City Council approves public works contract

Horner & Shifrin is working on the Budslick Midway Court/Concord/Hendrickson project. The City owns 36 parcels in this area that we will be transferring to them for the project. H&S has requested us to vacate those parcels from the Shannon Heights Subdivision, then request the Assessor's office to consolidate them into single parcels eliminating the lot lines. Then the City is transferring 5 parcels instead of 36. They said this was also suggested and approved by Angie in the Assessor's office. J SL Title is doing the title work on these, and the Developer is hoping to get things in place for the builders to begin sometime in June. | reports=1

Many developing towns have similar ordinances requiring landscaping development with all new commercial buildings. I wanted to give you all a chance to read through it and understand what it does and does not do before you decide how you may vote on this ordinance. Obviously, we can make changes as you see fit, but my goal in writing this was to make it easy to understand. Keep in mind, architects will be the ones reading and drawing plans based on this, not property owners. As they submit plans for the building, architects also include landscaping plans based on our code. Most, if not all, franchises already include and build out landscaping as their core model because most more towns they develop in than not, have such requirements. See Olive Garden and Chick-fil-A as examples. With all the commercial development in town, and the expected development over the next several years, we felt the time was right. The STAR Bond District has a requirement that 20% of all land developed has to be green space. So even though this ordinance can not force previous developments to comply, the SB District should eventually look similar to the requirements herein as well. To develop this ordinance, I primarily benchmarked ourselves against Mattoon. Mattoon is similar in size to Marion, has a similar growth trend, and visually, it looks more developed, in part, because they require landscaping. Their ordinance goes a bit beyond what I put into ours, again, I didn't want to create burden but more a standard that will make the concrete jungles more visually appealing. Imagine if we had this in place when Walmart was developed, the parking lot would have islands of trees and much more aesthetically pleasing than cart corrals and a sea of cars. Open to your feedback, but I hope you can see the value in this requirement. The bushes and flowers will make an immediate impact and the trees will make an impact for the next 50 years. I don't believe the added costs in putting in a few trees and shrubs will be financially prohibitive, and the benefits certainly outweigh the burdens. | reports=1

We originally negotiated this contract in May 2025. We left those negotiations feeling we had an agreement, as the union negotiators tentatively agreed to it. The union body voted down the contract based solely on the provision that the City no longer covers dependent premium costs for any employee hired after the effective date of the contract. The union never offered a counter over the last nine months and ultimately opted for a federal mediator, who met with the union and us on February 19th. Through the mediator, both parties agreed to covering 50% of dependent premiums, down from the historical 75%, but up from the 0% we proposed. We feel this language still accomplishes the goal of by pricing dependent coverage at a level that may discourage future dependents from coverage on our plan. As discussed previously, dependents are driving our claim costs and have historically done so. The FOP dispatchers, 773 Dietary, and 773 Clerical employees all agreed to the proposed provision of no dependent premium coverage, so we will ask you at a future meeting to agree to match this 50% language in those contracts. We feel it is unfair to ask those units to give up more than others have agreed to. Additionally, we will be modifying the employee handbook, covering all non-union employees, to match this 50% language as well. Again, this 50% dependent premium coverage is down from the current 75% level and only covers new hires, not any existing city employees. | reports=1