By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick is holding a town hall meeting in the Overton Community Center on Tuesday, Aug. 21 starting at 5:30 pm. And she is hoping for a big turnout from the general public.
“She has held these kinds of meetings out here before and come ready to discuss the important issues of the community and then has very few people attend it,” said Janice Ridondo, a member of Kirkpatrick’s staff and an Overton resident herself. “It has been a bit frustrating.”
“We hear a lot of complaints from people about various things,” Ridondo continued. “But folks have to realize that they must engage and be involved if they want to make things better out here.”
One of the main subjects that Kirkpatrick wants to talk about is the recent changes to the Moapa Valley Fire District. Over the past six months she has held an ongoing conversation with district officials about providing better services to the community.
This will include contracting paid EMT services during the weekday hours when many of the volunteers are unavailable.
Also a new pay per call system has been implemented among the ranks of the district’s volunteer force in an attempt to encourage more enrollment by young people in the community.
Finally, some changes are going into effect in how the local fire district will be governed going forward.
“(Kirkpatrick) wants to do justice to the communities and the wonderful group of volunteer firefighters that serve here,” Ridondo said. “So after discussing the options at length, this is the road that we are going down; because emergency services coverage is just so important to the valley.”
The town hall meeting will be immediately followed by a meeting of the Moapa Valley Fire District board which will begin at 7 pm. Many of these changes will be discussed and formally adopted in that meeting.
“Of course, we encourage folks to stick around to have input in that meeting as well,” Ridondo said.
Other topics of discussion in the Commissioner’s Town Hall Meeting will be the status of recent road paving projects, and discussion about future paving projects. Also discussed will be the addition of gravel roads to the county’s maintenance list. The ongoing Land Use Plan update will be another topic of discussion. And an update about the expanded community use of the Overton Senior Center as a Recreation center will also be addressed.
“She will stay there to listen to people for the entire time period just to hear what people have to say and what they are concerned about,” Ridondo said of Kirkpatrick. “We hope that we will have a good showing from the community.”
