What happened at last night’s meetings

Here are my notes from last night:

Vehicle purchases – Council approved the purchase of a dozen vehicles, everything from an ambulance to an excavator. Generally, we will approve all of these vehicles all at once in a given year. The administration does its best to shop locally, and one vehicle is in fact purchased from Marhofer Chevrolet. But mostly, we need to go outside the city borders to find the best prices. When I first joined council, I was surprised by how many new vehicles were needed, but then I started looking at the maintenance costs for vehicles with over 120K miles. It’s cheaper to replace vehicles than constantly sink thousands of dollars into them. I was satisfied that each of these 2017 purchases made economic sense. Each passed council unanimously, by a 7-0 vote.

2017 road repair program – Our service director provided a spreadsheet of roads that the city intends to repave in 2017. You can see that list at the bottom of this post. The entire list probably will not be completed, because it includes $1.9MM of jobs, and the program is only funded for $1.5MM in 2017. It will depend on how the bids come in. (You may have noticed a Facebook live video from this portion of the meeting. I apologize that it was low quality. It’s hard to shoot video during the meeting without being a distraction.)

Primary elections – We again discussed my proposal to move primary elections from September to May, and Matt Riehl’s proposal to eliminate them altogether. Brian D’Antonio and I agreed that we could place both measures on the ballot. The mayor thought it would be too confusing. The mayor and John Pribonic preferred that we spend more time deliberating the topic. Given that we have had this on the agenda since December, I was ready to vote. My proposal failed by a 5-2 vote (Rasor, D’Antonio). Based on last night’s discussions, it appears that council will give voters the opportunity to eliminate primary elections. But it will not give the voters the opportunity to move the primary date. If that proposal fails in November 2017, then I will be ready to re-introduce my legislation to be decided by voters in November 2018. The good news is, we have plenty of time before the 2019 election, which is the first election that could be affected by our potential changes.

EMS fees – By a 7-0 vote, Council approved legislation to bring our EMS fees up to a market level, effective May 1. It will include an automatic 2% increase each year, to keep pace with the increased costs of labor, equipment, and supplies. Again, no resident will ever pay this fee. It’s all about getting our fair share from insurance companies. The increase helps ensure our paramedic teams are properly funded.

Next meeting – Council will meet next on April 27.