Feb 15 Council meeting

Before the public meeting regarding the sewer, we held our regularly scheduled council meeting. We knocked out a few items.

The biggest was finalizing the numbers for the 12-13 budget. It had been mostly set, but we needed to finalize a couple departments. Also we had to plan on the revenue side in the water and sewer departments. We will need to raise rates come July 1. We are setting money aside to upgrade the system, and the raise in rates will be going to that.

We also set employee raises at 2% effective July 1.

On another note, we discussed (as we had no choice) that the city received "ownership" of Drainage District #50. 100 some years ago, the county set up drainage districts to assess property owners in a given area to build tile to drain rain water away. Well, if more than 25% of a district falls within a city limits, the county supervisors can turn it over to a city. Well, they did.

This particular district starts in the farm field SE of Roland, and then runs thru the area just east of the school, and thru the school property, and continuing westward to Bear Creek.

So now, the city, instead of the county, could assess people in that area for upgrades or maintenance of drainage tile in that area. The county actually did about 10 years ago, to fix the outlet and all that.

I don't know that it is that big of a deal either way. We have no particular plans with that. I suppose when the drain tile needs repaired, we can decide whether to ding the people in that drainage district, or the town as a whole. But again, it does end up in our lap.

Kinda like Hiway 221/E18. The state decided they didn't want Hiway 221 any more, so they just gave it to the county and the city. Here, you take care of it. So now the county has to maintain the road from Roland to the interstate and it became County E18 instead of State Hiway 221. Likewise, the parts within the city are ours now. Here, have this bridge. As they say, sh!t rolls down hill. But I digress...

The last major thing from the meeting was the discussion around getting a person hired to maintain our parks. That is moving forward now.