PORTER COUNTY COUNCIL
March 22, 2005

The Porter County Council met on Tuesday, March 22, 2005 at 6:30 p.m. in the County Administration Center, 155 Indiana-Suite 205, Valparaiso, Indiana.

Members present were Laura Blaney, Jim Burge, William Carmichael, Al Steele, Rita Stevenson, Dan Whitten and President Robert Poparad. Also present was Attorney David Hollenbeck, Auditor Sandra Vuko, Becky Phillips and Jan Noll.

The meeting was called to order with the Pledge of Allegiance.

Mr. Poparad, We have the approval of minutes from the last meeting.

Mr. Carmichael moved to approve the minutes of January 4, 2005 meeting as received. Mr. Whitten seconded, motion carried unanimously.

FIRST READING

At this time, Mrs. Vuko read the Notice to Taxpayers.

Mr. Poparad, Thank you. I’m going to juggle things. Is Judge Harper here?

Amy Beier, Not yet.

Mr. Poparad, Was she coming, Amy?

Ms. Beier, She is coming.

Mr. Poparad, Alright, we’ll get back to her then. First additional, Convention/Recreation.

CONVENTION, RECREATION & VISITORS COMMISSION 93
Additional Appropriation
$350,000 to 4110 Land Purchase

Lorelei Weimer, Good evening, I’m Lorelei Weimer, the Executive Director of the Porter County Convention, Recreation & Visitors Commission. We are coming before the Council this evening, we sold our visitors center, which was located on Indian Boundary Road in Chesterton a year and a half ago. The reason we sold that was to get our 20% of matching funds for transportation enhancement funds that we have a little over $2,000,000 for.
To build a new visitor center, that’s going to be 2.5 million dollars outside the Indiana Dunes State Park. TE requires that you have the 20% match, and in order for us to get that, we did have to sell our building. We sold it to First Source Bank. They let us lease it back for a year and a half, and then in November of 2004, we did have to vacate the building, and we are in a temporary location. The money has been sitting in the bank, and we did have it in our 2004 budget. Unfortunately, we didn’t have an opportunity to close on the land in 2004. We have a closing scheduled for this Thursday. The $350,000 will actually purchase the land for the visitors center.

Mr. Poparad, Any questions? Comments? I need a motion.

Mr. Carmichael moved to grant the request for additional appropriations submitted by the Convention, Recreation & Visitors Commission 93, $350,000 to 4110 Land Purchase. Mr. Steele seconded, motion carried on a unanimous roll call vote.

Ms. Weimer, Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

Mr. Poparad, Thank you, Lori.

ANIMAL SHELTER 01.45
144 Form
Probationary Animal Control Officer from $0 to $22,085, retroactive 1-1-05

Mr. Poparad, Animal Shelter. This is a 144.

Sandy Ogle, When I turned in my 2005 budget, I did not have on there the probation officer salary, and I didn’t have it increased by $1,000. So that’s why I’m here tonight, to have it increased by $1,000. We were paying them $21,085, and I want it increased to $22,085, and retroactive to January 1st.

Mr. Steele, That’s the $1,000 raise everybody got last year, right, Sandy?

Ms. Ogle, Right.

Mr. Steele, And you had this approved last year, you just didn’t…

Ms. Ogle, Yes, I mean I’ve had the position for like three years, but I didn’t put a salary on the 2005 budget, because I didn’t have anybody in that position at that time. You know, I had full-fledged officers; I had nobody in the probationary position at that time.

Mr. Steele, So this is nothing additional.

Ms. Ogle, This is nothing additional.

Mr. Steele moved to amend the 144 Form submitted by Animal Shelter 01.45, Probationary Animal Control Officer from $0 to $22,085, retroactive to January 1, 2005. Mr. Burge seconded, motion carried on a unanimous roll call vote.

Mr. Poparad, The motion passed. Thank you, Sandy.

Ms. Ogle, Thank you very much.

JUVENILE PROBATION 01.47
144 Form
PO Schaffer from $36,644 to $26,517
PO Foley from $28,543 to $26,517

Mr. Poparad, Juvenile Probation.

Ms. Beier, Hi. I have a 144 to change a couple of salaries. I had two probation officer resignations, and the replacement officers came in at the lower rate in the salary structure, so that’s the difference in those two salaries that you see there.

Mr. Poparad, Anybody? Motion?

Mr. Whitten moved to amend the 144 submitted by Juvenile Probation 01.47, PO Schaffer from $36,644 to $26,517 and PO Foley from $28,543 to $26,517. Mrs. Blaney seconded, motion carried on a unanimous roll call vote.

Mr. Poparad, Motion carries. Thank you, Amy. Is Mary coming?

Ms. Beier, She is. She should be here pretty soon.

Mr. Poparad, Okay, we’ll get to her.

GENERAL COURTS 01.78
Additional Appropriation
$10,000 to 1330 Psychiatric Services
Mr. Poparad, General Courts.

Judge William Alexa, Good evening.

Mr. Whitten, Evening, Judge.

Judge Alexa, I’m here on behalf of the General Courts budget requesting an additional appropriation of $10,000. The purpose of the appropriations is for psychiatric services. Over the course of the last several years--prior to my coming on the bench here--psychiatric services has been reduced, or mostly eliminated from the courts’ general budgets and from the individual courts.
As an example, In DO1, Judge Bradford has nothing in there for psychiatric services. In my court I have $4,000 in there. DO3 has $20. DO4 has nothing. DO5, $50. DO6, nothing. And General Courts, nothing at this point. Over the past several years, we haven’t had the necessity to have a psychiatric examination for people who are charged with a crime, relative to their ability to understand the proceedings and help in their defense.
The statute that we deal with requires that we appoint two psychologists and a psychiatrist to examine the defendant, and determine whether they are competent to stand trial. The minimum requirement is one psychologist and one psychiatrist. Presently I have two cases pending before me right now that require the appointment of these individuals, and I’m going to expend, I believe, that $4,000 that I have in my account for it.
So I’m here on behalf of all of the courts, because Judge Bradford also has one, and perhaps two that are coming online. We’re going to need this funding to provide those kinds of services. So what we’ve done is ask that it be put into the General Courts budget rather than in the individual budgets, so that we can all access it as we might need it.
The examinations that are done, we typically have been asking Porter-Starke to do them. They have worked with Judge Bradford and Judge Harper, and they have set up a low rate for these examinations. I believe its $125 an hour. The normal rates can range anywhere from $250 to $400 or $500 an hour, particularly when you’re talking about a psychiatrist being involved. But Porter-Starke has agreed to do that for us.
We have a problem also, and that is, we have to appoint--as I mentioned--by statute three individuals, two psychologists and a psychiatrist. The defendant could well be in a position to say, you have all three of those people working for the same employer, and therefore, it taints the evaluation that they have. So we have to have perhaps a third opinion. We do appoint two, but if we run into a situation like that, it will require one additional.
Basically, we anticipate the $10,000 would be enough to handle it for the rest of the year. As I mentioned, I have $4,000 in mine, but that is going to be gone between these two cases that I have right now. I can tell you that if we don’t use it before the end of the year, it will revert to the general fund, and we will not, none of the judges will be asking to transfer anything out of that at all. That is our request. I believe that Dave Lomaka from Porter-Starke is here if you’d like to ask any questions of him relative to the rate, negotiation, what it is that they can provide us. That’s it.

Mr. Carmichael moved to grant the request for additional appropriations submitted by General Courts 01.78, $10,000 to 1330 Psychiatric Services. Mr. Whitten seconded.

Mr. Poparad, Anymore questions or discussion? Sandy, call the roll, please.

Motion carried on a unanimous roll call vote.

Judge Alexa, Thank you very much.

Mr. Whitten, Your Honor, have a good evening.

ELECTION BOARD 01.21
Additional Appropriation
$6,000 to 1340 Boards
$2,000 to 3130 Training & Education
$409 to 3710 Equipment

Mr. Poparad, Dale, Election Board.
Dale Brewer, Hi.

Mr. Burge, Hello.

Ms. Brewer, Are we having fun yet; you will.

Mr. Poparad, It’s early.

Ms. Brewer, Now do you want to know what I want or?

Mr. Poparad, Well, yeah, just a little spiel.

Ms. Brewer, The first one on the Boards, it’s the 144 that you approved last year on the budget, but didn’t fund, so I need to come back to get that money so each election board member can have their pay. The second one is just in case we travel. As you know, we are looking at election equipment. It has to be purchased by July 1st or the State will tell us what we are going to get. I think we can do a little bit better, and probably get a better price. They do have QPA out there on election equipment--a standard thing--so it does not have to be bid, but we’re still allowed to go out and make our own deals with those companies that are state approved. The third amount on there, after the Training & Education for travel, would be for a late bill that came in for the rental of the tables and stuff on the election that was not encumbered.

Mr. Poparad, Any questions? Do you have a number on the voting machines, what it’s going to cost?

Ms. Brewer, I’m going to get $8,000 per precinct, so my idea is, hopefully, to have one machine per precinct that can do it all, but still have a paper trail. So I’m kind of thinking, the least amount that it may cost the County would probably be about a half a million dollars--$500,000--which is a lot better than it would have been before. We’re waiting for another piece of equipment on this particular machine to be state certified, and it’s supposed to be any day.

Mr. Poparad, Anybody else besides me?

Mr. Carmichael moved to grant the request for additional appropriations submitted by Election Board 01.21, $6,000 to 1340 Boards, $2,000 to 3130 Training & Education and $409 to 3710 Equipment. Mrs. Blaney seconded, motion carried on a unanimous roll call vote.

Ms. Brewer, There’s a couple of other things I wanted to inform you about so you know what’s coming down the pipe, that would be the statewide voter registration. Porter County will start to be coming online with that particular program July 1st. All 92 counties have to be on it by the end of the year, and it is software by the State.
Right now, the clerks and Quest, which is the vendor, are negotiating about whether to run through our server or on their dedicated lines. It if runs just on their dedicated lines, that means most of us will have to have two computers on our desk, and we don’t want that, we want one. I go from office to office, I’m not dragging two with me around the county. So hopefully, we can get that worked out, and it seems to be a workable solution. It shouldn’t be much of a cost to you, if any. They are also going to give us some printers and scanners. Our files are going to be shipped downstate to a scanning company. All the voter records, they scan in all the signatures, which is a cost that we do not have to bear, which is a good thing.
The second item that I’m going to try to do for the clerks, away from election, is get that document imaging going. That is the one thing that we’ve got to do. We’re running out of space rapidly, that information records, I’ve asked them for a price to go back and scan every record we have. Then like the old marriage books and stuff, once that stuff is scanned and indexed, which has never been done in this county, then we can offer them to either the state archives or to our local library, and then we’ll have some room. So if we can get somebody else to scan these records, bring them up to date, and then we take over, then we don’t need all the new employees and stuff. We’ll be right up to date.

Mr. Steele, And part of that too, is we link the different offices together too. Is that correct?

Ms. Brewer, Yes.

Mr. Steele, I watched that presentation. I’m very much in favor of that.

Ms. Brewer, It’s wonderful. It’s a good way to do it, and they’ve got, you know, a great indexing system, something we don’t have. And the J-tech system that was supposed to be coming online, well if you’ve all read about that, nobody knows when that’s going to happen. So the document imaging is something that needs to be done in every county, especially for the historic records we have. Because, you know, if something happens over there we have no way to replace this. So that will be the other thing I’ll be visiting on.

Mr. Poparad, Okay.

Ms. Brewer, You’re up to date.

Mr. Burge, Good.

Mr. Poparad, You’re out of time; thanks.

Ms. Brewer, Thanks.

EXPO CENTER 146.66
Additional Appropriation
$10,000 to 3980 Event Expenses

Mr. Poparad, Lonnie.

Lonnie Steele, Lonnie Steele, manager of the Porter County Expo Center, here to ask for an additional appropriation in the special event account of our budget. We have four rather major fund-raising events that the Porter County Expo staff puts on in December; three of them in December, and one in January. The expenses for those three, those four events, which consists of the Women’s Expo, the Small Business Holiday Party, New Year’s Eve parties, and Bridal Fair, all those expenses hit us in January and February. And we did not, anticipate spending some of that money out of our 2004 budget, and unfortunately, the bills didn’t come in time for us to get those paid. So we need to have an additional appropriation in the special events account. All of that will be funded with income from user fees at the Expo Center. By the way, these four events raise a sizeable amount of money to help us fund our budget, so we’re seeking money to make money is what we are doing.

