The Elizabeth Town City Council convened a work session to review departmental updates, including progress on the wastewater plant expansion and a summary of active construction projects. The City Administrator presented a comprehensive overview of infrastructure initiatives, citing specific cost estimates and timelines. The Airport Board requested municipal bridge funding to complete the Tea Hangar project. The session concluded with public testimony regarding neighborhood stormwater analysis and a closed session regarding real property acquisition and economic development.
Judy Elliott (Harvard Drive) expressed concern that she has not received a requested progress report regarding stormwater infrastructure filling her neighborhood since October. She sought a timeline for the analysis initiated in June. She did not explicitly state a position of opposition but requested accountability for the delay.
Council Response: Councilmember confirmed that an engineering analysis is currently underway to determine the best path for relief. The council agreed to have the department contact the resident the following day to provide specific dates, rather than leaving the inquiry unresolved.
Wastewater Department Update (Corey Bond):
City Administrator Project Updates (Ed Pope):
Airport Board Update (Carl Swope):
Good afternoon, everyone. We'll call the meeting to order and welcome everyone to Elizabeth Town City Council work session for January 12th, 2026. And I'd like to ask Councilmember Tony Bishop if he'd lead us in the invitation, please. And if you would join me in the Pledge of Allegiance, I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the Republic for which it says one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Madam Clerk, if you would please call roll. Yes, sir. Councilmember Bishop. Here. Walkerson. Here. Isaac's here. Springsteen. Here. Tyler. Here. We have a quorum mayor. Thank you, ma'am. And Councilmember Jones is out of town today, so he sends his regrets. And so we will start our meeting with a wastewater department update. Corey Bond is our director, and Corey, you get the pleasure of being the first person to present in our new chambers. Yes, this is very exciting. It is an honor to be the first one in the new chamber. It's very nice. Hopefully everything goes well. All right, so just a little introduction. We've done this each year, but just a little bit more about me. Um I'm a University of Louisville graduate from the engineering program there, bachelor's and masters from chemical engineering. Uh started with the city in 2016, so this will be my tenth year with the city. Looking forward to at least 10 more. Last year I reported that we were uh at eleven and we had one vacancy for chief operator, and we promoted from within, Jesse Arnold. He uh passed his class four wastewater certification license last year and has moved up into that role and has been doing great for the past year. We also hired two new employees last year with some people moving out of the department, and they started roughly in March. And then also uh more of a happy note to report also. We have now passed ten years of the wastewater plant with no lost time accidents. So we're today marks day 3,715. So knock on wood, hopefully there's ten more of those as well. Um little bit of an operational update on the department. Uh we treated uh 2.9 billion gallons of water last year, up from the previous year. Our average is around 8 million gallons a day this past year, whereas the previous year it was seven. We are at 62% of our capacity. Um some of that can be attributed to the amount of rain we had last year. We had very large amounts. I think we were at 62 inches roughly, whereas the previous year we're around 50. Um let's see, we're currently rated at 13 million gallons a day with our peak capacity at 29, and as I mentioned with those storms, uh, we also stayed at for three full days last year at our peak capacity. We were maxed out during those April storms, and also during that storm we had a uh incident where our berm was uh broken. We had a hole in the berm where the creek was flooding into the plant, and luckily with the help of public works and some other departments, we were able to stop that, and we are looking to repair that hopefully in the coming months. Uh one of the things I have for you in looking forward in our department. Uh, here in the next few weeks to a month, we will hopefully have an ad municipal order before you to do those repairs. It wasn't particularly budgeted because I was right during the time we were doing the budget and that incident happened, so it wasn't prepared for, but we will hopefully be able to have room and it would potentially carry over into next time, but hopefully we have it fixed before then.