The Plainfield Town Council met on Monday, February 23, 2004. In attendance were Mr. Brandgard, Mr. McPhail, Mr. Fivecoat, Mr. Kirchoff and Mr. Gaddie.
PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE
CONSENT AGENDA
Approval of the minutes of the Town Council meeting of February 9, 2004.
Approval of the second reading of Ordinance No. 02-2004: Rainy Day Fund.
Approval of the 2003 Annual Reports for the Plainfield Fire Department; Department of Communications; Department of Planning and Department of Public Works.
Approval to offer a free family membership (up to four per family) for all full-time Town employees for the Plainfield Recreation Center and Outdoor Aquatic Center per the Director of Parks and Recreation Report dated February 23, 2004.
Approval of the Town Engineer’s Report dated February 19, 2004; Utility Billing Director’s Report dated February 23, 2004; Human Resources Director’s Report dated February 19, 2004 and the Fire Chief’s Report dated February 19, 2004
Mr. McPhail made a motion to approve the Consent Agenda as presented. Second by Mr. Fivecoat. Motion carried.
Mr. Kirchoff said I would like to abstain on item one since I was not present at that meeting. Getting a new PC I did not get item three so I need to abstain on those as well.
PUBLIC HEARINGS
Mr. Brandgard said we have several public hearings tonight. Do we have proof of publication for all three of them?
Mr. Carlucci said yes. The first public hearing tonight is for Seven Points Associates. This is the Browning Investments Keystone’s property project. They are planning to construct an 812,936 square foot spec distribution building on 42 acres in the Airtech Business Park. The estimated value of the construction, land and the building is 15 million dollars. The project is located in the Six Points Tax Increment Financing District and the Plainfield Redevelopment Commission has met and has approved a resolution allowing the abatement to go forward in that TIF district.
I talked to Tom Theobold who is the representative for Browning Investments. He was not going to be able to make it here tonight. I don’t know if Mr. Higbee can tell me if they have filed anything on that new building.
Mr. Higbee said not yet.
Mr. Carlucci said but they have already constructed several buildings out in the industrial park. They plan to move yet this upcoming spring to start construction on that new building.
Mr. Brandgard asked, is there anyone in the audience who would like to address the Council relative to the Seven Points Associates Tax Abatement? Being no one coming forward we will close the public hearing on that abatement.
Mr. Carlucci said the second public hearing is for Griot’s Garage. They are proposing to construct a 100,000 distribution facility on Lot 31 in the Airwest Business Park. They are proposing to create approximately 23 new jobs with an annual payroll of $604,000.00. The estimated value of the project, land and building is 4.5 million. They made a presentation at the last Council meeting. They have started the process through the Plan Commission for Development Plan approval for their building. This project is located in the SR267 Corridor TIF District. The Plainfield Redevelopment Commission held a meeting and adopted a resolution allowing the tax abatement and the tax increment-financing district. This building is going to be located right next to Clark Products, which is next to Earle M. Jorgensen in the Airwest Business Park. We have representatives here tonight if they want to say anything.
Mr. Chris Alexander with Lauth Property Group said we are located at 9777 N. College in Indianapolis. We are going to be the general contractor on this facility. The folks from Griot’s Garage could not come in from Seattle this evening so I’m here to answer any questions. I know we made a presentation at the last meeting. So, I would be happy to answer any questions that you may have.
Mr. Brandgard asked, is there anyone in the audience who would like to address the Council relative to the Griot’s Garage Tax Abatement? Being no one coming forward we will close the public hearing for Griot’s Garage.
Mr. Carlucci said the last public hearing tonight is for Panattoni Development. Panattoni is planning to construct a 498,000 square foot spec distribution building on 28.5 acres. This property is located directly north of the Brylane building, which is, as you know, located on the northwest corner of Stafford and Perry Road. The value of the project, the land and the building is estimated at 9.7 million dollars. This is a spec distribution building and will be the first building that Panattoni plans to construct in Plainfield and Central Indiana too I believe. We have Andy Gerdom here tonight and a Panattoni representative if they would like to address the Council.
Mr. Andy Gerdom with American Consulting said I’m here tonight with Mr. Zoba who has started with Panattoni as their local representative. It is the first building that they have in the Midwest here or at least in this area of the Midwest. There is nothing else in Indiana that I know of so they are happy to be here. They bring forward some great standards of designs and I think you will really be happy with them as a developer here in Plainfield. I’m not going to talk a lot but I will show you real quick what we are thinking about.
Currently we are looking at a tract that is just north of the Prologis building. In fact, it is the ground that used to be owned by Prologis, which Panattoni has purchased. It can hold two buildings. Currently this is the north building of the two being proposed. It is approximately 400 foot in depth. We are looking at somewhere around 1,355 in length, a cross-dock facility and I think you have elevations there of what we are looking at at this time. If there are any other questions, I would be happy to answer them for you.
Mr. McPhail asked, what is the square footage?
Mr. Gerdom said it is around 500,000 now, a little over.
Mr. McPhail asked, how large is the site?
Mr. Gerdom said the site is 28.371 acres.
Mr. Brandgard asked, is there anyone in the audience that would like to address the Council relative to the Panattoni Development Tax Abatement? Being no one coming forward we will close this public hearing and deal with all three as we get farther into the agenda.
BUSINESS FROM THE FLOOR
Mr. Tom Brown said I’m General Manager of United Water here in Indianapolis and the Indianapolis area including Plainfield. I have asked Emily Nichols, our Public Relations and Community Relations Manager for the Indianapolis area to hand out a document that I just quickly want to review with you. It is always good to come before a body like this to talk about awards and that is what I’m here to do tonight is to talk about awards given to the Town of Plainfield as well as United Water for the operation and maintenance of the wastewater treatment facilities here that we run for the Town. The handout that I handed out gives you a brief overview of who we are and what we do for the Town. Some of you are new and I’m sure you are not completely aware of the activities involved. Before I do that I would like to introduce the people from our company that are here. In the back row is Pete Corsaro, who is our Project Manager for the project and Monty Sawyer is a supervisor with us. Dennis Unterreiner is also an operator that works for us here in the facility.
This handout that I just gave you just briefly describes who United Water is. We are formerly known as White River Environmental Partnership or commonly referred to as WREP. It is a name that we are gradually moving away from and beginning to use the name United Water. We are the premier provider of operation and maintenance services for projects all over the United States. We focus primarily on municipal and wastewater utility operations. Here in Plainfield we operate both the water treatment facility and the distribution system for the Town as well as the wastewater treatment facilities and the collection sewers and pumping stations for the Town.
There is an organization called the Indiana Water Environment Association. That was formerly known as the Indiana Water Pollution Control Association. They changed their name this last year but that group is a statewide organization that is centered around water and wastewater professionals. In our business people who have certifications or who are licensed engineers and are focused on this kind of business typically belong to this organization as a trade organization. This group is involved in advancing water quality issues throughout the State. They are organized for the purpose of serving and educating the public at large and its member. Each year they award various presentations or awards to deserving groups for the advancement of water quality and excellent performance in the area of wastewater treatment.
So, that is why we are here tonight. We have received three awards and they are listed here on this sheet. The first one is what is called the Outstanding Device Award. That is one of these three plaques. That is related to a change that we made in the operation of the wastewater facility recently utilizing an old gravity thickener tank and putting it into service with a simple connection and using it to help remove primary sludge. This creates a uniformed primary sludge that we then feed into what is called an anaerobic digester. So, overall it just helps the process of the facility. It was viewed by the IWEA as an outstanding device achievement for the Town and for United Water.
The second award we received is for the Best Annual Report. The utilities across the State submit annual reports for review by a selection board and ours was deemed to be the best in Class 1 for the Deer Path facility. I have extra copies of that report, which I will leave with the Town Manager if any of you would care to take a look at that.
The last is a safety award for Outstanding and Excellent Safety within the facilities. That is something that United Water prides itself in. We have a very very organized, very professional safety program that is administered throughout the Indianapolis area including Plainfield. Our employees regularly receive training in safety and perform drills. We have regular meetings on site with a safety director so our program for several years in a row now has been deemed to be excellent in the eyes of the IWEA.
I also listed here some awards that we received in the past few years. We regularly receive awards every year and we are delighted to do that and except them on behalf of the Township. So, now I would like to give these plaques to you and then you can display them where you would like to.
Mr. Brandgard said it is good to see that the work that has been done especially in the safety area. That is very important. Again, taking an old device and reutilizing it and making it work is great. So, again thank you and thank you for sharing this with us
TOWN MANAGER’S REPORT
Mr. Carlucci said the item that I want to talk to you about has to do with the Inventory Tax. As you recall, late last year the County Council did away with the Inventory Tax and in return increased the EDIT by a quarter of a percent. The next item for the County is to adopt an ordinance. I believe that they are going to do this in March. In that ordinance it is important to the Town because they will have to decide how that money is going to be allocated back to the communities. As you know, Plainfield, Guilford Township, Avon, Washington Township, Brownsburg and Brown Township most of the inventory in the County is located in those townships. What I would suggest, and I’m having H. J. Umbaugh prepare the numbers for us, is I’m asking the Council to recommend to the County Council that we adopt a proportional way of distribution. We get the proportioned amount based on the Inventory Tax that we are losing. That is important because there are some townships here that have no Inventory Tax hardly whatsoever. If you equalize it among every township, every township gets an equal amount, then what it does it punishes the Town of Plainfield and the taxpayers and the ratepayers who have built the infrastructure, both water and sewer, the roads, all of the investment that we have made, that gets distributed to all of the townships whether they have Inventory Tax or not. So, we think it is a matter of fairness for the communities that were generating it and we believe that should come back in a proportionate amount to what ours represented of the total in the County. I would need your approval to prepare the information and get it over to the County Council.