Mr. Poparad, Anybody?

Mr. A. Steele, Lonnie, everybody has, you know, bills in December that you pay in January, but we budget here for an entire year, and so it just goes on to the next year. I just don’t see why a person can’t pay those bills out of last year’s money. Are those monies carried over? And you had $90,000 last year to do that. This year you’ve got $90,200. So…

Mr. L. Steele, Yes, and in answer to your question…

Mr. A. Steele, So I don’t see why you can’t pay those out of this year’s budget, because again, next year when the December bills come due in January, you’re going to pay them out of next year’s line. It just seems like we’re adding on another $10,000 to your last year’s budget.

Mr. L. Steele, Well it is difficult when the events fall in December, in order to get the bills paid. If the bills aren’t in, Al, we can’t even encumber those dollars. So there was money, there was a balance left in the special events account in 2004, and yes, the money does carry over, it’s just not budgeted. The money is there. There’s, you know, we had a cash balance at the end of last year, and there’s money, I think as of today, we have all bills paid, and $110,000 in cash that we would like to go ahead and pay our bills the rest of this year.
We had a bigger turnout at some of these events than we anticipated, therefore, we had more expenses. Meals for a New Year’s Eve party is a rather significant bill for us to pay, and that didn’t come until January. Now, I think we can probably more intelligently budget in the future, but we didn’t last July, calculate that we weren’t going to be able to pay the bills before the end of the year. We just didn’t. So we have no funds in special events now to carry on for the rest of this year.

Mr. A. Steele, Can’t you transfer from something this year into special events to pay this? It’s just that we have $110,000 in the pot. It just seems to me like the money is there, and I don’t see why anybody should want another $10,000.

Mr. L. Steele, Ask that again, I’m sorry, I don’t follow that.

Mr. A. Steele, You told me that you have $110,000.

Mr. L. Steele, Cash flow, yes.

Mr. A. Steele, So I don’t see why you can’t take $10,000 out of that.

Mr. L. Steele, Oh, but we are. That’s what I’m asking. I’m asking for…

Mr. A. Steele, So this is not, is this the additional, Lonnie? Is this an extra? Like you’ve got $90,000, and you want another $10,000 to make it $100,000 for the year? Or are you taking it out of monies that you already have?

Mr. L. Steele, I’m taking it out of monies we already have, that we had at the end of 2004. I couldn’t anticipate what the cash balance was going to be at the end of 2004. We had more expenses, and I’m asking to spend some of the money that we had as a balance. I think there was about a $160,000 balance at the end of the year, and a great deal of that was spent in January and February for these special events--what I’m saying a great deal of that.

Mr. A. Steele, Lonnie, that’s something that has always confused me for two years is when people ask for an additional, they have the money. If we just ask for a transfer or for permission to spend it.

Mr. Poparad, That’s what we’re giving him, the additional, we’re going to give him permission.

Mr. A. Steele, So if you’re asking us to let you spend money you already have, then I’ll say yes.

Mr. L. Steele, Well that…

Mr. A. Steele, The terminology is very difficult.

Mr. L. Steele, I understand, and you know, frankly, Al, past history with the Council was that we had some limitations on the amount we could raise our budget. I understood what those limitations were and didn’t raise the budget; the cash was there. But I had some instructions not to raise it beyond a certain percentage, so that wasn’t done in July.
I think we have the cash flow to raise the budget rather significantly for the Expo Center, and it does not affect the general fund or the taxpayers. I mean we are paying, I believe, almost everything that’s an expense of the Expo Center is now covered with user fees.
As I recall, when I came into the budget, you all added $34,000 to the budget that I didn’t budget, that had been paid out of the general fund. It’s now being paid for out of the Expo Center funds, and we have, we still have the cash to go ahead and spend this extra $10,000 out of special events.

Mr. A. Steele, Thanks, Lonnie, for the explanation, because I didn’t understand.
Mr. L. Steele, And truthfully, you know, I really would encourage you and I to sit down and to go through this, because it is a little different than a regular budget situation.

Mr. A. Steele, We’ll do that.

Mr. Carmichael moved to grant the request for additional appropriations submitted by Expo Center 146.66, $10,000 to 3980 Event Expense. Mr. Steele seconded.

Mr. Poparad, Call the roll, Sandy.

Mrs. Vuko, Okay, are you doing this as an additional or a transfer?

Mr. Poparad, Yes, we’re doing it as requested.

Mr. Whitten, Well then I have questions.

Mr. Poparad, Okay.

Mr. Whitten, And maybe I’m not following, and I apologize. But it sounds like at one point we’re talking about a line item transfer, but then the request is for an additional appropriation to the budget. What are we doing here? Help me out here.

Mr. L. Steele, I didn’t ask for a transfer. I asked for an additional appropriation.

Mr. Whitten, An additional appropriation, another $10,000 to be put into your budget.

Mr. Poparad, Well his cash.

Mr. L. Steele, That’s correct.

Mr. Poparad, He has the cash; he has nothing in the line item. There’s nothing in the special event line item, correct?

Mr. L. Steele, At this point…

Mrs. Vuko, There is.

Mr. L. Steele, $70.

Mr. A. Steele, So in effect, it is a transfer, isn’t it. I mean, they have the money, the money is there, we have it, and there’s nothing here, but you bring it out of this one and put it over here, that to me is a transfer.

Mr. L. Steele, If we’re transferring from one account to another, that’s what I consider to be a transfer. I prefer at this stage of the game not to guess which account to transfer it from. We have cash. We have a cash balance--do you follow--we have a budget that’s been approved, and I don’t really want to deplete other funds at this point this early in the year.

Mr. A. Steele, Lonnie, we all have the situation in life where we’ve got money is this drawer, and in that drawer, and we take it out when we’ve got to buy groceries. I mean I just don’t see this.

Mr. L. Steele, But once I do that, I can’t put the money back in. We do have the cash flow to cover it.

Mr. A. Steele, But you’ve got $90,000 just in Hourly to work with besides other monies this year. I mean this is a lot of money.

Mr. L. Steele, If I take it out of Hourly. You said hourly, if I take it out of Hourly, and in December I don’t have enough money to pay people, because I transferred $10,000 out, how do you respond when I come in and ask you for an additional appropriation. I think your rules would say I can’t get it.

Mr. Steele, But you’ve got a whole year to make adjustments. You know, maybe not work an extra hour here. I mean you’ve got a whole year to improvise, and use your ingenuity to work within your means.

Mr. Carmichael, Call for the question.

Mr. Poparad, Call the roll, please.

Mrs. Vuko, Okay, you want a roll call.

Mr. Poparad, Call the roll.

Motion carried on the following roll call vote:

Stevenson - Yes Carmichael - Yes
Blaney - Yes Burge - Yes
Poparad - Yes Whitten - No
Steele - No

Mr. Poparad, Thank you, Lonnie.

Mr. L. Steele, Thank you.

HIGHWAY CUM-BRIDGE 25
Additional Appropriation
$240,000 to C-500-1014.05 Bridge 1014/Calumet Rd over CSX Railroad
$9,482.20 to 9306 Center Township, Materials, Labor & Equipment
$20,942.40 to 9358 Center Township, Material, Labor & Equipment
$12,253.30 to 9386 Boone Township, Material, Labor & Equipment
$15,019 to 9412 Washington Township, Material, Labor & Equipment
$9,907 to 9418 Pleasant Township, Material, Labor & Equipment
$35,150.26 to 9430 Pine Township, Material, Labor & Equipment
$28,760.67 to 9431 Washington Township, Material, Labor & Equipment
$18,205.22 to 9432 Pine Township, Material, Labor & Equipment

Mr. Poparad, Highway, please. Hi, Al.

Al Hoagland, Good evening. I’m asking for additionals in bridges. One will be for the design and matching federal funds, and all the rest are for maintenance and construction.

Mr. Poparad, You’re already committed to x-amount of this, because you know later on we’re going to be using the bridge fund to operate on. That’s what I was asking you out in the hall, the 240 is committed.

Mr. Hoagland, The 240 is committed. We had to sign an agreement to go ahead and meet the deadline to get the matching funds on that one.

Mr. Poparad, Alright, maybe we won’t have to borrow that much. Does anybody got any questions?

Mr. Carmichael moved to grant the request for additional appropriations submitted by Highway Cum-Bridge, $240,000 to C-500-1014.05 Bridge 1014/Calumet Rd over CSX Railroad, $9,482.20 to 9306 Center Township, Materials, Labor & Equipment, $20,942.40 to 9358 Center Township, Material, Labor & Equipment, $12,253.30 to 9386 Boone Township, Material, Labor & Equipment, $15,019 to 9412 Washington Township, Material, Labor & Equipment, $9,907 to 9418 Pleasant Township, Material, Labor & Equipment, $35,150.26 to 9430 Pine Township, Material, Labor & Equipment, $28,760.67 to 9431 Washington Township, Material, Labor & Equipment and $18,205.22 to 9432 Pine Township, Material, Labor & Equipment. Mr. Whitten seconded, motion carried on a unanimous roll call vote.

Mr. Poparad, Thank you, Al.

Mr. Hoagland, Thank you.

ANTABUSE 27
144 Form
Registered Nurse from $15.50/hr to $16/hr
Security Officer from $11.90/hr to $12.40/hr

Mr. Poparad, Antabuse. You’ve got a 144, Neil. Is this one we missed last year?

Neil Hannon, Pardon?

Mr. Poparad, We missed this last year in the budget?

Mr. Hannon, Yes. Both of my requests are for a, are from accounts that the clients pay the fees for, so they’re not out of the county general fund money. But we, when the record was read, and I sent a copy of that, it was actually read in at the 90, or the 2003 rate. So during the year, what we want to do is just correct the 144 so that it would show that the nurses would be being paid at $16 per hour, and that the security officer at $12.40 per hour, retroactive to the 28th of December 2004, which was the date that this fiscal year started. So that’s the first one.

Mr. Poparad, Let’s do that first. Any questions?

Mr. Steele, So Neil, this goes back to what was agreed last year.

Mr. Hannon, Yes, you approved it during the budget, it’s just that when the record was reflected during the actual hearing on the 19th of August, the 2004 amounts were read into the record rather than, yes, we read in the 2003 amounts because they were never corrected in 2004.

Mr. Whitten moved to amend the 144 Form submitted by Antabuse 27.134, Registered Nurse from $15.50 to $16 per hour; and Security Officer from $11.90 to $12.40 per hour, retroactive to December 28, 2004. Mr. Steele seconded, motion carried on a unanimous roll call vote.

ADULT PROBATION USER FEES 48
144 Form
Ruth A. Garriott from $12,010 to $12,879
Additional Appropriation
$869 to 1110 Salaries

Mr. Poparad, Do you want to keep going?

Mr. Hannon, The second request is for, for the newer members of the Council, there are minimum salaries that need to be paid for probation officers based on years of service. When we did our spreadsheet, and I’m not sure how we missed this, but out of the probation user fees, Fund 48, we shorted one of our employees, $869. So I’m here just to correct that, and also have it made then back retroactive to December 28th as well. Then we’ll be current again with all the employees on the amounts that they are to be paid.

Mr. Whitten, This is just a clerical error?

Mr. Hannon, Yes.

Mr. Carmichael moved to amend the 144 Form, Ruth A. Garriott from $12,010 to $12,879, retroactive to December 28, 2004, and grant the request for additional appropriations, $869 to 1110 Salaries, submitted by Adult Probation User Fees,. Mr. Burge seconded, motion carried on a unanimous roll call vote.

Mr. Poparad, Thank you, Neil.
Mr. Hannon, Thank you very much.

JUVENILE BILL DISCUSSION

Mr. Poparad, Judge Harper showed up, so we’re going to slip her in here. Here it comes

Judge Mary Harper, Good evening.

Mr. Burge, Good evening.

Mr. Whitten, Good evening, Judge, how are you?

Judge Harper, Apparently quite late, and I apologize. I didn’t get an agenda, and I thought it was at 7:00, and I apologize.

Mr. Poparad, Do you want to share with everybody what you’ve been sharing with me for the last couple of weeks.

