Plan Commission - Regular Meeting

It is now 7 o'clock. Mr. O'Toole, council staff meeting is now in session. Mr. Sharma, please take your role. Yes, President Cox. President Cox. Present. All right. Councilor Nugent. Councilor Hagan? What was that? Councilor Johnson? Aye. Councilor Lundquist? Aye. We have a quorum of four members present. All right. All right. Thank you all for attending. You've got some new faces in the audience. i'm sure we'll have some discussion just so everyone knows this is a staff meeting we've got a couple of those that will take place tonight but we're hoping that for feedback discussion or what have you um to get it started before we jump into the uh agenda did you like that speak hopefully it's not up to the podium just please state your name and your address or business address My name is Angel Smelt, and this is Jay Tribble. Here at Shepherd, we are from Elder Rick's Group, Smith Instruments Group, and we are the agent for Sister Ellen. We thank you for giving us that opportunity to have a beautiful town in this play area. So we operate, Jay and I created a team effort. We have a total of about 16 employees, and there are about eight, seven, eight of us that write public entities, collectively we write over 200. So, we're happy to have you in that family, but we just wanted to introduce ourselves, let you know who we are, where we live. I live between Monterey and Kirkland City. They live in Union County. So, we know each other, but the main help to Rick's office is 11 locations, but the main help to Rick's office is about 11 hours from here. So if you need anything, ever, if there's an emergency, we will be here. Someone will be here. And we just wanted to let you know that we do operate as a team. Wanted to kind of meet you guys. And I said, I know Jacob and I know Rhonda. That's the people that I've worked with. Neither one of them are from here. I said, you know, so. I said, I don't even know if anybody knows where Calvin is. Okay. All right. So I'm going to get back to you. Mr. Cooper Yeah, we're excited. Yeah, yeah. So I kind of know a little bit about, yeah, she's very detailed. And anything they'll ask for, she'll come for us. We've had to save a lot of money to understand what we're doing, so. We definitely appreciate you having me. We truly hope to look after you in the future, sir. Thank you. So thank you all very much. You guys are welcome to stick around. If you want some exciting stuff, you're more than welcome to go deep as well. Thank you guys very much. Thank you. All right. Okay, so we'll jump right into it. So I had a couple phone calls on the late limit restriction to return. I had one of my drivers look at the late limit restriction, sitting in town watching the sun rise and the trucks go through. They were trying to interrupt the community project on those sides. They were able to tell me that we were going to have to recreate East Jackson for a second time. I don't know how many years has it been since 2019. So we have been taking a beating on roads out there for continuous heavy traffic or heavy traffic flow. So we put our movements out there. Didn't have any feedback at the time of putting our movements out there. I've had a constructive conversation with Mr. Watson here. I'm very, very grateful to listen to see what he can make of it. as well, and that's where we, that's where we stand, so. And the point of this discussion is that we want to start off assuming that's what you're here for, and we welcome our clients that are proposing to stay here in the place where they're going to be, and if they can make it happen. And for everyone, it's your job to ask that you do that. And so, John, go ahead. My name is Jerry Lawson. I'm a lifelong resident of Hamilton County. I live between Douglasville and Spencer Road. It's been a lot more time up here than I did in Douglasville. I live on Fall Road, and I represent K-Stone Grill. I'm one of the 65 people that's right here in the community. um that was on vacation for a couple weeks around the holiday and we started getting phone calls from multiple formulas that were getting pulled over and getting Nobody was cool. Just say there's a weight restriction in force now. Here's the ordinance. And it was like scratching my head. So I felt afraid for a while. And I thought, man, I was like, is this, I'm missing out on something. He was like, no, we've got a new rule. We've got an issue. You should reach out to the new rule. And I've known Eric for a while. So I just put up on the phone with him. Why am I concerned? I'll probably have to go there and talk to several of the business owners. This puts a big burden on local businesses such as ours that have mostly heavy traffic. That's a pretty typical crew size. That's a gross vehicle weight of 14,000 pounds. All the way up to, I mean, max 20 ready trucks. So that's going to be, we run a lot of hydro excavation trucks, functional trucks that pass through town. We work all over central Indiana, but this is our main program in downtown. Like everybody else, we've been patient, waited on the 236th Street interchange to get fixed, and then it gets fixed, and it's like, man, we're back to getting the job sites on time, and they've influenced me in that mess. I drove in today just to see what it would take us to get around if we drove on my next 1.5 ton truck in 14 extra minutes. That's a 1.5 ton truck. It's going to be 5.1 mad when you get to heavier truck. It just doesn't get through the years, I'm saying. 3 or 4 times that's more. Now, it doesn't sound like much, but when you multiply that times 2, and depending on which one of my crews are going, and we do work in the Annapolis, and if we're going towards Annapolis, we can right now break 7 to I-69. But if we're going towards the Lafayette area or the Westfield area, which has a lot of work push right now, or even the west side of Indianapolis and Avon, you know, that adds up a lot when you're asking for, you know, basically an extra 30 minutes per van per day. And I'm figuring out what we're going to do to our fuel trucks. And we'll take that, start figuring out how it's going to cost the time. I'm talking about $400,000, $500,000 a year for a real impact. It's going to happen. I want to say also appreciate what you're trying to do, because this is my community. I mean, I live outside of town, but we come in here to eat all the time. My son lives up by a bridge road, and my daughter, well, my grandson, when they're still up and down, they're showing every day. So we want to say that there's no good way around town. That's the problem. You know, I speak in the area, because like what I hope is, you guys will be torn down in 30 days, which, I mean... If I tell you to drive to North Sheridan, which any of you guys want to drive all the way up right now, I have a hard time believing that I would want to. But the truth is, it's just not an inconvenience. It's a genuine financial impact. And not just for me, but, you know, I've talked to Greg Filston, Frank Bowers, to Cliff, to Matt Morgan, who owns a business next to us, to Cluedway Strokes. There's a lot of businesses that call this side of Hamilton County home, and it's our main thrill part of Middletown. So, I'm just asking for mercy or help. I understand you don't want these heavy trucks on your secondary roads, and I understand that. But the truth is, it's just... Those dollars have to be answered for. Remember, if you guys don't want to answer for them, you can see that as a cost of business. But if it wasn't a cost of business, then it's changed. First-line road library loans, right back when you front home, have to answer them right at the end of the year. Why? Because it's all costing a lot of money. And I don't have a good history. You know, a lot's changed. People don't trust the road to have deteriorated. I understand all the reasons. You know, I could also say that the road deteriorated because of the quality of the paint. My biggest thing is there's not a great plan for us to get around. I mean, that bridge across Jackson Street is a major paraphernalia for traffic. I mean, I know it used to be Highway 47, but you think about how it connects Anderson to Cicero, to Sheridan, and out to I-65. I mean, it's a major highway paraphernalia for a lot of folks. I mean, if you're asking the truth, there's a huge financial impact. And it's going to not just hurt my small business, but other small businesses. And it's going to also impact other roads. So, I mean, my biggest issue, if I understand what you're trying to do, I sure wish there was a plan to get us around the bridge or somehow give us another source that wasn't going to cost us a lot of time. First, as you and I talked about, if you still have it, please shut down. The truth is, bypassing Keystone Avenue to stay on Highway 31 is not that big of an impact. The other day, it's a couple minutes. I'm thinking, well, this road doesn't allow a lot of heavy traffic on secondary roads. But we're still walking into the town with the main roads. I mean, it's just a lot of this, it's a lot of heavy road traffic is in Sioux Falls. We're not over the road freight. We're working in a lot of these communities. And I understand for passing through, for passing through, it still costs your rents. But anyway, I just, I know this is the start of a little bit of a conversation. I appreciate you all listening to me, but again, it's, this is a real world impact. And it's still all these blue collar workers that work for us and the helpers that live in your communities and support them. Every time I've got a phone call, they're responsible for leading your kickbacks, where it's a lot of work, so anything else, I've had no problem with you. I'm happy to try to be part of your community and support it. but it's difficult too but all of a sudden it's like never mind we don't