The Vanderburgh County Council met in session this 18^th day of August, 2009 in room 301 of the Civic Center Complex. The meeting was called to order at 9:00 a.m. by County Council President Tom Shetler, Jr.

President Shetler: Before we begin, I do want to just kind of set maybe the tempo a little bit. I have something to pass out to the County Councilmen. I have a sharpened pencil and sharpener for each one of you. What I’m hoping is that we all, and I apologize, one of them was a little bit less expensive than the others. I want you to leave that there on your desk these next two days, and anytime you get tempted to give in to some of these officeholders who want a few extra bucks put in their budgets, I want you to get out that pencil sharpener and just start sharpening that pencil down and realize that, guys, we’ve got a tough budget ahead of us and we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. We just need to be reminded that we’re working for the taxpayers and to make sure that we keep the rolls down as low as we possibly can. So, that’s the way I kind of wanted to start this meeting off today is to let everybody know that we’re serious about it. We, our goal is to make sure that our total amount of budget is exactly what it was last year, or less, if it’s at all possible. So, given the fact that–

President Shetler: Well, we’ve been using a fountain pen for too long. So, thank you. Alright, without any further delay, Rick, you’re the fortunate guy to get to go first here. Okay, excuse me. We’ll take roll call real quick and attendance.

COUNCILMEMBER	PRESENT	ABSENT
Councilmember Sutton	X
Councilmember Bassemier	X
Councilmember Lloyd	X
Councilmember Goebel	X
Councilmember Raben	X
Councilmember Kiefer	X
President Shetler	X

President Shetler: It was my effort to try and speed things along a little bit here, because I know we’ve got a long day ahead of us. We have seven members present, none absent, so we have a quorum.

Rick Davis: Good morning. For those of you keeping score at home, my name is Rick Davis and I’m the Vanderburgh County Treasurer.

Councilmember Raben: There is one item that looks like there may be some room for a slight reduction and that’s 3410, Printing.

Rick Davis: Well, I’m glad you brought that up, because that’s exactly what I wanted to tackle with you guys today. We spent $46,300 to print our tax bills this year. The printing of the tax bills was done in South Carolina. It was not done here in Evansville. It has been 18 years since the Vanderburgh County Treasurer’s office has printed the bills in-house. The county invested roughly half a million in a new property tax billing system, which went into effect this year, February 6^th. With that new software we have the ability to print the tax bills in-house. That is a major task. It took a professional printer in South Carolina two weeks to print the bills, stuff them and put them on a loading dock to be mailed. I feel like we could do that in-house now. That’s why I left this at $65,000, because if we do this in-house, and I came here to get your blessing to do this as well, we will need to buy a high speed printer, and we will most likely need to buy an inserter, and we’re even possibly considering the postage metering machine itself. But, I would like to put this out for a bid, or a request for proposal actually, and see if we can capture this cost. We only had one bid last year on this contract. One bid. That is not healthy. One. And, two, after the contract was signed, the day that the bills were to be delivered, we received an e-mail that we had excessive programming fees. They didn’t go into great detail, and we didn’t respond to that e-mail, but after the bills were printed and delivered I received an invoice for $7,850. I informed our County Attorney, Mr. Ziemer, he instructed me that it was not in the contract and we do not pay it. We have not paid that bill. But, I definitely, with the investment we put in with the property tax billing software, I would like to see us print these bills in-house. I’ve talked to other counties in the State who are on Manatron, the software that we are on, several of them are printing the bills in-house. The last time it was done in our office it was done on typewriter. We’ve gone way past that in technology. I’ve got the room to do it. I’ve got the budget to purchase the equipment, and I think that we can re-capture these costs. We may not capture it next year, but the year after and the year after, once the capital costs are gone, I think we should be able to re-capture some of these costs and that budget should be able to be trimmed from the next year on.

Councilmember Goebel: Does this request, is it reflected anywhere else in the budget?

Rick Davis: No, I left it in the printing costs, because if it doesn’t come in as low as I think, we still need to hire a vendor. Again, we only had one last year and it was $46,300, and then they charged, tried to put almost $8,000 on top of that. So, we need a little cushion there, and the DLGF has added one more sheet of paper for next year. We just got that memo sometime this month. So, I don’t know what else they’re going to throw on us. They’ve been known to mandate things in February when we should be printing and delivering in March and April. So, I left it in there as a cushion.

Councilmember Goebel: That seems like a reasonable approach. What do you estimate that it’s going to, it would cost your office to do it compared to the $46,000 contract?

Rick Davis: Toner and paper. Once we get the equipment, toner and paper, and then postage. But, you know, we have postage regardless of whether it’s done, outsourced or not. As an example, the 48,000 adjusted bills we’re going to send out, we’re going to use recycled envelopes that have 2008-2009 dates on them. We’re going to put a label over them and say adjusted 2009. For that, for those 48,000 bills, I’ve got the, we’ve only spent, here it is, $2,800 in toner and the labels. Now, we didn’t have to buy envelopes because we have some, we’re going to recycle. But, that’s not counting postage either. Postage is going to be around $19,000 to $20,000. We’ve gotten a few phone calls this morning due to the article in the newspaper. For those who have paid for the full year this year, you will most likely get a refund check. We’ve had several phone calls today.

Councilmember Sutton: Say, Rick, I know often times you do have to make an investment up front to ultimately see a savings. I appreciate you taking a look at this from a broader perspective and trying to find ways that ultimately will save the county dollars. But, as well as you’ve shared with us what your, some of your hardware and equipment costs are going to be, what about the manpower that’s going to be involved in this? Have you factored that in? I mean, is this something where you’re talking about potential overtime? Or part-time help that’s going to be required during the cycle when you’re preparing the mailing and all the other processes that go on with getting the bills out the door?

Rick Davis: We’ll get the job done with the manpower we’ve got now. I don’t foresee us having to hire part-time help. We’re all just gonna, we’re a team, we’re going to have to help each other out. I’ve even contemplated having someone come in as a second shift to get the job done in a timely manner. Somebody who would normally come in between 7:30 and 4:30, two or three of those people they come in in the evening and they work from 3:30 in the afternoon until 11:30 at night. It’s a very important job. We have a State law that says we have to give 15 days from the postmark to the due date. So, we will not be able to dicker around. Once we get the bills from the Auditor, we need to get them printed, we need to get them stuffed, we need to get them delivered. I like the fact that we can do it in-house. I can see what’s going on. There are a lot of decisions that factor in on what somebody pays for their property tax bill, but there’s only one name on that bill whenever people get it, and it’s mine. I like having the control in my office as well. But, we can get the job done with the manpower that we’ve got.

Councilmember Sutton: We’ve got 92 counties, you know, we send this out and we only get one bid back on–

Rick Davis: They, I don’t know. Maybe they’re smaller. We’re one of the, we’re a larger county. We’re not the largest, but some of the counties may go....like Manatron can print the bill themselves. Perhaps they go with Manatron. Or, perhaps they have a vendor, a local vendor, that can do it. We have a lot of variable data on these bills. They’re nothing like they were 18 years ago. I think back then you got a bill, here’s how much is owed. Now you have to have a comparison statement showing what you paid in the past, what percentage goes to the Levee Authority, the city, the county, etcetera. But, that’s all built into the software that we’ve already paid for with a half a million dollar investment that we made.

Councilmember Sutton: I would say, on the whole, I mean, this is, your budget is a good start for us, because it does present, for the most part, a straight line budget up and down. So, I want to commend you for that.

Councilmember Sutton: Maybe that sends a message to the other budgets that we’re also going to be reviewing over the next couple of days here.

Rick Davis: Okay, and one more offer, too. Mr. Shetler’s talked about, you know, having some floaters from office to office. If we buy this equipment, yes, it will be in the Treasurer’s office, but there are times when the County Auditor sends out many letters, you know, hundreds of letters at a time. There are times when the County Assessor will send appeals letters out that are, you know, over 1,000. We will more than, we are more than welcome to let the other two offices come over and use that equipment. The county taxpayers paid for it, it benefits the county offices. I have no problem at all letting the County Auditor and Assessor come over and use that equipment.

President Shetler: Well, Rick, you’re kind of going where I was kind of thinking here. I appreciate your initiative. I think it’s a great idea, and you’ve opened the door here for us, I think, to maybe think a little broader on it. That might be to look at putting this in a centralized printing operation so that it could be utilized by the various different departments within this building and keep the costs down, and yet, at the same time, be able to....maybe Purchasing might be the area to put it in. I’m not sure. I think that’s something we can start talking about the next couple of days and weeks to decide exactly if we want to go this avenue, where we might do something like that.

