Work is well under way at the Lutsen Town Hall and Fire Hall. At the Tuesday, July 17 Lutsen town meeting, Fire Chief Paul Goettl reported that builder and construction manager Max Wahlers said he is on target for getting the building done in 100 days.
The new addition to the current fire hall/ town hall in Lutsen was the focus of most of the Lutsen town meeting on Tuesday, July 17.
The addition to the fire hall has been moved back 7 feet and floor drains will be installed in the garage being built to house the fire trucks, reported Fire Chief Paul Goettl. He said when it was discovered that the setback for the expansion (measured from the center of the road on the Caribou Trail to the edge of the building) was 7 feet too close, the architect revised the drawings. “It was a quick fix,” said Goettl.
Originally floor drains were going to be installed, but because an extra tank would have to be installed to collect pollutants and then pumped by an out-of-the-county firm at a potentially high cost, the board voted to build the garage without floor drains.
Goettl said the builder had pointed out a potential problem with the garage floor if drains weren’t installed. “He said that if the garage floor was poured without drains, water might run off and then freeze in the seams and crack the floor. We more or less made the decision right then to put the floor drains in, in the interest of safety, and we didn’t want to see the foundation destroyed.”
The board accepted the decision, and, as Goettl pointed out, “The installation of drains won’t cost us more money because they were in the original plans to begin with. We will, however, incur the cost of purchasing and installing a holding tank for the pollutants.”
A second, separate septic field will be built for the new building because it is more expensive to tie new pipes into the current system, said Goettl.
At an earlier meeting the board had been told this was probably going to be the case and no one was surprised by this decision.
Meanwhile builder and overall construction manager Max Wahlers is on target with the timeline for getting the building done in 100 days, said Goettl.
In other business:
EMS Director Fred Schmidt said his crew is getting called out more and more as the summer gets busier. Goettl said the firefighters were called to six fires this last month.
West End Commissioner Bruce Martinson said the lodging tax report for May showed that lodging was down 2 percent in the West End when compared to the same time as last year.
“Grand Marais was up 9 percent and the Gunflint Trail’s was up 3 percent. Ely was down 7.8 percent in May,” Martinson said.
Martinson told the board that the state has a new policy for Highway 61 that will mean rumble strips will be put on the centerline and on the sides of the lanes where the shoulders are wider than two feet. The installation will be done when crews are working in the area.
“I asked for them to be put in no-passing lanes only. In Lake County where they [rumble strips] have been added people living near them have been complaining about the noise,” Martinson said.
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