Looking Forward
Weekly Update #248 10/20/2024 to 10/26/2024
Are you tuning in this week to see what I have to say about our Civil Investigative Demands, or CID, from Attorney General Todd Rokita’s office? Well, before that, let me share some from the majority of my week serving as mayor of the best small town in America.
Thank you to Head Start and Immanuel Lutheran School for allowing me to come in this week and visit with a couple classrooms. I had a good time talking about community helpers and what my day-to-day activities look like serving as mayor. The fun part is always trying to explain preparing a budget and planning road projects in an interesting way for whatever age group that day. I don’t think we give teachers enough credit when it comes to educating our future leaders and hopefully building a lifelong love of learning for them along the way. Thank you, teachers, for the invitation to share with your classes and thank you to all teachers for what you do each and every day.
I sat down this week with Assessor Katie Kaufman to discuss the city helping fund the 2025 imaging for Geographic Information System, or GIS for short, that a few city departments utilize along with the county. As I told Katie, we will work on finding a way to help for 2025 and build it into the budget as it comes around every two years in the future. Katie, thank you for being a county official that tries to work with us for a better tomorrow.
I sat down this week with Indiana American Water to get updates on some past projects and some future plans they have in the works. They shared that their Rockford Dam Removal project is pretty much completed with just a few items left to button up. Projects for the future will include a new water treatment facility to replace the existing one that serves the Seymour area. This project has been in the preliminary phases for some time now and will really start to see some noticeable progress over the next year or so. We also spoke of how to improve their portion of our next Insurance Service Office, or ISO, rating. Things like adding a hydrant can improve our score and ultimately help not only increase our community safety, but decrease our homeowners’ premiums ever so slightly. It was a good chance to meet new faces from Indiana American Water and to look to the future of our community on this topic.
Well, I guess I should get back to that CID that some of you tuned in for this week. The problem with sharing information on it, though, is that there is not much to share. Seymour Police Department is working on preparing the documents requested in the demand. Some of this is information that Chief O’Brien had offered to send up to the Attorney General’s office a few months ago when they asked for it, and they declined it then. Beyond that, as it is an open investigation, I don’t believe I can say much more about it at this time and look forward to seeing the press release from the Attorney General’s office when they have completed their investigation.
This week, I will close with a quote from author Max Lucado, "A little rain can straighten a flower stem. A little love can change a life."