Iola City Council members agreed Monday that North Kentucky Street should have markings to make travel safer.
Just how many markings the street should have remains in question.
Council members voted, 5-0, to put white lines along both edges of Kentucky, from North Dakota (Strickler Road) to Oregon Road.
If it can be worked out — if the road isn’t too narrow — the Council also wants to see a center stripe added.
The lane width may be an issue, Assistant City Administrator Corey Schinstock said.
An engineer that looked at the street recommended lanes be at least 10 feet wide.
However, Kentucky is only 22 feet across from Oregon to Miller Road. Unless crews put stripes on the edge of the asphalt, the individual lanes may not be wide enough.
Because of that, Schinstock and City Administrator Carl Slaugh said the engineers recommended putting only a middle stripe along Kentucky.
Council members disagreed.
“I’d rather see the lines on the side of the road than in the middle,” Councilwoman Beverly Franklin said.
Mayor Joel Wicoff, meanwhile, encouraged Schinstock and City Administrator Carl Slaugh to do everything possible to get both the edges and center lines painted.
“We don’t want it to become a liability issue, where lanes are pinched,” Slaugh said.
Schinstock said regardless of what the Council decides, crews likely would postpone any painting until 2016, when the city planned to chip-seal the corridor.
Three council members, Donald Becker, Aaron Franklin and Jon Wells, were absent. A fourth member, Bob Shaughnessy, was not at the meeting, but he otherwise participated via speakerphone to ensure the Council had a quorum.
COUNCIL members will decide soon whether Iola soon will have wind energy among its sources of electricity.
Iola purchases energy from a variety of sources, explained Scott Shreve, the city’s energy consultant, including Westar and Kansas City Power and Light.
Westar is considering buying a block of energy from a new wind farm under construction in Pratt County.
Iola has the option of buying 3 megawatts of electricity a month from the wind farm. The price would be negotiated and locked into the contract, Shreve explained. The agreement would involve only a certain number of megawatts per month and a set price per kilowatt, not an outright purchase of a portion of the wind farm.
The advantage to locking in a contract now is that wind farms have federal tax credits available to provide energy at a lower cost.
If Iola can lock in a price before those tax credits expire, it would give the city the option of reducing its energy demand elsewhere on the grid.
The agreement likely would be 10 or 20 years, Shreve said.
Council members promised to consider the proposal.
THE COUNCIL approved a resolution to trigger the second phase of the city’s Safe Routes To School grant funding.
The city’s primary focus, for now, is to target damaged or missing sidewalks in and near the city’s three elementary schools, although those priorities may change once Iola learns what areas USD 257 would like to target, Slaugh said.
Eighty percent of the construction or rehab costs would be furnished by the state through the grant program, Slaugh noted. The city is eyeing about $180,000 worth of improvements.
The first phase, in 2014, was a grant worth about $15,000 for design.
Slaugh said the district handed out surveys during parent-teacher conferences and surveyed condition of sidewalks and handicap ramps around the elementaries.
The discussion occurred simultaneous to Monday’s USD 257 Board of Education meeting, at which board members decided against going with a 50-50 split of local contributions. Instead, the school board said it would contribute $5,000, leaving Iola responsible for the remaining $31,000.
Slaugh told the Register this morning — when he was informed of the school board’s lesser participation — that the city likely would continue with the grant application.
“We may have to scale it back or suck up the school district’s portion,” he said, although those decisions haven’t been made.
THE TERMS OF all eight Council members and Mayor Joel Wicoff may be extended about nine months, to conform with a new state law converting all city elections from the spring to the fall.
City Clerk Roxanne Hutton gave Council a possible scenario in which four of the council members and Wicoff would face re-election in November 2017, instead of April of that year. State law stipulates that those who win seats would take office the second Monday the following January.
Wicoff, Nancy Ford, Beverly Franklin, Don Becker and Sandy Zornes are up for re-election in 2017. Council members Jonathan Wells, Bob Shaughnessy, Austin Sigg and Aaron Franklin’s terms expire in 2019.
