Your Property. Your Problem. City Weighs in on Ditches, Easements, Etc.

Your property.  Your problem.  That’s the general consensus following the Carmi City Council meeting Tuesday evening.  A handful of citizens who reside on Fair Street were in attendance regarding concerns over the encroaching ditches located on their properties.  City Attorney Greg Stewart was on hand to discuss ditches, easements, and more.  At issue is the deep creek that runs behind homes on the south side of Fair Street that is eroding and slowly devouring backyards of homeowners there.  They’re looking for help from the city.  As Stewart puts it, the city of Carmi has to keep public and private land separate.

There are probably some very legitimate concerns you deal with everyday.  But when you get down to the legal aspect of it, even though you may want to help, and help somebody maintain their property, we don’t have the legal right to do it.  And if we were given the legal right, there’s a lot of liability and expense issues that you all need to really consider before you start.  Because once you start, how do you tell the second one ‘no’?  So, bottom line to me is, the city has no legal right to maintain private ditches within the city of Carmi which means you don’t have to do it even if asked to do it.  And I understand that creates a problem for landowners in some circumstances.  It may be very expensive to keep up a ditch; I don’t know.  But, we have to keep separate private versus public property, which is what the city of Carmi is.  And the end result, unfortunately, if you’re a private landowner, it’s your responsibility and at your expense to keep your land up.

Councilwoman Sheila Headlee concurred with the landowners.

I mean there’s a lot of people…elderly people…who can’t get down into the ditch or whatever you have to do to maintain.  There’s a lot of people not able to do that and then what…then it erodes their yard all the way up to their house.  I don’t agree with it.  I’m sorry.

You can see photos of one of the properties taken by the homeowner and shared with WROY/WRUL News below:

Also at Tuesday’s one hour and seven minute meeting, council opened up bids for the Carmi Public Library roof.  The low bid was from Trico Roofing at $38,300 but the council ended up tabling the matter as the city is still awaiting important insurance information to find out how and how much of that they’re going to have to pay.  The library roof is only roughly 13 years old.

Council opened and approved several bids for property as well, though many received no bids.  Those that did include:

509 West Sycamore which will go to Scott Howard for $321.65

611 2^nd Street was awarded to Rebecca Brashier for her bid of $628.21

Peyton Turrentine will receive the deed to 805 3^rd Street after his winning bid of $555

Finally, Bryant Attebury won a parcel with no formal address behind East Side Liquors that’s near his current property.  His bid was $1,002.

Council approved a litany of pay requests, invoices, engineering bills as well and also decided to open a checking account for the Carmi Fire Department after learning about a $220,000 gift from an anonymous source.  Chief Daniel Ballard has details.

The City of Carmi Fire Department is a city department.  We also cover 210 square miles in the county going from where the Little Wabash dumps into the big Wabash half mile north of I-64 at Burnt Prairie.  So in that area, we have a lot of farmland, woods, that the city of Carmi’s equipment is not able to take care of.  So, I’ve had a person reach out to us…needs to… I say needs to donate some money, but wants to help out in any way they can.  So, I went to them very large scale saying we’re in really good shape, the city has taken really good care of us, there’s not a lot of things we need.  But this is something of interest to them.  They own property.  So I explained to her, we have no way of taking care of your property; this is what we’d like to have.  So, break down, we need a brush truck basically that we can maneuver around some fields; a lot of guys are going to side by sides that you can take basically anywhere.  So, after talking to her, she’s reached out and they’re going to give the city of Carmi $220,000 for us to purchase this kind of equipment.  Giving her quotes and everything else, that’s what she’s working off of…I’ve give her a quote for two pickup trucks; one to turn into a brush truck and another to pull a trailer with the side by side on it…the side by side, a trailer to put the side by side on…some small tanks, motors, pumps to put all that on.  At this time, she’s handed me a check for $195,4xx some odd dollars.  Cynthia has that right now so we need to get that secured to where we can start buying equipment.  Once the equipment comes, she’ll make up the rest for lights, sirens, communication, lettering to put on the vehicles.

Attention then turned to spending money at that amount might trigger needing to go through the bidding process.  It becomes an issue of who’s writing the check.  If the source of the money gives the city a check, a purchase in excess of $25,000 must be bid.  If the source of the money purchases the equipment and then donates it to the city, that individual doesn’t qualify for tax exempt status.  Council would eventually vote to allow the Carmi Fire Department to open the checking account while attorney Greg Stewart checks on the requirements surrounding bidding.

Carmi city leaders adjourned at 6:37pm.