County discusses ARPA funds

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The Highland County Board of Commissioners announced more details on the county’s plans for money from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) at its Wednesday meeting.

Commissioner Dave Daniels said that former clerk Nicole Oberrecht moved into her new role of going through possible projects for the money and other aspects of ARPA funds. He said Oberrecht started work on what the county would be doing with the money and how that process will work. Daniels said Oberrecht’s office for this project would be at the Scott House.

Daniels said the first part of ARPA funds would be a little more than $4 million and that they already have around 24 to 26 projects they’ve been made aware of that people requested money for. He said that means that “obviously” there are more projects than money.

Commissioner president Jeff Duncan said that one of the first things Oberrecht worked on was creating a type of scoring system that would allow each project to get a “fair chance” of getting looked at.

Daniels said the board has some infrastructure needs it must take care of. He said it has also received requests for some “pretty interesting” proposals, including some for broadband expansion into extremely underserved areas of the county that private companies inquired about. He also said the commissioners received project requests from municipalities that asked to partner with them on different projects.

However, he said some of the funds were restricted on what they could be used for, so the commissioners are trying to find out if some of the possible projects fall into that restriction.

Daniels said that it’s the hope of the commissioners that by possibly mid-April they will have an idea of what the projects might look like and how the office would possibly assign funding to them.

Daniels said that if people have projects they think might work for the ARPA money, they should call the office commissioners’ office.

In other news, there was a bid opening for companies to reinforce a concrete storm sewer culvert pipe. There was only one bid, which was from Forterra. Duncan said the bid to reinforce the concrete storm sewer culvert pipe included culvert sizes from 12 inches all the way up to 72 inches. The bid from Forterra was for $32,179.

Also, Duncan said the commissioners were contacted by the architects working on the dog pound, who said they were still putting aspects of the building together. He said the project is currently ongoing and that they would hopefully be close enough within the next week that they can start letting bids come in for the project to start.

There was also one contract approved by the board of commissioners It is a contract between the board of commissioners and McCarty Associates, LLC for site engineering design services for renovations to the Buford ball park.

Reach Jacob Clary at 937-402-2570.

Highland County commissioners (l-r) David Daniels, Jeff Duncan and Terry Britton are pictured during their weekly Wednesday meeting.
https://www.timesgazette.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/2022/02/web1_DSC_0466.jpgHighland County commissioners (l-r) David Daniels, Jeff Duncan and Terry Britton are pictured during their weekly Wednesday meeting.
Architects still working on plans for new dog pound

By Jacob Clary

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