A Village of Milledgeville official recently spoke about the upcoming eight-mill, five-year renewal operating levy for current expenses that will appear on the Nov. 3 general election ballot.
“It’s mostly for street lights,” Milledgeville Mayor Ronald Anderson said on Tuesday during a phone interview. “We can’t put a ‘street light’ levy on, it needs to be an operating levy. We have done this for 25 to 35 years. It will not raise anyone’s taxes, it is just a renewal. We use it to pay the street light bill and this year we just changed over to LED lights.”
Anderson explained that the cost was around $1,200 to convert the street lights to LED and that cost comes out of money raised via this levy.
“We replaced all of them this year,” Anderson said. “If the levy doesn’t pass this year, we do have next year to put it back on as we go a year early. We just signed a new contract with Dayton, Power and Light (DP&L) for the LEDs, which are cheaper to run than the old lights. There will definitely be a savings. We do this — goodness I have been here for 35 or 40 years and I know we have had (the levy) on for 30 years at least and it always passes. People know that they should vote for this or they lose the lights, simple as that and when the electric goes off they will definitely understand, but we don’t have a problem with that. This village is a nice place to live and we are in pretty good shape out here. All of our alleys and streets are black-topped and we are going to order new sign posts here soon, but we try and keep things up.”
During the interview Anderson expressed his appreciation of the village residents, “We tell them (thank you), we let them know.”
“We don’t really advertise anything, but I might put a sign up out here in front of the post office or something like that to remind (residents),” Anderson said. “One year, I think it passed by one or two votes so we got a little scared. A lot of older people are passing away and we are getting younger people in the village, different tenants so maybe they don’t know as much about what is going on.”
Finally, Anderson took time to provide an update on village projects. He said the village received a grant to build a chainlink fence around the school house/playground and fixed up the spot. This is in preparation for another project to build a 30-foot-by-30 foot shelter house the village also received a grant for, which will begin in a couple weeks.
“We need to move a swing set and we will get a grant from our insurance company to put security cameras up there this year once the shelter house is up,” Anderson said. “We also got a $5,000 dollar tourism grant which will be used to finish the shelter house and for picnic tables and benches. We also applied for another $5,000 for next year to clean up the shed and get a nice looking park area finished up. Any park I have ever been too there is never enough benches. That (park area) is going to be a plus for the whole area out here. Jeffersonville got one and we are kind of copying, but ours is 30-by-30, a little smaller, but it will cover us well out here.”
The information in this article was provided by Village of Milledgeville Mayor Ronald Anderson. Stay with the Record-Herald for coverage of this levy and more issues or races at this year’s general election on Nov. 3.
Reach Martin Graham at (740) 313-0351 or on Twitter @MartiTheNewsGuy.
