With all members present, Mayor Danny Fergen called the January 13 Lennox City Council to order. The mayor and council heard agenda items including structure for the Parks & Recreation department, vacating a right-of-way, and speed limits.
At the December 16 meeting, the council received a check from the South Dakota Department of Corrections for $10.5 million. The money has been temporarily deposited into the City’s account with First Interstate Bank and the City needs to find a permanent place for those funds to go.
“My recommendation hasn’t changed from the December 23 meeting, recommending South Dakota Public Funds Investment Trust as the best option for our purposes,” said City Administrator, Nate Vander Plaats.
Motion to approve the DOC proceeds go to Security Bank in a 12-month money market account with a 4.2 annual percentage yield, motion approved, with Lauren Van Driel abstaining.
The City of Lennox must determine a new structure for the Parks & Recreation Department upon the hiring of a new director.
“This is a repeat item from last fall, now that we’ve hired a parks & rec director, who will start on January 27, I think our best option is option one in the memo. This option will continue to allow a specific position to be responsible for upkeep of park grounds and facilities, and to oversee groundskeepers,” Vander Plaats said.
Alderman Britney Mower asked if the employees would know who they are reporting to and if there would be issues in knowing who their direct supervisor is.
“No, we’ve talked to them a little bit about that already that essentially for the nine months that we are operating park facilities, they’ll report to the Parks & Recreation Director, and the rest to the Streets Superintendent,” Vander Plaats responded.
Motion to approve option one from the memo was approved unanimously.
Vander Plaats presented a Court Avenue discussion to the board.
“I don’t see my memo coming through here, but this is another one that was going up last summer with some options discussing with the neighborhood whether we would vacate the old right of way for Court Avenue. City Engineer Mitch Mergen is here tonight to talk about his proposal to improve that right of way,” Vander Plaats said.
The total cost of the project would be $623,500 as the project includes a buffer, utility work from Cedar Street to Juniper Street, storm sewer, and property would need acquired. Alderman Bill Daugherty asked if the owner of the property had been contacted.
“I happened to run into the owner at a function and brought this up, I don’t know if it was ten years ago, it kind of came up back then, and it was amicable, and he would entertain some or part of that property,” Mergen said.
Alderman Mower asked what the advantages are of doing a project like this now.
“Where it falls on your priority scale is probably, I’d say lower, what we’ve been trying to do is tackle the gravel roads. With Juniper Street, it would help to have the storm sewer system coming from the West so if Juniper Street became a gravel road that you wanted to get paved I’d probably try to do the storm sewer and the water main at the same time,” he said.
Mower made a motion to put a proposal together for funding including grant funding for this project, seconded by Van Driel, motion carried unanimously.
Mayor Fergen requested information and a discussion on the existing speed limits along city streets.
“One of the things that we get comment on is the 20 versus 15 versus 25 miles per hour speed zones, so right now, SDCL has 25 unless otherwise marked and 15 in school zones unless otherwise marked,” Vander Plaats said.
Twenty-six percent of stops for speeding last year resulted in a citation while the other 74 percent were issued a warning.
“Before proceeding with any specific recommendations, we would welcome Council input on what exactly to study with respect to traffic in Lennox. We are able to look at specific streets and intersections, all streets, we could include signage, and many other items that relate to traffic safety. If this is a somewhat large project, we may wish to engage Stockwell Engineers for a formal traffic study,” Vander Plaats said.
“I think a study is a bit much, I don’t think you need to go that route,” Mergen said.
Police Chief Will Ericksen was present to give his opinion.
“I think it’s nice to have a general consensus speed limit, I remember the days of many different speed limits on many different roads, so to have it consistent is great. Safety concerns, I think with moving the stop sign on Boynton, a lot of people did not like that, but it has cut down on our accidents up there. I can’t tell you when our last accident at that intersection was,” he said.
Vander Plaats and Ericksen will come back with a suggested action.
Mergen returned to the podium to give recommendation on awarding a bid for the ash tree removal project.
“We opened bids last week and we had four bidders, but Complete Tree Service was the low bid on the project at $58,720. We had estimated the project at $70,000 based off of some recent projects in Sioux Falls that had bid out that were similar in nature. So we would recommend you award it to that bidder,” he said.
The project would begin in March and would take a few weeks to continue. Motion to approve Complete Tree Service, LLC approved unanimously.
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