want you guys in town anymore Please understand that you guys hear that You still have to start thinking in the pounds per square inch when you start spreading weight out over axles. You know, so you'd have a job in a dump truck that's a quad axle and floats on the front. The way your weight is spread out is much different than what your sedan at home might be. So that's why a lot of times when you see these larger vehicles, I'm trying to fill up with you with this, but it's... You know, extra axles are added, and wider tires are now added to disperse that weight impact on the roads. So, you know, an F-350 is a fully cab chassis truck. There's a $14,000 converse here at the Lakewood. I have a single wheel of an F-350. I think it's $12,000. The truth is, with your 11,000-pound weight on it, and I hope you guys understand, I talked to Eric about this, what is on your plate doesn't matter to the race. If you open that cab at your door, up and on your door, or in your trucks, it's going to have gross people waiting for you. And you should always be on your trailer via gross vehicle weight ratio. And then to get your total, you would add those up and get your gross combined weight ratio. And that's how most state agencies monitor that. Truth is, like, I don't know many of you that would have a half-time truck from a boat through town that are going to be under 11,000 pounds. Pretty little of any RVs coming through town are going to be under 11,000 pounds. Most of your 350, 3500s, Chevy Dodge, whatever, are going to be over 11,000 pounds. and then one of them you really need to reconsider in your medical way unless you're ready to start enforcing all right tickets to everybody because there's very few people up and down the road and this can be an expression of our role for our community so i know we're on the edge of that and you know there's a lot of ones in the trucks up and down for sure they're not commercial but they're privately owned they're still available So, I'm still going to be able to listen back. I don't know if that's the way to listen to music, but as I was talking, I was sure. So, I've been working on it. Now, I have a band group that I've been quite pushing to be back together to let them see a little bit more about me. Right here. Right here. Right here. Right here. Right here. Right here. I'm part of the report of the eloquent people of Holtville. It's been through and through in some town. I'm going to go very quick around the house for people to turn around, because right now, I'm going to go to the city limits before you see the size of it. I mean, you've been in violation. And I know a lot of officers have been very kind, and I'm sure in town they can see that more than you, but it would be good to know ahead of time. So I would say, as the first one, we have to have those discussions with the county. I'd like to make sure that that can happen. This was just a bit about just the start of the pandemic. So if there's an error call, we can go to City Council. He's not calling. Okay. I don't remember what the bicycle number was. And of course, there's that problem. Well, I appreciate the feedback, and there's a lot of things to look at, so I appreciate that. Absolutely. And we may have more questions during the course, but it's going to be a little bit more of an impact as well. Like, you should not have a number of people on there. So I'm going to see if that occurs. Thank you. So, do you ever like yours? What's the typical? Come on, can you go in the truck right now? I was wrong. I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. So, you were told about that, and you were saving my sister's life. How much did I lose? I lost a girl, and I lost my friends, and I lost my mother. I lost my mother, and I lost my family, and I lost my father, and I lost my mother. Stay calm. Stay calm. Okay. And just so you guys know, we have our information in the cabinet. We have a discussion about the potential blind boxes. Boom, on top of it. Please, take over the other space that we've made for this and put all the stuff in there. We have the coordinates. Sure are. I've provided all the data for both. We all know those plates you need for porting to your companies. You can track them all. You can put them in your bag and put them in your bag. Okay. Would you say that triumphal was? I don't know. I am part of our challenge ever since the new first station opened. Even this side of the road has become more of a connection with our government. But it's sad as well. So we've seen her take a turn around. It is beautiful. I think we can get her to reverse on all of us. It's not intended to be that. And so it is. There is the rest of the soil that we found great. But we're not keeping up with it. We don't get money from the county. We're going to be adding two local roads and services that run roads. That's very minimal. We're not keeping it. Our next discussion is going to be on the cursor, which is a real deterioration cost. So having to do East Jackson, and we can argue whether it was done correctly, I'm going to try to split the story about the end of the title. And it's not intended to be a good affair during our time. And that's, unfortunately, that the board approved once and now there's an exit vote. That's what's being needed. We've had enough. The chief stopped us so long. Let's build this. Build the tip thing. And Israel should be the 28th, right? And he stops there and he just wants to pick the back rooms. Here in the heck, out of our rooms. And we just We have to do something. The bridge is not here to continually repair this road. It's not. And that's the point. We only have 25% responsibility for the cost of this. And another 75% goes to the bridge. So thinking about this so far is not to say in the future we're going to get it. So we have a major issue our town is trying to keep up. And we have another thing that needs to be done for town that we're not able to get to because we're trying to keep the major roadfares working. in decent shape, but we guys know the rest of the bridge has potholes in it, and it's deteriorating pretty quickly, and right now we don't have a solution for that. We don't have the funds and our payment funds to pay for that. So it's a real issue. Any more feedback? Okay. Thank you. Cliff Carley, Casey Construction. My stuff's not near the biggest scale as these guys, but my truck's sitting out front. You know, I wanted to bring my truck and skid steer and stuff and park it out on the street this morning, this afternoon, so if you guys wanted to, I could show you what the tags and stuff are on it. But, you know, if I come through town, it's going to be, you know, my truck is about 1,000 pounds. The truck drives. Yeah. So, and that's just a three-quarter ton short bag. And Hayden didn't mention that he talked to me because it wasn't constructive criticism. It was the conversations that we had. Him and I kind of have a... A different type of relationship. I didn't get the good mention. What about your garbage trucks in town here? What about your back trucks? You guys don't understand. A lot of those trucks didn't come to town on the 4th of July here to do the parade because of that. I mean, that's a pure saying. I wasn't here for it. I don't know for sure. That's right. Um, they're delivery trucks. They're delivering food to your restaurants. So, they don't want any exclusions. Listen, I haven't seen the, the, the... They're doing business with, uh, food. It's exciting. Okay. So, basically, add school buses, a little bit of deliveries. Okay. Okay. So, my next question, I told Hayden, I would... just just so we can run it through the system um just because but you know you guys are gonna have to see you know you talk about you need to find out whether you want to spend money on the officers writing tickets or saving your money for fixing your asphalt because I guarantee you, you know, I don't look different out of the blue being instructed. Yeah, well, so I mean, I guarantee you, you know, if I get it, so if you guys ride one of my trucks and take it when they're coming through town, I'm going to go to court with it. So we're going to go to court and you're going to pay your officer to go to court and we're going to beat it because there's no scales, there's no nothing. You guys have no proof at this point that I was over 11,000 miles. No way to you. you know, to go in front of the judge. So you're going to get beat. The only way you're going to get any money out of it is if, you know, somebody rolls over and just writes a ticket and doesn't want to mess with it. And you go to court, you know, and they don't want to go to court and lose. You know, nobody wants to go lose. So you have to do this stuff. You have to do this, Mr. Crowley, that says that this thing, everything's done. It's over, but it's so good. Be constructive in any conversations you might have. Well, John, I'm just trying to figure out what the hell, how, if you have any, if you have any proposals that can help us, that can help us make decisions and not have a sequence. I think that the 11,000 pounds is, is, you're way under, you're asking for my tickets all day long for that. Hey, I'm not sure what they're, Logistics. Are those 200,000 pounds the right number? Well, I'm being serious, bro. So next time you want me to come fly your snow in my one-ton truck, I'm 11,000 pounds. And I'll get a ticket to go out there to your place to buy snow. I'll drive you down. That was personal. That's what the company said. Yeah. Do you have a clue? Right. I know. I don't think it's anything. Yeah, but it's connected. That road, now that that road is a town road, so it's probably not. Wow. So, no, you would not get a ticket to do that. So, what about shingled doors? You would not get a ticket to do that? There's a lot of... I don't know. It seems like it's not...

