IGA for Village of Beecher and BFPD Not Going Anywhere Yet

By Jeff Vorva

For now, the intergovernmental agreement between the Village of Beecher and the Beecher Fire Protection District is still a thing.

At the village’s board meeting on March 13, an ordinance to dissolve the agreement was tabled.

At the center of the board/fire district unpleasantness is an independent fire inspection system that board members have heard complaints about for quite a while.

Recent meetings between the board and fire district have not been productive and Mayor Marcy Meyer and Fire District President Margie Cook were scheduled for a one-on-one meeting this week to see if they could hammer out differences on this matter and others.

“If you get to an impasse where you cannot sort out differences between the two boards, it comes to the head of the fire district and me,” Meyer said. “I have a meeting with Trustee Cook set up.

“The IGA itself is contradictory and there is a lot of terminology that doesn’t belong. We talked about this from the beginning. It needs to be updated no matter what we do.”

Meyer said she is confident that she will have a workable and productive meeting with Cook and after the meeting, the two will go to their respective boards and possibly take action.

The inspection issues continue to be a sticking point.

One wrinkle is that the board is getting complaints about poor treatment during inspections and Trustee Jonathan Kypuros is chafed that they are not being taken seriously because they refuse to put the complaints in writing.

“We hear over and over that the complaints we received are voidable and unwarranted and mean nothing because they are not in writing,” he said. “I take a lot of offense to that because businesses that come to us with these complaints are our businesses within our community.

“Whether or not they are willing to put their name on paper and actually make a formal complaint about the way they feel about the way they were treated, whether or not it makes it significant or not, I think it’s an absolute slap in the face to every one of us who sits on this board.”

Kypuros said he knows an owner and a manager of two Beecher businesses who never received a violation but were still unhappy with the way they were treated.

“I did speak to both of them and asked them if they would put it in writing and they had absolutely zero interest because both of them said they were afraid of the ramifications if they did,” the trustee said.

No referendum resolution

Meyer said that she spoke to the village’s lawyers and the board is not allowed draft a resolution supporting School District 200U’s referendum seeking extra funding to help ease a $1 million shortfall.

“It is clear that we can’t do a resolution,” she said. “But as individuals, we can do what we wish, and I support it. If you have a good school district, you build the houses and you build the businesses.”

With 200U Superintendent Jack Gaham in the audience for a portion of the meeting, Kypuros also threw his support the school district’s way.

“Out board is fortunate enough to have multiple sources of revenue among our funds,” Kypuros said. “The school board does not.

“This directly affects our property values. As far as the village goes, these are things that we rely on for economic development. This can affect the (Equalized Assessed Value), which is what our levies are based off of. A good school district is a very important factor. I fully support it.”

Beecher bits

–The March 27 meeting will take place at 7 p.m. in the Public Works garage but there will be no committee reports, only action items during the first portion of the gathering. The rest of the meeting will be a budget workshop.

–The village is prepared to sign an agreement for a donation of land with an appraised value of $112,000 from Jim Van Drunen. The land, located at 419 S. Dixie Highway, has been vacant for more than 40 years, officials said.  

–David Garza was sworn in as a part-time police officer at the meeting.