Mulliken Council Approves Emergency $50,000 Transfer After Clash Over Cleanup Costs, Unsigned Contract

The Mulliken village council called a special emergency meeting to authorize moving $50,000 from the Major Street Fund into the General Fund to keep up with bills, and the vote came only after a tense, at times heated debate over cleanup costs at the property next door to the village and a rental contract that still has not been signed.

Treasurer Kelli Waldo told the council the Major Street Fund holds about $153,000, though the sewer fund already owes it roughly $70,000. The $50,000 shift to General was described as an interest-free loan, expected to be repaid once property tax revenue reaches the village, which officials said should arrive between September 20 and 25.

Officials said the transfer is needed to cover payroll and other bills, along with cleanup work underway at the property next door to the village. The tenant doing that cleanup has billed the village $20,000 so far, covering roughly two and a half months of work.

Much of the debate centered on how that $20,000 cleanup bill compares to what the tenant pays to rent the building — $1,000 a month, with rent expected to rise if he takes on more of the space. The treasurer said the tenant currently owes $3,500 in rent, which the cleanup work was to go toward. One member suggested the arrangement appeared to be profiting the tenant well beyond that rent. Another trustee countered that the council had already voted to approve the cleanup work in the first place, though acknowledged members hadn't expected the bill to run this high. A third pointed to a rival company's estimate of about $1.2 million to clean the site and leave the building standing, plus an earlier court-ordered bid of $70,000, arguing the current cost compares favorably. At points the exchange grew sharp and personal before the board moved on.

Separately, members confirmed the tenant still has not signed a contract for the property, despite the council reportedly agreeing weeks earlier to changes he requested. There was open confusion over who was responsible for drafting the revised terms: some said the tenant was to write up the changes and return them to the village, one said the update needed to come from the village's attorney, and another said they had personally taken notes on the requested changes. No draft or notes had reached the full council by the meeting, and members who had missed the earlier discussion said they'd received nothing in writing to review.

One trustee argued the delay in finalizing the contract may have cost the village other potential bidders on the property, saying interested parties might have come forward sooner had the process moved faster. The council acknowledged it does not yet know whether any competing bids have been submitted, since the meeting to review them has not been held. The deadline for outside bids on the property was said to fall in September, the Friday before a date discussed at the meeting.

A member also objected to taking the emergency vote without the full council present; attendance for the meeting was limited. Others responded that the absent trustees had been made aware the meeting was taking place.

The motion to move "$50,000 from the Major Street Fund to the General Fund to pay bills" was made by Trustee Sherry Kempf and seconded from the floor. It passed on a voice vote of those in attendance.

The council said it hopes to begin repaying the loan once property tax revenue arrives in late September. Still outstanding are a finalized, signed contract with the tenant and a follow-up meeting to determine whether other bids were submitted on the property before the deadline.

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.