Judge Harper, No, I don’t want to, but I think you probably want me to. As you know, you gave the juvenile court the responsibility of trying to get a handle on this DOC situation. Previously the obligation did not reside in our budget; it was in other budgets. So you gave us some money to investigate it. We have tried to investigate it without utilizing the money, and basically, are pretty close on everything.
Amy, for those of you on the Council who don’t Amy Beier, this is Amy Beier, the chief of the juvenile probation department. We’ve had our staff going over and over and over the bills, and the claims that we can find.
This is a printout that we’ve received from the auditor, and we have been going over miscellaneous payments over the years. This is a ’92. It’s a little bit difficult to get a complete handle on it, because a number of the old claims have been destroyed. You know, there’s a certain limit on how long you have to keep things. Bottom line, it would appear the last time we were current on the boys was 1984.

Ms. Beier, I believe so, yes.

Judge Harper, And the last time we were current on the girls payment was 1985.

Mr. Poparad, Just 20 years.

Judge Harper, Well, we’ve paid a little bit. For a bill last year that came in at several hundred thousand dollars, we paid $8,000. A number of years, no payments were made. Some years, a partial payment of part of a bill was paid. The figures that we received previously, there was a list made up in ’92 that showed payments for Care of Wards in Institutions, a lot of those payments were not made for juveniles.
We have our people who are incarcerated in mental health facilities that we apparently make a payment for. There are some names on the list that were questionable accounts, and I personally recall that those were people who went in for long-term substance abuse treatment, because they were adults that I would sentence them out of the Portage court.
We have narrowed it down to the potential that we have, maybe, if we can resolve things with the DOC; maybe, one to one-and-half percent of claims that are still in dispute. Now as you know, Bob, the threat is that the County will lose its property tax credit if the bills are not paid. And I think that property tax credit is…

Mr. Poparad, One-third.
Judge Harper, A lot of dough.

Mr. Poparad, A lot of money.

Judge Harper, A lot of dough. Okay. So it seemed pretty important for us to get as good of a handle on this as fast as we could, and I’m going to give most of the credit to Amy for working on it. I think right now that that is right at $2,800,000, and that is through the June 30th of ’04 billing cycle. We have not yet received the final six-month billing cycle for ’04.
I have worked with the chief financial officer of the Indiana Department of Corrections on the potential for a payment schedule. I have worked with Ralph Ayres on the potential for a payment schedule, and believe that we have, they have offered a payment schedule as follows: Minimum up front, 25%; and then the balance payable in equal annual increments over the next five calendar years--’06, ’07, ’08, ’09.
I have been told that the commissioner of the Department of Corrections has approved an arrangement of that nature. The question then is how you wish to address it. Two caveats to the bill: One, we can continue to investigate questionable claims, and if we can come up with any form of verification that we made payments that they don’t have, we’ll get credit for that. Two, any bills that come hereafter, if we question the validity of a billing on a child, we can pay a portion of the bill that we don’t question, and pursue the issue of whether or not the child at issue is our financial responsibility. Those are the numbers.

Mr. Poparad, Is Marion County agreeing to the same deal?

Judge Harper, That’s the deal that they will offer the counties who are delinquent, so I’m told by the chief financial officer of the Department of Corrections.

Mr. Steele, Judge, I agree with that second caveat. And I think those bills should be sent to us within, I know you can’t do it in 30 days, but 60 days or 90 days, so there’s a continued accounting. Then if there’s any question, we aren’t looking back 10, 15 years; we’re maybe looking back six months or three months, and the ones that are questionable, you can get on, and the others are…

Mr. Poparad, I think they only bill once a year. Right?

Judge Harper, They bill every six months, and we have asked them, and received sort of an informal bill--statement--every month, but it’s not the formal bill that we need to pay. It’s not the demand for payment.

Mr. Steele, But still, it gets your attention, and it brings you up to speed and you’re in the position to ask your questions, and get going on it right away.

Judge Harper, Yes. Now, there is, the bills are higher than I thought they would be, because we kept track of the kids that we committed to the DOC. We know who we sent. We keep a sheet--carrying it around with us all the time--what kid is where and what is the per diem that we’re getting billed for that kid. Okay. Because we know the charges of the institutions.
What we have no control over, and what I think has significantly inflated the bill, maybe as much as 25% over what we calculated, was the fact that when the child is released from a Department of Corrections facility, they are on parole. If parole determines, and that is an administrative, an executive decision, because parole is run out of the executive branch of state government, if they determine that there is a parole violation, unbeknownst to us, the child is recommitted to the Department of Corrections, and we are billed for that.

Mr. Poparad, Do they notify us when they parole the child?

Judge Harper, Occasionally.

Mr. Poparad, Okay.

Mr. Burge, Have they given any kind of a timeframe when this would need to start up?
Mr. Poparad, Now.

Judge Harper, In 90 days.

Mr. Poparad, They are threatening to withhold the PTRC money for this.

Judge Harper, Yes. We need to reduce this writing, and they need to execute it. So I was hoping that maybe your lawyer would help do that, so that if they will agree and you will agree, so be it.

Mr. Steele, And, Judge, since this is going to be a legal document can we put stipulations into that, such as, when people are recommitted that they notify us within a certain amount of time, because this is really a negotiation. Can we do that or would that not be practical?

Judge Harper, We could attempt to that. I negotiated the financial.

Mr. Poparad, Do the commissioners want to jump in here, because you have a little bit of cash laying around to go with this?

Mr. Whitten, Do you have 2.8 million?

Mr. Poparad, No, they’ve got…

Com. John Evans, We’ve been collecting cans, but we don’t have that much.

Mr. Poparad, They have $400,000 in cable fees. We have about $600,000 or $700,000 in casino money. I mean we could probably put a million dollars on this bill, give or take.

Com. Evans, Cable funds are selective you know, in regard to their use.

Mr. Poparad, I agree with that.

Mr. Hollenbeck, Mr. President, can I ask the judge one question so I understand what she said.

Mr. Poparad, Yes, go ahead.

Mr. Hollenbeck, Judge, I assume that this payment plan is in addition to keeping the current bill current.

Judge Harper, Absolutely. Absolutely.

Mr. Hollenbeck, What’s our annual bill, independent of what we’ve paid?

Judge Harper, Being mindful that we have initiated a process of retaining jurisdiction, so that we have attempted to take parole’s authority away on children, okay, so we will have a control element there. We have done some programming with the YSB, and we’re looking for another local contract to attempt to reduce our commitments significantly, and I’ve called in a few favors from other facilities to take some kids here and there. You put $300,000 in the Circuit Court budget, I think, for this year. We’ll be, I just don’t know what that ‘04 bill is for that last six months, so I can’t tell you how close that is. I’ll tell you for the ’05 commitments, we’d be right on track.

Mr. Hollenbeck, With $300,000?

Judge Harper, Which is down significantly.

Mr. Hollenbeck, What I understand then, the proposal that the Judge has discussed, is that the State would want $700,000 within 90 days, and then to be current, we’d have to budget $720,000 a year for five years. That would be paying off the old stuff and keeping current; $420,000 payments on the old stuff for five years, and $300,000 for…

Mr. Poparad, In addition, well, if the 300 holds, yes.

Mr. Hollenbeck, Right.

Judge Harper, It’s 420 a year on the old stuff.

Mr. Hollenbeck, Right, 420, and then…

Judge Harper, And then keeping current. The second half of ’04 is, now I’m not sure exactly what that’s going to be.

Mr. Hollenbeck, But just so we…

Judge Harper, Yes.

Mr. Hollenbeck, Capture the magnitude of this, $700,000 within 90 days, and then $720,000 a year for five years.

Mr. Poparad, Sandy, how much do we have in the casino, was that about 700 or 600?

Ms. Phillips, There’s $644,000.

Judge Harper, It’s a lot of money, but it’s a bill that’s been neglected for 20 years.

Mr. Whitten, Have we previously budgeted for this bill or have we just completely…

Mr. Poparad, Only $25,000.

Judge Harper, It was $25,000 the last three years, of which, and the commissioners have some financial responsibilities for inmates who are adult, and apparently the mental health people. But last year the appropriation was $25,000, and $8,000 was paid on the juvenile bill.
Interestingly, we collected from parents last year, about $26,000 to reimburse the County for juvenile DOC bills, which was deposited into the general fund. As well, the Office of Family & Children transferred $31,000 to the general fund, I think, last month, which must be paid on this bill. It cannot be used for anything else. So far this year we’ve collected another 12-grand in parental reimbursements. We’re turning the heat up on parents.

Mr. Poparad, Sandy, do you segregate that out of the general fund? Or should you have a special fund for that so we can keep track of it?

Mrs. Vuko, Well…

Ms. Phillips, Where is it coming in from?

Judge Harper, Two from juvenile probation last year, and then the monthly payments, a share from juvenile probation.

Ms. Phillips, That comes from the state? Where do the monthly payments come from?

Judge Harper, Juvenile Probation.

Ms. Phillips, The collections?

Judge Harper, Right. And then, do you remember, Sandy, we talked about the $31,000 from the Welfare Department.

Mrs. Vuko, Right.

Judge Harper, Our fund is child care, not OFC.

Ms. Phillips, It doesn’t go into the general fund that you’re thinking, it goes into a separate line item.

Judge Harper, Child care, not welfare department.

Ms. Beier, There’s two child care folders. Child care for OFC, the Welfare Department, then child care, not OFC, and the ‘not’ one is the DOC.

Mr. Poparad, So they’re already segregated.

Mrs. Vuko, Yes.

Ms. Phillips, Yes.

Mr. Poparad, Do you guys want to jump in with the cable fees to help us out?

Mr. Whitten, Do we have to make a decision tonight on this?

Ms. Phillips, You can’t.

Mrs. Vuko, You can’t.

Mr. Poparad, Okay, we’ll we’ve got to do something.

Judge Harper, They are waiting for an answer.

Mr. Whitten, Well I would of liked to have known that this was going to be presented; I would’ve given it some thought. Here we are, you’ve been talking for weeks and…

Mr. Poparad, No, she just called me last week.

Mr. Whitten, So I would have thought that…

Judge Harper, They, yes, I…

Mr. Whitten, I would have been told.

Judge Harper, I got an email from them last week as to what terms were agreeable with them. It’s, you know, I mean it’s really your call whether or not this bill is paid, and whether this is worked out with the state. It’s sort of a crap shoot on what’s going to happen, because if it’s not worked out to their satisfaction, it could get crazy. I don’t think the deal is going to get any better. The best thing that can happen is, we could find a few more credits here and there that they didn’t credit us for.

Mr. Carmichael, Bob.

Mr. Poparad, Yes.

Mr. Carmichael, I’d like to see all this in writing, and turned over to our attorney. Let our attorney come back to us next month with an item on the agenda.

Mr. Poparad, Okay.

Mr. Carmichael, With possible solutions.

Mr. Poparad, That’s fine.

Mr. Steele, I think that’s a good idea, Bill.

Judge Harper, Whatever you want to do is fine with me. I’m just your information person.

Mr. Carmichael, Let’s have it in writing.

Mr. Hollenbeck, Sounds good to me.

Com. Evans, We’ll be happy to work with you in whatever way we can to try to find the funding.

Mr. Poparad, Yes, it’s the only loose cash we have floating around, that’s all I’m saying.

Mr. Hollenbeck, I would also…

Com. Harper, Bob, let me just say something. Okay?

Mr. Poparad, Go ahead.

Com. Harper, That’s true. But I sat here last year in a meeting, and you know, all of a sudden you get a meeting and 40-grand, $400,000 goes out the window, and then you don’t have a plan for the rest of the year.

Mr. Poparad, I agree with that.

Com. Harper, And that’s what I have a real big problem with. Okay? We have to pay this bill, and I think we should have like three study sessions, between the Council and the Commissioners in the next 30 days, and figure out how we are going to do it, and what the plan is for the rest of the year. We’re coming up here tonight with $180,000 for family services. We’ve got bills coming from everywhere, and I’ll be real honest with you, because I’ve been sitting back there burning because I just think, you know, when are we going to sit down and plan this whole thing out. I want to see that our employees, across the board, get their raises this year, you know. And this bill has to be paid by the way, and I don’t have a problem with that, but I just want to see us get it in a plan, you know.

Mr. Poparad, I don’t disagree with that at all.

Com. Harper, Just rather than have a meeting, like we did last year, which I’m still burning about, and all of a sudden, you know, it goes, and then where’s the rest of it going to come from.

Mr. Poparad, We’ll just have to budget for it.

Com. Harper, And John’s got, by the way, John’s got, I think we should have a couple of work sessions, because he’s got a couple other suggestions of ways we might do it. But I think we need to not only say how we’re going to take care of this, but how we’re going to take care the rest of the year.

