The board moved through a wide-ranging session that touched nearly every corner of city life, from a major bridge to backyard tree damage.

The largest commitment was infrastructure. The board awarded $1,563,144 to Vector Construction Corp. for the 2026 South James Street Bridge Project, the single biggest contract of the meeting and a project drivers in that part of the city will notice.

Much of the meeting was spent closing out the 2025 budget, and while shifting money between accounts is routine year-end housekeeping, the numbers told a story. Unsurprisingly, the story was snow. The city had to move more than $460,000 into snow-removal accounts to cover overtime and road salt that ran well past what was budgeted. This money was pulled from budget items as varied as the municipal pools, street lighting, and legal accounts. The board also covered fire and police personnel costs, employee retirement, and health insurance, which are ordinary but sizable bills that come due at year's end.

Not all of it was numbers on a ledger. The board booked a free summer concert series at the Griffo Green outside City Hall, approving four performances for residents to enjoy. Together the shows cost about $4,400, which is a small line item with an outsized presence in the community.

Several actions were about protecting the city's finances and managing risk. The board renewed Rome's overall insurance package at about $810,000 for the year with Haylor, Freyer & Coon of Syracuse, and renewed "stop-loss" coverage that shields the city's employee health plan when a single person's medical claims top $275,000. It also hired Troy & Banks to comb through six years of the city's electric, gas, propane, and phone bills hunting for overcharges; the firm is paid only a share of whatever it recovers, so the audit costs the city nothing up front. And it settled a resident's claim for $5,500 after a city tree fell and damaged her property.

The rest of the agenda leaned heavily on engineering and upkeep. The board hired firms to monitor groundwater at the closed Tannery Road landfill ($23,500) and to design a fix for stormwater leaking into the sanitary sewer system ($69,400). It also revived and approved a $165,000 engineering contract for the South Madison Street streetscape project, an item that had been paused at the previous meeting over a question about how it would be funded. And the city continued selling tax-foreclosed property, with a parcel on Clinton Street going for $3,650.