During the Mount Pleasant City Commission meeting on Feb. 10, City Manager Aaron Desentz highlighted items that the city completed and those that will continue to be worked on in 2025. They also presented their 2025 goals and objectives, and some of their plans to achieve them.

A few of the items reviewed included:

Complete required landfill remediation efforts
Prepare a climate change preparedness plan
Adopt best practices in asset management
Look for ways to cut down or find ways to compensate for services provided to non-city customers without payment
Monitor the City's tax base and develop interventions to stabilize
Identify grants and partners to expand GKB Trail and increase signage on trail
Create recreation programs identified in the recreation needs assessment
Work with community partners to support an event that brings more people to Mount Pleasant

Vice Mayor Maureen Eke and Commissioner Elizabeth Busch brought up concerns with working with area event hosts to develop a combined event for 2025. Eke also suggested the creation of a new position intended to coordinate events.

“If we're going to use this space (downtown development) that we spend a lot of money in working on, we're going to need to have lots of events,” Eke said. “I'm thinking somebody designated to doing all of that and coordinating all of that with the community, as opposed to people who already stretched.”

Busch added that previous issues, such as community sculpture placement, could have been solved faster if a position like this existed.

“We're also talking about somebody who will create an institutional knowledge of cultural things, about climate,” Busch said. “It just fits so many of our goals. I would be very interested in finding out more about the possibility of a position like this and helping write job descriptions and stuff.”

Three events were determined to be partly fulfilled.

These events involved working with community partners to support an event that brings more people to Mount Pleasant, monitor and evaluate the performance of our PILOT and The Neighborhood Enterprise Zone Act programs and determine interest in continuing the Downtown Development Authority (DDA) and Tax Increment Financial Authority (TIFA) districts beyond 2025.

“Work(ing) with community partners to support an event that brings more people to Mount Pleasant (is the goal) that we identified as needing more resources on and more partnership within the community,” Desentz said. “Staff is working with some of those partners to try to develop some sort of a combined event for 2025 and we'll continue that into the next fiscal year."

The only goal for 2024 that was determined "uncompleted" was considering long-term development options for the former Mount Pleasant Center property.

“The Court of Appeals had essentially decided against the city, which puts us in a very difficult position,” Desentz said. “City Commission will likely consider future action to take in 2025.”

The City Commission will hold its next regular meeting at 7 p.m. on Feb. 25, in Mount Pleasant City Hall.