Mr. Poparad, I agree.

Com. Harper, Okay.

Mr. Poparad, I sort of thought they were bluffing, but it appears they’re not bluffing.

Com. Harper, No, I don’t think they are. They’re going to have to have their money. One of the other things I’ve mentioned that I think is part of the problem is, and I think it was the greatest thing to ever happen to move it to Judge Harper’s budget, because the commissioners have so many things in their budget, which there isn’t a great impounding interest, you know, it’s not stuff that going through the commissioners’ office, and there’s no excuse for it, but it has a tendency to get lost. I think there are other things that are going to come up this year that really should be questioned whether they belong in that budget, you know.
We’re going to be talking about it sometime about the, which all the judges are working real hard on about the drug testing budget and so forth. It all ends up in the commissioners’ budget, and we don’t even use it, you know. So I think this is a good example what we need to do in the future, but I think we need to get our plan together.

Mr. Whitten, I guess I would agree, if I could, Mr. President.

Mr. Poparad, Yes.

Mr. Whitten, I guess I would agree with you, Commissioner Harper. It seems like we had that joint meeting last time; we discussed in quite detail our desire to have a long and short-range plan for the County. We were going to go out, and solicit some comments and input from different elected officials, and I don’t know that any of that has occurred, quite frankly.

Com. Harper, Well we had a meeting set up, and something happened, that was the night the…

Com. Evans, Snow storm.

Com. Harper, The snow storm was that night. But I, Dan, let me just say this. It’s been real hard, and I need some, and I told your chairman, I need some suggestions on how we go about it, but we need to do it. We just need to do it; we just need to have a plan. I mean, John, mentioned to me, I mean he has on this problem in getting the money. I mean there’s different ideas, but I think we need to sit down and work it out. But if we start grabbing money from places, we’ve got to make sure we’re going to be making it to the end of the year with everybody that needs it.

Mr. Whitten, That’s exactly right.

Mr. Burge, I have a question too. As far as the last several years, it’s understandable why those bills didn’t get taken care of, the funds were not available.

Mr. Poparad, No, no, you’re not stating that correctly. The funds weren’t appropriated basically, and nothing against the commissioners, they just, everybody ignored it for 20 years in this building.

Mr. Burge, That’s my point though. It’s water under the bridge at this point, but for over 20 years it was neglected. Do we know why it was neglected, and how we got to this point?

Com. Harper, I would answer part of your question is, because we, because all of a sudden something comes up here one night a month, and everybody reacts to it, and something gets done, and then it gets forgotten for another 30 days, and then it comes up, and everybody reacts to it, and we don’t have a plan. That’s what I feel it is. Okay? We need to plan.

Judge Harper, It got ignored.

Mr. Whitten, Surely, this 2.8 million dollar debt is going to need a meeting.

Judge Harper, Because nobody was making us pay the bill.

Mr. Whitten, Right.

Judge Harper, They’re not charging interest on it; they’re not denying us putting kids there.

Mr. Whitten, Right.
Judge Harper, You didn’t have to pay it.

Mr. Poparad, They just ignored it.

Judge Harper, The only reason it’s on the table now is because there is a huge hammer, and that’s it. Otherwise, we keep ignoring it.

Mr. Poparad, Do you want to shed some light on this, David?

Com. Harper, Well we did it with the health insurance fund.

Mr. Hollenbeck, We…

Com. Harper, The health insurance people kept telling us.

Mr. Hollenbeck, We were told not to pay the bill.

Mrs. Blaney, By who?

Mr. Steele, By whom?

Mr. Hollenbeck, The Honorable Raymond D. Kickbush, who sat in that seat, and told us not to pay the bills.

Judge Harper, Well, that was a long time ago.

Mr. Poparad, That was then, this is now. Okay, do you want to, you’ll get this down in writing.

Mr. Hollenbeck, Yes, I will do that. And the other thing I would suggest that you authorize me to do, and I think someone has mentioned this, the 800-pound gorilla right now is Marion County, who owes, I believe 50 million of the 80 million.

Mr. Poparad, Yes.

Mr. Hollenbeck, I would like your authority to contact Marion County, and find out what they’re doing and what their approach is. Because they are going to be the biggest target in this whole thing.

Judge Harper, I would not screw with this too long, to be frank.

Mr. Hollenbeck, Well 30 days…

Mr. Whitten, You know, with all due respect, Dave, I think I’d like to contact them as a councilman. Why don’t you work on the memorandum, and I’ll make some calls downstate.

Com. Harper, I think Ralph Ayres is trying every way he can, and I think he’s saying just what Judge Harper is saying. We’re going to try to do what we can do, but you better not, this is not an idle threat.

Judge Harper, As long as I’m on record of having told you what the negotiation is, and brought the information to you. You know, just so, and I know you keep minutes of this meeting, I’m satisfied.

Mr. Poparad, It will be fine.

Com. Evans, I was just asked this in the back of the room, these children are juveniles. Obviously, if they are not incarcerated they would be in schools throughout the county, would they not? Are they not being paid for by the state to the schools? Is there not an avenue that the schools could help contribute to this? I mean they’re getting the money for these children, yet, we’re paying for theirs.

Judge Harper, I don’t think that’s going to work, John, to be real honest with you. The schools really need that money.

Com. Evans, They show up the day that they count the attendance, so then they get, the school gets…

Judge Harper, You’re not going to be able to access the schools’ money. Is it in our fund, under our control; do we have any influence over that money? That’s a separate pot of money.

Mr. Steele, I agree with, John, though it’s not only this case, but there’s other instances too that the school gets credit for those children being there that day, but other people are really taking care of them, feeding them, even putting them up a night, so to speak.

Judge Harper, We work on that all the time on our alternative schools, trying to get the schools to compensate us for that. Kids in detention, we have to educate those children, trying to get a fair level of compensation from the schools for that. The Learning Place, YSB, you know, they’ve got a number of children there. Do they get anything from the schools for that?

Mr. Poparad, Ten dollars a day.

Judge Harper, Ten dollars a day, and the schools get about $6,000 a year for each child. I do notice that, well, I’m not going to go where I was going to.

Mr. Steele, Let me just say something too. John or Mr. Harper, would you entertain an idea where maybe one of the commissioners or one or two people from the Council went to the school board and presented this to them to see what they have to say. I mean after all, I know the schools take 78% of my tax dollars, this group here only takes 18, so it’s not too hard to figure out where our money is going. And I think if they’re making $6,000 a year per student, there’s other people that could, are really entitled to this money. Thank you.

Mr. Poparad, Anybody else? David, you’ve got your marching orders. Dan, you’re going to talk to Marion County.

Mr. Hollenbeck, It sounds like I’ll be working with Dan in the next 30 days to bring a report back to you.

Mr. Poparad, Okay. Do you guys want to schedule something? We can sit down and hash this out, and do it at the next meeting.

Com. Harper, Well I think we should have at least one work session.

Mr. Poparad, Alright.

Judge Harper, David, I have a, just a note I typed up here, basically, my discussion with them, the points, and I will trust this matter to your further efforts.

Mr. Hollenbeck, I will do that.

Com. Harper, Why don’t we have Melissa and Jan work tomorrow on a night this room is open, and just set it up.

Mr. Poparad, Alright.

Com. Harper, And as many us that can be here should be here. I’ll try to…

Mr. Poparad, Okay.
Com Evans, I’ll try to give your attorney ten days, a time period to get something together.

Mr. Poparad, Yes, he’s got a couple of weeks to get something wrapped up. Okay, thank you, Judge.

Judge Harper, My pleasure.

PARKS OPERATING 127.85
Additional Appropriation
$2,000 to 1120 Hourly
$155 to 1210 FICA
$1,500 to 3310 Printing other than Office Supplies
$2,285 to 3980 Event Expenses
$6,925 to 1121 Interpreter/Educator
$575 to 1210 FICA

Mr. Poparad, Parks.

Ed Melendez, Good evening. I have a couple of additionals and a transfer for you folks tonight. The first one I have is in the 127.85 for $2,000 to the 1120, which is the hourly wage. The 127.85 for $155 into the 1210 FICA fund. And the 127.85 for $1,500 into the 3310 Printing, and the last line item on this page is the 127.85 for $2,285 into the 3980 special events.
And this is, as a notation, this is not the general fund money. This is a grant that we receive from Tourism. This is check #1 and #2 that we received for this year. All this money will go for is the hourly people that work at our festival and events. The printing and advertising for our events, as well as any expenses that we have for the events.

Mr. Poparad, Anybody got any questions?

Mr. Whitten, No.

Mr. Whitten moved to grant the request for additional appropriation submitted by Parks Operating 127.85, $2,000 to 1120 Hourly, $155 to 1210 FICA, $1,500 to 3310 Printing other than Office Supplies, and $2,285 to 3980 Event Expenses. Mr. Burge seconded, motion carried on a unanimous roll call vote.

Mr. Melendez, Okay, I have another additional into the 127.85 for $6,925 into the 1121, and that is the Interpreter/Educator; and in the 127.85 for $575 into the 1210 FICA fund. Again, this is not general fund. This is a grant that we receive from the Anderson Foundation for indoor program, Parks to School.

Mr. Whitten moved to grant the request for additional appropriations submitted by Parks Operating 127.85, $6,925 to 1121 Interpreter/Education and $575 to 1210 FICA. Mrs. Blaney seconded, motion carried on a unanimous roll call vote.

Mr. Melendez, Okay, thank you.

PARKS 01.85
Transfer
$200 from 2110 Office Supplies to 2120 Office Fixtures under $100
$300 from 3130 Training & Education to 3330 Photo & Blueprint
$350 from 3950 Contractual Services to 3955 Compliance Testing
$1,000 from 3950 Contractual Services to 4510 Data Processing Equipment

Mr. Melendez, I have now our transfers in the 01.85 account for $200 from the 2110 Office Supplies into the 2120 Office Fixtures less than $100. In the 01.85, for $300 from the 3130, which is Training and Out-of-County Mileage into the 3330 Photos & Blueprint. In the 01.85 for $350 from the 3950, from Contractual Services into 3955 Compliance Testing. And the last one, 01.85, for $1,000 from the 3950 Contractual Services into the 4510 Data Processing.
This is to help organize an office. Our educator is moving out to Sunset Hill with their outdoor programs, and we are equipping out there with the material that she needs. Our Photo & Blueprint, our indoor programs have pretty well exhausted grant money that they’ve had so we are now putting additional money in for covering the summer expenses now that we will need for photos. And with the additional testing for our wells, and the $100 per well fee, we are making sure that we have that covered through the year in case anything does happen like it did last year to us. And the data processing material, we are getting access for outside the county. You should have a letter from Sharon Lippens, the director of ITS, stating that we had communicated with her to hook up the lap-top computer that we have out there at the facility for the educator, as well as the site supervisor to be able to tie in with the county, and working with ITS to have it under control.

Mr. Poparad, Thank you. Any questions?

Mr. Carmichael, moved to grant the request for transfer of funds submitted by Parks 01.85, $200 from 2110 Office Supplies to 2120 Office Fixtures under $100, $300 from 3130 Training & Education to 3330 Photo & Blueprint, $350 from 3950 Contractual Services to 3955 Compliance Testing and $1,000 from 3950 Contractual Services to 4510 Data Processing Equipment. Mr. Whitten and Mr. Burge seconded, motion carried on a unanimous voice vote.

Mr. Poparad, Motion passes. Thank you.

PLAN COMMISSION 239
144 Form
Temporary Service Position from $0 to $16/hour
Transfer
$1,512 from 1110 Salaries to 1130 Overtime
$317 from 2250 Other Supplies to 4410 Office Equipment over $100
Additional Appropriation
$4,000 to 3320 Legal Notices
Adoption of Job Description
Code Enforcement Officer

Mr. Poparad, Plan Commission. You’ve got a 144.

Robert Thompson, Yes, I have a 144. To explain this, this is for temporary services. There was a period there, I had one deputy out who was under medical leave from a doctor for five weeks, and during the same time period I had another one of my deputies that was off on bereavement leave due to the loss of her husband; she was gone for two and a half weeks.
Your secretary, Jan Noll, did step in and offered to help in the Plan Commission, which I agreed, which I appreciated. She is very familiar with the Plan Commission procedures since she used to work for the Plan Commission. I agreed to pay her simply because it would not, so that way it would not go on your nickel. So I agreed to pay Jan for the time she spent up in the Plan Commission doing minutes for us, and doing the agenda. I mean that was something that was greatly appreciated during a time that was rather stressful up in that office. So that’s the reason for the 144. The $16 an hour, the reason why is because that is the approximately hourly range of the two deputies that do the work that Jan filled in for. The transfer, the $1,500 from Salaries to Overtime is for paying Jan. Do you want me to explain the rest?

