11/11/2025
Comments from my final meeting
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Thank you Mr. Mayor.
First I'd like to say congratulations to Councilwoman-elect Karen Scott, and congratulations on reelection to Councilman Rob Baker. I wish you luck and hope that everything goes well for you. If you ever have any reason to reach out, please do not hesitate. You both of course have my phone number.
Second, I am happy that the Charter change I proposed and that passed, one discussed with Councilman Baker, coming to a compromise, will help future City Councils when doing City Manager searches.
I've been thinking back to my first regular meeting on City Council, as Karen will soon have hers. The biggest thing that stands out was... stormwater standards. I was thinking like what does this even mean, I'm going to need to do some research on this.
11 years later we are still talking about stormwater, especially with climate change. At some point our civil engineers estimated it would be a $300-400 million project to separate all of the sanitary sewers and stormwater sewers. There's no reason for us to be processing rainwater every time it rains. Every ounce of rainwater we process costs us money. A lot of money. The rainwater should be going to the lake, or soaked up in rain barrels or bioretention areas.
And it just makes me think about how many things are in front of us. 99% of things voted on will not make a headline.
We discuss and vote on the budget and ordinance changes, which can be anything from:
✔ Funding our pension, retiree healthcare or death benefits, to
✔ Water mains, Sewer lines, Lead service lines, to
✔ Roads, to
✔ Garbage, to
✔ Police, fire, to
✔ Library services, to
✔ Elections and dog licenses, to
✔ Parks, to
✔ When we get sued, what to do, to
✔ Hiring the City Manager and hiring the City Attorney
✔ And that's just a subset
I'm proud of the things I've done and been involved with over the past 11 years. I am most proud of fighting for safe drinking water by getting all the lead service lines removed. When we received $3 million from the federal government due to the COVID pandemic, the Congress was intending on those funds being used for public health related priorities. Only due to a loophole in the law could a City accept it as "lost revenue" and then use it for anything, leading our City Manager at the time to propose using it to repave a road. I fought against this, partially winning, allocating $500,000 of it to remove lead service lines. Thanks to our State Senator Veronica Klinefelt, we received $10 million more to finish the job. Thank you to Darin Paolucci and our DPW and contractors for doing the heavy lifting.
Also, a thousand lines would have been missed had a conversation between myself and the Mayor not happened, and I followed up about it. The City's master list was missing about a thousand lead lines (Elke was not City Manager at the time) basically because it was unfinished and was assumed finished. But something was up when Mayor Klinefelt's house was not on the list but yet we knew he had a lead line. And then I even wrote a software program to compare five different spreadsheets to find inconsistencies and found a few dozen.
Also I'm proud of:
✔ Something very simple... one of the first things I proposed back in 2014-2015 was the use of credit cards. The City could literally not buy anything off the internet or that required a credit card because the City had none. I am glad we moved into the 21st century on that one.
✔ An ordinance to outlaw in the City puppy mills and similar for cats, rabbits, and ferrets.
✔ Facade improvement program, that I proposed five years ago is still happening in the DDA district, initially starting with 5 matching loans of $3,000.
✔ Proposing body worn cameras, something the City did not have implemented until 2021, helping to promote a good relationship between the police department and community. Initially our police chief at the time was against it and there was a lot of pushback.
✔ Better side streets by doing a joint sealing and patching program to manage the decent roads, and reconstruction for the failing roads.
✔ Park improvements - new playgrounds, new sidewalks at the parks, a disc golf course, first basketball court in the City in decades.
✔ Two parks went from what I have called "Field Parks" to "Community Parks", since they are now not just a large field of grass.
✔ New dog park.
✔ An updated fiscal management plan - updated not long after the recession happened and previous City Councils were able to bounce us back.
✔ Moved the pension system to MERS so that it is most professionally managed.
✔ Keeping the shamrocks on the side street signs (and printing them in-house). And getting the giant Shamrock at City Hall, but now at the DPW (but was previously just sitting in storage until I proposed the DDA do something with it).
✔ Dozens and dozens of trees planted, and I helped plant some of them.
✔ Converted all streetlights in the City to LED, promoting energy efficiency and environmentalism.
✔ Updated ethics policy, bringing back an Ethics Board that in theory will enforce ethical violations.
✔ Electric car charging stations at City Hall, as we know electric cars will soon be ubiquitous.
✔ A splash pad coming.
Sometimes the answers up here are easy and sometimes they are hard. I believe that is why Legislative bodies have more than one person, so that they can discuss and come up with even better solutions than any one person on their own.
And sometimes you have to go about something on your own, like when the City hired a police officer that punched someone for no reason while working for their previous department. The Police Chief at the time said he didn't know about it, our City Manager refused to do anything about it, and eventually I went on the news calling for this officer to be fired. Even then nothing was done and the officer was only let go once the State pulled his law enforcement license and was literally not able to be a police officer. I hope that the public fights as hard as they did about Nine Mile for issues like this in the future.
