Hillsboro also agrees to help fill refuse collection void

By PHYLLIS ZORN

Staff writer

A $600,000 community development block grant will help pay for development of a community child care center, city council members were told Tuesday.

The $600,000 CDBG grant will be matched by a $600,000 private pledge, an $855,216 child-care-capacity accelerator grant, a $67,834 Patterson Family Foundation Fund grant, a $45,000 child-care-aware grant, and $500,702 in private donations to pay the estimated $2,668,752 total cost of Hillsboro Community Child Care Center.

Crystal Hinnen from Ranson Financial said the money must be kept in a separate account from other money dedicated for the center.

Council members voted unanimously Tuesday to accept the grant from the state Department of Commerce and sign a contract with the department.

Hillsboro also will be stepping in to fill part of a gap left by Waste Connections’ abandonment of county customers near Hillsboro.

Already, Hillsboro’s refuse department is picking up trash for about 10 families in a housing development at Jade and 190th Rds.

City administrator Matt Stiles said customers in development were being charged the same as city residents but had been told their rates could change.

Council members last week told Stiles to compare rates for refuse services that serve rural areas so that the city was not undercutting their prices.

“We want to be competitive,” Stiles said, but the city doesn’t want to expand its area beyond the small number of rural families it is now serving.

“I don’t think we want to go farther out,” he said.

The city also has agreed to provide a trash container to Ag Service and empty it weekly.

Two sanitation services run routes in Marion County.

Nisly Brothers Inc., of Hutchinson, offers service to rural Marion County customers south of US-56.

Marvin Nisly said he would be glad to see whether his company could take care of the needs of people abandoned by Waste Connections.

Nisly Brothers offers a temporary discount to customers who recently lost trash service.

Jaren Wiebe, who operates Durham-based Sunflower Sanitation along with his father, Calvin, said his company was available to customers in the Hillsboro area.

“I think we’ll go down to US-50,” Wiebe said.

Wiebe said he was aware Waste Connection had dropped customers because some recently had signed with Sunflower.

Some of his new customers hadn’t known Waste Connections was dropping them until trucks stopped coming, Wiebe said.

• Approved a proposed job description for director of parks and recreation.
• Reviewed, but made no changes to, the city’s 2024 budget draft. Stiles said the proposed budget would be reviewed at each council meeting until it formally is approved.
• Made a quarterly review of progress on the city’s strategic plan.
• Stiles said container housing developers Felix Ramirez and Dustin Burke told him they would not be able to meet an August planning and zoning commission deadline to provide updated drawings of the container houses they propose. A meeting planned for July 27 was canceled because new drawings weren’t ready.

The developers hope to meet a September deadline, Stiles said.

“We’ll see how that goes,” he said.