Council - Regular Meeting

It is 6.30. I'll call this meeting in the St. Mary's City Council order. Roll call, please.

Buck? Here. Lund? Here. Slater? Here. Motter? Here. Fitzgerald? Here. Aguero? Here. Gillen? Here. All rise.

Please join me in a brief prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, we ask for your guidance and wisdom this evening as the business of St. Mary's is done this evening. And Father, we ask you to bless those who have stepped forth to take care of our city, who it's not always an easy job, but Lord, we ask you to bless them as they make the best decisions that's available for our town. Father, we are blessed to live in this place, and we ask you to give us continued safe and quality living in St. Mary's. Thank you, Lord. Amen.

Council. If not, may I have a motion to accept, please? Mr. Lunds, Mr. Gilliland, all vote, please. Mr. Modder abstains, arrest yes. Under petitions communication, the first thing on the list is we have an oath of office for Mr. Modder.

Please raise your right hand and repeat after me. I, state your name. I, Eric J. Modder. Do solemnly swear or affirm. Do solemnly swear. That I will support the Constitution of the United States. I will support the Constitution of the United States. And the Constitution of the State of Ohio. The Constitution of the State of Ohio. And that I will faithfully, honestly, and impartially. That I will faithfully, honestly, and impartially. Discharge the duties of the office as council member. to discharge the duties of office as council member. For the city of St. Mary's, the state of Ohio, during my continuance in said office. For the city of St. Mary's, the state of Ohio, during the continuance of my office.

Mr. Ponson, you want some introductions?

Yes, if I could. And then behind her in the back row, everyone knows Lonnie Howe. He's our superintendent of water and sewer departments. And then beside him is Lindsay Liette. Lindsay is our supervisor of the wastewater treatment plant. And so we all kind of work together. I asked them to be here tonight to hear the latest conditions of our lake. Thank you. Thank you.

Welcome. Next on the list, we have Mr. Tim Rear for an update. Mr. Rear.

Just a quick update on our second floor project, the Veterans Foundation and Museum. So since our founding a year ago, we've been fortunate enough to raise a little over $85,000 through our founding memberships, some corporate sponsors. We got some trust money. Community Foundation, of course the city, Eagles, and the VFW has been a really big contributor of ours. Most recently, if you read the paper, the Veterans Services Commission in Wapak and the Vietnam Veterans of America also made some significant donations to us. And in the near future, pending a vote in Columbus, it looks like we're going to get around $33,000 of state budget money. And so far our biggest capital expenditure has been about $20,000 that we paid for display cabinets. And they don't go very far, but we really like how they came out. Our latest fundraiser is the Purple Heart cards that we're selling for $5 a piece and we'll keep them going until August the 7th, which is Purple Heart Day. And we're hoping to get with some of the retailers downtown to see if they might hang some up in their business or maybe sell for us. After a really long period of time, we finally got our architectural drawings to finish out the second floor space. So we're hoping to have those approved by the state very soon. At least I'm told it's going to be very soon. That's going to be for a drywall electrical to put in the windows that match the third floor. And then we're looking at doing some type of an epoxy finish on the floor up there. And then additionally, we've agreed to manage the Veterans Banner Project, which was previously managed by the hometown heroes. So they've always funded it and managed it and took care of taking applications, etc. So we're going to take that on and we're going to make the banners a little bit smaller this time because we've had so much wind damage and loss. I think it'll be a good way to help fund the museum and some extra funding to replace damaged and lost banners and such. It's a great way to honor our veterans and the families really like it. We have way more application than we have spaces to hang them, so we're hoping maybe we can improve upon that too.

so i could i could check well the other day i tried to look and see but i i couldn't tell if it was purple hard or not but yeah if you're in need of one let me know okay okay i'll donate one okay thank you thanks kip next on the agenda we have uh miss theresa dirksen all right thanks for having me i'm going to talk a little bit about grand lake st mary's and

