City Council meeting Aug 23

We moved the City Council meeting to the Community Center tonight for a larger than normal expected crowd. And indeed it was a bigger crowd.

First I'll mention the things that I assume the crowd wasn't there for. We had a brief discussion mention about trees hanging over streets and sidewalks. On a check a couple weeks ago, approximately 200 homeowners in town had a tree or trees hanging low over their sidewalk or street. It is the responsibility of the homeowners to keep that trimmed. So if you haven't done so lately, you may get a notice for the city requesting you to do break out the snips.

The council approved the loan agreement so the city can begin work on the Arthur and Bryan street extensions.

The council approved a new ordinance setting all city park hours from 6AM to 10:30PM. We had some issues with noisy users of our parks into the wee hours. They weren't necessarily causing problems, other than being noisy. But we wanted to make sure we had a tool to help the sheriff's department move people along if they were getting a little noisy.

The council approved the first reading of the ordinance allowing "urban chickens". If you are interested, stop by city hall to read it. It has not had final passage yet, as this is something we wanted to make sure the citizens had an opportunity to weigh in on before final approval.

Those were some of the issues that we discussed. However, what most were there for was to discuss issues they had with flooding, sewer backups, and water in the basements.

Though we had a good idea on some of the issues, it was nice to hear from folks who came out, told of the issues they had, and offered potential solutions. We also had our city engineer on hand to take notes, and offer insight on some of the things he had looked at so far.

Hearing some of these things, we couldn't really make immediate decisions on solutions. But this was a good first step in hearing the problems, and getting the info to find out what we can do, and how much it is going to cost. We had a couple homeowners telling of the decisions they are going to have to make, based on the decisions we make as a city council. Mainly, if it is likely they are going to flood again soon, and if the city is going to do any mitigation of future heavy rains, that they may not want to rebuild or refinish their basement. And that is fair thing to ask by a homeowner.

So we requested our city engineer to get us some info on these various wet spots, and see what we can do. His initial ideas is that the items on the north side of town might be a little easier to prevent, on the west side, more costly.

So we are going to have him visit with us at the next council meeting, and let us know our options.