At Tuesday night’s Indiana Borough Council work session, the council discussed plans to implement a bike trail throughout town that would connect to the Hoodlebug Trail, as well as an Urban Agriculture ordinance concerning the keeping of chickens in Indiana. The ongoing issue with the closing of neighborhood schools was also mentioned.
According to councilwoman Katherine Hood, the original plan for the Borough, the County, IUP, and the Township was to connect the Hoodlebug trail through town and on to the S&T Arena. However, the Township will focus its money on connecting the Hoodlebug Trail to the university campus, which will then connect on 8th Street, but it isn’t certain what the university plans to do in between. Now the Borough will focus on determining how far it can get the trail from 8th street into town and through traffic. According to Hood, two options for the $400,000 trail budget were considered:
“So at this point we have the option of using the money we have at hand to do that as much as possible, or, keeping that money and using it as leverage to get further grants. And, we as a committee felt keeping the money and trying to get further grants would just frustrate people and that we were better off doing something and then building onto it later.”
Some members of the council, including Kaycee Newell, have been researching Urban Agriculture ordinances throughout the country to determine what criteria for the keeping of chickens in towns like Indiana would work best for the community as a whole. Newell cited ordinances in towns within Pittsburgh and even as far as Grand Rapids, Michigan, and recommended similar criteria, such as a minimum of two and maximum of six hens, and no roosters, that can be kept only by the owner of the property. The chickens would need to be in an enclosed coup of at least 5 square feet, and the coup itself would need to be in a back yard and at least 10 feet from a property line and 25 feet from any residence. The final details of such an ordinance in the borough are yet to be determined and will be discussed further in the future.
On the issue of the closing of neighborhood schools, councilman Peter Broad is concerned about the overall state of discussion:
“All the discussion at this point about the schools seems to be about the suitability of the building, whereas the real issue is two-fold. One: the effect on the children of putting them in a mega-school instead of smaller schools, which all studies show are better, and, the effect on the community of closing our neighborhood schools.”
A public meeting to continue discussion about the school closings is slated for January 26th at 6:30 PM at the fire station on Indiana Springs Road.
