Greg Beaner, Mayor
I hope that everyone is having a great start to the summer. Several things have been happening around the city and behind the scenes. As for behind the scenes, we are updating our employee handbook with the help of HRD, a human resources consulting company. Our last handbook was at least 20 years old. One of the important things that goes along with this is that we are changing the employee benefits for the advantage of the staff and the city.
American Legal is working on uploading all of our city documents like ordinances and resolutions. This will allow public access to all of our documents, and it will make it much easier to store and track these documents as required by law. Lastly, our city website is just about ready to come online at CityofGarretson.com. Hopefully the new site will be more user friendly and help keep people up to date on the happenings within the city. The old website address will be transferred to the Commercial Club.
The 3rd Street/Truck Route project will be coming to an end this summer. The current construction company, First Rate Excavate, has done a great job and has been really good to work with. It will be good to see this project completed. The next plan will be to fix 4th and 5th Streets. This will be in a few years, but the street and infrastructure needs to be replaced sooner than later. There will be more to come on this as our plan progresses.
The 5th Street Bridge project is currently with the state and waiting for their approval. It has been delayed from the original plan. I feel that the delay has actually been in our benefit. It will allow us to have the truck route completed before work begins on the bridge. This will prevent having truck access completely blocked from Hwy 11 on both ends of town. According to our last update, construction is slated to start this fall or next spring at the latest.
The city council has been working towards improving the sidewalk infrastructure within Garretson. Whether from disrepair or just never having been installed, several areas in town need sidewalks. Tom Godbey and Greg Franka will be working on a plan to get the sidewalks in Garretson installed and updated.
Everyone is aware of the natural gas spikes that happened this year in February. Our natural gas buyer has come up with a plan to purchase 100% of our gas needs during the months of December, January and February. Clayton Energy is recommending this plan to all of their customers. We currently only purchase 70% of our needs as this is standard for most places. The increased cost to the average customer will be a $13-15 increase per month during the 3 months. I feel that this is a small price to pay for the insurance of not having the price over runs like we had last February. It’s easy to say that we should have done this sooner, but unfortunately we’ve never had anything like this happen before. The best thing that we can do is prevent this from ever happening again.
Lastly, I would like to discuss the proposed community center. On May 24th the city council will be meeting with the architect to review information and set a price that they feel comfortable with spending on this project. Once this price has been set the architect will be able to create options for the task force to review. This will also make it easier to start site selection because we will know how big the building is going to be. This will be a great addition to our community and the council and I want to ensure that it is done correctly.
I hope that everyone has a great summer. Thank you.
