Finance, Public Hearing & Regular Meeting

Agendas: Finance | Public Hearing | Regular. Proceedings below are from the meeting transcript; vote titles are verified against the clerk's minutes.

Finance Committee: Late Items and Abstentions

Chair: Council President Steele. Called to order at 6:30 p.m. Council Member Greg Campbell-Cohen absent (ill). In attendance: Mayor Carmella Mantello, Deputy Mayor Seamus Donnelly, Comptroller Michael McNeff, Head of Finance and Personnel Gabrielle Mahoney. About 20 members of the public attended. Adjourned at 6:53 p.m. No one spoke during the Finance public forum.

Steele opened by adding two items to the agenda by unanimous consent, meaning no member objected: Ordinance 46, a change to the 2026 Water Fund budget, and Resolution 96, waiving a 60 percent residency rule for the 2026 East Side Seniors Grant.

Struber said both items reached council members "mere hours ago." She hadn't had time to read them, she said, and doubted the public had either. She and Favreau abstained. Comptroller McNeff said he held the budget change back so he could present it with the related grant. Steele pointed out that the grant itself came through Finance two weeks earlier. McNeff called it his error and apologized. Both items passed 4-0, with two abstentions.

Council Member Kathleen Spain-McLaren explained that an abstention is not a no vote. It means a member didn't have enough information to cast one.

Finance Committee: Other Business

Local Law 5, the disabled veterans tax break, passed 6-0 with no discussion. Steele and Favreau sponsored it at the administration's request.

Resolution 94 appoints a member to the city's Ethics Commission. Spain-McLaren said she hopes it leads to regular meetings. At the Regular Meeting, Council Member Noreen McKee said the commission needs to be a resource residents can turn to, and "it hasn't been for years." It passed 6-0.

Resolution 95 accepts a $60,000 state grant for a cybersecurity review of city systems. A council member said residents have been asking what the city is doing about cyber threats. It passed 6-0.

Regular Meeting: Beman Park Neighbors Honored

Council President Steele presiding. Called to order at 7:00 p.m. Council Member Campbell-Cohen absent. About 20 members of the public attended. Adjourned at 8:10 p.m.

The council gave certificates to two Beman Park neighbors. The first went to the family who restored the iron horse trough at 15th Street and Peoples Avenue, cast in 1872. Judge Ed Spain, Council Member Spain-McLaren, and Maddie McLaren scraped it to bare iron, rust-proofed it, and repainted it in its original green and white. Neighbor Michelle Miner, who has planted flowers in the trough for years, replanted it for fall.

The second honoree used a 2024 Neighborhood Improvement Program grant to build what presenters called "a free library on steroids." Troy High School engineering students modeled it on the home of Peter Baltimore, an abolitionist whose son, Garnet Douglass Baltimore, designed Beman Park. A QR code will soon link to a local historian's talk about the family.

Steele asked for a moment of silence for the Rizzo family after a fatal house fire that week. Spain-McLaren thanked the Troy Fire Department for its work at another fire the same day, where a neighbor carried a trapped man out on his back.

Regular Meeting: Local Law 3 Adopted

Local Law 3 passed 6-0 on final adoption. McKee, the sponsor, said it took almost eight months of public input, research, hearings, and drafting. "It's not perfect. It's a start," she said, and promised the council will keep watching how police use the cameras.

Struber said she is "personally very much against Flock as a company." She argued against folding a police review committee into this law, as many speakers asked, because that body's job would reach far beyond the cameras. Council Member Phil DiLorenzo said the law is built on data, which he called one of the best ways to write legislation.

Steele told residents she understood their frustration, but until the council's lawsuit over the Flock contract is settled, ending it "is totally not within our purview." She said support for Flock on the council going forward is thin. Spain-McLaren said the guardrails exist because of what residents said.

Favreau said the council would be in a different place if the administration had given it the Flock contract on time in March, and had answered the council's emails asking for an extension. She voted yes because the council is stuck with Flock until the lawsuit ends and needs guardrails in the meantime, and because the law can be changed as the technology changes.

Regular Meeting: Public Forum on Any Topic

Chris Heinbach, a trustee of the Troy Uniformed Firefighters union, spoke with Vice President Matthew Ryan. Three people died in Troy fires over the past week, one of them a child, Heinbach said. He thanked residents for the plants left on firehouse stoops and thanked the Troy Police Benevolent Association and the Albany firefighters' union for opening their counselors to Troy members.

Heinbach said fires turn deadly much faster than they used to. Federal research found a room with older furniture took about 30 minutes to reach flashover, the point where everything ignites. Modern synthetic furniture can get there in under four minutes. He praised the mayor and fire chief's smoke detector giveaway, but said crews hear a low-battery chirp in about one in ten homes. He asked the council to help look into requiring sealed-battery or hardwired detectors.

Mike Nelligan of District 4, who lives downtown without a car, said the new apartments there have no pharmacy or grocery store nearby. He asked the city to publish a plan for downtown, including zoning and incentives to bring in those services. "Surveillance is not going to attract people to here," he said.

Greg Lyons said several of his Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests came back wrong. One was answered "no records found," and then the appeal said the records were online. In another, emails he sent the mayor and deputy mayor through the city's official contact forms were missing from the response, though he has records showing they were sent. Stacy Pompei, who runs a new nonprofit offering plumbing help to veterans and seniors, said the mayor's office hasn't returned her calls, and that a FOIL request about a December car accident returned wrong data that was never corrected.