City council met last night. You can find a great blog post by Emily Battle of the FLS here. The meeting started off with a passioned statement about the War Memorial, very appropriate for Veteran’s day.

They city then heard another passionate request for the city to do something, anything, with the Idlewild mansion. This was from Leif Johnston, one of the three people proposing commercial or commercial/residential developments for the area, who had sent in pictures of errosion and vandalism at the site.  Later on in the meeting, the council stated that it was not approving any of the three proposals due to the estimated $3.5M in infrastructure improvements that the city would have to make.

Another regular ‘hot topic’ in the meetings came up – 1200 Prince Edward Street. Basically, this was a statement that lots of work has been done on the property, supposedly by volunteers. It was unclear whether it was truly volunteer labor. An exchange between Vice-Mayor Devine and the planning director made it apparent that the city approved a requirement for the owner to have someone check on the property weekly, but the approved wording doesn’t require any metric or reportout to the city. It was an uncomfortable round of questioning considering this council approved the wording just a few weeks ago. Is council attempting to revise their agreement now that they see the holes they left in it? In the FLS blog, there is dangerous quote attributed to Ms. Devine, does she imply future action based on a donation? –

“I certainly hope the owner, because of the volunteer labor, would consider a donation to a homeless shelter or program,” Devine said. “That would certainly be a wise thing for the owner to consider.”

Council also moved forward with a request to ask to have the city’s charter modified to call for a special election if a council position is vacated more than 2 years before it expires.

From the FLS writeup on the meeting, during budget discussions, it sounds like new councilmember Mr. Ellis is willing to offer his opinion in matters where there are other elected officials have authority (school board expenditures). Interesting considering Mr. Ellis himself is not elected, but was appointed.  Had Mr. Ellis investigated standard SW licensing in today’s environment, he might find that 300k for the number of seats needed in the city school system across many SW products is a very reasonable estimate.  We all bring strengths from our regular careers to any work done, it’s pretty obvious that Mr. Ellis works as a financial guy. Seems that the deep dive into this one line item surprised other council members.  I wonder if he will be as critical in evaluating the $1.9M in bike trails that he advocated during his run for the city council appointment.