Rick Davis: Purchasing just got out of that business though. They had their own metering equipment for postage, and, you know, they’re over at the School Corporation building now.

Rick Davis: I’ve got a side room that the State Board of Accounts used to have, and then last year when the township assessors were consolidated on July 1, the Assessor moved those township assessors over into that office. It’s just sitting there with excess furniture and some storage for the Assessor’s office right now. I’ve talked to the Assessor, he’s going to remove them as soon as possible if we get this project going . We do have the room, and it’s in a centralized location for both the Treasurer, the Auditor, and also the Assessor. So, we’ve got the room and it’s in a nice, convenient location for all three of those offices.

Councilmember Sutton: I mean, taking on your idea, I mean, we might even want to think a little broader than just county.

Rick Davis: Actually, I, the first place I called whenever we had our joint city-county Purchasing, the first place I called was the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corporation. I asked them, could you print the bills? That would be, basically, at cost. They’ve got the vocational center. My first thought was have the high school kids do it. Have it done at the technical center. They’ve got high speed equipment out there. For several months they said it could be done. Then, a couple of months ago they said it can’t. So actually, that was my first call was with the School Corporation to see if they could do it.

Councilmember Lloyd: I mean, I would agree, it’s an excellent idea. So, what you’re looking at is just to see what the cost of the equipment would be, and then the pay back on that, which I think is created by doing it.

Rick Davis: Yeah, for instance, we’ve got $65,000 in the budget for printing. If the capital costs are $50,000 or $55,000, then, you know, you’ve got $10,000 or $15,000 extra. It doesn’t get spent. Or, we use that to maybe purchase paper for the first year. But, that second year you’re not going to have that $50,000 or $55,000 cost. We’re back to toner and paper, perhaps some maintenance, you know, we may have a maintenance agreement in case the equipment breaks down. On the last day they come out and fix it. Those types of things. But, I see this budget being dramatically decreased when I’m standing in front of you guys next year.

Councilmember Lloyd: Well, and I think with the county, with the county ITAC Board doing other equipment purchases, you may be able to get a good printer, high speed printer for a lot less.

Rick Davis: Yes. This was brought before the Information Technology Advisory Council, and they’re on board with that.

Councilmember Raben: Just a brief comment. I’m not looking for an answer here on the floor on this, but you might consider looking at possibly putting this in the Recorder’s office.

Rick Davis: Oh, okay. Gotcha. The, oh, that thing called the Perpetuation Account, I think is what it’s called. Yes. Does anybody else have any other questions? Obviously, our investments this year, with, you know, we’re talking expenditures now, but revenues from our office are a big factor, too. Our revenues from interest off of our investments are down, but we’re making money, and it’s better than what my PERF is doing when I open it up every quarter. We should be right around the $900,000 mark by the end of the year on interest earned for the county. That’s not what you’re accustomed to, but with the economic climate we’ve got right now, I think that’s fairly good.

Rick Davis: So, do I need a vote, or do I just have your blessing to go ahead to the Commissioners and ask for a request for proposal for the equipment to start printing our bills in-house.

President Shetler: This is just a review session. Actually, this won’t be finalized until the latter part of September? Something like that.

Councilmember Raben: I think the decision is his ultimately anyway. I mean, you, your office has made a decision on where they’ve been printed in the past. If you’ve got a better mousetrap, I think you need to make that decision.

Rick Davis: Okay, well then, I will go to the Commissioners and see if we can get a request for proposal. I’ll come back as soon as possible and give you a report on where we stand. Because I think it’s very important we do this in-house. Thank you for your time.

President Shetler: Has anything been decided yet on the location that you guys are looking at?

Loretta Townsend: Yes. I don’t know that there’s a contract, or if there’s going to be a contract signed, but it’s located at 2901 East Morgan, which is just west of McDonald Golf Course. We’ve been out there a number of times, and once it’s cleaned out, it will work.

Loretta Townsend: It is city property. I understand that it was given, not given to, but they allowed Wessleman’s to use it for storage and this type of thing, providing, or as long as another department did not need it. Of course, we need it, and so they’re out and we’re in.

President Shetler: What kind of rent are we going to have to pay on that building?

Loretta Townsend: I’m looking for Troy, because I do not know. I don’t know. I don’t know if there will be rent. It belongs to the city and we’re part city, so it’s not like paying it to a private place. There may not be any rent. I just don’t know. Whenever we had to make this out, the budget, I didn’t know where we was going. The sidewalk, I guess. I mean, we had no idea where we were going to go or what was going to happen. We just knew that we had to go. If we go out there, there’s going to be monthly expenses that, of course, included in that $5,900 a year rent. There’s going to be electric, now that’s going to come about. There’s going to be water, that type of thing. Then, all of our cleaning supplies, we’ve done our own cleaning for a good while. I mean, we’re not above doing our own cleaning, but you’re going to have to have, we could go over to the hotel and get supplies from them to do it with. Out there, we’re going to have to go to the dollar store or somewhere else to get them, you know. So, we just, it will be cheaper, it is a place to go. Hopefully, they’re not going to tear that down to build something. I don’t know what to tell you to leave in there for it. We’re going to rely on Other Supplies a lot for the things that we’ve been getting from the hotel for the last 20 years.

President Shetler: Have we exhausted all alternatives with county properties that we have out there that might be more centrally located?

Loretta Townsend: Nothing’s going to be more centrally located. I mean, we are centrally located now, per se, but we take the whole county in, the north side, the east side, the west side. So, we’ve got the whole county, so being in town, per se, it’s easy accessible, and what I’m looking at is the big fence around it, because you don’t want me to have to come in here and ask to replace that hundred gallon prover at the cost of $30,000, you know. Then, even our test measures run about a thousand dollars a piece.

Loretta Townsend: There is a bathroom facility in there, and they’re going to make it larger, because we’re going to have to share it with the guys.

President Shetler: This really has nothing to do with, you know, the budget, per se–

President Shetler: –but, since you’re here I do have a question on it. The monthly reports that we get from your office that tells us about how many inspections, is it possible to, I guess, two things that I’m thinking about, one, is it possible to let us know what places that you have visited–

President Shetler: And, the second part of that question, is it possible that on, I don’t know if you have a standard form that the state requires you to use–

President Shetler: –or if you could do something in addition to that? Thinking in terms of the Health Department and the inspections that they do on food service, and you all, I think, offer a very similar type of service to the consumer, and to assure us that, you know, that the weights that we’re getting and the gallons that we’re putting in the tanks and stuff is all accurate. I’m afraid that sometimes that your office is out of sight and out of mind. I’m trying to make it in a way that it may be a little bit more pressing on people’s minds that they understand what those tax dollars are going for. What I’m thinking in terms of, that like you see every so often in the newspaper–

President Shetler: –where a critical violation has been committed by XYZ restaurant. They had, you know, found this, this and this on down the line, and that, you know, perhaps the violators of those that that could be reported to the news media so that they would be able to give a listing of those people, and we could, you know, as a consumer could look at it and avoid those who might be habitual criminals, or, I mean, habitual violators of those weights and measures and stuff.

Loretta Townsend: There’s only one problem I’ve had with that, and it’s my idea, I don’t know. In the Health Department these things can be avoided by the people who are doing them. You know, like not wearing gloves, not using the sanitizer, you know, dirty things being put back on the wall, that all could be avoided. In ours, most of the time, it’s actually not the gas stations are at fault, or the scale. They might, they don’t deliberately take them off, you know. They’ve got to get in there, they’ve got to cut the seal, they’ve got to (Inaudible) calibration. If they know to cut the seal, they’re going to belong to us. We don’t welch on going after them then, but I hate to do that to a number of places and they’re not even aware that their equipment is off until we go there. They’ve got no means of checking to see if it’s giving away too much, or if it’s giving away less than it should be. A lot of times on the scales it’s the same thing, you know. They’re taking our inspections that tell them they need to get it fixed. So, that’s the only thing that I sort of back off from, Tom. You’re sort of putting it to people that really, actually it’s not their fault, but in there, the Health Department, yeah, I mean, if they don’t wash their hands, or if they’re drinking and stuff around cooking food, or whatever....they know they’re doing that. It is their fault.

Councilmember Raben: Just a general comment. One of the bigger differences, too, when you read an inspection report about a restaurant that says they found two violations, the restaurant continues to be open.

Councilmember Raben: When she inspects a gas pump and it’s not operating correctly, it’s locked down.