A lot of issues that you guys aren't going to be good with.

So we're open to constructive feedback. And I think we need, I mean, I think we're in agreement. We need to look at it again and make sure that it fits what we're trying to do. I think not to hurt local companies.

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what it appears to be doing. But it doesn't seem like it was super thought through on how it was going to happen. It was just, hey, let's throw this out there and see what happens. I mean, if you want to have a truck, I mean, every other place, every other town, you know when you you come into a little towns all across the united states you know there's a truck route when you come to town no trucks in town and here's here's the route that you go so we have 276 we have 38 but none of it's posted and see you guys should have probably got with the county and stuff before you did that ordinance to post that before you can do that and that's another thing you write somebody a ticket you know it's not posted that we're not supposed to be there all of a sudden bam we're here with a 30, 40, 50, 60,000-pound truck, where are we supposed to go? So, I mean, at the end of the day, if this sticks and it's something you guys want to continue to do, I think you're going to have to have an officer that's going to strictly have to do that all the time to to do it, you know, to make it happen, because, you know, the county has been, you know, the county has built these roads coming into your town, beautiful both directions, no different than Beck's. You know, Beck's built a big road out there, and they're killing our road out there, but, you know, what do you do? I mean, there's a huge uptick in traffic since I moved out here 30 years ago, you know. 281st Street out there by my house, man, you know, I could... you know, run through that stop sign any time of the day and never be a car coming. And now you've got to stop and look through four times to make sure it's 18 wheelers and everything else are coming down that road. So, I mean, it's, but the county, part of that's county, you know, they, they built the roads coming to you, you know.

Mr. Carter, of the trucks that you've got running through town, how many of them are serving the town? 50%? 90%? 10%?

Serving the town? Yeah. 10%, 15% probably. Not very many. I mean, it's a thoroughfare to go from one place to another. Now, we like the Beck's Road, but if you want to stop and get something to eat, I mean, you come to Cicero. So if you don't, if we're not coming to Cicero, then we're not going to McDonald's. We're not getting fuel here. So, I mean, it's kind of a catch-22 on, you know, there's a lot of people that buy diesel fuel at Village Pantry that aren't going to be coming, won't be able to come through there because they can't come through town. And it's going to be super confusing with 19 because you can run up and down 19 all day long and nobody can say anything out there. And I'm not so sure where, you know, I feel like I pay a Hamilton County wheel tax or, you know, my stuff on my 47 things that we played each year. And, you know, does that enable me to be able to come to Cicero? I mean, I didn't read that on the, you know, when I pay that each year. This license plate is good for you to drive here. So.

I mean, we're not the first community to put in weight restrictions.

Who else has got them?

Normal has one. They're 19, what was it, 19501? Keystone had one. Mr. Watson told me that that's been removed. But for a while, Keystone had it. I haven't gone back to look to see if it's still there's restrictions.

You see them on bridges. I've never, I've never been pulled over and going through Carmel.

So, so actually for all you guys, do we as a council need to look at this a different way instead of the overall rate? Do we need to be looking at this thing more from weight per axle? You had mentioned the weight per inch. which in Indiana is restricted to weigh a hundred pounds.

Yeah. Well, I'm not having a check into that. I don't know the answer to that, sir, but it's really a, um, I just want to bring to light that you had axles and had tire width. You lower your ground, your ground pressure with some packs. Sure. Um, you know, another thought I have while sitting here, if I may, was, is there even a way you can do a time restriction? Cause I know it's terribly busy, let's say after three o'clock on weekends, you know, to where it's even something that, you know, It's up to a certain way we could use the roads in the mornings and maybe that's a compromise where I can't have it. My guys can't use the roads coming in at night, but at least going out in the mornings when traffic is much lower. I understand that it's crazy busy here when the restaurants fire up on the weekends and kids are getting ice cream. So maybe after three or four on the weekends there's a weight restriction. Just trying to think of a compromise there that would work. I understand Mike's concerns. I understand what Cliff's saying. It's tough on all of us.

I understand the big trucks, and I understand the whole road thing. Asphalt is something that doesn't last. It's like your furnace in your house. It doesn't last forever. You have to maintain it and take care of it, and still it doesn't last. I don't let triaxles drive up and down my driveway either. But I'd sure drive my trucks up and down the driveway. To me, I mean, Frank would be in a little different position because he's got the bigger stuff, you know, the big boy stuff where, you know, I'm running about the same stuff that Jerry's running and, you know, the 20,000 to 30,000 pound range is what my stuff's going to be. So, I mean, that's, you know, I guess it, and I understand, you know, semis running through town and stuff i get it but you know i think there's just there's got to be a different or better sure better way to go about it yeah i guess so and the goal was to minimize not to eliminate right but i mean you got you got you know you just got to figure out to me you gotta think about things from the business aspect and and i know that Either one of these guys get a ticket in there, they're all going to be standing in court. The way it's at now, if you're not scaling trucks and you don't have any proof that they weigh over 11,000 pounds at that point, then the judge is going to just throw it out and it's going to be a waste of everybody's time. Sure. I mean, so.

Sure.

But that's just. You know, Cicero's been good to me over the years and never had any issues with the PD. And, you know, when we have had issues with the PD, we go in and sit down with them and have conversations with them. And it's always been good. So just constructive. Sure.

Appreciate it. Thank you. So it sounds like we have some work to do.

Mr. Crater, do you have anything?

Yeah, I've got six trucks that runs out here every morning. Called Bobcats. I've got a single-axe dump truck, two trikes.

All run through town?

Yeah, they run Main Street.

Main Street?

Yeah. And they've been stopped three times. And I had concrete trucks coming through here yesterday, and they stopped them. Then he had to transfer them all the way around. He was pulling right out of here on a bear fly.

So based on what you're saying, then you're probably running up close to the 70,000 pound mark too with the tri-axle weight, correct?

Yeah, yeah. But most of the time, we don't run through town with weight or any diamond out there. Gotcha. Yeah. But your trucks come to you here every day, twice a day.

Twice a day, you said?

Yeah, twice a day.

And that's what, one ton with a trailer and a bobcat?

Mm-hmm. Well, that's, yeah, three of them. Then we've got three Douglas, same last two tribes.

Okay. Can the local businesses buy a permit in our big town?

I mean, they're already excluded as it is.

Well, no, commercial vehicles. Oh, commercial. I got you. So I think that's something that we'll have to talk to legal about and see. Okay. I mean, that's a proposal we need to check out.

And just to be very clear, there was no, this was not, the intention of this was not to make money off of it whatsoever. That was never even part of the discussion.

You definitely need a lot more science. Yeah. I mean, we wrote off 19 from city limits. If I didn't have that letter and I didn't see those two little signs, I would have never known.

I'm not even seeing this on YouTube. I know it can't happen, but it'd be nice to have just Jackson Street open, but everywhere else could be that lower weight and talent.

I mean, Jackson's, unfortunately, Jackson's the street that's taking the beating, right? Right. I mean, you know.

It's a lot of construction and building, and Hamilton County's a busy place.

There's a lot of money around here.

Not enough for paving.

No, people keep coming.

Right. And that's part of the challenge. Right now, all of our money is going to the paving of Jackson Street, and we're essentially neglecting. I shouldn't say neglecting. We just can't get to the neighborhoods that we have responsibility for as well. You know, so.

Oh, man.

Well, I think we have some solid feedback. I'd say we have some work to do.

Yeah, we have a couple legal questions to ask. Yeah.

Like we said, in a staff meeting, we don't make official decisions or take votes. So nothing, we won't do any of that tonight. And it may not be the next council meeting we get it done either. It just depends on how long it takes us to work through it.

I mean, if you guys are in other communities and they have different proposals, I mean, you guys see the problems we're facing. I mean, money is very limited. So if there are, if you guys see something or have ideas, I mean, there were a couple of good ideas brought up now tonight. So let us know. I mean, we're willing to listen and we don't, our intent was not to harm local businesses. That's not the intent, but something has to be done. It's not, we're not able to keep pace with what's going on and it's only going to get worse with this being the interchange. And the county did do 276 as a thoroughfare to BEX. But, I mean, that was intended to be a truck route because of BEX, but it goes out to 19. But, I mean, if you guys have ideas, please reach out, and we'll go back and do our homework with legal and see what we can come up with.

Does the county pay for that, or does Sunny pay for that?

I don't know. I have enough on my own in Cicero to worry about.