water quality in Grand Lake St. Mary's, some of the projects we've been working on a little bit of history. So you guys are generous and do donate to the Lake Restoration Commission every year. So predominantly those funds are used towards pump maintenance and just general maintenance at our wetlands, along with it goes towards the monitoring of the wetlands, which I'm going to talk about some of that data and where you can find it. But we officially organize as a quasi organization. We actually serve as more of an advisory board for projects around the lake. So when the big algal bloom happened in 2010, this was kind of everybody's efforts towards looking at ways to improve the water quality outside of agriculture. And we've done a lot of projects since. As part of that, we also organized the Lake Facilities Authority, which consists of the Mercer County and Allglaize County commissioners. They come together once a month. They can receive grants. We administer grants. I act as their project manager, and I also facilitate the Lake Restoration Commission. So we were really working on strategic planning for projects around Grand Lake St. Mary's that could improve water quality and I also help with the agricultural side of things as well. I started with the Soil and Water Conservation District 20 years ago, so I've got pretty heavy ag background and I still work with them to this day. So agriculture is still part of the game, still improving, still working on things as well. But predominantly I'm going to talk about wetlands. You may know the term treatment trains. I prefer to call them wetlands. The reason it was coined a treatment train because the very first one that was installed was a series of different treatment practices. So we pumped water from Prairie Creek into a wetland system, and we had the ability to feed alum into the water as it came into the wetland system. And then it went through constructed wetlands, through a forested wetland, and then through in-lake, littoral wetland, which served two purposes. It was a place to create more habitat, more wetland vegetation, and it was a place to use as a dredge material relocation area because we all know dredging is important to the lake as well. But this is kind of a map that shows the watershed of Grand Lake St. Mary's, the major feeder creeks that you can see there, Coldwater, Beaver, and Chickasaw, and then prairies kind of in the middle, and then you have Little Chickasaw and Barnes off to the the right side and a couple other small feeders so starting with prairie creek that was our first project then we moved on to cold water creek and i'm going to talk about a few of these not all of them in the interest of time beaver creek and then we did a stream restoration project in conjunction with the mercer county elks and things have kind of just expanded every one of these sites is different they have different capacities They're operated differently, they have different vegetation, so they all serve kind of a unique purpose. And we do have one future project here in Auglaize County that we're working on currently that I'll mention as well. I'd like to talk about Full Water Creek. This was our second wetland system on Grand Lake. It is our top performing wetland project on Grand Lake St. Mary's. It sits really just adjacent to the lake. You can see in this photo about 25-ish acres of constructed wetland, and you can see the littoral wetland in the lake in the background. But we're able to pump water into this system about six months a year, so we usually start around April 1st of each year, and we're able to pump to October sometimes, We've been able to go into November, but it just depends on the weather. Here, at its max capacity, we can pump about 5 million gallons per day. So we can really pump a large volume of water, even in the driest times of the year because of the lake backwater that we receive at this point. It just flows through that series of wetlands and then back out through a 24-inch tile, and then it enters back into the lake. The next one that I'm going to talk about is our Burtwood Lane and Camp Wetland Conservation Area. This is probably my favorite project because I was involved from start to finish. We acquired this land in 2020 using Clean Ohio funds. It's about 90 acres in size and we're treating water predominantly from Burtwood Creek, which drains about five to six thousand acres of the lake's watershed. It's heavy agriculture, so It has to travel, the water enters the system and has to travel over a mile through a meandering marsh before it enters back into Coldwater Creek and hits the lake. So it's a really pretty site. It's highly interactive. We've got a lot of signage on the site and a lot of opportunities to birdwatch and walk and just enjoy nature there. I should mention that was funded through the H2Ohio program. It was one of the very first H2Ohio wetlands funded by the state of Ohio. This was our second H2Ohio project at the Mercer Wildlife Area. So we received a $1.7 million grant in 2021 to do a very wide expansion of wetlands on the Mercer Wildlife Area, which sits at the corner of 127 and State Route 703. So we started, we kind of broke it up into phases. We did our first phase in 2022, where we added 11 acres of wetland and some controlled drainage. We pumped water from the lake into these wetlands. And then in phase two was 2023. We added another 10ish acres and then enhanced an existing 10 acre wetland as a green tree marsh. So it's a completely forested wetland that we're able to flood and then flash flood basically, and then let the water back off quickly. pretty effective for improving water quality. And then in phase three, we added, I think, another 10 acre wetland, plus we revamped the shoreline that sits along adjacent to the wildlife area to help improve the erosion issues happening on the shoreline. Because we were so efficient with our funds, that $1.7 million went a lot further than we had anticipated. I think we finished all three phases with less than a million dollars. So ODNR allowed us to use those additional funds to build more wetlands. So in the top left-hand corner is our South Bay Motel slash Southwest Green Space, if you remember where the South Bay Motel used to sit. We have a five-acre wetland there now treating water from Monroe Creek. And then in the top right-hand side is adjacent to Wright State Lake Campus. It's about four to five acres of wetlands, and it treats the majority of the runoff coming from the campus. So whereas all the runoff from the campus used to go straight into a tile out into the lake, now it's being treated with the wetlands before it hits the lake itself. In the bottom left-hand