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The council meeting was held Monday since it can't be held on election day.
Item O2 (2 Fire Fighter Resignations)
This is/was not good. I have privately been told there may be more resignations coming and it sounds like they're not happy with the new chief. I have no idea if it's justified, and assuming things go my way today 🙂 it'll definitely be something I'll dig into.
Some amount of angst is expected when leadership changes and I believe we have a path to have a better idea of what's going on in the next few months.
Item P (Outstanding Utility Bills)
This comes up every year at this time. There's a couple dozen people in the city that don't pay their water bill and instead opt to let it get put on their property taxes. The issue here is there's a fee added to do this...
Item Q (Long Term Plan Discussion)
The Long Term Plan is where we stage items we need to fund over the next 10 years. In reality anything over 5 is totally fiction, but it at least provides a place holder and constant reminder it's out there.
This discussion had a number of surprises (all of which are the good kind).
- We had roughly $900k spread over the next 2 years allocated for city hall upgrades. Our new temporary administrator told us he believed the value wasn't there since it would only provide a few offices and with the likelihood that there was going to be a small shift to at home working. We decided to push it out and look for other solutions since we had years to come up with something.
- A few rather expensive pieces of equipment we deemed unnecessary and were pulled.
- Here's the biggie... The full blown fire station was pushed out to 2028. The 5 of us agreed that was the correct move. As I've mentioned in the past, at that time the city will have funding in place for a lot of infrastructure. In the mean time we will continue to look for a short term solution to medical calls in that area. I've been pushing both of these ideas for years.
- Associated fire station equipment (engines, etc.) will be pushed out to coincide with the station.
- Some rearranging of roads rebuilds / improvements but not much.
Item R (3rd Quarter Report)
Not much to see here. It's just to keep us aware of the financial state of the city. Having someone in house taking care of our books is so much nicer than a contractor.
Item S (RFP for Transportation Plan Amendment)
A few weeks ago the council decided to make changes to the transportation portion of the Comprehensive Plan and this will help us get that done.
As always, if you have comments or opinions you'd like to share, feel free to contact me!