Mr. Poparad, Okay. We’ll do the additional for the Legal Notices.

Mr. Thompson, The additional, the $4,000 for Legal Notices, the reason for this is because in November we did a new fee structure for the Plan Commission, BZA and the Building Department. Back in 2000, we used to pay for the legal advertisements for all the petitioners coming in front of the BZA and the Plan Commission for the public hearings. Due to the 10% cut during the time of the steel mill bankruptcies, that was one of the line items I immediately cut, and the petitioners had to pick up that burden paying those legal advertisements.
With the new fee structure it would be best if maybe the Plan Commission went back to paying for some of this, because it can be a costly item for the petitioners to pick up and pay for their own legal petitions. So we’ve put that back into our fee structure where all public hearing petitions in front of the Plan Commission and BZA now pay $75. So this $4,000 will be recouped immediately on any public hearing that comes before the Plan Commission or BZA with the petitioner paying $75 for this. Again, this is all money that’s coming out of the 239 Fund, the Building, Planning & Zoning fund, and not the general fund.

Mr. Poparad, And the other transfer is for the camera.

Mr. Thompson, The transfer of $317 is for a camera for the zoning inspector and myself to use in the field. I was using my own personal camera, and the Plan Commission told me to go out and get one for the office.

Mr. Poparad, Well we’ve got a plan commission member here.

Mr. Whitten, I have no problem with any of this, quite frankly.

Mr. Poparad, Is that a motion?

Mr. Whitten moved to amend the 144 Form submitted by Plan Commission 239, Temporary Service Position from $0 to $16/hour, and grant the request for transfer of funds, $1,512 from 1110 Salaries to 1130 Overtime and $317 from 2250 Other Supplies to 4410 Office Equipment over $100, and the additional appropriation of $4,000 to 3320 Legal Notices.

Mrs. Blaney, I have a question. With the Legal Notices, are we able to do it cheaper than the petitioners do it?

Mr. Thompson, Considerably.

Mrs. Blaney, Okay. I just remember when the landfill guys sent out the legal notices, they sent quite a few, if you recall.

Mr. Thompson, Now this is just paying for the legal advertisements that goes to the newspapers.

Mrs. Blaney, To the newspapers, that’s it.

Mr. Thompson, Correct.

Mrs. Blaney, Okay.

Mr. Thompson, And yes, by paying the $75 to us, it’s considerably less than what they would have to pay on an individual basis, yes.

Mrs. Blaney, Okay.

Mr. Poparad, Is there a second?

Mr. Burge seconded.

Mr. Poparad, We’re not doing the job description. Does anybody have any more questions? Call the roll, Sandy. This is for the 144, the transfers, and the additional, all at once?

Motion carried on a unanimous roll call vote.

Mr. Poparad, Okay, we need to adopt the job description it appears.

Mr. Thompson, Yes. This has been budgeted. As soon as we started into the Building, Planning & Zoning fund budget, and under the new fee structures, we budgeted this position for the past few years. It’s just that I have not gone about creating a job description for this yet, and I did not want to do that until I felt comfortable we had enough money into the fund.
I feel comfortable now with that, and the commissioners just recently adopted the new unsafe building structure ordinance, which this position is going to be one of the main enforcers of that. Plus we also have a new ordinance as far as soil and erosion and sedimentation. It’s a position that we need because one of the things we definitely within our codes within the Building & Planning Department is enforcement.

Mr. Poparad, Okay, does anybody got any questions? I need a motion to adopt the job description.

Mr. Carmichael moved to adopt the job description submitted by the Planning/Building Department for the Code Enforcement Officer. Mrs. Blaney seconded, motion carried on a unanimous voice vote.

Mr. Poparad, Motion passes.

Mr. Thompson, Thank you.

Mr. Poparad, Thank you, Bob.

PORTAGE TOWNSHIP 01.11
Additional Appropriation
$10,000 to 3950 Contractual Services
$525 to 3130 Training & Education

Mr. Poparad, Commissioners.

Mr. Whitten, What about Portage Township?

Mr. Poparad, I’m sorry, John. Portage Township. I’m jumping ahead.

John Scott, I think we have two requests on the board. We had three, and one of them some how just got pushed under the boards. The $10,000 is for professional help, commercial and industrial. I think Bill is a little aware of what happens in my township when we don’t have everything right up on the board. I do most of the grunt work out, and I go out for the commercial and industrial, the steel mills and stuff like that. I do measure and everything; take pictures; bring it back. But we need a professional person to say, this is what you have, this is what you don’t have. And if you don’t have that, I think we ran into a problem with one of the apartment buildings when we put it on. We didn’t have the professionals doing it the way we were supposed to do it, and it cost us quite a bit a money.
So it’s, my township right now has three huge projects coming up. One behind Wal*Mart, Wal*Mart itself, which is adding, I think, either a third or a half more onto their building. The complex that’s going to go up, which the land just turned over, I think, for 5.2 million up on Lefty’s Coho Landing, and all of that stuff is going to be starting to develop.
I’ll just tell you, we’re overwhelmed right now in my office. The trending has came through, and although we did hire professionals to do the trending, but they don’t go through the grunt work. They don’t bring in all of the information that we’re supposed to have, the full disclosures and see if they all match with everything else. Probably if he would do all of that, or that company would do all of that, it would probably be three times as much as it is right now. And the other one is…

Kathy Cochran, It’s been approved.

Mr. Scott, Huh?

Ms. Cochran, It’s been approved by the commissioners.

Mr. Scott, That, it has to be approved by these people.

Ms. Cochran, But maybe, I thought they should be aware of it.

Mr. Scott, Yes, you are aware that we had the contract approved by the commissioners for this $10,000. I’m sorry, I apologize.

Mr. Poparad, How did they approve something that wasn’t funded? Was that contingent on funding?

Mr. Scott, Yes, it is. Absolutely.

Com. Evans, Pardon?

Mr. Poparad, Was it contingent on funding?

Mr. Scott, Yes.

Mr. Poparad, Do you have any money in Contractual now, John?

Mr. Scott, No.

Mr. Steele, John, would you be willing to take this out of your Hourly?

Mr. Scott, I have $14,000 in Hourly, okay. That is just for residential. We do almost 2,900 residentials, I think in, what does that sheet say. Just out of the city we do 2,023 different permits, and every permit that we have we usually visit it at least two to three times. Because you have to be able, when it gets to the March 1st date, you better have, you know, what your percentage is, is it done or isn’t done or you’re going to be in trouble again. And that does not include Ogden Dunes, and it does not include the township.

Mr. Steele, But in the budget for this year, ’05, you don’t have hourly broken down into commercial or residential, it’s all one line item.

Mr. Scott, No, it’s nice to say we’ll give $20 an hour for commercial/industrial, but we’re using all of that up in residential. I mean I’m going out into the field now, and I’m measuring up the buildings and taking the pictures, and getting all the grunt work, or what you want to call all the information there. The professional is to protect us so that we don’t have a pitfall like we’re having right now. We’re going through all this stuff.

Mr. Steele, I understand. It’s not a question of giving you the money. It’s just where it comes from. Like back in 1998, you took $15,000 out of Hourly and put it into Contractual. And just in ’02, you took $32,000 out of Hourly and put it in Contractual. I don’t see why, with a whole year to go, and I use the same argument with Lonnie, I have to be fair to him and say the same thing to you. You’ve got $14,000 now; you can take that.

Mr. Scott, That contractual money came from reassessment I do believe. I think that was encumbered and brought over from reassessment, so it had nothing to do with day-to-day work to be done.

Ms. Cochran, Could I add that we traditionally have had money in our budget for contractual, and it was taken away a couple of years ago. So now there is nothing in there to do commercial work. It involves, it generates a lot of money.

Mr. Poparad, Has it been done?

Mr. Scott, Huh?

Mr. Poparad, How did the commercial work get done then?

Mr. Scott, We were doing it from the previous reassessment. Now that money is no longer there, although we’re into reassessment again with the trending and stuff. But I mean, you know, it’s just like a catch-22. You do the best you can, and you put it on the board, and you hope to God that it, you know, that everything that you’ve done is correct, and that you’re not going to have the appeal.
We have an appeal from Pedcor; every single year we have an appeal from those people. They just want to drum and beat you and beat you. I have one appeal in the Supreme Court right now with a company that didn’t pay their taxes all these years, which they really should have had their goods and everything taken away, but they allowed them just to skip by. It’s over two-and-a-quarter million dollars in money that they owe us. And the Port Authority says they own it to us; we say they owe it to us. It’s in court. We don’t know where it’s at. We don’t know whether the court will sit down and make some kind of a deal with them, and allow them to sneak out from underneath it or not. I mean we can only assess the best we can assess.

Mr. Steele, But, John, you just said those monies came from reassessment. But isn’t it correct that every five years you reassess, and every year isn’t there monies coming from the general fund into the reassessment fund.

Mr. Scott, No, there’s no money. They are two separate funds, totally separate. Reassessment is reassessment, and should never be into the general or the general into the reassessment. That’s always two separate.

Mr. Steele, I thought we were passing that money around last year when we were talking about…

Mr. Scott, If they did, they did it wrong. It shouldn’t have been.

Mr. Steele, But you see, we did do it, and that’s again, there’s no consistency. You can’t refer back something because there’s a different reason for it. Here, we’d be following precedent, taking it out of Hourly, and now we say we can’t do it, so. But thank you for your explanation.

Mr. Burge, One thought that I have with what Councilman Steele indicated was, there’s history there of needing funds in that contractual line item, yet it’s consistently not funded at budget time. Is there a reason for that or? It’s seems like this thing should…

Mr. Scott, I believe it was to leave everything just like it was.

Ms. Cochran, It had been in the past, but it was taken away at some point.

Mr. Scott, In fact, when we went through reassessment we had something like $27,000 taken out of our budgets, and we were skimming along just trying to, you know, because everybody was in strife. Everybody was giving money back to the things that we, you know, we could, we wouldn’t sink. But it’s something that is very, very necessary.
And one person said, why don’t you have the county inspectors measure your houses; that doesn’t work. The county inspector has got their plate full just inspecting stuff. You know, we have to do the measuring. We have to do all of the stuff, and even if the county did it, they would only do it for the township. They sure wouldn’t do it for Ogden Dunes or Portage City, so, you know.

Shirley LaFever, Mr. President, can I speak?

Mr. Carmichael, You’ve got a motion on the table, Bob.

Mr. Poparad, Did somebody make a motion?

Mr. Carmichael moved to grant the request for additional appropriations submitted by Portage Township 01.11, $10,000 to 3950 Contractual Services and $525 to 3130 Training & Education.

Mr. Poparad, We’ll let Shirley speak. Go on, Shirley.
Mrs. LaFever, In the past, John did have a full-time field person. He lost that full-time person during budget cuts. Usually your three big townships, Westchester, Center and Portage, always wait to see how many permits they are going to have before they come and get a contract to do commercial work. They cannot put it in at budget hearing time because they’ve always made us stay as is, we’re supposed to submit so you don’t do any increases.
So that’s why you’ll probably have all three big units come back, and ask for additional funding for the commercial work. John has 14,000, and I believe it’s for residential permits. This $10,000 is for Mr. Clemenshaw, which is an expert in commercial and industrial, for him to do the work. Is that $14,000 for your residential, John? The $14,000 is for your residential work.

Mr. Scott, Yes, and it eats it all up.

Mrs. LaFever, And that’s not a full-time position, which will save a lot of money by having part-time field residential and a contract commercial instead of hiring a full-time person and paying benefits. This is a lot cheaper to go this way for the three big townships. So that’s why he is coming back to ask for the $10,000. And for the amount of permits in Portage for commercial, that is really a bargain.

Mr. Whitten, I think we’re all pretty clear on the numbers.

Mr. Whitten seconded the motion, motion carried on a unanimous roll call vote.

Mr. Poparad, Okay, you’re done, John.

