Resolution
Weekly update #281 6/8/2025 to 6/14/2025
As we approach the middle of 2025, how are you doing on your New Year’s resolutions? Before that though, let me share some of my week serving as mayor of the best small town in America.
This week, I had a chance to work with a few of the new faces at the Department of Public Works. While I am sure my help slowed them down a little, on Wednesday morning I had a chance to learn about them and their roles with DPW. We tackled yard waste picking up limbs, trimmings, and grass clippings while we chatted. While we gladly take bagged grass clippings, I can tell you it is much easier when residents place them in a reusable container. Everything from old recycle bins to buckets and even some smaller wheeled cans made quicker order of the stops. Thank you, Logan and Ronald, for the chance to join you this past week and help me understand your tasks a little better.
Each year, I speak to most of the area service organizations at least once, and sometimes twice, depending on what exciting items may be coming up. This past week, I had a chance to speak with the Evening Lions Club and share updates on what last year looked like and even some newer projects like the Shields Park Pool renovation and road work spread across Seymour. We had a chance to discuss abatements and what impact they have on a community. While Indiana legislatures changed the time schedules related to abatements somewhere around a decade ago, Seymour has continued to use the same 10-year schedules on real property (buildings) and personal property (equipment) and five-year schedule on information technology equipment as was previously in Indiana Code. While I have many personal feelings on abatements, I know that until the state legislatures start to place limits back on them, we will still have other communities in the state that offer much larger abatements than we are willing to. I know of a few 10-year 100% abatements that exist in other Indiana cities where the community will receive no tax dollars for the first decade of a new investment, and we are not willing to do that. Thank you, Seymour Evening Lions, for the chance to present.
While I had several other meetings this week where I learned about various issues communities big and small will face now that the legislative session has ended, I want to get back to a New Year’s resolution or two. Some years, my resolutions are as generic as they come. Things like being more positive or getting more active are standard order for many of us. Other resolutions are a bit more exact. In 2025, I made it a priority to finish the to-be-read pile on my nightstand. Some of the books had been there for many years and were buried deep in the pile. Others are ones I had picked up towards the end of 2024. Much like my music taste, I will read a little bit of everything even if I believe I won’t agree with it. Autobiographies to business are not that unusual. The stack of 13 books included a few on communities and what makes them tick and even a few classics. Several came from the motivational section of the book store. Today, the various types and titles don’t matter as much to me as the fact that this week I finished book number 13 and have checked off one of my resolutions for 2025. As I finished off a classic from 1936, I realized that while I was focused on that stack, I had added several books, nine to be exact, that come from recommendations in the last 13 books or recommendations from friends, to my new to-be-read pile. As I started a new book this weekend, I realized that I hope you are all interested in expanding your mind as much as I am. That doesn’t have to be in the form of a book but could come from other print media like newspapers or magazines. Maybe you are an audio learner and enjoy podcasts. However you prefer to expand your mind, I hope you are also willing to occasionally grab a title outside your usual list like I do because as Brazilian writer Mario Quintana said, "Books don’t change the world, people change the world, books only change people."