corner is our Rosenbeck Nature Preserve. It's treating about 25 acres of pure cropland drainage and a little bit of residential area through our wetland there. And then the bottom right is our newest site, Red Wing Nature Preserve, which sits on the north side of the lake in Oblase County, Office 703, adjacent to the state park. Hi. I want to also mention this QR code will take you to grandlaktrails.com. That website has all of our sites listed. It gives you the location, the history of the site, how much walking trail is available at each site, and kind of how things have progressed with photos from each site as well. So feel free to check that out. You can learn more about any of our, I think it's about 13 sites that we are up to on that site now. A little bit more about Red Wing Nature Preserve. As I mentioned, this is one of our newest projects. This is an aerial image up in the top that was just taken a few weeks ago. You can see the vegetation still coming on. It was seeded last fall. And we haven't started pumping water yet. We've kind of been waiting for that vegetation to get better established. So we're looking at maybe starting that up here soon. Just excited to see what this one can do. Wanted to mention published research. These are three papers that we just recently published within the last two years on our Coldwater Creek, Beaver Creek, and our Prairie Creek wetlands. Now that we consider those in a long-term monitoring program, we're able to publish actual peer-reviewed research on those projects and they are all available fully available online for free. So I wanted again to mention you know the funding that you guys provide to the Lake Restoration Commission goes towards the monitoring. So we've been working with Wright State University Lake Campus since 2017 to monitor these sites and just to share information and we share that every year. We combine all that information that we gathered throughout the year and then we come up with one shiny document for that year and show how many pounds of nitrate, how many pounds of phosphorus and how many pounds of sediment we took out of water coming into the lake. so that is available on grandlaktrails.com or the lia publishes it on their website as well but on average you can see we're moving removing like 14 000 pounds of nitrate and several thousand pounds of phosphorus from gumming into the lake and we're trapping that in our wetlands over time so bright state camp lake campus is out there on a weekly basis They test the inflow and the outflow and several things in between. And then in the off season when we're not pumping water, they continue to test the creeks on a weekly basis. So we know what the water quality is looking like throughout the entire year. This is our future project. This is at the southeast corner of the lake near the old rustic haven. We were able to purchase this land with Clean Ohio funds last year and waiting on some grant documentation to officially move forward with the project, but we're hopeful that's moving forward here very soon. We're estimating about $1.1 million for construction, and it'll treat water from Barnes Creek, hopefully up to 2 million gallons per day once we get it finished. So let's talk a little bit about actual lake water quality and the toxin levels. This is not my area of expertise. I rely on Wright State Lake Campus, Dr. Steven Jackman for this data, but this is a graphic he recently developed at the beginning of this year, but this compares 2015 to 2025 as far as the toxin levels go. And you can see quite a bit of difference. The red line is 2015. That was one of the worst years we had on record for toxin values compared to last year. The data on the toxin values goes back to about 2009, so we don't have anything previous to that. That was before it was reported by EPA. So, you know, we're at about 15ish years or so there. And then this is this year's data. So he takes that historical average, so he's averaging that week of every year previous to this year. So that's how he comes up with that historical average point by the week. So 52 weeks in a year, he's got a point at each week. So as we get better and we improve water quality, that historical average keeps coming down. So it gets harder and harder to beat, right? The Green Line is this year. We've had a lot of ups and downs. We're currently, that last point is last week. We get the data comes in on Wednesdays of each week. So this is kind of his explanation of why he thinks we're seeing elevated, a little bit elevated toxin levels this year. So the winter, he logs biomass each week as well. He's got some sophisticated equipment that measures algal biomass. And we really didn't see it drop. and stay dropped for a long period of time this winter like we normally see. Normally it'll come all the way down to zero and it'll stay there for maybe four to six weeks. Well, this year it came down for only one week and then it spiked back up. And I know we had a really cold winter, but I feel like we did have a lot of ups and downs in our temperatures. It didn't just stay cold. So that's one factor we believe. That's contributing to some of the higher levels we're seeing. And then the other one was I think attributed to the drought conditions. Lake level's been really low. We haven't gotten a lot of rain. And that's kind of shown in the data in the bottom that it wasn't until May a month ago where we finally saw our soils get saturated enough to where we saw normal runoff instead of getting a ton of rain like we had in March and April. We hardly saw, we weren't even close to normal runoff because that soil was just soaking up all that rain. And we didn't see the lake level come up either very quickly. So right now we're sitting at about five inches above normal pool, which normally this time of year we're a little bit higher than that. So the two graphics he's showing there is the top one's a trend in nitrate, and then the bottom one is a trend in dissolved reactive phosphorus. So we're seeing a really great drop in dissolved reactive phosphorus. It's like 40% since we started testing at the station on Chickasaw Creek, which was 2009. And then we saw a big drop in nitrate, and then we're kind of seeing an increase. So we're working on trying to explain that, and we're trying to do some education on nitrates and nitrogen use in agriculture. I don't know if you read the Daily Standard today, but Bill had a piece from the LIA meeting when I mentioned this on Saturday, so you can check that out. We're working on a grant application to try to do just that. So with that, I guess I will entertain any questions you might have. I didn't want to take up too much of your time.

