The Ottawa City Council isn’t ready to say whether the downtown LaSalle County courthouse can have an emergency generator. That would keep the courthouse running and avoid sudden shutdown problems with the computers. The city’s Historic Preservation Commission says a big generator on the lawn wouldn’t look good.
County Board Chairman Don Jensen says the looks can be managed with camouflage. He says computers have been damaged by power problems and the courts have to shut down when the power’s out. He says if it happened just once per year it wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s about three or four times.
Mayor Dan Aussem wants to look over options before dismissing the commission’s recommendation. The volunteers on the Historic Preservation Commission put hours of work into their decisions. Aussem doesn’t want to quickly disregard their recommendations. He also says the downtown power outages don’t last that long.
The City Council accepted the commission’s report last night but didn’t act on it. It was just last week that a power problem in an underground distribution box caused an outage at Ottawa City Hall, the courthouse, and Ottawa High School.