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Leadwood Mayor Ed Austin and Aldermen John Vickers and Charlie Lewis discuss city business during the Board of Aldermen meeting last week.
Leadwood Board of Aldermen at last week's meeting heard a 40-minute list of complaints from property owner Pam Perry of Bonne Terre. The grievances against the town included lack of policing, windows broken out of her vacant apartments, speeding up her street, garbage in town and a long-ago flooded rental property of hers that she said the city needed to remediate.
“Let’s keep the blame game out of it, make it short, sweet and to the point, and get some answers we’re looking for,” said Mayor Ed Austin at the top of the meeting. “Pam Perry, you have the floor.”
Perry, while not a resident, is a landlord. At the meeting, she referenced a property with two buildings, and she indicated one is a storage building with an apartment or two, and another is a building divided into four apartments.
“I’d like you to give my tax money back and I’ll put security in my own buildings, because I’m not getting it from Leadwood,” she began. “How’s that for a beginning. I pay on four properties.”
“Yes, ma'am. And I understand where you're coming from,” Austin said. “We all do. But getting police to come over here. I mean, getting police to go to county, getting police to go to Park Hills — Everybody is short staffed. And we're trying to do the best we can with just the couple (of officers) we got.”
Perry said while she doesn’t have tenants in her buildings at the moment, she has to have it ready to be rented by October, so she’s been working to spruce them up. She said she’s had to repeatedly replace windows that have been broken out.
“And no matter what happens, it still cost me in the end so I'm looking for a solution. I'm not pointing at you and I realized this is a bad situation. The economy's a bad situation, Leadwood Police has been a bad situation for the last 20 years that I've been around,” Perry said. “And it's that doesn't reflect on the police themselves. It's just that there's just not enough there's not enough money … I'm not sure what the answer is. But I do know that I'm paying a mortgage on those and I'm tired of paying the mortgage and not being able to use (the buildings) for three years now.”
She said an offer had been made by a previous police chief to set up motion cameras on the property, or ask nearby homeowners if their internet access could be borrowed to run the cameras, but it didn’t work out. She said an offer had also previously been made to put cameras on the animal pound that could also be placed toward her Main Street property.
She asked Alderman John Vickers if he might be willing to share his internet at his house for the camera system to guard her property.
Vickers demurred, saying, “I have no idea, but the problem is, if we try to specifically look after your property, we have to look out for everybody’s. I remember the broken windows the last time, and I thought the charges had been dropped.”
Perry asserted, “No. I have never, ever dropped charges on anybody there and I have insisted very vocally that I will press charges. When a kid was found there, breaking into the back, I went there and I would have pressed charges on them.”
Shifting gears, Perry brought up a building on the back of the property she said the city needed to remediate.
“Also, somebody from Leadwood has to come over and something has to be done about all the stuff that was ruined in my back building,” she said. “That, whatever, an overflow, whatever it is that goes underneath my back building — I said something before, they didn't keep the drain clean, so it all backed up and it ruined all my stuff in storage. It's still sitting there. It's locked up, but it's still sitting there. I have no control over cleaning that out.”
Perry explained there are two unrented apartments and a storage area in that building, and when a city-owned, trench drain backed up, it flooded the storage area. Aldermen and Perry pieced together that the building had at first been a pole barn for Miner’s Lumber, which was then partially turned into apartments, and Perry agreed, pointing out she had spruced up the dwellings when she purchased the property.
But now she wasn’t going to rent out the apartments there “for a lot of reasons. I’ll probably end up tearing it down and putting something else there, if I do anything in Leadwood,” she said. “But it’s the damage. My insurance doesn’t cover that, and there was nothing I could do about it. If I lived there, maybe I could have seen the water coming.”
When she was asked how long ago the storage area had flooded, she said possibly more than a year ago. Later, aldermen who conferred about the matter estimated the flooding had happened at least eight years ago. They asked if she would be willing to let them take a look at the property. “Bring a flashlight, it’s a mess,” she said, as discussion continued about her rental properties.
At one point, Perry asked, “I know you love this question, but what is the status on the water now? It’s been three months since I’ve been here.”
Vickers and Water and Wastewater Supervisor Kevin Brooks said the state is reviewing a second set of answers provided by the engineer, and the city is waiting for the Department of Natural Resources to give the OK to let the project out for bid.
The city has struggled for the better part of 10 years to pursue an overhaul of their city water system, the small, budget-challenged town having worked through passing a bond issue, then embracing a USDA loan, then going through the process of getting a DNR grant, deciding whether or not to purchase water from and build the appropriate infrastructure to Park Hills, deciding against it and resuming their pursuit of rebuilding their own water and wastewater system this past winter.
Perry had several questions regarding water meters, and whether private citizens or the city will pay for new pipes on private property. She expressed dissatisfaction at the thought of having to pay for pipes and water meters.
“Switching back to my windows, what can be done? I can’t rent it with boards over it,” Perry said, adding her insurance company was “yelling” at her for having no renters for three years. She repeated that police needed to watch her property better, and to the aldermen’s suggestions, said heavy screens outside the glass would cost too much, and repeated boards would be unsightly. “I need something else,” she said.
Alderman Charlie Lewis said the board hopes the one-cent increase in sales tax approved last April by voters will help retain and recruit police, but at the moment, more policing could not be promised. Perry said she was expecting another solution to address her plight now.
There was further discussion about the windows being broken out, previous vandalism incidents in years past around the town, and other properties that might share internet access for motion-activated security cameras before Austin reiterated they would come to her flooded property to see what might have happened with the flooded drain in Perry’s storage-apartment building.
During the rest of the meeting, the board:
Sarah Haas is the assistant editor for the Daily Journal. She can be reached at 573-518-3617 or shaas@dailyjournalonline.com.
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Leadwood Mayor Ed Austin and Aldermen John Vickers and Charlie Lewis discuss city business during the Board of Aldermen meeting last week.
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