By Barb Pert Templeton
The Jan. 21 meeting of the Algonac City Council lasted about 38-minutes and Councilman Ed Carter was absent. Officials moved through the agenda pretty swiftly including addressing a half dozen items under new business.
Here are the highlights:
State funding for school project stalls
Algonac City Manager Denice Gerstenberg told officials at the recent meeting that there’s some misinformation out there about the funding for the school project that she wanted to address. She said the City of Algonac, not the Algonac School District, requested $500,000 from Senator Kevin Hertel and the State of Michigan to renovate the former Algonac Elementary School into Algonac Community Center. Unfortunately, someone put the fund request into the state school aid package thinking the school district still owned the building and they were doing the renovations. Gerstenberg just found out the funds can’t simply be given to the Algonac School District and then passed on to the city, instead a bill must be passed by the legislator to move the funds.
“According to Senator Hertel’s office yesterday, the legislation could take until the end of the fiscal year, which is October,” Gerstenberg said. “We are working with the senator’s office to resolve this as soon as possible.”
Algonac City Manager Denice Gerstenberg.
Geographic Information System Updated
During her report to the city council City Manager Denice Gerstenberg offered the latest information about the city’s Geographic Information System (GIS). She said GIS is a computer system that analyses and displays data that is attached to a unique location. City departments have been working together over the last two years to acquire and input data points into the GIS. For example, at one time staff utilized paper documents to identify the location of water shut-off valves, information that was often not correct. Now we use a tablet in the field that has GPS coordinates and a field history for each property, and a picture showing the shutoff and water meter locations. We have also located all water main valves and our accuracy is within six inches. In addition, staff can also use GIS to track hydrant winterization and the condition of valves and when they were last exercised.
Gerstenberg concluded her report to the council with a Fun Fact about Water: The average price for a 24-pack case of bottled water is $3.99. Algonac residents pay $3.25 for 1,000 gallons of home delivered water which is enough to fill 315 cases of water.
City takes over flags at Riverfront Park Veterans Monument
Members of Fred Quandt VFW Post 3901 sent a letter to city of Algonac officials asking them to take over the maintenance and flag replacement at the Riverfront Park Veterans Monument. In addition to the monument, the city will take care of the flag at Riverfront Park and a pair of flags
at city hall. The post cited financial challenges and fewer club volunteers as the reason for the request. The VFW had a contract with Rocket Enterprises for $965 annually, to maintain the flags. In their letter to the city council the VFW noted that their brick pavers project near the monument is completed as they’ve exhausted all spaces there for bricks and the monument committee has been dissolved.
Mayor Pro Tem Dawn Davey asked if the city could use funds from the Milford Jackson Trust to take over paying for care of the flags at the park. Mayor Rocky Gillis said they usually end up with about $30,000 from the trust so utilizing some of the funding for the flag upkeep would likely be fine.
Mayor comments on Facebook posts
Mayor Rocky Gillis took a moment during the council comments portion of the agenda at the end of the recent meeting to address remarks being shared on social media about how city government works. He said everyone at the council table has one vote, none of them have employees that work for the city but they do have one employee in City Manager Denice Gerstenberg who runs the day-to-day city business.
“Blasting our personal Facebook messenger because you’re upset about something is just not appropriate, send me an email, I don’t mind my Facebook messenger for a couple questions here and there but to continuously blast it and to blame me for something, I’m one person, all seven of us are one body, we can’t fix things on our own,” Gillis said.
He added that he didn’t want to bring the topic up but it’s difficult to go on Facebook and see the council is just getting beat up when they’re just seven people trying to do the best they can for the city.
