The Lennox City Council met Monday, December 11 in the Lennox Boardroom. Board members heard agenda items including library grants, garbage hauler licenses and supplemental appropriations for the City of Lennox.
The Council heard from Audrea Buller, Lennox Community Library director, about future Library grants.
“There are three grants in your packet, one is Penguin Random House grants for small and rural libraries, it is a grant for $1,000 to help support circulation in your collection of your library. What my plan for this one is to try to get some of those non-fiction books that I was trying for earlier on with a grant we did not get. The other one is an accessible, smaller world library communities round two through the American Library Association and that is to help try to submit for the other half of the grant for the Library Circulation Desk…The last one is through Giving Hope, Inc., that’s the Bingo place on Sertoma…we did this last year, we get with the libraries in the Southeast area down here, and we put together a request for what we would use the money for…one check is sent out and divided between the six to eight libraries that we have through friends of the library,” Buller said.
Motion approved.
The City of Lennox Garbage Hauler License renewal applications are due on December 1 of each year. The City received three renewal applications for garbage hauler licenses in Lennox from Novak Sanitation, RBS Sanitation and A-OK Sanitary Service.
“I did not check, but I think we may have received the County hauler license from Novak, we know they’ve applied. They all have current licenses, the question is whether they’re going to have licenses on the 26th, we also need to change our timing to push it back after the County approves theirs. Overall, everything seems to be in order. I recommend a motion to approve,” City Administrator, Nate Vander Plaats said.
After some discussion, motion was approved.
Finance officer, Denise Hanson put together Ordinance 645, a supplemental appropriation ordinance of the City of Lennox, for the fiscal year 2023.
“I went through and tried to figure out what we might be short on and I came up with we have three payrolls, so our last payroll in January has to go back to December because we are accrual, so it throws us off once in a while,” she said.
Council members asked Hanson to go through the items with her for a better understanding of the material.
“The publishing, right now we have $946.42 in the budget, but on an average, we are doing about $1,200 a month, so I figure were going to be short about $1,400. For City Admin, we knew that we were going to be short after last year when we didn’t budget in the amount that you decided to move him up to. Finance, were going to be a little short on payroll, so that will make up for the difference. General government, the biggest thing was Nate’s repairs on his office, that kind of set us back a little bit, but that couldn’t be helped, that’s something that wasn’t planned. Police, I’m asking for salaries on that, I think that it’s just some overtime, but not all of it. They also have machinery and equipment for the traffic when they got the new police car, they had to get the equipment and I believe the fuel was a bit of an additional cost too. Liability insurance, that was just short, they went up and we didn’t budget enough for it. Highway and Streets did pretty good, I did put a little bit extra in there for payrolls. Economic Development, we paid out the $30,000 from there and I think that’s what made a change there,” she said.
Hanson was asked if this would impact the budget or payrolls for next year being one payroll short.
“No, next year in January we are going to have to bring it back. Every year we have that extra time and every year it’s remaining expenses that we need to go through remaining funds and disperse accordingly,” Vander Plaats responded.
A second reading and public comment portion will be held at the next meeting.