Should City Residents Pay Farms/Businesses' Real Costs?

 If you caught the “Lisa Show” a.k.a. Cascade City Council meeting Monday night 13 November you heard her read me out for conflating the current main town bridge repair with work essentially ordered by an Iowa Dept. of Transportation (IDOT) Bridge Condition report. That repair now underway was apparently authorized earlier in the summer. There was no discussion of the IDOT report or its potential cost, and either Councilman Riley Rausch or Andy Kelchen said, “Let’s do it.” The following Tuesday a Weber Construction backhoe was already cleaning out the accumulated sand under culvert on Tyler, 1,000 ft. from my house. So you can understand my confusion.  The culvert installed in 2005, so the DOT report listed its condition as “Good;” all it needed was to have the accumulated cleaned out of the waterway.

            At the previous council meeting an IDOT “Bridge Condition Report” was introduced showing various problems on three city bridges: 1) the main span over the North Fork in the middle of town, 2) the culvert, which replaced the bridge just on Tyler St. NE out to River Bend and 3) the Monroe Street Bridge, formerly the main road to Farley. It is now dead ends at Custom Pre-Cast, so the only traffic is to the self-storage and Custom Pre-cast, essentially a private bridge/road.

            When Lisa finished I asked Kelchen “Is Custom Pre-cast in the city limits?”

            “Half of it is; half of it isn’t.” Mr. Kelchen answered and then launched into a tirade on me insisting that his company “pays more taxes than a private residence like mine”; (Duh!) that it supports many other businesses (Bard Concrete, for example), and is beneficial to the town.  He further insisted that the DOT created a private road his family’s business, inferring, I guess, that the city is obligated to repair it.

            I beg to differ on two scores: 1) all the hard surface you and Bard are installing around town is a “benefit” and the city, which has lots of other demands? Question is: should the city fix the bridge, which is going to be expensive because it is old and primarily been used by trucks carrying multi-ton loads of concrete?           

Speaking of demands, the exchange was followed by property owner Allen Knepper coming from Wisconsin to exhort the city to install curb and gutter near his property adjacent to Thomas and DeLong streets. And speaking of bridge and culvert repair, from dawn till well past dusk—the last one returned around 10 p.m. last night—every 15 minutes for the last two days, there has been a multi-ton honey wagon up Tyler Street. How soon is the Tyler Street culvert going to start showing the wear and tear? Question is, should city residents be paying Farmer John's way? No wonder farms are so profitable—city residents pay for all their real costs!