Newly elected Windham Township Mayor Lawrence Cunningham attended the Windham Township Board of Trustees meeting last Thursday evening at Windham Town Hall to address several issues.
The first item he raised was that Windham would host Fun in the Sun in July, a local summer festival that had not occurred in several years, but the new Mayor said that one of his first acts as Mayor would be to reinstate that summer event.
He said that after speaking with Windham’s Chief of Police, he planned to install block cameras near schools to help with Amber Alerts and stolen vehicles. He also wanted to install the cameras on the corner of Horn and Wolfe and the corner of Parkman and Wolfe roads.
He asked the Board if he needed a permit to do so and was told he did not.
“It will assist in a lot of things,” Cunningham said. “I spoke with Streetsboro’s Mayor, they have the same thing around their schools. We are all concerned about our children at school and most schools have them all around in the area and it will help if someone gets abducted or there is a shooter. It will help them know which direction suspects went in so the police are not on a wild goose chase.”
The Mayor’s last agenda item was to discuss Windham’s annual spring clean-up, taking place on April 26 and April 27.
The Board discussed moving the clean-up to cover both days of the weekend instead of just Friday and Saturday but chose not to do so to avoid paying employees overtime for working on Sunday.
Trustee President Dan Burns said he already ordered dumpsters to be delivered to Windham and received a dumpster specifically for residents to deposit their tires. In the past, the Village was charged between $2.00-$3.00 for each tire thrown away but will only have to pay 50 cents per tire this year.
Burns added that a vehicle could only carry up to 10 tires on the road. If it exceeded that number, then the state patrol would issue the driver a ticket.
Trustee and Road Contact Brian Miller updated the board about the truck that was still at the Fairway Ford Dealership in Canfield. He said that the part that needed to be replaced was no longer being manufactured so the board would be fully reimbursed for the truck under the Ohio Lemon Law.
“I don’t know what we will do with that money,” Miller said. “It will be reimbursed and probably go into the general fund. Then we will go from there. For right now, wait until we get it. We will see what is happening and go from there.”
Miller said he was also exploring options to buy a new tractor mower attachment and had contacted several companies in the state but had not finalized a purchase yet.
An audience member proposed that the board consider outsourcing a roadside tractor to maintain Windham’s streets but there was no further discussion.
Trustee and Cemetery Contact Rich Gano said he had laid out 34 indigent burial lots and an additional 32 graves. Burns said that they already had a body that would receive an indigent burial.
Zoning Inspector Jake Sweet said that with the weather beginning to break he was receiving more permit requests. He had four permit requests that were pending, including building a pole barn on Wolfe Road, an accessory building on Bryant Road and another accessory building on Gotham Road.
Sweet told the Board he has been receiving phone calls about the status of the moratorium on installing the solar panels on properties that the Board had previously discussed. Gano said the Board was still waiting for word from the Portage County Regional Planning Commission.
Sweet added that he received an email from Portage Land Bank Executive Director Dan Morganti about the status of the property on State Route 303. He told the Board that Morganti advised he was still waiting for the grant for the property’s clean-up to be approved.
Sweet said Morganti notified him that he expected to hear back from the Ohio Department of Development by April or May and then clean-up could begin in July.
“Hopefully, it will be in place by late spring which would mean the work and funded projects would commence this summer,” Sweet said. “He will keep me posted as he learns more.”
If the grant is not approved, Burns said the Board’s back-up plan would be to ask Portage County for help.
Burns said Windham’s Fire Department has responded to 122 calls so far this year. The Fire Department was still waiting for the money from the levy that had been passed last year and once the money is recieved, it could begin assessing how much of a raise it could give the employees.
He added that the board would revisit those discussions in two months once he knew how much money the Fire Department had at its disposal.
“The most important thing is that we need a new ambulance squad,” he added. “We have two, but one is pretty old.”
In old business, Gano said that the light by the old war memorial was finally working.
The Board concluded the meeting by announcing they would be holding a special public meeting on Sunday at 1 p.m. to discuss substandard lots.
The next Board of Trustees Meeting will take place on April 4 at Windham Town Hall at 6 p.m.
