The City of Prescott is going to make sure it’s ready when Dennis Eaton, the city’s water and sewer superintendent, retires at the end of the year.

City Administrator Jayne Brand told the city council at its meeting last week that replacing Eaton as soon as possible is a priority.

“Dennis is retiring from our wastewater treatment plant. He’s looking at the end of the year, and we want to get somebody in so they can get quite a bit of things under their belt,” she said. “The seasons run so different at the wastewater treatment plant. We just want to get somebody in there.”

The city will advertise for the position this month and take applications through mid-March.

“We’re hopefully hiring in the middle-to-end of April so we can get somebody in and get them trained.”

She said the council’s Personnel Committee has discussed the matter, at its January meeting.

‘And then we do have one other retirement coming in our pubic works, a part-time position. Personnel is looking at moving that to a full-time position,” said Brand. “We had some other discussion of positions we may need in the future.”

The Personnel Committee is studying a combined position for Zoning Administrator, Code Enforcement Officer and a GIS mapping position. Also the city is studying a park manager position, as well as a lieutenant, captain and additional patrol officer in the police department.

The committee will work with staff to develop job descriptions and the positions could be included in the 2022 budget.

The city council also closed the books on two large road projects from last summer, with approval of final special assessments. The city completed improvements on Lake Street, Ellen Street, St. Croix Street and Hilton Street, including rebuilding the road and infrastructure and installing curb and gutter, concrete sidewalk, and concrete and alphas driveway aprons.

Work was also done to rebuild Pearl Street north of Hwy. 10.

The total project cost of Lake Street was $1,146,301.92, of which residents will receive special assessments to pay for $92,183.22 of the project.

The cost of the Pearl Street project was $680,083.35. Special assessments to property owners will cover $14,628 of that project.

The city council unanimously approved the special assessments.

The new street plat of Lake Street got rave reviews from the council.

“I want to say the Lake Street plat looks beautiful. That street is so improved,” said council member Maureen Otwell.

Brand said special assessments will be billed this month. They can either be paid for in a lump sum by residents in 30 days. If they don’t pay it now, the amount will be divided onto property tax bills for the parcels for the next 10 years at 4.5 percent interest.

Winter Parking

Vehicles parking on city streets are raising the ire of council members.

“I believe we have a winter parking ordinance,” said council member Rob Daugherty. “There’s lots and lots of cars parked in the streets. If you’d like to know the streets, it’s the same ones every time. We need to make them aware they aren’t supposed to be on the streets, especially on the narrow streets. They’re parking across the street from each other.”

He urged enforcement.

“We can have the officers do that, even if they pick one street a night,” said Mayor David Hovel.

Brand said the police department is working on enforcement.

“They did quite a bit of enforcement over the weekend,” she said.

Nature Report

The meeting started a little late, as council members awaited one more member to make a quorum. It gave council member Thomas Oss the opportunity to talk about how beautiful Prescott is year-around.

“I went for a walk down along the river and there’s a regular show out there, all day long, right on the Wisconsin side along our Prescott riverfront,” he said. “There’s feeding trumpeter swans, geese, ducks and fishing eagles. I counted seven fishing eagles today.: “It was wonderful,” said Oss/