The big truth is there needs to be a bypass. That's just not a quick fix. That's a years long fix. As town continues to grow and traffic grows, it's just going to be needed. We saw that in Noblesville for years for 32. It's just always a jam. It's going to be tough. You guys have a beautiful downtown here. Even with the automobile traffic, take the trucks out of it, you're still going to have a huge impact. It's Long term has probably the answer, but it's not.

It's not a quick fix and that there will be the spirit of the discussion with the county is because it will that whatever that bypass ends up being will be their roads.

So so there was a quarterly meeting within the last few weeks. I missed it. I'm usually there, but I missed it. But I mean that bypass was discussed it very limited that we it was decided that we needed to have a separate meeting.

It was fully dedicated to that conversation instead of doing it in the general updates. So that it's on their radar. So that will be taking place. We don't have it set yet though.

But like you said, that's longer term. I mean, that's not a quick.

That's a year long.

Years. Yeah.

That's years.

So just personal question. As far as a happy medium goes, obviously we have a, we have a low range and a high range. And to me, it sounds basically like 14,000 up to around 70,000. You know, In your gentleman's opinion, what would be the happy medium? I mean, that would capture a good majority of allowing a good majority of the trucks that need to come through, but also accomplishing what we need to accomplish.

26,000, I would suggest, at a plate level where you get, based on weight alone, water as a CDO. Anything above 26,000 will water as a CDO typically. There's weight limits below that can also be watered, but those are based on air brakes, combination vehicle passenger, stuff like that. But if the issue is weight alone, 26,000 is... You're talking about gross weight. Talking about gross vehicle weight yesterday.

I would agree with Frank on that. Once you hit that 26,001 gross combined weight limit, you're required to have a personal driver's license. That's a combined weight. It's a combined weight, that's right. Is it great? No. Is it better than where we're at? Absolutely. At that point, at least most of our one-time trucks and stuff could pass through town legally. I think some of our lighter-gun trucks with single-axis could still get through town legally.

Now, as far as signage goes, do we need signage all the way out at 31 and all the way out at 37?

I would recommend that. And really, every interchange, trying to get people to detour before they get too close to town.

Sure. And I was given that feedback from other people as well. I did too.

Yeah.

Yeah, that would be huge even coming off of Highway 31 in the quarters if you don't know if there's traffic waiting on the side or something. Because there's no turnaround. Once you're there, you're already past the point of no return. Yeah, I get it. No truck routes.

Yeah, that says Tipton City is waiting on us at 26,000.

Tipton. That's through downtown?

And the big difference is though, when they did that, they at least bypassed Big Room 19 out to where you can get around, right? Yeah, it was short, but they don't have two miles north. It's not too bad, yeah.

So does our ordinance actually, and forgive my ignorance on this, does it regulate 19? It doesn't, does it? No. That's a state road. That's in Dine. Yeah, it's in Dine. Okay. All right. You have anything else?

No, so we're not making any commitments, but I mean, we're looking to see what.

Yeah, we're definitely open to taking this on.

Well, we appreciate your time. I know it's kind of a little bit heated for some of us, so I appreciate you and the audience to listen and you guys taking the time to do so.

No, and we appreciate you giving the feedback because we didn't have this information beforehand. So, you know, we were flying with limited information, so this is very helpful. Thank you.

Well, we did a lot of research. Don't think we didn't do research.

We just didn't have live feedback from people that it impacts. Correct. And again, we we thought a lot of our exclusions would allow for what we were trying to allow, you know, but. So OK, we'll we'll work on it. So thank you gentlemen.

Thank you.

You guys don't want to stay for the road condition discussion next. It's unpaving.

Alright, do you have a pacer information?

So I can share if you don't mind. So. I asked for this PACER discussion to be on because I know that you've been pushing a neighborhood that needs to be used for CCNG. And I mean, we have main thoroughfares that are breaking down and this PACER part whatever it's called pacer is our utility street department assessment of the roads and i feel like we need to let this do the speaking for where we need to go next for ccmg i just don't want to get caught up And one specific because we get a few complaints out there I mean if you look at as an example if you look at West Jackson Street going west out of town and it's deteriorating pretty pretty bad as well We have other neighborhoods that are deteriorating pretty bad so I just wanted this on here that our our street department puts this together and they Numerically classify our roads and just as you guys move forward i mean rely on this from the experts on on what those what what that where that's guiding us to fix next is my real discussion point right sure so just for understanding the pacer 10 is best one is worse so before

your twos, threes, and fours, they're considered poor condition. And, you know, around the four and three is where, you know, you need to be taking action. And it actually says, you know, once you get down to a three, you're actually giving structural work to the replicants already. And just doing a quick look, we got about 35% of our roads fall into the three to four percent, or three to four grade scale. So, roughly around 35% of our roads.

I mean, you can see right here, main thoroughfares. That are threes, right? And that's a main thoroughfare. So I just wanted, they do the work to put this out there and let this help guide in the future what roads need to be worked. And the specific one you brought up, so I asked specifically about that neighborhood. And you want to talk to me just in general. I mean, basically, there's not potholes. The road has bumps. But it's not breaking down. It's in decent shape, right? But it's not smooth. It's not smooth. But there are roads that are deteriorating very quickly. that probably need support beyond that. So that's the only reason I brought this up is just, this is out there for a reason. It's an assessment. So as you guys move forward, it's probably worthwhile to rely on this to help guide you.

And some of those streets are, I mean, there are four or five, so they're getting there.

Yeah, I'm sure. But it is. I mean, it is a concern. Our main thoroughfares are getting beat on daily. No doubt. And we can't catch up.

Does this include alleys as well?

No.

No. So that's your next discussion. I know that's a whole other. That's our next discussion. Yeah. Which we've had that discussion since I've been on council to an extent.

Uh-uh.

I'll wait until we get to that part of the discussion.

Any questions on this, Mercer? Terry and I were talking, and I know it's been mentioned before for grant opportunities, where we want to go next. I just thought it was worthwhile to bring this back up.

Terry, you may know this. Outside of grants, are there other funding mechanisms for roads that are out there? You just look at this and obviously it's going to be an ongoing issue and topic.

I was just like Eric brought up earlier to the gentleman who was here. My pay budget is non-existent. When you're saying if I have to rely just on my paving budget and paving, we do about a block a week or a year. So, you know, we have to have grants, community-across grants to do any meaningful, meaningful paving.

We do do some. chip and seal based on this? We do crack sealing.

So that is a maintenance. So what that does is every year we do four full weeks plus weather there. We do four full weeks plus of cracks on it. That keeps the water from getting into those cracks. And then that's when you get your freeze thaw during the winter. That really accelerates the potholes. But, you know, that's part of our maintenance. And, you know, we cover the chimp seal, you know, when it gets to the outer surface. You're ready to do that.

sure I mean here here is a list of one twos and threes and there are 39 entries in here now I wouldn't let this drive the entire discussion right and I think you need to rely on the street department to guide as well because some some are used more than others so maybe a patch can work a little for a while, so.

Right, you know, a Jackson Street laying as a three is not going to last near as long as even a subdivision at a three because, you know, you're getting, just like we discussed, truck traffic, heavy traffic, and repetitive vehicles. So, in other words, you'll see a three deteriorate a lot quicker, you know, as a Jackson Street.

Those ones are out by the parks department and ballparks. I took those out. So it's really 36-ish.

So this is just a question from my own knowledge, because I don't really have a basis other than the main thoroughfares. I wasn't around when Morris Landing was done, so I don't know what the cost associated with that. A typical neighborhood like a Tamarack, which I know we don't need, or Morris Landing West, to do that neighborhood, what would be the expected cost? Use Morse Landing West as the example. I would say 1.7. Okay, that's lower than I thought.

I mean, what did we spend on just in Morse Landing going up the hill? That was 300 or something? I'm going from memory. I'm very concerned about those.

You're talking about the the scenes essentially and I

I think we got clarification on that. That's basically where the utility lines are running across the street, right?

I didn't agree with him by saying that because there's a lot of crossings that's not cracked, and there's not very few of them. If you look, they're almost the same. Uniform, right. Uniform. I'm not an expert, but I think it has something more to do with the mix that was originally used in the asphalt. I only had the one company come in and they said, oh, yeah, that's where you made your water line. That's good. It's not.

