The Chesterton Fire Department remains committed to establishing an advanced life support municipal ambulance service.

But the CFD’s original plan to have that service on line and operational on April 1, 2013, appears to have been a bit too ambitious.

At the Town Council’s meeting Tuesday night, Fire Chief Mike Orlich told members that he is currently revising the time line for establishing the service.

In particular, Orlich noted that the plan has a lot of moving pieces and that coordinating them all is proving more complicated than initially anticipated. Orlich did not specifically say when he now hopes to have the ambulance service operational but did promise to have a new time line in members’ hands at its next meeting, Nov. 26.

Orlich has expressed his confidence that—based on the CFD’s own numbers and on the experience of other fire departments with an ambulance service—it would be feasible for such a service to pay for itself in the Town of Chesterton.

The CFD would require a start-up loan from the council but Orlich believes that the loan would be fully repaid in 18 to 24 months.

In other business, members voted 4-0 to approve an expenditure of no more than $1,000 for the purchase of a new computer, needed by the CFD to make its reports to the State Fire Marshal’s Office.

The Porter County 911 Dispatch Center had been providing the software for those reports but will be doing so no longer as of Jan. 1. The CFD now needs a new computer to handle the required software, which Orlich believes the state will provide at no charge.

Meanwhile, Associate Town Engineer Chris Nesper reported that work on the Ind. 49 utility corridor is continuing and that progress is being made.

A force main is currently being installed on the Pope property along the west side of Ind. 49 south of the Indiana Toll Road.

North of the Toll Road, at the southern terminus of Village Point in Coffee Creek Center, crews are directional-boring a line beneath the Toll Road, Nesper added.

Finally, members voted 4-0 to nominate Judy Chaplin for re-appointment as the Tri-Towns’ representative on the Porter County Convention, Recreation, and Visitor Commission.

That re-appointment would be ratified by the Porter County Commissioner but one of the other two Tri-Towns’ councils must second the nomination first.

Chesterton residents have one more weekend to rake leaves and get them curbside.

At the Town Council’s meeting Tuesday night, Street Commissioner John Schnadenberg reported that the season’s annual leaf collection program will officially end on Wednesday, Nov. 21.

The program in fact is going well and crews are on schedule, in this, the fourth week.

Schnadenberg is anticipating that crews will be able to collect five days worth of leaves next week in three days. Town of Chesterton municipal employees are on Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday and Friday.

But there will be no set leaf-collection schedule next week, so folks had better apply themselves to the rakes this weekend and have their leaf piles ready to go Monday morning.

It’s that time of the year again.

The snow-ban time of year.

At the Chesterton Town Council’s meeting Tuesday night, Street Commissioner John Schnadenberg asked members, as he does every November, to activate the so-called snow-ban in the Downtown.

Under that ban, on-street parking is prohibited from 12 to 8 a.m. when two or more inches of snow fall overnight, to give the plows room to clear the roadways.

The ban will take effect at 12:01 a.m. Friday, Nov. 16.

“I always hate doing this,” Schnadenberg noted at Tuesday’s meeting.

Posted 11/14/2012