Mulliken adds second maintenance worker, sets new sidewalk snow policy after contract dispute

The village council voted to keep its maintenance worker on staff but scaled back his duties and agreed to hire a second part-time employee to handle mowing and snow plowing, after the worker described being harassed by residents while doing the job — including being flipped off and finding notes left on his personal vehicle after clearing sidewalks.

Under the revised arrangement, the maintenance worker will continue overseeing the sewage lagoons, for which he recently obtained his own licensure, along with missed utility digs, sewer tap permits and billing, catch-basin and drain cleaning, and larger infrastructure projects such as sinkhole repairs. He will also help with major storm cleanup. The council approved advertising for a new part-time hire to cover routine mowing and snowplowing, to be paid hourly and only when actually working — trustees were clear the village will not pay two people to do the same job at once.

Hiring the new worker will likely require a commercial driver's license depending on the weight of the village's truck. Trustees discussed the licensing class needed and noted the maintenance worker offered to help a new hire study for and pass the required exam.

After lengthy back-and-forth about who is responsible for clearing snow from sidewalks on Main Street, the council settled on a policy: the village will maintain sidewalks only in front of the post office, the library and the park. Other business and property owners are responsible for their own frontage, but if they push cleared snow out to the street, village crews will remove it from there. Trustees said they were wary of taking on liability for private property and noted the village's ordinances have no real enforcement teeth. The question of who is specifically responsible for the library sidewalk was tabled until the February meeting, when the council plans to check with library staff.

The council confirmed that money is already set aside for a sidewalk repair project along M-43 between Potter Street and Dollar General, and permits for that work are in hand and good through next November. The village will gather multiple contractor bids — including a local concrete company — for the council to review before deciding. A trustee also raised widening sidewalks elsewhere in the village so plow trucks can clear them in one pass, an idea the council said it would consider for a future budget.

Trustees discussed buying a trailer-mounted leaf vacuum system, at a price of roughly $20,000, so the village can handle leaf pickup on its own schedule instead of hiring outside help, which caused problems last fall. The council had previously voted to sell the village's current leaf-collection truck and agreed Tuesday to list it for sale on the village website, starting near what the village originally paid and negotiating down from there.

The recycling center was closed for several days over the holidays due to a backlog of pallets and was set to reopen. The maintenance worker noted the contracted hauling truck now carries fewer pallets per trip than in the past, and said he would contact the recycling hauler about scheduling pickups more frequently to keep the center from backing up again. Reopening updates will continue to be posted on the village's community Facebook page.

The treasurer presented paid-bill reports for November and December, including a payment of about $669 to the Michigan Municipal League and work by Cook Brothers Excavating on a village drain, both approved by the council. Budget-versus-actual reports for the general, sewer and other funds showed the village running over budget in some areas, which the treasurer said will be resolved using the village's fund balance when formal budget amendments are made at the March meeting, after the fiscal year closes February 28. A draft budget for the coming fiscal year is expected at the February meeting.

In other business, a trustee raised concerns about dark stretches of street lighting; the council was told Consumers Energy can add lighting with the village covering only the electricity cost, and a trustee agreed to follow up. A hazardous tree still awaiting a removal bid was flagged as a priority before storm season, and trustees discussed solar-powered flashing attachments, around $100 each, for speed-limit signage as a possible future budget item.

The council approved its meeting schedule for the year, moving the May meeting from May 12 to May 5, with other dates unchanged.

During public comment, a resident, Christine Wood, raised concerns about vehicles speeding around the corner of Potter and French streets, where children are often present, and described a vehicle that went off the road there during a recent snowstorm. She also complimented the village's plow operator for slowing down and warning children near that corner, and mentioned she has a used snowblower to sell for $50.

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.