Mulliken council picks Potter Street for repaving over French Street, tables new plow truck purchase

Village trustees opened business by approving the March meeting minutes and the treasurer's report without objection. The treasurer's report, presented by Treasurer Kelli Waldo, walked through the month's payments, which included road salt, general utility bills, a village credit-card payment, and various sewer-related expenses. No dollar figures were read into the record for individual line items, and trustees had no questions before approving the report.

The biggest decision of the night was choosing which village street to repave this year. A trustee had gotten a paving contractor to walk both Potter Street and French Street, and the group agreed Potter — a heavier-traffic route into town — was in worse shape and should be done first. The quote covers milling and repaving Potter from where prior work left off, plus removing and rebuilding a failing section near Brittany Lane, for a total of about $82,995. Trustees noted that a smaller amount spent on patching last year had essentially been wasted money. The council approved the Potter Street paving contract; French Street work is being pushed to next year unless village finances change.

The council also approved a one-year, time-and-materials contract with an engineering firm experienced in lagoon and lift-station systems, at roughly $100 an hour. The firm will help train the village's maintenance employee toward state certification to operate the lagoon system himself, a process that takes about a year before he can test for a license. Trustees said the state environmental regulator (EGLE) is already aware of the arrangement and supportive of it. The firm can also help prepare engineered plans and grant applications for future sewer system upgrades, which would be billed separately from the training work.

A trustee raised the idea of retiring both of the village's aging pickup and plow trucks and replacing them with a single larger truck — a one-ton dump truck with a plow and spreader — priced at roughly $81,000. Trustees discussed splitting the cost between the sewer fund and another village fund, and weighed buying an already-built unit on a dealer's lot versus ordering new, since new orders can reportedly take a year or more to arrive. After discussion of financing and which dealers to check, the council decided to table the purchase for about a month to shop around for pricing before committing.

A resident living on Eaton Highway had contacted the village about a large, apparently dead and hollowed-out tree on the ditch bank near her property, which she fears could fall and damage the road, power lines, or her home. Trustees discussed that the village's road right-of-way typically extends about 33 feet from the center of the road, and said they would go look at the tree in person before deciding whether it falls under village responsibility or needs to be handled through the resident's insurance or the utility company.

In old business, the maintenance report noted that catch basins have been cleaned and are in good shape. The council approved bringing in a roughly $1,000 rented dumpster so the maintenance employee can clear years of accumulated junk out of the village pole barn. Trustees also discussed, but did not commit to reviving, a past community cleanup event where residents could drop off bulk trash, citing problems in past years with people dumping tires and hazardous items like air conditioning units overnight.

The zoning report covered two items with no objections raised: a Potter Street resident's request to add a room onto his house, and a requested property split near the railroad tracks that would give an adjoining homeowner an additional 40 feet along his driveway while carving out a lot of just over an acre for a family member to build a new home.

The Eaton County sheriff's report for the period was light, with six total calls: two calls of unknown nature, one assault, one car-deer accident, one physical altercation, and one miscellaneous incident. On ordinance matters, trustees noted a neighboring property appeared to be cleaning up vehicles and trash from its driveway, and said a nearby store owner had been asked informally to get a dumpster rather than continue accumulating junk and debris outside the building.

During public comment, a resident asked how to arrange for his own driveway to be paved while the paving contractor is in the area for the Potter Street project, and was given the contractor's contact information; work on Potter Street is expected to begin in the last week of April or first week of May, weather permitting. The meeting closed with a motion to adjourn, which carried.

How this report was produced

This article was generated by an automated pipeline, and we think you should know exactly how. First, the audio of the meeting was converted into text by automatic speech recognition — software that infers words from sound, without a human listening along. That machine-made transcript was then read by Willbot, American2Day’s AI reporter, which condensed it into the report above. No human transcribed the meeting, and no human wrote this summary.