By Cornelia Grace
Jewett Council announced at their most recent meeting that Jewett’s Community Day, which was a big hit last year and a major success, will be happening again this year. The date chosen was Saturday, July 13. The date is set but the village is still looking for sponsors and activity ideas to make the day special.
After the finance and water report, Village Administrator Rick Meneely shared information from Village Supervisor Justin Niggemeyer.
“We need to order another one of those grinders, a spare one,” Meneely said, referring to a part for the water plant. “We need a valve for the water system… there’s like five of those valves, they’re about $5,000 a piece. If we don’t have a spare, we can’t backwash if one of them is down… there’s a chance we have two different kinds, we may need to buy two spares.”
Meneely said that Niggemeyer also mentioned the park building, which is currently still winterized.
“I’ve had calls from two people already,” Finance Officer Linda Ager said. “One person wanted it for this Sunday.”
“It shouldn’t take too much to get it set,” Mayor George Baillie said.
“But someone has to be there to make sure it’s clean before you rent it,” Ager said. She explained that someone also had to be there to let people in and then lock up the building after. In years past, the building was a popular rental, with most weekends each month through the summer booked ahead of time. Ager said that once it was ready, she had at least three people already interested in renting it at some point during the year.
Council discussed this briefly and Meneely texted Niggemeyer to ask if it was possible to prep it by Sunday. Several council members volunteered to go down to the park and do the cleaning themselves if needed.
Niggemeyer said that having the building ready by the weekend was a reasonable request and council said to go ahead with it and Ager would call the resident about Sunday for rental.
Baillie shared he wanted to get the ordinance committee together to discuss a building issue. A resident wants to put a trailer on their property and needs village permission to do so. However, a previous ordinance about trailer regulations was lost years ago. This was an issue that was discovered last year when council was going through all the village ordinances and cleaning them up for easier use.
The only ordinance that exists now pertaining to the issue is old and several council members remember that it had been revised. That revised version is the one that’s gone now.
The ordinance committee said they would meet soon to figure out the situation.
The rest of the meeting was taken up by an important call to the village’s new insurance provider. The village recieved a large fee without warning and wanted to clarify some information.