The Highland County Board of Commissioners approved the renewal of a contract with GovOS, for the county recorder’s office at its weekly Wednesday meeting.

Chad McConnaughey, Highland County recorder, said the contract was for the service that takes care of the organization’s images and storage, and would be for five years. He also said that the vendor’s service is paid for completely through his recording fees and that he’s “really happy” with them.

McConnaughey said that with this new contract all of the equipment in the office would be written over to the organization due to GovOS wanting to get out of the hardware business. Because of that, he said the office will try to get as much out of its equipment as possible and replace it “as needed” compared to its previous standard of replacing it every five years.

The commissioners also approved a measure in the contract to start uploading new documents into PDF-A format into the cloud for $492 per year starting in the first year and ending up at $550 by the end of the contract’s life in 2027-28. McConnaughey said this new service would replace him getting film backups for the documents.

Another service he proposed but that was not approved during the meeting was for all of the office’s documents back to 1980 and some from the ’50s to be backed up on the cloud in PDF-A format for around $14,000, with that being around 1.4 million images. However, McConnaughey said he wasn’t comfortable approving that service yet.

He said another aspect of the contract was that GovOS’ portion of the payment would change. He said the way document recording works is that a standard two-page document costs $34 to record. He said $17 immediately goes to the Ohio Housing Trust Fund, with $12 then going to the general fund and the recorder’s office then withholding the last $5.

McConnaughey said GovOS’ portion was $4 from the $5 he withheld. However, the new contract has that fee going up by 5 percent each year of the contract, and in the final year of the contract the fee would be $.86 cents per document.

In other news, the commissioners agreed to send its preapproved $750,000 to the city of Hillsboro for the Roberts Land Development Project. Commissioner Terry Britton said the city was coming up to a financial meeting where it needed information from the board on its plans. He said that was why the board decided to disburse the funds at the moment and that there would be agreements coming within a week or two.

Britton also said that on Friday, April 7 at 10 a.m. a ribbon-cutting will take place at the new dog pound at 9480 N. Shore Dr., east of Hillsboro. He said the public is invited and that the commissioners’ office will be closed for a couple of hours so everyone can be there to help.

“It’s a long time coming but I think we’ve got a great facility for the county and it should be there for a long, long time,” he said.

The board of commissioners approved the hiring of Chad Hamilton to do apiary work for Highland County, with Hamilton being hired at the rate of $6 per hive with 65.5 cents being paid per mile driven. Britton reported that $1,000 was appropriated for this work.

The board of commissioners approved an electrical rate of .057740 per kilowatt by Muirfield Energy.

Reach Jacob Clary at 937-402-2570.