For those of you who want to know what actually happened at our last council meeting, let me fill you in. First let me say I like Matt Baker and I think he has a talent for writing. I don’t understand where he goes when he’s at our council meetings. I know he is there physically but he must go somewhere else mentally. Unless his editor is changing his stories after they are written, he is missing a lot of what takes place. He reported that we had a tentative agreement passed in regard to the two cities sharing equipment. THIS DID NOT HAPPEN! What did happen was that our city attorney passed out a sample ordinance to get our thoughts on it. No action was taken and there is no agreement at this time to share equipment. Peru would also have to approve any agreement that we would submit before any exchange of equipment was done. The Mayor asked each alderman to comment on the idea and received various thoughts. These ranged from Boo Herndon stating “its a great idea, our superintendents of public works are great and our mayors our great!” I don’t think Boo has had a negative comment come out of his mouth since he became an alderman. Tom Ptak questioned who was getting a better deal since the discrepancy between the value of equipment requested between the cities was huge. We want to use a $30, 000 leaf sucker and they want to use our sewer televising vactor valued at $300,000.
Alderman Salazar just wants the two cities to get over what he perceives as a decades long dislike for each other.
I have a concern about the costs of manpower if we send our workers to operate our equipment in another city. Its no secret that we don’t have an overabundance of help in the city and sending some of our people to work in Peru and forgoing their responsibilities here seems like the taxpayer would get shortchanged. How do we balance that out? Do we require they make up equal time in our city? Who keeps track? I am all for emergency help between our neighboring cities when necessary, but the day to day exchange seems like it will be more costly than any benefit either city would derive from this agreement. We really have only discussed the two pieces of equipment mentioned above. If that’s all we are interested in then we should look into buying our own leaf machine and running it ourselves.
So Matt after the meetings, if you have any questions as to what took place, ask me. I would be happy to help you out.
What do you think? Do we want to share equipment,and employees between cities? Are we better off if we do? Let me know what you think…
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