The Alliance City Council met at their regular meeting on Tuesday night to welcome in many Girl Scouts, and presented them with a proclamation and City of Alliance pins. In return, council received a box of Girl Scout short bread cookies. Girl Scout Week is March 10 through March 17.

Box Butte County Girl Scouts recently interviewed Mayor Mike Dafney, and Councilwoman Annora Bentley to find out about city government. The Girl Scouts are currently working on a government badge.

One of the questions the Girl Scouts asked Mayor Dafney and Bentley was how they could be better citizens in our community. Bentley said, “Just the things that I know they have done exhibit the fact that they already do that. I have personally had them clean up my dishes at the Senior Center when they came for chicken noodle dinner. They volunteered their whole afternoon to do that. They took it upon themselves to do a supply drive for the animal shelter. They had gone to the City of Alliance Shelter House and they did an energy audit…wrote a letter to Mayor Yeager last year and had several suggestions of things they noticed that we should be doing to our building, and I think it’s really commendable that they even know what they are looking at. Staff is looking into what can be done and that’s thanks to their efforts.”

In other business, Terry Galloway of Almquist, Maltzahn, Galloway & Luth P.C. presented the City of Alliance audit from the period of Oct. 1, 2017 through Sept. 30, 2018.

“Overall a nice statement for the City of Alliance. Our spending is way down, you’re holding the costs down in the administrative part of that. Everything really looks fantastic, which isn’t always true across the state of Nebraska. You guys are in great financial shape. We’ve increased our cash reserves to where they need to be and really haven’t raised the levies,” Galloway said.

Baker and Associates of Scottsbluff submitted a response to the city’s request for qualification for the engineering of the Central Park Sunken Garden renovation project. At this time city staff is recommending moving forward with the concept planning and design development portion of the proposal. It has been quoted at $14,700.

Council also accepted the resignation of Alliance City Manager Rick Kuckkahn. April 1 will end his employment contract. Deputy City Manger Jeff Sprock will step into the City Manager position.

You can listen to the full City Council audio below.