Loretta Townsend: With big red tags hanging on them so nobody, you know, they know it. Even our yellow tags that we put on them, because maybe a glass might be broken and it’s got nothing to do with the calibration of what you’re going to get or something, we’ll hang a yellow tag on them. That’s one way of them getting fixed. People will shy away from that. If they see any kind of tag at all, they’re gone, they’re out of there, you know. There’s one on every corner in town, that’s where they go.

Councilmember Kiefer: In this conversation, are the equipment that you find broken down, mostly is it usually age related? Or sometimes is it brand new equipment?

Councilmember Kiefer: I’m just curious if it’s age related, older equipment?

Loretta Townsend: Mostly it’s age related, a lot of times, because they’ve had some gas pumps out there, that honest to God, I mean, they’re ancient. Eventually, I mean, it’s going to want to quit on you. You know, things are going to wear out inside of them, the meters are going to go bad, this type of thing.

Councilmember Kiefer: Well, the reason that I wondered, because I notice throughout the community you have fewer and fewer franchise type gasoline stations. You have more mom and pop, local ownership, I guess, and it seems like that’s where, at least where I notice a lot of the gas stations are getting run down and they don’t have the money to keep them up. Their signage looks bad, other things as well.

Loretta Townsend: In some cases, now how can I say this, in some cases they do still belong to a large conglomerate. They have leased it out to some people who are not really aware of how to operate businesses. There’s where your problem goes, Joe. I’m trying to put it lightly. We also have trouble with those people, too, trying to make them understand what they have to do.

Councilmember Bassemier: Loretta, it looks like your whole budget is the same as it was last year?

Loretta Townsend: Well, Ed, we don’t have any control over that top part of it.

Councilmember Bassemier: I know you don’t, but my question is, do you think you can hold this the same? I mean, you’ve got Gas and Oil, you’ve got Vehicle Repairs, and how is your vehicles right now? Are they holding up?

Loretta Townsend: Right now they’re holding up. I mean, it’s a day-to-day deal in that Ford. But, I think we can. We usually do it every year. Our whole budget, well, the county, especially with the portion that the county has to pay is a lot less, I’ve been watching and listening to this, and some of these departments line items. I mean, we’re able to live within it, unless something happens that was unforeseen. You know, how often do I come in here and ask for an additional appropriation? I don’t.

Loretta Townsend: Because we’ll start transferring. We’ll just start digging in another line item and transfer it out, you know, into something to where we have to have it. So, it can be done.

Loretta Townsend: Well, we don’t need good stuff, fancy stuff. We’re not too fancy. I mean, you know.

Loretta Townsend: I’ve often said before, that if I had anything to say about it, I would have a restraining order within 1,000 feet of the building of all the furniture stores in town. I mean, we don’t need new furniture.

Councilmember Lloyd: Loretta, question, you indicated that Commissioner Tornatta was talking to the city about–

Loretta Townsend: That’s why I was looking for him, but I didn’t see him. Because he can maybe answer some of this.

Councilmember Lloyd: So, he may know if, what the possibility may be for the rent?

Councilmember Lloyd: Okay, has the Executive then given you any other information about moving? When you need to move?

Loretta Townsend: No, but I do know, I believe, that our contract is up at the end of this year.

Loretta Townsend: I can’t see the Commissioners signing another contract with anybody, you know, so.

Councilmember Lloyd: And, I guess, if, you know, there’s a possibility if they want you out sooner, they may have to compensate the county for that.

Councilmember Sutton: You know, I guess, with this whole discussion around the new location, without having the, being able to see the rental agreement, I mean, I don’t know if we’ve got, if we’re going to end up with a similar type of arrangement. So, it would be nice if, I guess, maybe if you could get back with us–

Councilmember Sutton: –on what that’s, what’s going to be involved with that, because there’s so many different types of lease agreements that can be put together.

Councilmember Sutton: So, I don’t know if we’re going to end up with some maintenance costs, or some other things related to that facility. Or other issues that might be needed to get the building up to par so that you can move in that they’re looking for the county to take responsibility for. So, maybe if you can get some of that information to us, because I’ve just got a feeling that the line that we see here right now today at $5,900 for rent, I just kind of get a feeling that that’s not going to be exactly the same that we’ve seen before. So, you can kind of help us with that by getting some details on what the county is expected, what’s expected of the county in this arrangement with the city.

Loretta Townsend: You want to know? You think that we don’t want to know? We don’t even know, you know. We don’t know how we’re going to get moved. I mean, things like that. What if something happens once we’re in there, where we could call the Executive Inn, they would come over and they would have it fixed. My guys are good, but they’re not that good. I mean, there’s certain things, you know, they can’t do. They’re not plumbers, they’re not–

Councilmember Sutton: That’s the kind of thing that I would like to know more about. It’s just a little bit, I guess, concerned, and not wanting us to end up in a situation where you’re coming back to us with a bunch of costs later on that you’re uncomfortable coming up here with because, you know, the contract calls for us to do certain things that maybe under ordinary circumstances we wouldn’t have had to do that.

Loretta Townsend: After, before you’ll find me coming up here and asking for additional money, we’re going to go through every line item, no matter what it’s called in there, and we’re going to come up with as much money out of the other line items that we can before I’ll come up here and ask. You know, I’m a good, if I have to, I’ll transfer. Sandie knows, we are a transfer, I don’t when we asked for the last appropriation. You’ve got some of them up here almost every week, you know, but we try to live with what we get, one way or the other, you know. I hope I don’t have to come back for all that, because that’s also a pain to us that something’s gone wrong, too.

Councilmember Goebel: I just want to say thanks, Loretta. I believe you’ve come with a very good budget to us, it’s the same, and if you have any needs you’ll probably come back to us if you have to.

Terry Dietsch: Terry Dietsch, senior judge Vanderburgh Superior Court. First, let me take the opportunity to introduce Ms. Kelly Ward, who is our Court Admini-strator. She will be not only assisting me, but she may have occasion to appear before you from time to time.

Terry Dietsch: Our budget is substantially the same with the following exceptions. We have increased in two line items, a rationale was sent to the Council. One is the YCC contract, which automatically goes up, as you well know. The other is the Law Book account, and we entered into a contract, and for 2010 it calls for a five percent increase. But, over the term of the contract it’s going to save us money. We have decreased our requests from the 2009 figures in one, two, three, four accounts, and we have held the line in all the remaining line items.

President Shetler: Judge, the printing costs that you have in here, is that for like Xeroxing? Or is that for doing some heavier printing from time to time?

President Shetler: Again, piggybacking on the Treasurer earlier, I didn’t know if that was something that could help reduce your costs if there was a centralized printing system around here.

Councilmember Sutton: One quick question. Judge, I don’t know if you’ve got a book up there like we’ve got, the Admin Assistant position....I’m on page 94.

Councilmember Sutton: 1620-1370. 1620-1370. Is that position supporting, are you with me? I’ll wait until you get there.

Councilmember Sutton: Right, I was trying to find out who that position supports?

Terry Dietsch: What we’ve done is, we have rearranged the workload in the Court Administrator’s office. In addition to the Court Administrator, we had that position and we called that internally the Budget Clerk. We have rearranged some of that work. That position has taken on some additional duties, but some of the duties from that position have now been transferred to the Court Administrator, because we think it’s more efficient that way.

Councilmember Sutton: So, again, this person supports who? Does it support you? Or does it support four other people?

Terry Dietsch: In addition, handles all of the questions that come in by phone or in person. Just does practically everything in the office. The Court Administrator now has become more of an administrator rather than a judicial person.

Councilmember Sutton: The Court Administrator, I’m trying to find that position.

Councilmember Sutton: And the, perhaps I’ll talk with, on the personnel side, just kind of figure out what the, I guess, the qualifications are for those two positions. That just kind of interests me on those two here, just regarding where those are. Both require a college degree on those positions?

Terry Dietsch: No, but Ms. Ward is a licensed attorney. The Administrative Assistant, that position is governed by the Job Study.

Terry Dietsch: It certainly helps, and we’re thankful that Ms. Ward is willing to do that.

Councilmember Lloyd: All the way to the back under, you have CASA, and then you have GAL-CASA? Line number, or account number 3933, we had nothing in the budget in ‘09, and, I guess, we’re going to continue ‘10. Was that just some kind of restructuring with CASA?

Terry Dietsch: –budget, all of the proper adjustments have been made for that for 2010. Those figures are accurate.

Terry Dietsch: Then, on the Drug Court budget, Judge Trockman could not be here this morning. He’s out of town. I am informed that the line items in that budget have remained the same, with the exception of one item, and that’s insurance. That has gone up, and, unfortunately, I cannot tell you why that is. But, I’m sure Judge Trockman would be able to explain that.

Councilmember Lloyd: You mean, other than that it’s a flat line budget. It looks pretty good.