Mr. Brandgard asked, is there consent to move in that direction? Consent given.
Mr. Carlucci said I want to make it clear that the County has not said to us one way or the other what they plan to do but I think we want to be proactive here and make sure that it is done on a proportionate basis and not hurt us and our school system in the school district too. Because they have an Inventory Tax not only from Plainfield but also the Heartland Crossing area, which is pretty substantial too.
REPORTS
Mr. McPhail said I passed out prior to the meeting a financial report on the recreation center. I hope you have had a chance to look at that and Vestal Road. As you might all remember, several months ago we instructed our Town Engineer to move forward on the alternate bid on Vestal Road. We have made preparations to do that. The clearing has been done I believe and the right-of-ways purchased. Utilities are being relocated. We just wanted to make sure that based on the most recent financial information that we had prior to this report that I have given you tonight to make sure that we still had funds available to do that. I believe we have. I think by the time that we get to the end of the project that the cash flow is there. I believe having any luck with the legal system we will recover some of those costs that I have included in this forecast. Some of those are the delay costs and whatnot. I have tried to include all of those that Summit and the other contractor has been able to try to forecast. I believe there are still some of those that we will negotiate. Until we get the project completed it is going to be difficult to have a final number. But it appears that there is enough cash flow to go ahead and finish Vestal Road. I would recommend that we move forward with that and complete that project this spring. I will make that in a form of a motion. Second by Mr. Kirchoff.
Mr. Kirchoff said to bring Mr. Fivecoat and Mr. Gaddie up-to-date on this we basically had the new roundabout at the north end and we swung around there. But this is taking it from there up the hill and completing that corner.
Mr. Gaddie said I noticed today that when they come around the roundabout, they run off into the ditch. I don’t know if it is not wide enough when it heads west or northwest.
Mr. Brandgard said I think it is more of a case that they don’t slow down enough.
Mr. Gaddie said it does come back there quite a bit. I know the fire department has run their equipment around it because I talked to them about that. They said they had to maneuver but they could get around it.
Mr. Kirchoff said this is more at the top of the hill where we bought the property and correcting that line of sight problem.
Mr. Brandgard said we have a motion and a second to approve the alternate bid to complete that as described. If there is no further discussion, all those in favor signify by aye. None opposed. Motion carried.
Mr. McPhail said the next item that I have to report on is the progress in the downtown area and the acquisition of property. As you are well aware, we came to an agreement with Clement Electric. They have actually turned the keys over to that building. I believe they have until March 1. We had indicated to them that the sooner the better because we still plan to use that office to get our setup going with the computers for the recreation center. But that building is now available for us if we are ready to use that. They still have a few items to remove out of the back storage part but the office part is empty and ready to go.
Also, today we reached an agreement with the Orr family on the Riverside Trailer Park. Mr. Daniel has that signed agreement. Mr. Orr is in the audience tonight. I can’t remember who we had authorized to sign that document on behalf of the Town but I would move that we have our Council President sign that to approve that purchase agreement tonight and move forward. Second by Mr. Fivecoat. Motion carried.
Mr. Daniel said since you were talking about Vestal Road just since last week you may recall the efforts we made to find Mr. & Mrs. Bear for the one property on the north side of the right-of-way. We got a right of entry from them some time ago but in the meantime had not received any other word on selling us the right-of-way. Just last week I got it signed from Mr. & Mrs. Bear, an acceptance of the offer, on a very very small piece of right-of-way. So, it is the last piece there.
On Dan Jones Road we closed two of those properties. We only had two that did not close. We paid the money into the court and they are in the process of certifying the right-of-way for the Dan Jones Road project.
Mr. Brandgard said while we are talking about the Vestal Road area around the aquatic center where are we relative to looking at the property where the dump was located? I know we were considering purchasing that but it was contingent upon how much liability that dump would give us.
Mr. Daniel said we had a meeting with IDEM. I have also talked with Mrs. Elmore a couple of times. IDEM has indicated that they would like to work with the Town on that. We have looked into that and they are supposed to be sending us a couple of copies of cover letters that they have sent other communities, which we do not have yet. Cindy Kirk from our office who does environmental work is going to work with it. She has examined the statutes but we are waiting on a little more information from IDEM. They would like to work with the Town on that especially because I think the Town would probably disturb that less than anyone else would. That is the discussions that we had over there.
Mr. Carlucci said that was in November that we met with IDEM. There are different levels of environmental analysis that you can do out there. I think it would probably be prudent to us to do at least a Phase I. Mostly it is just paperwork. I think we ought to take a look at whatever paperwork is out there.
Mr. Belcher said when we did the Alexander Print building that we purchased, there was a similar type of situation. They went back into the records and maps that you couldn’t imagine still existed out there and put them all together to get all of the information they could about that. It gets put into the public record and a report made out of that. That determines at that point whether you want to go forward at all. A Phase 2 might be more physical, digging at the site or something like that.
Mr. Carlucci said IDEM’s recommendation was to at least do a Phase I. A Phase II would do core samples but I would suggest that we already know there is trash down there. I don’t particularly want to go to that kind of an expense on a piece of property where the real issue is can we get a waiver or whatever kind of letter that will protect us. I can guarantee you what typically happens or sometimes happens is that the Town buys this piece of property and now all of a sudden IDEM is more interested in getting it fixed than they were before. There have been consent decrees on that property for a long time with the previous owners. They don’t have any money and they can’t find anybody to buy it so you can have all of the consent decrees you want. That’s why the Town and the Township and Hendricks County stepped in to stabilize part of that landfill.
Mr. Kirchoff asked, how much damage did we have on the flooding?
Mr. Belcher said I had some photographs taken and then delivered to me that showed that the retaining wall that they built out of basically chain link fence, boxes and riprap that it began to go around the back of that. So, it wasn’t high enough to protect against the flooding that we had. So, it has begun to come apart, the repairs that were done by the State and the County.
Mr. Carlucci said I believe Mr. McGillem contacted Mr. Ayers about that because that is still in the County. We will have to get in touch with them and find out where they are.
Mr. McGillem said I contacted Mr. Ayers before the snow and ice and he was going to get out there and try to take a look at it to see how much damage there was and get back with us. I have not heard back from them yet.
Mr. Kirchoff said we certainly want to take that into consideration.
Mr. Carlucci said if the Council has no problem with this, I think we ought to at least do a Phase I. If we don’t do that, it may show us something or just may reinforce what we already know about it. But it is the minimum that we ought to be doing. It is information that we can use for ourselves but then we can take it back to IDEM and show them what we found.
Mr. Brandgard asked, is there consent? Consent given.
Mr. Isaacs said for the last several weeks we have been looking at the new software and the server. After looking at several different companies I think in your packet of information this evening you had a recommendation of the one that we felt would provide the best service for now and on into the future. We would like to get approval from the Council to move forward with that and for someone to be designated as a signer of that particular agreement.
Mr. McPhail said I don’t know if I missed it in your report but I couldn’t find the cost of that package.
Mr. Isaacs said I would ask Mr. Bill Castetter if he would come up and share some of that with us. Mr. Castetter has put together an extensive report on that.
Mr. Castetter said from the cost standpoint, the very final page of that report, listed three companies and three total costs for one-time expenditures as well as the annual expense of each system. It is a little different document than the first few so it probably comes up a little late but just let me review those.
The company that is our current vendor is offering an upgrade to our current system. We have a $65,000.00 investment in our current system and they are looking to upgrade at about $80,000.00. So, we would end up with about $145,000.00 invested in an upgrade with our current vendor. The documents that you have pretty well indicate that we don’t believe our current vendor is the way to go forward with this software.
We also looked at SSI Software Solutions out of Lebanon, Ohio. Their cost came in at about $118,000.00 one time and $12,000.00 each year for support. It is a very nice system. It is up-to-date. It is state-of-the-art. It would probably do the work that we want it to do. That was the second vendor that we looked at. We were all very well impressed with this vendor.
Then we took at look at what is called MUNIS. We looked at it on the internet. We were pretty impressed so we had them come in and were more impressed. Their product is pretty much the same as the Lebanon, Ohio company had to offer, however, it is kind of steroids, if you will, compared to that product. It just does a lot more. The search capabilities are there. It offers a lot of products down the road that we may not need currently but they will be there when we do need them. Then we can pick and choose from the menu of products. Their cost came in at $117,000.00 and about $12,000.00 annually.
