The Monroe County Commissioners Met in a Regular Meeting on May 2, 2018 at 10:00 A.M
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MINUTES MONROE COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS MAY 2, 2018 NAT U HILL Ill MEETING ROOM COURTHOUSE BLOOMINGTON, IN The Monroe County Commissioners met in a regular meeting on May 2, 2018 at 10:00 a.m. with the following members prese nt: Amanda Barge, President, Patrick Stoffers, Vice President and Julie Thomas. Also present: Jordan Miller, Payroll Administrator, Jeff Cockerill, Attorney, Paul Satterly, Public Works and Anita Freeman, Deputy Auditor. Not present: Angie Purdie, Commissioners Administrator and Lisa Ridge, Public Works Director. I. CALL TO ORDER The meeting was called to order by Barge II. PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE Led by Barge Ill. COMMISSIONERS' PUBLIC STATEMENT Statement read by Barge IV. PROCLAMATION • IU Women's Basketball Day V. ENCOMIUM • Local Artist recognition for the Alexander Memorial Coloring Book VI. PUBLIC COMMENT- FOR ITEMS NOT ON THE AGENDA My name is Scott Wells. This is for the voters out there. Chapter 9 continuing county corruption at its finest. The tentacles of corruption and cover ups involved in a recent west side trash transfer station debacle, IGTR directly involving the Commissioners, proves we need new leadership at the helm. On February 10th of this year the HT editorial called for an investigation pg. 1 of a political process involved in IGTR st ating quote "it painted a picture of dishonest, deceptive, political maneuvering that appeared designed to solidify one company's hold on an important business sector. It didn't make Yoder good either. County officials should continue to dig into the details ofIGTR's attempt to get a permit from the state for a trash transfer station in the community, as well as the apparent involvement ofHoosier Disposal/ Republic Services. This shady series ofevents deserves more sunlight." Th e whole sordid affairs sta rted when Kevin Robling was appointed to the Plan Com mission President last year. Quote from the minutes of the meeting "(Julie Thomas) I'm going to go ahead and nominated Kevin Robling President" Vice President Lee Jones respon se "how do we vote for this?" Robling then spea r hea ded this illega l scheme as discovered by the foyer request of May sth last year in the email phone ca ll to Plan Commission director Wilson involving Shelli Yod er as the f ace age nt for IGTRto get the IDEM permit and so it'd be quote unquote "delicately and smoothly handled without any public comment." And of course Pat, you as you remember, 2007-18 authored, one of those county ordinances of the three that was violated. At the Plan Commission meeting in Janu ary 16th of this year regarding the codified ambiguous language regarding this case, Schilling st ated, that's what the Commissioners wanted at the BZA hea ring February 7 th, sa id County attorney Schilling, nothing goes through without the Commissioners approval. Bottom line Commissioners approval is a paramount to action. Yet, Pat Stoffers has stat ed five times he was not aware of the trash transfer station until October 4th, about 4 months after ince ption. So are we to believe that Robling, Schilling, Wilson never informed Stoffers of IGTR? Can actions Pat Stoffers and Kevin Robling you've got co ntracts with Republic Services and you give Robling his contracts on the Showers new parking garage, YSB expansion et c. He gives you $1,000 for your campaign Stoffers. So we look at that. And then you look at Lee Jones, she's Vice President of Plan Commission and Robling was President, both are on t he key executive co mmittee and as I predicted on December 6th the permit was a front designed to sell it back to Republic Se rvices to expand their monopoly. So the bottom line is, we add all this, Lee Jones and Robling and Pat Stoffers, I'm asking you all out there this is why neither ca ndidat e should be elected. Pat Stoffers, Lee Jones they do not deserve a vote for County Com miss ioner. Th ank you. Good morning Com missioners, Jim Shelton with the Chamber here on behalf of CASA aga in. We start a new class tomorrow evening. So it's too late to register for that one. I know we had 13 people signed up and there was still 4 applications to be processed . Our next training then w ill be at the end of August. We've still got over 100 children who need CASA's. And as I've explained to you and I want to tell the public aga in. We've got a new opportunity to volunteer, it's ca lled Ch ild Visit Monitor. It basically will help the CASA program do triage on children to decide which ones most desperately need a CASA. So if you're intimidated by maybe having to go to court or maybe havin g to write a report. Thi s might be a volunteer opportunity you want to look into. So you can call (812)333-2272 and talk to Susan Wannamaker who's a coordinator for the program. Or go to http://monroecountycasa.org for details. Tha nk you. (Barge) Thank you. So just to clarify, what do you mean by triage? pg. 2 (Shelton) To do an evaluation ofthe different children's situations to see which ones indicate they need a real total CASA the most. (Barge) Prioritizing kind of? (Shelton) Right. That's good. (Barge) Thank you. I hope you get more volunteers. ********** Good morning, my name is Mike Chaveas, good to see you all again. I'm the supervisor of the Hoosier National Forest. And I've just got to say that opening Proclamation was a lot of fun. My wife and I take our kids to {IU) women's games all season long. And a graduate of both IU and Virginia Tech, that final was (hard to know who to root for). (Stoffers) Well wait. Where did you fall? (Chaveas) I had my candy striped pants on, my IU shirt on and a Virginia Tech hat. I know these players {IU) way better than I know the Virginia Tech. The actual reason I'm here was just to share quickly that the Hoosier National Forest is about 600 larger now than it was a year ago. And 145 or so of those acres are here in Monroe County. So I just wanted to first of all thank the Commissioners for your support, which helped us get the funding in the first place for these acquisitions. But also your staff who helped through what is a very long process to finalize land acquisitions on the Federal side. So we can't be successful with these things without obviously the willing sellers on the front end, but also the support of local government and partners like Sycamore Land Trust and the Nature Conservancy who often help us on the front end of getting these pieces acquired and wait until we can move on it. So just wanted to thank you and the rest of the County for that assistance and support. (Stoffers) Thank you, sir (Thomas) Thank you. (Barge) Thank you. And definitely a shout out to Sycamore Land Trust. (Thomas) They do great work (Chaveas) They do. They do a lot of good and this is a new partnership with us working on the acquisitions. (Stoffers) Any legislation in the pipe line relative to the forest happening right now? (Chaveas) Well there's usually a lot of stuff in committee that's floating out there and I couldn't give you a full list of that and a lot of that doesn't go beyond committee. Something that just pg. 3 occurred though with the Omnibus Bill that passed for funding the whole Federal government was we finally got a fix to our wild fire situation, which is very positive to us. It doesn't kick in fully until 2020, but that's good that it's happening. So what people don't realize is we, in all years until 2020, we have to pay for the cost of wild fires suppression out of our regular appropriated budgets. In more years than not that amount does not cut it once we get to the end of fire season at the end of summer. And we have to pull funds from recreation, from forest treatment, from lands, from everything else in order to fight the rest of the season's wild fires that go on. So we have to basically rob one program to keep feeding wild fire funding and the costs have just gone up and up increasingly where now it eats more than half of our budget on an annual basis. So Congress did something that is very helpful for us and getting that legislation passed where now there's going to be a pot similar to FEMA where there's a pot of money for the largest of the large, most expensive wild fires that happen, almost all of them out west. So we no longer have to steal from one pot to the other. (Stoffers) I just want to make sure that I understood, so that when there is a wild fire out west that impacts your budget locally. (Chaveas) It does. When July, August rolls around and if our wild fire suppression funds have been exhausted at that point, the National office starts looking for anything that's left on the table unspent. That's one piece and also a lot of our employees locally are sent west to help fight those wild fires, so we lose capacity locally for a big chunk of the summer often.