From The Pineville Sun-Courier -
Pineville Mayor Scott Madon and several members of City Council have received complaints about children under the age of 16 driving golf carts throughout the city. “We’ve received a lot of complaints about kids on the golf carts,” Mayor Madon said. “We are going to have to enforce the golf cart age restriction, which is 16. We are going to have to step up the enforcement on that.”
The State of Kentucky requires that the driver of golf carts have a valid driver’s license in order to operate them on roadways. “We’ve also received a lot of complaints about parking within the city,” he continued. “Cars parked on sidewalks and in the grass, so we have also had to step up the enforcement on those vehicles and officers are writing citations for illegal parking.” According to the mayor, during COVID-19 officers slowed down in order to stay safe. “We told our guys during that time to sort of stand down and be careful,” he explained. “Not to arrest anybody unless it was extremely dangerous, drug dealings and domestic violence, things like that but we’ve turned that back up a little bit because a couple of weeks ago we had to put that curfew in place. So, we have kind of had to turn that back up a little bit but we are not missing anything.”
City operations have continued but at a slower pace than normal.
“We have continued to keep all of our services going,” explained Madon. “We’ve got a couple of guys on the street department and we get a couple of prisoners. I’ve hired a couple of people to come in and cut weeds so we have been able to maintain our normal services.”
Prior to COVID-19, pickups were done daily but more recently, they have been taken down to only twice a week. Grass cutting is also something that was typically done more often but Madon explained that they just do what they can to keep the main areas cut.
“We used to get 14 prisoners every day from the Forestry Camp that would weedeat, so you can imagine losing them and what that’s done to us,” he said of the mowing within the city. “I’m really proud of our folks that are here, the ones that stayed here and have been able to keep everybody happy.”
Due to COVID-19, City Hall does remain closed but the drive thru window is still open. COVID-19 has also posed changes within the city’s budget. “Our total budget is $4.7 million for 2020 through 2021,” Madon said. “We have a very tight budget due to COVID-19. We are projecting less revenue from where businesses were shut down.” According to Madon, this is the first time since he has been in office that they have not been able to give city employees a raise. “Everything is really tight this year,” he explained. “We just don’t know what to expect down the road.”
He said that some states are opening up going full swing and Kentucky is not doing that yet. “We are one of the 14 states that our numbers are drastically rising and I think one of the reasons that our numbers are drastically rising is because we are doing more testing now,” he said of the continued rise in cases. “We weren’t doing a lot of testing at first. It’s just uncertainty of the future where we are going with this thing.”
He continued to say that it is a very scary and uneasy time for not only city and county governments but also state governments.
“It’s new ground and new territory for all of us,” he said. “We tried to make a very conservative budget and like I said there was no rate increase for our employees.”
He explained that the city is maintaining what they have always done in the past and that the swimming pool is in the budget for next year with the anticipation of opening. “We are trying to anticipate doing business as usual for the remainder of the year,” he explained of the city operations. “We don’t know if we are going to be able to or not, some of our revenue is down because of this.”
Madon said that a lot of their expenses don’t go down because they still have to operate the city but during this time they have had to lay people off to reduce expenditures since the revenue has done down. “I think that has helped us overcome that in the long run,” he continued. “It’s a very tight, conservative budget with no fluff in it.”
He explained that in the past, the city has been able to leave a little fluff where the city needed it in order to do something or help someone but they just don’t have it right now because of COVID-19.
“I guess we probably won’t know until December where we are going with this thing,” he said of COVID-19. “I thought we were coming out of it but as it goes on and you see the cases rise, I don’t think we are going to come out of this anytime soon.”
The next meeting of the Pineville City Council will be held on July 13 in Pineville City Hall.
Opmerkingen