President Shetler: Alright. Any other questions? Alright. Thank you. Was that a tennis accident, Judge?

Terry Dietsch: No, it was simply an act of stupidity that resulted in a fractured ankle, Mr. Shetler.

President Shetler: Okay. Didn’t mean to get any personal details here, Terry. Thank you.

Carl Heldt: Good morning. Carl Heldt, Circuit Court Judge. Mr. Chairman, members of the Council, starting with our general budget, it’s flat with the exceptions of a two year step increase for a Bailiff at 1350-1360, and 3723, Psychological Evaluations, we’re asking for an additional $1,000. These are evaluations of criminal defendants when there’s been a suggestion that they’re incompetent to stand trial and assist in their defense, or were insane at the time of the commission of the crime. We, when they’re required, they’re required, and we have to hire psychologists or psychiatrists to do that. It’s been lower in past years possibly because Southwestern Indiana Mental Health Center does those for nothing for us, but of late there’s been, from time to time, a shortage of personnel over there to do that work. So, when that happens we have to go outside their system to get that done. So, that’s the additional $1,000. On the Probation User Fees, there’s a couple of step increases, and then for Other Pay, 1980, that is for a Probation Officer and an Intern to cover court, to free up the Probation Officers to do their work. That was approved back in February of this year. So, it’s a change from last year, but it’s not a change in effect. It’s the same as it was when you approved it back in February. The Rent, 3600, that’s rent over at 501 John Street, and that’s a $611 increase, and that’s the first rent increase over there in nine years, going on ten years. So, I think those are all the changes, and I would be happy to answer any questions. Or, Karen Angermeier is here as well, our Administrative Assistant.

Councilmember Lloyd: I mean, I just noticed one of their Probation Officers had a pretty big decrease. I assume that person left or retired. It’s number–

Carl Heldt: Yeah, Larry McDowell had substantial time in and retired and was replaced.

Councilmember Lloyd: Well, and that really helped the overall budget decrease–

Councilmember Lloyd: –in personnel costs. So, appreciate that. That’s good. Looks good.

Councilmember Sutton: Judge, what did you say 3530 includes, the Contractual Services? The $58,000?

Carl Heldt: That is, as a matter of fact, it’s Mr. McDowell, who retired as Probation Officer and it’s an intern?

Karen Angermeier: That is the maintenance agreement on our FTR Gold, our transcription equipment.

Councilmember Sutton: How much more time do you have on that agreement, do you know?

President Shetler: Judge, I didn’t notice in Superior Court, but Law Librarian, do you guys share that between Superior and Circuit?

Carl Heldt: No, that’s in the Circuit Court budget. I may say this is maybe one of the few years that I haven’t asked for an increase on that. For obvious reasons I knew you all wanted to flat line everything. It’s really, and this is also the law library that’s supported substantially by attorneys who contribute money to a law library foundation. We have, what we’ve had to do because of the drastic increase in subscription costs, is that we’ve really cut back big time in the law library as far as hard copies of books are concerned. We really didn’t want to do that, but the numbers are just, there’s not enough competition in the law book business. There’s no way I could come and ask you for more money under those circumstances, I didn’t think. So, we’re actually cutting back on what we’ve got.

Councilmember Goebel: Judge Heldt, this is just a general question concerning the copy machine lease, a few meetings ago–

Councilmember Goebel: Okay. We, I guess, were advised that there might be a comprehensive plan for copy machine lease. Would this be eliminated if that plan goes forward? Do you know anything about it?

Karen Angermeier: I don’t know anything about that. These are state bid plans on our copy machines through Xerox.

Karen Angermeier: We’ve run numerous calendars, court calendars every day and that sort of thing.

Councilmember Goebel: If we come forward with a county-wide proposal, which I thought we were working on, would the courts be involved in that, with other offices here?

Councilmember Raben: Good morning, Judge. One small account that I’m kind of zeroed in on, 3730, Continuing Ed. The request is $2,000. Is that one that we could look at trimming back a little bit?

Carl Heldt: Well, I mean, it’s, I’m sure is that just for the judges, or is that for the Probation as well? Just judges? We’re required, we’ve got three lawyers in our office, and we’re required, to keep our license, to have continuing legal education. I don’t think we’ve abused that. The policy has been that the office pays for that. So, what have we spent? I don’t know what we’ve spent this year.

Karen Angermeier: This year we’ve been able to handle a lot of these locally. Our staff attorney has been able to earn her hours locally. So, that’s why it has been lower this year.

Councilmember Raben: Okay. It looks like, and this kind of goes back to the no good deed goes unpunished thing, you know, you’re not spending it and now it’s, you know, I’m not trying to penalize you for not spending it, but you spent $690 last year, roughly $800 the year before, and while we’re looking for every penny, that was just a line that looked like we could take back to $1,000 or $1,500 and probably still cover it.

Carl Heldt: If you wish. Whatever historically we’ve been doing, I’m sure–

Carl Heldt: I would ask that what we’ve done historically, and not reduce us below that, because I don’t see it going down from what we’ve spent anyway.

Councilmember Raben: Yeah. This would cover what, $1,000 or $1,500 looks like it would be more than adequate.

President Shetler: Do we mix Travel and that account a little bit together then?

President Shetler: I understand that it’s separate in the budget, but, well, I guess, you brought up the point about they’ve been local. So, that kind of raised the question to me that, within that line item, do you, if it is out of town, are you saying that the tuition is higher? The fee for being involved in it is higher if it’s out of town versus local?

Carl Heldt: You know, I don’t know, I can’t think of any out of town. Out of town CLE for sure is when there’s a judicial conference and the judges go to a judicial conference and we get a lot of CLE there. We will have some travel expenses for that, although a lot of it is picked up by the State. I don’t know, I can’t think of any CLE, other than that, that any of us have gone out of town for.

President Shetler: Adult Probation, did we get that one yet? You got that one. Okay, alright. I thought so. Thank you.

Susan Kirk: Well, I do have, I did put in the rationale Extra Help, but I’m sure we’re not going to get that. Office Supplies will go up because our case load keeps increasing, which means more supplies, shucks, envelopes, things like that. Record Storage, I always ask for approximately the same amount of money, because that’s what it is every year. Then I have to come back and ask, you kind of usually cut that, which is fine, we’ll come back and ask for it again. The Clerk’s budget is pretty, you know, reasonably easy to figure out. Not hardly any changes there.

President Shetler: Let me ask you this, is it, supplementing your full-time help with part-time, is that something that would work in your office? I mean, as far as train- ability, I guess, do you have positions in your office where you could put part- time people occasionally that would help supplement and maybe hold down the cost of adding new full-time employees?

Susan Kirk: We just thought if we had some part-time people, basically, to do filing, it’s astronomical the filing over there, things that would free up the other staff to actually do the computer work, show up to court, things like that. I can’t say that, right now I don’t deem it necessary that these part-time people be trained enough to where, you know, we put them into the computer system, things like that. It’s just trying to free up time so that the full-time staff has more time to complete their work and not be in such a hurry. Because what concerns me is that, you know, sometimes when we do get in a big hurry we might make more mistakes. Of course, you know, society is very litigious, and we want to sue over everything. So, I just want to be sure that my staff can perform their duties in a reasonable length of time without having that added pressure of all the deadlines. Like I said, our business is thriving, unfortunately, so, I mean, we will make it without part-time help. We will make it, but the time is rapidly approaching to where we will not be able to get the job done in the time limits required by statute, and I really, it’s too bad the judges left, I was going to say, you know, their staff, if they wanted to do more, but I don’t think that that’s, you know, they’re busy too. So, that’s why I asked for the part-time help. It’s just to get someone in there to file to free up the other staff. That’s it.

President Shetler: I guess, I’m thinking somewhat in lieu of that if we end up with, you know, a couple of vacancies that would occur in your office over time, obviously that’s going to put you short handed. You know, are we being perhaps penny-wise and pound foolish here if we, you know, don’t look at replacing with some of those full-time with some part-time that could allow the fewer full-timers that you have left to be able to take on more essential tasks and have those part-time people that you may be able to supplement with to be able to do some of the filing type work.

Susan Kirk: Well, part-time help, they would have to work, I forget, what is it, Sandie, 30, how long? There’s a peak, they can’t obviously work 40 hours.

