Culver Town Council Work Session 8-8-23

A notice of a Culver Town Council Work Session came out Friday, August 4th, with the agenda listed as, “The Culver Town Council will meet to discuss goals and expectations.”

Since I have been serving on the Steering Committee for the new Culver Comprehensive Plan, I thought this would be of interest and expected there to be a full house. Because of the early time, I tried to listen in on Teams and attempt a bit of multi-tasking. Unfortunately, Teams failed again, with the sound going out about 10 minutes in. I was the only one online and after Karen (Clerk Treasurer) jumped through hoops to try and get it working for me for about 10 minutes, I told her I would just come down to the Town Hall.

I was a little surprised and disappointed when I got there that I ended up being the only one in the audience that wasn’t an elected official or an employee. Later on Karen said she had organized this as somewhat of a bonding meeting for the Council and the new Town Manager, so that made me feel a bit better about the low turnout. That doesn’t really excuse the public (and the candidates for these offices) for not getting involve. It was also an important meeting that received no press coverage…

There were several topics discussed, so I’ll hit the high points and my thoughts on them.

1. Plan Commission
   • The Building Commissioner was there and there was one Plan Commission (PC) member there, but not for that reason. While everything they discussed was salient, it was slightly off target without plan commission member’s input. They discussed redoing the Zoning Ordinance and things they thought should be fixed. It’s unfortunate they were doing this without the PC members, since the PC already has a list of things on their agenda to fix, mostly based on BZA input. Not bad on the TC’s part, but maybe redundant and in need of input from those dealing with it every month.
   • Redoing the Zoning Ordinance is on the PC’s agenda, but as a general rule, that’s a step taken after a new Comprehensive Plan is adopted, so any recommendations can be incorporated. Not bad to get it started, but it probably should be slow-walked rather than having to do it twice.
   • The Council was mainly talking about delegating redoing the Zoning Ordinance to the Building Commission and one of the Town’s Attorneys. I mean this with no disrespect to either of them, but I think if the Council is willing to put money towards this, which they would have to do with these individuals, they should consider hiring a consultant that can do this. The Attorney alluded to the amount of time required to research ordinances and tie things together. While I’m sure they would do a good job of this, someone or some firm that deals with these things daily would know those things without the research and with a higher level of efficiency.
   • They did discuss prioritizing the current hot button issues, one of these being solar installations and battery installations. They set a goal to finish this well before their 2 year moratorium which is admirable. There are too many local people that have economic concerns tied to this to let it languish.
2. The Budget and particularly how it related to employee compensation
   • While I know they listen to employees, I wonder if they are getting all the input they need here. They were concerned with the amount of overtime being spent and the need to “fix” that by adding staff where they could. There did not seem to be a lot of pushback on overtime from the employees. Are they sure that it is an issue with them or do they depend on it and look at it as a bonus?
   • It wasn’t clear if they had run the numbers on the cost of new employees vs overtime. If the employees are willing and or looking for overtime, then the break even point needs to be analyzed. Overhead items such as insurance generally don’t go up with overtime, but would with new employees. Likewise, things like training, additional uniforms, additional equipment, etc. come with new employees, but not with overtime for existing employees. How does this shake out? It would be different for different departments.
3. Personnel
   • There was discussion about salaries and what could be done other than monetary largess that could make the Town of Culver a better place to work. Various inexpensive, but meaningful suggestions were floated for consideration. In the end, they realize that they must be competitive with the surrounding communities. This has become a spiraling competition and will be hard to do.
   • They discussed how to create more interaction between the board and employees. One of those suggestion was to go back to a liaison system where each council member would be responsible for a department. This was nixed because in the past this had created the perception of favoritism. Personally, I was glad to see that dropped since I feel like it undermines the authority of the Town Manager and their legitimate role between the Council and the employees. Particularly with a new Town Manager, that would create a difficult situation to reconcile. (I don’t know how they have the hierarchy set now, but when originally established, employees were to go through the Town Manager to the Council and the Council was to direct the Town Manager through the Council President creating a clear chain of command.)
4. Combined Fire & EMS
   • A statement was thrown out that Culver is one of only five municipalities in northern Indiana that do not have combined Fire & EMS. Whether that is true or not, there are obvious value points in combined services, ranging from cross training, facility sharing and personnel availability.
   • Personally, I think this makes a lot of sense, but I’ve been involved in these discussions twice in the past in regards to just a shared facility and the conversations have broken down. I don’t think this is a reason to drop the idea, but the challenge needs to be recognized.
   • There was also discussion under this topic of forming a Fire Territory. I think they were wise in a decision to form a subcommittee to research this. Unfortunately, the subcommittee, at least initially, does not include representation from Fire and EMS. I think that would be important in order to achieve buy-in, plus it would add expertise from those in the field.
5. Comprehensive Plan
   • There was discussion of the Comprehensive Plan and the current timeline. “We are farther along in the process than we were 6 months ago…” The Council remained mostly supportive, which seems appropriate since all of them have participated to at least some degree. I have some concern that this should have been addressed under the Plan Commission again, but regardless of that, it will come to the Council for final approval.
   • There was discussion on extending the extraterritorial boundary (Two Mile Limit) to 2 miles. I was asked to speak on that and discussed the sewer issue and why I thought it was important to gain that control now. Granted, the town would not have to provide that additional sewer for free, but they need to get the extended boundary as part of the negotiation. (They have made this more difficult by implementing their solar moratorium. Property owners are generally already suspect of coming under Culver’s control with a perception of no representation. Mandates such is this one demonstrate potential issues that will make this difficult.)
   • There was discussion on prioritizing the Comp Plan goals based on the public input meetings, i.e. the dots exercise. I thought this was good, but personally I liked what the Council did after the last Comp Plan, where they created an action plan based on those priorities. This led to some focus and was responsible for the Entry Level Housing Committee, pursuing and obtaining some grants, and finally, Culver’s successful Stellar journey.
6. Common Good
   • Karen expressed the Council to come together for the Common Good. She expressed her concern that the Council had been fractured the past eight months and while they all had Culver’s best interest at heart, they had lost some of the spirit of working together that was achieved under Stellar.
   • Karen expressed concern that if they remained fractured, the new Town Manager would struggle.

All in all this was a good meeting. I would have liked to have seen more participation, but I’m sure it was helpful to the new Town Manager and I’m hopeful that it was a move in the right direction for meeting Karen’s goal of reminding them of their common cause of making Culver better.