COMMISSIONERS 01.30
144 Form
Building Security from $10 to $10.50/hr
Additional Appropriation
$30,141.47 to 3110 Legal
$180,000 to 3963 Youth Service Bureau
Transfer
$10,000 from 3710 Equipment to 3978 Care of Patients & Inmates
$70,000 from 3510 Power to 3420 Bldg/Liability/Comp Coverage
$108 from 3520 Water & Sewage to 3650 Vehicle Repair
$139.94 from 3520 Water & Sewage to 4440 Furniture & Fixtures over $100
$65 from 3520 Water & Sewage to 3930 Dues & Subscriptions

Mr. Poparad, Commissioners. Holy cow.

Mr. Whitten, The gang’s all here.

Com. Harper, Come on one of you guys, I don’t want to be up here by myself.

Mr. Poparad, We’ll do the 144, and the additional both at the same time. Do you want to go ahead and explain the 144. Is this for Charlie?

Com. Harper, That’s a, yes. And that’s for the building security, Bob. There was not a raise given to these part-time people last year. Some of them we can give them the $.50 out of our budget, but our building security was capped at $10. So we are asking to raise that to $10.50 so we can give him a raise. I mean he’s part-time although he works almost full-time, he didn’t get in on the raises last year.

Mr. Poparad, And the $180,000, I think everybody is well versed on that.

Mr. Whitten, Well, I guess I have a couple of questions about both.

Mr. Poparad, Go ahead.

Mr. Whitten, Starting with the security, are you indicating, Bob, that it was the intention of the County to give this raise, and it was inadvertently left off? Or are you indicating that there was no raise given, and now you’re asking for it to be given?

Com. Harper, I’m indicating it was an oversight in not getting the raise.

Mr. Whitten, Okay.

Mr. Poparad, All the part-timers got $.50 last year.

Mr. Whitten, Okay, that’s good. Then on the $180,000 to the Youth Services Bureau.

Com. Harper, Why don’t we take that last, because they’re here. Aren’t they here?

Mr. Poparad, Yes. Is the Legal…

Com. Harper, If that’s alright with you.

Mr. Steele, Sure.

Mr. Poparad, The Legal is for?

Com. Harper, The Legal is for the appeal bill on the landfill. We’ve already paid, we paid around $12,000, I think, for the work they did before the appeal started. Now there could be some more appeals if there’s a transfer, but we don’t know. It shouldn’t be a lot more, but if there is a transfer once the decision is given in the appellate court, but this should be the majority of the bill.

Mr. Whitten moved to amend the 144 Form, Building Security from $10 to $10.50/hr; and grant the request for additional appropriations, $30,141.47 to 3110 Legal submitted by Commissioners 01.30. Mrs. Blaney seconded, motion carried on a unanimous roll call vote.

Mr. Poparad, Youth & Family Services.

Mrs. Blaney, Do that last.

Com. Harper, Well, I was going to do the rest of them because they’re here, and they’ll want to come up and speak probably.

Mr. Poparad, Oh, okay.

Com. Harper, You know, and answer. So I was going to do the others. The $10,000 transfer to equipment…

Mr. Whitten, For a broken microphone.

Com. Harper, To Care of Patient & Inmates, this is a continuation of the last discussion we had. Here’s what happened, as I understand it. Although there was not much paid on this bill for juveniles, there was a $25,000 line item in the commissioners’ budget to do that. Everything was taken out and put in juvenile out of that line item. Now when that was done, no one at that time thought to say, wait a minute, we also have to pay the state. There’s a state statute that says those people that are in, you know, confined to mental institutions and so forth out of Porter County, we have to pay for their clothing and so forth.
So we are getting bills for that right now. The sort of maddening thing about it is, we get the bills, and checking up to see if these people are actually from Porter County, and if everything is legitimate, the county attorney, they send us the Cause Numbers, and we’re pulling all the Cause Numbers right now to check them out and make sure they’re legitimate, and once we determine they’re legitimate, we’re going to need to pay these bills, so we’re asking to transfer the money into the fund so we’ll have it to pay these clothing bills. That’s what that is about.

Mr. Whitten move to grant the request for transfer of funds, $10,000 from 3710 Equipment to 3978 Care of Patients & Inmates submitted by Commissioners 01.30.

Mr. Poparad, Well do you want to do all the transfers at once or do you want to do them one at a time?

Mr. Whitten, It’s up to you guys.

Mr. Carmichael, Do them all at once.

Mr. Poparad, Alright, go on, keep going, Bob.

Com. Harper, Alright, $70,000 from Power to Bldg/Liability/Comp, when Melissa prepared the budget last year she was told to use the same amount as the year before in liability and so forth to keep our budget in line. All our insurance coverage is over a million dollars. They go, you know, some 3 to 5% a year. Further, the last few years, in an effort with every other department, and I believe to keep things in line, this figure has been held down.
One of the ways it’s been held down is, when cars were totaled some of the money was given back as a credit on these insurance policies. So we’ve gotten to a point this year, if you figure 5%, it’s almost $50,000, and we’re going to need some extra money in that fund. Further, the other thing that’s happened is that when we add to salaries, the work comp goes up because you base the work comp, they come in and base it on what you’re paid. So that’s going to be some more; we may have to come back on this one, one more time.
I’ve already talked to our insurance agent. Next year we are going to come in with a true figure on this. We’re going to get exactly what we think we need in every category, and try to get back on track with thing. But we are asking to transfer at this time. We believe, that obviously, that power fund we’re leaning on that, and that prisoner money, but we believe we’ll be able to do and make it until the end of the year doing it this way, so that’s what that’s about. Melissa, help me with the Sewage to Vehicle Repair.

Melissa Hartig, That’s the repair for the Soil & Water truck.

Com. Harper, Alright, that’s for the repair of the truck at Soil & Water. What’s this Fixtures over $100.

Ms. Hartig, That’s for a file cabinet.

Com. Harper, That’s a file cabinet for Com. Knoblock. And the $65?

Ms. Hartig, That’s the newspaper subscription.

Com. Harper, The newspaper subscriptions and so forth. So all those, we’re asking for transfers.

Mr. Whitten moved to amend his motion and include the transfers of, $70,000 from 3510 Power to 3420 Bldg/Liability/Comp Coverage, $108 from 3520 Water & Sewage to 3650 Vehicle Repair, $139.94 from 3520 Water & Sewage to 4440 Furniture & Fixtures over $100 and $65 from 3520 Water & Sewage to 3930 Dues & Subscriptions. Mr. Carmichael seconded, motion carried unanimously.

Mr. Poparad, Motion passes.

Com. Harper, Alright, Dennis.

Mr. Carmichael, Did Dave Burrus take his file cabinet with him.

Com. Harper, He never had one.

Mr. Carmichael, He never had one?
Com. Harper, No.

Mr. Poparad, Yeah, he took all the juvenile bills with him too.

Com. Harper, We had this joint meeting with the Council. We discussed this Youth & Family Services. There was a lot of different opinions on it. So what we did as commissioners, we put it in for the full amount in our budget, knowing that that last and final decision is up to the Council on how they want to handle this. So we’re presenting this as part of our budget for your action. So I’m going to let them, whoever they have here to answer questions and so forth.

Dennis Morgan, I brought a couple of body guards tonight, and board members. If you would, introduce yourselves.

Jerry Dixon, I’m Jerry Dixon, lifetime resident of Porter County. I’m recently retired from Portage Township Schools after 40 years, now serving as a board member with the Family & Youth Service Bureau. They have made some significant changes with kids throughout their services, and I’m proud to sit on that board.

Larry Klemz, I’m Larry Klemz, a resident of Porter County, owner of Home Mountain Publishing, member of the board for the Family Youth Service Bureau for the last six years.

Mr. Morgan, I think this is the third or fourth time we’ve gotten together. The first meeting to acquaint the new council with our agency, that was, I think the last week in December. And also to let you know of our financial difficulty. There have been a number of personal conversations with people here, and then the workshop in February with the commissioners and council members, and I think a couple of letters to you.
I want to make sure that you know that we understand that we’re asking for a lot of money, and we don’t believe that our needs our any greater than any other department or agency in the community. We don’t, also, but we do believe that certainly our needs are not any less, and that helping kids and families, particularly in the world that we live in the world that we live in is a very, very important thing to do.
We are not pitting ourselves against any other agency or department by being here to ask for dollars. Certainly anybody in a non-profit business or government is, needs all the help that they can get right now. We’re not, and we’re not any different in any way from that. But it’s my job to represent as best I can the needs of our agency, and the needs of the clients--kids and families--that we work with, and that’s why I’m here tonight.
There were a couple of tense moments at the workshop in February, and I apologize for whatever my part may have been in making that meeting a little tenser than it would have been otherwise. But I care about our agency, and I care about what it is we are trying to do with kids and families in our community. I’m sure that you care too, and of course, you have the added responsibility of trying to do what’s right for the whole county.
As I have indicated in various pieces of correspondence that have gotten to you before, we’ve had a deficit that has, over the last several years grown to about $65,000. And that is after we’ve used up the little savings that we had, and that have sold off a major asset. We tried to manage that deficit as best we can by borrowing. Unfortunately, something that county government knows about at this point in time. The state has been some help to county government, and the bank has been a lot of help to us.
In addition to borrowing, we’ve done, again as the county has done, and we’ve cut back a lot. Whereas you may have had to limit hours of operation in some department or the defer small salary increases or essential purchase, we’ve done absolutely the same thing.
Our problem comes from a couple of different areas. One, people that fund us traditionally have fewer dollars to allocate. We have had under utilization in a couple of our programs, and that has come primarily because there were fewer dollars to use, and therefore, fewer services requested.
Also some increased expenses. Among them, people were talking about insurance earlier. We experienced a 7% increase in a two-year period of time in our medical insurance. Other kinds of insurance go up 15 or 20% a year. So total, that turns out to be a pretty substantial kind of figure for an agency of our size.
There has also been a number of unforeseen circumstances. As I indicated in the correspondence, the foundation of our building at 257 W. Lincolnway was washed out completely in June, and we obviously had to have that repaired. The insurance company decided that they would not pay for it, and that was $13,000. Whereas we did have some money budgeted for repairs, we did not have that much, so that hurt.
We are called upon constantly to provide more services for kids and families in the community. Sometimes the services don’t bring with them enough income to pay for additional staff that we would need to hire to cover that additional workload. We’ve addressed the deficit by cutting across the board, and I want to make sure you understand that, because there was a fair bit of conversation about that at our last meeting.
The Learning Place, which is a school that is for kids that have been expelled or shipped to us just short of expulsion, three years ago had 6.5 full-time equivalent staff; today we have three. The weekend detention program, last year at this time, ran both days, both weekend days. Today, this year, only Saturday, because the funding has been cut in half. The Learning Place operating budget has been cut by half. The Learning Place schedule has been cut by one day per week.
We close our business, our office one hour earlier four days a week, and a half hour earlier another day a week. We’ve increased employee percentage in reimbursing for medical insurance. Nine years ago nobody paid anything. It went up to $50 a month, and $70 a month, and then last year to $110 a month. And that’s out of an average premium per employee of about $550. So the agency is still paying about 80%. But again, we’ve gone from nothing up to $110, and that has saved us 14 or $15,000 a year.
But we have combined a number of programs, thereby saving some staff time and dollars. There was a 1% addition approved by our board to add to the employee, employers’ contribution to our 403B, and that 1% addition had to be deferred and that saved us $9,000. Salary increases, small ones that had been scheduled over the last four years have all been deferred. In some cases, we’ve hung in there to our own financial disadvantage because others have said our program was needed, and that sooner or later utilization would go back up, and of course, they were right.
In the case of residential services we’ve gone from two or three residents, two and half years ago, which was down from an average of 11 or 12, years before that, back to an average of 11 residents over the past six months. So that has begun to change. But in the intervening time we were put in a very difficult position. Our deficit grew as a result of staying there without an increase in number of residents.
The difficulty in our making any headway with the problem I am describing to you has to do with the cash flow that I’ve already described on other occasions. The state owned us $180,000 in July of last year. They’ve been able to make some payments. They got down to $120,000 by the end of December 2004; made a substantial payment in January. They had hoped to make it in February; it did not come through. However, they did make a payment in March. We will not be paid again until July, at which point we expect, based on current usage, that the number of dollars that they owe us will be, I think it’s about $230,000.
So we think that we’ve done about all we can do at this point without substantial relief. We don’t know what next steps would be. In all probability it might mean selling a building. In Portage we were able to double our space there a couple of years ago. But if we had to make a choice about a Portage office and a Center Township office at this point in time, it would be the Center Township office because we are closer here to the juvenile center, to the Office of Family & Children, to probation, and to the detention center. We feel very badly about that having to happen because the services don’t get to Portage in the numbers, but they ought to anyway.
Things would not be looking as good as they are, but last August, Judge Harper and the Council approved a tax levy increase that will allow for more dollars to be used for placement of the kids. And really that was anticipating what the state has done this year. House Bill 529, I’ve got here somewhere, well I won’t continue to look for it, but what it says is that the county has to have a levy adequate to do all of the work that needs to be done with kids in placement, and in child services. It also makes it okay for the county to borrow money to pay for those services. So had this happened next year or the year before, probably, and hopefully, you would have been borrowing money so that we would be able to continue our operation as it had been, rather than our having to borrow the money and paying the interest on it.
So we believe things will continue to get better, and the hole shouldn’t be any deeper. But unless we get some help now, we’re looking at closing whole programs because we’ve trimmed them as much as we can, and perhaps having to limit our facilities as well. So I’ve tried through the last couple of letters to answer questions that I think were asked of us the last time around. I would try to answer more this evening. I’ve got a couple of letters here.
Mr. Whitten, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Poparad, Go ahead.