Susan Kirk: 37, whatever, we actually need all of the hours that we can get. I did take a letter over to Council yesterday, I took it over to Sandie explaining why I gave numbers as to the case load. You know, we’ve cross trained several people in our office so that when, you know, one has the normal work day, which is extremely busy, we cross trained to where if someone just gets bombarded with something and move them over there, it’s just, you know, I’m not saying it isn’t possible, but I think that by taking away or not allowing us to continue on hiring our full-time staff, and eventually it won’t be a matter of we think we can make it. It won’t. If it keeps increasing like it has been over the years, the job, it will not be done. I mean, we’re going to have lawsuits, and it’s really going to cost the county money because of errors that could be made from just trying to work so fast. We’re just, we don’t have a seasonal office. It is busy every day from start to end.

President Shetler: This is, kind of, I guess, asking for a little bit of speculation on your part, and again, I don’t know what your age range is within your office. Do you think, I’m presuming here, perhaps you may have some that might be close to 65 or older within your office, and again, maybe you don’t. Do you feel as if, if the Council looked at some kind of incentivizing program that would encourage folks to take the Medicare program and then supply the supplement, and then somehow look at, you know, some kind of incentive to, you know, extra money if they chose that program, in other words, it would save the county some insurance monies, but then they would still be taken care of with a supplement and some other things, do you think that some kind of arrangement like that might be helpful?

Susan Kirk: I’m very glad that you brought that up, because I have for the last few years, I talked to the last Commissioners, I don’t remember which Councilman, anyway, I think this is what would help the county, I asked Sandie about this, it’s been back quite some time ago also, if everybody would do like the Sheriff’s Department, well, I don’t know about the Sheriff’s Department, the firemen I know for sure, my brother was a fireman, and they pay a very small amount of money into insurance so that people who retire will have their insurance. They don’t do like the county did to where if you’ve worked here ten years and then you quit, the county is going to pick up your insurance, or whatever that is. How long?

Susan Kirk: 20 years? If I started working here say at 20, I work 20 years and I’m 40 and I quit, you’re going to pay my insurance, I don’t know how that ever got started, but that’s not good. Anyway, but–

Councilmember Raben: That’s not accurate. Hold on, though. That’s not accurate.

Susan Kirk: So, that would still be another five to ten years that we’re paying insurance, which is still expensive. But, anyway, that’s a big deal for people retiring, health insurance, big deal, and if everybody, I don’t know the figures, as long as it wasn’t too much, because, obviously, people need their paychecks, but if we paid into that to where it would at least help supplement those who want to retire, their insurance, even if it was, if you could give them $200 a month, maybe not pay the whole thing, but something, I think you would see some of the people that have, you know, put their time in, worked hard, maybe retire early, which would, you know, free up that salary that they’re getting for longevity, someone comes in with a little bit, you know, less time, quite a bit less money, I think that’s, I mean, I’ve brought it up a few times but nobody ever does anything. So, but I think that would be a great incentive to do that. But, to try it, I don’t know of any other way to, you know, I’m certainly not going to ask somebody to retire because they’re 65, because–

Councilmember Raben: Just a little clarification on the, since it was brought out there, on the insurance, it’s 30 years after age 55.

Susan Kirk: What? So, it’s not 20 years? Okay, whichever, I just, I still think it’s a good idea to maybe see how much that would cost each person who works here, you know, as long as it was a small amount just to see if we couldn’t supplement somebody’s insurance. Like I said, maybe not the whole thing, but the supplemental Medicare, or whatever that’s called.

Councilmember Bassemier: Susie, on your Storage, you’ve got an increase of $20,000. When was the last time that you checked out, it seems like that’s a pretty good size amount of increase. I know that there’s more paperwork.

Susan Kirk: It really isn’t an increase, Ed. I always ask for the correct amount of money in my budget, which is this amount of money. When you take the $20,000 and put it on top of what it is, $100,000, that I request, because that’s what it’s been over the last few years. Then Council cuts it and I have to come back and ask for it. So, it’s really not an increase, it’s just, you know, we’re all trying to save money, and we are trying to get rid of as many records as we can through the process of destruction of records. But, we keep getting more than what we can get rid of.

Susan Kirk: So, it’s not an increase. It’s the same amount. If you look back through the last several years you will see it’s been exactly what I have requested, very, very close to that.

Councilmember Bassemier: For information purposes, where are we storing these records at? Refresh our memory.

Susan Kirk: We are storing our records at Kinder Moving and Storage out on Buchanan Road, and I’ve always invited everybody if you want to see a warehouse full of records, boy, that’s the place to go. It is big.

Susan Kirk: I think, I don’t remember, I think it was when Marsha Abell took office the records were at Willard Library there for awhile–

Susan Kirk: –then that overflowed, and they took it out to the Garvin Park industrial area. She had noticed that the records were, well, deteriorating. It was bad. Homeless people were sleeping in the boxes and different things like that, so they had to come up with another plan because by statute, there’s records, some of the records, we have to keep forever.

Councilmember Bassemier: Is there anywhere else that you can check out, other locations? Now, it’s been several years, but maybe there’s other places that would be less cost.

Susan Kirk: We did, Council brought that, actually brings that up almost every year. I did a cost analysis for them since being at Kinder Moving and Storage. They, of all the years that we’ve used them, hardly ever raise a price. When they do it is so minimal. They also do our scanning and our microfilming. It’s, I mean–

Susan Kirk: They are, and, I mean, to even try to move all of that, I don’t want to be the Clerk. Let me finish my term before you decide to move anything like that. But they have, they’ve shown over the years that they are extremely fair. They go over and above, beyond the call of duty so many times for us. So, I personally feel–

Councilmember Raben: I was going to suggest, we probably need to get moving because we’re about a third of the way through our agenda–

Councilmember Kiefer: One last question, Record Storage, how big of a space do you, I mean, is that like a, how much square footage?

Susan Kirk: I’m not too sure exactly what the square footage is, it is a warehouse.

Susan Kirk: A big warehouse with, you know, like 100 foot high ceilings or whatever. They are really tall.

Councilmember Raben: Anyone that’s not been out there, she can get you set up with a tour of the facility. It’s climate controlled, it’s everything. I’ve been out there initially with them to do the tour, and it’s pretty elaborate. It’s a nice set up.

President Shetler: Yeah, it’s all controlled computerly, and then they also, it’s charged by the box. Then, you know, if they scan something they charge for that, if they mail something back to you, whatever they do, it’s all pretty well, you know, an incidental type of charge is how most of those file storage units are worked.

Susan Kirk: Yeah, every case is barcoded so that we know where to find it. But, there’s times where they bring us things that they don’t charge for, or, like I said, they really, I can’t, I have no complaints with them.

Councilmember Lloyd: I assume you’re doing everything you can to computerize records? I know you’re constrained by state law on the old stuff.

Susan Kirk: Now, we have it on computer, on paper, on disk and on microfilm. That’s what’s ordered by the state. So, now–

Councilmember Lloyd: Oh, so you have to do that all by the state? Each one of those?

Susan Kirk: Then after, depending on the record, depending on what it is, there’s a time limit. Then we destroy those records. But, there’s a lot of records that the state says that you have to keep, you know, forever. Some of those we are going to ship up to them and let them take care of them.

Councilmember Lloyd: And the sheet you handed out, your cases up to 14,000, roughly 33 percent over eight years, so, almost 34 percent.

President Shetler: Alright, any other questions? You took care of both sections of your presentation? Both–

President Shetler: The Election Office, and that’s on page 62. Does anybody have any questions?

Councilmember Raben: Why are the numbers so much different? I mean, as an example, as you go through each line, Absentee Teams as an example, in ‘06 were $5,800, this year we’ll be pressing $10,000. Election Assistant is double. There’s a lot of these line items that are significantly more than ‘06.

Susan Kirk: Well, we have a few more people working in the Election Office because we have early voting sites now. So, that requires some more people. 2006 we didn’t have any of that. Well, I take that back, we did, let’s see, I believe in 2005 we had one library, and in 2006 we had three libraries, and in 2008 we had five libraries plus the Election Office. You have to remember the 2008 Presidential election, 2006 is what we call, it’s coming up next year, usually when the President or the Governor or the Mayor’s not running, things are a little quieter, we don’t have as much voter turnout. So, things are going to be a little bit less.

Councilmember Raben: I guess, that’s my point, or maybe my question. Let’s, starting from the top, Election Assistant, in ‘06 we spent $30,305. The request for ‘10 is $60,000.

Susan Kirk: It is. I had to come back and get money because we started doing some, like I said, we started in 2006 with our libraries, which means I have to have two people at each library. Now we have five libraries for early voting in the General Election only. So, I’ve included it rather than coming back to Council and asking for the money, I just put it in there.

