Charles City Council sets goals for 2025

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

As the Charles City Council looks ahead to the new year, it continued its goal-setting discussions during a workshop meeting on Wednesday, Jan. 23.

The first step for the council was knowing what its limits are by determining how many goals are realistic and making sure that they have clearly defined goals to achieve.

“We don’t want to have eight goals knowing that’s totally hard to achieve,” said Mayor Dean Andrews.

Deciding to aim for five objectives, the council’s first priority will be the continued reduction of blighted property in the city. But determining how exactly the city can step up its efforts to address blight remains a challenge.

Hiring additional staff dedicated to addressing blighted properties was discussed, but it’s not clear if that would have a measurable impact.

Between the time it takes for the city to take nuisance properties through the court system and the expense of addressing nuisance properties afterward, there are bottlenecks for clearing blight beyond staffing.

“I feel like it’s money and there are certain factors outside of our control,” said council member Phoebe Pittman.

The second priority for the council this year is the Main Street Bridge and developing a plan for its inevitable restoration.

Following last year’s flooding, the Main Street Bridge has been closed to heavy traffic since it reopened, due to accelerating degradation. The city will have a study done to determine the feasibility of either rehabilitating or replacing the bridge, but either way engineers have advised that a plan be developed soon.

For priority number three, the council discussed hiring a full-time grant writer for the city.

Seeking out and applying for grants is both a specialized skill set and a time-consuming endeavor, and it is not uncommon for entities to miss out on potential funds due to unawareness or missed deadlines, city officials said.

“I could see this as easily a full-time position,” said council member Patrick Lumley.

Along with being able to seek out and apply for grants for city entities like the Police Department and library, a staff grant writer could even be utilized by other area organizations in exchange for a share of the funds.

“I think there’s a lot of entities that could benefit from a grant writer,” said Andrews.

Coming in fourth for the council is the development of a long-term solution to make sure the city maintains an ambulance service. The city, along with the county, are currently contracted with AMR for service, but they have explored establishing a public-run ambulance service instead. An effort to pass a levy to support emergency medical services in the county failed for a second time last year, raising the question of what a long-term solution will look like.

“We have to decide if doing it ourselves is feasible,” said Andrews.

Narrowing down a fifth priority, the council discussed land annexation, constructing a shooting range for the Police Department and establishing a master park plan.

The master park plan, which identifies major projects and priorities for the Parks and Recreation Board, was agreed on as the fifth priority for the list and building a shooting range, which is already listed as a priority on the capital improvements plan, got squeezed in as an extra for sixth place.

Outside of the major goals for the city, the council also reviewed capital improvement projects for 2026, which include a new storage shed, new computers for the library, work on the 17th Avenue storm sewer, new traffic lights and tree planting.