Braland Benefit

Just wanted to share the info for the Steve Braland benefit coming up on August 6. Steve has colon cancer, and a benefit is being held to help his family with medical costs, and travel costs to Mayo Clinic. His kids go to Roland-Story, and obviously a tough time for the family. HERE is a flyer for the event.

July 25 council meeting

Pretty short meeting. Only myself, 3 of our 5 council members, 2 city employees, and our city attorney in attendance. Biggie was doing the paperwork to transfer the property on Cottonwood to its new owner. It is nice for the city to be rid of the property, and hopefully the new owner will be putting a house up there.

Alliant has been informed to install new street lights on Bryan and Arthur. We also have the street signs up to guide wayward travelers in west Roland.

We found out that our city clerk, Deneen Frost will be returning to work on a part time basis on August 1. She has been out since January with medical issues. So it will be great to see her back in City Hall. Janet Olson, our billing clerk has done a great job picking up the slack in the office, along with our temporary clerk, Jodi Meredith. Librarian Laura Urbanek has also been a great help with working on payroll for the city.

Eighteen minute meeting, which was a quickie. Those are always nice to have.

July 11 Council meeting

I missed the council meeting on July 11. Not sure when I missed the last one. Planned on being there, but was diverted due to my real job. I was toting generators around Story and Marshall Counties to cell towers that lost power due to the early Monday morning storms. Wow, there was quite the damage to corn fields in Marshall County. As I write this Tuesday evening, 40 hours after the storm, Alliant still has 15000 customers without power.

I was in Slater, Sheldahl, and Alleman this morning. They really got pasted too. Pretty much every house had a pile of branches in their front yard to be picked up. They still had trees in the streets in Sheldahl, and Hiway 69 between Huxley and Alleman was still closed this morning due to a major power line being down. We sure dodged a bullet. Roland's only power outage was along the north side of Maple from Bergen Church to Bear Creek. I think they were without power for about 10 hours or so.

As for the meeting, got some word of what all went on. The key thing was approving final payment for our new street.

As mentioned in earlier posts, I still have some city board positions to fill. If you have an interest, let me know...

Street Dance Saturday

Street Dance on Main Street in front of the Legion from 8 to Midnight. Live music by The Likely Suspects. Burgers and Brats served from 5:30 to 7:30. And here is my favorite video in front of the Legion.

Hit me up with events and news

Seems a little slow on the blog lately. I know there are events and such going on around town. If you would like me to publicize them here, I'd be happy to do so.

June 27 Council meeting

Not a lot on the docket, but we continue to move forward on a couple things.

Found out the electrical in the old library building is in reasonably good shape. So we continue to go forward in potentially moving City Hall into that building.

Also we are going forward with the hazard mitigation grant. Not a done deal that we will get it. But if we do, we would like to update the sewer main from Maple all the way to the sewer plant. This will help backups all over town. We need to be somewhat in a hurry, because it is possible some money could be redirected to the flooding along the Missouri. But we are looking at getting about a $300,000 grant. That would be nice, needless to say.

With the new fiscal year approaching, the city council approved a 3% pay raise for the staff working out of City Hall.

Fireworks on July 3

Fireworks will be around 10PM on Sunday July 3. For now, slight chance of showers, so hopefully we will be good to go.