Prospective tenant walks away from village’s elevator building after clash over cleanup payment

The man who had been expected to lease the village-owned elevator property at 345 Main Street told the Mulliken council he will not sign the lease and is withdrawing from the deal entirely. He handed the council a rent check covering the four months he had already used the property, at the agreed rate of $1,000 a month, for a total of $4,000, and gave 30-day notice that will run through October 15.

The tenant said being left in limbo cost him the chance to buy salt for the coming season, since he no longer has anywhere to store it, and that after the last meeting he wrote an offer on a different building. "We had momentum, and the rug just got completely pulled out," he told the council, adding that he could not continue doing business under uncertain terms and has to move on. The council also learned that the 30-day window it opened on August 3 for outside parties to submit their own proposals for the property closed the previous Friday with no proposals received. Trustees said the property's fence will need to be repaired to secure the site now that the lease is off.

The meeting opened with a tense exchange over a $20,000 payment tied to cleanup work at that same property. A trustee asked how many council members had not known the contractor was being paid. The treasurer, Kelli Waldo, said the check was cut the morning after the August 26 special meeting and delivered to the contractor by noon that day, and said she was upset to learn that two trustees had separately contacted the village attorney asking that the payment be held.

Trustees pushed back, saying the vote taken at the August 26 special meeting was to move $50,000 between village funds, not to approve payment of the cleanup bill, and that they had asked by email for an itemized invoice before any payment went out. Waldo said she had the invoice in hand at Monday's meeting and had not seen that email until three days earlier. The two sides also disagreed over who is allowed to contact the village attorney: Waldo's position is that a majority of the council should ask the village president, treasurer or clerk to make that call, while a trustee argued that every council member has equal standing to do so. The discussion grew heated, with raised voices on both sides, before the council moved on.

In other treasurer's business, Waldo announced she intends to train a deputy for one year before stepping back from day-to-day duties, and the council voted to appoint a volunteer to that unpaid, one-year training position. The council also voted to move the $50,000 back after last month's transfer, and separately approved paying the contractor's final invoice for the cleanup work, with the amount cited inconsistently as $3,400 and $3,500 — roughly $3,500.

On maintenance, the village's maintenance supervisor reported that a sewer pump had been damaged after a rag was flushed into the system and became wrapped around the seal; the pump will need to be pulled and serviced. Crews also had to jet a sewer line between two lagoons after a valve became buried and hard to locate, a repair that ran about $1,200. The council approved spending $500 for an additional coat of paint on the metal end of the salt barn. Separately, the village has an estimate of roughly $4,200 to put new vinyl on two sections of the recycle center's awning, with the council still weighing whether that spending makes sense given rising disposal costs; a third section of the structure is in poor enough shape that it will be torn down.

A resident owning the long-vacant former taxidermist building on Main Street, which the county has condemned, told the council he likely cannot afford the engineering work required to bring the structure up to modern commercial code and is now considering demolishing it and rebuilding a smaller structure, possibly as storage units, while keeping the storefront's look consistent with the street. Council members said they had no objection in principle, so long as the front maintains its current commercial character.

During public comment, a resident said he was glad the elevator property had gone out for public bid but argued that the cleanup spending had "just moved trash around" rather than solving the underlying problem. The treasurer interjected that his characterization was incorrect. The same resident urged the council to slow down, get itemized invoices before any future emergency payments, secure the site to protect against liability, and prioritize the village's sewer system as its top spending concern.

Looking ahead, the council will need to decide next steps for the now-vacant elevator property, address fencing and cleanup of the site, and continue work on the sewer pump repair and other infrastructure items discussed Monday.

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.