The North Catasauqua Council will await further information from borough Fire Chief Shawn McGinley before deciding to draft an ordinance requiring the use of Knox Boxes by borough businesses.

The council has a number of decisions to make about the possible enactment of an ordinance about the use of Knox Boxes in the borough. McGinley had proposed requiring the use of the devices to allow easier access to businesses and other buildings by firefighters.

McGinley was not at the meeting Sept. 9 when it was discussed.

"Once we get [McGinley's] comments I think we'll present it to council again," borough council President Joe Keglovits said. "Are we going to make it mandatory? Are we going to make it voluntary? Are we going to include apartments? There's a lot of questions."

Councilman Peter Paone mentioned a lot of other boroughs around the area are requiring it or looking into requiring it. He said one of the problems volunteer firefighters face is they sometimes have to wait three hours for a building owner to arrive with a key when they are responding to a false alarm. Having immediate access to a key inside a Knox Box would allow them to handle such a call more efficiently.

Another ordinance, on regulating noise and nuisance behavior in the borough, had been proposed by resident Brenda Dreisbach at the Aug. 26 meeting.

Council members reviewed the proposal and came to the Sept. 9 meeting with their comments.

Councilman Bill Nothstein led with a question to borough Police Chief Kim Moyer.

"Do we have a lot of calls that are happening based on noise?" he asked. "Do we need an ordinance? Is there a rash of this going on?"

Moyer said there are "isolated incidents" and most are rectified with current statutes.

Keglovits said a current ordinance for disturbing the peace after 10 p.m. at night would take care of problems with excessive noise. This proposed ordinance calls for blowing the whistle after 8:30 at night, he said.

"I think there's enough ordinances on the books that cover most of the things the this person was trying to establish and I think these have pretty good leeway that disturbing the peace falls into a lot of categories," he said. "We're not having a lot of complaints from the police department that they 're having a hard time enforcing whatever."

Most people respect being asked to quiet down, he said.

"If we have a problem in the future, we can bring it up again," Keglovits said. "Noise ordinances are pretty hard to enforce and they're costly."

Councilwoman Cherie Gebhardt commented on the notion of having quiet enforced during evening hours.

"We don't all work 9-5," she said. "For the past six years, when my husband was working second or third shift, I didn't go to my neighbors and say, 'Please down cut your grass or run your snow blower because my husband's sleeping. That's not their problem, that's our problem. You can't tell everybody to be quiet."

The council voted to table consideration of the proposed ordinance, and agreed to contact Dreisbach who proposed it with their reasons for doing so.

Note: For more on this issue, see coverage of the Sept. 23 meeting in next week's issue