Common Council - Regular Meeting

later.

I just feel I feel so good going to bed.

December. together. Yeah. That's cool.

Okay. Yeah.

How are you guys? She's she does she Good evening and welcome to the Monday, February 23rd, 2026 meeting. Marginal Common Council meeting is hereby called to order. At this time, I would like to invite Pastor John Mabels of First Baptist Church to come forward tonight to offer our invocation. So, if you could stand and remain standing for the pledge. Heavenly Father, we gather tonight in gratitude for the privilege of serving this great city. We thank you for our city's residents, our staff, and the leaders assembled here. Grant this council the wisdom, the foresight, and the courage to make decisions that promote justice, prosperity, and peace for all citizens. help them to work in unity even when they disagree and to keep the welfare of our city at the heart of their uh speaking. We pray for the protection of our firefighters, our police officers, and all who serve on the front lines.

Bless our schools, businesses, and neighborhoods. May their work tonight reflect integrity and compassion in your holy name. Amen. Amen. To the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you, Pastor Maples. At this time, Stacy, would you please call roll? John Badger, present. Jonathan Collier,

present. Bill Deckard II, present. Josh Faron, present. Susie Lips, present. Ben Mayan, present. And Miller, present. We have a quorum. Thank you. Prior to tonight's meeting, you were sent minutes of the Monday, February 9th meeting. Are there any additions or corrections to the minutes?

I move to accept the minutes. Second. Been a motion made and seconded to approve the minutes as presented. All in favor say I. I. oppose. No motion abain. So with one abstaining. Uh also prior to tonight's meeting, you were sent copies of the claims for review. Are there any questions or comments about the claims?

I'll make the motion to approve the claims as submitted. Second. It's been a motion made and seconded to approve the claims as presented this evening. All in favor say I. Oppos? No. Motion carries. On agenda, we have our committee reports. Councilwoman Miller, do you Do you have an update?

Okay. Uh, I do have and licenses um information. If I'm going to pass it around and everybody can look at it and if they want to add anything to it, they can. I thought we had copies of it. Can we legally do that? Thank you for council. Okay. Thank you. Uh and that do you have that on email by any chance? Yes, I do. Could you maybe send the email to each council member? That way we could have a sure we just look at that way if you don't mind. Yeah. Thank you.

And any additions or corrections would be they could email me that. Is that okay? I have no objection. Okay.

Getting into the area of being a nonchar possibly if if uh Mrs. Miller could send the the draft to the to the council and then if the council has comments um maybe let's bring those back next meeting so we can discuss them in public as far as disseminating them through email. Okay.

Okay. So at this time you'll send out what you have to the council. The council can look it over and then come back next meeting with any kind of comments and that can be discussed during the public meeting. and if you can send me what you want them to receive. Anything else you want to say on what you and Councilman Badger are working think needs to be added or subtracted. So, well, this Ann, if you would just go ahead and send that to M. Any questioning on the gallon? Do you need a motion? There's no action requested. I think it's just a matter of moving it over. Just put it on the agenda.

Good to see you all. I'm losing my voice behind me. Happy to hear that. Um, just like in the past, Jonathan, Councilman Call, you're this is probably new to you, but I give you a book to look at. This isn't everything we're going to talk about tonight. I'm going to hit the highlights of everything. Uh, one of the things that we go to probably about four pages, five pages back will be the run totals. So, it' be 2025 incident types. you could see the pi graph and then what we did as far as runs. Um, this year we were up on fire runs from 69 last year to 78 this year and then we were down a little bit from a couple years ago, but we were up on runs from 2024. So, um, it's kind of interesting. We give you all these things and if you get a chance to look you can go to the next page like busiest shift last year was a shift this year C shift. There's really no rhyme or reason to some of these things. Um if you notice busiest month last year was May this year's March. So know that was um check things that are really important is I want to go back a little bit down a little bit. We had some issues um in our but the guys did a really good job keeping up with all the things they had to go up there. It's painted blue at least the fire get a few other things like a smoke machine and the oil especially when you're burning in it and hot and cold hot and cold because they're not a district five. We have some um educational places around here like city9 they use it. They pay for it. Other departments or other places will use it and pay as well and that money just goes into the training fund. It's not a lot, but it's a little bit. We've had border uh border patrol has been there. The state police have been there. Our local police department, sheriff's department people have been using the facility. The new section that

