Letter to the Editor: George's Alderman Highlights

Senior Advisory Committee:  The BOA will investigate forming a Senior Advisory Committee. Several seniors have expressed interest in using their talents to help the city. Duties and responsibilities will be drafted and reviewed. What do you think?

Liquor license:  Lake Saint Louis is the last city in St. Charles County that prohibits convenience stores from selling liquor by the package. Convenience stores include filling stations like QT and Phillips 66. Convenience store owners asked the BOA to change the ordinances to allow sales of package liquor. Now they direct potential buyers to Dardenne Prairie or Wentzville and some stop shopping here. Police told us that selling package liquor in LSL would make no difference in the problems they see. We directed staff to suggest appropriate ordinance changes and let us look at them.

Green Disposal:  Lowes offers disposal of small batteries and CFL (inc. spiral type) bulbs.  These often contain Mercury and can contaminate landfills if not properly disposed of. We thank Lowes for providing this much appreciated service.

Budget:  We were presented with a draft city of the budget for review. It will take an effort to understand some 75 pages of budget information and we will have several “special” sessions to work on a final budget. We expect about the same or slightly more revenue next year excluding state and county grants for Freymuth road construction (about $2M.) Sales tax income is now bigger than real estate tax income. As usual with cities like ours, our biggest costs are for Police and Public Works that add up to about 60% of our total expenses.

Some citizens continue to request additional city services that would require more staff and raise costs. Two general areas are snow removal and appearance of plantings through out the city. We could contract out for some snow removal for major storms. This would help Public Works remove snow quicker. But tying up contractors for quicker removal would cost money even if little snow falls next year.  So this is a guessing game of cost vs. need. Others want beautiful greens, flowers, and neatly trimmed shrubs along our Interstate exits, in parks, and in the LSL Blvd. islands. They seem to want a British garden look. We currently don’t have staff or volunteers to do the work needed to get this appearance. We don’t do anything along our interstate exits. Shrubs and trees are currently selected so as to need little maintenance meaning a somewhat natural/wild look. I suspect we have talked ourselves into too many plantings for staff to keep pristine.

What do you think? Any thoughts on the budget would be appreciated.