By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
City Manager John Sheedy recently gave city council members updates on ongoing city projects, including a new City Hall, Brown Plaza, a combined dispatch center and nuisance vehicle and building complaints.
Sheedy gave the update during the council’s June 13 meeting.
“We’re very excited about moving on our new City Hall. Of course that’s the building at 801 S. Main St. We’ve gotten our 3D scans completed, and those scans have already been sent to the architect. We’re having a pre-bid meeting Thursday morning (June 15) to prepare for our make-ready, our demo and asbestos abatement,” Sheedy told the council.
He said city staff is also working with the beauty college that currently occupies the building to help with its relocation efforts.
“Brown Plaza renovation. Our paving is expected to be complete by the end of the week. We passed by there, and it looks like everything is going good there. They’ve got the drinking fountains expected to be in there this week.
“The electrical work and the connections, I think, are all going to be completed this week. The outlets around the perimeter of the plaza, extra outlets, are planned for phase two, and I just wanted to reiterate that, when we took on the Plaza Brown project, we immediately realized that we would probably have a second phase.
“We didn’t know if we would be able to do that in this next year or in the following year, but when we do that second phase, that’s going to make it very easy for us to add additional electrical outlets, to keep the trucks a little bit farther away from the plaza, and again, by putting too many plugs around the plaza, we end up limiting our emergency vehicle access, so we’re really trying to pay attention to, in the future, that events have emergency access and good traffic flow,” Sheedy said.
“Combined dispatch. Of course, we’re excited about our combined dispatch. We’ve been working on this for about 10 months. We had our go-live date, which has now been moved back to June 26. There’s just been some supply issues in getting some of the mobile equipment. A staged rollout is set for June 14 where combined dispatch will dispatch units via radio and track the times and then as the mobile client hardware starts getting installed, then it will continue to advance,” the city manager told council members.
“I want to say that this is a very important accomplishment for our community. We’ve been trying to get this done for years. We’re decades behind. I’m very proud of all of our staff that worked on this. I want to thank the hospital, our fire chief and police chief. They’ve done a phenomenal job. We’re getting very close to combined dispatch, so that’s a great thing,” Sheedy said.
“On our nuisance issues, again, we appreciate the community’s patience. It’s been quite a challenge to really get this up and running, but we are committed. We will not stop. I know that our junk vehicles code enforcement had already sent out over 30 notices to collect vehicles. We have numerous violations that have been reported.
“The police department has increased the patrol for abandoned vehicles, and we’re resolving those. And the dilapidated buildings, of course, our public works and code enforcement have been working together to remove some dangerous structures on Fox (Drive), and we’ve got some others that we’re working on.
“We’re going to be implementing the fire department to help us to make ready on some of the more dangerous structures,” Sheedy finished.
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