On May 13th, the Carmi Township put out the 2025-2026 Township and Road Budget for the Fiscal Year. According to law, the budget is to be publicly available for 30 days, and it was not posted on the Township website until Wednesday afternoon. On June 11th, the board members approved the budget. Mike Baxley was absent, and Tim Scates participated by phone. In the new budget, the total, which is $510,900, is down by $19,878 from last year. Within that, the board agreed to raise funding for the Town by $10,960, Cemetery funds by $15,300, Audit by $500, and Insurance by $5,000. They lowered General Assistance by $18,638 and IMRF by $33,000. The Road Budget was also reduced in total by $32,000, bringing the overall amount to $640,000.
Additionally, during the May meeting, Deig stated that she would contact the insurance company for the Township, TOIRMA, regarding the roof situation https://www.wrul.com/local-news/carmi-township-swears-in-members-and-talks-roof-repairs.
At Tuesday night’s meeting, she explained that TOIRMA will not cover the cost of a new roof due to the result being from wear and tear. The board approved a motion to seek sealed bids for roof specs from companies.
Bills were approved, with one slight hiccup. A bill from S&E for $133 was mailed to the board with no items or explanation showing what the bill was for. The board encountered a somewhat similar problem in the May meeting when they received a personal bill from O’Reilly’s that was supposed to be charged to Highway Commissioner Chris McEwing, who had taken care of the matter. Supervisor Pam Deig said that she called about the bill and was told that it was the “norm.”
“That’s what I was curious about. Because when we called out the bill, they said that that’s the way it had always been done. Okay, so all right. So you’re telling me that’s all been taken care of? And do we have any, any excess on there? We didn’t get a bill this month.”
McEwing stated that the personal account has been deleted from O’Reilly’s, and the S&E bill will be reviewed.
Moving along with McEwing, he updated his reports to indicate that the Sycamore Project was 95% complete. Then, around June 30th, the Road Department will begin milling roads at Burrell Woods Road, the 4-way at Sycamore to 1700 North, 700 East, 1500 North to 1700 North, Route 1 to 875 East, and past Kingdom Cemetery.
For New Business, McEwing denied the request for a credit card for the Road District.
Lastly, the General and Emergency Assistance for May totaled $5,919.82, with all 32 sign-ins being from Carmi.
The next Carmi Township meeting will be on July 8th at 6 pm.
