Canfield council approves $250,200 in budget additions

May 23, 2014 at 12:00a.m.

By Robert Connelly

CANFIELD

City council unanimously approved adding $250,200 of expenses, mostly in road projects, to this year’s budget when it met Wednesday.

The bulk of the $250,200 addition to this year’s budget was $216,000 for the Fairview Drive Storm Water Management Fund for capital outlay. City Manager Joe Warino said of the Fairview project that the city had “set up the fund, [but] didn’t transfer the funds” for the project. He added that monies from the Ohio Public Works Commission will be made available July 1 and the project will start soon after that.

The city is looking to send out for bids for the project next month.

Another road-project addition was $10,000 in capital outlay for phase two of the North Broad Street upgrades. Warino told council he doesn’t expect crews to use all of that funding but didn’t want to run out of money and wait until the next council meeting to ask for more funding. Warino said the current portion of the construction, phase two, should be finished by next week, weather permitting.

Another budget addition was $4,200 for the police department with that amount being evenly divided between contractual services and supplies and materials.

“This year, unexpectedly, our generator that was running our police department failed,” Police Chief Chuck Colucci said. He said the generator had been having power surges and it was preventive maintenance to repair that generator that has been used by Canfield police since 1994.

Council approved the purchase of a new vehicle and a radio-and-lights package for an unmarked police vehicle. Those combined will not exceed $28,438 and are paid for using federal forfeiture money.

Seven vehicles were declared surplus by council Wednesday night. Of the seven, five were from forfeitures through the police department and will be used as a trade-in for the unmarked-vehicle purchase. The other two vehicles were a tractor and a truck through the road department.

A motion was passed for council to meet only once during July and August. Those meetings, both to start at 6 p.m., are July 9 and Aug. 20.