October's Park Board and Park Corporation meeting

The October Park Board meeting went longer than normal and it had a full complement of members present. With four guests from youth soccer and one blogger, two people were without chairs.

The meeting opened with a discussion with the youth soccer people. Youth soccer came to Rensselaer in 1991, organized by a local businessman whose daughter wanted to play soccer and the soccer coach at SJC. It operates under the umbrella of SJC, which handles its finances. Money that is raised (registration fees and sponsorships) is turned over to SJC and then SJC pays bills (fees for referees, the cost of jerseys, socks, and a medal for each member, insurance, and equipment). The organization has always had revenues exceed costs. There are two programs, one for local competition and another that has teams that travel for games in Northwest Indiana and Illinois. The first program has about 320-330 kids and the second about 60. The small kids (the U4 and U6, which means Under 4 and Under 6) do not really play soccer. They just run around and kick the ball. The older kids (U8, U10, U12) are expected to follow rules of the game and their games have referees.

Peak enrollment in youth soccer occurred at the turn of the century with over 450 kids. Since then Pop Warner and sixth grade sports programs have provided other outlets for kids sports in the fall. This year it was not clear that there would be a soccer program. SJC decided to convert the field that was used for soccer into a second softball field. Quick work by several people behind the scenes moved the program to the old Monnett School property. One concern for the soccer visitors was keeping a regulation sized field for the U14 travel team. It needs to be 120 by 70 yards.

While they were there and after they left I got the impression that the Park Department will want to separate the local leagues part from their SJC sponsorship and make them part of the park programs. The travel league will probably continue under SJC sponsorship. That transition should not be too difficult. The more difficult question will be where the field will be. The Park Board wants to put all the youth baseball fields in one location and all the soccer fields in another. There are two ways to do that. The ball fields can be grouped together at the Monnett property and soccer fields at Brookside Park, or it can be reversed, with soccer at Monnett and baseball at Brookside. The members of the board are unsure of which direction they want to go. If you as a citizen have some strong feelings or opinions on the matter, you need to communicate them to the people on the Park Board. If you wait too long, you will be able to complain as much as you want, but it will have no effect.

In other business, the park currently makes no money from the pop machines. The bottles they dispense are not the same as what is sold in the stores and the vendor, Pepsi, has raised prices so that it gets all the profit. The pedestrian bridge (what I refer to as the Talbert Bridge) has been paid off. The bridge was provided by Talbert, but the Park Department had to pay for the site work. A new diving board for the pool was approved; at the end of the summer the diving board cracked and was taken out of service. There was discussion of whether there should be a closed meeting or an executive session so that the members can try to reach some agreements on what direction they want to go with locating ball fields. Some members thought that was a bad idea. (Other than me, there are rarely members of the public who attend these meetings.) The next meeting will be held on All Souls Day at the Knights of Columbus Hall.

The picture for the day is of the harvest. It was taken on Sunday along Mattheson.

The trees are still green but they are dropping leaves.

October Commissioners Meeting

The October Commissioners' Meeting was short--it lasted less than two and a half hours. They approved and signed some contracts and took care of lots of things that seemed unimportant to me but I am sure are important to the people involved.

One of the first items was signing a letter to NIPSCO that changed the people that NIPSCO should recognize as representing the county. The county is installing a back-up generator at the Sheriff's Annex near DeMotte and it will use natural gas. Currently nothing can be done with trying to get NIPSCO to agree to provide natural gas because the people NIPSCO recognized as representing Jasper County are no longer employed by the county. (Editorial comment omitted.)

Community Corrections received permission to replace an officer who is leaving and also to add a few circuits to their kitchen, which is tripping circuit breakers fairly frequently. Animal Control had a variety of small items that needed attention. The Soil and Water Conservation District wanted to replace a part-time worker and the county to pay the full salary of their program specialist. The memorandum of understanding that they have with the county needs to be renewed.