Mr. Whitten, I’ve just got a couple of questions. First of all, Dennis, I appreciate you responding in writing to me with some of my concerns. It was very helpful. I’ve tried to glean from all of this, and I don’t want you to take, and I don’t want anyone to take from my questions the last meeting or my questions in this meeting that I don’t appreciate the efforts of the Family Youth Services Bureau. Quite frankly, I do, and I think they are essential, and I would hate to see any reduction in the center. I think that would just be catastrophic, and we would feel the results of that for quite some time. So I’m with you on that. I understand your passion and I can appreciate that. I just want to be clear, and I guess I still want to be clear. If the state pays you the money that they owe you, would you still need the $180,000?

Mr. Morgan, Yes.

Mr. Whitten, Okay. What about next year? Are we talking about, and I know I asked this before, and I wasn’t real clear on your answer. Are we talking about just a one-time shortfall or are we talking about a real shortfall in your budget that we need to be addressing long term?

Mr. Morgan, Well I think it’s a combination of those things. We would intend in August to ask for an increase in our annual allocation to help cover what’s been happening the last several years, and hope that we can make a case that the quantity and the quality of our contributions to the community deserves a greater proportion of the dollars that go to, particularly to human services. That would be for you to decide at that time certainly. But in terms of where we are right now, yes, this is a one-time thing, and we think that what is happening will allow us to get back where we need to be, and stay there.
But the reason, among other reasons, that we would still need the money as we need to pay back the bank, and the bank is not going to go any further with us than they have now. They’ve been very, very supportive. We, obviously would not have gotten here without there support, but that’s got to be paid back, and we believe that they are going to be very cooperative with us on a payment schedule, but it still needs to be done. But when we have, again, that kind of cash flow problem it just doesn’t allow us to manage the small deficit that’s grown with any kind of effectiveness at all. We just can’t get that done.

Mr. Whitten, I guess I have, I understand the shortfall, and I’m a real, I mean for my part, I’m a real stickler, I’m really committed to the fact that budgetary issues should be addressed at budgetary time. I think, Dennis, you probably even understand because in one of your letters you addressed that.

Mr. Morgan, Yes.

Mr. Whitten, And I appreciate that. But I really think, because we are looking at the whole pot at that time, and we’re seeing, this goes back to Com. Harper’s discussion about planning, and where we are going to be five years from now, and ten years from now, and twenty years from now.
We don’t have a judge sitting in front of us saying, where are you going to come up with 2.8 million dollars, because we haven’t planned. So I’m really, really, really big on that, and I think that it’s, I would love to discuss with you further and in greater detail some of your budgetary problems. But I think you’re probably right, that’s better left for the budget time.
I understand. I’ve done a lot of homework on this. I talked to one of your trustees as a matter of fact. I’ve called downstate. I’ve looked at some of the issues you guys are facing. I want you to know that as a former police officer and an attorney I understand and appreciate what you do for the County. Alright? So don’t ever take my questions or comments to be anything other than just trying to be fiscally responsible. With all that, I’m going to move that we give him the money.

Mr. Whitten moved to grant the request for additional appropriations submitted by Commissioners 01.30, $180,000 to 3963 Youth Service Bureau. Mr. Carmichael seconded.
Mr. Poparad, Any more discussion? Questions? Sandy, call the roll.

Mr. Burge, I had some other discussion, but since we’re to a vote. I have reservations I can talk about after, but I’m going to vote no.

Motion carried on the following roll call vote:

Blaney - Yes Burge - No
Poparad - Yes Whitten - Yes
Steele - Yes Stevenson - Yes
Carmichael - Yes

Mr. Morgan, Thank you very, very much.

Mr. Whitten, Good luck.

Mr. Morgan, I expect to sleep a little better tonight.

Mr. Poparad, We’ll see you guys at budget.

Mr. Steele, Thanks for coming, Larry.

UNION TOWNSHIP 01.58
Transfer
$402.29 from 3230 Postage to 4510 Data Processing Equipment

Mr. Poparad, Union Township needs a transfer of $402.29 from Postage to Data Processing.

Mr. Carmichael moved to grant the request for transfer of funds submitted by Union Township 01.58, $402.29 from 3230 Postage to 4510 Data Processing Equipment. Mr. Whitten seconded, motion carried on a unanimous voice vote.

PORTER TOWNSHIP 01.57
Additional Appropriation
$100 to 2110 Office Supplies
Transfer
$10 from 3220 Telephone to 3930 Dues & Subscriptions

Mr. Poparad, Porter Township, an additional of $100.

Mr. Carmichael moved to grant the request for additional appropriations submitted by Porter Township 01.57, $100 to 2110 Office Supplies.

Mr. Poparad, Wait a minute, they’re not here.

Mrs. Blaney, It’s under $200.

Mr. Poparad, It’s under $200, that’s right. We have $100 to Office Supplies, and transfer of $10. You made a motion, Bill.

Mr. Carmichael moved to amend his motion and include the transfer of $10 from 3220 Telephone to 3930 Dues & Subscriptions. Mrs. Blaney seconded, motion carried on a unanimous roll call vote.

WESTCHESTER TOWNSHIP 01.12
Transfer
$60 from 3910 Laundry & Cleaning to 3920 Disposal
$250 from 3230 Postage to 3610 Maintenance Agreements
Mr. Poparad, Candy was going to be here, but it appears her husband got in a car wreck today.

Mrs. Vuko, A car wreck?

Mr. Poparad, Yes.

Mrs. Vuko, Is he okay?

Mr. Poparad, I guess it’s not bad, but she called me and said she wasn’t going to make it.

Mr. Whitten, Do we give him one of my cards.

Mr. Poparad, Yeah. She has a transfer of $60 to Disposal, and $250 from Postage to Maintenance Agreements.

Mr. Carmichael moved to grant the request for transfer of funds submitted by Westchester Township 01.12, $60 from 3910 Laundry & Cleaning to 3920 Disposal and $250 from 3230 Postage to 3610 Maintenance Agreements. Mrs. Blaney seconded, motion carried on a unanimous voice vote.

Mr. Poparad, Motion carries.

AUDITOR 01.02
144 Form
Part-time from $9.50 to $10/hr
Additional Appropriation
$10,000 to 1130 Overtime

Mr. Poparad, The Auditor has a 144. You’re up; am I right, yeah.

Mrs. Vuko, Do you want me to come up there?

Mr. Poparad, I’m sorry, I’m looking at Shirley, hell. It starts with an A.

Mr. Whitten, Close enough.

Mrs. Vuko, This is from part-time, $9.50 to $10. My part-time didn’t receive a raise, and there are a few girls in there that do quite a bit of work and I’d like to give them that $.50 raise if possible. They deserve it.

Mr. Poparad, Did we skip them last year at budget?

Mrs. Vuko, Yes.

Mr. Poparad, Okay. Does anybody got any questions? Do you want to do the additional at the same time or do you want to handle them separately?

Mr. Carmichael, You’re talking about just the part-time?

Mr. Poparad, We’ve got the part-time, yes.

Mr. Carmichael, I think that should be handled separately.

Mr. Poparad, If that’s what you guys want to do.

Mr. Carmichael moved amend the 144 Form submitted by Auditor 01.02, Part-time from $9.50 to $10/hour.

Mr. Poparad, Is there a second? We’ll have discussion.

Mr. Whitten, If someone seconds it.

Mr. Carmichael, For discussion purposes.

Mr. Poparad, Al?

Mrs. Blaney, These people were skipped just like the other people we’ve voted on today.

Mrs. Vuko, Yes.

Mrs. Blaney seconded.

Mr. Poparad, Alright, discussion.

Mr. Whitten, These are just merely, you’re telling me that this is merely an oversight, that the County’s intention was to, when they blanket raised the part-timers $.50, they got overlooked?

Mrs. Vuko, Right. My girls were not raised. It was $9.50 to begin with, and everyone else got the $.50 raise except my part-time girls, so.

Mr. Steele, So they weren’t overlooked, they were denied. Is that right or not?

Mrs. Vuko, No, they were overlooked. Do you think I’d let them get denied, no. They were overlooked. My budget stayed the same, it was $9.50, and was never increased like everyone else’s.

Mr. Steele, But that’s the time you should have done it, Sandy.

Mrs. Vuko, Well then that’s fine. Whatever you think.

Mr. Poparad, We have a motion. Any more questions?

Mr. Carmichael, Call the question.

Mr. Poparad, Call the roll, please.

Motion carried on the following roll call vote:

Poparad - Yes Whitten - Yes
Steele - No Stevenson - No (changed to Yes)
Carmichael - Yes Blaney - Yes
Burge - Yes

Mr. Poparad, Okay, motion carries.

Mr. Carmichael, Bob, can we take five minutes.

Mr. Poparad, You want to burn one; I quit. Alright, we’ll take a break. Let’s take a break. We’ll take five minutes.

At this time, there was a five-minute break.

Mr. Poparad, Okay, we’ll reconvene. Sandy, do you want to come back up? You’ve got an additional for $10,000.

Mrs. Stevenson, Bob, can I first…

Mr. Poparad, Yes, let Sandy sit down. Rita wants to do something here. Alright, Rita.

Mrs. Stevenson, I made a mistake. I was not looking at the right line as far as the part-time, so I would like to reflect my vote, and change it to yes.

Mr. Poparad, Okay. Did you catch that, Jan?

Ms. Noll, Yes, sir.

Mr. Poparad, I’m ready, Sandy, go ahead.

Mrs. Vuko, Okay, I’m asking for a $10,000 additional to my Overtime. As you know…

Mr. Poparad, Is that to do the appeals?

Mrs. Vuko, As you know, we have 12 township assessors, and each one of them has dumped their work on us after they were done, and we have been catching up. We have 20,000 deeds to do. I’ve closed my office from 8:30 to 1:00 each day in order to work without telephone calls or interruptions. We have a schedule with the Treasurer to get done so our bills can go out on time. I have to pay this money for this overtime. These girls are working overtime. I don’t have the time; I can’t give them the time--the compensation time. I have to pay them. I have girls at, 170 hours, 140 hours, 150 hours, and I can’t give them the time off. So I need this extra money for overtime. You’ve given everyone else overtime money, and you gave John Scott his $10,000. So I was, you know, I need this.

Mr. Poparad, Okay.

Mr. Steele, Sandy, may I be consistent? You’ve got $27,000 in Hourly, and you’ve got $9,000 in Training. You’ve got $36,000 you could draw from without an additional, you could transfer some of that money, couldn’t you?

Mrs. Vuko, Well, yes, but it’s already been spent.

Mr. Steele, You mean you spent, your ’05 dollars already on this?

Mrs. Vuko, Oh yes, I have people, I have a lot of overtimers working, yes.

Mr. Steele, So you have no hourly money left for the rest of the year, and no trainng and education money left.

Mrs. Vuko, Well, you figure out 150 hours, 170 hours, 140 hours, how much do you come up with?

Mr. Steele, I haven’t, that wasn’t my question. I mean those two line items are depleted.

Mrs. Vuko, Yes, after I pay all these, the overtime, yes.

Mr. Steele, We’ve only had one meeting, how, when did you transfer it?

