Ravenna City Council discusses new ordinances for city
The Ravenna City Council held a meeting on Monday, December 5 at approximately 7 p.m. The council met to pass a series or ordinances for the city on a variety of topics. However, ordinance number 2016-172: an ordinance appropriating the sum of $10,000 from the capital improvement fund (65-74) to pay one half of permanent improvement funds at the Muzzy Lake right away faced a series of questions from Ravenna citizen Cliff Soudil.
According to Soudil, the council had previously discussed and decided using gravel on the access road on Muzzy Lake to the pump system house would be sufficient and there had been an unexpected and sudden change in council decision to instead pay for the development of a concrete road.
Service Director, Donald Kainrad, said Ravenna owns three different lakes: Lake Hodgson, Muzzy Lake and Crystal Lake. “In Muzzy Lake, they ran a line that came over to Crystal Lake,” said Kainrad. “They would pump water from Lake Muzzy over to Crystal Lake. That’s where our old water plant used to be and we would treat the water over there. We don’t want to lose the connection between the two lakes, we want to maintain it because it’s a valuable asset to have that water resource.”
Every year, the Ravenna City Council must pay to add gravel and grate the road. Every time it rains, they lose gravel, the access road to Muzzy Lake is also at a slope causing runoff and ground water to carry away some of the gravel. In case of an emergency, the access road allows access to the pump house which will supply water to the town of Ravenna. The last time this occurred was in the 1960s. The town of Ravenna owns 75 percent of the land around Muzzy lake, but the pump house is the easiest access to the lake water supply.
Council member Fred Berry said, “For the time and labor and cost that the city has had to deal with over the years to continue on almost a yearly basis to go out and add gravel to that road and grate it, by doing this on a permanent basis, we’re not going to be out there every year and we do this, and we don’t know how long it’s going to last, but it definitely should last more than a year,” said Berry. “It’s going to save the city time and money and labor.”
While the council would save money in the long-run and save the city time and labor, some citizens of Ravenna are still upset over the potential precedent it may set for Ravenna as the city’s household income has decreased over the past few years.
“We’re doing a piece of property, not inside the city limits, and a lot of those people might not even be tax paying people in that township,” said Soudil. “I understand that it’s our easement, but it’s an easement that we’re going to cross the point where it’s necessary what we do. We’ve kept that property up since 1880 something and now we’re going to pay.”
Soudil is concerned primarily about the money being spent on the blacktop project for Muzzy lake. “I live in the city and I live on a street and my street isn’t fixed yet. My street is concrete, and I get woken at three in the morning when the snow removal trucks come by as they’re breaking off chunks of concrete because everything’s uneven,” said Soudil. “Having to drive over that when we’re now spending money outside the city, it’s just a big question on spending money wisely.”