So, I think if you look at the three numbers, what stands out to me is that the $80,000.00 number, which is an upgrade, is indicative of what we would get. We are going to get what we pay for here. The other two vendors I’m just amazed that they are about $1,000.00 apart. However, one of them is a lot more product. So, we are looking at a one-time expense of $117,000.00. Almost all of them agreed to take payments so you could pay this over a couple of years, if that is of interest, and an annual expense of $12,000.00. There are two options on this particular product. The two options are $2,250.00 each per year. One of them allows internet access by employees, which means we can put all of the payroll information, insurance information, etc. on the internet and allow employees to go there and look at that information. The second product is an internet applicant for citizens. So, that the citizens can go on the internet and look at their utility bills and their utility consumption or anything else that we may want to give a citizen to look at. A complaint form we may want to track, those kinds of items are in the systems. I put those as options for January 1, 2005. We are biting off a pretty chunk with the resources that we have here. So, we are looking to do something in the June time frame with the software and get that up and running as well. And then bring on the other two items in January.
A big piece of this pie, if you will, is the utility billing. We are looking to bring that back in house. We didn’t want to have two systems. They need to be integrated. This company has the utility billing package. That is totally integrated with everything else that they do. It is a very good package. Hopefully, there is enough detail in what I gave you but I wanted to make sure that everything was there. That is where we are talking about going. We are asking that you give us approval for the MUNIS software. They have about 1,000 installations of this software around the country. They have 275 employees. Their office is in Maine and they are owned by a company out of Texas, Tyler Technologies. Anderson, Indiana uses the product. East Chicago uses the product. Elkhart uses the product.
I talked to Anderson, Indiana and their indication was everything they are just installing so they have about three of the modules in. Everything was going very smooth. The product they are giving up they had for 20 years. So, it is like night and day to them. They are very happy but they just wish it could go faster. I think that is indicative of the amount of resources that we have to put these kinds of things in.
In East Chicago they were having some technical difficulties but after hearing their size and the way that they are implementing the product it didn’t surprise me. They have about 400 clients and we have about 130 people to get computers for and keep going. They have about 400. They have 19 servers and these servers are clustered together, which means they are attached and they try to run together. They are of different vintages and different software. To have that kind of platform already and have someone come in and try to install something it didn’t surprise me that they were having technical problems. That did not bother me whatsoever. I understand why they are having it. We don’t have that situation. While we have implementations from three or four different outsources who have chosen to do it differently they haven’t got so far off the path that we can’t bring it back together, which is what I have been about since I have been here trying to bring that into something that looks alike everywhere. So, I don’t think we will have any technical difficulties. I think the most important thing is there are 40 days of training and consulting. They start over almost and give you their expert opinion on how you should be doing this. If we have something that maybe we haven’t been doing just exactly the way that we want to or the way that someone else is doing better, we are going to hear about that and get a chance to say that is the way that we would like to do it or no we don’t want to do it that way. But we will at least get it out in front of us. It is a chance to kind of start over with the applications that we are already running, which happens to be two different payroll applications and the accounting application. All of the other applications will be new to us, the utility billing, fixed assets, those will be new to us so it will help to know how another 1,000 customers are setting those up. Then we become one of those 1,000. We become one of that group that we can talk to about problems that we are having on a day-to-day basis if we are having any. At least there are other folks that are in here with us, this user group. It will be a big benefit to us. I think there is a lot there. Both of the parties that I have talked to, East Chicago and Anderson indicated that Anderson said they looked for four months and this was the vendor that gave them the most for their dollar. East Chicago said the same thing that they looked for quite some time and, in fact, they did not want to come into the Microsoft fold. They didn’t want to move but they finally did because of the cost and what they were getting for the money was so good. I would be glad to answer any other questions. I kind of covered what is in the document.
Mr. Kirchoff said, if I could add a couple of comments. By the time that I got named to the committee they looked at the first two so I have only seen the MUNIS but I was impressed with that. Mr. Castetter and I talked today. I support this recommendation and I think it is the right way to go. Two meetings okay I asked about where we were on fixed assets and this provides us the software to go forward with that, which we sorely need to do. The other thing you know how unhappy we have been with our utility billing. We want a good system brought in to do that and do that right so that when we take it over, we have raised the level of service and we can do that with this software. I’m not sure that I would think that we would necessarily be ready in a year to do those two options. We have a long way to bring the utility billing up to the point that I think we want to provide those services on line. I think we may want to revisit that down the road as far as a day is concerned. The only other thing I would say is I didn’t pick this up when I read the report but it seems to me that the annual expense is over 10% and that seems like an awfully high annual expense. My history has been you don’t pay those kinds of annual ongoing expenses. In 10 years you have paid for this system again.
Mr. Castetter said it is negotiable and actually what we are asking for is to negotiate with MUNIS. They have to come to our way of thinking or we are probably not going to do this because we have SSI, which we were all pretty happy with. We want to negotiate something with MUNIS. Sanderson was actually about $9,000.00 a year because they were split in two payments. When we added those payments together, they were about $9,000.00 a year but these vendors to me appear to recognize small cities and towns as not having any technology expertise and they just say we have to do it all for you so you are going to pay us for that. And those phone calls are going to cost you. They are looking to be called for every little thing there is. Part of my reason for being here is to do those little things and when we have bigger items, then that is where we go. We should be able to negotiate that kind of a thing. I don’t think we will have trouble with that. I didn’t doctor the numbers at all. I put them in the way that they came. This happened over a week or 10 days for them to make a proposal so we hustled them up pretty good. I believe that we could do some work there. There is no doubt in my mind that we can do that.
Mr. Kirchoff asked, Lois are you comfortable with the utility billing side?
Ms. Burgner said absolutely.
Mr. Brandgard said as I read through this, the thing that intrigues me and I really like is the fact that whether we do it next year or the following year is being able to go on line with this so that the individual ratepayers can go in there and look and see. And also if you have a complaint or a problem, you can submit it that way. It is going the way that I would like to see it go.
Mr. McPhail asked, what about hardware?
Mr. Castetter said I have a hardware number in there. Again, it was about the same for the two vendors that we liked. We do have to change the hardware. We are actually getting away from the UNIX platform and getting into the Microsoft platform. So, we are changing that platform that will actually have the two servers downstairs on the same platform. Right now they don’t talk to each other. The reason that the cost in the hardware is in a little bit of an estimate right now is one of the things that we will be able to do is back up the data. If they look alike, you can use the same backup kinds of programs and hardware to do that. So, having these look alike you can buy one set of hardware rather than two. That is one of the things that happens when you decentralize the thing. Pulling this together a little bit from a hardware standpoint will save us some money. I have the money in there for the hardware. I have seen a couple of numbers from MUNIS on what it takes to run their hardware and I think we are well within the number.
I might mention that you talked about leaving this citizen’s request thing off for a while, which is fine. On the East Chicago home page, the website there is a picture of the controller and underneath his picture is his name and then it says MUNIS program. You click on MUNIS program and it lists all things for the citizens that you can come in on the internet and look at and see. And all of the things for the employees that you can come in and look at and see. The citizens included building permits, things of that nature. Some that we don’t have that East Chicago does but they had that up and running and it was very neat to be able to see it live so they were doing it.
Mr. Kirchoff said I support it but I just think we ought to walk before we run. We have provided some very poor service and got a lot of complaints in certain areas so let’s do this right.
Mr. Brandgard said what Mr. Kirchoff is saying is let’s get the thing up and running and then bring the other stuff in when we are sure we understand what we are doing. The ultimate goal is to provide all of those services, which is great.
I just have a question. When we talk about servers, I don’t know what level of server we are talking about, but I know we have a local company that builds and ships servers from here. What Hitachi does out there may be far more than what we need but it might be worthy to talk to them to see what they have. And if they have something that fits with the proper price.
Mr. Castetter said I have priced Compaq and Dell. They are the two that I have looked at but I have no trouble taking a look at that. The reason Compaq and Dell is because it allows us to standardize across all of our offices. The fire station has servers, the police station has servers, we have servers, the recreation center will have servers. I don’t disagree with looking at Hitachi but bringing another product in now we are stringing it out again in terms of having different products.
Mr. Brandgard said it is just something to look at. I’m not saying that you go that way. I fully understand what you are saying.
Mr. Kirchoff made a motion to authorize the Clerk/Treasurer to proceed with the purchase of the software for the MUNIS software system not to exceed $117,000.00 and to begin the negotiations.
Mr. Brandgard said add to that to leave the option open for SSI, if we are going to go into negotiations. If we are going to go into negotiations, I don’t want to lock in one and that takes our ability to negotiate out of it.
Mr. Kirchoff said MUNIS would be number one and SSI the backup. Second by Mr. McPhail. Motion carried.
Mr. Isaacs said we need to talk about the server as well because in order to operate this software we have to increase the server capacity.
Mr. Castetter said I have the server hardware for the accounting system in the $117,000.00 so that is in there. The other server that we have down there is called the NT, which handles the file and print services for everyone else in the building. That server, the space utilization on that, there is five percent of that life. It is four years old and I’m having to administer that every day so that we can keep people running. We need to replace that. The cost on that is $9,500.00. We don’t really have a choice here. It doesn’t have any memory. It doesn’t have anything to speak of. Every day I have to take something off so that everybody can run. I’m asking people to delete e-mails. We are asking people to take pictures and files off. It’s just not the way we ought to run our business. This is another
nine thousand dollar item but these two will look alike and we will be able to find some equipment that will do jobs for both of them that will save us in the long run.
Mr. Kirchoff asked, how soon can we do this?
Mr. Castetter said we need to do it right away. I would like to get it ordered. I think it ought to get here in a couple of weeks. We can get that done a long time before the other happens.
