Attributed by AI speaker identification from official meeting recordings; excerpts link to the full transcript for context. Attribution is conservative — unverified speech is left unattributed.
And so I frankly, strongly believe that, I don't know that this is a philosophical conversation, but conversations where we are asking questions that essentially boil down to, is it responsible for us to keep doing things the way that we always have?
Whatever the proper forum is, but I, along with my colleagues, believe that there is opportunity for us to do better with the numbers in our budget without necessarily laying off thousands of people and doing any kind of dramatic, you know, sweeping, you know, consequential changes.
And I think, ideally, we would be putting money away and parking money, frankly, in anticipation of what I think is going to be a reality that we all, and by we all I mean our county and our constitutional offices need to brace for that impact.
But when we have a charge for departments of don't raise your budgets by more than 3% and growth in the rolls at an average of about 4% or 5%, I'm going to need a lot of explanation as to requests that are, you know, 20%, 21% year over year on budget request increases.
Okay, and is that industry standard for a municipal government to pay $6,400 for a Motorola radio, or whether it's Motorola or whatever the brand is, but the device that we are purchasing as a government, that per radio cost of $6,400 is industry standard?
Because if the facts lay out that Camila's housed, you know, a number of our homeless trust facilities and all of the other amazing organizations that do this great work are reflecting numbers of available beds open every evening, it's going to be difficult for me to understand a justification for this item.
My staff tells me that they, too, have received correspondence to the District 5 e-mail that have not been shared with me,
or maybe a lobbyist on this at some point in the past, but nothing regarding the specifics of the application
And so I thought it would be beneficial to both the FIFA host committee as well as this body to allow you the opportunity to share your progress, share where you are financially, share what you have done with those public dollars and do it as transparently and as much in the light as possible so that everybody can be on the same page regarding where that funding is being earmarked and directed.
I thank her for the amendment, but an oral representation on the record absent a written pledge from their leadership, from their board taking a vote, from them saying we're willing to put a skin in this game, carve out money from our fund because we believe in this project as much as you all do, tells me that something is missing here, that this is not ready to advance.