Council meetings might or might not have to be suspended at some point in the coming months, but no matter what happens, the City of Stanley should be prepared. Endowing the positions of Mayor and City Administrator- Clerk-Treasurer with 30 days of bill pay authority without prior council approval, the Common Council tackled mostly ordinary business on Monday November 16, but first there was a procedural matter to address.

“All right I’m going to call the Common Council meeting to order,” Stanley Mayor Al Haas said at 7:00 p.m. down at the Stanley Fire Hall November 16. With all members present save Jacob Huff and Mike Karlen with Karlen having resigned, the first item of business was simple: strike agenda item number 7. The reason? County-mandated quarantine of city staff.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Donelle has no help in the office right now,” Haas said, meaning that the planned budget hearing would need to be pushed back with two of the threeperson office staff out, and returning before the wait period wasn’t an option.

“Clark County said no,” Administrator-Clerk-Treasurer Donelle Spaulding said of a city worker quarantined for COVID recently. “They will stop, forcibly detain…if she does not quarantine,” Spaulding said without identifying the worker by name. Meanwhile during the public comment period, a frequent meeting attendee and local citizen brought up a related matter in public comment.

“…And the other topic I want to bring up, is COVID,” they told the Stanley Council at its regular meeting Monday. “The Bureau of Wisconsin Prisons states there are 291 cases of COVID at the Stanley prison,” they said, adding, “That’s not statewide.”

“This disease is getting closer,” the commenter went on, noting that they saw people “in obvious uniform, from the prison” getting dinner at lunchtime and noon from the local deli counter. “No mask,” they said. If the City wanted to stop the disease they needed to come up with some type of plan the commenter said, predicting there would be a federal mandate before the end of January.

“Right now we are following the county authority,” alderman Kevin Hendrickson said of the next level in local government, while Kent Barby motioned to continue.

“Go right ahead,” he told the frequent attendee. With the floor later being yielded to ordinary business, the next topic was the new police addition: what to do in regards to the A/C units on site, reaching the end of their service life. With each side of the combination police station-city hall controlled by its own A/C unit, the two would be replaced by one new unit when the addition was built, with the police department effectively pushed into the addition space and getting its own new unit. So what did the council think?

“I don’t think we need to pay Cedar $850 to size it,” Haas said of the new unit meant to replace two now on site at the combination police department and city hall building. Holly Kitchell, who gave the update, agreed. Not all did.

“You can’t just do that on what we think,” alderman Kevin Hendrickson said, adding, “I think it’s a necessary expense Holly.” The council as a whole differed, opting not to have Cedar re-size the units. But there was still pay dirt. A sewer dig-in on east 10th Avenue was outside of city limits, meaning that it was also outside the ordinary service area for City services. Alderwoman Holly Kitchell put it simply.

“So this is my input,” she said. “Some of us who live in the city do not have utilities, so I don’t know that I like the idea of people who aren’t in the city receiving services,” Kitchell said.

“If we do one without ramifications it’s going to happen again,” alderman Mark Fitzsimmons said of branching utility services outside the city and people’s behavior. Although a city employee had done the dig-in, they assumed at the time that the property was within the city limits. So far there were only partial utilities on site, with no electrical or water hookup. But on a side note, there was a notable quote to report.

“She said it much nicer-ly,” one council member (not Fitzsimmons) said of their colleague’s explanation of a point of business that night. And then it was time to talk about the Street Sweeper.