Mr. Brandgard said this has been a problem for several years. Nobody brought a solution forward on it.
Mr. Castetter said it was a problem when I walked in the door. If I could have replaced it that day, I would have.
Mr. Isaacs said we need to add more workstations, which is going to compound that problem as well as moving forward into the future at some point.
Mr. Kirchoff asked, will the GIS be on this?
Mr. Castetter said I’m not sure where GIS sits right now. I don’t know where it is going to end up being housed. If we need to house it on the server that this nine thousand dollars talks about, we can house it on that server. It was originally talked about being housed at the police station. I don’t know exactly where and what this animal looks like to talk about where it is going to be housed. I don’t know if it is oracle database. I think it might be. If it runs on an oracle database, it may be as well off being housed where it is and we get to it via the internet. But if it not, and it can be a sequel database, then we can talk about housing it here. So, we have to figure out just where we want to set that piece of the pie.
Mr. Kirchoff said that is why we have you on Staff is for us to think about those things so we just don’t do it a step at a time but we look futuristic. We know GIS is coming and I’m not sure what else is coming but we need to be thinking along those lines.
Chief Brinker said I haven’t seen specs or anything but it is going to have a faster processor and hopefully it is going to have a better storage space. But at $9,500.00 that would be my biggest question is what kind of storage are we looking at here?
Mr. Castetter said 72 gigabits. I think he is trying to give me some hints about how big this GIS database is. I haven’t seen it and I don’t know what it resides but before we order anything we will see what that is going to do and what it looks like and where it is going to sit.
Mr. Kirchoff asked, do we need to know that before we take the next step?
Mr. Castetter said we have to replace this server in this house now so that we can get some space. The ability to add space to that server is not a problem. The processing speed could be so we need to take a look at that and I can do that in a day and I don’t have any trouble doing that. I just have not been able to see the specs on the GIS.
Mr. Belcher said I have been trying to get with the person at Schneider to get with Mr. Castetter so that they can sit down. And I don’t have the right person’s name yet but that will hopefully be coming soon, within the week possibly. And they can sit down and talk it over. Mr. Castetter will have a full understanding of the exact size and the scope of the database that we would be handling with GIS.
Mr. Kirchoff asked, how much are we going to be doing here and how much will Schneider keep?
Mr. Belcher said that was more part of the long-term maintenance. In other words do we want to hire people in house to do that or allow a lot of that to be maintained outside? That was the direction that we were headed initially, the maintenance somewhere else.
Mr. Kirchoff asked, and the data would remain here?
Mr. Belcher said yes.
Mr. Cecil Whitaker with Schneider said we deal with all sizes of databases so when we look at this thing, I think one of the discussions that we will want to have is where is this thing likely to go? Obviously, you can have additional hardware storage capacity but we will want to look and probably talk to the software vendor in terms of what they see in five to 10 years down the road and how people are currently using it. There are really some great cutting edge things that can be used with GASB34 and those kinds of things that you will definitely want to have this plugged into. So, I think based where you are now the time for this is probably as soon as possible.
Mr. Castetter said it is not cost effective to add space to the server that we currently have. The server that we are talking about getting and adding space to that is cost effective. We might decide that GIS ought to sit on our wide area network and contest with things that we are doing. Or we might want it to sit outside our wide area network and not contest with things that we are doing based on how it compresses maps and what number of things are down the road. We could say we are going to put it in here and three months from now it has gotten so big that we don’t want it in here, we want it somewhere else. I think our options are open here. We can do it either way. We just need to have a little more data about the GIS files.
Mr. McPhail said I don’t have any questions on the storage. You have alluded to speed. If the GIS needed more speed than what you are looking at and wouldn’t be adequate, is that what you said?
Mr. Castetter said you can always add a processor also. This is a single processor server. It can become a dual processor. When I talked about speed, my concern for the speed is how good are the compression tools now that make these things smaller as you send them out somewhere. That is my concern for the speed. I think there are some pretty good tools. I just don’t know what is being utilized.
Mr. Whitaker said we have people who do it both ways without dimensioning the service. This is just something that we have to do as a corporation, we have to continually upgrade ours all of the time with the software. Some people choose to say maybe it is better for you to continually be upgrading the software and having it on your system as long as our access is unhindered to it. The access would be through the web and you could get any data you wanted at any time. That may be a way that you choose. Particularly in fast growing systems they do this. Other times people say no we need to upgrade our own on a regular basis anyway. It makes more sense for us to house it. That is the kind of discussion that you would have with the GIS. I don’t think you can go wrong with whatever you do right now but there are a lot of options that you have that will not be limited by the decision on taking care of a needy problem.
Mr. Kirchoff made a motion to authorize Mr. Castetter to move forward with purchasing a new server not to exceed $10,000.00. And that you have this meeting with Schneider very quickly to come back to tell us what you are seeing there. Second by Mr. McPhail. Motion carried.
Mr. Brandgard said thank you for your reports. They are very good.
Mr. Prince said I didn’t have an annual report on the Consent Agenda. I just wanted to make sure that everybody got that.
The first topic that I wanted to discuss tonight is at the last meeting there was a misunderstanding, a miscommunication probably that came from my department concerning how we were going to handle marketing, advertising and sponsorship of the Parks and Recreation Department. I had put in a memorandum to the Council regarding that and I wanted to discuss that briefly. It is kind of a focus on how we were going to approach that. I formalized a marketing plan for this year. So far in house we have attempted to bring in a radio advertising campaign that is highly targeted to a group that we think is likely to attend the recreation center. We have also worked out a print media deal with the Hendricks County Flyer that I will be asking you to comment on a little bit later. That is all that has really been done for marketing outside of some specific advertising later in the year when we move back in in the fall. We are kind of front loaded here. The radio advertising campaign was proposed for Splash Island only. If it was approved, it would begin now and end in August. The print media situation was a trade, which gives us newspaper advertising through the end of the year. That was really all that was planned for 2004. I went on to mention in that memo that we would still intend on using Avatar Communications to finish up our website and for some expertise in areas that we don’t have experience with when those arise. Working with Mr. Carlucci we have identified a few activities that we think they may be useful in and one is with our grand opening of the recreation center and some things like that.
Mr. Carlucci said one other item that we don’t have a lot of expertise in is we have the local reporters like Carol and Bruce but where Avatar can really help us out is with the electronic media. We have learned from experience to keep them at arms length if we can. That is not a negative way but they are run by deadlines that are not necessarily deadlines that we have. Their reporting is not as in depth as we get from the local reporters. In fact, Chris sent me an e-mail today on some dates and times and Mr. Prince and Chris and I are going to get together. There is a roll for Avatar in all of this because for some reason we are just not strong enough and they are. But in terms of what Mr. Prince is going to do with the promotion this is where his expertise lies and like he said we need to front-load this quickly. It seems like we are bringing a lot of items in here but that is kind of the rush that we are in because we are moving toward that date happily. I did notice today that they are putting the roof on, the green part of the roof. Mr. Prince had a lot of these on the Consent Agenda and I said no I don’t want them on the Consent Agenda because some of these items need to be discussed and he agreed 100%.
Mr. Prince said I’m sure you were able to read that memo. Basically, what my department is asking the Council to consider and possibly give consent to is we continue on with some of our marketing and advertising endeavors. One example you will see tonight is where we actually traded and no money changed hands. Our goal is to work strategically to get a lot of our word and message out there for free. We are having a pretty successful time so far, if we can move ahead. We are going to reach some areas where we don’t have the expertise to carry it out with and then we will call on Avatar to help us out with that, if that would get your approval on that. Since we do have a lot going on in the Town what I would propose is as these deals come out, I give you a report on them, a very detailed report, and we attempt to put that on the Consent Agenda. If a Council member has an objection, he can pull it off and discuss it. If there is one that looks pretty straightforward, we can just go on through with it as these things come about with our department keeping you informed exactly what we are doing in this area.
Mr. McPhail said I might comment that Mr. Prince made a presentation at the Chamber of Commerce last week. It was in reference to the sponsorship program that he is working on. We seemed to get a lot of support from the community and feedback. I don’t know how much he has gotten. He might want to comment on that but I certainly got some comments back that I believe that we have corporate citizens that want to participate. The presentation that he made was more of things that would bring income into us but yet get that corporate sponsor a little exposure while they are with company activities. Or get the reduced price to have a company function and be able to get their name on the sponsor board, etc. Am I conveying that right Mr. Prince?
Mr. Prince said I’m going to touch on that tonight. I tried to move through three things pretty quickly. Back in front of us tonight would be the Radio Disney proposal. We thought last time this would give you two weeks to think about that and ask you to move forward with that tonight. I brought some data back in at the last meeting and I tried to go from memory and I said don’t hold me to that. But I did get some updated information from Disney from the end of July last year through January 22, 2004 Radio Disney generated 19,319 calls from zip code 46168. The total “317” area code was 651,304 phone calls that generated from Radio Disney to a call center in Orlando. They have provided more data in our target market. If you can believe this, which is two to 12 years old, there is a time period that happens to coincide with the end of school to six o’clock. If kids are listening to the radio, 75% of them are listening to Radio Disney. Also, their moms are listening with them. That is what the data points out. You got to meet my daughter the last meeting. When I went in to leave tonight, she had Radio Disney on the stereo in the bedroom. I would ask that if it would please the Council that we move forward with that.
