Paul Szmal: It's 8.39 on FLX Morning on Finger Lakes News Radio. We're joined as usual at this time on a Friday by Auburn City Clerk Chuck Mason. Chuck, good morning. How are you, sir?
Chuck Mason: Good morning, Paul. I am good. How are you?
Paul Szmal: Doing well, doing well.
The council meeting last night actually started out with a very special event, a ceremonial swearing in.
Chuck Mason: That's correct. We had a packed house last night at the beginning at City Hall. Room was filled up with lots of fellow police officers and members of other departments in the area, such as state troopers and county sheriff, for the ceremonial swearing in for our new police chief, Matthew Androsco. He was joined by his wife and his children and his mother for the swearing in and the chief spoke briefly upon his swearing in and he's actually been chief now for about, you know, going on about three weeks now. But sure enough, the first night that we had him scheduled, he had come down sick that week on the Thursday of the week and we had to cancel the original plan. So this was kind of a make-up ceremony that we had for him last night and in front of a full crowd of people and we wish the chief well. You know, he spoke about what his vision is for the department and we really look forward to his work as our new police chief and wish him well in that new responsibility.
Paul Szmal: All right, so that was a good way to start off the meeting. Kind of a light council ledger last night.
Chuck Mason: Yes, as we talked about last week, we had the Community Development Block Grant program. The five-year consolidated plan for that program has been put together by our city staff after months of community meetings and a significant community survey that was being run. They've collected all the public input on that and last week had held the public hearing in front of the city council and this week was the council's final step in that process to approve the plan. So last night the council unanimously put in its stamp of approval onto this year's plan and this is a special year because you do have to forecast out in this five-year consolidated plan. You kind of have to take a farther look out as to what you think the needs will be over the next five years in the community and then within that five-year plan you also outline the specifics of the program year for this next city budget year which would be the 2025-2006 city budget. So the staff has done a tremendous amount of work on this. It was our program manager at the planning department, Renee Jensen, and senior planner at the planning department, Tiffany Beebe. They will be the ones that administer this program and they administer the the public process and this is the funding that will see a lot of work being done specifically in a lot of the neighborhoods when we're out there doing some sidewalks and areas and street trees, sometimes curb replacements, sometimes sewer line replacements, but the more popular work that we do with this funding is really get in and spruce up a lot of the parks and the playground. So a lot of our recent playground updates in recent years have been completed thanks to the community development block grant program.
We are currently underway with a renovation of the Wall Street playground down on the west end of the city. We got that 50 percent done back in the fall and as soon as the weather breaks this spring we will be down there to complete the Wall Street playground before summertime sets in and we'll have a beautiful new playground down on our west end and that is all being done with community development block grant funding. Now this is to remind everybody this is a federal government program. City of Auburn has been a part of this since 1994. We've been an entitlement community under this program and it is administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and we really look forward to these resources in Auburn and they really help us get a lot of work done out in the neighborhoods.
Now another significant portion of this money will go towards helping some of our human service agencies and we're usually able to get grants in the amounts of anywhere from five to fifteen thousand dollars out to some of our human service agencies which would include food pantries, the local scat van for senior transportation, usually the Booker T Washington Center, usually the Seneca Cougar Action Program for a workforce development program that they run. There's usually anywhere from 10 to 15 human resource agencies that will receive a piece of this funding as well. So council last night putting its final stamp of approval on this Paul and now the plan goes off to Washington and we'll wait to hear back. We usually hear back by summertime on the final approval of this plan and the work will get done in the fall of this year.
Paul Szmal: We're talking with Auburn City Clerk Chuck Mason this morning here on FLX morning. There was also the awarding of a contract for what's referred to as Facilitation of Community Dialogue.
Chuck Mason: That's right. With one thing that the new chief spoke about last night is we will be running a facilitated process over the next several months for our police department to discuss with the community at large their policies and procedures and for us to be able to facilitate a discussion with the public to provide feedback to what they feel about the Auburn Police Department and it's something that the council last night unanimously approved. We will be using a facilitator for this project and last night the council agreed to approve the contract with the facilitator and I just have to pull up the background memo to remember the name. The company that's going to be doing this work for us is the Center for Governmental Research and they will be in to facilitate several community meetings and as soon as we have a meeting set up and stuff we will be fully announcing those and probably talking about them on future Fridays, Paul. But this is just kind of the first step in the process. The council making this decision based on feedback it was hearing from the public last year and you'll remember that Auburn and lots of communities a few years ago 2020-2021 at the directive of the governor at the time did a public airing of policies and procedures and and went through a process to solicit feedback from the community and weigh that in and weigh that against policy and procedure and make changes as addressed by the public and it was a very good process for us. Chief Butler was the police chief at the time and actually our former chief Jim Slayton was the training officer at the time so he was very involved with that process as well but it's been five years now so this will be a good time for the city of Auburn to hold a set of those meetings again and have a great discussion what we hope will be a great and productive discussion with the community and our police department is being led now by the new chief Matt Androsco is very much open and willing to participate in this process and we hope for good results.
Paul Szmal: And one of the other things I wanted to touch on to see if this was brought up as a topic of conversation at last night's city council meeting was the recent ADA audit that we're reporting on.
Chuck Mason: That's right, the city of Auburn was one of 20 communities throughout the state of New York that received an audit from the New York State Office of State Comptroller pertaining to Americans with disabilities compliance ADA compliance at some of our city facilities and as you know Auburn is known as history's hometown and one of the reasons for that is we've got a lot of old buildings and old infrastructure and history here and our city hall is coming on 95 years old and was built back in 1930 to specifically be a city hall. It was a gift from the Osborne Family Foundation at the time and it served us really well but it was it is a building that was very specifically designed to be a city hall and built in the 1930s so modifications to the building sometime are a little bit more challenging than not and so the Office of State Comptroller took a look at our Auburn City Hall, our Auburn City Police Department, our new Auburn Fire Station and our Auburn City Court Space which is located in the old post office building that is owned by Cougar County where some other courts are located as well and they came up with a list of us for out of it was like 575 things that they measured and they discovered that we had come up short on about 60 of those things I think it was or 68 I can't remember the exact number but the city manager did write a letter in response and we totally agree with the things that were identified in the ADA audit and we totally look forward to addressing all of these things in future renovations to the building and future capital projects.
I will note that a significant amount of probably about 25 percent of what they put down on the list for us was signage at city buildings and signage at specific offices so we will be right away ordering the signage that they had recommended and this would be signage that would identify the specific office spaces such as in city hall that would also have a braille listing of the name of the office that was one of their top recommendations and that that takes up about 25 percent of what's on that list and we will we do intend to order up those signs and get those installed as soon as possible. Some of the other projects such as you know adjustment of some of the counter spaces and things needed for entranceways and things like that will be factored into some future capital projects but we will also probably have a presentation on this sometime over the spring here as we get into spring in front of the city council this may require the council may in fact I think we have 90 days for the council to put a stamp of approval on what the what the plan is and get it back to the state comptroller's office so overall it was a very productive process for us here in Auburn we worked in cooperation with the state auditors that came in they were very educational for us really took a walk through these buildings and really pointed a lot of stuff out to us that we we will look forward to addressing and and make improvements to try to improve the accessibility of our city buildings.
Paul Szmal: That's Auburn City Clerk Chuck Mason joining us here on FLX morning thank you sir we'll talk to you again next week.
Chuck Mason: Sounds good have a great weekend everybody.
