From The Daily Northwestern, I'm Eke Allison. This is Everything Evanston, a podcast about the people, business, and going on in Evanston, Illinois. Today, we're doing a recap of the January 23rd City Council meeting. Then we'll take a look at one of this week's leading stories in Evanston.
This week, Council had everything from Billy Joel references to lengthy discussion on local alcohol ordinances. We'll start off with the Council's discussion on the allocation of remaining ARPA funds. The American Rescue Plan Act gave Evanston City Council $43 million in funding to address economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. Interim Community Development Director Sarah Flax, so the committee had originally over-allocated its funds.
Since that time, one of the largest of the requests, which was from the reparations committee, was withdrawn. So that actually has given the Council some flexibility on what to do with remaining funding. We have an unallocated balance of $5,751,423. During public comment, several residents of Evanston offered suggestions for the allocation of their remaining funds, such as using them to help small Evanston landlords.
The Council was also set to vote on an ordinance banning cashless businesses that was introduced at the previous City Council meeting. We covered it in our first episode, but to summarize, bans on cashless businesses are widespread across other municipalities, such as New York, San Francisco, and his third-word Alderman Melissa Wynne put it, That's right, not part of it, not most of it, but the entire state has banned cashless businesses. One of the goals of the ordinance was to protect unbanked residents of Evanston, as well as other disenfranchised populations, who might not have the resources to pay without cash. Second-word Alderman, Chrissy Harris, spoke in favor of the ordinance.
There's a lot of disenfranchised people out there that aren't homeless. They just can't have eggs, can't have mortgages, can't have checking accounts and credit cards because the rates are too high. So I want us to be conscious of that. However, many of the Council members who agreed with the goal of the proposed ordinance voiced concerns that there was not enough information on the impact the decision would have on Evanston.
Sixth-word Alderman, Tom Sufferton, expressed the need for more insight into how the decision would affect cashless businesses and Evanston's economy. Yeah, I'm just writing this, and yeah, I was on this as possible, so we can create the best legislative products for the residents of the city of Evans. After a discussion among all nine Council members, a motion was passed to move the ordinance to the Equity and Empowerment Commission, as well as the Economic Development Committee. Other highlights included public comments on the proposed rebuilding of Ryan Field.
As well as Economic Development Manager, Paul Zamazak's presentation on Evanston's economic recovery, entitled, We Didn't Start the Fire. The last few years have really brought this 1989 song to mind, and forgive me because you'll have this, you're warm in your aftermath. A discussion took place on the city ordinance prohibiting public possession of an open container of alcohol. Eighth-word Alderman, Devon Reed, argued that the current ordinance could be amended.
Taking a bottle of wine in your leaving wine goddess, and if there's a tasting of any open your bottle, you'll be allowed to walk down the street. Sergeant Scott Sophia, a member of the Evanston Police Department, answered questions from Council members, and explained that the police department uses the ordinance to enforce laws against public intoxication. The Council voted to pass an amended version of the alcohol ordinance for Introduction to Council, meaning it will be on the agenda at the next meeting. Make sure to tune in for the next city council meeting, the week of February 13th, 2023.
Up next, Lena Koznikov brings us a story from this week. Janet Alexander-Davis, an Evanston resident of 80 years, said she never quite understood why her neighborhood seemed to smell. That is, until she realized the smell came from the Church Street Waste Transfer Station, a garbage dump in the Fifth Ward. I'm Selena Koznikov, and we're going to learn more about and focus at a really scary story on Evanston's initiative to conduct environmental justice investigation within the city, after a delay of almost two and a half years from its initial proposal.
When I finally realized that there was no reason for this garbage dump to be in a neighborhood and walking distance of businesses, of homes, of the high school, I started with a lot of other people to start picking and trying to get rid of it, and as before we didn't understand, we couldn't get rid of it. The Waste Transfer Station is still up and running on the Fifth Ward, despite the proven negative impact on air quality levels in the surrounding neighborhoods, which are predominantly black. Evanston residents, specifically those living in historically red-lined neighborhoods, have faced disproportionate health inequities for decades. A lot of times people don't know that we have rights that we don't really use, or we have a way that we can solve things within our own community if we just understood what was going on.
The city seeks to amend these inequities by launching an environmental justice investigation. Mayor Daniel Bist, at the purpose of the investigation, is to provide the city with a roadmap and benchmark to achieve environmental justice and map data on environmental inequities by using an environment. I don't have clear how long it will take, so I think what's important is to move in as quickly as possible to make sure we have a solid, thorough, professional plan in place, and we ask to start to execute. The city worked with Environmental Justice Evanston, or EJE, a branch of local environmental advocacy group Citizens Greener Evanston, while planning its investigation.
EJE co-chair Jerry Garals said many of the inequities she discussed with other chair members are based on a lack of public engagement in the black community, about decisions are being made by the city and developers. That affects their neighborhood and affects the quality of life in that neighborhood, so the whole goal here was to uncover some of those decision-making processes and attitudes, programs, policies, procedures that lead to these kinds of environmental injustices, whether they're intentional or not. The 2022 Evanston Project for the Local Assessment Needs Report said 5th Ward residents face more adverse health effects than residents in most other parts of the city. Garals said EJE hopes to incorporate resident experiences to accurately assess environmental injustices in the city.
EJE member Robin Herdick said EJE has been conducting listening sessions with residents from the 2nd and 5th wards to increase public engagement. We want to hear from those residents of Evanston who aren't typically heard from, and that's, you know, our black and brown are underserved communities, so that's who we seek out for these to make sure that they have a voice and that we're documenting that voice. The city's government pledged to make sustainability a high priority going forward after resident criticism for inactivity on its climate action and resilience plan early last year. The city allocated $100,000 for investigation in this year's budget.
The city will use that money to hire facilitators for more listening sessions. As the mayor said in his press release, we will continue with the listening sessions. We'll continue to work together on the mapping tool, and we'll continue to work together to help shape this investigation. But the burden is on the city to take action.
That's all for this week's City Story. We'll be back in three weeks for another Look at Evanston City Politics. From The Daily Northwestern, I'm Mika Allison. And I'm Selena Kuznikoff.
Thanks for listening to another episode of Everything Evanston's Rapid Recap. This episode was reported and produced by me and Mika Allison. Lily Carey contributed her reporting. The audio editor of The Daily Northwestern is Eric Kushman.
The digital managing editors are Joanne Hayner and Olatunji Osha Williams, and the editor-in-chief is Alex Perry. Make sure to subscribe to The Daily Northwestern's podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or SoundCloud to hear more episodes like this.