Inspection will keep city busy

That comment by Mayor Shane Williams summed it up for the Littlefork City Council during a Thursday review of a multi-paged report from the Minnesota Municipal Utilities Association.

Hired by the city, the agency completed a mock Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspection on Feb. 23.

While City Administrator Mike Fairchild said the report contained “nothing big,” he acknowledged that the nearly four dozen itemizations which concluded the inspection “really adds up.” The city hopes to be OSHA compliant on most of the findings by June 30.

The MMUA Regulatory Compliance Service found the most non-compliant OSHA issues with Littlefork’s Fire Department facility, ranging from innocuous to hazardous — from file-keeping systems to safety conditions.

Other non-compliance issues in the city’s community center, liquor store and City Hall were also reported. Some of the more serious finds were with the city’s ambulance service such as a lack of access to proper sanitization and with the handling of potentially infectious materials. These issues were already known to city officials and yielded their decision that an improved ambulance facility was imperative.

“Most of these inspection concerns will be solved with the new facility,” Ambulance Chief Tom Donahou told the council Thursday.

New ambulance

facility is realized

Following the last architectural tweaks and approval by the taxing district board and the Ambulance Committee, committee member Loren Lehman Thursday made the recommendation that the bidding process for the new ambulance facility, which will be housed along with the city’s Fire Department, should finally begin. Bids are scheduled to close May 17.

The action has been a longtime coming — but well worth the wait for those who handle emergencies in the area, they said.

Currently, when an emergency call comes in from the Littlefork service district, an ambulance pulls out from a two-stall residential garage. There is no water on this site.

After delivering a patient, the contaminated ambulance returns to a garage that is crowded with equipment and the paraphernalia necessary for saving lives. The interior of the vehicle is then disinfected with spray cleaners. Dirty laundry is taken to the Littlefork Medical Center and emergency medical technicians bring their own soiled clothing home to their families.

The ambulance circumstances have been increasingly challenging, yet local service members remain dedicated in this rural area with an aging population. The ambulance responds to approximately 75-100 calls annually.

“I mean there’s not even a floor drain where we are now,” a member of the Littlefork Ambulance Service told the council in June 2008. “We can’t take a shower, or clean off blood and vomit.” She added that if the facility was more user-friendly, the recruitment of EMTs would be more successful, a problem that Donahou reiterated Thursday — citing the low number of applicants who actually complete the training.

Other Littlefork projects

In other business, Fairchild reported to the council that a revised design (see artwork) for the new fiberglass Jackpine Savage statue has been ordered from Fast Corp, and should arrive by June 30. This version, for which a mold has been created, will cost the city $14,984, considerably less than the original estimate of $19,840.

City Engineer John Mattonen, Fairchild and other members of the council are scheduled to meet May 18 to review submitted bids for the restoration of Littlefork’s 100,000-gallon water tower. The council will act on the bids which remain open until 1 p.m. May 18, at its May 20 regular meeting. Some discussion ensued Thursday that it would be judicious to schedule the resurfacing and painting project outside of the dates of summer’s All Class Reunion.

Other Littlefork business

The council approved the Littlefork Medical Center annual audit report. “Nothing in there jumped out at me,” said Fairchild, noting Administrator Calvin Olson’s conscientiousness in these matters.

Littlefork’s new all-terrain vehicle ordinance will go into effect after its current publication in The Journal.

Williams told the council he noticed that a traffic counter has been placed on Unorganized Township Road 168, following the determination in an April 6 meeting with the Koochiching County Board that the action was necessary to qualify for state aid toward the road’s paving. However, the paving of UT 168 is in competition with many other roads in the county, county Highway Engineer Doug Grindall said in that meeting. Grindall is pursuing the cost of having calcium chloride applied to the road for dust control.

The Littlefork Municipal Liquor Store sales to date are $79,986, showing a decrease of $12,000 from 2009, Fairchild reported