City Seeks MFT Funds For Year

By Alex Haglund

The Nashville City Council held their first regular meeting of February on the evening of Thursday, February 1. The council approved a resolution appropriating their motor fuel tax (MFT) funds for the upcoming year.
“We’re going to appropriate funds for us to take care of our streets,” said city streets department superintendent Richard Schuette, who presented the resolution to the council.
Schuette said that the appropriation totalled $75,642. The items and amounts that the city will be seeking were:
• BAM (Bituminous Mixture Number 1), 250 tons
• CA6 Aggregate, 700 tons
• Premix cold patch, 200 tons
• HFE 150 Oil, 4.75 tons
• Sealcoat aggregate, delivered after October 18, 1,300 tons
• Chips, 600 tons
• Reswept Chips, 125 tons
“It’s an off year this year,” Schuette told the council saying that there were no major road mintenance projects planned. “We’ll do some patch work, some curbing…just a couple small jobs.”
The council approved the resolution. Following that, Schuette said that they will sign off on it, Clerk Terrie Kurwicki will affix the city’s seal to it, and then it will be sent to the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) for approval.
There will be a bid letting for the materials listed above, and pending IDOT approval, that will be happening in March.

SCADA System

City Utilities Superintendent Blaine Middletongave the council another update on the new SCADA system at the water plant (the SCADA system is the computer which automates operations at the plant).
Middleton said that work was progressing on the upgrade and that currently, there is bench testing happening on the new systems. This testing is not happening at the plant, but the changeover will happen soon.
While the changeover is occurring, Middleton said that there was a possibility that the city’s water systems would need to be operated manually for a short time.
If a period of manual control was required, “Overnights are the issue,” said Middleton. “We’re possibly looking at one to two days of having someone there 24/7.”
This wasn’t necessarily the case though, he added, but they would just need to see how things went once the physical changeover of the systems got started.

Other

Schuette gave the city recycling report for January, and for 2017. In January, 272 residents recycled 8.35 tons of materials.
In 2017, Schuette stated that Nashville residents recycled just over 89 tons of recyclabled materials total.
The deadline for a case to apply to the city zoning board is Thursday, February 8. Schuette stated that there was no cases that he saw currently coming through, so it was unlikely that there would be a zoning board meeting for the month of February, but by Thursday, he would know for sure.