Joplin city manager provides weekliy update

(City Manager Sam Anselm provided the following update to Joplin City Council members Friday afternoon.)

Good afternoon, everyone. Please see below for this week’s update.

*Earlier this week I attended the Vision Joplin 2022 Governance Team meeting to explain the priority-based budgeting process to the members of the team. Several departments have returned their project scoring sheets, which are used to score each of their programs against the Results Maps that were previously presented to you, so we are close to moving on to the last step in the program identification process, which will then allow the consultants to package the information, and present it to you for review.

*The most recent update from public works is available by following this link. In addition:

-The pre-bid conference for the CDBG-DR Main Street project was held on Wednesday. Several contractors were in attendance to receive information about the project and the complexities that often come from doing work on public streets in front of businesses, in order to provide a good bid on the project.

-I was informed this week that the trickling filter media used at one of our wastewater treatment plants collapsed. We have another filter on site to continue operation, but staff will be engaging our engineering consultant to put together a bid package to replace the damaged one. The plastic media used in the filter was installed in 1985/86, so it lasted about 30 years, but it will need to be replaced, and the project will be expensive. For your information, the following link will take you to a Wikipedia page that fairly accurately describes what the filter system is used for and how it works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickling_filter. We will keep you posted as the work moves along.

* In planning news:

-The consultants we hired to update our zoning code are almost finished with their review of our comprehensive plan and current zoning regulations. Once complete, they will be able to identify deficiencies in our current zoning code and its relationship to our comprehensive plan, in order to determine our plan of action to update the code. Staff is putting together two committees, one technical committee and one advisory committee, to help guide the update effort. The technical committee will have representation from the building division, planning, public works and other departments that directly enforce and implement the zoning regulations. The advisory committee will have executive/administrative representation, most likely to include one or two members of the zoning & planning commission, myself, and if there is interest among you, one or two council members. If you think you’d like to serve, and have any questions, please let me know and I can work to provide you with additional information. Otherwise, I will continue to provide updates as we make progress.

-We closed today on the purchase of the property adjacent to the new senior citizens’ center, so we will be engaging Bates Architect to design/engineer the additional parking lot space into the overall project. As a reminder, this project is being paid for using CDBG-DR funds.

*Finally, in finance department news:

-Starting January 30th, our external auditors will be on-site to begin their annual audit. We expect them to be here for three to four weeks.

=It is also business license renewal time, which means in the next several weeks finance will be mailing out approximately 3,500 requests for gross receipts sales tax information, to be followed up with about 4,500 bills in the beginning of March so businesses can renew their licenses. As mentioned in a previous update, we are working with our financial software provider to eventually move the business license process online, making it easier for our businesses and our staff to complete this process. My hope is that we will be fully online by the time the license renewal process begins next year.