What else does the mayor do?

I often get asked, "So what does the mayor do?" One of the things that the mayor does is being the Roland representative on various county boards.

Just this past week I attended the meeting of the Story County E911 board. We heard about the Code Red test call from a week ago. Did any of you get that? I don't recall it, but it was a countywide test of an emergency update system via phone. You have to be in the system to get it. The report was that it caused some concern with some elderly folks. Code Red is the brand name of the product. The call stated something to the effect of "this is a test call of Code Red", and people heard the Code Red, thought of Homeland Security red, and got all freaked out. The system is a good one though, for getting out quick info, if there was a chemical, terrorist, or some other disaster/issue going on in all our parts of the county.

As for other boards, the county mayors are all on a board that helps set the assessor's budget. We don't do anything about assessing, but we do have the purse strings on his budget.
The county mayors also set the per capita rate charged by the sheriff for police protection. That will stay the same this year. Don't have the number in front of me, but it is something like $46 a person.

Which puts me on another tangent. Filling out the census form...A higher population costs us money, and it gets us money. We pay and receive money based on our 2000 population of 1324. So we pay the sheriff that $46 times 1324 each year for police protection. We pay our garbage contractor a rate times 1324 people. So if our population goes down in 2010, we will pay less to those entities for the next 10 years.

However, the higher our population, we get more money from the road use tax fund (which comes from our gas taxes). So if we end up with fewer people, we will get less money for use on our streets.

It all pretty much evens out. So get your nose counted. Best guess is we might go down about 20 people or so. Maybe we should have a pool on the Roland census count....