January 17, 2008

Jerry and I had a long discussion about the Dept. of Public Works this morning. We discussed some personnel moves and other items relating to the dpd.

We decided that we should proceed with the Killough street project. What we are going to do is have the engineer draw the plans for the needed improvments. We will bid the project and if we have enough money we will proceed. If we do not have enough money we will keep the plans and in the future, when the money is in the bank, we will proceed. The council voted several years ago that this would be the next project we would complete when funds are in hand.

We agreed a few days ago that the major equipment purchase for the street dept. this year will be a replacement for our street sweeper. We have the spec. now for the sweeper that Jerry wants and today we placed an ad for bids on the sweeper. The cost of the new sweeper, with our trade, will be about $100,000.00. We will have to finance this over a two year period. We also asked for bids to finance this purchase for the next two years. The reason for this appraoch is that we only budget $50,000.00 per year in the street dept. for equipment purchases.

I hope that we have enough money to complete Killough. This will greatly improve the traffic flow to the northern part of the city. The traffic has grown quite a bit since we completed the missing link in the street and Wal-Mart and several other businesses have located at the intersection of Killough and highway 64.

In the department head meeting we discussed the new cart system for the sanitaion dept. All comented that all of the response they had received had been positive and the people who had talked to them were looking forward to the change. So am I.