Okay.

I think there's something else there that we need traffic engineer or road engineer to find out why. Because if you've just done a mill and pay and didn't address whatever that problem is, you remember they came back in 19 and had to readdress on that.

Sure. Okay.

Thank you. All right. I think we're done with that one. Yep. All right. Alley work. So it's been on the table a lot as well. Mr. Cooper went out and talked about chip and seal with the county to start doing that. And he's had a lot of feedback that they're too high and chip and seal really won't fix it because there's ruts and everything else. And maybe, maybe, There's a solution to put base material down, grind it down into base material. And what Terry and I talked about is maybe we start just a small section at a time. And I asked Terry to go get some numbers. I don't know if you have those yet, Terry.

I do. I have some.

some some yeah to uh to maybe not out of his funds but maybe we find something else in the general fund to start doing a little section at a time and start putting base pavement down just to try to start to clean some of that area up and i don't know that it's realistic or not but But something probably needs to be done here in the short term to grind it down, get it back down to where it belongs, and maybe put something in that starts to last a little longer. And I'm not talking hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but maybe in our budget planning we start setting aside some amount to start on that.

Did we give any commitment from the county for assistance on those alleys or no? On what side? Chip and seal. The chip and seal? They said they wouldn't do any good.

That wouldn't do any good. Gotcha. I'm with you. And he gets complaints about water running off the alleys into people's yards and puddling as well in some ways. Because it's just too hot. Sure.

Yeah, so like Gary said, I've met with several county guys who have walked some of the alleys, and that is their recommendation, is that you just go in and basically grind them down, back down to level, and come up with then double coats of chip seal. But at that point, And that's an every year thing. He said, you can get it on program where you do that every year. And so that's when we kind of, you know, was kicking around and maybe it would be better to actually asphalt them with just base. I've done that analysis before and it's held up really well. So what it is, you use the base, which is the bigger stone, and you just don't put that nice slick vinyl coat on it. It really holds up pretty good.

Were we in a situation where it would make sense for us to own milling equipment? That may be a stupid question. It's just my ignorance.

We definitely, if we started doing it on our own, we'd have to have more choice. It would be an ongoing thing. You know what I'm saying. So there'd be more cost than just going out and buying the equipment.

I think it's something that maybe you looked at.

I don't know that you would. I mean, if you only used it a little bit. I mean, I don't know. I think it could be worked out.

I know we looked at, I think you might have showed me the, what goes on the skid steer, the power part of it. Right. We'd have to rip one or buy one that's big enough to carry the tool, because the little one we've got doesn't have the hydraulics and stuff that we run on equipment.

So do you want to talk numbers real quick, just briefly?

Yes. So as I was looking at the alleys, some of them need to be taken down further than the other ones and more grinding. So I tried to come up with just like an average. And so what I came up with, it was $100 to $110 a running foot. So these alleys are about... Well, they're actually plotted as 16 1⁄2 feet, but most of them is like 12 feet wide that's covered. And that would be taking them down.

So you're saying one foot by 12 feet?

Yes. So kind of looking at our alleys, some of our alleys are anywhere from 300 feet to 550 feet. That's in between your blocks. so you know by using say the the higher number 110 dollars a foot that'd be 33 000 to 60 000 basically to uh mill down and you know hire somebody to kneel down carry off the spoils and then put you know the base back four five inches of base back now There's a lot of things that will play with this. If you're able to do more, you're going to get a better bid. If they come in and do one alley, then that's where you're going to get up into that $110. But if you come in and you say, hey, you know what, we can make a big push this year. So, and I've actually done this before. We've actually went out and like using these numbers and say, okay, I just throw some numbers out. Say we got $500,000. So we go do $500,000 worth of alleys that we think, and then we bid those. And then they, because we're doing that, it'll come in, say it comes at $350,000 to do all of them. Then we're ready to go ahead and immediately throw out some more alleys to it. I mean, it, In other words, you kind of work into what money is available to do those.

Thanks for putting those numbers together. It gives an idea.

Right. And like I said, that's an average. Some of them are going to be cheaper because they don't have to be milled down as far.

Thank you. So I mean, we just had another payment discussion, so it's probably in the right time to have that talk. But it probably is worthwhile to consider.

So the grants for alleys, are they typically separate from CCMG?

Well, there's nothing available for alleys. No, there's not. No, even the community crossings, Dan and I, we've discussed with them several times. And one of the things too is beating these outlets up as the trash trucks, just like these guys said. That's one of the heaviest trucks you can see on the road because they pack as much as they can in those, because that less trips to the dump. That is a thing we've got to deal with. So that's kind of driving into how we do the outlets.

Since we're talking, I mean, there was a proposal of 26,000 one pound for roads. Just think about that and let us know your feedback of that. I mean, that's a third of what's going through town on some of these semis, so I'm sure that has to help.

Right, and honestly, I don't think anything we do is going to help. I guess the ones I would like to see targeted is these overloaded triaxles that's coming through here. You know, they're in the semis. They're just like, you know, you guys were talking, Jeff said, well, he just wanted to go rampant through the country side because it stopped up here at the truck stop. Well, we don't need that. Like, well, turn right around to 31, catch 28, and that's, you know, that's an integral.

Okay. Have we had any feedback from the county? I don't know who was going to talk to the county about signs out of the county property.

I talked to, let me see my notes. uh joel from the highway department so i was going to talk to brad when we were at our quarterly meeting so they said joel and i had never met him before the first time i met him and i talked to him before the meeting started and i told him that because i've got a list i've got a little list right here that jeff and my guys went and do exactly what they're saying, is get these signs out to where people can turn on some of these.

It's like an unofficial truck route.

So anyway, I talked to Joel about it, and I told him what we were discussing about putting signs into the county. I'm not, we're not doing a truck ride, I'm not. I'm just needing to get those signs out, like they're complaining about, to warn them for the year. And he said that he wanted me to send this list to Brad, and then Brad would pass it around, you know, as the guys get into it. And then Joe brought it up in the meeting, and that's when Joel's the one that said, Yes, we need to discuss this and it would be possibly in August, just specifically for truck route.

But what about getting signs out there saying it's limited thoroughfare, what if no trucks allow there?

Joel, which I don't know where he's at as a pet owner, he didn't seem like that would be a problem, was putting signs out in the county, following their specifications for signs.

Do you want to follow up with Brad, or do you want Mr. Davis, or do you want Joe or myself too?

No, I can follow up with Brad. Okay. That's who Joel sent the sentence to. Okay. All right. Thank you.

Good on Alice? Yeah, I'm good. All right. Moving along. Picnic. Miss Pearson. I'm assuming that's you. Oh.

Picnic. Yes. July the 24th at 12 o'clock at the park.

Red Bridge?

No. Community. Community. And we will furnish the meat and the drinks. And the employees can bring a side dish.

That's a Friday, right?

That's a Friday afternoon, and Friends of the Park are going to donate $25 gift cards for any employees that are there. Nice. And we're having our first meeting this Thursday, but the meeting is for the committee, but since most of this has already been planned for this year's, it's to get started on next year's, because I truly want it to be the employees picnic, what they want, what they want to do with the limited funds that there is so they can decide the day they want it, the time they want it. It's going to be at the Parks Department at Jimmy's office. And I will feed you.

All right. Thank you very much for your work on that. Thank you. All right, moving along, plan. Frank, do you have anything?

I do. I asked Rhonda to get this on the agenda. She must have took it on before I had a chance to. I'd like to get the planning office, facility office, parking lot front and rear sealed and re-striped. Looking pretty rough. I am PACER certified. I would put it at three or four if I were doing that. I did go out and get a couple of quotes. And one of them we got from Ferris became highly recommended by one of our partners. It's 4,800 bucks and that includes sealing every crack and then seal coating the whole thing and then re-striping like it is now. I did get another one from Sowers. They're the ones that have done it before. Same thing. He did say he was throwing out an extra $100 of asphalt because there's a repair that needs made in the rear. But it was $2,766. I don't have that money in my budget. So it's unfortunate that Ron is not here tonight to see where we can swirl that from. I could probably contribute $1,000 with a miscellaneous line like that.

