10/20/2003 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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ROUGlI DRAFT - NOT REVIEWED OR APPROVED BY COUNCIL 10-20-03 Regular Council Meeting Page 18 Council President Buckholtz said I appreciate the comment, Mr. Marquardt. Dr. Parker, did you have a [comment]? Dr. Parker said I was just going to say I voted in favor of this based on what I heard from these individuals. And those were my primary concerns. I will say one of the reasons why I voted for it was because I felt that while it was not like adding a sixth lane, if you put a median in and you find it is problematic, we can easily take it out obviously and so I didn't have a great problem with the idea; if need be, we could take it out. On the other hand, I do agree with him in that we spent a tremendous amount of time with a tremendous amount of residents and people hashing this out and maybe while our intentions are good-maybe the way in which we're deciding this isn't necessarily fair to those residents that live on that street. Maybe just a little bit more time just to allow them to voice their opinion and they may be well in agreement with us-it might be appropriate considering the amount of heat that was generated so many years ago on this whole issue. Council President Buckholtz said thank you Dr. Parker; Mr. Riter? Mr. Riter said Mr. Christian, I wasn't on Council at the time that that original vote was taken. And I happened to be in favor of medians way back when so this is really the first time that I've had a chance to cast a vote on this particular subject. But I will tell you one thing that I feel is a touch unfair and it's why I tried to recognize you before the vote was taken. It doesn't make much sense to have an open portion for New Business when the open portion is after the votes have been taken after the New Business because we can't hear what your thoughts are on that piece of legislation. So in all fairness, I did, and you'll recall, try to have you recognized before we did take that vote. I did want to hear what you had to say. And maybe, Mr. President, in the future, if we do have a controversial piece of legislation, under New Business, we can allow an extra open portion. Obviously, Mr. Christian lives on S.O.M. Center, he is concerned about those medians because they go basically right down his front yard and I was just curious as to what he had to say. I did take Mr. Ilacqua's position (both on S.O.M. Widening and on Council) and I know he cast votes on both of those committees and this was truly my first opportunity to cast a vote on the medians. And I have always felt that they would be a positive thing but that's the one thing that I felt was a little unfair was that Mr. Christian didn't have an opportunity to comment before the vote was taken. Council President Buckholtz said thank you, Mr. Riter. And as long as we are all clarifying things, I did call out to Rick and say if you have something you are passionate about, go ahead and he said no, never mind. Just for the point. I am not sure that it would have changed the vote and the other language you used was when we have a controversial issue-I don't feel like I am a senior member of the community here but maybe I amin all the years-8th _ 9th year of being on Council--you know-it behooves me to know in advance which, sometimes-which legislation is going to be controversial and which is not. I, in all fairness and in all honestly did not see it as controversial legislation. I recognize some of the points that you are making as being valid. We make a lot of decisions here that we don't go door to door onwhether to light ball parks or not; or, you know, there are a lot of decisions that are made and many that are-if I may finish-I am going to restate my offer that we do invite people to meetings and everyone knows when Caucus is and regular meetings and pretty much it's known that the things we vote on in regular session is discussed a " week or two in advance at Caucus meetings. So once again, I don't think this was done in a way to