Mt. Pleasant Council gets report on ‘gratifying’ progress within Public Works Department

By Angela Marx Thompson

02-28-2019

MT. PLEASANT—Progress within the public works department is being made at a gratifying pace, reported its foreman Coulter Allen at a Mt. Pleasant City Council meeting Tuesday, February 12.

Over the past several months, the department has been working to train new hires and adapt forms and operating procedures currently in use in the city’s power department, Allen said. “Currently we are working as a team where we all work on everything,” he said. “As you have seen on the work plan, we split the work up but rotate to get everyone experience in all the different areas.”

Allen indicated that Public Works Director Paul Madsen has been closely mentoring him. He along with Lynn Beesley have worked to bring greater efficiency to the department. Currently a weekly work plan is submitted to Mayor Dan Anderson with scheduled projects prioritized and a list of future projects included in the event that work is completed ahead of schedule.

Allen said, “In the past six months we feel that communication between departments and city hall has improved drastically, work orders have been completed in a timely manner and kept current. Things have also strengthened between our department and the aquatic center, library, rec department and power department. We have great working relationships between us all.”

Although the staff of the city’s public works department is relatively new and decidedly “green,” more city projects have been brought to completion in the past six months than were anticipated. This has brought praise from many community members, Allen reported.

“Every person in the department is a valued key player,” he said. “We all have different ideas and strengths that we have brought together and use them to complete all tasks that we need to complete or emergencies that have been thrown our way. We all have strengths in different areas that we use together to be very successful. We believe the reason we have been so successful in the last six months is because we all want to work here; we love our jobs and we love Mount Pleasant City.”

Also, during this meeting, the council selected Councilman Kevin Stalling to serve as the new Mayor Pro Tempore. The first round of secret ballot saw a count of two votes for Kevin Stallings, two votes for Justin Atkinson, and one vote for Russell Keisel. The second round of voting, to break the tie between Stallings and Atkinson resulted in three votes for Stallings and two in favor of Atkinson. The Mayor Pro Tempore is responsible for the day to day management of the city in the event that the mayor is unavailable.