Can I give you, outside of here, two additional names to contact to just get a price? Yes, sir.

Okay. So I guess then I'm more immediately going to pay to have this done. Sure. I think it's something we're willing to look at.

I don't think it needs to come out of his budget. No, I don't disagree with that. Town council budget.

Yeah, I'm not saying to put it in his budget. Where I'm struggling is why is there a $2,000 delta between those two quotes? Where's that gap come from? I know that's not your questioning. I'm just curious there.

So I'll give you two more names and maybe you see what they come in and see what the difference is.

We'll take a look at it. And if you'd like, we can add it to the agenda for Tuesday. Just please send Rhonda an email asking her to do so. All right, moving along. Chief Frazier.

thank you sir good evening council um so we were having we've been having this conversation pretty much um all year coming this but if you remember in our retreat one things we talked about was that we are We're working to get our PRN staffing up, which we have. We've actually added about 10 that are working. Each of those about five are working a fair amount, but we've also had probably 10 or so that kind of slowed down. So we're kind of breaking a little bit above even on our PRN staffing. So it's actually been pretty good. It's going the right direction for us at LEAP this year. But we're also running into that point to where we talked about where now it's summertime. So the people who work for us, most of them work at another fire department. So now it's time where they're either on vacation or they're getting overtime at their department. So we have a lot of issues with Either call-offs because we really don't control them. The day before, they may call and cancel their shift because they got called in for overtime or something came up. So that being said, what we're seeing now is we're running into that issue of summertime where weekends are just becoming impossible to fill for us. So every weekend, we start the weekend with three people, and we're filling three 24-hour shifts pretty much every Saturday and Sunday, sometimes Fridays depending on the thing. We've been really pushing, trying to get everybody to take spots, but there's only so much that we can squeeze out of our current staffing. So we're kind of running in that, which led me into what we had talked about before about wanting to have a conversation of what would it look like if we actually went to 15 full-time and then filled the rest with PR and overtime. Um, what that does for the town is this gives us consistency a little bit more, but the other part is just to understand how we staff. So when we staff, we actually staff our PRN first. So our PRN always given the first slot three weeks out. Two months out, they have the ability to fill slots. So they go in and grab all the slots they want to work that are open. Then after that, we fill with overtime. So anything we do won't affect our PRN staffing. We'll still get that really good cost value benefit of getting that average of $25 an hour. Most of them are more to the $22 an hour range. So that actually keeps us getting our lower cost staffing that we get. The only thing this would do would it be actually maybe pull from overtime, but overtime is going to be pretty consistent around there. But all I wanted to kind of show you tonight was from all the numbers that we've looked through, we can pretty much equally do what was budgeted for in the fall. We could actually meet the same numbers by staffing three more people. Our overtime costs average between 38 to $47 an hour, depending on the rank of the person are hourly rate for hiring a person. with benefits, with everything that he gets, about $42 an hour. So we're kind of in that break-even phase between whether we're paying overtime or we're paying with that. Currently, to this point, we're about 1,700 hours that we haven't filled for the year, which equals about 70 days of just not filling a position. The problem with that is we get a lot of days where we fill six, and then we have a lot of days where we may have two. So, for example, Sunday, this last Sunday, we started the day with four people going into Saturday midday. By Sunday morning, we had one person call in sick who was extremely sick, and we had another person who was a part-time person who also on Saturday called off, pulled himself off the schedule. So we went from four to two first thing Sunday morning. So that being said, what ended up happening was I got a phone call from our battalion chief on duty. He called me and said two, so I immediately got in the car from Kokomo, drove to here. I worked a 23 hour shift on Sunday just to fill that spot. During the course of the day, we were just making phone calls to people. One person decided to stay over for a few hours to help out. One person went to church. Went home for a little bit, came back for a few hours to fill in the spot. By the end of the day, we were in a pretty good shape, but we started the day with two people, and it was a scramble to even make it through. And sadly, that's what most of our weekends look at, like currently. We're just struggling to get those extra positions filled, because any time we have one person on vacation, we're starting the day at half-staffed. And then filling that is just the... the big issue we run into. So that being said, I want to present this and kind of show you what that looked like. Uh, 2026, the first column is the current budget of what was approved by the council. Originally that's just the staffing portion of the contract, which is the majority of this contract, um, projected. And this, the second column of the projected costs is $7,000 cheaper to hire people. Plus that's added in about $50,000 of PRN costs because we've, uh, added in like how much potential loss could we have. That's calculating if I lost one person a year for an injury. So an injury would be like a blue knee, blue shoulder, had to actually go on a surgery. That's my biggest concern we have. So the actual number of that is about $80,000 of difference minus no issues if everybody's healthy, everybody comes to work, we have our normal staffing, everybody shows up when they're supposed to. We would save approximately $70,000 to $80,000 from the first one to the second one. And then the other three are just projections of what it would look like going forward in 27 with the different potential pay raises. The benefits part, I calculated at 3% across the board. I wasn't really sure at the time what we're at. I'm still trying to figure that out with Mrs. Gary to get an idea of what our actual benefit cost is for next year for everybody. going forward. So I know this is a lot. This is a big conversation to have. It's probably hard to have this here. But what I would like to do is try to see if we could set it up where one or two of you at a time we could have a meeting and just kind of go through these numbers and talk about it and answer questions, kind of go through the details of it, all the little pieces of it, and see if there's something that makes sense or not going forward.

So your projected cost column is adding three?

Yes. Yeah, below that the down below the lower says 2026. So the salary. So if we're hiring people, we're going to hire him at the most. So if we do a lateral transfer, the most they would come in as a five year employee. with the benefits of a five-year employee. So that's what that shows. That's what a three-firefighter salary would be a five-year employee. They would get that benefit or that cost package. And then the benefits that go with it include their longevity and anything that they would get, vacation time. Everything that goes into that is the second column. So we're looking at three firefighters would be about $370,000 is the increased total for benefits and hiring three people. We kind of run it. It's like almost $124,000 per individual total cost.

So then you had turned up for vacations and sick leave? Yes.

That was added into the increase in backfill in the second budget. So I actually increased the vacation backfill. So when you look at that, the cost of what PRN and overtime would cost actually takes in the cost of what we would have to backfill for vacation, sick time, things of that nature for the extra three people. It's included in the second column already.

And you still say $400,000?

What's that?

And you still say $400,000 is what you're showing?

No. Roughly? I said worst case. Yeah, but it would bump into wages and overtime. Wages and overtime.

I just went off of that line. Correct, yes.

That was an unrealistic number because of the actual... That was such like a whirlwind of information everybody was trying to figure out, and the council chose the PRN staffing, which was basically all of our extra staffing was going to be PRN, which we only have a limited number of PRN. Most of it gets filled with overtime. So overtime is actually higher than was budgeted, and PRN will be way less than what's budgeted. We knew going into that there was going to be some transferring of funds between those three categories, basically make ends meet at the end of the year, figure it out. And one thing I remember when we were talking about this, one of the things you have to understand in the fire service, January, February, March, Sometimes April, that's your time where you're fully staffed. Most people are here. This is vacation times, like every other business, starts in March a little bit. April slows down a little bit. And then when May hits, it's vacation season. It's vacation season up until now with everybody having fall break in high school. Now October is a big month. People take a lot of time in October. And we limit. It's one person a day. So we can only have one person off each day. So that number, you hit the summer, we have a person on vacation almost every day. off and on through the rest of the year. November is kind of a slow month. The end of October is a slow month. And then we get right back into about the second week of December. Everybody starts using the end of vacation, trying to burn it up. So we kind of have ebbs and flows when we actually use it. But we're hitting the peak of vacation season right now. So like I said, pretty much every day we're filling three spots from here on out going forward. So this is just a proposal or an option to try to solidify that and actually staff us full time.

You said every day you're filling three spots?

Yes. We have four full-time firefighters each day. If one person's gone, that means we are at three. We have six positions to fill every day.

