Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAboutNewsletter City_February 2018Mayor’s Message M AR K YO U R C AL E N D AR F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 8 City Council Meeting February 7th & 21st @ 6:30pm in the council chambers. Happy Valentines Day! All City offices will be closed February 19th- for Presidents Day!! My wife and I went to Fat Cats Friday afternoon to see "The World's Greatest Showman". It was a great show with an inspiring message. At the end, a quote from P.T. Barnum ap- peared that I think applies well to all of us as citizens of our wonderful cities and county. It said, "The noblest art is that of making others happy". Why do some of us want to work at City Hall? Why would we want to work outside in the cold or the heat, fixing the streets, mowing the lawns or at the wastewater treatment plant? Why in the world would someone want to be on the City Council or worse… be the Mayor? (my wife asked me that several times!) Many folks said, “Aren't you just opening yourself up to criticism for everything you do? You can't EVER make EVERYONE happy!” Why would we do that?? Answer: BECAUSE WE'RE SICK!!! Yes, it's true! We are sick with a disease called PUBLIC SERVICE. Public Ser- vice is a strange disease. Many think it affects us because we have exposure to the desire for a good steady job with good benefits and its true…..that is one of the symptoms. City employees know they will not get super wealthy on their salaries, but a solid, steady job is nice for raising a family. But there is another symptom to this disease called Public Service. It's a strange desire to, like P.T Barnum said, "make other people happy". Yes, it's true. As I rub shoulders with all the great team members of the City of Rexburg and Sugar City and Madison County….I sense that this is more than just a job to them. We do our work at City Hall or out plowing the streets on Christmas Eve or working in the evenings and on week- ends getting fields ready for soccer or football games or making sure everything is flowing the right direction at the wastewater treatment plant 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week because we want to make everyday life good and enjoyable for all of our citizens. We are driven by the hope that each of you, can enjoy whatever you want to do with your family and friends without even thinking or worrying about your water being safe, the gym or field being avail- able for your kids games or the road being unsafe for you to get over the river and thru the woods to Grandmother's house. We have made a lot of progress this year in the city of Rexburg. Let's take a look at some of the highlights: Public Works Wastewater Treatment Plant: SKADA software system upgrade. This software monitors every little thing that goes on in the plant and sounds the alarm if anything goes haywire. The $8 million upgrade of the pasteurization solid waste handling process is now complete and most of the bugs have been worked out. We are now producing Class A compost and won't have to be hauling all of that waste product to the Jefferson Co. landfill. That will save us a lot of money over time and now we have a reusable by-product. And the good folks that live in the neighborhoods that we had to haul it through will be a lot happier also! Water Lines Upgrade Project: Mostly completed in the downtown and many neighborhoods. We now have less potential for line breaks (some of our lines were close to 100 yrs. old!) and sufficient water flows to fight large fires which we hope never happen, but we are now ready for it if it does. To do this project, we received an almost $12 million dollar very low interest loan from the Idaho DEQ (Dept. of Environmental Quality) plus they are going to forgive approx. $2 million of that amount upon completion of the project….making it more like a "no interest loan"…a great deal for us, so let's all think twice before we complain about the State's involvement in our local affairs. (We don't like them telling us what to do, but when they give us money, we're happy to have them around, right??) We have a good working rela- tionship with the Idaho DEQ and we appreciate their help and common sense approach to environmental issues. The Great American Eclipse: What an awesome, cool event! I'm going to miss not having it again this year but I can't get Scott Johnson and Dan Torres to arrange for it again! I asked these two (our entire Economic Development department) to take on the ma- jor planning role for Rexburg. They ended up training and coordinating with lots of folks from surrounding cities and counties and did a masterful job. Our police, emergency services folks, public works and parks staff and all of our team stepped up and did a great job of helping people feel welcome and made sure they had a wonderful experi- ence. We received many letters and e-mails about how well organized and prepared we were and how much peo- ple loved the friendly and clean atmosphere of our city. In commemoration of that event, we will be continuing the Teton Storytelling Festival. Jackie Rawlins and her Cultural Arts Department are excited to make that an annual event for all families to enjoy for many years to come. Center Street upgrade: Mostly Complete. Something a little different from the way we've done things in the past. Center Street is our most used pedestrian way in the city and the heart of our downtown. It connects BYU Idaho, Downtown Rexburg, the Ro- mance Theater, the Tabernacle Civic Center, the Madison County Library and Fire Station, and Riverside Park and Rexburg Rapids. It's kind of like our ceremonial Main Street. The goal was