Odds and ends post Valentines Day

The Carnegie Players performed the first of two showings of "Improv at the Ritz" on Thursday. They provided an enjoyable experience for the audience and they seemed to have a lot of fun doing it. The format was similar to that in the TV series Whose Line Is It Anyway?.

The final performance will this Thursday at 7:00 at the Ritz Theater.

Before attending the Improv show, I attended two meetings. The first was a meeting of Rensselaer Urban Forestry Council, which meets in the basement of the First Christian Church. They are preparing to plant trees this year on South McKinley and South Cullen. They have two people starting planning for this year's Arbor Day program and two other people will be writing articles about trees and the RUFC for the Rensselaer Republican. The Council has a Facebook page here. They had a discussion about the Amazon Smile program in which Amazon donates .5% of the value of purchases to organizations and I see that details are now on the RUFC Facebook page.

From that meeting I went to a meeting of the Rensselaer Advisory Planning Commission, which after a long discussion approved a declaratory resolution that is required to enlarge the Lintner Park TIF area. This was previously approved by the Rensselaer Redevelopment Commission in January. Next it will go to the City Council.

(The Lintner Park TIF area is on the northeast corner of Rensselaer and includes businesses such as Chief, National Gypsum, and White Castle. The new addition includes all land within City limits to the east.)

We finally got some days with significant snow melt, including a day with quite a bit of rain. The result is a rise in the level of the Iroquois River. There is still ice on it, but some of it has been dislodged and has been carried downstream.

The Maxwell ditch was full of brown water on Friday.

Our forecast is for roller-coaster weather with significant precipitation. 

On Monday evening the Rensselaer Board of Public Works met and approved two invoices from Commonwealth Engineering. The City Council meeting later approved an ordinance returning outdated warrants. As I understand it, this voids out checks that are two years old and older and returns the amounts back on the books of the issuing fund. It then approved expanding the TIF area that was discussed above. On February 1 the Mayor polled the Council to reduce the quarantine to five days in accordance with guidelines from the CDC and the Jasper County Health Department. The Council ratified the poll. An employee in the metering department was honored for 20 years of employment. 

The gas tracker for February will be an 11¢ decrease per hundred cubic feet. The Gas Department had obtained three quotes for roof replacement. The building's roof has several leaks. The Council passed a motion to declare an emergency that waives the competitive bidding process and then approved the low bid of $158,080 for a rubber roof.

The City Attorney is preparing a "green" energy ordinance that seems to be something for companies that want to advertise that they use "green" energy. The City may be selling one of the engines from the power plant. The Mayor is waiting on the broker's report. The Council moved to instruct the City Attorney to prepare something to repeal the payments that employees get if they get COVID. The County recently made this change.

The new Walgreens building has four walls and after the picture below was taken, a roof was installed. This may be the last update picture for a while.

Do you know where this picture was taken?

Until a few weeks ago, there was a house there. It is in the lot just west of the REMC building on John Deere Road. REMC bought the property in November. In August the zoning for the property was changed from A2 to L1.

I never got a close look at the property, but the Jasper County Interim Report calls it the Monnett House. It was owned by Fletcher Monnett, brother of Cordelia Monnett who funded the Monnett School. (For some info on Fletcher, check out this blog post.)