Commissioners decide to re-bid project; field budget questions from sheriff

By Tay­lor Kaser -

Bids for improve­ments on Kenny Lane and Co. Rd. 168 in Card­ing­ton were approved for adver­tise­ment again at the com­mis­sion­ers May 30 meeting.

Only one bid was received for the paving projects ini­tially. The bid sub­mit­ted was $26,000 over the engineer’s esti­mate for the project.

Direc­tor of Oper­a­tions Pat Davies said that some of the bid specs have been changed, includ­ing the win­dow of time avail­able for the project, which has been lengthened.

New bids will be accepted on June 25 at 11 a.m.

Sher­iff Steve Bren­ne­man asked the com­mis­sion­ers why respon­si­bil­ity for pay­ing the CORSA insur­ance bill has been deferred to his office.

“As things change, we’ve expended all the money plus the addi­tional; we’ve already paid $10,000 and $18,000 addi­tional,” answered Com­mis­sioner Tom Whis­ton, “So we felt it appro­pri­ate for you to be chair­ing on that.”

Bren­ne­man then asked Com­mis­sioner Tom Harden if he had ever been asked to pay the CORSA bill dur­ing his tenor as Sher­iff — he answered ‘no.”

“The insur­ance rate went up 18% for the office,” said Bren­ne­man, “the county over­all rate only went up 10%.”

Harden stated that the com­mis­sion­ers did ask the insur­ance com­pany why the Sheriff’s Office rate was increased. “They said because we had more pris­on­ers and more employ­ees,” said Harden, “the insur­ance com­pany said there’s an expo­sure to the pol­icy, the expo­sure is how they rate a pol­icy. I dis­agree with them.”

“The rates went down sig­nif­i­cantly when we laid off,” Bren­ne­man said. ”We didn’t get that pushed back out there for the sav­ings the county made when the rates went way down. Why am I being told to pay it when it goes back up to where it had been?”

Com­mis­sioner Olen Jack­son said, “You have to com­pare the bud­gets of when he [Harden] was in office, to the bud­get that you’re in now. They’re com­pletely dif­fer­ent. We [the county] just took a $2.5 mil­lion decrease. But agreed to give you every penny that that ICE con­tract brought in, and I sat and talked with you at times and said, ‘If we get in trou­ble, we need to look back at that ICE contract.”

Bren­ne­man stated that his office has taken the most sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the cuts made to the bud­get. “You’ve kept tak­ing money from the gen­eral fund fund­ing away from it with that ICE money too.”

“At this point in time we’re just look­ing for any penny we can find to pay the bill because we don’t have the money in the gen­eral fund to pay the bill,” said Jackson.

“We try to work with every­body,” Whis­ton said, “but from the stand­point of think­ing you get a reduc­tion, how you stated, if you never paid any­thing, why would we give you money back from some­thing you hadn’t paid?”

“Why am I being pun­ished for when it goes back up then?” asked Bren­ne­man, ”Why am I being told to pay it when it comes back up, when I didn’t get any­thing when it went down?”

“Because it becomes an addi­tional expense we didn’t have rev­enue for,” answered Whis­ton. “We used every penny we had. Come July 1, I think we’ll have to reeval­u­ate everybody’s budget.”

“We put $50,000 in a rainy day fund, know­ing that for the past two years we’ve not had a cent in a rainy day fund for things that come up, and things did come up,” said Jack­son, “We took money out of that $50,000 and bought you new cruisers.”

“I’m ask­ing why I’m pay­ing for some­thing I never paid for before.” said Brenneman.

“You aren’t the only one that’s been asked to pay the addi­tional,” said Whis­ton. He cited the Dog War­den and Johnsville Sewer as exam­ples. “We will con­tinue to eval­u­ate things as best we can, things are going to be tight.”

In other busi­ness, trans­fer of funds were approved for the Prosecutor’s office and Com­mon Pleas Court.

An amended cer­tifi­cate of $1,350 was received from the sale of vehi­cle parts from old cruis­ers. The funds will put towards replacement/Sheriff’s vehicles.

Noti­fi­ca­tion was received from the Ohio Depart­ment of Nat­ural Resources that the appli­ca­tion to admin­is­ter brine to pri­vate roads and sur­faces owned by Wal­ter and Karen Fish­burn and Camp­ground Man­age­ment, Inc. was approved.

A pub­lic hear­ing regard­ing the 2012 Small Cities Grant pro­gram is being held June 11 at 10 a.m.

A pub­lic hear­ing regard­ing the 2012 County Tax Bud­get was sched­uled for June 25 at 10 a.m by the com­mis­sion­ers at their June 4 meeting.

Addi­tional fund­ing received by the Bud­get Com­mis­sion for the Court of Com­mon Pleas for DYS pro­gram fees. The amount, $26,074.89, was appro­pri­ated to Other Expenses.

Rev­enue received from the HVEO Grant was appro­pri­ated to Salaries, $1,104.10, at the Sheriff’s request.

Due to pop­u­la­tion changes, Mor­row County will now only be appoint­ing two mem­bers to the ten mem­ber Delaware-Morrow Men­tal Health & Recov­ery Ser­vices Board. The num­ber of seats occu­pied by each county is deter­mined by county pop­u­la­tion, accord­ing to the Ohio Revised Code. The county pre­vi­ously held four seats.

Approval was given for the sub­mis­sion of a new grant for the Court of Com­mon Pleas. Called the Juve­nile Account­abil­ity Block Grant, fund­ing will be fed­eral and admin­is­tered through the state. It will cover one year of fund­ing and be renew­able for an addi­tional year. The appli­ca­tion was explained by Pro­ba­tion Offi­cer Amanda Wheeler.

“It does require a 10% local match,“ explained Wheeler, “how­ever, because it is a fed­eral grant, we can pro­vide that 10% match through our state fund­ing. That has already been allo­cated through the con­tin­u­a­tion of our cur­rent DYS grant.”

Fund­ing from the grant will be used to hire an addi­tional full time pro­ba­tion offi­cer who will cover juve­nile diver­sion. She stated that the needed funds have already been allo­cated to cover PERS and Medicare, as well as some fringe ben­e­fits. The posi­tion will focus on address­ing state requested mat­ters through the juve­nile pro­ba­tion department.

Wheeler explained the term juve­nile diver­sion, ”It’s a pro­gram that is pro­vided for first time, non-violent mis­de­meanor unruly juve­nile offend­ers, to give them a chance not to have a juve­nile record. It’s very valu­able and deemed very successful.”

If the grant is awarded, it will be put into affect July 1.

“If we can pro­duce the data, if we can show reduc­tion in detain­ment, show suc­cess rates — that’s what the state wants.” said Wheeler. She said if the pro­gram proves that it’s sav­ing money, it will be eas­ier to receive fur­ther help and fund­ing in the future.

Posted by Randa Wagner on Jun 6 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.