Jackson Mayor Barbara Lohr gave a review of 2012 and plans for 2013 for the City of Jackson at a Town Hall Meeting held on December 4, 2012. The event was sponsored by the League of Women Voters and was held at the Cape Girardeau Public Library.
TRANSCRIPT
I would like to just give you a bit of information about the state of the City of Jackson. When I was preparing this, I looked back at last year and I thought, gosh --last year was a pretty good year. I was here last year telling you the same thing. Well, I am really pleased to let you know that 2012 has also been a very good year for us.
One of the things that we always look at is our building permit totals. And in the City of Jackson, from the beginning of the year to the present time (Dec. 4, 2012) -- our building permit totals have been $25,583,000. Now, for us, that is a really good figure.
We have several new projects that we are getting started on. One is a new community center. Our voters passed a dedicated sales tax for parks and recreation and that is going to pay for the operation of a new community center. That community center will be donated to the City of Jackson by a Southeast Missouri medical group. There's not a doctor in that group but they are a group that were formed to improve medical facilities in Jackson. And they've done that quite well and they have extra money and they are very generously donating that to the City of Jackson. We will be starting that, hopefully, in 2013 probably will not be finished before 2014 but that is a new project for us.
We have just entered into a contract with Liberty Utilities for them to establish a corporate office for a
four-state region in the City of Jackson and that will be in our north industrial park.
We are already starting clearing and as the folks say "clearing and grubbing" for a new elementary school.
We have several residential and industrial projects that are going on.
Jackson Villa is remodeling some senior citizen apartments. It was very definitely needed. We have a large
senior population in the City of Jackson so we are happy about that. We have town house complexes on
Broadridge and Orchard. Park Place Commercial Development, which is simply a group that is getting an area ready for commercial development. They are not building there -- they are putting in sewers and their detention basin and getting the land ready for that.
We've got a couple of other commercial developments -- Family Dollar and Wings, etc. I am very happy about those because my citizens always tell me, Barbara, we need more commercial development. Don't build us any more houses, we need more commercial development. Frankly, I like both but I am happy we have some commercial development started.
Our city continues to work to stay in compliance on new mandates for our waste water disinfection. The EPA has great mandates and expensive mandates for all electric utilities and any business that runs a power plant. And we have mandated modifications at our water plant. Now you notice that I am continuing to say mandated. We have not chosen these. The government has said through the EPA, this is what you will do and if you don't do it, you will not get a permit to operate. So, we are working very, very diligently on that.
And then finally, as always, we will continue to run the City of Jackson in a fiscally responsible way. We
do not spend the money if we don't have it. Thank you.
