Dorchester likes splash pad idea, needs to hear more

By Neal Hogden

The Dorchester Board met with Alex Pinter of the Dorchester Park Corporation at the village board’s meeting on Wednesday, December 6 to discuss a donation to the park for a potential splash pad.

Pinter presented preliminary ideas for the splash pad. He said the potential ideas for the pad included a fresh water intake which would be fed through a sprinkler system for kids to use. He said there would be no standing water which meant the water would not need to be treated with a chlorine or salt water-type system which would have cost roughly double the amount of the fresh-water pad.

Pinter said the park corp has all the funding for the project in line but would want the village to donate the water and sewer costs that the pad might incur. It was estimated that the cost of the water portion of the project would be about $75 per day the pad was in operation.

Although no specific plans are in place, the board members wanted to see that the pad had some sort of system that could limit the time that the pad was in operation. Pinter said there were options available to go with a timer system where a user would need to push a button in order to activate the pad. This system would limit the water use as opposed to a continuously running approach.

Public works director Clint Penney said the DNR might have an issue with the plans for the splash pad if the park corp planned on running the sewer portion of the pad into a creek in the park. The board tossed around ideas about potentially drilling a well and

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draining the pad into the Dorchester Lake. However, the board was unsure if they could drill a well within village limits as deputy clerk Christie Erikson said residential wells were not allowed to be drilled within the village.

Due to the lack of knowledge about DNR regulations, the board asked Pinter if the Dorchester Park Corp. could get information from the DNR on what was and wasn’t allowed before the village committed to donating money to the splash pad.

Despite the need for more information, multiple board members voiced their desire to see the splash pad plans come to fruition.

“I love the idea,” Keith Lageman said. It was agreed that Pinter, Penney, water and sewer manager Rick Golz and parks committee head Daniella Schauer would meet to fine tune some of the details before bringing a proposal to the board with DNR information.

Other business

n Sue Bedroske and Julie Bach attended the meeting as members of the Dorchester Library seeking clarification on what the library would be charged for in terms of maintenance. Bach, as president of the library board, said more expensive items like the air conditioner and furnaces should be the village’s responsibility. The village board agreed as it is the village’s building. However, the village said the library has traditionally been given a maintenance budget in the past of $750 per year that is to go towards items such as those.

Schauer noted that the library needs to communicate its needs to the board in a better fashion and also said when the library decided to redo landscaping last summer, that should have been brought to the board as well.

Bach said the library is currently budgeting for repairs to the bathrooms but wanted to know whether that should be something they are budgeting for or if that would be the village’s concern.

Village board members said bigger projects to the building would fall on the village but those items should go through Penney and the public works department.

A motion was made to send the issue to the buildings committee to meet with library representatives to come up with a more firm policy for the library building maintenance costs.

n The village board agreed to use the ARPA funds for road projects. The $90,000 in ARPA funds need to be spent by 2026.

n The board received a letter from residents residing outside of Dorchester asking them to reconsider the passage of an extraterritorial zoning ordinance during the public comment portion of the meeting. No action could be taken at the board’s December 6 meeting on the matter.