There was a short explanation by a representative the Nature Conservancy about wetland restoration on a property just north of Jasper-Pulaski. I am not sure why this was on the agenda because the infringement of the county right of way that put it on the agenda had been eliminated with a change in where they were placing a culvert.

There was an appointment to the Tourism Commission, Ann Marie Lynch representing SJC. SJC has a representative on Tourism Commission because it pays the hotel tax on the rooms it rent for summer events like band camps.

The county signed a contract with EMCOR to redo the heat and air handing controls for the third floor of the court house. This is a first step in upgrading the entire heating/cooling system for the building. It will, according to the engineer's estimate, save enough money on utility bills to pay for itself in six years. The total cost of this stage is a bit over $200,000. The commissioners had some questions about timing of payments and EMCOR accepted their revisions to delay final payment until after work was completed and judged satisfactory.

The commissioners approved a contract to hire a consultant to work on a revision of the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO). There was discussion about new federal audit requirements. The feds are moving towards having local governments subject to financial reporting requirements similar to those for publicly traded corporations and the discussion today was about some sort of risk assessment group. The issue will return at a future meeting.

The Sheriff had several items. A corrections officer is moving to a new job and his position will be filled by someone who is currently part-time, opening the part-time slot. The Sheriff wanted permission to fill the part-time slot. Two contracts moving the communication tower project forward were signed, one with Motorola and the other with Midway Electronics, which owns the tower. The lease of the tower is for twenty years with a ten percent increase every five years. When the tower is in service, it will become the main communication tower with the current main tower near Monon going into a secondary role. A renewal of a heating and cooling contract was approved and signed. It will cost more but it increases the services provided. There was discussion of how to comply with House Enrollment Act 1269 that involves getting Indiana residents spending more than 30 days in the county jail enrolled in Medicaid. The law was apparently not well crafted and no one seems to agree on exactly what it means. Finally, the Sheriff says that his office serves tax warrants for the state and the county gets 10% of the proceeds back. However, his office can also charge a $25 processing charge on each warrant and it is not presently doing so. An ordinance is needed and that will probably come at a future meeting

There was a brief discussion of whether the county annex building that houses the surveyor's office should convert to natural gas. Apparently the city has recently run a gas main up that way. The issue will probably come up again with a better sense of the costs of conversion.

There were other things discussed. The meeting was continued until Oct 19th when it will be reconvened if there are agenda items.

Our picture for today is from the Court House, which is full of interesting border patterns. Recently I have become interested in the classification of borders and patterns. This one looks like it has both vertical and horizontal symmetry, but it has neither. If you flip it either horizontally or vertically the pattern will not line up with the original. However, if you rotate it 180 degree, it does reproduce itself. It belong in group p2.

There are only seven groups of repeating frieze symmetry patterns. The 17 wallpaper groups are more interesting.

Repaving

The grinding of city streets seems to have been completed and repaving has begun. This morning (Saturday morning) new asphalt was being placed on Van Rensselaer Street between Kellner and Washington. Later in the day other streets were done, including, I am told, Angelica. If weather permits, I expect all the rest of the streets that have been ground to be repaved next week.

 It has been interesting looking at what is revealed when the streets are ground. I noticed brick under parts of the intersection of Susan and Weston. The bricks seem only to be where the pedestrians would have crossed the streets. At one time were the streets mud with brick pedestrian crossings?

The city has been installing new storm-drain grills on some of the streets being repaved.

OktoberFest had ideal weather but the Saint Augustine Fall Frolic was not so lucky. Saturday night was cold, windy, and had light rain. Kids still seemed to enjoy the inflatables.

 It must have been miserable sitting in the dunk tank given the weather. It was October weather like that we had tonight that caused the shift of OktoberFest from early October to late September.

The Rensselaer Republican had an article about the dedication ceremony at the hospital, which has been Franciscan Health Rensselaer. I did not see any notice that the event was happening or else I would have made an effort to attend. However, I am not sure I could have made it. I was drafted into working a rummage sale. I wonder if the end is near for that rummage sale.