to create a place where people can gather for small events and to celebrate together. So far, this has worked well. The big crowd we had there for our Christ- mas tree lighting ceremony was a testament to that. And the BIG NEWS….the Fire Pit is working again!! After some technical difficulties, our flame is burning bright again….I'm feeling warmer already! We plan to hold many fun events in the mini-plaza and it is available for others to use as well. The concrete planters have been filled with tu- lips and daffodils to give us spectacular early spring color as we saw in other places around town these last couple of springs and when those fade away, they will be planted with more flowers to carry the color and excitement on thru the summer and fall. We are looking for volunteers to help the Beautification Committee accomplish this task, so if you'd like to help make our city "VERY COOL", please contact me or Council Member Sally Smith to get in- volved. With the flowers and the new trees growing, we envision this to be a very beautiful street. In Planner lingo, this is called "placemaking" because it gives people a place to be together and enjoy each other. The other goal for the Center Street upgrade is to encourage some redevelopment of our downtown into new buildings that can house new and existing companies in upgraded office space. We have already had interest in that type of space, so we believe this will help us attract companies with good paying jobs into our downtown, which, of course in turn, means more business opportunities for all the surrounding and supporting businesses here. Community Development: The buildings keep coming! Because land prices have risen tremendously the last several years, especially near the BYU Idaho campus, people are selling their land and in many cases their homes to make way for more redevelopment. Our goal has been to encourage the single student housing to be as close to the campus as possible to cut down on the need for students to drive to class, thus reducing traffic and parking problems. The Building De- partment has been very busy getting all the inspections done, especially on the new apartment complexes that were "mostly ready" for move-in that first week of January. The first week of a new semester is always crunch time with builders trying to squeeze in under the wire to have everything ready to go for the new students coming in. If you compare the square footage of those buildings to the average Rexburg single family home, our Building Dept. team finalized the equivalent of 125 homes in a single week. Great job guys and gals… You are awesome! Cultural Arts: Romance Theater restoration work: How many of you have been inside the Romance lately? A faithful volunteer, Bill Hall from Rigby is devoting so many hours of dedication to the work in there and it's amazingly beautiful. Be sure to attend the Gala Masquerade Ball next Friday night for a fun date night with your sweetie. You'll have a great time and you can ooh and ah over the beautiful work that has been done in there. Tabernacle: We completed the stage reconstruction and are having more new windows built to finish up the window replace- ment project. Pat Huish from BYU Idaho and his Architecture classes have been working with us on ideas for replac- ing the old addition on the North side to something that is much more functional and enhances the architecture and history of the building better. Definitely more to be done to this historic building to protect and preserve it. Presently, we are saving money and looking for grant possibilities to help us accomplish much of the work to be done. Parks: We added a huge addition to Riverside Park which gives us more room for soccer, football and other activities. We were able to install sports lighting to Riverside Park to extend the usage time into evening hours and that has been a great success. Visitors from other teams that used to complain about our poor Rexburg facilities gave us rave re- views this year for our new fields and lighting. (Except the one night when the lights didn't come on at dusk, but we got that fixed quickly and they were happy again!) Through the generous donation of Beehive Credit Union, we added a pavilion to Porter Park which is available for all kinds of programs in the park and will benefit all of us for years to come. Our parks are so well maintained that we get many compliments from locals and out -of-towners alike about how beautiful and nice our parks are. Thank you Gregg McInnes and crew for your great work! A big thanks goes to our Police and Fire Departments for helping us to be voted the #1 Safest City in Idaho. Both of these departments are the best of quality and run on a very lean budget compared to similar services around the state and country. We are working on getting our Police Training Facility completed and are saving towards getting a Fire Training Tower built to enhance training for our people and surrounding areas Fire Departments to train in as well. I’d also like to acknowledge some of the more unseen heroes amongst us. Thanks to our Water Department for keeping our water clean and pure AND good tasting! Kudos also to our Wastewater Treatment Department for keeping our toilets flushing and everything going the right direction, the Engineering Department for helping traffic to flow and doing the design work on our many projects and overseeing them built. Most people don’t even know about our GIS Department. This a shared department with the County and Sugar City (to save on duplication of costs) and they do tons of work on all our mapping and keeping track of where everything is. Our Finance