Mr. Brandgard said I’m pretty comfortable with it. If it works, it is a good deal. The numbers are phenomenal on that. Are there any other comments?
Mr. McPhail said I know that we need to fill up the recreation center.
Mr. Prince said we have 12 weeks before opening day. I think I mention in there that if you could approve it, we would have Mr. Daniel look at the document on behalf of the Town.
Mr. McPhail said, as always, I’m concerned that we get the counsel’s review.
Mr. Brandgard asked, is there consent subject to counsel’s review? Consent given.
Mr. Kirchoff asked, is it all in the budget?
Mr. Prince said yes.
Mr. McPhail made a motion to have counsel review the contract with Radio Disney and have Council member Mr. Gaddie be the signatory on the agreement. Second by Mr. Fivecoat. Motion carried.
Mr. Prince said next in a similar arrangement is an agreement to the Hendricks Flyer to provide newspaper advertising at a deep discount. I did not bring mine with me. I know it is in your package. Basically, we are getting $6,350.00 worth of newspaper advertising. We are trading services for that in its entirety. No money changes hands. They are going to purchase 400 tickets to Splash Island at full value. They are buying a sponsorship on a sponsorship sign that I hope you approve right after this. Their company is interested in an event at Splash Island Water Park, which would be traded out at our list price value for that advertising, if that would be satisfactory.
Mr. McPhail said I know what it looks like but I couldn’t open the sponsorship board.
Mr. Kirchoff said that was the only thing that I couldn’t open.
Mr. Fivecoat said I couldn’t open it.
Mr. Brandgard asked, is there consent? Consent given.
Mr. Prince said here is a picture of the sponsorship board. I have a few extra to share here, if you couldn’t open it up. This is a sponsorship recognition board. This proposed sign would be on the deck of Splash Island. This sponsorship sign holds what we call yellow level sponsors. That is the yellow line across the top. We have blue level sponsors. There is an opportunity for 30 sponsorships on this board. These would be Splash Island alone. It would go from April to September. Like I said we have people interested with them already. This sign is themed like the rest of the signs in the aquatic center. That is how you see the design that we have. This sign matches the rest of the signs that are being designed and will be fabricated for the rest of Splash Island with the building and the facility. As you can see Pelican Pete is our mascot. He is off there to the right. I also passed out the proposed fees for that for you to look at as well. If this would please you, we would ask for approval for that tonight as well or if you want time, I would certainly understand that.
Mr. Brandgard said, as most people know I’m not one that is in too much in favor of the advertising stuff in the parks. But I think something like this is tasteful. It is not banners everywhere. As long as we keep it up, I think I can go along with that.
Mr. Kirchoff asked, do you have a sense of where it would be?
Mr. Prince said I know where it is going to go but it is awful hard to describe. In a facility as big as ours the sign is not obtrusive. This one is 12 feet wide. It is about six feet high. When it is mounted in the ground, it will be in a landscape berm. It will be surrounded by plantings. It will not hit you in the face when you walk in. The larger sponsorship signs on here are about two feet by 18 inches. The lower ones are about 12’ x 18’, which is the size of a regulatory sign on the road, i.e., “do not pass”, etc. I think we mentioned way back in the January meeting that we are hoping to use some of the revenues off that to help with our website and help with some of our marketing endeavors. Again, attempting to get those advertising and marketing dollars down to as close to zero as we possibly can.
Mr. Fivecoat said I had a conversation with Mr. Prince the other day and he showed me on the drawings over there at the aquatic center where it was going to go and how the landscaping was going to be. It looks very nice.
Mr. McPhail said you got positive feedback from the chamber and we need that.
Mr. Brandgard asked, is there consent? Consent given.
And again we didn’t want to create any misunderstanding at the last meeting. We just needed to have a better understanding.
Mr. Prince said I’m sorry about that and I’m glad I could clarify that for you.
Mr. Jason Castetter said I sent you a memo in the report stating that Governor O’Bannon had put into a bill last year the Indiana Underground Plant Protection Services. This is a service that is done by a non-profit organization. For an excavator they have to call the “1-800DIG” or the “Indyunderground.” With that the Indiana Underground then in return calls utilities. We are not part of that Indiana Underground right now. We are one of the utilities that do not get called. So, when an excavator gets on site, he calls the “1-800” number and they call all of the utilities minus ours so we are unprotected at that time that the digging is going on. This is a group effort. They are trying to get the whole State involved with this by mandating that all utilities join this. So, when someone calls they will reach out to all utilities and everybody will be protected. Mr. Belcher, Mr. Isaacs and myself met with an Indiana Underground representative last week. The information that we need to give them is a mapping system. It is a polygram I do believe that it is called that we can do an outline of our utilities and then they take that information and base any locates on that mapping system. The locates they call are a ticket. These tickets we found are going to be charged to the Town of Plainfield for every utility that they locate. It is sixty-five cents per ticket. To give you an idea last year in Guilford Township there were 3,900 locates called to Guilford Township. To give you an idea of the surrounding areas there was 9,000 in Washington Township and 392 in Liberty Township. So, we are up and growing. Any time a contractor gets out there to do work we are going to be called for a locate. That will be sixty-five cents per ticket.
Mr. McPhail asked, does that include the cost to locate?
Mr. Castetter said that does not include the cost to locate, equipment or anything we would need to do that locate. It could be a very expensive budget item. It is something that we are looking at now. It is coming down the pipe. They are asking the deadline to become a member is August 31st of this year.
Mr. Brandgard said it is one of those things that is a good thing. I just don’t like it mandated especially when it is quote a non-profit organization out there doing it. But anyway it is good and it saves big dollars later on I think. Or at least it puts the liability on the person who has a ticket and hits something.
Mr. Carlucci said we can also control who is out there locating. We have utilities both inside the Town, a specific boundary and we have utilities outside the Town. But if they are down at Heartland Crossing, does it have anything to do with us?
Mr. Castetter said that is a different township.
Mr. Carlucci said Heartland Crossing is not a different township. It can be.
Mr. Castetter said it does not have our utilities in that township. We give them a map that borders our utility area and when they call for a dig that would specify us being in that polygram system where we needed to locate. It would rule out Heartland Crossing because we do not have any utilities in that area.
Mr. Isaacs said that has improved considerably. It was a 900-foot grid and that has been narrowed down to a 200-foot strip to where they can actually pin point the utilities that close. The sixty cent charge is for every time that they call that we have facilities in that area that they send a ticket out that Mr. Castetter was talking about. So, we will get that charge. And then there will be a cost to go out and locate it. So, whether you decide to do that by a contractor or you decide to do it in house there will be a cost to that.
Mr. Kirchoff asked, so this doesn’t necessarily put us in holy-moly then?
Mr. Isaacs said it does. Actually the mandate that we were talking about there when I served on the board at IUPPS we were trying to get that accomplished then five years ago or longer. I guess that has been 10 years ago and it is just now happening. So, what it does is it requires every utility that owns underground facilities to be a part of the Indiana Underground Plant Protection. A lot of that is safety just from the aspect of the contractor out digging. The contractor still has the responsibility every time he puts something in the ground to excavate to make the call. In the past if you were not a member of that, then they would say these are the utilities that we call. You will have to contact any other utilities outside of that. You have two days in which to locate it once they call in and then the locate is good for 20 days total.
Mr. Kirchoff asked, have we been doing this ourselves?
Mr. Castetter said we have done it in the past. Right now United Water is doing that as part of the contract. But we have done that in the past. To give you an idea United Water had 1,100 calls last year on locates. IUPPS is reporting to us that there are 3,900 calls in Guilford Township. We don’t have utilities in all of Guilford Township but out of those 3,900 calls which ones were in Plainfield that had our utilities that we didn’t get called? The contractor picks up and calls the “1-800” number and figures all utilities are going to be called so we were unprotected on a percentage of those calls and where those were we don’t know. That’s all that I have. I just wanted you to know that was coming down the pipe, if you were not aware of that.
Mr. Brandgard asked, what was being put in along Perry Road?
Mr. Castetter said I saw SBC and Hendricks County Power both out there today and I did not stop to see what was going on out there. I don’t know if this is part of it but they were putting fiber optics in for the Galyan’s headquarters from Stafford Road to Perry. I don’t know if this was part of that or not because I remember they were north of there today.
Mr. Brandgard said from where I saw it they were north.
Mr. Castetter said I did bring an agreement with the IUPPS and the bylaws. If it is okay, I will give it to Mr. Daniel and he can start the review process. We have until August 31st before we have to become a member. There is a $200.00 waiver if we were to join before the end of the month; however, I thought it would not be proper to give Mr. Daniel this paperwork in such a short time.
Mr. Brandgard said I wanted to thank Chief Brinker for the display of the new vehicles and their markings. They look good. I like the light package. There is no reason that people shouldn’t be able to see in the daylight let alone at night. At the same time I appreciate you going ahead and getting the ID cards for the Council. They out pretty decent.
Mr. Belcher said I have my annual report that I would like to give you. The Power Point presentation was also on your disk. I have that and would like to hook that up.