Councilmember Raben: Okay, but that is the expended number. You spent in ‘06–

Councilmember Raben: So, we need another two thirds, I guess. Well, I mean, again, our mission here is to–

Councilmember Raben: –cut this thing to the bare bone. When I look at this budget, if there’s any fluff at all, we need to adjust those, and I would rather do it today with you–

Councilmember Raben: –than do it on my own arbitrarily, and may not be correct.

Susan Kirk: I agree. I’m very conservative, too. I mean, you can, that’s fine if you want to cut that down, and if I need more I’ll come back. It’s kind of a guesstimate a lot of times, because we don’t know how many people are going to show up and vote. Obviously, the more people that vote absentee, that’s the big thing, and that’s, oh, that’s really becoming extremely popular. That’s more work that my staff has to do. So, I take a guess, basically, and, hopefully, I’m reasonably close. Like I said, you’re more than welcome to cut that back some, and if we see in the General Election that we’re going to run short we can come back and get that.

Councilmember Raben: Okay. Again, I guess, maybe I’m going to weigh on you to possibly come back to us, because even when you turn the next page, and, again, I’m trying to make myself comfortable with these requests. But, you know, Contractual Services from $10,000 to $20,000, Janitorial Services from a little over $2,000 to $5,000, it looks like a lot of these numbers set are more, I don’t know really what they are. But, reflecting back, even if you look at the Presidential year of ‘08, those numbers are significantly higher than–

Susan Kirk: Well, this is pretty well, I mean, when you go through and figure you have polling places, so many places that we rent, that’s for both elections.

Susan Kirk: No, not too much, but I don’t, are you looking at both elections, or are you looking at one?

Susan Kirk: Are you looking at a primary or a general, or primary and general together?

Susan Kirk: Well, this was pretty well, the only thing that I changed in ‘08, I added more for Election Assistants because I had to come back. We didn’t have enough to complete it with the five libraries. Otherwise, there’s so many judges, so many clerks, so many attorneys, most of that’s pretty well the same.

Councilmember Raben: – but, so you have an understanding of where I’m coming from, Printing in ‘06 was $5,500–

Susan Kirk: Okay, the printing, I’ll tell you, I don’t know what that’s going to be.

Susan Kirk: It is, and I can’t, I do not know, I put that in, as a matter of fact it’s in red on my piece of paper here. We are in the throes of doing contractual agreements for our election support with ES&S. Russ, you were there, he’s my liaison.

Councilmember Raben: Would you consider doing this for us, let’s look at your ‘08, your ‘06 numbers, because it’s a similar election, figure in the two extra libraries, and double check these numbers?

Councilmember Raben: Because, I think, to me it looks like they’re way out of whack.

Councilmember Raben: I would figure a slight, you know, two or three percent increase, maybe, on some of the other printing costs or something like that–

Susan Kirk: –until we get these contracts done, like I said, that’s in the red on my sheet, because I don’t know. I don’t have a clue. That $10,000 is what it was, that’s what it’s always been pretty well, because ES&S only covered so many ballots and then we had to pay for those over and above. Did Council get one of these from, did they get–

Susan Kirk: Okay, so you have some kind of an idea of what these contracts may cost that are still in negotiations, because that’s quite a bit that you need to have figured in your budget.

President Shetler: Now, the people running the election sites at the libraries that are part-time people–

Susan Kirk: Everybody is part-time in the Election Office except the Supervisor.

President Shetler: Are we required by law to have two people there, one of each party?

Susan Kirk: Yes, it’s a constituted polling place, which falls under State statute that you have to have a Democrat and a Republican. It has to be bipartisan.

Councilmember Raben: Okay, last point. Susie, I just calculated it, it’s about a 24 percent increase over the ‘06 request, so–

Susan Kirk: Well, it would have been, because we had the added libraries and different things like that. But, I will go back and look at at least 2008 which was the last election that we had where we had all five libraries open.

Councilmember Bassemier: Susie, just some food for thought, the airport has two fabulous warehouses out at the airport, secured, air conditioned, whatever, you might want to talk with Mr. Working and check out their storage area there. We’ve got two really nice buildings out there, huge buildings that would store anything that you have. So, you might want to check with him, and maybe work out a price. Just trying to save tax dollars, of course.

Susan Kirk: Okay, the only thing is that if Mr. Working would be willing to bring our files back and forth. Because even though we store the files out there, we are in them all the time.

Councilmember Bassemier: Well, that’s something you could work out, whatever. Just food for thought.

President Shetler: I don’t think it’s a matter of, it’s a competitor of mine in some respects, not totally, I don’t get into file storage. The problem with it is it’s not a matter of space that’s the problem for the county, it’s the matter of the service that goes along with it, actually. Renting that facility, well, it’s not a one bear job. I mean, it’s a pretty difficult thing to do, and you’ve got to have the other equipment, the computers, the bar graphing, all that stuff that goes with it.

President Shetler: It’s a huge investment, as well as, you know, the actual management of that facility. It would require, I think, the county to hire full-time people, maybe a person or two, I don’t know how many, to manage that, and then when it all comes out I don’t know that we could do it any less expensively than contracting this out with someone else.

Councilmember Bassemier: Well, we’re looking for cost savings, I just thought I would throw that out there.

President Shetler: No, it’s a good point, Ed. I mean, yeah, you’re right. As far as a place, if we just needed a place that you needed to store furniture into it, that would be adequate, but I think to manage those files, which is what Kinder is doing in addition to allowing a space there, he’s managing those files for us, that’s something that would be difficult to–

Susan Kirk: It is, and the bar coding and the scanning and all of that, too. Thank you, Mr. Shetler.

Councilmember Lloyd: I’ve worked with Susie Kirk on these contracts and they are a mess. It’s just very difficult, and I know you’ve had to spend a lot of time on it. County Attorney, Ted Ziemer is involved, so we’re trying to do the best that we can for the taxpayer, but I know it’s difficult. I appreciate your effort on that.

Susan Kirk: Thank you very much. I think that you all should commend our Election Board members, because they are all doing this for free, because they didn’t get any money this time. So, we’ve had the two members and our Election Board attorneys that have spent a lot of hours with these contracts at no cost to the county at all. So, they need to be commended.

Councilmember Lloyd: Just a comment, I mean, this budget is down $35,000 since ‘07, and it’s up $400. So, I mean, it’s just flat. They’re doing a good job with it. They’ve eliminated some positions, I don’t know, I guess the workload has changed somewhat because of the license branches and the statewide network.

Deloris Koch: Deloris Koch with the DADS program. The only increases, aside from two step personnel increases, the Rent, as you know we had a new landlord last year, or at the end of ‘07. We finally got a new lease last year which increased our rent. We had to come back for some additional appropriations earlier this year.

President Shetler: And, you can’t go to the county, one of the county buildings, like county, like the Old Courthouse?

Deloris Koch: We discussed, Mr. Kiefer and Mr. Bassemier came over and we discussed some about the possibility of using space in the main Civic Center building. I believe the costs were going to be pretty high. Even though ours went up it’s still relatively low. So, we’re there for the time being, unless a better idea comes up.

Councilmember Raben: On 3770, Treatment Costs, this year we budgeted $4,500, you’re again asking for $4,500, history doesn’t reflect that we need that much money.

Deloris Koch: That we’ve used that much? I believe that was cut last year also.

Deloris Koch: It probably could be. It’s one of those items that it’s difficult to estimate what you’re going to need. Part of that comes from, we pay interpreters for people who have language barriers. We may contract with counselors at times, but in the past we have used that more than what we have. I believe we did cut that last year. I think it is one area that could be reduced somewhat, but I don’t know from year-to-year exactly how much we will need. So, I guess it would be something that I may have to come back for more appropriations if necessary.

President Shetler: The, going back to that Rent one more time. The Old Courthouse, and why does that not work for you?

Deloris Koch: We have looked at some space over there. We would need a fairly, maybe not as much space as we have where we are. We would need a fairly large space, but one of the problems is having the individual counselor’s offices private for the confidentiality problems that we have with the clients that are coming in. So, we would need each counselor’s space to be pretty private. I don’t know that just partitions would be enough with open space, as high as the ceilings are. We’ve looked at some wide open space, but it would need a lot of work. My question is, who would pay for the remodeling, and who would pay for the furnishing and all of those things? I’m not sure where that would come from, whether that would be worthwhile. As I said, it is still a possibility with a lot of improvements that they’ve made in that building in the last couple of years.

Deloris Koch: We, at this point, we are the only office on the second floor of this building. The only people that have access, other than the landlord, to that part of the building.

