Appleseed plans

 The Rensselaer City Council met on Monday with a short agenda. The meeting would have been very brief if not for a presentation during the Citizens Comments portion of the meeting. Adam Alson, representing Appleseed Childhood Education, told the Council what his organization wanted to accomplish in the near future and how they could help.

Appleseed is a not-for-profit organization that wants to bring a licensed child-care facility to Rensselaer. He outlined the reasons that this would be beneficial, arguing that it would benefit not just children and their parents but also the wider community. Employers benefit because good childcare helps them attract employees and reduces absences. 

Appleseed plans to open a facility that will serve 75 children. It will be open from 6:00 to 6:00 Monday through Friday and will be operated by Right Steps Child Development Centers of Lafayette.  Right Steps currently operates five centers in Lafayette plus the centers in Remington and Goodland.

The projected annual costs of the center will be a bit more than $1 million. Most of this will be met by tuition and fees, including vouchers that are available to low-income families from the state and federal governments. Each year about $300,000 will have to be met with donations and grants. He told the Council that Appleseed would like to have the City of Rensselaer be one of the entities that would help with funding, though he did not have any amount at this time. He mentioned that Appleseed was working with a large local employer to secure a site. After the meeting several people who know a lot more about what is happening in Rensselaer than I do asked each other where that site might be and none of them knew.

Turning to the agenda, the Council approved a transfer of funds and also approved spending $13k+ to clean water well #6. At the last meeting there was discussion of whether to continue paying employees in quarantine. At this meeting the Council voted to keep the ordinance, which pays for quarantine if the Governor has declared a state of emergency. The last item of the agenda was a proposal to waive the building-permit fee for a building at Brookside Park. It passed and the building should be installed in early August. (Work on site preparation began Tuesday.)

FBI will start working on the new storage building for the electrical utility this week. Work on South McKinley Street is finished. 

Going to the meeting, I noticed traffic backed up on College Avenue. There was an accident on I-65 that had stopped traffic. What was unusual about the traffic detouring through Rensselaer was that it was not going through the downtown on the highways. I suspect that the traffic was coming from people whose cell-phones told them of the closure and gave them the College Avenue route. Below is a picture showing traffic on College backed up to Lincoln Street.

In one other news item, Ray Seif announced that he will be leaving the Jasper County Airport to take another position. He has been at the airport for five years and has been a vigorous advocate for the airport and for flying.