Mt. Pleasant council thanks Scouts for cemetery project
By Doug Lowe
Staff writer
12-19-2019
MT. PLEASANT—City leaders discussed details of several ongoing developments and renewal efforts, and also thanked a prospective Eagle Scout for completing a cemetery project that will help visitors find the exact grave site they seek.
These items were discussed in back to back meetings held early in the evening of Dec. 10.
The board of Mt. Pleasant’s Community Development and Renewal Agency, consisting of the currently elected or appointed members of city council, raised questions and concerns to the agency’s Executive Director, Monte Bona, with Justin Atkinson asking “Why are the services of Sunrise Engineering being used so much?”
Bona explained that for all work completed before project funds would be released for disbursement a licensed civil engineer had to sign off on the work being done, such as installing more water and sewer to make the old airport more of an industrial park. Therefore, having the work done at lower cost always incurred additional professional engineer services to inspect and certify proper completion to the grantor.
A somewhat similar question arose when Keith Collier and other board members expressed concern about how the federal grant monies, receive for design and construction of a proposed bike way connecting Mt. Pleasant and Spring City, seemed to be “getting so little bang for the buck.” To some degree, the discussion that followed found fault with UDOT for not having the flexibility to reduce the engineering and design requirement for a simple bike path instead of treating it like a highway construction project.
However, in a telephone interview conducted a few days later with Nancy Jerome, UDOT’s project engineer in the Richfield office, she related that “such disappointment often happens when cities first receive and expend the kind of federal grant monies being used by Mt. Pleasant because federal requirement are so stringent.”
Jerome also pointed out that in Mt. Pleasant’s case, some city leaders may have wrongly assumed that UDOT’s right of way along Route 117 to Spring City would easily accommodate the desired biking and walking trail, while in reality “the lack of sufficiently wide right of way along that route creates a challenge in designing and financing the city’s goal.”
In a different vein, during another part of the CDRA meeting, Monte Bona told the board that in order to attract regional level swimming competitions to the city’s aquatic center, changing rooms would have to be added to the existing facility. Hope was expressed that purchasing the adjacent old elementary school might provide what is needed at a lower cost, if the district’s new superintendent would be willing to significantly lower the old $600,000 asking price.
Practically in the same breathe, Bona mentioned that a similar problem existed at the Con-Toy Arena and Eccles Equestrian Center because changing rooms and showers were greatly needed there also in order to attract more large scale events.
During the last city council meeting of 2019, the members of council and the mayor took time to thank Tanner Sorensen from Troop 507 for his Eagle project that so admirably demonstrated a way to improve the current signage at the cemetery, which often failed to provide enough guidance to visitors seeking to find a specific burial plot.
In describing his project, young Sorensen stated that his project showed how to solve the problem of existing “aluminum spikes placed in the sod getting overgrown with grass, or buried—making them impossible to find without a tape measure.” He also explained that his work in Section B of the cemetery “involved more than 100 total man hours.”
It was noted that Sorensen’s Scout project will provide a benefit likely to last for generations.
