City Council Meeting

Catherine ReadAnd so you see behind me people who are like, I want to know more about how this government works. And it's really important because it's an investment these folks have made for seven weeks, seven weeks, once a week to come in here. They've heard from city staff members, all kinds of departments, to talk about how our government actually works. We just did a recent community survey where the results came back and said, we have one of the happiest communities in the country, happier on the national average, happier than other communities in the Mid-Atlantic. And people talked about what made them happy, including refuse and recycling, by the way. So this all ties back to Edwin in a very unique way.

Catherine ReadWilliams and a new police chief, Raul Pedroso, you took on those tasks and you gave it everything you had and the city and its first community survey results show that our city is very happy with how things are run and for the last nine months it's been because you led our city staff. They had faith in you. They trusted you and so do I and it's been an honor and a privilege to work with you we are fortunate as a city that you dropped out of wherever you dropped out of and into city hall to get us through this past nine months so i want to say thank you and since we're talking about retirements i wish you well and what you decide to do after october 31st you have earned a bit of rest thank you mr foster

Anthony Amosand four both still fiscal negatives for us and the the only other additional context that I'll be thinking about in these further discussions is that I know that our community survey came in and under parks and community parks and I'm tripping recreation one of the items that the number one item that was listed was availability of walking trails and biking trails. So that's something that I'm going to be factoring in. It's not the decisive point, but I did want to address that. Number one, I have fiscal concerns with just because I really don't want to pull money from the general fund or our unassigned fund balance. So thank you.

Brian Fosterstaffwe've accomplished over this past year through a variety of whether it's you know getting national accreditation for fire and for emergency management and all of the different programs that we've done you know creating a budget open house from scratch all just you name it we've done it and I think that the the community survey that we just results we just got none of the mayor's mentioned that a couple of times and in public settings just shows you that this community really values all the services and all the things that are provided by the city and that's certainly in large part to the staff who are the ones who have to execute and actually deliver those services so it's been a real pleasure and joy to work beside all of them