A ribbon cutting and a follow up on meetings

On Thursday Another Chance Vintage Emporium had its ribbon cutting. The shop has been open for a couple months.

 The shop is in the back of the Horton Building.

In the previous post I only mentioned a bit of what happened at meetings on Monday and Tuesday. Here is more.

The Rensselaer Board of Public Works met Monday and approved pay requests for work on the water main currently under construction and also for the renovation of the old fire station/new police station. In the old fire station the framing is finished, the conduit is in place, and most of the duct work and insulation are finished. The final invoice that the BPW approved was for the high rate treatment plant. The Board refused a request from someone to have the environmental fee waived.

The City Council approved something that it approves every year, that the moneys intended for checks that have not been cashed after two years be returned to the fund on which the checks were written. The Council approved an ordinance that established interconnection standards, that is, regulates how people generating their own power (with, for example, solar cells) can connect that power to the City power system. The Clerk/Treasurer asked if this ordinance needs to be advertised and perhaps have a public hearing since it has fines and penalties. The City Attorney will investigate. The Council voted on it as a first reading.

The Council voted to allow the Mayor to sign an agreement with NITCO for telephone. The City currently uses Centurylink. NITCO offers better prices. The gas tracker for March is a ten cent increase per hundred cubic feet and the electric tracker for the second quarter is a decrease of $7.11 per 100 kilowatt hours.

The Council approved a number of street closings requested by the Little Cousin Jasper Festival. This year they will have a car show.  The Police Department has narrowed the candidates for a their open position to seven. Blacktopping of City streets will begin in the second week of April. If your street is all marked up, it is probably on the list of streets to be paved. Grace Street will be closed south of the bridge for several weeks this spring. The City is now replacing water feeds on Milroy Street so it is a mess. When all the work tearing up the street is finished, it will be repaved.

The last Steering Committee for the Downtown Revitalization grant took place on Tuesday morning.  The work that this grant is funding was reviewed by the public in January and those plans were submitted to OCRA (Office of Community and Rural Affairs) for review. OCRA wanted to see more detail on costs and the planners have been working on that. The biggest change since the January meeting is that the proposed pocket park/water feature on the site of the old Johnny Rusk building has been removed because the County, which owns the land, did not want it developed in that way. The entire project has been divided into about nine different parts or phases. There will be another public meeting about the plan on March 31 and the final plan has to be submitted for OCRA approval by May 31 in order to have OCRA release the last payment of the grant. The plan will at some point be endorsed by the City Council and then will be used to seek funds for the actual construction.

The County Council meeting on Tuesday evening had a short agenda, with the main item mentioned in the previous post. In addition, the new director of the Jasper County Economic Development Organization introduced himself to the Council and gave a brief report on what he was doing. He said that he was stressing more business expansion and development and workforce development and less on recruiting outside businesses. He also said that he was trying to work in cooperation with neighboring counties. He noted that lots of people are willing to drive 60 miles for jobs and that there are in excess of a million people within 60 miles of Jasper County.

A discussion of the local income tax was brief, with no interest in changing it. A couple of other items from discussion: Umbaugh will be giving a report at the Commissioners meeting on April 2; the drug recovery house has been staffed and will soon be opening; Wabash Valley has new leadership that understands that it has had a problem in the past satisfying the County with its services.

In other news, I stopped by to check the progress on the second Elza Street apartment building. It has a roof, windows and doors, is wrapped, and work is beginning on the brick exterior.

Finally, I found this fascinating map on a post from the Pulaski County Government site. It purports to show locations of the proposed RES wind farm planned for eastern Jasper and western Pulaski Counties.