Should local officials be able to apply for aid?

The Nashville Town Council has received $250,000 grant from the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs to help small businesses in Nashville recover from the pandemic. So far, more than a dozen businesses have applied.

Town council members or their relatives aren’t eligible to apply, though, said council member Nancy Crocker. She is also a business owner in town and has suffered losses, so she’d like to see that restriction changed, she told the council at their Sept. 17 meeting.

“It just seems, in our small town, that it’s unreasonable to have these same restrictions on something like this. … It’s not an ordinary grant that would be coming up hopefully ever again,” she said, pointing out that the aid is not coming from local tax money.

Town Attorney James T. Roberts said he’d look into relevant statutes, such as conflict of interest and anti-nepotism, and get a memo out about the situation.

Generally, “if you’re in a position of discretion regarding the distribution of funds and you also profit from that distribution, you have a problem,” Roberts said, adding that he’d try to clarify exactly what the statutes say.

Speed limits, new speed bumps planned in town

If any road in Nashville town limits doesn’t have a speed limit posted, that speed limit is now officially 30 miles per hour.

The town council passed the speed limit ordinance on Sept. 17, which affects town streets that weren’t specifically named in the town’s existing ordinances. To set the speed limit at less than 25 mph, the town would have had to do a traffic study, so Town Attorney James T. Roberts proposed 30 mph.

Without an ordinance saying what the speed limits were, town officers had a harder time trying to write town tickets as opposed to state tickets for speeding, Roberts said. The town does not get to keep nearly as much money from state tickets as it now does from town tickets.

The town also will be installing some new speed bumps, perhaps as early as this fall.

The town sent out inquiry letters in three neighborhoods asking if residents wanted speed bumps: in Artist Drive, Orchard Hill and Coffey Hill. Only in Coffey Hill did a clear majority of homeowners want to have them installed. Of the 23 letters sent to Orchard Hill households, 13 said yes, one said no and the rest didn’t answer. In Artist Drive and Orchard Hill, more of the homeowners who answered were against than for.

Town council President Jane Gore, who lives in Coffey Hill, said sometimes, people go 50 mph on her road.

The speed bumps will be removable for snowplowing. Town Administrator Phyllis Carr said she’d have to have the street measured for the two or three speed bumps and get them ordered, so it could take some time to get them in.