House coming down

Looks like the dilapidated house on South Cottonwood will be coming down in the next week or two. There has been stuff in the hopper on this for the past few months, but I have avoided talking about it here, as I did not want some speculator to become aware of it and attempt to purchase it, or something like that.

Here's the deal with it. (from my recollection--I may have some details slightly wrong) The homeowner let it go back to the bank. The bank did no upkeep on it. So the property became a massive eyesore. The city tried to purchase the house from the bank (Citibank I think), but they would not talk to us. They also refused to pay any taxes on it. So the house went to a sheriff's sale.

Some other individual bought the taxes on it, but didn't do anything with the house. So we as a city went to court to take over the property. As it should be, it is very difficult for a city to take over a property. There are lots of legal hoops to go through, which again, I think is good, to protect people from getting their property claimed by a government entity.

Adding to this, the Iowa Legistlature had recently changed the rules regarding this, so the judge and the county officials wanted to make sure they had done everything right. So that added to the delay.

The judge eventually ruled in our favor to take over the property. So we had to return the money to the individual who had purchased the taxes on it.

Then we had the house inspected, and found there was asbestos. So we have gotten that abated. And FINALLY, we should get the house, and the dead trees, and all the junk torn down and hauled away in the next couple weeks.

So the city will have a lot to build a house on. No decision has been made on what to do with it yet, or what we might sell it for. But if you, or someone you know, are interested in a city lot, in an established neighborhood with mature trees, and all that, let City Hall know.

Nice Saturday afternoon

Stopped in at the Library Open House on Saturday afternoon. A few people stopping in to mill about, and get some snacks and punch. Twas nice to have a little celebration of the new facility.

Then the highlight of the day was the sweet corn feed at the community center. Great job by the RADC folks for the eats. Burgers, brats, bologna, watermelon, and all the sweet corn you could eat. For 6 bucks. I like going out for pizza, and Mexican, and I love a good steak. But a meal like that is really hard to top.

The crowd was pretty big when I was there from 5:30 to 6:15 or so. The meal was a fundraiser for roof repairs on the community center. Wasn't sure how big of crowd you would get on a weekend in prime vacation season. But it was a pretty good turnout.

So thanks to everybody that helped put these 2 events on.

This is awesome!

Just got sent a link about the Historical Society paying to get all of the issues of The Roland Record digitized. That was Roland's newspaper until it closed up in 1975. I didn't move to Roland until 1997, but I love history, and it is so interesting to read what was going on in Roland in years past.

In the last issue in 1975, I saw an ad for Casey's. I didn't know Casey's was in Roland for that long. Then in the 60s, it appears Roland had competing grocery stores. I liked looking at the low food prices in the ads. I'm sure the Roland old timers could fill me in, but still, it was very interesting.

Haven't had time yet, but I am going to look at the news stories when Roland High closed up, and had the merger with Story City High. So anyway, check it out.

http://rolandhistory.newspaperarchive.com/

A busy Saturday July 24th

All sorts of stuff going on, on the afternoon and evening of July 24th. First up, the library is having an Open House. It is from 3 to 5:30. My understanding is that there will be some snacks, and it will serve as a kind of celebration for the new library location. If you haven't been in there yet, that would be a great time to go stomp around, and check out the new facility.

Then around the supper hour, the Roland Area Development Corp will be hosting an all you can eat sweet corn feed at the Roland Community Center. There will also be bologna, brats, hot dogs, and watermelon. It is a fundraiser for roof repairs on the community center. As with the library, if you haven't been in there yet, this would be a great opportunity.

Price is a low low $6 for adults, 5-10 year olds $4, and 4 and under eat free.

If anybody has more details on these events, feel free to add a comment. I was just kinda going by the flyers I saw at City Hall.

City Council Meeting on July 12

Relatively uneventful meeting tonite. A bunch of my appointees to various boards and commissions were approved by the council. It's really nice to have people in the community interested to volunteer their time on these boards. I still have one opening to fill on the Planning and Zoning Commission. Let me know if you are interested.

We also discussed our city engineer, and who we may hire in the future. We are going to continue with MER Engineering on the 3 projects they currently have going. Though we may lean towards Bolton and Menk for any future projects.

Skeeters

Just a comment about the city's mosquito spraying plan. We talked about it a little bit in the council meeting tonite. For the near term, mosquito spraying will be done approximately weekly. It needs to be done when it is really still, so it will be generally after 9PM, or just after sunrise.

If you have any concerns about the spray, there is information at city hall, about what is being sprayed. You can generally hear the sprayer coming, as it is pretty noisy.

Hopefully we can get the skeeter population knocked down some. With all the rain this year, those things are nuts. Keep the OFF handy!

And above, in case you don't get the reference....that is the band "The Mosquitoes" from when they got stranded on Gilligan's Island.