone else have a public comment tonight. So anyone online seeing none, I will go ahead and close public comment, and we will start in with item C, which is uh our victim advocate report, Celeste. Well, we'll get sure. Oh there. Come on up to the table. We got a spot for you. And share with us the latest report of your work. Yes, I would love to. Hi, I'm Celeste. Um, and I'm the victim's advocate for um Syracuse Clinton and Sunset City, and I'm here to just present the semi-annual report on how the victim service is going. Okay, so the goal today is to um show the numbers for victim served and services provided for both FY25 and the current year we're in FY26. Um, and then lastly, we're going to go over just Syracuse City's numbers, which would be you know, same the same year services provided, and then we're only going to look at the victimization categories for Syracuse City for the current year. And then as always, I would like to end the presentation with a positive story. Okay, so here um the number one thing that I um wanna point out with this um slide is if we look over this is the overall number of victims served for uh and compare comparing FY25 and FY26. So you can see that Syracuse has definitely had an increase um in victims served in the last year. And then um prior to FY25, um, Clinton and Syracuse had always stayed at a pretty um close number. And lately, we in the last two years, we've definitely have jumped ahead um when it comes to um victims being served and between Syracuse and Clinton. If you look at the bottom corner, this is total numbers of victims served. You will notice that there's a small decline or decrease in number of victims served, but we're going to discuss on the next slide show why um I'm still I'm my workload has still increased, although that number might reflect a little um differently. Celeste know why the drop in Sunset. Um Sunset, you know, let's just knock on wood. That is just been a good city to not have any crime committed. That's really the only reason. Yeah, knock on wood. Um so I don't have any other reason than that. So for um, this is services provided, and this is kind of this is gonna touch more on the um why that decrease in victim, the total number of victims served. So if you notice um the chart with the yellow, so that is FY25 and pink and purple is FY26. So you can tell you can tell that there's been a dramatic increase between services provided to victims in the last year. So we had a big jump with all of them. Um, and just to keep in mind here, the service quantity um is so one victim can be served, provided services multiple times in each category. So kind of going for a fresh reminder on what those categories are is information and referrals that um includes providing information on the criminal justice system and referrals to other two community resources. Emotional and safety is providing that emotional support and discussing um safety issues and um creating safety plans uh with the victim. And finally, criminal justice assistance and advocacy that's just um includes me communicating with the prosecutors, um, communicating with law enforcement and providing notification of criminal justice events to the victims. This right here is these numbers are just um Syracuse City again, comparing both years. Um you can tell again, there's an increase in services provided. So what this really means is that although there's a small decrease in the victim served overall, I'm spending more time with each victim because with each victim they're receiving more services. So either the cases um they the victims are needing more emotional support, the cases might need uh more notification of criminal justice events. There's just so many things that might be included in those services. And then this is a the victimization category for Syracuse for the current year we're in. As you can tell, um, domestic violence is still the number one um victim category that I focus on the most. Those are the cases that are more likely to go to court. So um that's why there's also there's a lot of services that are provided for that category following stalking and harassment and child physical abuse neglect. Um, and then the number of victims uh do not they may not add so the total number of victims is not going to add to the not the total number of victimization because one victim can be a victim of multiple crimes. So domestic violence involving a violation of a protective order or any other case. And then um ending the presentation with the story or a positive impact that um one of our agencies made on a survivor.