The “Friday Memo,” written by Northfield City Administrator Joel Walinski and various department heads and other City staff, summarizes the staff and department activities for the week. The Friday memos…
Category: <span>City</span>
The City of Northfield’s compost facility is not due to open for two more weeks, April 13, despite the fact that spring has arrived 2-3 weeks early. Normally, I Ross Tracy would be bitching whining about the City’s lack of flexibility or poor “customer” responsiveness.
But this year’s budget woes compel me to approach it differently. I don’t know how much the City spends each season to have a part-time people staff it but let’s assume it’s approximately $15, 000 (40 hrs/week * 30 weeks * $12/hr).
The City could save money by cutting back hours and telling people to pay Waste Management or use the Rice County Recycling Center (see the 2010 compost site PDF).
Or it could ask its citizens to volunteer to help keep services at their present level. (Imagine this scenario happening with many other services that the City provides.)
Here’s a straw poll that’ll give city fathers and mothers an indication of citizens’ appetite for cutting vs. volunteering in order to save money:
The “Friday Memo,” written by Northfield City Administrator Joel Walinski and various department heads and other City staff, summarizes the staff and department activities for the week. The Friday memos…
I blogged about the problem of graffiti on downtown buildings back in 2008 and again in 2009 so I was glad to see this item on the tentative agenda for…
I began complaining about the construction mess on the undeveloped parts of the corner of Hwy 3 and 2nd St. back in the spring of 2007. I blogged about it…
It’s nice to see the grass greening up around Santa’s house on Bridge Square, not to mention the Muni Xmas window that’s still on display. But I’m eager for the…
The City of Northfield is hosting a meeting with community event organizers tomorrow night, Wed. March 24, 7 pm. It’s not clear who from City Hall will be there and who’s invited (it’s open to the public) because other than the date and time, there’s no meeting information available that I could find. I’m told that packets have been sent out to various stakeholders. I don’t know why the general public can’t have access to them.
The issue was on the Council Work Session agenda for March 9 and the proposed changes are detailed in the packet PDF, pages 9-32. I’ve excerpted some of the text here for convenience (see below).
Update 3/25/10: photos from last night’s meeting:
Our guest this week was Northfield Deputy Police Chief Chuck Walerius, talking about the new CodeRed emergency notification system for Rice and Steele counties (brochure/FAQ PDF) and the test of the system coming up on April 15.
You can sign up now so that the system alerts you via landline phone, cell phone, text message and email. Just visit either the City of Northfield Police Dept. page or the Emergency info page and click on the CodeRed logo/link. You’ll be sent to a special Rice/Steele page on the CodeRed.com website. (I’m deliberately not linking to it from here in case the URL changes.)
The “Friday Memo,” written by Northfield City Administrator Joel Walinski and various department heads and other City staff, summarizes the staff and department activities for the week. The Friday memos…