City Council Meeting 02-09-2015

The City Council met Monday night and I have delayed writing about it.  They approved the minutes of the last meeting and also of a special meeting of February 3--I do not know what that meeting was about.

The gas tracker for February will be a nine cents decrease per hundred cubic feet.

Much of the meeting was taken up with two presentations. The first was from the city's financial advisor who is preparing the bond offering to finance the new fire station. He said that the preliminary estimates are that construction costs will be about $3.3 million, but adding in a variety of other things such a payment for the various architects, engineers, financial advisors, etc., the total bond offering will be about $4.5 million. The bonds will be 25 year bonds that will be backed by the TIF revenues from Drexel Park, but with a backup of general tax revenue. He explained that to get an estimated interest rate of 3.3% the city will need to reduce risk to lenders, and if anything should happen to the TIF revenues, the lenders want to be sure that they will get their money back. Bids are expected to go out in March and the bonds may be sold in April.

The next presentation was a vendor who had been contacted by the police or fire department to present a proposal for a dispatch center. At present the city has one, at the police station, that also serves the fire department. That system is old and may not work as well when the fire station is moved a mile west. He was nebulous about cost, but said it would not exceed $300,000 even with all the bells and whistles. The bond guy, who had stayed for this presentation, said that it might be too late to include the item in the plans for the fire station.

The last item of importance was a discussion of remodeling the utility office to make it ADA and OSHA compliant. Only one remodeling bid had come in, from the Deerwood Group which is connected to Kem's Hardware, but more than one had been submitted for furniture and some heating-cooling work. After some confusion, the Council approved the remodeling, furniture, and one of the heating.cooling items. Councilman Barton abstained because he is employed by the Deerwood Group.

On Monday I noticed that construction had begun on a building at Cullen and Vine. A comment to an earlier blog post said that it would be a storage building.

This morning (Wednesday) the walls were up.

In other news, it appears that there will be no Community Garden this year. For the past two years it has been located behind Crossview Church north of town.