Mr. Brandgard said while we are doing this and now that we have the technology I would like to see us go ahead and use the computer and screen as a presentation meeting rather than using the hard copy. I think it would work better. That way it would save a few trees and I won’t have to carry as much paper home.
Mr. Belcher said I would like to see that the only hard copy that you would get would be the annual reports. The few graphs that you might find in there that sort of jump off the page would be seeing the growth of some of the different warehousing buildings, etc. that you will find in the middle of the report. It is amazing to me sometimes to see how much the Town has grown. In a graphical form it just jumps off the page for you.
To give you a little bit of background but not take too much of your time the geographic information system we are about half way through a two-year project. It started some time ago and the collection of data is obviously the large cost in this project. I have learned as we have gotten into this, the accuracy of the data is what determines the cost of the data. It makes sense when you think about it. We got very good photography and some of you have that loaded on your laptops. Looking at the photo being able to zoom down into the ground makes a big difference at the elevation of the plane taking the photograph. The lower you are the more photos, the more compilation, the more cost. So, we pay a lot for those but the return on that investment is great. That’s were we are now. Since we started the project to now a couple of things have changed in the world that we live in. One is the way that people use cell phones……………
[Tape one concluded at this point and time and tape two resumed as follows with Mr. Belcher speaking:]
Mr. Belcher said……………was very much common in the industry with how they would collect the data. As I understand it, and I’m not an expert on this at all, but mainly it would be done in the office by using the air photography photos on the computer screen and an address range that might be collected from several different sources, everything from an emergency address guide to a TIGER file or other files that are out there. The computer technicians would look at a range of addresses on a street and see 10 homes and they know the address ranges and they would assign those address ranges to those homes in the most logical fashion. They would do some quality control, obviously, but that is how we would collect the addresses. I know I’m over-simplying this but that is the basic method that they would do that. Another key point since we started this is the funding for cell phones has gone into the State government now. It is working its way through in a really good way to County government, emergency service government and then also if we are lucky enough, to local towns, etc. to help fund the accuracy of cell phone data and the ability to locate people who might call from cell phones that need help and that are not at a particular address. So, locating those people when they are somewhere out in the field or something like that has caused a lot more funding to be generated and pushed toward that goal. I’m here tonight to ask you to look at the ability to go to a higher level of detail in our addressing, basically a field level verification, which involves people being out there walking the streets, actually looking at homes. And taking that same data I believe the computer technician would give them, which helps them speed up the process. But still it takes a person in the field physically looking at structures and saying okay this is where the address is to where this building is and making sure that it matches what they found in the office. That also brings up other issues like what about homes that sit way back off the road and have a very long driveway. The address the old way would have shown it somewhere along that street but an emergency service call would have had a tough time finding that home. Especially if it was covered by vegetation in terms of the woods or something like that. These slides are a way to try to help us understand where they were going.
There are a lot of different terms on there. MSAG is the master street address guide, CAD is the computerated dispatching. And this all goes back to the ability of our dispatch people to be accurate when they dispatch somebody to a run knowing that the computer will then generate a map possibly that is the best route to that location and be very confident in it. We have private roads, we have long driveways, we have public streets and we have roads on the State property. There are lots of different roads that have to be classified and actually routed in terms of lengths, etc.
I understand that this slide was an example of how in the old way you might see breaks in a roadway because of offsets like that. The computerated dispatch, if somebody doesn’t field verify those, someone could be sent to the wrong direction, etc. in terms of trying to find an address.
This slide helped me a lot in that it showed one large parcel. It looks like a farm of some sort. There are many buildings on the site. It could have one address or it could have many addresses. A field verification would allow us to now know if somebody is in the back building. If they have a problem and make a call, it is going to make it a lot easier to find them in an emergency situation than if we only had one address along the street for that particular property.
This is a typical neighborhood. I think what they are showing here is that the blue dots and the yellow dots might be the difference between field verified and non-field verified data. The computer technician might have said this one makes sense and these don’t. These need to be checked by somebody actually looking at the front door and verifying that on the mailbox or something where those addresses exist. Again, the whole thing is moving toward the accuracy level. I don’t think they would ever be 100% but I think they are telling us that they are going to get a lot closer to that.
Again, quality control I suppose is the main thing about this, the iterated process between the people in the field that are going to look at front doors. They are going to send that data back to the office. They will probably electronically collect it too at the same time with the map in front of them when they are looking at the house. Again, with our good aerials we can do that pretty well. But the whole idea again is we may find houses in a middle of a block where an address doesn’t make sense. That address could be right. That’s another thing. We will find in Plainfield sometimes in a middle of a block if you just looked at a list of addresses, you might find one if you were sitting somewhere else saying that’s not right. It can’t be right but it is right. Somebody has to say I checked that and it is out of order but it is the right address so if they call, you are going to go to the right house and not be going up and down the block looking for someone else.
Another interesting problem, if you can imagine this building being a million square foot building and doors on four different corners that are 1,200 feet apart, now that makes a lot of difference to a police officer or a fire person going to a building this size knowing which door is which address. On a large building it is even more difficult than a small one like this. Field verification again takes us to that next level where on the system that we have now it might say at the throat of that driveway two addresses and then you would have to find them. This one isn’t a huge deal but if you knock on the wrong door, it could cause a problem.
Apartments are another good slide. Just looking at what would be the logical sequence of addresses on the building verses what really were the sequences of addresses. That’s the kind of thing that the 911 folks struggle with and the police and fire struggle with is making sure because they have to know that stuff is right. They live and breathe that everyday.
Again, just things like this that they find are inconsistent, 1600 up on possibly the north and another 1600 on the same street, those kinds of things can maybe be corrected. I think that would be the best thing. If you find something like that where a home is not built yet, then start the process of correcting that in the public record too to make sure it was right.
Again, this slide is an example of comparing two databases and something jumps out saying one of these can’t be right, which one is right? You are not just guessing at it. You are going to have a field verified address.
Those are all of the slides. I didn’t want to belabor you with too many details of this, first of all, because I’m not an expert in this. But I did quiz our consultants enough about it to basically ask them why is it that we are just hearing about this now? What didn’t we start out with this program to begin with? I think a lot of it had to do with just in 12 months things have changed in our world in terms of the number of people who have gotten cell phones. The amount of money is now available possibly for us to acquire as far as cell phone work that is being done by counties around the State and we know more now than we did. I think the best comparison that I can give you is using the color aerial photography, which has given us so much more for the money. I think this will also do the same thing for police and fire especially. Everything else like for zoning and planning and for engineering I could probably go out and verify some if I had to if I did it right. It’s not as big of a deal for me as it would be for a policeman or fireman. So, the more accurate data can always be used in every other department. But we started out this whole program with the idea that we want every department to have what they need when we are done. Just because I get better addresses than I need doesn’t mean I don’t use them. It could be good for me too but the key is we don’t want anybody to look at this system at the end and say this isn’t helping me. This department isn’t getting what they need. That is where we are. As I said in my report, one of the great things about this is we have the opportunity to go to the County and if they are willing to cooperate with us, it is a reimbursable program. If they are willing to apply for funding, we could potentially get an additional $44,000.00 that I’m requesting tonight and also the initial $50,000.00 that was already in the contract to fund this program. So, it could be an increase to our contract or it is but it also could be a net decrease to our budget if we are able to get the cooperation. I’m confident of that. We know some people over there so maybe we can talk to them. The police and fire said they would help me to do that so I would know who to talk to. I think it is the right way to go I believe for the system and for the long-term integrity of the system. So, we want to make it the best that we can. I would appreciate your consideration of the additional money. Just so it gets on the record it was an additional $44,540.00 that would be on top of the existing money that is in the contract already but that would be my request for your consideration.
Mr. Kirchoff said I would just like to look to Ms. Holland, Chief Brinker and Chief Anderson if they have any comments?
Ms. Holland said I would like to say that not only does it get the addresses and everything but you can take blue prints, hazardous material information, pre-planning information and attach it to those specific addresses. So, when your address comes up, you can access all of that information along with all of the planning, zoning and engineering and the data that they might have for those specific addresses. You can even have the photo, etc. so the possibilities are endless. It is going to be one of those things that once we have it how do we do without it? So, I think the possibilities are endless and I think it is a good thing.
Chief Anderson said one of the biggest reasons for the computerated dispatching needing this data is being site specific and address specific is to save time on an emergency response. Anything that can help us eliminate searching for an address that doesn’t fall within a logical sequence is a benefit to us. Any emergency that could cut off that response time of searching for an address that we know is somewhere but we aren’t sure exactly where it is. In fire and EMS dispatching it gets to be really really complex depending on whether it is residential property, commercial/industrial, etc. If some of that data is not locally available, then it reaches out farther to other districts for mutual aid to bring up something that is available at that time. So, all of that saves time. That’s where we see the benefit.
Chief Brinker said the accuracy is vital in emergency response. But I think the other thing that is important to look at is we are not promising that we are going to get it but we will have the opportunity to try to go back and recuperate the funding for that is part of the cellular program that the State has put together. I think based on that and the accuracy and the need for the accuracy it makes a great program for all of us.
Mr. McPhail said life and death is sometimes a matter of seconds or minutes. Forty-four thousand dollars is not much if you are talking about saving a life.
