The Garretson Commercial Club met for their regular meeting at 4p.m. on Monday, Jan. 11 instead of the planned lunchtime meeting later in the week because the venue where the meeting was scheduled was closed because of COVID-19 concerns. So, instead of hosting the regular meeting, the club’s board opted to hold the meeting directly after the 4 p.m. annual budget meeting.
The first item the board discussed was the Hometown Christmas Events hosted on Dec. 12. Generally everyone was happy with the result of the Parade of Lights which was the only event the Commercial Club hosted for this past Hometown Christmas events due to COVID concerns. The parade was well received and the only complaints were that with all the cars parked downtown, the parade was more difficult to see. In hindsight the club members agreed that we should have asked the city to perhaps close the street for that day. But some citizens watched the parade from the safety of their vehicles too because of COVID.
Robert and Misten Long won the home decorating prize of $100 Garretson Bucks and the City of Garretson offices won the prize for best downtown storefront decoration.
Anna Uhl game a quick update on the Light up the Park event, and it was a stellar success with a lot of local and regional traffic coming through. Uhl also reported on the FFA creating new Christmas cut-outs for residents, and that there were only a handful of them made this year.
President John Brinkman had a rough estimate for the new sound system downtown. The speakers would be hard wired (which will include some boring under city streets) but the speakers would go from the City Office to O So Good on both sides of Main Ave. The cost would be roughly $18 thousand to setup. The Commercial Club will be exploring cost sharing with the City.
Ness Tax Service and Dakota Stained Glass were featured in the Gazette being officially welcomed into the Commercial Club by President Brinkman. We have a few other new businesses we’re hoping to feature, but they’ll be put on hold for the time being.
After calculating the 2021 budget, just a half hour previously, the board voted to approve it.
The City, the City’s Park Board and folks from Palisades State Park, along with Grow Garretson will be working together to create a new grand map of all of the park areas in and around Garretson. Initial projections say this will happening by May 1st.
The board ratified their votes by email earlier to postpone the Commercial Club’s Annual Meeting until April 26, 2021. Garretson Food Center will cater. The club will need new nominees for board positions, including vice-president, and secretary (Margie Martens has officially given her resignation as secretary as of this printing). Ron Luke, Guy Johnson, and Laurie Bennett are up for re-election of their positions on the board, but have indicated their willingness to serve another term.
This however brought up discussion from board member Ron Luke. He spoke about the Commercial Club and worries about the future. Stagnation, he warned, is something that could harm the organization. Too many people have spent too much time in certain board positions, pointing out that the newest member will be moving to his second term as president very soon and that everyone in the room has had multiple turns at the job, and then they tend to repeat. He expressed the need for new blood.
“Most people know that we’re in charge of Hometown Christmas and Jesse James Days,” he said. “But they don’t know what else we might be doing. Grow Garretson has done some great things the last several years in our community. They aren’t necessarily business people here in town, but there are citizens with an interest in making the town better. We need to forge ahead doing more things in partnership with them. Maybe it’s even time we looked at our by-laws and such and see what we can do to change the club so we could merge the groups. We’ve got a lot of people who belong to the club, but we struggle to get the manpower at times to get the things done we want to do. Maybe this is a discussion we want to have at the annual meeting.”
All agreed that they wanted to maintain the legacy of the club, so that it would be here for generations into the future.
After that, the board adjourned.
