West Main Street in Saxonburg on a snowy night. William Pitts/Butler Eagle

SAXONBURG — Saxonburg borough council tabled action that would have allocated money for the borough to purchase 11 road bollards to place at each end of West Main Street for safety purposes.

The intention of the bollards — which would have been placed at the North Rebecca Street and Pittsburgh Street intersections — was to prevent a vehicular attack from taking place during a highly-populated event on Saxonburg’s main street, such as the attack which occurred earlier this month on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.

However, multiple members of council took issue with how the money would have been raised to pay for the bollards — namely, by raising solicitation fees from $20 to $30. This would have increased the cost that vendors would have paid to apply for a permit to participate in one of Saxonburg’s many local events, such as Mingle on Main and the newly-established Artisan Market.

In particular, Dave Johnston — whose wife is the owner of Red Door Antiques — raised concern that the fees would lead to reduced participation by vendors in local events, which are a lifeline for local businesses.

“We have a nice thing going on with all these events that are occurring on Main Street,” Johnston said. “But there's a lot of expenses that the people that put these events up have to incur. They rely on these vendors to come up with the monies, for the most part, in order to fund these. My concern is that if we continue to raise (fees), they're just not going to show up for these events.”

After some discussion, both the motion to increase solicitation fees and the motion to purchase bollards were tabled.

May estimates that, had the fee increase gone through, it would have led to another $3,000 going into the borough’s coffers.

“With the fee increase, we would have turned around and put $3,000 right into the bollards,” May said. “We budgeted at $9,000. Leaving it the way it is, it’s $6,000. The difference between $9,000 and $6,000 is what we would have put into the bollards.”

Had the fee increase gone through, it would have taken effect March 1.