September's gone

October is here. September sure went by quickly. (Or should that be, "September sure went bye quickly"?)  Some of the trees are starting to turn yellow and there are some leaves littering the streets, so it is beginning to look more like fall. The temperatures are now more fall-like. I need to do a lot of winterizing tasks.

Work has begun on paving city streets. On Wednesday I saw the machinery that strips the top layer off the streets that will be repaved. It was on Webster near Vine. It was not in the right light but I did not think I should go over and ask them to re-position their equipment so I could get a better shot. The list of streets that will be repaved has been in the Rensselaer Republican and was on page one yesterday.

The city electrical department has been working on underground cables in the downtown. Yesterday they had turned off power to one of the stop lights so they could do their work. It turned the intersection into a four-way stop.

Today is the set-up day for the annual Saint Augustine School Rummage Sale. There is more than the usual amount of stuff, and there is an especially large amount of non-clothing stuff. The sale begins Friday at 9:00 and most of it sells for $3.00 per grocery bag. (If that is too expensive, on Saturday you can fill any size bag for only $1.00.)

On Saturday at noon cleanup of the sale begins. Later that afternoon and into the evening (from 4:00 until 10:00) Saint Augustine School will have their Fall Frolic with food, music, bingo, beer/wine garden, and kids activities. Admission is free.

The band McGuffin played its last gig for OktoberFest. I asked one of the members what the story was and he said that two of the members now live in the Indianapolis area so it was just too hard to do practices. I would not be surprised if another band emerges from the local members.

Quick notes on a couple of meetings

The second City Council meeting of September did not have any big surprises. Some people who live outside the city limits but who get city gas were upset by the $3 a month environmental fee that is tacked onto their utility bill each month. They wanted to know what they received for that fee and if it could be waived. The city attorney said that the only body that can waive the fee is the Board of Public Works and they had rejected the request. The Council could pass a new ordinance, but there was no one on the Council so inclined. The people left unsatisfied with the answers that they had received.

There was a public hearing on the 2016 budget that had no public comments, probably because the information that is presented is not intelligible. The Council approved the signing of a contract with TV cable that covered a number things including pole rental and the installation and leasing of fiber optic cable to link city facilities.

A representative from IMPA (the organization that provides electricity to municipal electrical utilities) spoke about the need for an ordinance to deal with something that has not yet happened here. He argued that a person could set up solar panels to generate power for the home and would sell surplus power during the day and draw power during the night. Such a installation might draw as much power as it supplies, and the person who installed it would therefore not owe any money to the city other than the $5 customer charge that everyone pays for connection to the grid. He argued that the value of being connected to the grid and the cost to the grid of having him as a customer was much greater than $5 and suggested that the city consider passing a fee schedule to reflect that higher cost/value in case there are people in the future who want to generate their own electricity yet remain on the grid. The issue will come up in future meetings.

The city has accepted a paving bid of $303K from street repaving for 18 projects. The bid was awarded to E&B Paving.

The Council approved a road closure for Harrison Street by the fire station  on October 8. There will be a Fire Prevention Open House that evening.

Work on gas main extensions has been completed. Now attention will turn to service lines.

There was also a meeting of the county Board of Zoning Appeals on Monday evening. The case was interesting and instructive. A young couple purchased some landlocked property in Walker township with an easement to the county road. They wanted a variance that would approve 25 feet of frontage so they could build a house. They had purchased the property with the understanding that it was a buildable lot. After they purchased it they found that it did not meet county requirements. The Board's attorney suggested that the Board could not issue a variance because they currently had no frontage--an easement is not frontage. He suggested that they get a letter from the seller that states that the seller will grant them or sell them partial or joint ownership in the easement and that the easement be larger than 25 feet because the BZA has never approved a variance for such a small frontage. The case was continued to the next meeting, which will be held on October 26.

My picture for today is of the brain that I found in my yard. I wonder if it is good to eat.

As you probably realize, it is a mushroom or puffball--some kind of fungus that has sprouted as a result of the heavy rain a week or so ago.