Monday night’s Sycamore City Council meeting included a discussion of last weekend’s rainfall, which flooded and closed many roads, along with the Evergreen Village mobile home park.

“We will, for the next couple of days, be struggling with some street closures,” said Sycamore City Manager Bill Nicklas. “Hopefully the number [of closed roads] goes down substantially over night.”

Rainwater flooded North Main Street, North Avenue onto Maplewood Drive, Brickville Road and East Davis. Regular traffic was detoured.

Nicklas thanked the Sycamore Public Works and Fire departments for posting barricades to prevent further flooding and helping people get shelter. The departments also created the safe road closures.

Red Cross set up shelter at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. John, 26555 Brickville Road, for those whose homes experienced flood damage.

Public Works Director Fred Busse said the wastewater treatment plant was silently pumping water away at the end of Cross Street all last weekend.

“We’ve been pumping at the rate of 15 million gallons a day for the last two days. Our flow is usually 2 million a day,” he said.

Other damage from the flooding was minimal. Public Works did not receive any flooded basement calls due to backups and did not have to do any bypass pumping out of the sanitary manholes throughout the whole collection system.

Busse said, with the flooding both last year and this year, Public Works plans to make new detour signs this winter exclusively for the detouring during flooding conditions.

The council also discussed the proposal to build a monopole wireless communication tower already considered, but unfavorably, by the Plan Commission.

BTS Tower Development plans to build the tower at the southeast corner of Page and North Carolina Streets. Sycamore residents whose homes are close to the proposed location spoke out against the idea.

“It certainly will have a detrimental affect on property values for the people who live in the area,” said Sycamore resident Brian Corr.

Another resident, Patrick O’Brien said the tower would only limit the property’s use for future development, which could result in lower taxes and job losses.

Although a developer wanted to make his or her case at the meeting, he or she was absent due to the hurricane weather in Texas.

Third Ward Alderman Gregory Taylor spoke in favor of giving the developers a fair chance to be heard, and said the tower would allow for not only better cell phone service, but other data transmission.

The council agreed to postpone the consideration until the next meeting.