A long post after a road trip

Last week I was out of town taking a road trip through five states and hundreds of miles of corn and soybeans and as a result I missed the City Council meeting on July 13. However, the minutes of the meeting are online. Here are highlights.

The council approved closing two streets for the Little Cousin Jasper Festival. It agreed to extend a contract with IMPA that currently expires in 2042. There was no mention of what the new expiration date would be.

The gas tracker for July as a 7½¢ increase. The mayor declared September 4 as the Mayor's Holiday, which will be a day off for City employees. There were no police issues on Cruise Night.

Work on State Road 114 seems to be finished and work on US 231 has started. On Monday workers were sealing the highway north of John Deere road. A couple of sweepers cleaned the road, a tank truck applied a layer of tar, and then another machine with the truck attached sprinkled stone on the fresh tar.

On Tuesday evening there was a Rensselaer BZA meeting that I missed and I cannot find the minutes online. I believe one agenda item was the fireman training facility behind Dollar General and I assumed that it was approved. A second item was a conditional use application to construct and operate an auto repair business in an R1 district on Grace Street. The decision on this was continued to a meeting on Wednesday, July 22. The BZA met in executive session to discuss exactly what the legal requirements were and then in an open meeting with 12 members of the public present. To approve the application the Board had to agree to five findings of facts, but all five members voting rejected the first finding, so the application was denied. The meeting lasted less than ten minutes. The members apologized to the applicants, but said that the law gave them no leeway.

On Monday night the County BZA met with one item on the agenda, a special exception for a home business of repairing autos along US 231 in Walker Township. The business has been operating for about five years and the owner wanted to comply with the legal requirements. A neighbor was in the Zoom meeting to object. He did not like the business next to him. After discussion the special exception was approved for two years. After that the owner will have to come back for a reapproval and show that he is in compliance with all regulations. The exception was approved on a four-to-one vote. The next meeting will be August 17 if there is an agenda.

After the BZA meeting the plan commission met with three items on the agenda. The first was approval of a two lot subdivision in Barkley Township. Two months ago the land been rezoned to A2. Lot 1 will have 4 acres and lot two will have 9 acres. The request was approved. The second item was a three-lot subdivision in Walker Township. The owner would like to subdivide it so he can give a lot to his daughter so she can build a house. The final item was an amendment to the Unified Development Ordinance that clarifies the date needed to get agenda items published in the newspaper.

On Tuesday evening there was a joint Counsel/Commissioners meeting. It was a hybrid meeting with some people physically meeting at the old youth center on Sparling Avenue, and others attending via zoom. I decided to attend via zoom, and that was a mistake. The audio quality was very poor when a speaker was not close to the mic. For a while two mics were on and the echo was so bad that it was hard to hear anything.

The first item discussed was EMS funding. The question is how much should the Township EMS services get. At the August 3 commissioners meeting the commissioners will open the bids for EMS services and will review those bids in an executive session to try to decide funding. It was noted that when the jail is paid off in 2022, funds can be juggled to give more for EMS services.

There was a discussion of the hiring and personnel freeze that is not working out as anticipated. There have been more people retiring than expected and in some cases multiple people from the same offices have retired or resigned. Some of this discussion was unintelligible because of the echo effect.

Brienne Hooker of the Jasper-Newton Foundation addressed the meeting to explain what the Foundation was doing but the audio was very poor and I did not catch much of what she said. One of the last items discussed was a request by Sheriff Williamson for some kind of benefit or hazard pay for working during the shutdown. While many County workers worked from home, the members of the sheriffs department continued working as usual. A suggestion from Kendall Cobb was that instead of paying more, the employees could be given an extra 40 hours of comp time. There are 44 full-time officers and personnel that would be affected.

After the meeting those present toured the building but that was not broadcast.

The Council meeting that followed had several additional appropriations on its agenda and several transfers. But first Judge Potter, who has lost one of his court reporters and we'll have another retiring at the end of the year, addressed the Council. The remaining reporter is training her replacement but the judge does not believe that the replacement will be able to train a second reporter when the new year starts. So his request is to hire the second replacement early to get her trained so when the new year starts his court will have two trained reporters. The item could not be approved at this meeting because it was not advertised soon enough. It will be on the agenda of the next meeting.

There were additional appropriations for CASA, the Clerk's office, and the Sheriff that were approved. An additional appropriation for Animal Control was tabled until the next meeting. At the end of the meeting a citizen from the Kankakee Valley School District who was attending via Zoom said that he would like a mandate for school masks. He will probably get his wish as the Governor on Wednesday issued a directive making masks mandatory for grades 3 and up when school resumes.

I was surprised and disappointed to learn that the 2020 County Fair has been canceled. Because the fair was canceled, the person who was going to sell biplane rides also decided to cancel.

I have a preliminary virtual tour of Rensselaer's murals here. It expands the recent post summarizing RENARTWLK 2020 to include RENARWLK 2019 and some other things as well.