Mrs. Vuko, Pardon me? Transfer what?

Mr. Steele, We haven’t had a meeting yet. When did you transfer it out of those two lines?

Mrs. Vuko, I didn’t transfer it out of the other line.

Mr. Steele, You just told me the lines were depleted.

Mrs. Vuko, I didn’t tell you that.

Mr. Steele, Do you want to have a recall here? I mean that’s exactly what you said.

Mrs. Vuko, I meant my Overtime is depleted once I pay these hours. Now my training one is $9,000, you said?

Mr. Steele, The thing is, you’ve got the money. You’ve got all the rest of the year to make adjustments, again, be innovative, and you’re asking for additional money. I just can’t see that.

Mrs. Vuko, Oh you can’t.

Ms. Phillips, We need more people.

Mrs. Vuko, We need more people in there.

Ms. Phillips, It’s just…

Mr. Steele, You’re not talking about more people here. You were talking about overtime.

Ms. Phillips, We’re talking about part-time though on our overtime, and our part-time money. We’re talking about hourly money, we need more part-time. Actually, we need more full-timers.

Mr. Steele, But you weren’t asking for more additional people here. You were asking to use this money to pay the people who are there.

Mrs. Vuko, Why am I having such a hard time getting this overtime, when everybody else seems to get whatever they ask for? What’s the purpose here, Al?

Mr. Steele, Because they got by with it, and may not.

Mrs. Vuko, Oh. That’s all I wanted to know.

Ms. Brewer, Whoa, wait, wait. You guys don’t know.

Ms. Phillips, You don’t know.

Ms. Brewer, Yes, but I do, the stuff that gets dumped on her office from the assessors. Do you remember them working upstairs? Does anybody remember reading about that?

Mr. Steele, We’re not talking…

Ms. Brewer, The hours that they made.

Mr. Steele, Dale, excuse me.

Ms. Brewer, This all comes there.

Mr. Steele, We’re not talking about not giving you the money. It’s where it’s going to come from. It’s very simple.

Ms. Brewer, I know, but what she is trying to tell you is she needs that part-time money. She’s already down to, what is it, 18, 19?

Ms. Phillips, It’s 19.

Ms. Brewer, Yes, since the beginning of the year, she’s trying to pull in and use part-time people so she doesn’t cost you the benefits on full-time. If you take away her part-time, then you’re just digging her deeper in the hole with more excess overtime. That’s what she’s trying to get across.
Mr. Steele, You’ve got 15 people in that office.

Mrs. Vuko, Well do you know how much work I have? Have you been in that office?

Mr. Steele, I know you’ve got a lot of work.

Mrs. Vuko, You are not qualified to tell me how much work I have in that office.

Ms. Phillips, We used to have a lot more…

Mr. Steele, I didn’t say how much work you had; I told you how many people you had. And I will back off now.

Mrs. Vuko, Yes, I wish you would.

Mr. Steele, I just wanted to be consistent throughout the evening.

Ms. Phillips, We used to have a lot more people with a lot less work.

Mrs. Vuko, That’s right. I mean you have no clue of the work I have in that office.

Ms. Phillips, And now we have less people.

Mr. Steele, And I think your doors could be open too, and that’s one reason I don’t think…

Mrs. Vuko, Oh no. You are wrong there. Don’t tell me when my doors should be open when you’re not even in my office.

Mr. Whitten, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Poparad, Sandy.

Mr. Whitten, Whether or not we approve monies or whether or not we approve requests, I would ask that the Chair at least mandates that those before us distribute a modicum of professional courtesy.

Mr. Poparad, Yes.

Ms. Brewer, Well I’m just trying to give you a view from being there, seeing the assessors, and where I am now, I’ve never seen so much in all my years. And you know I don’t come and ask for a lot of stuff, but I’m coming on her behalf. They just can’t, they can’t get it done. I’m telling you, they cannot get it done.

Mr. Steele, Dale, I’m not saying they’re not going to get…

Ms. Brewer, I know, you want her to transfer it from here to there. But what happens when she has to go to her state-mandated meetings?

Mr. Steele, Well, the only thing…

Ms. Brewer, What then, she’s got to come back again and ask for the money to go?

Mr. Steele, She asked for 10, and she’s got 36, you got 26 left in that. I’m going to be quiet.

Mrs. Vuko, No, I don’t have 26.

Ms. Brewer, She doesn’t have 26 left.
Ms. Phillips, In what?

Mr. Poparad, Does anybody got any more questions?

Ms. Brewer, Part-time.

Mr. Whitten, I do.

Ms. Phillips, No, we don’t.

Mr. Poparad, Go ahead, Dan.

Mr. Whitten, And I don’t want to focus on this one, but are things happening that we didn’t anticipate at budget time? Is that what’s happening? I mean is there…

Ms. Phillips, Oh, a lot.

Mr. Whitten, We didn’t, we had no idea this was coming down.

Mrs. Vuko, Oh yes.

Ms. Brewer, No, most everybody was told to keep their budgets pretty much where they were.

Mrs. Vuko, And if you needed more money you could come back and ask for it. Do you think, I don’t want all this extra work. I mean it was given to me. Portage alone.

Ms. Brewer, Yes, the last place we all want to be is in front of the Council.

Mrs. Vuko, Right.

Ms. Brewer, It’s not, you know, on the top of our list of things to do.

Mrs. Stevenson, And what you’re basically saying is, as long as we give you the additional for part-time, then you’re not going to have to hire any more new bodies in the office, because you are getting it done with the part-time.

Mrs. Vuko, Right, exactly.

Com. Evans, If I could, I’d like to voice my support for the auditor to get some more people too, because I think it would make all of county government run a lot smoother. She’s the backbone. She has to take care of everybody’s office, and everybody’s work comes through her. All the appeals come to her. Everything comes through her, so if she can’t function, and she’s got a lot of turnover, and a lot of work, she really could use the extra people. She just lost Sheila. The experience that it takes built up to go into there, then they’re distracted and have to go to the window; she really does need some extra people.

Mr. Whitten, Well I think that the discussion of extra is best suited for budget time, quite frankly. But you may or may not be right, John. I don’t know.

Mrs. Vuko, Right, I mean I agree with you.

Mr. Whitten, And I think at this point you’re saying that you have had an unanticipated load of work.

Mr. Poparad, The assessors, when the appeals come through, they get dumped in there. I’m not going to stick up for Sandy, but all reassessment, all the work the assessors did ended up in the auditor’s office with a mountain of errors, and the CAV’s they got incorrect, it’s created a mountain of work.
Mrs. Stevenson, And also, they were cut back to ’99 budgets.

Mrs. Vuko, I have three employees gone.

Mr. Poparad, I mean they, the appeals, just the appeals alone are how many thousands.

Mrs. Vuko, Oh my gosh, there’s…

Ms. Phillips, They go through the front, then they come to the back.

Mr. Poparad, Then they’ve got to correct all the assessments, and tax bills, and everything else

Mrs. Vuko, Yes.

Com. Evans, You’re still on 2003 appeals?

Mrs. Vuko, Yes.

Ms. Brewer, She has to be.

Mr. Poparad, And I know the deeds haven’t been transferred, because I brought some property, and it’s still the old way, so.

Mrs. Vuko, We’re trying.

Mr. Poparad, I know. Dig mine out of the stack, would you.

Mrs. Vuko, I’m doing it. I’m even doing it.

Mrs. Stevenson, You know, as far as this is concerned, what I see is that we are expecting them to do their job, but we’re tying their hands. And if we don’t give them the $10,000 for the part-time to take care of this, then we’re tying their hands, and you can’t keep doing it.

Mr. Poparad, Well, I mean if we don’t, I shouldn’t say if we don’t, but if she doesn’t get the $10,000 and things slow down, the tax bills don’t go out.

Mrs. Vuko, Exactly.

Mr. Poparad, Then we’ve got the whole county mad at us again.

Com. Evans, It’s a domino effect, and that’s where the first one is going to fall.

Mr. Poparad, Yes, it all runs down hill.

Com. Evans, That’s right.

Mr. Poparad, And they’re at the bottom of the hill.

Mr. Carmichael moved to grant the request for additional appropriations submitted by Auditor 01.02, $10,000 to 1130 Overtime. Mrs. Stevenson seconded.

Mr. Poparad, Any more discussion?

Mr. Whitten, I guess I’d just like to say one more thing. I understand that unexpected things occur. But for the future, I’m going to ask all elected officials, as well as fellow council members that we address, and we anticipate, and we plan for this sort of thing as much as we can--this may be beyond something we could have planned for--at budget time so that we can really look at how we want this money to be spent that belongs to our constituents.
Mr. Burge, I agree.

Ms. Brewer, Dan, we agree too.

Mrs. Vuko, Yes.

Ms. Brewer, It’s been so many years we were told to come back with these budgets, because we were in a financial crunch. That’s why most of us, including me, I didn’t ask for election money, because I couldn’t give you a firm figure.

Mr. Whitten, Well hopefully we are coming out of the fog now, and we can start planning, all of us.

Ms. Brewer, Yes. Believe me, it’s not that we are spend-happy. It’s our money too.

Mr. Poparad, Call the roll, please.

Motion carried on the following roll call vote:

Whitten - Yes Steele - No
Stevenson - Yes Carmichael - Yes
Blaney - Yes Burge - Yes
Poparad - Yes

Mrs. Vuko, Thank you.

AUDITOR MAPPING 33.02
144 Form
Deputy Real Estate from $0 to $3,000
Transfer
$40.37 from 2110 Office Supplies to 4510 Data Processing Equipment

Mr. Poparad, Auditor Mapping.

Mrs. Vuko, Yes.

Mr. Poparad, Go ahead.

Mrs. Vuko, Okay. I have a girl in the front office, the one with 170 hours overtime, which I tried to pay her, but I want to give her $3,000 from the mapping fund to support her raise. She needs a raise. I don’t know what I’d do without her. And this is not county general money, so.

Mrs. Stevenson, This one I have a problem with, only because last year we told Dale to come back at budget time with Heather. We told Shirley to come back at budget time, and she asked at different times through the year. So I’m just saying that I would feel that this one would need to be addressed at budget time. It’s not that she doesn’t deserve a raise. It’s that we have to be fair across the board with this. We have to have some kind of consistency, and God knows, we’re not always.

Mrs. Vuko, Yeah, I know.

Mrs. Stevenson, We’re not perfect.

Mrs. Vuko, I know, none of us are.

Mr. Poparad, Does anybody want to make a motion?

Mrs. Stevenson moved to deny the 144 Form submitted by Auditor Mapping 33.02, with the request to be presented at budget time. Mr. Steele seconded.
Mr. Poparad, Discussion?

Mrs. Blaney, Why are you asking for it now rather than at budget time?

Mrs. Vuko, Why, because…

Ms. Phillips, She is the one that is doing all the CAV’s that we got.

Mr. Poparad, Sandy, will you speak.

Mrs. Vuko, Right. No, she is. She is the one doing all the CAV’s. She’s the one running the front office with Jane. She’s doing a lot of extra work, and she gives a lot of her time. I just thought that a dedicated employee, as much as she does, should be compensated for what she does.

Mr. Poparad, I don’t disagree with you. I’m sorry, did you have?

Mrs. Blaney, No.

Mr. Poparad, I don’t disagree with what you are saying, but the building is full of dedicated employees. I’ve got to echo what Rita said. If we, I mean, there’s no doubt that she doesn’t probably deserve the raise, but if we do it now, then next month we’re going to have Shirley in here with somebody; then we’re going to have Susan Larson and Dale; and probably…

Mrs. Vuko, Well you’ve had other people with their funds come in and ask for additional money for their employee, and they were given that, so.

Mr. Poparad, Well we probably, may have set a precedent then.

Mrs. Vuko, Right.

Mr. Whitten, Well from my part, Mr. Chairman, it makes a big difference to me whether or not it was the County’s intention to give raises last year, and somebody got overlooked, that’s not fair, and I won’t buy into that. However, a raise outright is a little different to me. And I think you’re right, I think we open a Pandora’s Box when we start giving raises outside of budget time, and I appreciate the enthusiasm of the elected official entrusted with the well-being of her department, coming and asking. However, I certainly can’t support that outside of budget time. Now that’s not to say when we get to it at budget time, I won’t be your best friend here, but I just have to stick to my guns on this.

Mrs. Vuko, Okay.

Mr. Poparad, Anybody else? The motion is to deny the request. Please call the roll, please.