Mr. Kirchoff made a motion to authorize Mr. Belcher to go forward with the additional addressing in the amount of $44,540.00. And also authorize him to go to the County to try to recuperate the total $95,140.00 since that is available to us today. Second by Mr. Fivecoat. Motion carried.
Mr. Belcher said I have one more thing to show you on the screen. Quickly on the Grunion parcel. I put that in my report. I talked to Mr. Daniel about it a little bit today. He advised that we would be better off probably if you could allow one Council member, possibly Mr. Kirchoff since he is involved with streets, that he and I and Mr. Kirchoff could sit down and go through that specific parcel’s owner’s situation. It would be better than bringing it up at the meeting. I think I agree with him after talking to him and it makes a lot of sense. We are very close to settling that particular issue. What I hope will come out of it is a policy on this issue of how does the Town look at right-of-way descriptions, legal descriptions that go to the center of the road and paved portions, etc.? We run into that a lot and we need to instruct our appraisers in a certain way because Mr. Daniel will eventually end up with these sometimes in court. But we want to have a solid situation to stand on.
Mr. Brandgard asked, is there consent? Consent given.
Mr. Belcher said on the last item, and it’s not in my report, it happened between Friday and Monday but it involves the Ready Mix on Carr Road.
Mr. Brandgard said I saw some construction going on there.
Mr. Belcher said that is what started the situation. To give you the background I talked to two Council members who I think met with the owner of the plant on Friday to tell them what was going on. Mr. Carlucci said I should let the whole Council know what was going on. The owner of that facility has had a lot of problems with mud tracking on the street. He has had a lot of problems keeping his business running and also keeping the mud off the street. He is doing a poor job doing that. On Friday he decided, or sometime between Thursday and Friday, to start excavating about a 20-foot wide trench from the edge of the existing pavement of Carr Road east toward his building and about 100 feet long, about the middle third of his property. I called him and asked him what he was doing? After looking at some of the issues in terms of right-of-way we found that he was working in the public right-of-way. That is actually Town right-of-way. It was a platted lot. So, again I asked him what he was doing? Of course, he said I’m trying to clean up the problem. I want to pave concrete pavement along here and started to describe to me what he wanted to do. On the one hand, obviously, he appeared to try to make some effort to clean it up by paving with concrete on his site. But he was not willing to give me any kind of plan or how he was going to do it. He was working in public right-of-way so I said you at least give me until Monday to look and see if there is anything that I can find in our ordinances that will allow you to do anything close to what you are thinking about doing. He could only describe it to me verbally. He didn’t submit anything to me. So, again after looking at the Access Permit Ordinance that we have, this is just on road access, I was talking to Mr. McGillem this morning and there is no way that what he was planning to do would fit under our Access Ordinance. For example, you cannot have a 100 or 200-foot wide access in the Town of Plainfield anymore. They exist out there and his was one of them but you can imagine the problems if you have a 100-foot wide access and have 50 trucks come out at once going every direction. That is hazardous. So, we would never allow that to happen again. But in a way it is sort of a non-conforming issue. It is basically allowed to stay until something changes with the road or his business. The bottom line was the access control issue he was in violation of our ordinance. He was going to put concrete down on Saturday. I said you better not. You would probably be taking it out next week. So, I was trying to do him a little bit of a favor and trying to encourage him to come in and talk to us. And get an engineer and get a site plan and let’s talk about it. He got discouraged and said I will just forget it and I won’t do anything. It’s going to be the Town’s problem and that kind of thing. It’s not
over yet but I just wanted to alert you to that. He’s got a lot of evidently pressure and a lot of business. He’s trying to expand it appears to me. It’s one of the things that Mr. Carlucci asked me if I could show the rest of the Council this.
Mr. Carlucci said the mud and the dirt up at that location is still the biggest complaint that we get in Town. I think following the work that he was doing I got a couple of more e-mails. It is heavily traveled up there because it is right near the post office and people come through there and go a lot through that way.
Mr. Belcher said this is through the County website to give you some idea it shows a minor plat 296. The orange line is what I believe to be public right-of-way, the color code for their site. What I have noticed again is he has things parked on the public right-of-way you can see in the photo there. There are things actually on the public right-of-way and the whole public right-of-way is being used as an access point. I don’t know the date of the County pictures. I think it is 2000 but this is one of our aerial photos at the same site. It is not hard to see how the site is busting at the seams. He has so much going on there and it is great that he is a thriving business but he is thriving out onto the public street is the problem. One of the things that I was very concerned about that I talked to him today about was if he were to pave that site, as much as I would love to see it paved so that we wouldn’t have the tracking, you can see at the upper right hand corner that a lot of the drainage and washout area flows back there. It looks like it just busts out at the side and goes over to the property owner to the east, which right now there are not residences there. But Blackthorne is being developed there and a year from now we will have 100 people along that edge. If that is done, we will have a huge problem and I was surprised that we haven’t already with the current landowners who are farming that area coming up and having major problems with it. So, there are a lot of problems.
Mr. McPhail said I believe from the time that photograph was taken that he has done some remediation on the east of his property line and tried to restore some of that overflow drainage that was going onto the other property owner. I believe he has established a holding pit instead of an overflow pit because I got a complaint late last fall or early last fall from Gunstra Builders who is developing that land back there. They cleaned some of that up and dried it up I believe. He still has a holding pond, if it is working. I haven’t been back there for several months.
Mr. Belcher said if that site were entirely paved, the amount and rate of the water that would come off that site I would really be concerned about Oak-rite and the fields to the east and even Carr Road possibly being flooded. It unfortunately would trade one problem for another if he just paved the whole site, as much again as I hated to discourage him from doing something. But there has to be somewhere that we can come to an agreement.
Mr. Fivecoat said I had a meeting with him along with Mr. McPhail and Mr. Higbee. We met with Mr. Hartman and what he is planning on doing were two things. We are trying to help him to find other properties to relocate. He said he would relocate if we could find him property. The problem is we are having a hard time finding him property. The second thing he wants to upgrade this plant completely and modernize it. When it is completely upgraded, there will be a complete recovery system. Instead of dumping it the way that they do now they will dump it and reclaim almost everything from it. They will reuse some of the water. They can use some of the sand and the gravel that is coming back. It will be completely cleaned up. I have seen one concrete company by Clermont, Indiana that is this way and the whole property is concrete. It is clean as a pin. That is what he wants to do. He told us that he wanted to put two million dollars into this plant for remodeling. I talked to him today and he was telling me about the problems that he ran into and he said I’m trying to help and I said yes but you have to go within the framework. I told him to get a hold of Mr. Higbee and to work with Mr. Higbee. He said I’m trying to help and you are stopping me. I said there are parameters that you have to stay in and you need to work with the Town people and work with Mr. Higbee and Mr. Belcher. We said we would work with you but he has to work with us too. I don’t know what transpired today but he was flustered. He said I will just forget about it and let it happen the
way that it is. And I said no you need to work with us and we can get through this but we have to work together.
Mr. Belcher said that was pretty much the tone of my conversation with him too.
Mr. Higbee said you could take what Mr. Belcher said about ordinances that he administers and just exchange my ordinances with his ordinances. I had the exact same discussion with him but I was telling him that basically I will look to see if there is any kind of exemption in my ordinance that let’s you do what you want to do. If there is, we will figure out how you can do that without too much pain. If there isn’t, it is going to be a Plan Commission approval. You will apply and go through the Plan Commission meeting in April or whatever time you choose, which he wasn’t interested in doing, if that was the case. But I said just give me some more information on what you want to do and I will find out if there is an exemption that allows you to do it. That was the discussion that we had today. He said he was going to send me something. He didn’t sound like he had a lot to send me but I’m hopeful that he will send me enough that we can at least tell him whether our ordinance would permit it or not. Then we can decide if they don’t, what steps we need to take.
Mr. Carlucci said the situation with the Ready Mix Plant we believe it is a legal non-conforming use where it is because of the zoning. But something needs to happen because we have had this same conversation more than a year ago. We sat down and they showed us some simple drawings that they had just drawn on some regular white paper. But again we are getting these complaints every single week, almost every day. I don’t get them all because I can imagine what they do at the Town Garage or if they are contacting the Council members. But when it rained last week, even that little drizzle, the amount of material coming off that site, just on those trucks, makes the road slick. It is dusty. He may be frustrated but we have to go forward and do something to stop the stuff coming onto the roadway. I can go back and look but I know it has been more than a year since we met with him. And we had a gentleman, Mr. J. R. Ewing that would come over and sit down and talk and then it is the same thing nothing happens and we are back to square one..
Mr. Belcher said I just wanted to make sure that you are aware of it. It is a pretty serious issue, obviously, and effecting a lot of people. The post office is there and a lot of us use the post office. There are a lot of negative things going on there but that is the current situation and any guidance that you can give me would be much appreciated.
Mr. Brandgard said I don’t know what other guidance to give you other than I think you are moving on the right track. Trying to help him through the problem is what we need and should be doing. On the other hand he has to be willing to work with us to make that work. So, keep trying.
Mr. Kirchoff said I think he and Mr. Higbee are doing the right thing and who we need to have working on it.
Mr. McPhail said I don’t want him to spend a lot of money and violate all of the ordinances then we are creating a worse problem. It doesn’t help anybody. Believe me I get at least a call a week and sometimes three and four from my neighborhood.