Any questions or comments?

Yes. Are there any other future projects outside of, I mean, the one that you got planned and I guess even outside of that, are there any specific of the watershed that are, I guess, more critical to try and treat over the others? It's fairly even.

It's fairly even. You know, each one has a little bit of a nuance possibly. As far as big wetland projects, no, we don't have any others on the pike. But I think we're hopeful that we are able to get some funding to look at this whole nitrogen piece and try to do some cost share with farmers on reducing their nitrogen inputs, which will only help water quality. And that's gonna be a big undertaking if we are successful in getting that grant. We've been really good at getting land over the years through the Clean Ohio program. And as land prices go up and we get some of these other pieces knocked out and we get these projects done, it's gonna be harder and harder to find land that's available and for a decent price. So it gets to be a real challenge when land prices keep going up, so.

Are there any key spots that you'd like to focus on?

Not necessarily. I mean, we wanna be close to the water, of course. So the further we get away from the creeks, it's just not feasible or desirable, nor do we wanna be in that location. So the closer we can stay, the better. And, of course, the dredging program is always looking for land to lease or purchase for dredging because that's going to continue to get harder as well.

Any other questions or comments from council? Thank you very much.

All right. Thank you. Thanks, Teresa.

Okay.

In addition to communications, this is the time when anyone can I have a report to city officials. We have a mayor's report. Mayor Herbert? I have no additions or corrections to my report. Any questions or comments from council?

Our first Friday that we just had, I guess I was hearing that there was a few fights that broke out. I mean, that's not like our first Fridays have been.

It is unusual. I talked briefly with Chief Turpin this morning. Some folks that were there, I think some of them witnessed it. I think Kim and Mike were both up here. They witnessed some of the fights. It's my understanding that suspects have been identified and that charges are forthcoming.

Was it alcohol related?

Any other questions or comments from council? Yes, sir. What's the updated status on Indiana Avenue?

Well, that's a good question. I think right now the electric department is running the electricity for the new traffic signals. I think some of the dirt work is being completed around the sidewalks. If you've been out I don't know a complete timeline when it will be finished, Dave, but I can look into that.

I just noticed there's some unfinished sidewalks and I wonder if those are waiting until after the new street lights are put up and all that.

Our reports to the city, the committees of the city council, we have none under the readings of ordinances and resolutions. Under second reading, we have ordinance 202607, an ordinance authorizing the execution of an agreement with Hines, Nelson, and Associates for employee relations work. Any questions or comments from council? This will be back for its third reading at the next meeting. Next, we have resolution 202608, a resolution imposing a template including the development and construction of any building, structure, use, or change of use that would allow data centers for a period of 12 months from the effective date of this resolution in order to allow the city administration and city council time to review applicable federal codes, the highest statutes, codes, and regulations, along with the city's codified ordinance relative to such activity and declaring an emergency. Any questions or comments from council? Okay. If not, let's be backwards. Under new legislation, we have Ordinance 202608. May I have a motion to read, please? Mr. Acquero, Mr. Fitzgerald, who else is about to read, please? All yeses. Ordinance 202608, an emergency ordinance requesting the cooperation of the Director of Transportation for the reconstruction of streets, sidewalks, utilities, pedestrian facilities, street lights, and traffic signals along a section of Spring Street in the city of St. Mary's.

I think most of us agree that we should.

All yeses. That being the case, may I have a motion to pass? Mr. Quirrell, Mr. Gilliland, don't be afraid to pass, please. All yeses. Thank you. That completes all the legislation on the investigation of miscellaneous business in closing. If you have a request for a finance committee meeting, The next Monday, June 15th at 5.15. Mr. Fitzgerald, how does that look to you? It's fine. Okay. Is there anything else coming before council? Mr. Buck. Motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn by Mr. Buck. Mr. Buck to adjourn. Second by Ms. Slater. Council vote to adjourn, please.