The Elizabethtown City Council met for a work session Monday evening.
City Public Works Director Don Hill gave an update on projects the city’s Public Works Department has been working on. Hill said investment from the city has helped with efficiency in the Sanitary Sewer Department, which completed several installation projects.
“On the sewer construction side, they installed 985 feet of sanitary sewer line, they installed 500 feet of water line at the nature park for the orchard, we just got that completed,” Hill said. “New taps installed: 20. Main line repairs: 33. Cleanouts installed: 9.”
Hill discussed changes in the department such as bringing maintenance of the Elizabethtown City Cemetery in-house, and reviewed other stats such as city paving projects.
“To date, 4.9 miles of city streets have been paved,” Hill said. “They have the schedule and they started on that this week, and there’s 6.63 miles in this next paving schedule, but we also will issue them another one around the end of September, so our target is to get between 12 and 15 miles of paving done.”
Hill said 1,897 loads of brush have been picked up since January, 675 bags of clippings have been collected from residents, and 5,480 bags of litter have been collected along 231.6 miles of city streets. With such a burden already on brush collection equipment and employees, Hill said the department is proposing setting limits on tree removal.
“We’re not saying we want to eliminate picking up trees,” Hill said. “We’re not saying we want to eliminate contractor-cut trees, but what we’re saying is because of the dollars, because of the lead time on parts and the difficulty of getting parts, because of the lead time on buying new equipment, we’re proposing, up for discussion is we’d like to reduce the size of what we pick up and kind of limit that.”
Elizabethtown Mayor Jeff Gregory supported Hill’s call for limits. He said brush collection is an important service the city provides but he feels some people may be taking advantage of it.
“I would even be willing to bet that some of those contractors figure in, on their bill, removal, and use us as a service to do it, and so they’re making money off of what our services provide, and it’s absolutely destroying a lot of our equipment on the pieces that you’re talking about that are extremely large, so we have to set a standard somewhere,” Gregory said.
The Elizabethtown City Council will next meet September 3.