City engineer Ian Kohli delivers a presentation to the Lima Council of the Whole on Tuesday night as councilmembers Derry Glenn and Jon Neeper listen.
Jacob Espinosa | The Lima News
LIMA — Councilor Tony Wilkerson said the city of Lima should make sure there is no wiggle room concerning residency requirements for elected officials at Tuesday night’s council of the whole meeting.
Councilmembers held a rescheduled regular city council meeting prior to a scheduled council of the whole meeting to discuss traffic calming and the aforementioned requirements.
“This has been an ongoing situation,” 7th Ward councilman Jon Neeper said of traffic calming. “The people in my ward look at other areas of the city and see they have stop signs, but they’re ticked they don’t because of what it says in some book.”
City engineer Ian Kohli said, in a presentation, just a few miles per hour can change the risk of death in the event of a car crash and compared Lima to cities like Delaware, Dublin and Hilliard as examples of similar sized locales with similar problems.
“Traffic calming can impact speed, but it also looks at the volume of cars,” he said. “It’s important to have an understanding of what you’re trying to solve when you’re trying to implement the Safe System Approach.”
Mayor Sharetta Smith said putting stop signs in the wrong place could open the city up to liability, and the important thing would be to make sure whatever solutions are implemented worked.
“The purpose is not to arrive at a solution, but to allow Ian to educate all of us,” Smith said. “We’re not here to say we’re not going to do anything. We’re here to say there are options, but we have to be sure what the problem is that we’re trying to solve.”
The council agreed to review all information and hold a discussion at the Monday, Oct. 7 regular city council meeting.
The council of the whole also agreed to remove four residency requirements for elected officials of the existing 11.
“That would give us a total of six with the top three absolutely required being a driver’s license or state ID; a voter’s registry; and tax filings for federal, state or local government,” council president Jamie Dixon said. “And then after that, you get to pick your other two between your address of residence or where you receive mail, the location of real estate for which you claim property tax exemption or reduction and then the address used by your driver’s record for the Ohio BMV. If you’re looking to run, you need the first three and then two more for a total of five.”
The council also agreed to change the requirement of residency from six months to 12.
Law director Tony Geiger will take the proposal to draft an ordinance for city council to vote on.
During the regular meeting, city council defeated a tabled ordinance to establish a governmental natural gas aggregation program, with Wilkerson abstaining.
Council also passed an ordinance allowing the city to add a new identification officer in the Lima Police Department as part of a succession plan and for compliance with national ballistics testing standards.
Reach Jacob Espinosa 567-242-0399.
