The Farmington City Council meets in regular session in the council chambers at Long Memorial Hall this month.
The city of Farmington finalized its Christmas plans during a recent regular session.
City Administrator Greg Beavers said the tourism board decided to move the ice skating rink to the multi-use court at Wilson-Rozier Park for this year.
“We are going to do some other festival activities around that through the parks department since we are moving it out of downtown,” he said.
Beavers then gave some recommendations to the council on how Winter Wonderland was going to be configured this holiday season.
“We have a number of concerns that labor intensive as that is, are people going to participate in it?” Beavers asked. “That close to the holidays, people run the risk at being at a public event like that then going to a family event.
"A compromise we came up with, is to do a Winter Wonderland Lite, which would be: we will do a stage where we have the Christmas trees and those things with Santa Claus and not set up the train set. Then we can utilize the floor area of Long Hall to queue people up to see Santa Claus indoors, and still maintain the social distancing that we need to.
“[Setting up] the train set is still about three weeks in labor to set it up, and then 1-2 weeks to tear it down. For our parks crew, 10% of our work activity of the year is just focused on that one thing. Which is great, because it gets a lot of use and it’s become a tradition in town, but this year, my intuition is that it’s not going to get as much use, and if it doesn’t have as much users as it traditionally gets, I just don’t feel like it’s worth that much expense and labor.
"But, we need to offer something. The other problem is, if we are going to try and respect the health department’s thoughts on maintaining social distancing, we would have people queued up all the way back to Cozean’s in bad weather conditions. If we do this, put dots on the floor all through Long Hall and some stanchions up, we can get kids in for some kind of event.”
The question came up about whether people would want children sitting on Santa Claus’ lap.
“That’s another consideration I don’t have an answer for,” Beavers said. “We were checking with our standby Clauses, we’re going to see if they’re willing to do it.”
Mayor Larry Forsythe said that maybe the city could give out a little bag of candy or something more than they’ve been doing.
In other matters, City Clerk Ashley Bischoff presented the council the results of the city’s biannual resident survey.
“The purpose of the resident survey is to provide a line of communication between the city and the residents,” she said. “This survey will compare results from 2018 and 2016. This year we mailed them to all resident utility accounts.
"That was 6,603 surveys mailed out. We received a little over 1,500 back. Sixty-three percent of respondents have lived in Farmington for over 10 years. Nineteen percent of respondents have lived here 1-5 years.”
Bischoff pointed out some highlights from the survey.
“In 2016, 48% of respondents indicated that the taste of tap water was poor; that dropped to 24% in 2018, and dropped again to 18% this year,” she said.
Officials assume that the low satisfaction level in 2016 was due to the introduction of chlorine treatment.
“…Waste water and sanitation,” Bischoff said. “In 2016, 66% of respondents reported a satisfaction of level of good or excellent. That number increased in 2018 to 73% and then increased again to 77% this year.”
On the question of whether taxpayers received a good return on city services, the yes response decreased by 9% since 2018, although the no opinion has increased by 15%.
Bischoff said that they did see a 10% decline in excellent responses to sidewalk access for disabled residents since 2018.
The police department rating went up in the neighborhood patrols category with excellent responses at 32% compared to 26.9% in 2018.
The survey revealed that respondents want more money spent on citywide cleanups, sanitary sewer maintenance and fire protection. The survey had a new question regarding medical response by the fire department with 55% of respondents considering it excellent.
Mark Marberry is a reporter for the Farmington Press and Daily Journal. He can be reached at 573-518-3629, or at mmarberry@farmingtonpressonline.com
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October 19, 2020 at 06:15PM
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Council continues holiday planning - Daily Journal Online
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