VINEMONT — The Town of South Vinemont passed a budget of around $550,000 during Tuesday night’s meeting. 

The 2020-2021 budget’s projected expenditures of around $549,000 and revenues of around $553,000, which is around 6 percent higher than last year’s budget. 

“It hasn’t changed much,” Mayor Radginal Dodson said. 

The council also approved a few expenditures for projects and other items, including a payment of $19,925 to the Alabama Municipal Insurance Corporation to pay for insurance for all of the town’s buildings and facilities. Rather than one lump sum, the amount will be divided into three payments of $6,641.

The council also approved the spending of $25,000-30,000 for the paving of Tillery Road, which runs from Patton Drive to the bridge behind Vinemont’s schools.

Dodson said the road is one of the town’s main thoroughfares as many residents use it to get to school, and many others use it to get to County Road 1354. 

“Even if people are not going to the schools, they still go through that street,” he said. “It’s a busy street.”

Public Works Director Mike Graves said the work will not close down the road all at once, but travelers may be delayed as work is done on one half of the road at a time.

“They’re just going to resurface it, so you may have to be held up a little bit to go around it,” he said. 

The council also approved a motion to spend $15,000 on a new drain pipe at the Vinemont Sports Complex.

Dodson said an issue was caused in the sports complex’s drain pipe after debris washed in from a neighboring property, and the town is having to replace the pipe while the landowner works to prevent more blockages coming onto the town’s property. 

Dodson said Graves and the town’s two other employees have been working at the site for more than a week trying to deal with the drainage, and he thanked them for all of the hours they have spent in the mud. 

“They have earned their dollars and cents for what I’ve been around and seen myself,” he said. 

For another project at the sports complex, the council also approved the purchase of sunshades for the bleachers at all of the baseball fields at the complex. With four fields and two sets of bleachers at each field, the town will purchase eight sunshades at a cost of around $2,000 each, Dodson said.

Because of other expenditures that have cropped up, the council voted to purchase the sunshades separately as the town gets the funding for them, but they should be in place by the time ball season starts in the spring, he said.