Brad Mills: Good morning, Brad Mills, Area Plan Commission. The budget basically is flat, except for one request to get two new computers for our front desk. I sent an e-mail to Mr. Kiefer describing our issue with that. When we switched from going from paper maps to having our information on the GIS, we put two computers out on the front counter, basically for our customers to go in and view the zoning maps. Since that time we have converted our permitting from the old Vax machine that we had down in the basement to a new CityView software, and with that we are using two old computers, which are, I think 2002 and 2003 that we’re using now, but basically can’t stay caught up with it. We’ve been working with Computer Services to try to get them to do everything they can. Basically, they’ve taken everything off the computers except for CityView and being able to get to the network so that we can view GIS, and they are just too slow. It makes our customers have to wait, and we would just like to have two new computers. Other than that I would be happy to answer any questions.

Councilmember Raben: Mr. President, Sandie, do we have in our line, do we have funds available this year for those two computers? Okay. Brad, we might – talk to Sandie about that.

Brad Mills: Okay, that will be great. Thank you, Sandie. I appreciate that. There were two steps that we had, too, that I didn’t mention for employees, but other than that, it’s flat lined.

President Shetler: Okay, any other questions? I have a quick one. Down here you’ve got Zoning Administrator, an Investigator, and a couple of Enforcement Officers, are those calling in complaints that you would get and then you go out and inspect it? Or do you guys have, you know, kind of patrol it, or just have a, you know, every so often go out and check different areas to make sure that everybody’s in compliance, where they’re going to be?

Brad Mills: It is a combination of that. We do respond to complaints that we received from either citizens or from elected officials, but also we our, basically, we have the county divided into three different zones. We have the east side, the central and a west side. We have investigators that work in those areas, and they do go out and patrol, they do go out and look to see if we have any violations, and then we send out notifications to try to get them to be in compliance. So, it’s a combination.

President Shetler: You know, we have, I guess, a lot of people that are out in the field, through the Assessor’s office, you know, and various different departments. I’m just wondering if, do we have good cooperation between other departments that kind of help us do their work and we help them do their work on things like that?

Brad Mills: With that, I don’t know that we have a lot of cross training, because our violations, our ordinance is so much different. My investigators aren’t out all the time. They go out, each of them might go out once a week, because they also do work in the office. So, they help to run the counter, they do scanning that we do. So, they do a number of different things other than just go out and drive around. So, they’re not out all the time.

President Shetler: I mean, do you think that that would be something that would be feasible, though? Let’s just say if you have a County Assessor that’s in the field and he’s doing measurements and he’s able to ask a few field type questions, and just by plain observance that there’s a certain activity going out of a building that, you know, he should have all of that stuff on his sheet anyway of whether it’s an R-1 or C-1 or whatever the classification is, and that he could just simply duly make those kind of notes? Then, if we had a better collaboration between–

Brad Mills: It’s quite possible. I mean, we can talk to them and see if they would like to work with us. We do other things other than just go around and look for those violations. Whenever we get sign applications and things we have to go out to make sure that the signs are put up as per the code. We go out and do site visits for all the rezoning requests, or all the subdivision requests, so that we can take photographs so that we can put our staff field reports together. So, it’s a number of different things that we are doing out in the field. But, I mean, I’m happy to do things. I mean, I do that myself on my own personal time, is I’ll catch violations, and, you know, send myself a voice message so that I can remember to talk to the staff the next morning and say, hey, you need to go check this property out. So, I think we do a pretty good job of going around, obviously, some things get missed, but most of those we catch with citizens complaints. Or, when somebody comes in to say, hey, I want to expand my business, it’s like, well, you know, your business isn’t zoned correctly, or you don’t have the correct permit. So, we’ve tried a number of different ways to make sure that people are in compliance.

President Shetler: Yeah, I don’t, I’m not quibbling with the job you guys perform.

President Shetler: I think, you know, it is high quality. I guess, I’m trying to think of ways that we might be able to, I don’t know if we have, particularly today when building is down–

President Shetler: –that if we don’t have, you know, maybe inspectors and people that are kind of coming and going all of the time over different, the same property, and if there’s not a way to consolidate that a little bit and save some personnel.

Brad Mills: I mean, we will find things that they have that are violations, and we’ll have them go out and do inspections. Vice versa, they do the same for us. They say, hey, we see somebody, they’ve got a business in there and we don’t think it’s licensed for that or permitted for that, and we will go out and investigate it.

President Shetler: If our people are cross trained in a way, could that all be done as a one stop deal? That, instead of them noticing something and then getting on the phone and then making a call and saying I think there’s a problem here with the guy’s electrical or plumbing or whatever, and, you know, you guys need to go out and make a further inspection on it. Is it possible to cross train some of those inspectors so that they could actually just stop right then and there and say, you know, I’m also noticing that you’ve got a violation on this, this, and this, and check it off and get it going?

Brad Mills: I mean, anything is possible. It would just take much more training to make sure that people are able to do that. Our investigators would have to, you know, help them to come up with it. So, I mean, any of that is possible. It’s just going to take time from whatever that staff person is already doing if they’re going to start doing work that we would do as well. Like I say, we’re not out constantly investigating, you know, so that’s just a small portion of what my staff does.

President Shetler: Right. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Alright, thanks, Brad.

Bob Working: Good morning, Bob Working, Evansville Regional. I submitted our budget to our board earlier this year, before all of the dialogue came out on the raises. Anyway, I’m here to answer any questions that any of you may have.

Bob Working: It reflects a union Teamster negotiations, firefighter negotiations of a three percent raise, is basically what it is.

Bob Working: Salary is, no, this was before that, so I added a three percent for salaried employees, non union.

Bob Working: And the firefighters were at three, and the Teamsters followed the third year of their contract. Again, that was submitted before that information came out. I also, I guess I would just say that our revenues are substantially down this year, compared to our expenses. We have seen nationally a reduction in the available seats in the airline industry. Our traffic is down about 24 percent this year versus last year. That correlates to about the same in revenues. The only thing that we increased last year on the revenue side was that we had a 17 percent increase in our parking lot rate, but our revenues are still down by being down 24 percent. Our airlines, we did hit them with a rate increase.

Councilmember Raben: Just a general comment, with that being said, I guess I’m shocked to see that there’s any increases in any of these lines. I would think that we would be seeing some decreases just to help offset the decline in revenue.

Bob Working: Yes. Again, I guess, where I would come from in saying that in the past the Airport had, we have never been on the tax rate to operate. So, we had always been within our budget from an operations standpoint. This year, we hope to give you a zero effect by taking the money that we’ve been getting in our Cumulative Building Fund and putting into the General Fund. The raises, again, I’m just saying was from prior to the edict coming out on the raises. But, you know, Vectren isn’t zeroed out, and, you know, the expenses or the price of gasoline hasn’t zeroed out. So, there are items that, you know, we had very little or no control over.

Councilmember Raben: –how these fees, for those who don’t know at home, the fees are basically, this budget is charged back to the airlines, basically.

Councilmember Raben: But, on the flip side, you know, we support those airlines by buying tickets. So, you know, any increase at all, you know, the lower we can get this budget, you know, hopefully that reflects a cheaper airfare. So, you know, there’s a little give and take there with all of this. But, you know, as I look, as an example, Bob, you know, we understand Utilities, $495,000 is what we budgeted last year, this year $567,000. That may be what it needs to be, but Telephone is a $7,000 increase, Contractual Services is a $15,000, those are the items that I’m kind of singling out and asking you to double check those and make sure that there isn’t room to maneuver those down a little bit.

Bob Working: Alright, Sir. How much? Since we haven’t been on the tax rate before, and–

Councilmember Raben: I understand, but I’m just looking at the conditions that you mentioned when you opened.

Bob Working: Well, Sir, I mean, for 26 years I’ve operated with no, without ever coming to the Council and asking for any monies. You know, and this has been a tough year. Certainly we are trying our very best to maintain service, maintain the airport in the safe condition that it needs to be in. I’m, you know, we stay within our budget.

Councilmember Kiefer: What is Other Compensation? What all does that include, Other Compensation?

Bob Working: That is temporary employees that we hire during the summertime, and, I believe it’s also overtime wages are included in that.

Bob Working: Yes. Part-time valets that we have throughout the year and then the overtime. Sometimes I get a little confused on those because you group together different than what we do in our budgets. So, I have to go back, but yes, that Other Compensation should include those two.

Councilmember Kiefer: Just quickly, you said a number of flights are down, or the number of people flying are down. What’s the numbers?

Councilmember Kiefer: I mean, what’s that represent? I mean, like how many people?

Bob Working: I would say, in a good year, Evansville, with this community and a robust economy and the airlines operating the way they should, we have about 240,000 passengers getting onboard airplanes, about 240,000 getting off. Right now, I think the last 12 months we’re at about 167,000. If you’ll give me just a second, I have, 169,000 for the last 12 months. 90,000 enplanements since the first of the year. That was through July.

