City Council - Regular Meeting

There were there were two simple lights and people getting in and out of it was like you've got short blocks a lot of traffic but not nearly the traffic that's already a bad intersection Right.

I know what you're talking about. And then they were takes a lot. He just leave it.

Tanner. Yeah. 8:30. Oh, is it 8:30? 8:31. One minute past warning. Sanction. on the country. All right. Yeah. All right. It's one of those weird years where they pull off a pull off a minute.

I'll blame Jesse. What a convenient excuse. Rob already blamed. So, I'm I'm looking for somebody else to All right. All right. We will call this March 5th meeting of the utilities commission to order at 8:32. That's Jesse's fault. All right, the clerk can call the role. Mr. Sers here. Mr. Ball here. Mr. Reinhardt here. Mr. Venber here.

All right. Uh, so we move on now to minutes approval from the February 5th meeting. Commission members, you have the minutes from the prior meeting in front of you. Are there any additions or corrections? Hearing none, I will entertain a motion to approve the minutes from the February 5th meeting. So moved. Have a motion. Do we have a second? Have a second. All in favor of approving the February 5th meeting minutes say I. I.

Meeting minutes are approved. Move on now to new business. I'll go ahead and say that um we should probably move the backflow from old business to new business as what we had previously been discussing was uh fog regulations. So we will uh amend today's agenda uh to new business. But uh we do have um an update for uh the codified ordinances uh regarding backflow protections. This is the first reading of this um really an update to the ordinances uh regarding backflow protections. Um this is an opportunity for this committee or this commission to review um this piece of legislation that we would then recommend to council and then council would entertain it for three readings and and subsequently pass it hopefully. All right. So right now just uh it's not very long so I actually run down to briefly read through this. The utilities commission shall adopt rules concerning installation of backflow protection devices to protect the public water system. The rules shall include but are not limited to the following. When consumers uh install an approved backflow uh protective protection device, the requirement to secure a permit for the city inspector for the

requirement to secure a permit that be from from

Yep. See, this is why we do this. Uh, the city inspector for the installation of a approved backflow protection device, a list of approved backflow protection devices, and fines for violation of these provisions. Once adopted, an impacted consumer must install an approved device immediately at his own expense at a location in a manner approved by the city inspector and shall have inspections and test says test made of such approved devices as required. B. No person, firm or corporation shall establish or permit uh to be established or maintained or permit to be maintained twice. any connection whereby a private auxiliary or emergency water supply other than a regular public water supply of the city of Mount Vernon may enter the supply or distributing system of said municipality unless such private or auxiliary or emergency water supply in a method of connection and use of each supply shall have been approved by the utilities commission and by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. C. It shall be the duty of the commission to cause or conduct surveys and investigations to be made of industrial and other properties served by the public water supply uh where actual or potential hazards to the public water supply may exist. Such surveys and investigations shall be made a matter of public record and shall be repeated as often as the commission shall deem necessary. be the commission, the city inspector and his design and employees of the city's water and wastewater departments uh shall have the right to enter any at any reasonable time any property served by connection to the public water supply or distribution system of the city of Mount Vernon for the purpose of inspecting

the piping system or systems thereof on demand the owner lees or occupants of any property so erved shall furnish any information which may be required regarding the piping system or systems of water of water use on such property. The refusal of such information when demanded shall within the discretion of the commission be deemed evidence of the presence of improper connections as provided in this section. E. The city of Mount Vernon is hereby authorized and directed to discontinue after reasonable notice to the occupant thereof the water service to any property wherein connection in violation of the provisions of this section is known to exist and to take such other precautionary measures as he u may deem necessary to eliminate any danger of contamination of the public water supply uh distribution mains water service to such Such property shall not be restored until such conditions have been eliminated or corrected in compliance with the provisions of this section. F permits for the installation and the use of backflow protection devices are to be issued for a maximum period of one year. Applications for permit renewal shall be submitted no less than 30 days prior to the expiration date of the permit. G a fee shall be assessed for each of the following. one to permit issued uh to each permit issued for the installation and use of a backflow protection device which shall be paid prior to the issuance of the permit to for each day that a property operates without a backflow prot prevention device. In the case of a defective backflow prevention device, the customer has 30 days to repair the device before incurring penalties. These fees uh shall be set by the control board. Failure to

