BOTKINS — The Botkins Village Council is working on a sidewalk plan.
At Tuesday’s meeting Village Administrator Ryan Piche asked the council if they should require Edgewood Street to have sidewalks. This opened a discussion on whether this was fair, beneficial, or cost effective.
The engineering of the work on Edgewood Street is almost complete, and they have the grant, they just need to decide this one last item so they can have a contractor in place and everything ready to go when they get the funds in July, Piche said.
If the council decides to require sidewalks on Edgewood, then the property owners would have until a certain date to put in the sidewalks themselves, or the project contractor would do it, and the cost would be assessed to their property taxes.
The council wondered if setting this precedent for projects going forward was a good idea. They brought up the point of if they don’t require them to get sidewalks, then they can’t really require any other street projects to do it in the future. They also discussed helping with the funds for the addition of sidewalks to an area, but not for replacing already placed sidewalks.
They also grappled with the idea that having a sidewalk on that street doesn’t make any sense because there is no sidewalk on County Road 25A to connect it to anything. This brought the council to the idea to maybe have a city wide sidewalk improvement/addition plan, so all streets are connected by sidewalk.
Piche was asked by the council to put together a few more plans and bring it back to them at the next meeting. He said they have to make a definite decision by the end of the month.
Also at the meeting Tuesday night, the council gave the Botkins Fire Department the go ahead to send several of it’s firefighters to training in Bowling Green the first week of April.
The council also approved the purchase of chemicals and insurance for the swimming pool for this summer.
Piche announced the Botkins Community Park will be open for the season on March 17. The Botkins Easter Egg hunt will be Saturday, March 26 at 2 p.m.
He also said the ground breaking on the new housing development will be in about two weeks.