Mr. Fivecoat said he has to be willing to work with us and stay in the guidelines.
OLD BUSINESS
Mr. Fivecoat said we were going to take a tour of all of the facilities that the Town owns. Has that been arranged yet?
Mr. Carlucci said I think we are waiting for weather to be a little bit warmer and then we will probably schedule something. I would rather try to do it sooner than later and try to do something near the end of March and try to avoid the NWCA basketball and other things. So, that we can do it in the morning and spend some time going through them. We will try to do it near the end of March on a Saturday morning.
Mr. McPhail said I didn’t know United Water was going to be here this evening but I did have this on my list of things that I think we need to start seriously thinking about. If my memory serves me right, our contract expires I believe this fall, maybe September with the operation of the water and sewer facility. I think we need to seriously look at what options we have whether we negotiate a new agreement with United Water or whether we go back out and take competitive bids or whether we consider bringing the operation back in house. I think we have at least three options and there may be more that I haven’t thought of. But I certainly think it is time that we start some kind of a process through our Town Engineer and Superintendent of Public Works. And other people can start bringing some information and recommendations on what we ought to be doing. I don’t know if we have a notification within that contract but we certainly don’t want to wait until the last minute.
Mr. Brandgard said we started looking at it and I think we need to accelerate it to look and see what makes sense. I agree. We need to go back and look at that contract and see what timing we have in there and need to move on it. Thank’s for bringing that up.
Mr. Kirchoff said this is just a reminder that Thursday night is our public meeting at Hummel Park at 7:00 p.m. If I remember, it will be about the roundabout, the sewage lift station, Center Street traffic study and the greenway expansion. I saw in your report that you have gotten together and talked about that so I appreciate that.
Mr. Belcher said since the Council is all here and I won’t see you before that we did develop a very short survey form to give people when they come in. We will ask them to fill out what they feel about different things. And they can turn it over and write on the back what they think about this or that. Those will be handed out at the door and our idea is to try and get as much information back verbally or otherwise as we can. But it is nice if they would write it down and tell us how they feel about it based on what they see. We tried to make that as easy as possible. We are going to give them something when they come in to help them do that.
Mr. Brandgard said I went to the Ronald Reagan corridor meeting last Wednesday and I brought some information back on that. I think the biggest thing there is that I believe two meetings were scheduled in March and another joint meeting and then the regular steering committee meeting under the same basic way that we did this month. I think the 2nd of March is the joint meeting and I believe the 16th is the steering committee meeting. I will get that to you and they said they would send information out again.Mr. Belcher said since the Council is all here and I won’t see you before that we did develop a very short survey form to give people when they come in. We will ask them to fill out what they feel about different things. And they can turn it over and write on the back what they think about this or that. Those will be handed out at the door and our idea is to try and get as much information back verbally or otherwise as we can. But it is nice if they would write it down and tell us how they feel about it based on what they see. We tried to make that as easy as possible. We are going to give them something when they come in to help them do that.
The other thing is after a lot of discussion at the last meeting Mr. Fivecoat and myself along with Chief Anderson and Chief Brinker went over to the County meeting that they were going to hold on the Emergency Management Advisory Council. If nothing else, I have to congratulate the meeting. I’ve never been to a meeting that the council only lasted 10 minutes. It was interesting at best. There weren’t very many towns in attendance and town officials in attendance. But we did bring back copies of the statute interpreted that was handed out. I asked Mr. Carlucci to give Mr. Daniel a copy to look at and Mr. Daniel give us an interpretation. Again, it comes back to the same thing that we looked at when we had a big agreement. When I read this, what I get out of this is if we sign up for this and become a part of the advisory council, we essentially sign away our responsibility to make sure for safety in the Town to the County. Because it says in here if the County declares an emergency, they can come in and collect not only equipment but our engineer as well as police and fire and public works people and funds. I get concerned when I read that. At face value it looks good but I’m not sure I’m willing to turn all of this over to somebody else that if we have an emergency here, they can pull it out if they determine there is a bigger emergency somewhere else.
Mr. Kirchoff said when we had a work session Councilman Young requested, we talked about perhaps the need being greater to be tied to Marion County more so than our County. Is that even an option under this?
Mr. Brandgard said I think in the overall thing that is still right I believe but I think even if you tie it up with Marion County, you would have the same thing. The mayor of Indianapolis can declare an emergency. Actually it is the chief county executive who would be in Indianapolis the major and here it is the president of the commissions. So, again they are going to have another meeting in March but I think I would like to have a legal interpretation on that to make sure what I think I read is correct.
Mr. McPhail said I remember last Labor Day and the flooding situation and I saw our Town Manager, our department heads and all of our people at work. We have as qualified or maybe more qualified people to handle situations than anybody in the County and I certainly don’t want to turn over control of our Town to anybody other than the people that we employ because they are qualified to handle it.
Mr. Kirchoff said in addition to that it took a lot of phone calls to get someone over here to clear up the bridge at Hadley Road.
Mr. McPhail said and U.S. 40. We couldn’t get anybody else to do it except our people to get it done.
Mr. Carlucci said the County came and done it. The State stared at it a lot.
Mr. McPhail said I can tell you that the citizens of Plainfield are in good hands with our Staff sitting right out there. They are not going to take second place to anybody as far as I’m concerned.
Mr. Brandgard said I agree and like I said I get concerned. That is one of the things we are charged with and to turn it over especially if you sign up to it, that places all of our emergency people under whoever the director of the County Emergency Management is at that time. I would like to have a good legal opinion on this. I think it is bad law. I understand why it is done but again it is more geared to something like Marion County than it is us.
Mr. Kirchoff said in addition to that it took a lot of phone calls to get someone over here to clear up the bridge at Hadley Road.
Mr. McPhail said and U.S. 40. We couldn’t get anybody else to do it except our people to get it done.
Mr. Carlucci said the County came and done it. The State stared at it a lot.
Mr. McPhail said I can tell you that the citizens of Plainfield are in good hands with our Staff sitting right out there. They are not going to take second place to anybody as far as I’m concerned.
Mr. Brandgard said I agree and like I said I get concerned. That is one of the things we are charged with and to turn it over especially if you sign up to it, that places all of our emergency people under whoever the director of the County Emergency Management is at that time. I would like to have a good legal opinion on this. I think it is bad law. I understand why it is done but again it is more geared to something like Marion County than it is us.
NEW BUSINESS
Mr. Kirchoff said I wanted to say thank you for the new PC, which I’m still trying to get equipped but thank’s to Staff. I need to get with Mr. Castetter and Larry to get some things done. Did you say the 18th for the steering committee?
Mr. Brandgard said yes.
Mr. Kirchoff said that is our work session night.
Mr. Brandgard said yes I recognize that. That’s just when they set it. We may have to work around it.
RESOLUTIONS
Mr. Kirchoff made a motion to approve Resolution No. 2004-07. A Confirmatory Resolution for a ten-year real property tax abatement for Seven Points Associates. Second by Mr. McPhail. Roll call vote called.
Mr. McPhail – yes
Mr. Kirchoff – yes
Mr. Fivecoat – yes
Mr. Gaddie – yes
Mr. Brandgard – yes
5-ayes, 0-opposed, 0-absent. Motion carried.
Mr. McPhail made a motion to approve Resolution No. 2004-08. A Confirmatory Resolution for a ten-year real property tax abatement for Griot’s Garage. Second by Mr. Kirchoff. Roll call vote called.
Mr. McPhail – yes
Mr. Kirchoff – yes
Mr. Fivecoat – yes
Mr. Gaddie – yes
Mr. Brandgard – yes
5-ayes, 0-opposed, 0-absent. Motion carried.
Mr. Fivecoat made a motion to approve Resolution No. 2004-09. A Confirmatory Resolution for a ten-year real property tax abatement for Panattoni Development Company. Second by Mr. McPhail. Roll call vote called.
Mr. McPhail – yes
Mr. Kirchoff – yes
Mr. Fivecoat – yes
Mr. Gaddie – yes
Mr. Brandgard – yes
5-ayes, 0-opposed, 0-absent. Motion carried.
ORDINANCES
Mr. Kirchoff made a motion to approve Ordinance No. 03-2004 on its first reading. An ordinance for abandoned vehicles. Second by Mr. McPhail. Roll call vote called.
Mr. McPhail – yes
Mr. Kirchoff – yes
Mr. Fivecoat – yes
Mr. Gaddie – yes
Mr. Brandgard – yes
5-ayes, 0-opposed, 0-absent. Motion carried.
Mr. Fivecoat made a motion to approve Ordinance No. 04-2004 on its first reading. An ordinance for “no parking” on Airtech Parkway. Second by Mr. Gaddie. Roll call vote called.
Mr. McPhail – yes
Mr. Kirchoff – yes
Mr. Fivecoat – yes
Mr. Gaddie – yes
Mr. Brandgard – yes
5-ayes, 0-opposed, 0-absent. Motion carried.
COUNCIL COMMENTS
Mr. Brandgard said as a reminder, the Plainfield Plus box supper is tomorrow evening at 6:00 p.m. at Hummel Park.
ADJOURNMENT
Mr. Kirchoff made a motion to sign the necessary documents and adjourn. Second by Mr. Fivecoat. Motion carried.
Meeting adjourned.
_____________________________________
Robin G. Brandgard, President
