Regular Meeting of City Council of Walnut Grove
October 14, 2021
7:00 PM

The Planning & Zoning Chair, Don Cannon spoke regarding the Rezone of the Hwy 81 property at Guthrie Cemetery Road. Much of it was confusing to me, but will try and listen again and see if we can make more sense of it. The basic thing I garnished was that they approve it with conditions of increased lot widths.

Later in the meeting the council ultimately voted to postpone a vote on the rezone. There was a motion to approve that did not get a second. There was then a motion to send back to Planning & Zoning (P&Z) with a caveat of doing a traffic study as well as the consideration for putting in a road on the backside of the property in an attempt to alleviate traffic. That vote was Jon Dial- No, May Hall-No, Stephanie Moncrief-yes and Linda Pilgrim-yes. The mayor broke the tie with a yes. It appeared that the vote was mainly because citizens that were online were unable to unmute a participate in the Public Hearing portion of the meeting. The vote will come up again at the November meeting after having gone back to P&Z.

There had been evidently an issue with a property belonging to Jon Dial where by the city has been making payments to him since 2010 but with no end date for the payments and this was tied to the city sewage property. It goes back to 2010 and was hard to hear the attorney but bottom line is that after two years of negotiating with Jon Dial they have come to a mutual agreement. It will also involve clearing up a matter with the county regarding the deed from when the county decided to no longer be a partner with the city with the sewage system. I have some questions on this so will see if the city will answer our questions. Again, we could not hear well, but IF we heard correctly it appears that there was some sort of traffic study done by the developer and it was stated that the proposed development would not meet the DOT guidelines that would cause them to put up a traffic light.

The mayor stated that he has rented a bus to take the council around town and show them things in regards to the ordinances to see if they think we need to leave the ordinance as is, revise it or abolish it. He used the example of, If someone has a bush in front of their house that grows as tall as their house can we site them for that or should we leave it alone. Also should the city require property owners to trim the trees when they get in the road or should the city do it type of thing. We will try and come back with a revision of more exact wording later.

The new truck that blew and engine has been repaired, but the bucket truck is still in the shop.

Council approved the purchase of a 500 gallon pull behind sprayer for $4650.00.

The mayor wants to move the Planning & Zoning meetings so that there is 30 days between the time that P&Z meets and council votes. Don Cannon spoke up and stated that we needed to check ordinances as he thought the ordinances gave specific time frames for that.

We did note that there were a number of documents handed to council during the meeting and we wonder why these were not presented to council at least a week in advance so that they had plenty of time to review. An example was their approval of the purchase of the sprayer where something was handed out as they got to that discussion. But then again… the mayor pointed out once again that he can basically spend $5000.00 without asking council.

 

 

 

 

Footnote: These are the opinions and understandings of the meeting information as interpreted based on what we could hear and we do not have any documents presented to us in order to help with these opinions and comments.