150 Business View - May 2015
development, we think development will arrive.”
Smith oversees a department tasked with maintaining
city infrastructure – excluding parks and buildings. Its
65 employees provide customer service assistance for
water, sewer, streets and drainage, maintain five wa-
ter wells and a 5 million gallon waste water treatment
plant.
Additionally, public services oversees code compli-
ance, fleet maintenance and ordering for all municipal
vehicles. A utility master plan study is underway and
bonds are being sold to finance updates to the system,
and items are being budgeted for needed inflow and
infiltration upgrades.
“Our infrastructure is pretty old, for the most part,”
Smith said.
“We’ve done a pavement assessment study to tell us
what condition are roads are in – every asphalt street
and every concrete street has been measured and has
been rated from a 1 to a 5 on the ride-ability of the
street. Now we know what streets are the worse, and
we can bring those up to a nice smooth ride. This year,
we’re doing a $1.5 million project to do 30 streets.
INFRASTRUCTURE