So you call a position eight hours?

24 hours. No, a position is we have battalion chief, three on the engine, two on the ambulance, six.

That's what our staffing is. Yes.

One out of the three. And then everything else is part-time or overtime. What we have that's a concrete staffing is four a day. If one of those people are on vacation, we start the day at three a day. So that's either people working overtime or PRN filling the other three positions. We, every day, every day of the year, we're filling two positions, 48 hours with.

I got you. That makes sense.

That's the part I was missing. Yeah, yeah. Okay. No, our normal is four and two. Anytime somebody goes on vacation, it's three and one. So, like, for example, Sunday, or the Sunday before last, we had a person who has, we have a military guy, and when he has military, he has to go to military. So, you know, we deal with vacation, military, sick time. Those are the three big ones we have to figure out and backfill. And at least military time is planned. We know when it's coming. a year in advance, so that helps.

Thank you for coming in on Sunday.

Oh, no problem. It was actually kind of fun. It's fun to be a firefighter.

Thank you, Chris. Chief, right here.

I'll begin. I talked about briefly, but just to let everybody else know, one of our reserve officers in his real job does some grant writing. for the company. He's done very well. He's got millions of dollars for them and different things that he's wrote grants for. But he found a grant that would cover public safety vehicles. So it's not a matching grant. It's a 100% grant. And so he inquired with me whether or not we want to try to get some vehicles. Briefly ran it by the president. He said, bring it up to y'all. I think there was a maximum of maybe 10 vehicles he could ask for. So when I broke it down even further, when I talked to you about the other department heads, he said that this one's for public safety only. So I'm not sure if the fire department or whatever needs some new vehicles or not. He did say there were some others out there that would possibly work toward the other municipal departments, whether it's planning, street, or whatever, and trying to obtain these vehicles. Don't know if he gave me like a price range, like the maximum you can ask for, but he was talking about like 10 vehicles, depending on the vehicle you're asking for. As we're like right now, we're buying Durangos for roughly $40,000, $41,000. We got a quote for a hybrid Ford Explorer right around $45,000. So, I mean, you could probably ask for either make that you're wanting to buy. It just kind of limits your cars. How many cars? There was a second grant opportunity that you could apply for that would help assist with the upfitting, the putting the emergency lights on them and so forth. So basically I'm just here to see if one, if you guys would be interested in allowing him to write a grant to try to obtain some vehicles. And specifically maybe if you agree to allowing him is how many. I know we've had a lot of issues with our cars here recently, but we've actually got. We're starting, I think, get on the man. One of the cars had blown engine. We got to replace, got it back. The other one is supposed to be. It's still in the shop, but it's supposed to be getting repaired, which would give us two pretty good engines and cars. But I think that our 2020 2021 is the year they were manufactured. But as far as the police department ourself, if we could. replace those three reserve cars we got in our fleet. We could ask for the two that we typically purchase every year for a total of five. That's what I'd be looking for. I'm not trying to get a whole ten for us, because I don't know what I would do with the other ones sitting around numerous days out of the week, but Again, if the fire department needed vehicles.

He just said they needed 12 or two.

But that's kind of what I'm looking for.

Did you get any feedback on what he's looking for compensation-wise to write these grants?

He wants nothing to write the grant.

Wow.

I mean, I don't see a downside here personally. I don't either.

You know, with the thought being if you do ask for 10, maybe they say you get six, seven. I don't know.

And obviously there's no guarantee that we get the screen.

Yeah.

I'm of the opinion that based on what you're saying, it's worth pursuing. Anybody disagree?

No. Sounds wonderful.

Good.

Anything we could get.

Let's do it. Thanks, sir.

So one question. Those two blown motors, what vehicles were they on?

Ford Explorers with just a gas engine. One was five years, six months. It had 74,000 miles on it. The second one was five years, three months, and five-year warranties. So one was three months out of warranty. One was six months out of warranty. The other one had 61,000 miles on it. Another one of our reserves works at a Ford dealership. And he's like, hey, if you don't mind, we just tow them to Brownsburg. I'll have my mechanic look at it, tear it apart, and see if we can't get them replaced. So with his extra work and tearing it down, getting pictures and articulating very wisely, I think, Ford said, yeah, we'll replace the engines, 140.

Oh, wow. Thank you. Yeah. You've got some awesome people.

So I think he told me the new engine for those cars was around $7,200. So I think one's a 21, and the other one's a 22, so we'll have new engines. One of them's back on the road already, and the other one should be getting started working on right now.

Thank you for that. Absolutely.

You're welcome. Yeah. I praise him every time he mentions it, because they were about to be taken to the junkyard. All right. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Great news.

You're right. Water, wastewater.

I don't have anything else to ask questions.

I don't have anything. Anybody else have anything? No. No. Clerk treasurer, pseudo clerk treasurer, do you have anything? No. All right, moving along to your actual department. You had your chance. Yeah, project coordinator.

So anyway, I asked for the wheel and vehicle excise tax to be put on the agenda. I know we discussed it last year in regards to the potential of putting that in place for some additional funding as well as the possibility of need for the community crossing matching grant. So with that being said today, going into the day, we were uncertain whether it would need to be in place for the community crossing matching grant, which it does not appear to need to be due so for the September 2026 round of funding. But the caveat to that is the state did a lane mile funding. That was part of 1461 House and Road Act and the LMDD or lane mile distribution fund and which would require a will and excise tax. So basically that would allow you to potentially seek more money than the community crossing matching grant. So if there's a pool of money available, if you have those things in place after the grants are all funded, if there's additional funding left, then the towns would be eligible more than the grant opportunity. If there is less in that particular fund and the town receives some money, that portion would come off of the actual grant, but it would be made up by the lane mileage. So the whole lane mileage is driven by that you've probably seen on the news with Marion County and Indianapolis and the whole will tax thing that's going on discussion around there. If there's enough funds in the programs for grants, then Marion County would get $50 million. And then the eligible dollars from there would be distributed through the Community Crossing Matching Grant and the Lane Distribution Fund. So in order to be eligible for 2027, we would have to have a ordinance in place by September 1st And also that would have to go to the Indiana Department of Revenue and the BMB before September the 1st. So if the council would like to move forward with that, then Mr. Culp would need to start working on that fairly quickly. And if you remember that the will tax can be a minimum of $5 annually. or it can be up to $40 annually. And then the vehicle excise taxes on the low end of 750 annually up to $25 annually. So if you look back on it in 2023 is the latest numbers from Purdue from their study that I could still find, then basically that would raise roughly $50,092 based on the low end. that the town would receive from the wheel and excise tax itself.

So wheel tax was five to 40 and excise was?

750 to 25. And then if you know the town, if it decided to go to the maximum rate, you'd be looking at roughly $175,000, which I know based on previous conversations, I don't think there's a lot of appetite for taking that to the higher, higher limit. But, uh, It looks like, you know, that's something we might want to consider just because of the whole lane mileage distribution. And that's based upon that it was more fair to, like the bigger cities of Indianapolis because currently it's addressed on just a road. So now the funding mechanism, why it's called a lane mileage is if you have four lanes, then your funding mechanism, it's a different quote and to try to help the bigger communities get more dollars.

So we talked about this before. We should have did it then. I think we pushed Aaron to get it done by September 1st. We don't have time to value now. Think about it. We can make that determination. Sorry, Dan, I didn't.

No, no, you're fine. I mean, it's a discussion the council needs to have, and certainly, you know, we can discuss it if you want at Tuesday's meeting. I do know that I did see it on Rhonda's agenda at the SVOA conference that she will have an update on the lane mileage funding, so she'll be more of a subject expert on that. because it's been in place about a year, but we just started hearing about it probably a month or so ago when Rhonda asked me what I knew about it. So then I did some research to try to figure out what this was all about, and I know Aaron reached out to AIM's attorney to have a better understanding as well.

Okay.

Let's go. Are you guys good if we have it put on the agenda for Tuesday?

I think we need to tell Aaron to do it now, create the ordinance now. Okay. We can do that. I'm fine with that, too.

