Rather than step through all the day’s events I’m just going to highlight a few of the more important ones. Our primary issue for the day was the discussion with the County Commissioners regarding the fate of OPG.  A few weeks ago, the mayor submitted a request for the council to dissolve the interlocal agreement so a new development department could be created. This proposal was substantially lacking in details and was not really received too well by council, staff, or anyone really. Last week a number of council members put together a proposal to form a working group to come up with a plan to achieve the goals outlined in the “Taylor Report.”

As of Monday there was a pretty substantial divide between where most of the council was at, and what the administration had requested. Since Marilyn is out of town, I was going to be chairing the meeting. I was pretty concerned about how it was going to go. But then on Tuesday we received an email from the mayor where he agreed to withdraw the proposal and instead offered a plan for how to move forward with the council’s request for a working group.

So when we met again today, we were all pretty much on the same page. We had all the council members, the commissioners, and a whole room full of various staff people and other interested parties. We had two hours scheduled for the meeting. About ten minutes into it we had all come to agreement that we should move forward with the mayor’s new proposal. I figured since we were all there and we had so much time we may as well throw out some of our thoughts on our priorities and concerns for the effort. A few good things were said but after about fifteen more minutes of discussion everyone was done. So we got an early lunch.

The next item of interest was the discussion of the surplus city lots that we are trying to see developed for affordable housing. We opted to change tack and go back to the original staff proposal of just giving the lots to the Housing Authority. I did receive a few bites from folks interested in the lots but in the end this is the path of least resistance. We can just give it to them with almost no process or hassle and let them figure out how to make use of them. There will be one more opportunity for someone to do a home ownership project when we get back to discussing the parcel at the corner of Franklyn, Marshal, and Ivy.

In our last meeting for the day the mayor presented the most preliminary of budget projections for the coming year. The mayor’s general plan for this year is to maintain the status quo and not look for cuts or deferred expenses as has been the case for the last few years. With the contracted salary increases combined with the reduction in some grant funds and other factors plus and minus that puts us needing to increase taxes by about $800,000. That works out to about $25/$250,000 home. If you add in the current sidewalk proposal we are working on that will be about $40/home increase this year from the city side of your tax bill. We will continue to discuss this for weeks to come.