Days, Months, and Years
Weekly Update #211 2/3/2024 to 2/10/2024
Days, months, and years all seem to interchange in the world of government. Before I share more though, let me tell you about some of my week serving as mayor of the best small town in America.
This week, we had our first face-to-face meeting with representatives of the Federal Highway Administration about our Safe Streets for All grant. This meeting will get the motion started on getting our agreement signed so we can move forward with the planning that it funds. Our goal is to have the work completed to be able to apply for implementation funding by this time in 2025. With so many moving pieces and different offices involved, this is a pretty rapid timeline, but I believe we can make it happen. Only time will tell.
The Board of Public Works and Safety reviewed requests from the future this week as well as a few that had passed already. Upcoming events that require street closures or extra police patrols are a regular agenda item at a BOW meeting. From the past, you will have sewer adjustments for when you break a water line or fill a pool. They all have a set of criteria they must meet. A 5k race, for example, must provide a map and where they would like extra traffic control. On a sewer adjustment, you can only go back two months and must show that it did not enter the sewer. The extra water usage could be from a frozen pipe this time of year or from watering the lawn or filling a pool in the summer. On a different topic this month, we saw an update to a contract that started in 2021. This was for engineering work on a bond issuance we are presenting to council this coming Monday. Looking forwards or backwards can be months or even years for the BOW.
This week, the city working on a purchase of the Community Agency Building came to a halt as I learned that the building board had chosen to sell to a private buyer. While the details are unclear, I hope the new owner can keep the rent fixed as we were trying to do so the tenants can continue their work in the building. I wish them well and hope they can find a way to make it work.
I guess the time has come to get back to that opening thought. Sometimes the projects we are working on take days from start to finish. Others take months and most take years to get from start to finish. For example, the building purchase mentioned in the previous paragraph had been over six months in the works, but the theater project we had hoped to place on the first floor has been on and off the shelf for several years now. Two years ago, when some council members claimed that we didn’t have a priority list related to Water Pollution Control projects, we had already been working on the upcoming bond issuance for over a year and still had years more before we would be ready to apply and get approved for a State Revolving Fund Bond. As the last of the previous administration’s road projects are about to open bids or start construction, we are less than a year from opening the first award my administration received in 2020. Time is truly different in the world of government, and I am proud of what we have accomplished and will continue to keep working towards the future for our community, and I thank you for the chance to do so full time each day. Writer William Arthur Ward had this to say about time, "God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say 'thank you?'"