MEDICAL LAKE – Mayor Terri Cooper, gave her State of the City address at the May 17council meeting. Cooper said the city is in good shape financially, doesn’t owe any money and has well-maintained public works facilities.
“We are financially sound and we carry no outstanding debt as you know,” Cooper said. “We have solid reserves. We have a great wastewater treatment plant, and we have solid street, water and sewer maintenance and we don’t have a water problem, so we’re in good shape.”
The mayor explained how her initial mayoral campaign put her in touch with the residents of Medical Lake and gave her insight into what the public wanted. She expressed political transparency was a major issue the people brought to her attention.
“One of the things that came out of that is transparency in government, so that’s really important to me,” Cooper said. “So you’re going to see more discussion items as I’ve mentioned before. We’re going to have more time where we talk about the things that are important to the community.”
Stepping into another lane of conversation, Cooper spent a few moments describing how volunteerism helps keep the community going through partnerships and communal efforts.
“Volunteers are the backbone of our community— we have 15 volunteer groups in our city,” she said. “That’s a lot and we rely on them. I think other communities are envious actually of our volunteerism and they should be because they do a great job of it— a great job of working together. I think they just do a great job of serving the community.”
Cooper said the city is moving toward intelligent and manageable growth, optimizing city services and implementing best practices to increase overall efficiency.
After some other general discussion, the council opened the floor for the ever-developing topic of internet services.
A representative from Ptera explained the timeline the company is working with to potentially implement internet services in the city. He showed the council a realistic goal for the company to establish a link to Ptera’s data centers, build a central network site at city hall and have fixed wireless internet services available by the third quarter of 2022.
After that, the company would need to install wireless points of presence to provide service. Ptera hopes to have that completed by the fourth quarter of 2022, putting them in a position to begin building fiber internet zones throughout the town in mid-2023.
Other news
Cooper said public records requests had cost the city $6,820 so far this year because the city attorney must handle them. She expressed the idea of bringing the request services in-house.
Giving council a quick update from the public safety committee, Spokane County Fire District 3 (SCFD3) Chief Cody Rohrbach said that there is no foolproof way to be able to read the entire weather season this early. But he said the area could be in for a similar wildfire season as the last couple of years, looking over recent data.
“The long-term forecast is for a wetter and slightly cooler weather pattern,” Rohrbach said. “But it also matches the last two years, and I don’t know if anyone remembers the last two wildfire seasons.
“I’d say the pattern that has emerged over the past decade is we should expect larger fires, more extreme conditions, and hotter and drier. I think we should prepare for that and if it doesn’t get that bad we should be thankful.”
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