Hat's off to Malta City Council

On Tuesday night, I attended the Malta City Council meeting at City Hall in hopes of bringing you, ladies and gentlemen – and David Rummell – the most up-to-date news about this city as I possibly can.

Some might think attending these meeting once a month would be a boring, bothersome, pain in the neck.

Not so!

The dedication of our four City Council Folk, as well as Mayor Shyla Jones and Clerk/Treasurer Carolyn Schmoeckel, inspire me to come to these monthly meetings on Tuesday night’s after a 10-to-12 hour work day is spent filling these PCN pages with news, ads, announcements, photos and the occasional typo (and by occasional I mean otfen …cripes, I did it again.)

These folks aren’t 9-to-5 politicians (not on paper anyway) and they work in a mostly thankless position because they care about their community and the people who inhabit it. It is my duty to report the goings on at these meetings and keep you in the know (Dodson and Saco folks, I am working on a new schedule so that hopefully I will be able to attend your meetings as well…stay tuned.)

As of late, the big topic at these meetings has been the water works improvement plan. It was decided about two months ago to forgo the original plan as the outfits that were offering the City of Malta grant monies to help pay for the project were asking the City Council to flip the city coffers upside-down and dump somewhere around $1.5 million into this project so that they could lend us, the tax payers, another huge chunk of change. I wish I could be precise with these numbers (and hopefully I am in the story I write about the meeting this week.) Taking this grant money would have given this city all kinds of loans and interest rates, timetables to pay said monies back and the facts that made my head spin.

On Tuesday night this loan and project were finally going to get the “no-go” when a member of an outside entity who has been hired to assist the city (and I honestly believe she has the city’s best interest in mind) started throwing around acronyms, money amounts, possible penalties, you name it.

Now I am not looking at my notes, but if my memory serves it went something like this:

“You have TSEP and RD, CDBG and 1,2,3. You have RW and Tinkerbelle, Donner and Blitzen, grants from OPP and you know me. Then there is the FWP, Homeland Security and a cat in a tree. See?”

At this point – dear readers – my feeble mind exploded (Keep in mind that my background is as a sports reporter and oh, how I wished someone would run a post route.)

But not our elected officials, no sir. They handled the jargon with grace and decided that no, in fact, the $1.5 million wouldn’t be sunk into just one project, but yes, they would keep on open mind and look at other grants and monies in order to hopefully complete important water projects in our City.

My hat is off to you, Malta City Council. I appreciate the work you do for the benefit of all of us.