Sidewalks In Ladue; City Council Continues The Discussion

If the City of Ladue sidewalk issue was a movie, we’d be well into the sequel by now. The sidewalk-shore up the pension fund issues continues to preoccupy the mayor and city council members.

At Tuesday’s regular meeting of the city council, citizens used the public portion of speaking time to re-a-dress their concerns for building sidewalks on busy McKnight, Price, Dielman and other roads in the community.

Beth Deutch, who’s led the citizen’s drive for sidewalks put it this way: “The rebuild of McKnight is about to start soon, and that won’t happen again for another 20 years. We don’t want to wait that long,” she said.

She’s got her fervent supporters. Neighbor Mark Schnuck urged the council to continue its efforts to fund sidewalks in the community.

Robert Hensley, who resides on Ladue Manor said he had a petition drive in support of sidewalks, and most neighbors wanted them. Deutch reminded the council that the count from Ladue Manor was on top of the 340 supporting signatures she gathered in a short time span in her neighborhood.

This issue will remain in front of city officials as the engineering firm Horner & Shifrin continues to make recommendations to the council.

Officials from Mary Institute Country Day School petitioned the council for a special use permit to build a new $21 million math-science center on the northern portion of their sprawling campus.The council waived an 18 month wait period for the school to reissue its request, passing unanimously by voice vote of the council.

In other business, the council approved AT&T to modify three cell towers to provide additional data and voice service for its customers in Ladue. Sites are located inconspicuously on Ameren Missouri polls at 14 Warson Rd., 9418 Ladue Rd. and 103 Price Rd.

In further business, the council approved the trade-purchase of a new command post Chevy Tahoe for the city’s fire chief Eric Hinson. The Tahoe will be purchased at a cost of  $23,838.40 from Jim Trenary Chevrolet. The chief will trade in his 2008 model vehicle with 130,000 miles.

Council members had a lengthy discussion about beautification projects under the Highway 40 overpass at Clayton Road though no final contract was let.

The council also approved the renewal of the contract with Ladue High School for the continuance of the services of a resource officer with the district paying $71,500 to cover salary and benefits for the officer.

The council approved the police department’s $3,698 purchase of upgrades to the software incident reporting system from Larimore Associates.

Liquor licenses were approved for Truffles Restaurant t 9202 Clayton Rd and Ladue Pharmacy LLC at 9832 Clayton Rd.