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GOVERNMENT · AUGUST 23

The Open Meetings Act treats closed-door secrecy as temporary. Every six months, a council is supposed to re-read its own closed-session minutes and release whatever no longer needs sealing. Marengo's council took that review up in October 2023, put it off, and did not come back to it. On August 10 it caught up all at once, opening thirty-one sets of minutes going back three years. Here is what the paper trail shows.

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GOVERNMENT

GOVERNMENT · AUGUST 20

A request to rezone three parcels at Prospect and Prairie for a 24-unit apartment building split the Marengo Planning and Zoning Commission 2-2 on Monday night, sending it to the City Council without a recommendation. That is not the same as nothing: under the zoning code, granting the three variances that travel with it now takes a two-thirds vote of the council rather than a simple majority. Two members were absent and a third recused because he is one of the applicants, leaving four to decide, and the code required all four to agree before the commission could recommend in the applicants' favor. It separately recommended rezoning 605 E. Grant Highway from residential to general business for a grocery, along with six variances describing setbacks and a lot size that are already there.

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GOVERNMENT

GOVERNMENT · AUGUST 18

The council approved $32,161 to take down trees on city property. The estimate lists them by address, so we mapped it: nineteen trees at fourteen places, seven of them within about 900 feet of each other on the southwest side. Nothing goes back in their place, and the city says its own code bars a resident from planting there either. That code is not an accident. Marengo used to replant, and in 2016 the council closed the parkway to it.

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