By Beacon Staff
Jon Billups will continue to serve as mayor of Burlington for the next two years.
Billups was unanimously voted into the position for another two-year term by his fellow council members during Monday night’s regular city council meeting. While Billups was one of three council members to retain their council positions during last October’s election, it is up to the council to vote for mayor every two years at the beginning of a new year.
“Jon has the pulse of the people,” said returning city council member and mayor pro tem Lynda Graham-Murray.
Fellow council member Robert Maupin agreed.
“I think Jon has done a good job so far,” he affirmed.
Billups thanked the council for voting him in, noting how special it is to receive the approval of your peers.
“Still, this is a group effort. Everyone needs to understand that,” he said.
Graham-Murray was voted in unanimously as mayor pro tem for another two years while Katie Music was voted in unanimously as city clerk, replacing Kathleen Salisbury who retired at the end of 2021 after 42 years of service.
In other business, assistant city manager Nick MacGregor said snow had been cleared from most city streets by Monday night. He said those efforts came in spite of a staff shortage related to the New Year’s Day holiday.
“Hats off to you and your crew and city staff,” Billups said to MacGregor.
In other news, the council gave the green light to a resolution approving a municipal lease agreement for the purchase of a $900,000 records management and maintenance system for the police department.
Burlington Police Major Jeff Klein explained the records systems and the need to update them while asking for the budget request during last week’s city council work session. For the last eight months, he said, the incidents log on the Burlington Police Department website has been blank, even as the arrest log is updated on a daily basis. Since April of 2021, the department has had to keep those particular records by hand.
“In April (of 2021), DESCOM (Des Moines County Communications) went to a new system that would not speak to our current system. So, our records clerks went from everything being dumped from DESCOM’s computer system to them having to handwrite everything,” Klein explained last week. “We can no longer publish to the media, as we used to.”
The department last purchased a records management system in 1998, and the incompatibility with DESCOM has hastened the search for a new system.
According to Klein, the cost will be split between Burlington, Des Moines County, and West Burlington, with Burlington and the county each paying 45 percent and West Burlington contributing 10 percent. The E911 board will pick up the cost of the CAD system. While the county and West Burlington will pay their portion up front, the Burlington Police Department will utilize the capital improvement program, paying $64,000 a year for the next five years. The first payment won’t be due until January of 2023, and the department is paying $30,000 up front from the money it has already saved.
Klein said the system will not only restore record keeping but will also restore key information relayed to the computers placed in police officers’ vehicles. The information was not as robust as it was before the transition to a new DESCOM system in April, as councilman Matt Rinker discovered during a ride-a-long with the BPD.
“This will be an all-in-one fix, where we will not only get what we used to get before, but we will get it tenfold,” Klein said.
Changing the system won’t be quick, either. Klein said it will take 12 to 14 months to fully implement.