Joplin City Council Informal Meeting on Mowing and Street Lights - April 7, 2025
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Joplin City Council Informal Meeting - April 7, 2025
The informal meeting of the Joplin City Council on April 7, 2025, included two agenda items: an update on the city's mowing operations by Paul Bloomberg and a semi-annual street light program update by Jeremy Hagerman. Council members engaged in discussion and raised questions about cost comparisons, crime prevention, and maintenance issues.
Discussion Items
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Mowing Update (Paul Bloomberg) : Bloomberg presented a detailed cost analysis comparing in-house city mowing to contracted services. The city maintains over 900 acres of parkland, with 17 employees working during a 25-week mowing season (April through November). The city's cost per acre is $25.20, totaling approximately $523,000 in operational and maintenance expenses. Three contractor quotes ranged from $60 to $140 per acre, which would cost between $968,000 and $2.3 million annually. Bloomberg noted that recent salary adjustments have improved recruitment and retention of seasonal staff. Council members clarified maintenance expense details, such as trailer costs of $9,000 over 10 years.
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Street Light Program Update (Jeremy Hagerman) : Hagerman provided a semi-annual update on the voter-approved street light installation program. Completed projects include areas on 15th Street, Prigmore Road, Duquesne Road, and the Zora Duquesne roundabout. Remaining areas include Hidden Hills, Silver Creek, and South Shifferdecker. Since the last update, 210 street light issues were reported via Click Fix, with 177 resolved. New requests continue to come in. Council members discussed the need for a policy on alley lighting in high-crime areas, noting a previous citizen request, and the responsibility for trimming vegetation blocking street lights. The city manager agreed to revisit the alley lighting policy and suggested using Click Fix for tree trimming reports.
Key Outcomes
- The council received the mowing update with no further action required, acknowledging the cost savings of in-house operations.
- The council directed staff to bring back a proposed policy for alley street lighting in high-crime areas, to be reviewed at a future meeting.
- The city manager indicated that tree trimming issues related to street light obstruction should be reported via Click Fix, and code enforcement may be pursued for overgrown vegetation on easements.
Meeting Transcript
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the informal meeting of the Joplin City Council. We've got two items on our agenda this evening. We will start with Paul Bloomberg and a mowing update. Yeah. So I want to come back. We did this a brief overview in January. But came back with a little bit more specifics in our expenses so you can get a better handle of why city staff versus contracted services cheaper for the city. So I'll just go over the spreadsheet that I came up with. So the total parks budget as you can see is just under 1.3. Park maintenance budget is just under 1.3 million. So we start with 25 weeks of mowing. Okay. So we start in April, go through November, which equals you know roughly 175 days. But the land that we actually mow and maintain is a little over 900 acres. And 10 years ago, we did this study, and it really took us 14 days back in 10 years ago to get through our park system. So now we've got it done with the additional staffing. We've got it down to 10 days, which comes out to be 17 and a half times per year that we mow the parks in Joplin. That comes out to being just a little more than 16,000 acres mowed per year. Moving on to the operational expense. So we have a total of 17 employees that do the mowing and trimming. We have several different crews on what we do. We have one individual that all he does is goes around to the big parks and mows with the I I don't know the name of the tractor, so all I know is that the John Deere and it's a big tractor. So he mows the big areas. Maintenance expenses. We roughly spend about 17,000 in fuel. That's our staff. That's the central garage that that works on our mowers. We have a small small equipment crew that does that, or actually it's the same crew that mows. The transport with the trailers, our equipment, trimmers are the weed eaters. But we're not talking about you and I who mow our yards maybe twice a week. So they do get wear and tear. Um so our average maintenance expense comes out to a little over it's like a hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars. Um, and you put that together with our operational um staff cost here a little over four hundred thousand dollars in the mowing season. Um you uh going down to cost per acre. Um, and this is where when you we get into that's when we our contract services, that's what they give you. They give you a cost per acre depending on how hard the the the area is to mow, how big the area is to mow. Um so our uh city staff doing it comes out to 25.20 cents per acre um to do that. Um now we did receive three quotes um uh that that do have mowing services in this area. Um the lowest quote uh was around sixty dollars. The other the and then the high end is like a hundred and forty dollars. Um you can see at the lowest cost with the acres that we mow, it's just under a million dollars. Um the highest cost um with the 140 dollar per acre is uh make almost 2.3 million. Um and obviously when I that I at the very bottom I broke it out for everyone to see um outsource versus in-house, and you know, we we will we we would save 500 six five hundred and sixty-eight thousand to one point nine million if either way you look at it um from the low end to the high end. So really I mean this is no different than what we did 10 years ago. Um the city was cheaper. Um so um it just I just wanted to give you guys an update on that. That way you can see it. Um, and then obviously if you have any questions for me, um it's a lot easier for us to recruit um now. Our pay is good, a lot better than it used to be. We did consider doing contract services a few years ago, just that that's before we got readjusted our salary range.
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