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MARTINS FERRY -- Mayor John Davies said Wednesday that the city of Martins Ferry is preparing for winter weather.
"We're working right now on getting salt transported," he said during a regular city council meeting.
Davies said the city currently has about 150 tons of salt on hand and he wants to get an additional 50 to 100 tons.
"We have enough salt now, but we want to bring some new salt in to be prepared in case something does happen excessively over the year," Service Director Andy Sutak said.
Sutak said the city is working to get its snow plows ready.
"I think we're ready to go for whatever comes our way," Sutak said.
Davies also said he wants to change the street sweeper schedule so that it only runs during the fall and spring to pick up debris and leaves off the street.
He said the city does not have the manpower to run the street sweeper all summer, and it is inconvenient for residents to move their vehicles every week.
"When the streets were built, everyone only had one car for four family members. Now everybody has four cars per family member. There's no place to park, and I get a lot of complaints," Davies said.
Councilman Thomas Burns said he also has noticed that parking is an issue in the city. He said he agrees that the street sweeper should only be run during the spring and fall due to the lack of manpower.
"Unless we have an emergency in between (spring and fall), where we would have a storm or something, we wouldn't have to run the sweeper," he said.
Burns said a lot of city employees, including the street sweeper operator, take vacations over the summer, so only running the street sweeper in the spring and fall would help eliminate vacation scheduling conflicts.
Davies has not decided the exact dates when the street sweeper would run. He said he plans on scheduling the street sweeper to run for one month during the spring and one month during the fall, and he plans to conduct research to determine what months would benefit the city the most.
Once he decides, the new schedule will go into effect in 2024.
Davies said he will change all of the sweeper-related "no parking" signs throughout the city with the new schedule.
All members of council voted in favor of the street sweeper only running for a set period during spring and fall.
Davies also discussed raising the wages of EMS supervisors and part-time EMS employees by $1 an hour.
"To put it in perspective, our paramedics part-time make $16. Our basic EMT makes $16 on full time, so they asked if they can have a $1 an hour raise along with the supervisor, which the part-timers and supervisors haven't had a raise since the first year we come in," he said.
"The EMS do a lot. ... I feel that they deserve anything we can give them. They work hard," Auditor Jack Regis said.
Meanwhile, Police Chief Jerry Murphy said two officers recently handed in their resignations to work in other districts. He questioned council about replacing the two officers.
Councilman Robert Hunker suggested that council should discuss the issue after receiving the election results on Tuesday. He said that how residents vote on the proposed 1% income tax increase will determine the funding available for the police department.
Council plans to have a safety meeting sometime after Tuesday to make a decision on replacing the police officers.
Councilwoman Suzanne Armstrong also discussed the income tax increase. She said that she contacted the Regional Income Tax Authority to see how many residents versus nonresidents pay city income tax. Armstrong said she could not get those figures, but she noted that about two-thirds of the Martins Ferry City Schools employees live out of town.
"So the reason I'm saying that is there are a lot of people that are going to vote on the income tax, and there are a lot of people that aren't going to vote because they can't vote," she said
"I would like the residents of Martins Ferry to understand that even though they end up comparing younger people with the senior citizens, there is also a large group of people that do not live in Martins Ferry that pay income tax, and we would benefit from that," Armstrong said.
In another matter, Davies said the price increase for bulk water is in place. The price went up from 1 cent per gallon to 2 cents per gallon.
"It seems like we're doing pretty well in the bulk sales right now," he added.