Maquoketa weekly summary from January 6th through10th, 2025

City Operations Weekly Summary – 01.10.25

City Manager’s Office:
Here go again in 2025 with the first edition of the City Weekly Summary. This week Staff prepared Council
Committee agendas to begin preparing for the January 21 Regular City Council meeting. Staff discussed
several routine items with Council at Monday night’s Council meeting including the potential of a spray park,
possible locations, management expectations, and ultimately decided the matter should be referred to the Parks
Board to further study the City’s best options. This will likely lead to a cost feasibility study and third-party
data collection to identify the highest-value projects.
The City also opened a bids for a comprehensive lighting-energy efficiency project for Citywide facilities.
This essentially turns fluorescent bulbs to LED and rewires certain City facilities to limit energy use. This will
help the City’s energy consumption costs. The City’s electric bills runs around $20,000 – $35,000 per month
depending on the time of year. About 60% of those figures are due to the Water Plant and Wastewater Plant.
Community Development:
For those with keen eyes on Main Street, you may have noticed work beginning on the roof of the Hurst Hotel
this week. The new owners of the Hurst Hotel, as promised, have begun Winter and Spring work with the hope
of reoccupying the structure with low-income Senior Housing in 2025. Brad Koranda spent some time this
week with the General Contractors explaining they must pay special attention to the current roof conditions as
they embark on work.
Since we’ve had a mild winter (so far) the Public Works Department started some early demolition work at
the parking lot of 5

th Ward Park. The City is planning a new parking and landscaping on site. The City
consulted with the Master gardeners several months to discuss basic plans. Reed from Public Works described
the center island foundation walls as 5 feet deep…no more snowplow or personal vehicle bumps. The guys
had a lot of fun on this one and there is a lot of work to do still.

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Police Department:
On Wednesday, December 18th Officer Jayson Heair was promoted to Sergeant with the Maquoketa Police
Department. Sergeant Heiar was appointed to the position after successfully completing an Assessment Center
and appointment to the Civil Service List by Maquoketa’s Civil Service Commission. What is an Assessment
Center? An Assessment Center is an outside independent evaluation of eligible and interested candidates by
current, or retired police chiefs from other agencies. This Assessment Center consisted of Retired Chief Jeff
Cayler of Carroll Iowa, Retired Chief Brian Guy, of Clinton Iowa and current Chief Jeremy Logan from
Oelwein Iowa. After completion of the Assessment Center Heiar was placed on the Civil Service List making
him eligible for promotion. Heiar has served with the Maquoketa Police Department for almost 12 years and
will be officially sworn in as Sergeant at an upcoming City Council Meeting.

This week Maquoketa Police Officer Rob Blake started his journey at the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy.
The first Basic Academy Class graduated in July of 1968, Blake’s class will mark the 319 Iowa Law
Enforcement Basic Academy. The process began Sunday night when all recruits were required to report to
the academy. The recruits get their basic supplies and get checked into their rooms they share with at least
one, but up to three other academy recruits. Each morning for the next 16 weeks they will be woken up by a
trumpet playing reveille over a loud speaker signaling the start of a new day. Each day brings new challenges
for Blake and his classmates. These challenges will be transformed into knowledge and skills that provide a
solid foundation that officers can build upon throughout their law enforcement careers. Best wishes to Blake
and his classmates and we look forward to his academy graduation in April.

CITY HALL | 201 EAST PLEASANT STREET MAQUOKETA, IA 52060 | WWW.MAQUOKETAIA.COM

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Water-Wastewater:
Since we haven’t done a weekly summary in a couple weeks due to holidays, we’ve had some super exciting
things happening at the WWTP. We started up and running completely through our new Bio-P tanks. We
have taken away all possibilities of running the plant like in the past. This now includes raking our new bar
screen with anticipation of the mechanical one starting the week of the 13th
.

CITY HALL | 201 EAST PLEASANT STREET MAQUOKETA, IA 52060 | WWW.MAQUOKETAIA.COM

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Our fill valve at the water plant failed early Monday morning causing the West tower to overflow. We
unfortunately are still working on this issue. In the meantime, we are running this in manual until we can find
a new raw flow meter. All of the auto controls run when the raw flow shows a minimum of 200 gallons of
flow coming in.
I gave a nice little talk/presentation for the Optimist club Wednesday morning.
I completed a new updated Treatment agreement with Sonac and dropped it off to them for review. This was
requested in the DNR inspection since the last one was signed in 2011.
Public Works Department:
Here at Public Works we feel very fortunate to have received our 2nd new snow plow truck. This is a nice
addition to our fleet. We now have 2 Peterbilt trucks, 1 Kenworth, 1 International. Now all of our plow trucks
are equipped with a front plow and a wing plow. This now will improve the level of service we can provide to
our residents. So far, this winter has been fairly easy, but we still have a long way to go.

In other news, since it hasn’t snowed. That has allowed us to do a lot of other small projects we wouldn’t
normally have time to do. Like, at 5th Ward Park we removed the concrete flower pot entrance to the parking
lot. That will give us a head start in the Spring for that project. We have also done a lot of maintenance to our
own facilities at Public Works. Let’s hope it doesn’t snow the rest of the season.

CITY HALL | 201 EAST PLEASANT STREET MAQUOKETA, IA 52060 | WWW.MAQUOKETAIA.COM

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YMCA:
This Wednesday saw our dedicated board members volunteering for our McShare program at McDonalds.
Thanks to their efforts and the generosity of McDonald’s $600 was generated to provide scholarships to the
Y! Pictured: Board Chair Ruth Eltrich

Your Maquoketa Marlins currently have 13 swimmers qualified for the state swim meet. With 4 more meets
until state we’re hopeful that we can get a few more kids qualified.
Fire Department:
We have started off 2025 being dispatched 5 times so far. The most notable call was a mutual aid call with
Delmar Fire just south of Maquoketa. We were dispatched for tankers and manpower to assist with a machine
shed fire. Unfortunately, it was a total loss for the owner, but we are thankful no one was injured during the
call. We are always happy to assist our neighboring departments when called upon.
2024 was one of the busiest years we have had recently, our total number of calls were 185. The fire
department responded to 92 calls and the rescue squad responded to 93 calls. This does not include false alarms
that were cancelled before we had any fire trucks leave the station
We hope everyone has a safe and healthy 2025!
Library:
Last week, we said goodbye to our Children’s Librarian of 25 years, Colleen Miller. We held a retirement party
for her at the library Thursday night and to celebrate her last day, the staff competed at Maquoketa Brewing’s
trivia night on Friday (we got second place, not too bad). We are currently looking for a part time circulation

CITY HALL | 201 EAST PLEASANT STREET MAQUOKETA, IA 52060 | WWW.MAQUOKETAIA.COM

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assistant and have gotten some good applications. Our new children’s librarian will start in June, so we could
use some help until then. Our Goldfish taste test was a success, we had over 350 participants and got back just
over 200 scorecards which isn’t a bad return rate. The winning flavor was Flavor Blasted Cheddar with an
average score of 4.15. All the scores are posted on our Facebook page if you like to see them.