Grayville leaders once again are asking citizens to spruce up their yards or at the very least to maintain them. After Commissioner Andi Ford issued a request at the April 22nd meeting, Don Baldwin piped up Monday night to echo the sentiment.
Driving around town, we’re starting to get a lot of properties that are way overgrown and way overjunked. I know we have trash days coming up, this Friday right? I know it’s coming up soon, so people if you have junk to put out, get it out to the curb so we can pick it up and make the city look good again. And mow your grass.
Ford says they’ve begun to issue letters.
We have issued some letters thus far. Unfortunately, some of those homes are in foreclosure, so the odds of them being taken care of are pretty slim.
Even so, Ford says if you do have a complaint, you can call City Hall and officials will do their due diligence to investigate and see if they can get it taken care of.
Ford also reported oil income from Countrymark on the year has now surpassed $7,000 with the latest payment of nearly $2,000.
Chief Robert Hatcher says his department responded to 275 calls for service during the month of April. Those calls resulted in 18 case files being opened and led to 15 criminal arrests. The department during the month also issued 21 citations and 5 warnings while dealing with two motor vehicle collisions.
Following a 20 minute executive session with no action following, Mayor Travis Thompson says the city is close to reaching an agreement in collective bargaining negotiations.
City Attorney Jay Walden says progress is being made on the New Resident Attraction Program.
You and JoEllen have worked out an application form. It looks like it’s pretty much ready. I think what we’ll probably do is go ahead and throw together an ordinance that ties into that program so if/when new commissioners come in and they go, ‘what’s our residential attraction program’, they can go to the code book of ordinances and say there it is, so that’s the plan at this point.
Council awarded the concession stand proposal for the city pool to Canyon Neeley, approved the sale of excess equipment in the form of a zero turn mower to Dean Colyer at a cost of $1,100. Leaders granted a request from the Grayville Moose for a special event liquor license surrounding the upcoming June 22nd Hog Roast. The Liquor Barn was also awarded TIF #2 Assistance from the city amounting to 50% (or $900) of their $1,800 request. Officials also granted a GCAA request for utility assistance in the form of $5,000, which is expected to last a couple years.
Council amended the traffic code to hopefully prevent U-Turns on East North Street and Commissioner Chris James says the city will save about $4,000 on it’s Motor Fuel Tax program.
The Illinois Department of Transportation, when we first bid it out, was what we came up from the engineer was a total of $52,704, that’s what they estimated the oil and chipping to be. The bid we received today was $48,315 which saves us $4,389.
Council adjourned at 7:45pm.
