(Okoboji)– The Okoboji City Council Tuesday evening adopted a budget for the upcoming fiscal year following a public hearing that drew no comments. City Administrator Michael Meyers says it sets the tax levy at $4.75 per one thousand dollars of valuation, the same as it’s been the two previous fiscal years…
“As part of that is your general levy which is going to help pay for day to day operations of the city, but then also the debt service levy which is going to help us pay our debt down. In this fiscal year probably the big project that we’re budgeting for here is a new money bond to re-surface Lakeshore Drive, the Speier Park parking lot, and we’re taking a look at Country Club Drive on the east-west section as well. So that’s all kind of covered in this budget. Along with that is your typical day to day increases of running the city and then some smaller budgeted projects that we look forward to accomplishing.”
When it comes to the Lakeshore Drive project, the council Tuesday evening approved a contract with Beck Engineering of Spirit Lake to oversee it…
“We’re going to do a three inch overlay on Lakeshore Drive basically from Highway 71 to Pikes Point. We’re going to do very similar, we’re looking at doing a very similar thing on Country Club and Speier Park parking lot as well. Along with the overlay we’re going to do some real basic storm infrastructure work along Lakeshore Drive. As residents drive on Lakeshore Drive they’ll see off to their left and right things like some beehive storm intakes, and those things get clogged with leaves and ice and snow and what not so we’re going to put those more in line with the road. It’s just an opportune time to do that. As well as you know if there’s areas that there’s big dips and we need to fix things like that, that’s going to get fixed with this project as well. So we look forward to that. We hope to do that, we’re going to go out to bid here in early spring and then toward late summer, probably before September at some point, we’re going to try to start this project to give the contractor enough time to get in and get out all in this one calendar year.”
The city is taking out a $3,085,000 loan to pay for the projects. The council voted to add the Country Club Drive work into the project after learning there will enough funds in the bond package to pay for it as well.
