The Dexter Leader
A Heritage Newspaper
Weekly Publication
Who's footing the holly jolly bill?
By Sean Dalton, Staff Writer
PUBLISHED: August 28, 2008
Each year the Dexter community comes together and dresses the village in the trappings of holiday cheer and spirit, but recently the question of who would foot the bill is up in the air.
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In previous years the Dexter Area Chamber of Commerce has born the full brunt of the expense and management duties involved with putting the lights up downtown.
In a letter sent to village administrators and the Village Council, the chamber expressed its wishes to pass the duty along to another entity - specifically the village itself.
Village President Shawn Keough had lots of questions that he would have liked to ask chamber President Joe Nowak, who did not attend Monday's meeting and did not return calls as of press time.
"What I would like to do, in fairness to Joe, is communicate ... I don't have any problems helping, but I don't know the length of time it could take if we asked staff to do this and what we would be taking them away from," Keough said.
Nowak expressed a continued level of support in the letter received by the council, although nowhere near what the chamber had done in the past.
Village trustees speculated as to the cost, which was in the $4,000 to $5,000 range.
Installing the lights requires having an insured maintenance staffer from the village climb poles, trees and other structures to string the lights up in and around Monument Park.
"While we all so much enjoy the lights and we feel they are important to all the citizens of Dexter, financial constraints make it impossible for the Dexter Chamber of Commerce to continue to bear all the costs and responsibilities of the project," Nowak says in the letter.
He went on to say in the letter that the shift of the holiday lighting initiative was just one step in a larger process to "aggressively reduce costs by cutting staff and implementing cost-cutting measures throughout our organization."
Up until this point, all the village has had to do is allow the chamber to store the large quantity of lights in space at the Department of Public Works building.
Despite the pullback, the chamber isn't completely abandoning the effort to spread holiday cheer in the community. The letter states that a $1,000 contribution would be made on the organization's behalf to support the lighting.
The letter did not expressly state that the contribution would be a recurring yearly amount provided to the village, but Keough and others said at the meeting Monday that it would be, based on conversations they said they have had with chamber officials.
Council members Paul Cousins and Donna Fisher were or two schools of thought on which way the village should go.
"The chamber decided that its funds should be used for more business-oriented things," Cousins said. "If we could get a thousand (dollars) from the chamber annually, maybe the DDA could split (the cost)."
It should be noted that Cousins is the council's liaison to the chamber.
Fisher thinks that the downtown lighting is more of a Downtown Development Authority function, and should thus be paid for by the DDA's tax captured money collected from those within its taxing jurisdiction.
"I don't think it should even be split," she said. "It's a DDA piece, it's a downtown function."
Cousins pointed out that the cost of the project would only increase, as earlier in the meeting village officials discussed installing new light poles on Central Street and 31 new poles elsewhere in the village, which would require more lights and place more work on the shoulders of whoever the village hires for the job.
Keough and Dettling discussed the cost of covering the liability of a worker that would effectively be putting him or herself at great risk climbing hard to reach places at great heights in chiller weather.
"It has to be managed so we don't take on huge risks," Dettling said. "If the village is going to have lights or not, whether I like it or not, we have to manage that."
Cousins pointed out that the village has a truck with an extendable cherry-picker arm that would effectively make the job safely.
Trustee Ray Tell was for whatever, just so long as it's all "snap and pop."
"I want simple, clean white lights," he said. "You just take it out, snap it in the O-ring and that's that. But it seems like they have a variety of decorations."
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