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Andrews council lets food pantry use building

The Andrews Town Council decided Monday, Oct. 8, to allow the Shepherd's Food Pantry, in Andrews, permission to use of part of the Andrews Community Building.

Shepherd's Food Pantry will use the building the third week of every month, which is when it receives food and distributes it to the community.

Pat McCloskey, secretary-treasurer of the food bank board, represented the pantry before the council. She petitioned the council for use of the community building, located at 67 North Snowden Street, because of issues that the pantry's current location, at the Methodist church in Andrews, poses on the days when the pantry receives and distributes food.

One of those issues, McCloskey says, is that the boxes of food the pantry receives and distributes are quite heavy and it is difficult for the pantry's volunteers, many of whom are Seniors, to carry the boxes up and down the stairs that lead to the pantry's location at the church.

A motion to grant the pantry use of the community building passed unanimously.

McCloskey said that before the pantry will be able to start using the building, representatives from the Community Harvest Food Bank, in Fort Wayne, where the pantry receives a sizeable portion of its food, will inspect the building and help the pantry make sure that it meets its standardst.

Alana Christlieb, of SES Environmental, in Fort Wayne, addressed the council on its activities in Andrews, which includes drilling wells to test the town's water.
Andrews must deal with contamination in the ground and one contamination plume being tracked by SES consists of the chemical trichloroethylene, an industrial solvent, which Clerk-Treasurer Bill Johnson says the council wants to learn more about. He said trichloroethylene is "a very bad chemical to be in your ground."

Steve Brock, representing the firm that Andrews commissioned a water rate study from, gave the council an update on the study.

"Currently we're compiling numbers," Johnson said of Brock's update. "Steve has provided tonight a draft of where those numbers are over a three, five, seven and 10-year increase.

"He also gave us ideas of some costs of all the utilities that are going to occur over that period and how these rates will cover those costs in a cash flow basis, so as we go forward we can budget out ahead with expected revenues against anticipated costs of things like capital assets and other items that our utilities will need over the next several years."

The water rate study will be addressed again during another meeting of the council, scheduled for Monday, Oct. 22, at 6 p.m.

The council decided to set the trick-or-treating hours from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 31, and Johnson announced that the town's website, andrewsindiana.com, has been completed and is available to use.