Basically you want him to create an ordinance and not put in the dollar amount at this time. Is that what I'm hearing?

Yeah, because we've already had baseline discussions on this anyway.

We'll get that to Mr. Culp then and we'll start working on that.

Sounds good to me. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Do you have anything else?

No, sir. That's all I have.

Parks, Mr. Conner.

The first thing I had tonight was a discussion about the LWCF grant. We are currently on track to have that filed and submitted before July 31st. She promises to get us a review on the 24th or 25th at the latest for us to do final reviews. And I've seen some of it today and been able to review a little bit of it. But in the meantime, as part of getting that grant ready, I've got two documents that need to be signed. One is an assurance of compliance and says we won't discriminate some federal forms. And then one is build America by American regulations. And we've talked about these forms before, but if you agree with it, I'd love to get your signature on that tonight, and I can get these back to her and move forward.

Do you need it today, or can it be after Tuesday?

It could wait until Tuesday if we have to, but...

I'll make a motion. It's just President?

Yeah.

I'll make a motion to allow the President to sign the Assurance of Compliance in Build America by America for the LWCF opportunity.

I'll second.

Motion and second. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? We're good and done. Anybody have a blue pen with them?

The next topic for the LWCF discussion, and I've talked to a couple of you about it already, is the grant writers are asking to know if we would If we have interest in, if we get state approval, would we be willing to go ahead and move forward with engineering and some of the cost things associated once we get state approval, even though we still have to wait on the federal approval? If we're willing to do that, they feel like that would be a huge plus for us in terms of the grant and being able to receive the grant, but then also we could potentially cut off as much as a year of timeframe involved in by going ahead and expediting and moving forward.

Do we know what those costs are?

I think there's a fee, Dennis, of $275.

$279, and it would be part of the project, so it would be the reimbursement part. You're kind of moving forward on that so that the plan would be that you could start the project immediately upon approval.

We're still not guaranteed funding at that point.

No, but I think what you told me was that if the state approves it, we're not aware of a time where the federal doesn't. Gotcha. So it doesn't mean that it can't happen. It's just not the norm.

So we're just paying the $279,000 earlier than we typically would, essentially.

Theoretically, that amount, yes.

But we are protected to an extent by the state approval.

given the history of federal approval based on state approval yeah the federal government has never rejected protected but risk is reduced yeah and i mean that engineering something has to be done down there right engineering work i wouldn't say is a waste i would assume i agree you guys would move forward with grants grant after grant after green opportunity until we get something to move forward right um

Do you need an answer on that tonight or can we wait on that one? I'd rather do that in a general council meeting.

That's fine. I'm good with that.

That's my opinion. No, I agree.

I just look for that to discuss at a Tuesday night's meeting.

Yeah, absolutely. Have her on to put it on the agenda, please.

Okay. And then next up is our grant writer, Amy. She is at the end of her six-month contract, and we need to decide if we are going to retain her uh, from after in August, if we're going to continue working with her or whether we are going to stop that. Um, we're currently paying her $2,000 a month. Dan and I have talked about it, uh, for a little bit yesterday. Um, she has not got us very much in terms of, um, Scott of grants. Uh, we've, lost a whole lot of grant opportunities. We got a lot of no's and a lot of rejections back. But she has worked and or applied for up to 25 of them so far and we've got a lot of negatives back. We've got a few pendings. I don't really have a strong opinion one way or another on where we go and how we continue. But after talking to Dan yesterday, and I'll let him voice his opinion, but I think I would like to maybe continue with it for three more months. And I think that would help us get through this final grant process and tie up a couple of loose ends of things we've got pending as well as By only going to three months instead of six then we I think that'll send a message And maybe see where we can just reevaluate again in three months.

Do we have any feedback of why we're not getting awarded the grants? Or is it just a matter of we're throwing darts?

Unfortunately, we don't get a lot of responses back from people when we get denied. I've read every grant that she's submitted, and I feel like she's done a pretty good job with it and been very thorough in things. I think there's more competition out there than ever before to get grants. I don't know if Dan would want to elaborate any, but I don't have any good solid reasons for why we're getting no's.

Unfortunately, they typically don't give you any feedback as to why your grant opportunity has turned out. Once in a while they might make a comment about funding or something, but typically they don't give you what you could have done better to have a better opportunity to grant. And then I think the other side of this is we're applying for a lot of grants and I don't know At some point we do have to see a cost justification or return on investment so absolutely obviously we need our savings to

exceed what we're paying out, which makes sense.

And I think that's one end of the discussion with Superintendent Hunter that we talked about was maybe not doing an additional six months, but take another three months since we have quite a few pending and still some work to do on the LWCF grant and some of those things to see how the next three months go and have a better opportunity to make a better decision at that particular point.

Sure.

And Dan, do you think that's a good idea, the three-month?

I guess a different way to ask that question is, Ken, do you feel there's enough that could be accomplished in a three-month time frame to justify the $6,000 that would be paid out?

We won't get an announcement, but if we decide not to retain her, then...

Dan and I will be listed as contact information and also Julie Smith, Julie and Jonathan that did the original master plan. So if we don't retain her past after we apply, all we have to do is notify them via email that there's been a change in contacts.

So another question that I have personally is we're getting into a time of year where I'm assuming there are less grants available towards the end of the year as opposed to the beginning of the year. Is my thinking correct in that? I mean, she's applied for a lot of grants early in the year. Are there still that same number of grant opportunities in the second half of the year that would justify us keeping her on for an additional six months?

So I'm going to ask that question. So there is grant opportunities that we go in August and September that are still... possibility of applying for. And then we also want to know some additional grants at that particular point. But I don't know that we got a definite answer of what would be available in the later part of the year. I think that was part of the decision making that we would potentially not want to go six months. That makes sense.

I mean, I just don't want to pay $2,000 a month when there's nothing being applied for. Sure.

And then I think the other side of it is, is hearing, you know, Chief Redenauer speak that, you know, there's some public safety grants out there available that his department can pursue too. And I know that is some of the things that she's been looking at as well, but it sounds like that might be handled internally a little bit through his department as well.

Sure.

Does she do anything with NPO? No.

Not that I'm aware of. I don't have any knowledge on that.

Do you want to ask her if she has any experience with that? Does that work well, do you think, if she has any experience with it? We'll check with her. Okay.

So you said we need to make that decision, essentially, to re-up for August, September, and October.

Is that correct? We can talk about that Tuesday.

We're going to need a council vote on it anyway, so let's throw that on the agenda anyway. All right.

Last but not least, three, maybe three and a half years ago, I spoke to the council at that time.

I had a council member, Linda Drake, who came to me.

At that time, her husband was a retired lieutenant colonel in the military and was very well accomplished. At that time, she expressed an interest in putting a plaque of similar value to the picture there out on the Veterans Causeway. I had talked to the council at that time about putting it somewhere on the east end of the causeway, just that plaque or similar style. I don't know if we would put it on its own individual signpost or whatever, but at that time the council was absolutely willing to move forward with it and proceed. But shortly after that council meeting, Mr. Hartley who was helping to spearhead the project passed away and things got put on hold and life got busy and She didn't come back for until just recently and she's like to get back on track and explore that I Think we would put something very similar to that up somewhere on the east end Just want to know if the council still supports such a venture Associated costs I'm fine with it. I think it's a good gesture, and I have no issue with it whatsoever. I just need to figure out exactly where the place is on the east end and how we'll install it. She will pay for everything, no cost to us whatsoever, except whatever minimal time and installation efforts that my staff has.

I support it.

I do too. I remember Mike Drake. Me three.

Okay, that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Hunter.

Thank you. Anyone have anything else?

Mr. Bell? No? So there were a couple action items. Do you want me to follow up on those?

Yeah, please do. Okay. And we can jump back in and have another discussion on Tuesday before we... We'll see if we're even ready to make that call, but please feel free to do your own research in the meantime. I think it sounds like we have at least a target in mind to pursue, so we'll go from there. Good. Dennis? Emily?

I'm good.

All right. If no one has anything else, I'll entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved, Dennis. Second.

Emily?