MOUNT VERNON — As the end of the year draws near, Mayor Richard Mavis reported on several city meetings held last week.

A special meeting convened to review traffic patterns that developed during the fire at 201 S. Main St. in downtown. The mayor and other city officials from the Mount Vernon Fire Department, police department, engineering ddepartment as well as Emergency Management Agency were present.

“I thought we had a good meeting and a lot of good imput,” Mavis said. “One of the things we determined is that the county’s emergency management plan says that the police will determine traffic patterns in time of emergencies. But in this case, the police department couldn’t do it without the street department because they have all the signs and barricades.”

Mavis said the meeting concluded with the agreement that the police, street and fire department will collaborate on where detours should be.

“Our issue was that we didn’t have a good system of detours set up until about late morning,” he said. “Even so, our signage on the little barricades can be hard to see and if you’re unfamiliar with the city you might not understand what it’s talking about. We talked about getting some larger signs that could be erected at intersections to tell, especially truckers, where to go.”

The city has a computer program that can create detoured traffic patterns and new routes by placing in street locations, road blocks and other information regarding emergency situations such as fires.

“We are going to look into developing [the program] so we can come up almost instantaneously with detours and where signage should go. We have so many state highways coming through town so, even early in the morning you have traffic,” said Mavis.

kenesha.beheler@mountvernonnews.com