McPHERSON, Kan. — McPherson City Commissioners authorized signing of two Memorandums of Understanding (MOU) with the office of the Kansas State Fire Marshal at Tuesday’s meeting. One involves the McPherson Fire Department providing life safety plan reviews for KSFM’s approval, and the other covers fire inspections on behalf of the state within the Fire Department’s jurisdiction.
Commissioners also approved the hiring of an administrative assistant for the department, who will start January 5th pending completion of pre-employment requirements, and approved payments to Koehn’s Body Shop for repairs to three pickups damaged in a September Hailstorm. Repairs to one of the units was of an amount that required Commission approval. Total cost came to $7,655.15.
In another public safety matter, the Commission approved a six-day extension of the contract with McPherson Center for Health for EMS services, with a new contract expected to be presented to the Commission at their January 6th meeting. The current contract expires Wednesday night at midnight.
Commissioners approved change orders on two projects during Tuesday’s meeting. One change was on the design contract for the Myers Street reconstruction with Alfred Benesch for a contract deduction of over $80,000 to reflect costs being less than budgeted.
The other change order was with PLI for the Deerfield Estates South projects, that reduce the contract amount by over 213 thousand dollars, part of which reflects the developer, Twinland II LLC, picking up the costs for final grading, seeding and erosion control. Net result of this change order is a total refund to Twinland of over $213,000 from the deposit it put up for it’s share of the project cost.
Commissioners also approved an ordinance correcting street names in the Veranda West Subdivision and Veranda Planned Unit Development.
Ordinances related to mobile food vendors were approved, The major change to the ordinance relates to vendors parking on city property, which requires approval by either the Commission or the City Administrator.
Commissioners approved the 2026 fee schedule updates. Changes include adjustment of cereal malt beverage license fees reflecting a change in where a state 25 dollar stamp fee is collected, a five dollar hike in cremation fees and adding a category for larger animals, increases in fireworks stand permit fees, setting an annual license fee for food vendors, and several other adjustments.
It also approved an annual boundary resolution, and cereal malt beverage license renewals for Dillons and Kwik Shop.
The 2025 city audit for McPherson won’t cost as much as in the past, Commissioners approved a revised agreement that will reduce by five thousand dollars the cost for the basic audit. The Loyd Group cited quality of the city’s record keeping, consistency of staffing, and timeliness of responses to their requests in their request to lower fees, in effect passing along savings to the city.
Commissioners approved binding the city’s 2026 insurance renewal, which will carry about a 13 percent increase from 2025, mainly due to higher insured values for city buildings and facilities along with current market conditions. Related to insurance it approved payment of the first half of the 2026 workers compensation insurance premium, which in addition to that of the city also covers the Board of Public Utilities and McPherson Public Library.
