The Mason City Council held a regular meeting on January 21, 2025, at the Mason City Public Library. Councilmembers Latham, Simmons, and Adams were present; Councilmember Lee and Mayor Schickle were absent. The agenda was adopted unanimously. No public comments were made during the public forum.
Order. This is the uh regular meeting in the May City City Council for January twenty-first twenty twenty-five. Uh first order is of business is the roll call, Diana, please. Here. Latham. Here. Simmons. Present. Adams. Present. Councilmember Lee and Mayor Shickle are absent. Next item is the adoption of the agenda. Is there a motion and second? I'll second. Motion by Masan, second by Councilman Yasheski. All those in favor signify by saying aye. All those opposed, same sign. Motion carries. Time for a public forum. Uh Mayor and City Council, Mayor Pro Tem and City Council welcome comments from the public on agenda items during the public forum. Please step to the microphone there, give your name, address, and the agenda item number or topic you're referring to, and you'll have five minutes. Comment online. No mayor pro tem. We'll close the public forum, move to item one, city administrators monthly report. Turn it over to City Administrator Invernett. Thank you. I've got a few updates for the council uh for this month. Uh as we've mentioned in goal setting, we're really trying to make sure we're doing a good job of telling the story of all the improvements that we have in the capital improvement plan, all of the efforts by the council on so many different topics. And to that end, uh Mason City will be represented. Uh I'll be heading down with Visit Mason City and uh a few other folks to the Iowa Bike Expo this weekend. Um at that bike expo there will be a uh highlight on an economic study being completed on Mason City for the investments that uh Mason City's made into uh biking, whether that be mountain biking, pa bike paths, etc. So uh that's kind of an exciting development. Additionally, uh I had the opportunity to present at the state of North Iowa on those investments also. Uh also the uh state of North Iowa highlighted a lot of investments that that have been made in uh workforce attraction uh and just community betterment and was a uh great opportunity to kind of tell the story of of what's going on in North Iowa. And then additionally, just uh we'll continue to provide information uh to the community through social media outlets. Uh we're gonna continue to do the a glance back that we did um I think for the past three years we've done a glance back, which is uh infographic that has a lot of information on it uh from the various departments, everything from public safety to recreation to um you know the art museum, etc. So a lot of uh interesting facts for folks uh and the different services are provided by their local government. And then uh, you know, just moving on, talking about some of the other priorities that the council has. Uh you'll see on this at this council there's a uh support of a raise grant application. That raise grant is in relationship to highway 122. You know, understanding that we're still working to get the highway 122 project funded, asking the Iowa DOT to put it on his five-year plan. This is a request to the US DOT to uh fund it through a raise grant, and we're very optimistic that we'll be able to secure that. The request through this is to uh assist with uh design um going through planning and design to to essentially tee it up for uh implementation grant. Moving right along, uh just wanted to mention we we continue to uh enter the legislative season. Uh the session, the the legislators just arrived down at Des Moines at the start of the session. There's still a lot of conversation that impacts local governments, specifically property taxes that are on the agenda, and so we're doing our best to continue to inform basically the whole staff uh is uh in an outreach mode to kind of tell the story of each one of those departments and um how those property type property taxes are used to uh serve the community and uh the benefit that's that's derived from them, and also to inform future legislative proposals to make sure that uh the policy is sound when it's passed, where uh um I think we've got uh uh legislators uh that understand the issues and we're hopeful and optimistic that they'll be able to communicate that back into the general assembly. And then lastly, I just wanted to bring up the um fire department operations. I think the uh fire out at the recycling center was um obviously impressive just from a video standpoint, but I think the scope of operations and the unique situation that they were fighting with uh it being just outside city limits and trying to maintain water supply and then the collaboration between private entities and other agencies, um, just uh uh amazing effort to uh contain that and make sure that uh the community was protected from that fire, and uh just a lot of a lot of great partners that came together to work through what is an absolute miserable environment. So uh I think it you know we wanted to make sure that I brought that up, just understanding a lot of times, you know. I think uh we don't think about those departments until there's a situation like that.