we put up there, which is our nonburn, it's set up like a home. Um or we can set it up however we want, but we have it set up like a home right now. So, we've been doing a lot of search and rescue things like that. So, we we're starting to get quite a few hours into our training now, and it's it's really important right now. One of the things that we've noticed is that we have a lot of younger guys on the department and so uh today was a good day. We went to Walmart and they got to see the pumps and the sprinkler system at Walmart and you know it's there's a lot to they feel good about the idea that we're there. So you'll see us out and about uh fire trucks parked in parking lots. It's not because they may be shopping all day. Maybe it's because of big training. And so um we've had a lot of people welcome us in to those type of things. So, that's important. Um, you have that information on there. Obviously, I always give you a lot of pictures just so you can see that things are going on throughout the the day. Um, inspection investigations, that's Charlie Fraer. And so, now with our training center up there, he's been able to host some really important investigator classes from people from is further back in inspections, investigations, miscellaneous. As you know, the city's growing. It's grown by leaps and bounds. Um it's great to see, you know, site visits are 74, annual reinspections are um just 417. He's one person in his office. He's got a lot on his plate and he doesn't

great job in in doing this report together because he does a really good job. So I really appreciate that if you and Oh, information if that's what you want and happy to talk to you any other time. Sorry my voice is going out but hopefully that's the quick version. Enjoy your reading.

Any comments for Chief Green before you I just have a quick question. What is um uh service call? What does service call mean? service call could be letting somebody in their house maybe are locked uh in their in their door, you know, in their car. It could be going to check a a smoke detector. That could also be under good intent as well. Just depends on what the guys will put it under, but there's a couple different places that we could put that information and special incident. That would be

that could be a number of things, too. It could be water rescues. It could be anything that's outside of our normal uh rescue and fire. entire by the department. Um the total of arrest was 452. And one thing that our guys appreciate is when you break down the charges on top of the

see that the total number of charges highlight of the 7,194 calls called the police for help. We respond to every call that we that we hear 7,100 times um every time. 64 charges which represents our patrol and actively removing impaired drivers, narcotics. If you have questions, we can take those as well. But I want um to let you see firsthand. Does anyone have any question that handled?

We tried to provide resources. Um unfortunately, there's not a ton of um housing resources in in Martinsville, especially for men. Um but we have a few options that we can provide them. We have handouts for resource groups um whether it be male or female. We have choices that we can call that offers not only mental emotional but they also offer just resources for homelessness in general. Um our guys are very understanding to the fact of it could very easily have been one of us in in that situation. Uh you try not to look down or judge. You just try to act with compassion and uh treat them like you'd want to be treated is what our goal is.

Okay. So, these individuals aren't necessarily arrested unless there is a warrant for them. Correct. It's not illegal to be homeless. No. Okay.

So, um there are things that we run into with city ordinance issues on on some some of the the vagrants or the homeless population, but um that's not no they're not charged for being homeless. Okay. Because that's been a rumor that I've seen on social media unfortunately that people are getting arrested being homeless. And I said club meetings and one movie night. All of those took place at the city park. At the venue, we hosted two movie nights and eight concerts. I want to talk a little bit about the Fourth of July this year because we did that a little differently. Um the Fourth of July was different. We broke or we brought back the fishing contest. We had 47 registered participants for that. On top of the fishing contest, activities set up throughout the day to engage and entertain the guest. We added a second row of food trucks so our guests would not have to wait in um long lines like they have had to do in the years past. We plan on doing these items again this year for the 4th of July. We also feel like we saw an increase. We always have all attendance, but it did seem like this was our busiest year yet since I have been there. Um something new that we did this year too is we hosted our first pickle ball tournament in October. We had 22 teams register for that. We did have another one scheduled in December. We had 14 14 teams registered for that, but then it happened over weekend where we had a winter storm, so we had to cancel that. So, our plan this year is to do um a pickle ball tournament on the 4th of July as well with the fishing contest. So, that's just something um we plan to

grow since we have a lot of participation with that. The second sheet you will see um it is our daily emissions and our season passes for the swimming pool. If you add the numbers together for the emission, we had 13,030 daily emissions to the park pool for the 2025 season. If you add the number of season passes sold, we sold a total of 117 season passes. That is, of course, family passes, military discount passes, and individual passes. When you add those together, outside of our normal daily pool operations, we hosted 26 private rentals, 11 birthday parties, 10 weekly themed activities for pool guests in private swim and we offered private swimming lessons to 59 kiddos this summer. This was the first year um that I know of in the last 5 years that we have offered swimming lessons. Prior to that, I'm not sure when the last time was that the pool has offered swimming lessons. And as far as our 10 weekly themes, every Wednesday we had a special activity to encourage people to come to the pool earlier in the day than they have in the past. So like we would have a a luau at 11:00 a.m. from 11 to 12 to trying to get people in quicker. We had had Christmas in July throughout the summer. So just those kind of activities and we plan on bringing that back this year as well. The next sheet you will see is our shelter house rental report. That one's pretty self-explanatory. Um, we had a total with the pool and the venue, we had a total of 708 rentals for the 2025 season. Shelter one is the only shelter house that can be run at all year because it is the only one with heat. The others are open May 1st through November 1st. The last item you will see in your packet is a sponsorship report. Last year is the first year we've really tried to get sponsors to come in and