Department does an excellent job keeping track of all the “incomes” and “outgoes” and that is a very long, sophisticated task to track all of that…making sure it goes where it’s supposed to and planning and saving for Our Legal Team helps to keep us compliant with rules and regulations and making sure we are doing things the right way. The Streets and Sanitation Departments do a wonderful job keeping our streets in the best repair possible and keeping our homes and businesses clean and neat. The IT Department is always under heavy demand keeping all of our technology up and running and that definitely is a job that takes special talent! The Recreation Department is busy trying to provide a lot of fun things for families to do and encourage exercise and fitness to help us all be more healthy. Max Egbert, our Handyman Maintenance Mgr. is all over helping to keep things in good repair and working properly and Terri Hill does an awesome job on all of our HR matters. Last but not least, I appreciate our happy, smiling Customer Service Professionals at the front desk. They are amazing at wel- coming and directing people the right way and helping whoever and wherever they can. Thank you to all of our Department Team Leaders and all their team members that keep us up and running in so many different ways. I also need to express my appreciation to our wonderful City Council and Planning and Zoning Commission members as well as all those who work on our city committees, i.e., Traffic & Safety, Beautification, Recreation, the Arts Council, the Golf Board, The Airport Board, Legacy Flight Museum, Parks & Trails, Emergency Services Board and my awesome Mayor’s Youth Advisory Board. As you can see, it takes a whole lot of great people to make a city work and we are blessed with all of this service. If you would like to serve on a committee to help out, please let me know. We’d love to have you. Special thanks to our retiring City Clerk Blair Kay for his 16 years of great service to the city, mayors and councils and all the departments that he has been the keeper of the records for. (And helped keep us straight!) The theme of this Chamber of Commerce “State of the Cities and County” event is "Stronger Together" and in keep- ing with that theme, I would like to acknowledge the great relationships we have with Mayor Dave Ogden of Sugar City and the Madison County Commissioners and their capable teams. We welcome our newest Commissioner, Brent Mendenhall to the team. We have worked hard to strengthen our relationships with BYU Idaho Administra- tors and the Madison School District Officials and I feel like we've made great progress there and are working to- gether well for the benefit of all our citizens. I am so grateful to all of you in the business community that work so hard every day to improve the lives of your customers, our citizens. It does make a difference! Finally, let me tell you about a conversation we had in my church group last Sunday. The fellow I was sitting next to (very nice man. I'll call him Keith because that's his name) was telling us about how he had lived in a lot of places and how much he loves it here in Rexburg. He said, "As much as I love it here, there is kind of a bubble that you have to break through if you're an outsider." He continued, "I don't feel comfortable just saying, “Hey, this is me and here's my story”. I said, "Well, that's funny because I've wanted to ask you about ‘your story’ but wasn't sure how much I should stick my nose into your business!” I've had people tell me before that we live in the "Rexburg Bubble" and I say, "Yes, I LIKE living in "the Bubble". I feel safe here and it insulates my family from some of "the World" that we don't necessarily want to participate in. I learned from Keith that day though, that we need to not let the bubble become a “force field"…. something that others who are attracted to life in the bubble can't pene- trate. We need to let them into our bubble and help them enjoy the wonderfulness of life in our Rexburg Bubble. We have a wonderful, bright future ahead of us. Our economy is good and getting stronger. I love Rexburg and I love serving you. I am so proud to be a part of all we are building and all this great city has to offer. Thank you so much for allowing me this privilege! Mayor Jerry L. Merrill 35 N 1st E Rexburg, Idaho 83440 208.359.3020 / fax 208.359.3022 customerservices@rexburg.org Monday-Thursday 7:30am-5:30pm Friday 7:30am-12:30pm Parking Reminder: parking on City Streets over night is prohibited starting December 15th. Ordi- nance 1030: "It shall be unlawful for any person to leave or store any automobile, truck, bicycle, wagon or other conveyance or vehicle, machine, implement or other item of personal property be- tween the fifteenth (15) day of December of each year and the first (1st) day of March of the follow- ing year upon any street or alley in the City of Rexburg, Idaho, between the hours of 2:00 A.M. and 7:00 A.M.” Tabernacle: Feb. 9th: The Venues Gala– Masquerade Ball– 7pm-tickets at City Hall $10/ bag with 2 tickets and 2 masks are $40. Feb. 16 & 17th– Rexburg’s Got Talent AUDITIONS (Friday the 16th 7 -9pm/Saturday the 17th 9am-3pm) Feb. 17th– Michael Barrows & The Tourist/ Cinders More info to come Feb. 27th– Rexburg Tabernacle Orchestra with guest director Rick Hansen Romance Theater: Feb 3rd - Movie Night - Newsies 7 pm $1.50 Feb 12th - Movie Night - Annie (1982) 6:30 pm $1.50 Feb 16th - Movie Night - Unsinkable Molly Brown 7 pm $1.50 Feb 17th - Movie Night - Phantom of the Opera 7pm $1.50 Feb 19th - Movie Night - Jurassic Park 6:30 pm $1.50 Feb 23rd - Movie Night - Princess Bride 7 pm $1.50