The Babbitt city council began Tuesday night with a quick recap of the closed session regarding the performance of clerk-treasurer Nancy Sanford.
“We reviewed areas of strengths and weaknesses as per the annual review of the employee’s contract,” said Mayor Andrea Zupancich. “The employee is still on probation status and wages, and no motions were made as a result of the closed session.”
The council heard updates from the Recreation Committee and their ongoing projects. The projects include a new fountain and repairs for street lights at Fountain Hill Park. These are estimated to cost a little over $5,000, and will come out of the city facilities fund.
The city also had a presentation by the SEH stormwater resilience project managers, Emily Jennings and Jason Chopp.
“Last year, the city was awarded an MPCA stormwater resiliency planning grant, we’ve been working on it for the past 11 months, my colleague and me,” said Chopp. The grant totaled almost $123,000.
“The project’s objective was to identify areas of localized flooding and come up with some potential projects to help reduce these flooding instances or levels of severity,” said Jennings. Through use of a geographic information systems model, the project was able to construct a model of local water tables and flood areas. Using climate projections and historical flooding events, a map was created of existing conditions for vulnerable inundation areas.
“One thing that caused concern was the conveyance beneath Poplar Drive…currently, on the south side of the city, there are two 36-inch round culverts, and every scenario we ran in our report assumes that those (culverts) will be replaced by three four-foot-tall, ten-foot-wide box culverts,” said Jennings.
Currently, the culverts form a bottleneck as the main water drainage out of Babbitt.
In other business, the council: • Approved an application deadline of July 2 for the assistant recreation coordinator position.
• Approved wood chips purchase for Central Park Playground.
• Heard updates on the arena compressor project.
Approved five police department committee applicants: Terry Switajewski, Hailey Donahue, Dean Graber, Michael Jenkins, Rebekah Littler, and council members Joe White and Duane Lossing.
• Approved to discontinue Recreation department mowing of private property.
• Tabled heat pump No. 6 repair or replacement for next council meeting.
• Approved a resolution regarding ambulanceearnwhileyoulearn grant program.
• Discussed enforcing the peddler’s permit for vendors at the Farmer’s Market.
• Approved to hire back Ben Novak to the fire department.
Approved a fireworks permit for Peter Mitchell Days.
