The City of Wells is buckling down on its conduct policies in public forums and meetings.

After having multiple interruptions from the public on previous occasions, the Wells City Council decided to reintroduce its rules of conduct for public comments and public meetings.

“I just think we need to have a reminder that there are rules to public input,” said city administrator Robin Leslie. “We have had issues with disruptive behavior previously and if we don’t adhere to our guidelines, we can get off task very quickly and eat up valuable time. It is up to the council and Mr. Mayor to enforce the rules, and it is up to the public to follow the rules.”

Leslie stated that the rules of conduct were almost identical to other cities’ rules, stating the only difference between Wells and Blue Earth or Winnebago is that each speaker is given five minutes to speak compared to Blue Earth’s three minutes.

And the council agreed.”I think it’s a good idea to remind the public that we, too, have an agenda that we need to work through,” said council member Whitney Harig. “I believe that public input is very important in our work, but we have to keep things moving, and keep things civil.”

Leslie stated that the rules were also a reminder to members of the public not to berate members of the city council.

“We don’t want to have the council feel attacked in any way or begin a back-and-forth conversation that gets off topic,” said Leslie.

During the staff reports, chief of police Tim Brenegan reported that the Wells Police Department have already used their Narcan to save a young lady’s life from an opiate-induced overdose. The nasal spray given to police officers helps reverse the effects of opioid overdoses.

“We are very fortunate that we had Narcan available to us earlier on this year, and because of this medical aid, we were able to save that young woman’s life that night,” says Brenegan.

Both Travis Winter, the city’s engineer, and Mike Pyzick, Wells’ street foreman, reported that the Safe Routes to School Project is nearing completion.

With the cement poured and lawns being spruced back up, it will not be long before the city sees the nearly four-year project finished.

Pyzick stated to the council that once the final pieces of the sidewalks are done, his crew will begin to scour and scrape curbs and gutters to begin painting them. The street crew will also be prepping roads for crack fill.

Winter reported that things were going very well. There were some issues with trees being a little close to the new sidewalks, but the city engineer ensured the council that the construction team members who worked on the project were dutiful in removing interfering tree roots that would then allow room for sidewalks.

“This way, the sidewalks hopefully won’t be damaged by the trees and vise versa,” said Winter.

After the city’s first “Summer in the City,” the entire council in attendance had nothing but good things to say about the event.

“I think the whole city did a fantastic job,” said Harig. “Congratulations go to the chamber, businesses that participated, local law enforcement and city officials that put this all together. It was wonderful.”

The Wells City Council also:

Held a public hearing for the preliminary and final plats for the business park addition. There was no public discussion on the matter, so the motion was made to approve both the preliminary and final plats by John Herman and seconded by Steve Burns. All members of the council voted in favor of the preliminary and final plats for the business park project.

Received statistics from Wells’ city-wide clean up where Leslie reported the largest clean up in many years.

“We had five times as much garbage (25.86 tons) as last year, 54 appliances, 113 electronics, and 28 tires cleaned up,” said Leslie. The tires were an accomplishment, especially.

“Now that we know how harmful the Zika virus is, we want to make sure as many spare tires are cleaned up as possible. We want to prevent giving mosquitos as many hatching areas as we can,” said Leslie.

Wells’ next regular meeting will be held Monday, July 11 at 5 p.m. in the Wells Community Center.