The Highland County Board of Commissioners announced that multiple American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) projects are progressing forward at its weekly Wednesday morning meeting.
Concerning one of the planned projects, a possible new building at the fairgrounds, Ashleigh Willey, commissioner clerk, said advertising for bids for the building were live at the time of the meeting.
Dave Daniels, a member of the board of commissioners, said that the board has some engineering to do with some of its other ARPA projects.
He said one of those projects was the Rocky Fork Lake Sewer and its clarifiers. Daniels said that the project got sent to a contractor to get a better estimate and was estimated to be about $1.4 to $1.6 million. He also said the county recently got its permit to install approved for the clarifiers and said they’d imagine that project would be going out to bid.
Daniels said those two projects were the “big ticket” items that they were waiting on to see what the pricing and overall structure might look like. He said that after they get that idea, they would start to move “on several of those projects” that aren’t the big ticket items, with a lot of them probably not taking place until next spring for construction.
In other news, the board of commissioners moved to accept a bid from Tissot’s Home Center to do remodeling work at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles location in Hillsboro. Commission president Jeff Duncan said the plan was to replace the flooring in the desk and customer area with commercial-grade tacket-latitude planks or squares. He said the total price would be $5,689.
Daniels said repairs on the jail and kitchen area of the Highland County Justice Center, focusing on the grease traps, were “proceeding.”
Phil Dysard, the county’s representative with the Palmer Electric Company, attended the meeting to report the RFP results for the county’s electric facilities, and its recommendations for future plans.
Dysard said the company looked at two different pricing structures this time around, one of them being the all-inclusive where everything is built into the cost, which the county is used to using. He said the other structure is called capacity pass-through, which is where everything is fixed except for the capacity costs. He also said the latter structure was the one the County Commissioners Association of Ohio (CCAO) and Palmer Electric Company would recommend for the county.
Dysard said the supplier with the lowest pricing at this point was Freepoint, but he also said they would separate the second-lowest bid as well so that when the company goes for its final refresh, the pricing would still be competitive.
Jeff Duchardt, Highland County’s Canon representative, attended the meeting to introduce himself to the board of commissioners.
Daniels said the county is considering the construction of a records depository and wondered if Canon would know anything about document handling and scanning. He said the county was “nowhere” close to building yet, but was around two or three months away from looking at the type of system it might need to put into the building.
In other news, there were five resolutions approved by the board of commissioners:
* Res. No. 22-160 is a request from the Highland County Board of Elections for an additional appropriation from unanticipated revenue to poll workers in the amount of $2,582.
* Res. No. 22-161 is an authorization for an additional appropriation from unanticipated revenue to County Court Telephone in the amount of $295.98.
* Res. No. 22-162 is a request from Veteran Services for a budget modification in the amount of $6,200.
* Res. No. 22-163 is a request from Veteran Services for a budget modification in the amount of $104.03.
* Res. No. 22-164 is a request from the board of elections for an additional appropriation in the amount of $115,092.
There were also two contracts approved by the board of commissioners:
* Contract 82 is between the board of commissioners, Highland County Family and Children First and Hannah Allard for a provider agreement.
* Contract 83 is between the board of commissioners, Highland County Family and Children First and Dana Berryman for a provider agreement.
Reach Jacob Clary at 937-402-2570.
