MOUNT VERNON – The city was awarded more than $1 million to hire three firefighters for the Mount Vernon Fire Department.
Fire Chief Chad Christopher announced that the Fire Department was awarded this second SAFER (Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response) grant from FEMA.
“It's something he's been working on for about a year now,” Safety Service Director Rick Dzik told the Mount Vernon News. “And it's very exciting because it'll let us bring three more firefighters into our department. And that will cover their full salary and benefits for a period of three years.”
Surrender Day set for Nov. 10
The city’s Municipal Court will hold its second State Surrender Day from noon to 4 p.m. on Nov. 10.
“It’s basically a day where people with active warrants come in and basically try and get those warrants resolved without being immediately arrested,” Dzik said.
Surrender Day is for nonviolent crimes only, he said.
Stormwater, brick street work continues
Workers from the city’s Street Department completed a stormwater project at North Mulberry and Crestview, Dzik said. They finished work on curb and gutter work, plus catch basins.
“They've been working all week on restoring a lot of our brick roads from where we had to do some digs for our water department for utility stuff,” he said.
The crews must compact the dirt and replace the bricks by hand to make the streets look good again.
Street Department crews have also been grading the city’s gravel alleyways as they have time. They've also spent a week doing preventative maintenance inspections and cleaning all traffic cabinets.
“Citizens may not notice them. But wherever the traffic light is, there's a metal cabinet that houses all of the electronics that they like to keep in good order to make sure that everything works correctly,” Dzik said.
Report streetlight outages to AEP
As days get shorter, more residents are noticing and reporting streetlight issues. For several reasons, Mount Vernon asks its residents to report streetlight issues directly to AEP. First, the resident will have the number of the utility pole that the streetlight is on. More important for the resident might be that the power company will send them updates when it receives the report of the light being out and even when it has been repaired.
Streetlight problems can be reported at www.aepohio.com/outages/problem/streetlight.
More lime heading to farm fields
“A lot of our time and utility has been spent making sure we can get the slime out to farm fields,” Dzik said.
He said he was happy to report that more than 1,000 tons of the lime product had been loaded out last week to go to farm fields.
Mount Vernon Utility Director Tom Marshall and City Engineer Brian Ball have gotten things rolling, Dzik said. Chief water plant operator David Hall has been working diligently to move things along, he said.
The city remains under an order by the OHIO EPA to move at least 7,500 cubic yards of the lime material off the Street Department property near the water plant by Dec. 31.
