July 2011 Roundup

Com Ed and Power Outages... the City Council will be discussing strategies to repair and replace our infrastructure that has failed us. Redundancy and upgrades will go a long way on solving problems we faced during our last storm and power failures. One subject that keeps coming up is can Com Ed bury our lines? Yes, if you pay for them to be buried. The cost to bury lines is about one million per mile. Under current law, the standard residential configuration is overhead lines but there seems to be state discussion on this point. As we must all realize that any improvements Com Ed makes will be put on our utility bills.
Water Plant renovations prepayment for diesel generators and electrical equipment of 2.1 million.
Historical Society Special Event permit for Historical Auto Show on July 23, 2011.
CAFR (Comprehensive Annual Financial Report) was approved and can be seen at our City Website under Know your city finances..... This report shows everything you ever wanted to know about city's finances.
Spending $34,839 for a Tech Master Plan. Client First Consulting group will be getting money to review our technologies for the future. I was not convinced this was well spent money since I want to partner with several other governments and plan our future together. City Manager said this will not be waisted money to go in that direction and refused to wait until we made a deal with other governments, City Council concurred.
Voted again on Western Ave to create an escrow account for Highwoods construction to continue... Looks like it will happen in 2012.
Got an 8k grant from Hospital foundation for technologies to help locate individuals with Alzheimer's, autism or other disabilities..... Thank you!
City Treasurer is finally our wonderful finance director. I have been pushing for this for several years. Elizabeth Holleb has been doing the work for many years and now she wears the statutory title. Congrats!
Park Avenue detours are due to water main replacement that we approved at a tune of $574,218.00.