Over the last 20 years the City of Kalona has seen many changes, and it has adapted its local laws to reflect those changes. As a result, the city’s Code of Ordinances has become …
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Over the last 20 years the City of Kalona has seen many changes, and it has adapted its local laws to reflect those changes. As a result, the city’s Code of Ordinances has become somewhat messy, and the city is now taking steps to clean it up.
On Jan. 4, a public hearing was held on the Adoption of the Proposed Code of Ordinances of the City of Kalona during which no comments were made. The city council proceeded to approve a first reading of the proposed Code of Ordinances.
“A lot of this is cleaning up previous ordinances that were done and not codified, so that’s the first thing,” City Administrator Ryan Schlabaugh explained to the council members prior to the vote. In other words, no new regulations are being created; however, the existing regulations are being integrated into a systematic code.
“The second part is [codification and city attorneys] go through and legally look at our standing for certain things,” Schlabaugh explained. “So, I’ll use an example. We have a section that calls for possible jail time not to exceed 30 days. The Supreme Court has shot that all down. We as a community can’t do that. So, the codification through that process cleans up that language that would put us against the legal precedent.”
Having worked with physical and PDF copies of the Code of Ordinances until now has made it difficult to update. To ease that burden going forward, the city will adopt an electronic version of the code.
“It’s very, very good,” Schlabaugh notes. “This is much more user friendly. It’s able to be updated much easier and less expensive because it’s just a matter of changing some electronic pages.”
The city will now be on a yearly plan to keep the Code of Ordinances up to date.
In other new business, the city council approved the 2021-2022 Audit Report as presented.
“Sarah [Shmelar, City Clerk] and Heather [Trimpe, Utility Clerk] did an excellent job. Everything that we had to present was presented to the auditors timely. All questions that we were asked we were all able to answer properly to the best of our ability. It lasted about a day and a third. They had everything they needed,” Schlabaugh told the council.
The auditors had four findings that they asked the city for comment on, but overall, “The audit itself is very, very clean,” Schlabaugh said. “We’ve done the same things for years and now through changes in procedures they want to see us do a little bit differently, but it’s not that major.”
The city council’s final action of the night was to set a public hearing for January 16, 2023, at 7 p.m. regarding the joint application for an Iowa Community Block Grant between Pleasantview and the City of Kalona.
“We’re working with the state on an Iowa Community Block Grant, which is between $450,000 and $600,000. We would act as more of a pass-through on this for the Friendship Center,” Schlabaugh said. “We would like to have a resolution to submit [the grant application] based on our eligibility with us and [Pleasantview].”
