Danville mayor questions legality of public meeting

An estimated $45,000 has been allotted to fix parking lots at Millennium Park. The allocation was voted on by five of the members of the Parks and Rec Ad Hoc Committee who attended Monday’s meeting.

“We have delayed and deferred this paving. It just needs to be done,” said Mary Conley, county treasurer and a member of the committee.

Two voting members of the committee weren’t present — Danville Mayor Mike Perros and City Manager Ron Scott. The meeting, Perros said via phone later, was not properly advertised to his knowledge.

The last meeting was held June 19, and, at that time, the P&R Ad Hoc Committee voted to suspend its regular meetings until September. The Sept. 11 meeting was scheduled at that time.

According to KRS 61.820, all meetings of all public agencies, along with their committees and subcommittees must “be held at specific times and places that are convenient to the public, and all public agencies shall provide for a schedule of regular meetings by ordinance, order, resolution, bylaws or by whatever other means may be required for the conduct of business of that public agency.” The schedule must be made available to the public.

Prior to the vote on the funding for parking lots, City Commissioner and Ad Hoc Committee member Rick Serres asked Chair Rodger Ross if there was something else of a higher priority.

“We have an elephant in the room,” Ross said.

If repairs aren’t made to the pool at the Bunny Davis Center, he said, P&R won’t be allowed to open it next season.

That’s based on an inspection by the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, who said the decking and the gutter areas of the pool needed to be addressed before it could be opened.

Judge-Executive Harold McKinney said he wasn’t “much for moving the blacktopping money to the pool.”

Conley and Boyle County Magistrate Jack Hendricks agreed.

“If we move forward with (the blacktopping and paving), we have to come back to the elephant,” Serres said. “They don’t have extra money; they’re dependent on us to take care of these things.”

“I think we can revisit that, but I think we charted a path we were going to go down,” McKinney said. “I think we need to give (County Engineer) Duane (Campbell) a number of $45,000.”

Parks and Recreation Director John Drake said he understood that Earl Coffey, engineer for the City of Danville, was going to meet with maintenance supervisor Harold Logue to look at the pool. Drake said he couldn’t begin to speculate what it would cost.

Ross said the board’s main concern was knowing whether or not they could plan programs for the pool this coming summer. 

“I tried to request this information two weeks ago. I realize there are other priorities in the city, such as opening a new (water) plant, that postponed when this was going to get done,” he said. “I would have really have liked to have numbers at this meeting.”

Committee members agreed they should wait to discuss the pool until they have numbers in mind.

“I think this pool situation is a totally separate situation that we have to sit down and talk about,” said Hendricks. “If we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, we can’t do this without the full court and the full commission. Millions is not in my purview.

“If we’re talking $10,000 or $20,000, there’s monies in (the budget) we could switch around.”

Via phone after the meeting, Coffey said he had been to look at the pool Monday morning, as part of a yearly maintenance review. It’s premature, he said, to speculate on the cost of repairs.

“We’ll get into it and see what work we need to do,” Coffey said.

He agreed the gutters and deck likely needed work, and said there may be more work needed to make the pool operational for next summer.

“We’ve had to work regularly for the last few years to make sure it was operational for that season,” he said. “The Parks and Rec staff has done a good job with keeping us in the loop with some of their needs. That’s helped. At the same, we’ve stated publicly — that pool is old, in terms of aquatics, and does have a limited useful life.”

At this time, he said, he doesn’t know what the scope of work needed would be to get the pool open next year, but that they would continue looking into it.

That work will have to be done by April 1 for the pool to open on time, Drake said after the meeting.

The $45,000 voted on by the P&R board is to redo the parking lot at the baseball complex area and to finish paving at the soccer fields. Another $40,000 has been allotted to resurface the parking lots at the softball field and to build a new, small lot by the basketball courts, but Hendricks said they should use that in the spring or “in other ways.”

Almost the whole park will soon have wireless internet available, Drake said. That wireless access has enabled the purchase of new wireless cameras for the baseball fields.

There will also be electric eye controls installed in some of the bathrooms. In the spring, the bathrooms will be revisited for the installation of automatic interior lighting. One bathroom currently has the automatic lighting.

After the final two cross country meets, work is set to begin on building a volleyball pit at the park. It could cost close to the $20,000 allotted for the project, not including the fence, County Engineer Campbell said.

A temporary fence can be placed to keep balls from rolling into the pond, Drake said.

The park is also waiting on work to be done to the baseball fields, to improve drainage; it’s been a problem for 15 years, said Drake. The budget includes $10,000 for the project.

The next meeting of the P&R Ad Hoc Committee is scheduled for 10 a.m. Oct. 9 at Danville City Hall.