Common Council - Regular Meeting

Thank you.

You know that church clock? Oh, is it? Right. Yep.

So, good evening and welcome to the Monday, 10th and 22nd meeting of the Marksville Common Council. Meeting is hereby called to order. At this time, I would like to invite the Associate Master, Alex Sebastian, from Emmanuel Church to come and give us a presentation tonight. Please stand and remain standing for the pledge.

All right, back your hands up, Randy. I just pray your discernment and wisdom over this meeting. I pray that this meeting bears fruit. I just pray over our leaders that are here together that they are able to lead our city in a manner that honors you. Give them the foresight that they need in order to make the best decisions they can possible. I also pray this blessing over each and every family that I'm representing here that you just reach into their lives and just love them and help them feel you and help them grow closer to you. We love you and praise you. Amen.

I pledge allegiance 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, Alex. Mr. Mayor, would you please call the roll? John Badger. President. Susie Lips. Vacation. Ben Mayhem. Present. Josh Barron. Present. Ann Miller. Judgment for each project. Jonathan Collier. President. Phil Deckard II. President. Mayor, we have a quorum.

Prior to tonight's meeting, each of you received copies of the Tuesday, June 8th Meeting for review, are there any additions or corrections to the minutes? Make a motion to approve the consideration of the Tuesday, June 8th, 2026 meeting minutes. I'll second. Motion made and seconded to approve the minutes of the June 8th meeting as presented tonight. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed, none. Motion carries. You were also given copies of the claims for review. Are there any questions or comments regarding any of the claims? I make a motion to approve the claims as presented. I'll second. I make a motion to approve the claims as presented this evening. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Mr. Merriman?

Well, thank you for approving the claims. Part of the claims, you'll see in there, was a payment for the Park Bond 2018 payment. That is the final payment. So, I did let the council know that I would let you know when that final payment is made, and that will be mailing out tomorrow. So, Park is now, will be officially debt-free once that check clears. Also, we wanted to update the Council on a few things. Recently, I was appointed to the Executive Committee for the NELD Municipal Court of Treasurers, so that's just going to be involved in a few more meetings over the next 12 months, so I just wanted to let you know about that. And then an update on our audit. It has been officially filed. So officially, we were budgeted to spend $45,000 on our audit. We came in at $23,000, so we came in well in the budget and moved along very quickly. and also happy to report as far as we can tell uh we heard these two words for the city market for the first time it was a clean audit so no issues so we're not aware of any other time when that's happening so good job by all and i want to update you on all of that thank you and you said you mentioned 46 000 45 000 when we came in right at 23.

Any comments from the council this evening?

Yeah, I got one. I'd like to give a shout out, not only to a friend of our family, long time friend, but also a guy that is so involved in our community. The last few days we've had all this weather. Kevin Correale at Horsetime is giving us so many minutes ahead of time. He is focused on the whole state, don't get me wrong, but he singles Morgan County weren't allowed to let us know, way ahead of time, when these storms were getting close, where they're at. So I just want to give a shout out to the horse time crew and Kevin.

Unfortunately, they've been very busy and it looks like Wednesday night we've got more storms coming in. So, yes. Thank you, Kevin.

Mayor, I enjoy the avocados on television. That's great. And then I was going to check, is that promotional money in the park? Is it a combination or what?

That was all taken out of my promotion.

Well, thank you for that. That's great. And I hope that brings in revenue for the city.

It did last year during the festival. We did a segment for that and then also for the Christmas. I think John, you had visitors coming in to his shop and said they had seen things about Martinsville. So just trying to make Martinsville a destination for certain times of year, definitely the fall with the festival and then Christmas time.

Well, good, thank you. If I may, on July 30th, we'll get a lighting segment in studio with Ashley Cox from the park and Jerry Vest from the Spirit of 45 talking about the Fourth of July activities here in the city. That's June 30th? June 30th, I'm sorry. 10 o'clock a.m. We don't know what segment is going to be in that 10 to 11 hour, but they will be on Thursday. We're just going to run out of time. That's at Fox's 9th studio. Okay. You know, 3 a.m. now. Maybe there are about nine segments that they do.

Thank you.

Anyone in the public? I'm sorry, one last thing. On the roundabout, I just noticed in the evening hours, not that hot much, but on the sculptures that I participated in, the monument, and even just the lights, because at nighttime, it shines up like the lower half of the camp.

I will bring it back to your attention. I brought it back to your attention in one. You can't tell what it is, so I

So I'll just be uplining on that. Be uplining on that. Thank you. Anyone from public? If not, a couple of announcements. All non-emergency city offices will be closed on Friday, July 3rd for the Independence Day holiday. Those who come out of their trash picked up on Friday. They'll be picked up on Monday, July 6th. Also, want to bring to everyone's attention that we have done away with our post office box at the post office. There was some discrepancy in some things. They were going to quit delivering mail. Matt, can you explain? If it had the post office box and came here,

The notice that we got in our post office box was that effective, we got the assumption on the 22nd of June, right? May. May 22nd. That effective June 1st, eight days later, that if the address on the envelope said 59 South Jefferson, but we had a post office box, they were to return that piece of mail with the 59 South Jefferson address. And so, many of our documents have, for example, city court, the East 59 South Jefferson Street. So working with Mr. Mayor, we determined that it is in our best interest to discontinue our post office box and have mail delivered to the specific address where the items be addressed. The utility office has since taken the post office box off their materials, so it should be delivered directly to the East 59 South Jefferson Street. We have a box downstairs, mail from the police department, spreader 110 West Morgan, fire department 160 West Morgan, etc. And we shared all this with the post office. We're still having some issues in getting the mail loaded correctly, and we're working to get those resolved. But we ask that the citizens send their mail directly to I believe I've only received one text on the water office.

You might, unless it's planned, unless I overlook it, but you might go ahead. Well, we've released out to the media

And I will back up to the 2nd of May. Instead, we got the most of the 22nd of May to go effective June 1st, eight days later. That was on a Friday. So Saturday, Sunday, and Monday was holiday. So we actually ended up with five days to make this happen. And so it was a little bit frustrating on our end to try to make this happen to these post office. And we did put a notice out. We sent it to you. You should have gotten the notice. We sent it to the media and we posted it on our web page. We posted it on social. So we pushed it out there. Today we sent it because there was some sort of a debacle with the utility office and they asked us to put it out there. And we have a limited number of characters that we can deal with, so we can't put all of that information into the text message, but we can through an email.

I just thought that was nice, because those people have their phones with them, and that text, and I just thought if you could do your others one at a time or something, that would be helpful.

And you brought up, Ray, I haven't said this for a while, so again, it would be nice if everybody would just text the word Mark as well to 78015 and you'll be put on the rate system. We get all kinds of notifications and we don't bid for We do street closures that we're aware of.

You know, emergency street closures we get out. We do parade information and 5K runs and parking lots that are closed or whatever. You'll see some notices coming out in the next few days about some special events that are going on in the city. We're only up to 1,500, a little over 1,500 to that service, and we've got 19,000, or almost 12,000, excuse me, residents in the city, but only 1,500. And for example, I have, my wife has, there's two in the same household. So that cuts down the number of households that are actually receiving information. So we encourage you to talk to your constituents and get on the rate system, because we do use it for reporting information.

That might help, too, if they realize that I put some of that money on for a million dollars. It's up to your secret. Okay.

That might help. All right. Next regular meeting of the Common Council will be on Monday, July 13th, 7 o'clock here in Chambers. You can hear me turn.

Thank you.