Water and Sewer Task Force to meet Tuesday

UPDATE: This meeting was canceled.
The Water and Sewer Task Force will meet at noon Tuesday, Sept. 13 in the Piper Dining Hall on the Midway College campus. Meetings of the task force are open to the public.

Governor's wife to speak at dedication of new Midway College center, attend school convocation

Jane Beshear, the wife of Gov. Steve Beshear, will be the featured speaker at dedication of the Learning Resource Center building at Midway College tomorrow, Sept. 8, at noon. She will also attend the annual convocation starting the school year, in the Anne Hart Raymond Duthie Auditorium, and 11 a.m.

Midway College's new equine program director teaches how to train horses with body language

"Avo Kiviranna understands the silent language of the horse," KyForward contributor Elizabeth Troutman writes of the new chair of Midway College's equine program. said. “The horse, because it’s a prey animal, will instinctively scrutinize you. Because he wants to know what you are thinking, and the only way you can let him know what you’re thinking is through your body language,” he told Troutman.

Kiviranna, a New York City native who Troutman writes "marveled at the draft horses that delivered blocks of ice to his family’s brownstone," attended the University of Kentucky because “that’s where all the horses were,” he said. He returned to New York and worked as an extension agent, an assistant professor of equine science at the State University of New York at Delhi, a horse trainer, executive director of the American Morgan Horse Association and consultant for a Thoroughbred farm in New York.

He trains "through the least-resistance approach," using "calculated gestures" and what he calls "natural horsemanship," Troutman writes.

City council to consider audit at Tuesday meeting

The city audit for the 2010-11 fiscal year, and final changes to last year's budget to reflect actual spending, are on the agenda for the next meeting of the Midway City Council. It will be held at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 6 at City Hall, a day later than usual because of Labor Day.

Also on the agenda is a funding request from the Woodford County Economic Development Authority, to be presented by new Chair Brad McLean.

Though the meeting will be held a day later than usual, the notice from City Hall has the usual advisory that "Anyone wishing to address the council must request to be on the agenda and submit any information by ... noon the Wednesday before."

Council approves incentive pay on 3-2 vote

By Dick Yarmy and Al Cross

University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Telecommunications

After debating the issue a second time, the Midway City Council voted last Monday night to give escalating incentive pay to council members, the mayor, the city clerk and the assistant clerk for receiving 15 hours of annual training on topics related to their official responsibilities.

The vote was 3-2, with Council Members Aaron Hamilton, Doris Leigh and Sharon Turner supporting the proposal by Mayor Tom Bozarth, and Becky Moore and Dan Roller opposing it. Member Joy Arnold, who had been skeptical of the plan at the Aug. 1 meeting, was absent due to a death in her family. If there had been a tie vote, Bozarth could have voted to break the tie.

To support his initiative, Bozarth introduced James Chaney, chief governmental affairs officer of the Kentucky League of Cities. KLC will offer the training under a bill that it and state Rep. Carl Rollins of Midway got passed in the 2011 General Assembly. Cheney mentioned Rollins’ dismay that 50 to 60 percent of the 2,600 city officials in Kentucky receive no training.

Moore said the bill appeared self-serving for KLC, but Chaney said cities can award incentives for training from other accredited sources. The bill does not mention accreditation or providers.

Moore, who preceded Bozarth as mayor, asked, “If we’re going to incentivize training of city clerks, why not water plant workers and others?” She suggested the vote be delayed while a “policy statement” is drafted to ensure future leaders administer the program consistently, but made no motion to that effect.

Roller’s objections were budget-focused. He said an annual outlay of $18,000 (which would be the total in the fourth year if all eligible officials took the training each year) was excessive, and noted that Bozarth had not taken the plan to the council's Ordinance and Policy Committee. Roller read a prepared statement for the record, and Moore asked that her request for a policy statement be included in the minutes of the meeting. For a PDF of Roller's statement, click here.

In other action, the council approved tax rates for the coming year, as described at the Aug. 1 meeting. After the meeting, just as they did two weeks earlier, Bozarth and his allies walked down East Main Street, while Roller and Moore walked up South Winter Street.

Water & Sewer Task Force meets at noon today

The Midway Water and Sewer Task Force will meet at noon today in the Piper Dining Hall on the Midway College Campus. Meetings of the task force are open to the public.

We regret that this notice was not posted yesterday, when we received it. Since the task force does not have a regular meeting schedule, all its meetings are considered special meetings, which have a limited agenda. However, the only agenda item, "Water and Sewer Issues," is broad enough to allow discussion of any topic related to the task force's purview.

Council plans second and final readings Monday of ordinances on tax rates, training incentive pay

The tentative agenda for the next meeting of the Midway City Council, Aug. 15, is much the same as the agenda of the last meeting, because the major business is second readings and adoption of three ordinances: two setting tax rates and the other creating pay incentives for the mayor, clerks and council members to take annual training related to city government.

The proposed tax rates are the compensating rates, those that the state says will generate the same amount of revenue being generated by current rates. The personal-property rate would remain the same, 14.5 cents per $100, while the real-estate rate would rise to 10.2 cents from 10.1 cents per $100 in order to make up for a decline in the total assessed value of real estate in the city.

See the blog item after the one below for a report on the council's discussion of the training incentive program.

The meeting notice from City Hall says anyone wishing to address the council must request to be on the agenda and submit any information by noon the Wednesday before the meeting.