CRAIG BEACH Gravel will be delivered to street

When money is exchanged, thorough records must be kept, a councilwoman said.
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
CRAIG BEACH -- The village will deliver 13 tons of gravel to make good on its commitment to a village property owner, but it won't install new streets for others, according to Councilwoman Wanda Sabol.
Sabol's motion to buy 50 tons of gravel, of which 13 tons are to be delivered to Olive Avenue, was approved by council Wednesday evening.
The gravel w ill be bought for $1 a ton plus a $3.50 per ton transportation charge, she said.
Sabol added she will try to arrange for the truck to spread the 13 tons as much as possible when it makes the delivery.
"We have started the job. We need to finish it," she said. However, she said no more village employee time will be used to spread gravel on Olive Avenue.
The portion of the avenue, which is now partly installed, existed only on paper until Tony Parent recently built a house on it and asked for the village's help in extending the street for him. Village employees did part of the job, according to Councilwoman Joyce Hamrick.
Incomplete records
Sabol found receipts that showed Parent paid the village $325 for the installation, but she said she found no specific records of the tonnage to be used and its cost or how much, if any, village employee labor was to be used for the job. Sabol and her brother, Council President Pro Tem Larry Ellis, have been designated by council as acting village street commissioners.
"It's over $300 that we don't even have accounted for if it went into the village fund or not. We don't even have a track of where this money went," said Ellis, chairman of council's public works committee.
The receipts say the money was "received for street department slag,'' but the rest of the explanation is illegible, Sabol said. Parent, who appeared at a recent council meeting inquiring when the job would be completed, has presented village council with canceled checks showing he paid the money to the village. Parent told council the village still owed him 13 tons of gravel. "We do plan on making it right," Ellis said.
Keeping track of money
"We need to keep track of where money's coming from and where it's going and what it's being paid for," Sabol said. "It's important on any matter in the village where there's money exchanged. And I think that, as council members, we need to keep track of that. Let's figure out what went wrong and correct the problem," she added.
Hamrick said the installation was arranged in error by a former village clerk.
Ellis said such installations are against village policy. He added that developers are to install their own streets at their expense when they build along a section of a street that exists only on paper.
"Last year, whatever happened, it must have been misread and misinterpreted. Our ordinances protect us. We do not do this as a routine thing," Sabol said, adding that other village property owners won't be getting the service Parent got from the village.
Council also authorized $865 in repairs to a street department dump truck, which has an oil leak and brake problems, and authorized taking a village police car to mechanics for estimates on what it will cost to make it start reliably.
It also authorized purchase of a new $500 concrete catch basin for the intersection of Davis Road and Triumph Avenue if the existing one can't be repaired, and acquisition of street signs for streets lacking them.