Tuesday, May 15, 2012

15 May 2012 Dearborn County Commissioners Meeting Notes


15 May 2012 Dearborn County Commissioners Meeting Notes

Present: Jeff Hughes, President, Tom Orschell, and Shane McHenry
Also present:  Teresa Randall, County Administrator, and Andy Baudendistel, Attorney.
ABSENT: Gayle Pennington, Auditor (at conference) Margaret Minzner took minutes in her place.

Meeting was preceded by an executive session- no decisions- just gave some direction to County Administrator per Hughes.

OLD BUSINESS:

Payroll schedule change – tabled for June 5 meeting

NEW BUSINESS:

Appointments for Lawrenceburg Township Trustee Advisory Board Vacancy- Jerome Gilb – former township trustee, was appointed to fill that spot.

Carla Burkhart- Life Time Resources- CDBG(Community Development Block Grant) Owner Occupied Rehab Award corrective actions- cancelled at her request.

Gary Hensley, Assessor- approval to send out annual trending RFP- tabled for further information- until 2nd June meeting.

Margaret Minzner- Automatic vehicle Location grant- for sheriff’s dept and first responder agencies. She wants to submit to the June round of the Dearborn Community Foundation. 911 communications would be the applicant for this grant. They are regional and the other towns in the county are interested in partnering on this. Charlie Ashley is fine with 911 being applicant. The deadline is June 5th. The dispatch map is provided to each responder and reporting software is included and allows for GPS location of cars in the field. McHenry supported this. Dispatch can live track a pursuit for example. He thinks it could be extremely helpful. Approved to allow 911 to submit an AVL grant to the DC Foundation.

Data sharing agreement with the state- Minzner said we have done this in the past and it was administered through Homeland security. 86 of the state’s counties do this. They allow $2000 annually for the next 3 years to each count and our vendors costs are less than this. If we do this in house- we can get the entire $2000 in house. Some vendors charge about half this and we could use the rest. Approved to sign the agreement for data sharing with the state.

HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT:

Todd Listerman, Highway Engineer- Two copies of material on the Lower Dillsboro Bridge that he’s going to Council about next week. He’ll get Gayle’s signature when she returns.

The North Dearborn project was awarded to O’Mara as low bidder. We can use credits for our 20% on this project. He doesn’t yet know what our actual monetary costs will be on that.

He was working with Hrezo to purchase a wash pump from a defunct car wash facility to construct a truck wash facility at the Randall Avenue facility. Total cost is $11,520. This gets plans and he’ll work with Maxwell to get firm costs to go to the Dearborn Community Foundation on this. This is particularly important for the salt trucks to keep them well maintained. The only cost to the county is the design. The Foundation will hopefully pay the construction. This keeps us Environmental and EPA compliant.  Grieve also noted that it will clean other county vehicles- for animal control and sheriff too. TABLED- the commissioners wanted to see if they can do design in house.

Hughes said someone had concerns about the project going on Stateline. This is by Skyline. Access will be maintained to all businesses while this is going on. These people can come to Todd and he’ll show this.

Orschell said they’d had questions on Stateline speed limits. Max speeds are 30 mph in urbanized and 55 in rural areas. We use road and conditions and use an 85 percentile study of the people driving the road. He detailed how they do this. The highest speed limit on a county road is 50 mph. Sometimes it’s an enforcement issue when there is excessive speed. They could use radar speed trailer to help with compliance. Hughes talked about issues of accident spots on Stateline. The sheriff has the trailer and the highway dept suggests spots at times.

Tim Grieve, Highway Superintendent- had some flood issue problems at Salt Fork and Stateline. They are trying to jet out the culverts that jammed. This area is part of Listerman’s realignment problem so it needs to be fixed until that can be accomplished. 

New tractor is out and working well. Orschell noted they’d fixed the problem by Tom Stone’s house where the sewer went through.

They are fixing a culvert issue by the Davis property due to a large pipe the county installed above it. It’s off ROW and so he was informing the county they were going to perform labor there and no material costs. It’s about a half day job to realign the creek. This will keep access during emergency access if the bridge goes out. That will be part of the agreement that they sign now. Andy Baudendistel will work up something on that.

