LINGLE – The Lingle Town Council met at the community center Wednesday evening to discuss mandatory business concerning recent town matters, as well as upcoming plans and developments for summertime. 

Present at the meeting was mayor Micah Foster as well as council members Tabitha Lambert, Kathy Willhelm, and Jackie Hill. 

Council member Shelly Duncan attended the meeting digitally.

The meeting began promptly at 6 p.m. with a call to order and the Pledge of Allegiance, quickly followed by mandatory public comment.

Goshen County Emergency Management Coordinator (EMC), Tom Bozeman, addressed the council with requests pertaining to siren upgrades as well as similar enhancements on current emergency alert systems.

“I wanted to talk to you guys tonight about our outdoor warning sirens,” Bozeman began. “We do have a couple of changes and things happening with those sirens, and I understand you guys own your own. This year as far as maintenance of the sirens, the county paid half and the state paid half. I’ve done some research in seeing how much was with the county, and how much the state was spending on maintenance. What I’m here to do today is ask if you guys could share the cost of the county to maintain these things, and keep them going so we can maintain that relationship. I wanted to see if the town was willing to pay their amount.”

Bozeman continued his presentation by explaining how despite Lingle’s community-owned sirens are in need of maintenance and upgrading, the EMC was more than willing to provide efforts in writing essential grants in ensuring such upgrades could happen in a timely manner.

“With this, we would need patience with the sirens,” Bozeman continued. “What we did was have technicians come down and spend two days with dispatch trying to figure out why we couldn’t get communications with them. During reviews, we had them go around looking at a county-wide survey and found several are very old. Some are over twenty years old. The fact is we are having communication issues with the ways the sirens are supposed to work. With your permission, I would like to write a grant which will pay for this, and hopefully, we can get it. It’s a pretty substantial price tag but I didn’t want to do that without your permission from the town. It’s basically a county-wide grant application.”

In response to the proposals made by Bozeman, mayor Foster humorously replied, “Please write that grant.”

Moving on from updating Lingle’s emergency sirens, Bozeman continueed further before the council in describing the county’s intentions to also update its digital emergency alert system.

“Everyone is familiar with Code Red I’m sure,” Bozeman continued. “As far as the warning systems we send out we are actually changing for a company called Civic Ready. This allows for several things. It’s basically the same alerting system, but if you do not sign up for it you get the alert anyway on your phone. What it does differently from the other company is it makes phone calls to your house as well as local businesses. It also allows for general messaging so you can send messages back and forth. The county can also send festival messages free of charge, and as many as you want. You can create your own groups and other great stuff like that. We hope to be in the new system by the beginning of August. I’ll be sending flyers around, so there will be a big push on that probably in about a month.”

Soon thereafter, town attorney Anna Barnes notified the council of a contractual agreement made with Visionary Communications. The matter had been a lengthy discussion between both parties as far as reaching an amicable long-term agreement beneficial to both the community and the high-speed internet company.

“This is ordinance number 366 and is to grant a franchise with Visionary Communications. We spent about nine months going through the different terms,” Barnes began. “Some final things we have updated in the document were just contact information for town clerk, county maintenance and, the town address for mailing. I checked with Visionary, and then they will automatically start sending payments as soon as they have signed a copy. We do have to do three readings of this, so tonight will be the first reading of Ordinance #366.”

All council members motioned for the newly proposed ordinance to continue for a second reading at the next meeting.

The meeting adjourned at 6:50 p.m. and will reconvene on Wednesday, May 22 at 6 p.m.