help support our events. The ones you see are the ones that contributed funds for our events. We also had many other sponsors that came in and helped with their time or with goods or you know donated items to the parks department. I feel altogether it was a very successful year for shelter rentals the pool and event programming and we would just like to thank all of our guests that made the year possible. And that is all I have unless you guys have any comments. It seems like you've really tried to grow the programming. Thank you. Thank you. We really have. I appreciate that.

I just had a quick question kind of backing up to when I attended your meeting. Um, will the park be paying for the renewal of of renewal or to certified lifeguards? Is the park going to be paying for that? We are going to be paying to certify the lifeguards. Yes. Okay. Is that something Luke will be doing? We're still working the details out, the final details for that. Okay. Yes. And just out of curiosity, why did um why is the park deciding to go ahead and pay for the renewals andor the certifications of the lifeguards? What

we don't offer them very much money to work at the swimming pool. And it's a short-term job. So, if we had them pay for their lifeguard certification, it would be harder to find lifeguards because we struggle finding them as it stands now. Any other questions? Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

New business, Mr. coffee, the regulated green. Would you like to explain that? The county through their ready uh grant monies uh made a commitment that the Hilldale Cemetery drain or ditch lateral which flows out through um the Asian Boulevard cleaning out and so uh they received quite a bit of money through ready grant. in order to do that work and they have that scheduled out and uh are prepared to do that. As part of that project though, the county um drainage board had approached the city about making that or actually asking the city to approach them about making that particular lateral a regulated drain. through the Indiana state statute, there's a procedure for regulated drains. And um so uh the city uh has been asked to put a petition before the drainage board making that request which would then enable the drainage board to vote on that and to actually regulate that Hillale Cemetery lateral as a regulated drain. um the lateral itself and I see that unfortunately you didn't get the picture in the packet but there there's a drawing that shows the the lateral which is basically a straight line off a Hilldale ditch and it and it flows right out uh through uh and perpend or actually yeah perpendicular to Artisia Boulevard I guess being assessed to the land owners out there. So, as you see in the petition paragraph 6, there's no additional costs to the petitioners or

the land owners because it falls within the previously assessed Hillale Cemetery drain or the server drain waterheds. But what this is going to do is enable to be a regulated drain. So, have a separate fund now for the heel cemetery lateral which monies will flow through from those assessments for maintenance funds going further uh in the future. So, um, that's what you have for you tonight is authorization to allow the petition to go before the drainage board and allow the drainage board to vote on Second drainage board. All in favor say I. I.

No. Motion carries. Mr. You're up again. With that, I'll make the motion to accept the agreement between the city of Martinsville and Teamster Local 135.

Second. It's been a motion made and seconded to approve the agreement with Teamsters Local 135 and the city of Martinsville. All in favor say I. I. Oppose. No. Motion carries. Any comments from the council this evening?

Uh I would like to uh make a comment about uh the movies that are being shown at the Met. I have been both times. Mr. and Mrs. Dunn have been um wonderful volunteers there uh helping out. There was nothing like seeing Casablanca on the big screen or Willy Wonka in the chocolate factory. that was I had kind of forgotten all about uh Baroo Salt and all that, you know, all those characters. And so I I just can't say enough about how wonderful it is that uh to go see a movie there at the Met. It is just phenomenal. And I I really encourage everybody that can to go go see movies there. And also um I noticed there was something on the app next door about uh you know uh the goings on at the city. Um anybody is welcome to come to a city council meeting and come up and we have an area for public comment. Um it was interesting that this individual did not live in the city limits and they were uh you know uh passing around petition about uh uh the city or wanting to get um whatever you want to say like a a a group together to petition you know uh the city about what the goings on. And so I I found that very interesting. So I just encourage anybody that wants to come to please come to meetings and give their comments or concerns. Thank you. And anybody else anything for tonight? Anyone again like Ann? Anyone from the public want to get up and uh say anything at this time? Okay. If not, our next meeting of the common council will be on Monday, March the 9th.

2026 7 o'clock here at the council chambers we are journal

Chris Chris