And sometimes you lose a vote, but I think you can still continue to fight for what's right. I voted against our installation of Flock cameras in the City that read every license plate that drives by. There are 18 of these in the City. ICE is now using these cameras that are basically becoming ubiquitous to track Americans. ICE is supposed to find people illegally in the country, but they are time and time again arresting and detaining Americans who are legally in the country. The Flock cameras are helping them violate the Constitution. I believe this concern alone strongly outweighs any positive benefits of the cameras. And they are expensive... the licenses alone on the 18 cameras are $54,000 per year.
It is still my belief that the Nine Mile lane reduction would be positive for the community. I believe this because planning experts say so, not because a previous police chief said he stares out his window for hours per day and says it won't work, or because a previous fire chief said we can't possibly turn a fire truck on to a three-lane road (I thought all side streets were a three lane road or smaller). Our Master Plan says to use road diets when capacities are ideal. Not knowing if capacities were ideal when I first thought about this idea, I convinced City Council to have a traffic study done. The traffic study showed that your drive through would be the same in terms of time. [PAUSE FOR NINE SECONDS] That 9 seconds I just paused was the greatest time difference in the study, with many being faster than now. One issue was queueing, and with a few minor changes to the the initial proposal we were able to fix those issues.
I hope that the community does not let even the thought of inconvenience cause them to fight against something. It is my hope that we do things to improve the community as a whole, and people are not thinking only about themselves and use facts to guide them. Saying the same false thing 100 times does not make it true. And also, instead of only arguing against things, bring possible solutions forward.
I hope that we don't stall our own progress by not being willing to look outside the box. I appreciate Mayor Klinefelt and Councilwoman Podsiadlik, and previous City Councilwoman and now County Commissioner Sarah Lucido for being willing to look outside the box. And of course thank you to the residents who were and are speaking up about how the project can be positive.
I've joined a band recently (I play drums) and was telling Jon in the band, who is also an Eastpointe resident, about how much the City Council is paid. It comes out to about $5.55 per hour with the amount of work I put in, and he said "you may not get paid much but at least you get publicly slandered every couple weeks".
Some things you wouldn't expect prior to becoming a member of City Council: another member calling the cops on your wife, or code enforcement targeting your house - an address that had the numbers written out in English, most likely there since the house was built, was now all of a sudden an issue I had to resolve immediately, and only after I apparently irritated our Building Director at the time. And we recently got security cameras after I had to put a police report in on a resident that was threatening me.
My hope is that in the future being a public official is again viewed as a public service and not as an enemy. The point of these positions is to make a better society. Less and less people are going to want to run for City Council if the pay is $6,000 per year, and you get attacked day in and day out, and no one is appreciative of the service.
I am eternally optimistic, and believe things will work out, but I don't think that will happen unless we work every day to ensure it does. I think it's time again to think about this saying: how the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. Think about what you can do for your community. Speak up of course when necessary, but also ensure you are making positive change.
I have been the Treasurer of the Memorial Day Parade committee, and have coordinated the raising of funds and raised a lot of the funds for the last 4 years, and will continue on this committee. We actually have our Veterans Day event tomorrow at 6:30pm at the military museum. I'll continue giving blood when RARE has blood drives. I'll continue volunteering at the Beautification Commission litter clean ups.
I would like to thank all the board and commission members over the years, as it takes a village to run the City. Thank you to my wife Alysa Diebolt for all her early work on the Arts & Cultural Diversity Commission, Gary Sasek and all your work on the Parks Commission and Ethics Board, thank you to Craig Wodecki and all your work on the Beautification Commission and Housing and Library boards. I had a good time as liaison to the Planning Commission, being able to chit chat about City things with Sheila Ulinski who sat next to me. Thank you Chelsea Head for earlier putting that Proclamation together and the beautiful event for Margaret Smith. Thank you to groups like the Urban Seed for creating a community space and donating large amounts of food to those that need it. Thank you Bill Randazzo for your insane amount of work there. Thanks Chris Causley for running the military museum and recently bringing a monument tank to the museum. Thanks Betty Bishop for all the time you've spent with me on the adopt-a-flowerbed we shared.
Thank you to the school board for being a great partner in the community - to Board President Chineva Early, Vice President Robert Roscoe, Secretary Ed Williams, Treasurer Darlene Whitby, Trustees Ian McCain, Shelly Cioppa, and Addie Richardson. Thank you Judge Galen and Magistrate Mark Makoski for your running of the courts. I am glad we have been able to improve our relationship with the court, except for maybe a few finance kinks here and there. I'm glad you've improved so many things. Thank you Elke for stepping up and being interim City Manager while we searched for a new manager. I am confident that Ryan Madis will become a member of this community and take us to the next level. I look forward to seeing him pushing City Council's vision forward, and not fighting them. Thank you Rich for being a fantastic attorney for the City, one willing to even pick up trash with us. Thank you to everyone that said nice things at Hearing of the Public.
It has been an honor to be a City Councilman and Mayor Pro Tem for the City of Eastpointe and I will always treasure these 11 years. I believe I've been an ally to the employees of this City over those 11 years, as our government will only improve if the City Council supports them. I thank my wife Alysa Diebolt, and my mom and dad, for supporting me these 11 years and putting up with all the insanity that follows even a spouse or family member of a Councilperson and someone trying to improve their community.
Thank you Mr. Mayor.
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