As the year 2022 approaches the halfway point, members of the McKittrick Board of Trustees discussed their vision for the small town for the rest of the year during a two-hour meeting on May 15 at the Farmers Mercantile building.

“I mainly would like to see us pull together a little more as a community,” said Mike Struttman, a longtime McKittrick native who recently was elected the board’s chairman. “Everybody can just get together and talk about their issues and this and that. Communication is a big thing. We just need to sit down and talk and make our plans.”

Clerk Joey Los, who has been living in McKittrick since 2011, said one of the plans is figuring out the metes and bounds issue, which describes the town as two-thirds larger than is shown in any Montgomery County map.

“We read the metes and bounds and we understood that the county had the metes and bounds of the town incorrectly reported on the map,” Los said. “They didn’t have any accurate maps of the town as reported in our original metes and bounds. We tried to annex some properties. We were thinking about trying for Loutre Market, so we had a volunteer attorney and she said that we have to get our boundaries clearly defined. There was no available map, so we had to address it and say this is our metes and bounds. So that’s how that came up.”

Los said she also hopes that the streets will be repaired more adequately than in the past and there will be a ban on burning toxic waste in the town.

McKittrick, located just two miles north of Hermann, has a population of 77 people, a 26 percent increase of its population of 61 in the 2010 census. McKittrick has two main businesses, Gleeson’s Landscaping and Maczuk Chrysler, which are located on Highway 19.

“Those are two businesses that have a lot of business,” Los said. “ They could be paying some sales tax that we could use because we don't have any other businesses except mine. I have a bed and breakfast called Joey’s Birdhouse and I have five rooms. So I’m paying about $2,000 a year in sales tax. We can use more sales tax.”

McKittrick’s budget is now $45,692.90, an increase of its last reported budget of $41,382.59 in February.

“It seems that McKittrick has a lot of money,” Los said. “We have $45,000 in our bank account. That’s really not a lot of money and it has taken us since 1900 to earn that much money. The amount of income that we now have for the town of McKittrick is approximately $1,500 a year. It’s not a whole lot because we have to pay for streets and we have expenses that are increasing with the town. We could never really improve. Just having the road repaved would drain our whole bank account.”

Other board members who attended the meeting included Pete Gabathuler, Cole Lensing, Mary Struttman and Larissa Lackman.