ADMINISTRATOR: Teresa Randall- Additional Appropriation request to Council for Hoosier Square- some items they did not anticipate. Hughes approved her to go and commissioners ratified her request. They need to install an appropriate storm drain. They want to fix it permanently- Maxwell Construction will do it for $25,000 and a sump pump will be installed. The staircase needs to be replaced to the lower level and they will not accommodate heavier foot traffic. It DOES meet code as is. Code is the very least you can get by with.  They need wider treads. An employee fell down these stairs when they first moved in. They have a $20,000 bid from Maxwell for this. There is a wiring problem for fiberoptics to run overhead over CSX railroad. [Note: Whose fiberoptic cable are they extending?]They think it may take about $15,000 to get it there per her discussions with Jeff Bittner. Fiberoptics is needed for the internet issues and wireless is unreliable there. This total request for Hoosier was about $65,000. [NOTE: Maxwell constructed the original Hoosier Square building.] Commissioners ratified Hughes’s signature to go to Council for this request.

Certificate of Substantial Completion- Hoosier Square- this is needed to get the final permit for occupancy. There are 2-3 very minor items that they are fixing now. This does not take the contractor off the hook for completing these items. Commissioners signed this form. There is also a handrail on outside steps to put up- but the contracts with contractors hold them to finishing these items per Teresa Randall and Joe Mrak of RQAW.

Votaw Shumway Building demolitions- she did not get the grant form City of L-bg on this. They still have money on this form Lawrenceburg city. “Maxwell has graciously helped me on this” to get the costs of gravel parking areas done. There is savings to get both buildings done at one time. Hughes said they need to get bids on this. She said absolutely. Baudendistel reminded her that the county surveyor said there is ROWs there to be aware of.

EMS Study from Duncan and Associates which will be presented on May 24th at 6:30 PM at the Dearborn Emergency Management Building. This has been published.

Whitewater Canal Scenic Byway Grant- On Sept 20th 2011the County agreed to sponsor the grant for them. She thinks the commissioners didn’t realize they were actually administering the grant. It’s a federal highway 80/20 project per Todd Listerman.  Whitewater Canal Scenic Byways name is not on these documents. There are costs to the county to administer this. One concern is that we are spending highway road and bridge money for some studies for things that are not roads and bridges. This year INDOT stated  that if you have an active project you may not be able to apply for other projects. This could disallow us from other funds we are applying for. Collier Ridge is coming up for us next.  Franklin County Commissioners were the last sponsor for a previous project they had. This raised a flag that maybe this is not something we want to be a sponsor for, because they have an audit that has to get done on this and they hav eto get Whitewater to get that done too. This really is NOT a grant – it is federal aid. This is a worthy project and a wonderful organization per Randall. BUT she wants then to know whether we want to proceed with this knowing it is different from what we signed up for initially. INDOT was not sure if this would affect our other projects in the queue.

A spokeswoman ( Candy) for Whitewater said this is NOT money that would be used for roads or bridges. The audit requested by Franklin County was sent in April. She sent that to INDOT and they said that they can ask for audit and they have all the paperwork in Franklin. INDOT attorney, Whitewater’s attorney also concurred that this was an expense that Franklin County would incur. This is TEA funding is Transportation Enhancement Funding. She also gave them the bank statement showing that they will upfront all the money- not Dearborn County. They will agree to sign a contract detailing all this. Commissioners said they will do some more evaluation and then decide later. Listerman said he wanted them to make sure any administration costs with the auditor of highway dept would be paid for by Whitewater Canal Scenic Byways. Randall said they can bring those costs to the next meeting. They will work with Andy Baudendistel on this too.

AUDITOR: Margaret Minzner presented in Pennington’s absence. Claims signed.

ATTORNEY: Andy Baudendistel- agreement with HVL POA and Sheriff’s Dept was signed. Commissioners now signed it. This stays in effect until a new sheriff is elected. They are also looking into what vehicles they will be leasing form the county. Sheriff caught this and Jack Prarat worked with Andy on this.

COMMISSIONER COMMENTS- Hughes- appreciated everyone who participated in primary elections and congratulated the victors.

He has also talked to Maximus about finding some solutions to cost issues in the jail. This would not be bricks and mortar issues.

Orschell said that he attended an awards ceremony at the middle school up in ST Leon won this- for doing a mapping of the Greendale Cemetery. Art Wenzel and Margaret Minzner helped with it.  Art said it was fun and they were good kids.

McHenry- the sheriff said they purchased an 8x10 dog kennel for the new canine to store oil, fluids etc. Randall reminded him they have to have hazardous chemical lists.

LATE ARRIVAL INFORMATION- none

PUBLIC COMMENT- Art Wenzel said there were 7 kids from Destination Imagination who helped do this. They helped catalog the old graves that were moved from Lawrenceburg’s old 1802 cemetery to Newtown Park and then to Greendale Cemetery. They go to Nationals with this. There may be something in the paper about this.

Meeting adjourned at 11:00 AM

Christine Brauer Mueller

Lawrenceburg Township

No comments: