Alva Review-Courier -

High school classes are kept to less than one hour. Sunday morning sermons are generally 20 to 30 minutes. Movies are usually less than two hours. How long can adults stay focused in a meeting?

I’m wondering about this after attending a city council meeting that stretched to about two and one-half hours. I expected a long meeting after seeing the agenda, but the topics I thought would generate the most discussion and be the most time consuming were just a blip.

The item causing the lengthy discussion was a plan for the City of Alva to borrow $5 million through a bond issue through the Oklahoma Water Resources Board. Back when the State of Oklahoma was taking applications for projects to spend a large amount of federal ARPA funds, one main focus was water infrastructure. The city tasked their engineering firm with drawing up plans showing the needs in the entire water system. As it turned out, the state ARPA funds were used over a more diverse number of projects.

Alva’s mayor asked a company the city has used before to look into how much the city could borrow for water projects without raising their debt payments. Some of the debt is about to be paid off making this possible. The answer came back at $5 million. For that amount, the city would not have to vote a sales tax or substantially increase other forms of revenue. That dollar amount was passed on to the engineer who looked at the greatest needs in water infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the mayor and city business manager talked about these projects briefly during city council meetings.

At Monday night’s meeting, both the engineer and the bonding company were present to answer questions. Some of the questions could have been asked earlier. Open meeting laws don’t restrict a city councilmember from talking to the mayor or city business manager privately. (There’s an Open Meeting, Open Records free seminar hosted by the state attorney general’s office in Enid on Oct. 30 at Autry Technology, 1-4 p.m. if you’re interested.)

If you’d like to see how the city council spent two and one-half hours, we’ve posted our video of the entire meeting on our website: http://www.AlvaReviewCourier.com under the Video tab. Hopefully it will be posted to the website by the time you read this. It takes a while to get the video rendered into the proper format.

Thankfully somewhere near the two hour mark, the meeting recessed so people could stand and stretch, visit the water fountain and make use of the bathroom. The mayor rushed through the remaining items. A couple of things were tabled for later, and we all escaped.

The city has installed a couple of flat screen TVs in the council chambers that allow projection of the agenda and other relevant information. Both city officials and the public are able to see the screens. Monday night, they successfully used the system to have a video meeting so a company representative could give a presentation on some software and answer questions. I’m sure these screens will prove useful to the council and other groups using the meeting room.

If you ever decide to visit a city council meeting, let me assure you that you aren’t trapped. Those in the audience are seated near the door and can leave at any time.

On a final note, I spent about a half hour wandering around the Big Cruise and Car Show on Saturday in Alva. It was fun seeing some vehicles from the era of my high school days. I saw a Chevy Corvair similar to one my husband drove when we started dating.

This year, I saw that one lane of traffic was kept open on the outside of the square. This allowed people who wanted to visit the stores a chance to park closer. I saw a Facebook posting that showed another benefit. Someone who has had orthopedic surgery in the recent past was able to ride in a car to do a tour of the vehicle displays without walking. Thanks to the huge number of volunteers who make this and other community events possible!

Our photographer Desiree took far more pictures than we can publish, but hopefully some of them will make it into the Newsgram today.