Snow is melt-ing, rain-drops pelt-ing, birds a-nnounc-ing Spring is near…—and that can mean just one thing, in context: The threat of driveway snow being plowed across township roads illegally and the resulting fines then being sent to town residents for this will soon be at an end for this present winter season! No word on what next year might bring though.

Speaking of seasonal changes, visitors of the Thorp Town Hall for its March 2019 meeting would have seen a furniture re-shuffle with the annual town meeting scheduled for this upcoming April, although the present environmental hazard present in Wisconsin and nearby Chippewa (you know the one I mean), could amend this plan—it’s hard to know.

At any rate under the new furniture arrangement, the town board in session now faces southward while in session rather than towards the east, and a straightening out of the bench rows used for public seating now faces northward. Previously, the public benches were arranged in a half diamond fashion vis à vis the board members, but no more!

Moving into actual meeting business, it was reported by Town of Thorp Chairman Louis Andruszkiewicz that the township located in Clark County had been one of the lucky few in a rather competitive grant award season, with $220,638 in grant funding from outside going to help the town of Thorp blacktop, offsetting the total projected cost of $301,000 for a road project. In this grant award season, the Town of Thorp was reportedly one of just two within Clark County to make the final cut. Then it was on to road ditches and cell phone towers.

“How much more can you stack it?” Chairman Andruszkiewicz asked of buried ditch utilities, as another town board member expressed curiosity on how far down the infrastructure went. “I’m curious how far down they put it in the ditch,” he said, “because pretty soon we’re going to be ditching again.” Gas lines, power lines, or the long forgotten detritus of a past era, it all factors into how the infrastructure of the township is squeezed together under the surface and made to serve town residents. A couple meetings for continued training were also in the works as of the March meeting date, including a Pipeline Safety meeting April 2nd at Paradise Shores (to which nobody was going), as well as a Work zone Flagger safety workshop on Wednesday, March 25 at 4:30, in Eau Claire. Chairman Andruszkiewicz was going there. “They got a lot of nice stuff there,” Supervisor Jack Leja said. “Dewalt and all those tools.” After utilities and meetings there was also cell phone reception to consider: do you already have (or desire to have) 5G phone technology? It was reported at the March meeting that a cell phone company had been putting in small towers to feed off the bigger ones and increase the local coverage for said capability. The town of Thorp had control of the right of way for most of these towers, but not over tower receptors on private property, such as a silo. And then there’s the tree factor. If trees got in the way of cell phone reception they were cut down Andruszkiewicz said, although he wasn’t sure on the exact agreement between the affected landowners and cell phone company.

In other town business, the Thorp town board approved a $25 culvert permit, told a landowner the township would remove said culvert if it held water (the culvert installation involved taking out one culvert and putting another one in elsewhere on the same property), and moved a building permit ordinance to the next meeting agenda. Dog owners in the Town of Thorp who wish to avoid a $20 late fee on their kennel licenses should get their payments to town treasurer Rita Derks by April 1st, with 92 dogs currently reported as living within Thorp’s confines. Finally, there was a mattress that Public Works head Loren Gulcynski picked up off the roadside. “It finally uncovered itself from all that snow,” he said, with another incident reported by the board where 25 lbs. of dog food had been dumped or fallen on the road.

Photo by Joseph Back.