By Crystal McGough
For The Tribune
The Clay City Council held a bid opening for the new Clay Library Tuesday night at its regular council meeting at City Hall.
Two companies submitted bids for the construction of the library. Boatner Construction Company, Inc. in Gadsden bid $1,823,000 for the project. Battle-Miller Construction Corporation in Hoover bid $1,748,800.
“I’ll take those over the next couple weeks and evaluate them and report back to you at the next meeting,” City Manager Ronnie Dixon said.
Councilor Ben Thackerson asked if these bid amounts were more than the council had projected to spend on the library.
“Way over,” Councilor Becky Johnson said.
According to Dixon, the council had planned and prepared to spend $1 million on the library.
“We know why some of that (extra expense) is, especially on the furniture side,” Dixon said. “We know that there’s some stuff in there that we’ll have to look at.”
The council also unanimously passed Ordinance 2017-09 to amend the city’s business license ordinance, adding photo-badge requirement language to the section on peddlers.
“It requires each individual who will be going door to door to come to City Hall, have their picture taken, and for the company to have a business license on file,” Dixon said. “That is to alleviate some of the concerns of the citizens. People were showing up with no identification.”
The council previously authorized the city to spend up to $3,500 on badge-making equipment, but the city ended up spending $2,017 on equipment valued at $3,200.
“We’ve already ordered and received part of the equipment that we’ll need to manufacture those badges,” Dixon said.
According to the updated ordinance, door-to-door peddlers will be required to purchase a $25 badge per person in addition to purchasing a business license with the city.
During the pre-council meeting, Barry Fagan of Volkert, Inc. gave a presentation to the council regarding plans for dredging Cosby Lake.
According to Fagan, Cosby Lake is at least 100 years old.
“To my knowledge it has never been dredged,” he said. “You’ve got a pretty clean source of water coming into it, but as you know, all lakes at some point need some maintenance, and I think you’re there. The issues that we were aware of were algae and submerged weeds and just the shallowness. We did our surveys…and we also had a consultant come in and survey the lake bottom for us. He collected over 7,000 points of data for us, and we’re going through that right now. The obvious sedimentation issue is on the upper end of the lake up near where Turkey Creek comes in.”
In other city news, Councilor Dennis Locke announced the winners of this month’s school grants as: Clay Elementary School teacher Celeste West; Clay-Chalkville Middle School Social Studies teacher Kelly Thompson; and Clay-Chalkville High School English and Speech teacher Jennifer Gallagher.
Each teacher will receive $500 to put toward needs for their classrooms. West plans to purchase books that reinforce Stephen Covey’s seven habits of highly effective people, Thompson plans to purchase two Chromebooks, and Gallagher plans to purchase a Windows laptop.