City Of Maquoketa Weekly Update (10/14 – 10/18)

The Maquoketa City Manager said that this week City staff prepared a bear of an agenda for City Council on Monday night. Some items weren’t finished in time for the week end and had to be moved to November 4th (including two active Industrial Park contracts with the City’s broker CBRE).

The PT Sectrtaty position yielded 11 applicants for the City’s consideration. It was a successful turnout and we’ll begin to assess what  we believe is the best fit for City business.

In Community Development news, this week the City concluded the appliction period for “Community Developent Manager” with 10 candidates. Three will be interviewed. Brad Koranda and I will be leading Interviews.

The Chamber hosted their First Impressions public event. 30+ showed up for a public presentation on the matter which I described as a  fantastic public engagement result.

The Maquoketa Betterment Coporation authorized an offer on Tuesday morning to engage in phase 2 architecture and engineering services for the Green Space Redevelopment payable 100% by private funds, not City. The Project will be gifted to the City as a biddable document in January.

In Police Department news, On October 9th and 16th members of the Maquoketa, Preston, and Sabula Police Departments along with the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office conducted joint firearms training at the Maquoketa Ikes Club. In the Fall we conduct our annual Night-Time Firearms Qualifications and training. During the training Officer and Deputies worked on transitioning from taser to firearm, as well as movements drills that incorporate magazine exchanges while holding a flashlight.

In Water-Wastewater news, The solar panel project went live Tuesday 10/15.  We had a VFD go down on one of our influent pumps at the wastewater treatment plant late Friday causing our flow to the plant to start backing up which is normally ok as it backs up it flows into our overflow basin and is pumped out to the overflow lagoon but with the project the overflow basin is being rehabbed so we had to manually pump around the basin until Tri-City electrical and MVP our pump guys could find the problem and bypass it.

The Bio-P basin is circling completion at the wastewater treatment plant so we got to go up on top and view what it looks like so they could start filling it.

In Public Works news, since we started getting some colder nights, we started to winterize some equipment in the parks, like the misters at Little Bear and the dog washing station at Horseshoe pond. Also, we got our first snow plow truck ready.

Looks like leaf season is just around the corner. Next week we will get the Hesston Hay Stacker out and make sure it is ready to go. The street sweeper will also be running full time until leaf season is over.

In YMCA news, The YMCA is transitioning to a new membership, payroll, and financial softwear program.  We’ve completed all initial training and are now transitioning to one on one training sessions. We went live and things are going well thus far!