Family Recovery Services (FRS) Transportation will be adding another day of travel service to its travel options soon, according to Chris Hetzel, Highland County mobility manager, at the weekly Wednesday meeting of the Highland County Board of Commissioners.

Hetzel said FRS Transportation will introduce Saturday travel service to its options on April 20, 2024. He said it will have the same working hours as the other days of the week, 5 a.m. to 11 p.m., allowing all three work shifts to be serviced.

He also said the addition of the new day of service will not increase the cost of travel passes, saying that prices will stay the same. He said those passes range from $20 to $35 for 30 days of unlimited travel.

The pricing for individual service is $1 for one person paying for one ride and to be picked up within the Hillsboro city limits and go anywhere within the county. For those within a 10-mile radius of Hillsboro, it’s $2 and for those outside of the 10-mile radius, it’s $3 per ride.

Hetzel also reported on multiple topics from a prior meeting of the county’s 10-region transportation area. One of those areas he talked about was an initiative called the Friends of Mobility.

He said this is a program mobility managers in the region started where each county’s manager tries to solicit funds to hold in a pot to help people who fall through the cracks with transportation. He said an example might be someone’s insurance not qualifying them to go to a doctor’s appointment. The program could also be geared toward someone in the workforce who gets hired for a job, but then can’t pay for transportation, with a pass helping them get started.

Hetzel said the Ohio Valley Regional Development Commission is currently in the middle of its oversight for the rewrite of the 10-county region’s coordinated transportation plan; Highland County being one of counties.

He said the Ohio Department of Transportation has had each region start going to a regionalization format with their transportation plan rather than an individual one for each county. Hetzel said the process started on writing that plan, with the writing process to take the next year and the new guidelines going into effect in July 2025.

In other news, Mark Partin, a concerned citizen adjacent to a solar farm, attended the meeting to discuss his issues.

Partin said he has felt throughout the entire solar process that neighboring homeowners haven’t been heard. He said after the solar farm next to his property was turned on last week, he has heard a constant noise from the project. He said other issues include water run-off that comes across and down the road and onto his property and that his property taxes have gone up.

On the drainage issue, Partin said it has swallowed up two dump trucks and has started eroding the road. He said the issue will cause the loss of his transformer for his electricity in the next year because it will fall into the hole the drainage issue is causing.

Commissioner Dave Daniels said the solar companies are required to not disrupt the normal drainage of the areas they’re in. He said that if there are issues like that, the board of commissioners should be made aware so the information can be passed onto the regulators such as the Ohio Power Siting Board, which he said the commissioners are “happy” to do.

He said that the commissioners sometimes share Partin’s frustration. Daniels said the commissioners have gone through the process and dealt with some of the problems, and that it was a “fair thing to say” that they’ve identified problems the state needs to address. He said they’re at the beginning of a lot of these kinds of projects and that the state rules and regulations “need to be tightened” in many areas.

Highland County Auditor Alex Butler said the county currently has appraisers out in the field working for the 2024 reappraisal year. He said the state mandates a full reappraisal of every parcel in the county every six years, and in those years, an appraiser will visit every property. He said the general public should be aware that these appraisers are out viewing properties and should have an ID badge on them and a magnet on their car.

Southern State Community College President Dr. Nicole Roades was also in attendance to discuss Community College Awareness Month. She said that, according to data from 2019, SSCC’s economic impact is around $45 million. She said that might sound like an “awful lot” at first look, but also said if someone looks at the employees from the college’s five-county region, the wages, the students that attend the college and the aid they receive, it’s not such a gaudy number.

Roades said that the college’s attendance had been going down post-Covid-19, but this year it saw a 3 percent increase in attendance compared to pre-pandemic numbers. However, she also said that might not continue due to some “major glitches” coming from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).

The board of commissioners also approved an authorization to execute, that being a Subgrant Award Agreement with the Ohio Department of Public Safety for the Highland County Sheriff’s Office Body Worn Camera Grant for $82,170.

Reach Jacob Clary at 937-402-2570.