Our guest this week was Northfield Second Ward City Councilor Betsey Buckheit. We discussed her reflections of her first year on the Council, which she wrote about on her blog last month in a post titled What I’ve learned so far.
Click play to listen. 30 minutes:
The “Friday Memo,” written by Northfield City Administrator Joel Walinski and various department heads and other City staff, summarizes the staff activities for the week. The Friday memos are published and archived in PDF form at the bottom of the City Administrator’s web page. The first memo of each month usually includes an update on the actions and activities of the City’s Boards and Commissions.
Friday’s memo can be found on the memo page for the week. Items of note include:
To avoid frequent government closures on Federal holidays, many of which fall on Mondays, the City Council has changed their regular meeting dates to the 1st and 3rd TUESDAY of…
Workers at Schmidt Homes Remodeling, a division of Steven Schmidt Construction, have been bearing down hard at the Archer House in recent weeks. It’s partially the result of the…
Randy Jennings, Occasional Press, sent me PDFs of the new Northfield brochure that he created for the City of Northfield Economic Development Authority (EDA).
It is intended to be used as a take-away piece when Economic Development Director, Jody Gunderson, and others meet with business folks and investors considering moving a business to or starting a business in Northfield.
It’s a classy-looking, well-done brochure (and that’s not just because he used some of my photos). I don’t know how much it cost. Anyone?
On our last podcast of 2009, we tried to decipher the Nfld News column by City of Northfield At-Large Councilor Rhonda Pownell titled Teamwork: Time to let go of fear, unforgiveness. So this week, she came on our show to explain it herself. From there, we broadened the discussion to include overall City Council performance for 2009 and anticipated new goals for 2010.
Robbie and I were in Hudson Wisconsin over the New Year’s weekend and noticed that they use DIY crosswalk flags on some of the intersections along State Trunk Highway 35 as it runs through the city.
Can you think of some busy areas in Northfield where these might work?
The City of Northfield’s snow-related web page has maps to indicate which sidewalks and trails get cleared of snow by city staff. See the Downtown walk plowing routes map and…
I noticed that it was mainly trucks from Thiele Trucking of Owatonna hauling downtown snow to Babcock Park yesterday morning. A separate contract is awarded each year for the plowing of the nine City parking lots. Evidently City workers and City-owned equipment are used for everything else snow-related.
When we first moved to Northfield in the mid-70s, garbage-hauling was done by City workers using City-owned trucks. At some point, a decision was made to contract it all out to Waste Management. Updated Jan. 5, 7 pm: Not true. See comment #5 below by Dave DeLong and my following comment.
In September, Chicago Mayor Richard Daly considered using private snowplow drivers for city’s side streets: