Last week the Greene County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved to temporarily suspend music from the Mahanay Memorial Carillon Tower in Jefferson.

The decision stemmed from a request made by an outside organization to have patriotic music played on Inauguration Day. However, the Board denied the request, citing its public art policy as guidance. But then the county’s public art policy does not cover music playing from the bell tower. The Bell Tower Community Foundation has handled music requests and programmed the music for the bell tower. Supervisor Pete Bardole said at their January 18th meeting that the Bell Tower Community Foundation did not receive the same request that was made to the Supervisors.

County Attorney Thomas Laehn said at the Supervisors January 21st meeting that the original will of Floyd Mahanay, who gifted the tower to the County over 50 years ago, was that the County had entered into a memorandum of agreement.

“In the will he indicated that he wanted at least 50-percent of the music to be patriotic and sacred. So that’s the intention in the will. What we agreed to was to the best of our ability to respect his wishes. That is one of the legal considerations we’ll need to take into account when drafting these policies.”  

Supervisor Chair John Muir tells Raccoon Valley Radio why the Board felt it was necessary to suspend the bell tower music until a policy was in place.

“There had been no complaints, no problems. We had an issue come up and at that time we decided that as quick as we could we needed to address it and get all of our policies consistent across the board. That was the biggest reason we thought we need to get this defined and consistent so the public knows what our policy is on that.”

A group consisting of some Supervisors, Laehn and members of the Bell Tower Community Foundation will work on establishing those policies. The chimes will still ring at the quarters and Laehn hopes to have the policies finalized within one month.