pay fees may result in determination of water and wastewater services. That's all straightforward. That was not meant to be said and just the only thing I see we need to make sure that as far as approved devices that we interact with Terry Davis from the fire department. I know they have some preferences on the fire system backflows.

I think that could be probably administratively handled through the be codified that changes routinely. That's a good point. Well, I'm assuming we'll also have some more detailed things in rules and regulations. about some rule making afterward. So, good stuff.

So, I've got a couple of fixes that from Tanner's read through. If anybody else has questions or suggested changes, if you could send them to me in the next three weeks so that we can get them onto the agenda for next utility commission. Do we need to specifically say that? Does this need to specifically say the utility commission has the authority to make rules. Uh in a it says shall adopt rules concerning. All right. Perfect. Okay. Yeah, we'll read it again and give the public a chance to ruminate on it.

Yep. Anybody from the public wants uh this is publicly available now on the city's website. You go into the utilities commission under agendas and minutes and get this a copy of this. Um or you can reach out to anybody at the city. We can furnish you a copy. Um we'll go down the list here. Councilman, do you have any questions? No. Like you said, it's pretty straightforward to me. Well, I'm good.

Good. Okay. If uh Mr. Zimmerman, anything to add? All Marine. All right. So, uh, if anybody from the public has anything they'd like to add, please do so. Be that way, we can, uh, either have those questions in advance and ready to answer at the next utilities commission meeting or we can make additions or corrections to this proposed ordinance for council. What I'd like to do if if there's, you know, nothing substantive that we really need to change is have this up for a vote for the utilities commission at the next meeting. That way we can submit it to council and move on because it's kind of a a sister piece of legislation to the fog legislation. Um, yeah. Well, all right. We'll move on from that. And uh where is the chase and How do I cut to it? That's it. I'll open it up to the floor.

Yeah. Going to wax poetic. Limited to four minutes, sir. Okay, that would be fine. Um, I just wanted to give everyone a heads up. We had a meeting yesterday with the solid waste haulers, which falls under you guys. You were limited to two. Um, we're going to either have to uh clean up, well, I know we have to clean up a little bit on some verbiage on our ordinance. And uh,

I would suggest based on the meeting, I would suggest that that we adopt that we ask council to adopt a specific requirement that um, recycling is picked up at the same frequency as trash. It's not specifically spelled out in the legislation and you could see the wheels turning amongst several common sense would tell you that you when you hire a company to do a service like solid waste or trash that it's a weekly service. So your recyclables you would assume is weekly but they are kind of chipping away at that a little bit. So we need to

I would suggest that we do that even if the uh even if we're going to potentially recommend uh talking about aggregation because even in aggregation there will be some smaller independents people are not required to do that and so we want to have that as the requirement for everybody so that there's no question going forward.

Yeah. Overall the meeting was a little chaotic at times. There's only there's only so much you can do. You know, they have they need to understand that if you want to do business in the city of Mount Vernon, we have we have legislation that dictates the rules to do do so. Um I think in general the haulers that we have want to do a good job. There's a couple outliers that um we just need to clean a few things up so we don't have any issues. So that that's just get down the road here so you guys would have full knowledge of it. So, and if you have any questions as we go, you'll have my number. Just give me a holler. So, that's all I got. Thanks, sir. Anybody else? There is nothing else that we need to discuss. Entertain a motion for adjournment.

So moved. Have a motion and a second for adjournment. All in favor of adjourning say I. I. All stay here. All right. Thank you. I was gonna say that Philip