SALEM — Mayor Cyndi Baronzzi Dickey presented the annual state of the city address to council Tuesday.

Each year, the mayor is required to present the address, which provides an overview of the operations and significant accomplishments of all the city departments in the previous year.

“Welcome city council members old and new. Welcome city department heads and city elected officials. As required, tonight I will be delivering the Salem State of the City Address. Settle in,” joked Dickey.

The 2025 year proved to be a busy one across the city, including at city hall. Dickey said that in addition to representing the city in meetings “in the city and as far as Columbus and Chillicothe” that she had been meeting with the Salem City School District to discuss its K-8 school building project and the role of the utilities department in the project. Last year also saw the mayor’s office successfully open negotiations with Omni Fiber to bring fiber optic cable to Salem, with “annexation meetings and research” also being a “big subject” for the year 2025.

Dickey said fund raising and grant writing were top concerns for the mayor’s office in 2025, successfully securing an approximately $400,000 grant from the state of Ohio to create the One Ohio Salem Resource Referral Center. She said that in 2025 the center took in eight individuals “without shelter off the streets of Salem and assisted 32 total with safe housing.” It also made contact with 500 people and has successfully enrolled 72 people to date who “have accepted education, job training, job placement, court and legal referrals and assistance, driver’s license reinstatement,

transportation, referrals for counseling and behavioral management.” Of those enrolled, 49 individuals were primarily struggling with substance use disorder (SUD), and 13 with mental health.

“This goes a long way in the reduction of SUD related arrests and overdose and medical calls,” said Dickey.

Dickey said she was also “assisting a couple of residential developers with getting their project’s initiated as well as one large commercial developer” and that her office was “researching in preparation for union contract negotiation in the next month or two with all four unions” which represent city employees.

The service and safety department oversaw several projects in 2025, including the annual street paving project which “paved over $2,200,000 worth of streets” for half that price, and the completion of phase two of the Lincoln Plaza Project which was funded through a grant from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. The department also successfully applied for several other grants in 2025 including: an $850,000 grant from the Ohio Department of Transportation which covered the costs of paving sections of State Street and North Lincoln Avenue; a $486,402 federal grant for software upgrades for the traffic signals on State Street; the $438,943 OMEGA Regional Planning Transportation Grant for the downtown sidewalk project; a $112,800 grant from the Community Development Block Grant Program to pave portions of East Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth streets; and a $43,089 grant from the city’s gas aggregation supplier.

The 2025 year also marked the first full year of the city’s renegotiated rate for the city hall cell tower contract, which netted the city $12,000 in revenue an increase of 83% from its prior contract.

Following the address, Councilwoman Sara Baer suggested revisiting the question of adopting uniform digital format for end-of-year department reports like the one used by Medina. She argued that it would provide both consistency between the reports of each department and make it easier to compare those reports from year to year, and that the cleaner format would allow it to be distributed to city partners.

Dickey asked if doing so in that format would meet the requirements of the state that the report be delivered annually, and City Law Director Brooke Zellers said typically communities which utilize a similar approach make it known that the full report has been compiled and is available for review and “provide a brief synopsis” of the full report in a designated public meeting.

During the report of standing committees, Councilman Mike Weir announced the Public Services Committee would meet at 6:30 p.m. March 3 to discuss a potential grant for the parks department to renovate the basketball courts and a suggestion by a resident to potentially rename a section of a city street.

Council will meet next at 7 p.m. on March 3.