City Of Wayne Purchases Old Final Touch Building, Finalizes Budget

WAYNE – A public hearing highlighted the regularly scheduled Wayne City Council meeting for the acquisition of real estate along with the budget being adopted.

From the council chambers inside City Hall on Tuesday, council first heard from Sandy Brown with the Wayne Green Team who requested similar street closures for the upcoming 9th annual Electronic Recycling Event for Saturday, September 24 from 8 until 10 a.m.

There’ll be two eastbound lanes on 3rd street between Pearl and Lincoln as traffic will be closed to westbound. Prohibited parking will begin on Friday, September 23.

Council approved 4-1 (Woehler in decent) with a fifth vote needed by mayor Cale Giese for the price of $315,000 of acquisition of real estate. This would be the old Final Touch building from Vakoc Construction Company.

Mayor Giese said this would relieve general pressure on the City of Wayne for storage and keeping space for operations but did state councilmember Chris Woehler had a point.

“He said this isn’t exactly what we want so why are we jumping at the bit to buy a building that isn’t going to meet all of our needs,” Giese added. “Then we’re going to have to put more money in to renovate it to get it to be usable and it’s still not going to be perfect even when we do it.”

The City of Wayne will take over possession in early October.

City Administrator, Wes Blecke added this space would be more temporary for Parks and Rec.

“Ultimately we’d like to build a new building down in the Prairie Park area (old lagoon area,” Blecke added. “But you don’t know how that timeline is going to go necessarily. The library would like a little more space, they have storage needs. Friends of the Library they do book sales periodically.”

Council finalized their 2022-23 budget as the tax asking will see a two percent increase with the tax levy seeing a seven percent decrease. The City of Wayne valuation also had a 10% increase.

“The city is in great financial shape,” Giese mentioned. “We’ve got a bunch of projects that still need to be done especially looking at the future for infrastructure work. So, I guess the bottom line is that we raised taxes because the valuations went up so high. We decreased the levy, but we raised taxes just slightly because of the valuation increase was so dramatic.”

Roger Protzman with JEO Consulting Group, Inc. finalized the 2022 Aquarius Tank Diffuser Replacement Project. A change order of $19,002.75 pertained to additional repairs along with a one month extension due to a delay in the supply chain for the general contractor, Philip Carkoski Construction and Trenching, Inc. The project wouldn’t need to be done for another 10 or more years.

The final payment was approved for $408,722.75.

Councilmembers were reminded about the 25th anniversary of the building where the Wayne Senior Center and Library is located as Chamber Coffee will be on Friday, September 16 at 10 a.m.

Council also went into executive session during an update on the Bradley J. Woehler and Bradley F. Roberts vs. the City of Wayne litigation matter.

The next regularly scheduled Wayne City Council meeting will be on Tuesday, September 20.

‘View from Wayne America’ interview with City of Wayne Mayor Cale Giese and City Administrator Wes Blecke.

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