Meeting Cancellation w/o Council Approval about Pay Issue, Well Contamination

4/11

I find it interesting that the 3/14 Montrose City Council Meeting was canceled and then rescheduled as a Special Meeting on 3/28.  It might have been that the Mayor and Acting Mayor wouldn't have been there or late but they could have appointed an Acting Mayor for that specific meeting, and there were a few meetings last year where only 3 council members were present.  Maybe it was that City Clerk Barb was on vacation and a $3/$2 past pay increase item about her and the Deputy Clerk was on the agenda?  In the last 2 years, Mayor Andy had missed 0 council meetings with 0 notes that he was late.

Who would've decided to cancel it?  All it takes to schedule a special meeting is 2 council members OR the mayor, so it seems it should be a council decision to remove a regularly scheduled meeting.  And the mayor was quick to call a special meeting about some contamination found in the block by the ECFE a couple of months ago.  In this case, the city had stopped using the well by the Community Center in case the contamination was in the water, however they didn't have the report back yet to tell if it was contaminated (it wasn't) and had to postpone their decision.  The plan to replace the well is in the Comprehensive Plan but the debt load is high and it would've increased city utility bills.


Regarding the $3/$2 increase in 2004, when I had reviewed some pay change data over a year ago for the City Clerk, for the year 2004 the City of Montrose gave me the 11/8/2004 and 11/22/2004 council packets, 11/3/04 canvassing minutes, 11/12/04 joint meeting of Montrose and Woodland Township minutes, and 11/17/04 public hearing minutes.  The only relevant data I could find was in the 11/8/2004 minutes where Clerk Barb Swanson received a $3/hour and Deputy Clerk Wendy Manson received a $2/hour increase to assume the responsibilities of Supervising the Public Works department.  For other years, most of the data was isolated.

Readers may have noted that the reporter reported for the 3/28 meeting that the City Clerk said that the pay increase came up 1 and 3 years ago.  I don't recall this being on an agenda in the last year, so I'm not sure where it would've come up.

There was also open forum at the 3/28 council meeting.  I tried to add that the City's report saying Fox 9 got the wages wrong, was itself wrong, the City was reporting 2010 numbers and Fox had reported on 2009 numbers.

[Well Contamination
Regarding the contamination by the ECFE they discussed a few months ago, the city engineer thought the well by the Community Center was contaminated.  The contamination went down about 20 feet and there weren't any wells reported in the notification area. To build 2 new wells at the north end of town by Rolling Meadows (last subdivision off of Cty Rd 12/Buffalo Ave) would've cost $800,000 of which engineering fees would've been about 15%. This would've increased water rates by a few dollars a month.  Since the well wasn't contaminated, there is enough pumping capacity to meet peak demand so this project was put on hold.

Not sure if having odd/even watering would've helped offset peak demand enough to not need the new wells if the old one couldn't be used.  There is another well by the community center they only use when necessary as it has a crushed casing which I believe causes it to suck up sand when used.]