MOUNT GILEAD — Fixing the sidewalks around the south east portion of the square is next up on the village’s “To Do List.”
“We will begin near the old Union Store building where a large portion of the gutter has sunk about eight inches,” village administrator Dan Rogers told village council Monday night.
Rogers said crews will remove two sections of the walkway near the building and about two sections of the center walkway. The building’s owner is participating in some of the repairs since under one section there was an old room that was a restroom.
“This section will be removed and filled with controlled density fill. This should alleviate the water runoff into the basement of the building that has been going on for decades,” Rogers said.
In other business:
• The chip and seal with fog coating was completed. Crews worked to remove the loose gravel on the streets on Monday.
One village resident, Debbie Curtis, is not a proponent of chip and seal work.
“The streets are gravel; rough. I don’t want to live on gravel roads,” Curtis said.
Mayor Mike Porter explained chip and seal is “a temporary fix.”
Curtis said she understood that financial limitations exist and just wants the village “to not sell ourselves short.”
Porter said, “When local government funds were cut in half and other revenue was lost, we had to go into survival mode, not improvement mode. It is getting better.”
He said chip and seal is needed so that the base of the streets don’t erode.
Curtis said residents here “like to walk and ride their bikes. We have a beautiful village.”
• Clean-up efforts continue at several properties — 236 and 324 Lincoln Ave. and another at 148 N. Rich St. The first two are being handled through the village and the third one has a bank soon to take control of the property.
• The water towers painting project is complete except for final grading around the towers and re-installing fencing around the North Tower. The village used all the grant funding.
• Mike Kirk from the Mount Gilead Public Library told council the library is seeking public input on its services.
“We’re at the beginning stages of our strategic plan. We want to find out what people want,” he said.
Kirk asked residents to go to the website, mglibrary.org, to complete the survey. For those without a computer, he invited patrons to stop at the library to use its computers or fill out a paper copy.
