ShoHANCOCK — At its regular meeting Wednesday, the Hancock City Council heard a presentation by Copper Country Intermediate Superintendent James Rautiola on the work the CCISD performs in the region. He also shared the ambitions of the district if it were to achieve the millage request in the August election.

Rautiola said the CCISD serves more than 900 students with special needs and operates 13 Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs at the CTE Center in Hancock. “390 students are enrolled in CTE classes, with 300 from Houghton and Keweenaw Counties and 90 from Baraga County,” he said. Rautiola added the CCISD is looking for a millage to fund infrastructure updates to its current building and to eventually bring the CTE Center to the campus on Hecla street. If the CTE building were to relocate the Hecla location, Rautiola said the CCISD board does not want to let the building go. There are plans to possibly turn the current CTE building into a location centered on early childhood education.

“We serve as a fiscal agency for early childhood right now, but we don’t actually run any of the classrooms,” Rautiola said. “So we couldn’t solve the whole need, that’s not our intent. We wouldn’t be taking work away from people, but we would basically be able to serve 80 to 100 more kids of the Early Childhood population from zero to four. And I’m just gonna use the number 15, let’s say 15 students in an early childhood classroom. We would reserve five of those spots for students with special needs, because it’s hard finding qualified, certified staff to be able to do that work. And then the other 10 slots for that classroom would be opened up to the community.”

Rautiola emphasized everything regarding the current CTE building in the future is all conceptual. Rautiola also shared the CCISD closed on property in L’Anse and which will bring a physical presence to Baraga County. The mill being requested from the CCISD equates to one mill across Keweenaw, Houghton and Baraga Counties.

“If we’re successful with this, it’ll allow us to elevate that work across the three counties, moving forward. The timeline on it, if we’re successful as a community in August, it’s a four and a half to five year project. Our intent is to keep the dollars local. Our intent is to utilize a local workforce, and we feel like we came up with a good plan as far as doing that, so our local contractors can not only bond it, but they have a part of it, and we’re not sending the money outside of this area,” Rautiola said.

In other action, City Manager Mary Babcock shared the Hancock Fire Department was able to earn a grant from Copper Shores in the amount of $5,000. Babcock said the city has been working with FEMA quite a bit last month. Hancock is owed money from the Father’s Day Flood of 2018. “They are now in the midst of paying us $700,000 out of the $1.15 million that is owed to us. We only have received $100,000 of it, but the rest is in the finance process for funding. So we should be getting that in the next two weeks of the other $600,000. So we were very happy to make headway, we feel like we have good connections now with somebody in Washington that is really helping push this along and we meet with them every other Monday now,” Babcock said.

Babcock also suggested the city council meet twice instead of once a month. She explained during the past six to eight months many last minute agenda items have been added without enough time to review the items’ content before the meeting. She also said by having two meetings a month there is the hope of shorter meetings. This will be decided in a future meeting.

The council then moved to approve the Waste Management Service Agreement for a recycling compactor rental and haul rate. Babcock said the recycling collection has become a nuisance with materials flying everywhere and the cost to haul the material being high. A compactor will hopefully alleviate the issue which includes saving the DPW time from cleaning the area. The compactor location would be at the DPW.

The council then approved the amended budget for fiscal year 2024-2025. The resolution in regards to expanding the footprint of Porvoo Park has been tabled for the council to have further discussions on how certain areas of the park will be handled in its reconfigurations.