The previous Chenoa City Council meeting was canceled because not enough officials could attend to have a quorum. Because of this, Tuesday’s regular meeting had a larger agenda than usual and ran for two hours.
The Council approved the minutes from the last meeting and the bills to be paid. The Mayor then nominated Jay E. Myers to replace Commissioner Kyle Buchanan as the Finance and Insurance Commissioner. The Council voted and approved this appointment.
A representative from Pavlov Media talked about the new fiber optic system to be installed in Chenoa. The company headquarters is in Champaign, with over 300,000 subscribers nationwide. There will be no cost to the city for this new fiber optic system. New Chenoa subscribers will pay $70 per month and receive one-gigabyte upload speed and one-gigabyte download speed. The representative estimated it would take five to nine months to complete the installation. The project can start in March if the City Council approves the permit request from this company. The permit request will be submitted to the City Council by the end of this week.
Another representative from a GIS mapping company then gave a presentation on the mapping services offered by his company. A geographic information system is a database containing geographic data combined with software tools for managing, analyzing, and visualizing those data. Ottawa, Illinois, has used this company to map all public utilities, including water, sewer, and fiber optic cables. Ottawa utilizes the maps to improve its public services.
The maps have proven invaluable for quickly finding and repairing water main leaks. Most towns map their water systems first and then decide it is a valuable enough system to map the remaining utilities. The company proposed that mapping Chenoa's water system would cost $35,000. No vote was taken on this proposal, but the City Council will consider it for future approval.
The City Council voted and approved the project to seek the extension of the existing TIF agreement.
A Prairie Central Youth Football team representative asked that several minor improvements be made at the Chenoa football field where they play their games. The Council agreed to investigate and make these improvements.
The computers in the Chenoa Police Department cars are now more than ten years old. The City Council voted and approved the purchase of new computers for the vehicles.
There are road flooding issues and dock maintenance issues at Silliman Pond. The Mayor received a proposal of $84,000 to fix the problems. This contractor does all the marine-related work at LakeBloomington. The City Council will investigate alternative solutions to solving the issues at Silliman Pond.
The Chenoa city improvement volunteer group gave an overview of their planned improvement projects in 2023. The Route 66 Corridor group asked for the city's help with Ameren in providing electrical power at their new stop location on Route 66. The Mayor agreed to talk to Ameren and help the group with their project.
The City Council went into an Executive Session at the close of the regular meeting.
