Wednesday, April 26, 2017

City Council Meeting

Sat in on last night's city council meeting for about an hour. Despite the number of cars in the parking lot, not that many people attended the meeting. It looked like more of them were there for the reading meeting down the hall.

The Liquor Control Commission's part of the meeting was pretty uneventful, with Hangar 9 getting warned about an overcrowding incident earlier in the year. No fine and no court costs.

During the meeting proper, council on several things without much argument:

1. Created a Class F3 license allowing 3rd party vendors to sell liquor on SIUC property. The university has control over its own selling of alcohol but the city regulates 3rd party vendors. This new licence is designed to streamline procedures and give the city some imput into campus alcohol sales where warranted.

2.  Adopted the new design standards for downtown. It appears that due to some comments from businesses in downtown, inspectors will have greater leeway in enforcing standards in the "entertainment district" south of West Elm. North of Elm, the standards will be more strictly enforced. I did find out that if a building is destroyed by fire or storm, rebuilding the structure to its original design would not be allowed. The building would have to be rebuilt complying with the new standards. Incidentally, neither Evolve nor the downtown Hilton would meet the new design standards so it is a good thing they were completed/started before the standards were enacted.

3.  Authorized just over a million  to move utility lines to the rear of buildings and install new lighting along Illinois Avenue. Assuming the "perfection fallacy" doesn't kick in, the redesign should be "substantailly completed" by August 10, about 2 weeks before the Carbondale Eclipse. Given that students will hit town right about then and the city will see an additional 5000-50000  people in town in a week and a half, here's hoping downtown is still not under construction during the Eclipse.

I skipped out before the budget discussion but assume that passed as well.

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