2024/02/07 - Mayor's Column: Keeping Our City Moving Forward
“AN OPEN DOOR TO O’FALLON”
A WEEKLY NOTE FROM MAYOR HERB ROACH
Over the past two weeks, we were busy helping to keep our City moving forward.
This consisted of several meetings on budgets, many hours of in-depth work among the departments to come up with a balanced budget, and meetings with the Council to give them a look at the first drafts and get feedback. These individual budgets will now go to the City Council for their further review and the eventual approval prior to the new budget year on May 1st.
Then we had a Town Hall meeting to share with citizens the growth items that had been approved in 2023 and were set for construction. The second item discussed was the great S&P Financial rating that your city had received. The best of any city south of I-80 or in the lower 80% of the State of Illinois. Then we asked the citizens in attendance to rate six possible concepts for use on the old Southview Plaza property to see what they would best like to see.
Then we had a Council of the Whole Meeting to see what the council thought of some possible ideas for the future development of the city.
There were three ideas presented for the council’s feedback.
They were asked to also evaluate six possible concepts of usage for the Southview area. They were asked to evaluate them as were the citizens in the Town Hall. The result was that the Council and the Citizens both agreed on the same three concepts that they preferred. This gives us three concepts to present to any future developers of what would be preferred for future use of that 3.5 acres. We would like to be proactive with any possible new proposed developments and that is why we sought our citizens and council’s input. Of course, the developers may come up with their own concept that they would like to propose.
Then we discussed the possibility of working with the County on the old St. Ellen Mine Property (this is currently a park maintained and belonging to the County) to upgrade the park area. The Council was in favor of us having discussions with the County to see if something could be worked out.
Finally, was a discussion on the possible development of a program that would work with citizens who have property that is significantly impacted by drainage areas. The idea was liked and will be worked on by our Public Works Department and discussed with the Public Works Committee over the next few months.
As residents of O’Fallon, you should always be able to reach out to your elected officials and ask questions about what is happening in O’Fallon. Having open communications is important to me and something I care very deeply about. Thank you for reading, and please remember, my door is always open.