Finance Committee and City Council held meetings tonight. My notes follow:
Thanks to everyone who said “hi” and made the Independence Day parade special. I have included some pictures with this post.
-- The City of Stow received a nice honor tonight from Team NEO. We received the award for Public-Private partnership based upon the lease of our Parks Building to Enviroscience. Kudos to Mayor Drew, again, for pulling that off. It was probably one of the best developments fiscally in 2012.
Find out what's happening in Stowwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
-- Stow Cemetery is sold out. The columbarium (where urns are kept) also is sold out. So the Parks department wants to buy another columbarium, which will have 80 niches. Some quick stats: The columbarium will cost between $35,000 and $40,000. We sell each niche for $895. Based on these numbers, the city expects the columbarium to pay for itself within five years. This ordinance passed unanimously.
– City council also approved a public auction to sell items taken by the police department and city-owned equipment that is no longer needed. In the past few years, the city moved to online auctions (to avoid the auctioneer’s cost), but bidder turnout was very poor. So we are going right back to the traditional auction, which will be advertised in the Akron Beacon Journal and Stow Sentry sometime this fall.
Find out what's happening in Stowwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
– Now for some bad news. The city is raising water rates from 3.37 HCF to 3.49 HCF. The rate increase is mandated by a prior city ordinance (and therefore, we didn’t vote on it). The cause: Our water provider (the city of Akron) is increasing rates, so we are passing along the increase.
– Please be aware that Route 91 will be closed starting July 22 at Dave’s TipTop restaurant. If you want to visit TipTop, you have to enter from the south on 91. If you want to enter CVS, you need to come from the north. The closure will last 5 or 6 days — maybe more or less depending on weather.
– Speaking of weather, a big thanks to all the city employees who were out helping residents yesterday. We have received a lot of rain in the past few days, and just concluded an historic streak of days with rain. Employees in our service and engineering departments have done a great job to help with flooding issues.
– City council will meet next on Thursday, July 25 beginning with a Finance Committee meeting.