City begins preliminary budget process

City of Maryville logo

MARYVILLE, Mo. — The Maryville City Council on Monday began pre-planning for the new budget year, looking ahead at general areas of emphasis.

That process started with reviewing this year’s five strategic goals. The council typically sets five goals that can range from very specific to very broad for each budget year, which ends on Sept. 30. This year, the council’s goals were to finish improvements to South Main Street, enhance downtown revitalization efforts, continue efforts to build a new water treatment plant, continue to invest in infrastructure and to plan for Maryville’s future.

During Monday’s regular council meeting, City Manager Ryan Heiland said that over the past year, the city crossed off two goals entirely: Phase II of the South Main Corridor Improvement Project is substantially complete and the council approved a new 20-year master plan for the city’s future.

Heiland broadly went over some goals for the future, including putting more of an emphasis on city services. One example he brought up was that currently, calls to City Hall or city departments after hours or on weekends are eventually routed to 911 dispatch.

“I would like to find a way to remove that burden from dispatch and let them deal with the calls that they need to (deal with),” Heiland said.

A possible solution, he said, would be purchasing AI software to handle calls during those times, though he said that current pricing for such services may be cost prohibitive. Another possibility is to have some personnel “on call” after hours to receive phone calls.

Additionally, Heiland said he would like to look into textcaster systems for alerts and notices. It would have been especially useful in situations like the water main break last week.

“Really the only way we had to talk to people was through Facebook, through social media,” Heiland said.

Overhauling city manuals and city codes are also priorities Heiland would like to see, he said.

During the discussion, council member Erin Allen said she would also like to see more of an emphasis on “stewardship” in the budget instead of just new projects. That includes maintaining initiatives and infrastructure that taxpayers have already paid for, she said, like shoreline maintenance at Mozingo Lake. Allen also said she wants the city to stop funding annual street overlay projects with money from the water and sewer fund, and instead find a more sustainable way to fund those projects.

The council will begin the budget process in earnest with a series of workshops in August.

Fireworks cleanup

For the second straight year, Betty Quinn, who lives off of East Halsey Street, came to the council looking for help in getting neighbors of hers to clean up what she called a “block-long” set of firecrackers that they set off each year.

Last year, Quinn and a neighbor on another street came to the council about the same issue, which they said had been going on for more than 12 years.

Each year around the Fourth of July, a neighbor on Halsey Street sets off a 16,000-firecracker roll in the street and does not clean it up, they said last year. The massive explosive leaves behind a significant amount of paper, cardboard, plastic and other charred materials.

This year, Quinn said that police warned the neighbors to clean up the firecracker remains, which they have also done in previous years. An officer even came back afterward to tell the neighbors to clean it up. But even though the officer said the neighbors had cleaned it up, Quinn said she came out the next day and found the street littered with debris.

“There’s four 5-gallon buckets of debris that I cleaned up,” Quinn, a soft-spoken senior citizen, told the council on Monday. “And when people saw me out there Sunday morning cleaning it up, they stopped and insisted they help me clean up. One of them was the deacon from the Catholic Church, and I said, ‘No, that’s OK, I just need to get my frustrations out and do this myself.’”

The deacon helped anyway, Quinn said.

Quinn asked the council to please do something about the issue, and suggested a couple of city codes that the firecrackers may violate. But her goal, she said, is not to eliminate the firecrackers.

“I love fireworks,” Quinn said. “I love the Fourth of July. But I don’t like all that debris going everywhere.”

Other City Council notes

• Heiland said Phase II of the South Main Corridor Improvement Project is substantially complete, but a few minor checklist items remain. One of them may be redoing the medians, he said. Currently, the areas between the trees in the medians are filled by grass and weeds. The plan was to fill them with mulch and turf, which is one of the items remaining on the final punch list. However, Heiland said it might be a good time to reassess that plan because of how difficult it would be to mow those areas. The most popular off-the-cuff suggestion from council members seemed to be some aesthetically pleasing rock instead.
• During the public comment period, a resident asked about paving South Depot Street next to the Sunrise Bark Park. Later in the meeting, Heiland said Depot Street will be left to “sit” for about a year to settle, which he said is standard practice. After that, the city may pave the road.

• Also during the public comment period, Maryville resident Ryan Hawkins, a frequent user of Mozingo Lake, said he understood the reasoning behind the new wake boat ordinance that restricts bow height. But he said he hopes the city might reconsider backing off to a middle ground, like allowing the practice during the week when lake traffic is lower.
• At the next council meeting on July 27, Heiland said the council will discuss side-by-sides, which are small utility vehicles. The council will consider safety risks and whether any changes should be made to city code to address a perceived uptick in the vehicles being driven within city limits.
• The downtown pavilion is on track to be completed by the end of next week after asphalt is poured at the site, Heiland said.