Councilmember Goebel: Mr. Working, that is a national trend as well, isn’t it?

Bob Working: Oh, yes, Sir. We’re no different than 95 percent of our other airports. It’s, certainly having Delta-Northwest merge has not been good for our community. Next month we see all service to Memphis will cease. We went from three flights to one flight to Detroit. I think we’re going to get one of them back in September, but there certainly is a reshuffling of the industry right now.

Councilmember Goebel: Do you recognize any increase as of late, or it’s pretty flat?

Bob Working: No, they’re continuing that trend at this point in time. We were coming out of it when the flights were the same. From an economics standpoint, I think we had bottomed out, and we’re starting to increase a little bit. But then, all of a sudden, you see a drop in the Delta flights, and that’s just going to exacerbate that issue. As we see the seats go down, the tendency for the airline is to raise the price because of the scarcity of the resource. So, you’re seeing the price go up and the opportunities to travel diminish.

Councilmember Lloyd: As of July 31^st though, roughly what are revenue and expenses? I know I read the minutes that we receive as Councilmembers, and the last deficit I recall was roughly, you know, $1.7 or $1.8 million, something like that.

Councilmember Lloyd: So, we’re looking at, were are we, half a year through, roughly?

Doug Joest: Hi, I’m Doug Joest, I’m the treasurer and finance manager of the Airport Authority. Year-to-date through July, our revenues were $2.7 million versus three million last year. Like Bob mentioned, most of the, we had decreases in everything except the rates and charges that we charge the airlines and that’s up five percent, or $57,000. Our expenses, actually were down over last year in everything except Utilities. Just going through here, we’re essentially, expenses including depreciation this year is about $2,370,000, but the depreciation is $2,143,000 of that. I can leave this with you. Or, I can get you a copy. It’s not quite finished.

Councilmember Lloyd: Okay, and that’s, the deficit is somewhere in that neighborhood, maybe a little bit smaller?

Doug Joest: Because, as Bob mentioned, we’ve always stuck with our budget, and I would just like to emphasize, we always spend a lot less in our budget.

Councilmember Lloyd: Then, I guess, on personnel, have you had any reductions or eliminations?

Bob Working: We put, I was going to say, we put a freeze on the hiring almost a year ago. I lost my assistant this year back in June–

Bob Working: –went to Peoria as the director there. We’ve not filled that slot. We also have a training director position that remains open. There’s a third one too, isn’t there?

Bob Working: So, those right now would, I’m estimating would be somewhere in the $160,000 to $170,000 with benefits–

Councilmember Lloyd: I mean, nationwide we are seeing that it’s really a recession in the travel industry. It’s rough. So, I commend you for trying to hold the line on pricing, because I think that’s important, too.

Doug Joest: Yeah, we’ve got to be careful of the airlines. We can’t put too much on them. There is fewer of them to spread that burden over now. You know, in the good old days we had about eight carriers here to spread that over. Now we’re down to two. However, we’re actively seeking others as well.

President Shetler: That 160 plus boardings, how many of those represent out of town, do you have a clue on that?

Bob Working: Normally, we see a split of about 70-30. It’s 70 percent of the traffic originates in Evansville.

President Shetler: So, we’re bringing, we’re attracting 50,000 people right now out of that 160 roughly?

President Shetler: Any idea what the purchasing power or how much economic benefit that Vanderburgh County receives off of that 50,000 that comes in? Do you guys have–

Bob Working: Well, I can say that historically, and we’ve used very conservative figures, that the airport has a positive economic benefit to the community of about $150 million a year. That, we do, every other year we do an economic benefit analysis for the airport.

President Shetler: But, if that 70-30 would hold true, then you’re talking about roughly a $50 million impact perhaps–

President Shetler: The other, if we would, you know, exempt the contractual arrangements that you have with the bargaining groups, etcetera that are locked in for a three year contract, the salaried or non-contractual employees, and flat lined those at no increase, do you have an idea of how much that might save out of the budget?

Doug Joest: If we flat lined just the non-represented employees, it’s only, their raises are only like $13,800.

President Shetler: Okay, plus fringes, etcetera? So, we’d be dealing with about 17'ish.

President Shetler: Right, do you guys have about, I mean, are you on the same kind of plan the county is as far as sick days and all the holidays that we might have?

Bob Working: We’re similar in some respects. I think we have three personal days, where the county has four. I think we both have 14 paid holidays. So, in that respect we’re kind of similar in benefits. We, our health insurance, we do not have that process where you can continue on after you retire with your health programs. So, our health premiums are substantially less, I think, than what the county’s is. But, other than that, we have, there’s great similarities.

President Shetler: Are your contracted employees that are with Teamsters, are they on the Teamsters health program?

Bob Working: The Teamsters are under Teamsters, and the firefighters and non-represented employees are with Deaconess or the old Welborn Health Plan.

Councilmember Bassemier: I just wanted to say that we also lost revenues, I mentioned two buildings, we’d lost revenues out at the airport on two buildings, the foreign trade zone and also the Bristol Myers hangar. That’s why I wanted to bring that up, if there is a possibility, even if maybe somebody knows a use for these two facilities that we sure would like to get them rented out again.

Bob Working: For the eight individuals that aren’t represented it’s $13,869.

Doug Joest: That’s based on our current employment level. As Bob mentioned, we have some vacancies.

Councilmember Bassemier: Tom, one other thing, I would just like to, you know, consideration for our non-union employees too, because they work hard, too. Sometimes it’s kind of unfair, so we ought to consider the non-union employees, too, because they need a raise, too.

Councilmember Goebel: I was just going to ask that if expenses are down this year, maybe you could go back and revisit some of the increases.

Bob Working: Our people are very conscientious. I’ve always been very proud of them. I tell them to hold the budget and they do a good job responding.

Councilmember Goebel: We’re proud of the airport and everything it represents to–

Doug Joest: Just a for instance, since we’ve joined the co-op purchasing program that the School Corporation has, and, you know, the city-county has as well. We’re doing stuff like that every day.

President Shetler: We’re going to take a slight break here. I’ve got a time out motion on the field. So, we’ll just take ten minutes here. Thank you.

President Shetler: Okay, thank you. We have a lot to do yet in a relatively short period of time here, so we’re going to try to get moving along a little quicker. Mr. Jeffers is up with the County Surveyor’s office, and that is on page 33. Bill?

Bill Jeffers: Yes. Good morning. Account number 1060, County Surveyor, General. I got your directive from Sandie Deig to submit the 2010 budget proposal identical to the 2009, and that’s what you have in front of you.

Bill Jeffers: I would have preferred to give my employees at least a token raise, $500, or a thousand dollars, something like that, as a token of my appreciation for their service to the county, but I would think that would be unfair if all county employees couldn’t get the same. So what you see is what you asked for.

Councilmember Lloyd: I mean, I think hard-working employees, I think all of us would like to see them get an increase. It’s just unfortunate. I guess it’s not totally out of the realm, but it’s probably not likely and I think we all regret that, but under these conditions, we’re kind of strapped with what we can do.

Councilman Sutton: Bill, line 3700, can you tell us what is included? That’s Dues & Subscriptions.

Bill Jeffers: That would be for the same kind of things that the County Commissioners or any other elected officeholder would have with regard to Indiana Association of Counties, IAC, the Indiana Association of County Surveyors, etcetera, a couple of magazines.

Councilman Sutton: That may be something we take a look at there, so I know you’ve been pretty consistent in terms of the amounts there, but during these times, those are the kind of things that we –

Bill Jeffers: I don’t mind you taking a hard look at that, that’s fine with me. I’ll get you a – I don’t know the exact extent of our obligations for 2009 or what we may have obligated in advance in 2010, but I can get you that figure, Councilman Sutton, and then I’ll get that from Linda Freeman and you can get your meat axe out if you’d like.

Councilmember Raben: Just, Bill, every year I apply for that Party Chief’s position. Am I getting any closer to being the Party Chief?

Bill Jeffers: Yes, Sir. If you’re ready to take that step, as long as you make a place for my employee to step up, you can fill that position any time.

Bill Jeffers: Basically, Surveyor’s Perpetuation Fund is the deed transfers, land transactions that take place in the Recorder’s office. We get $5 per deed that’s transferred, where recorded, and that money goes into our perpetuation fund. As you may imagine, perpetuation fund is substantially down over the past two years and especially again this year due to the down turn in land transactions. So I left it the same, but I’m a little apprehensive about the collections there unless the economy picks up again.

Bill Jeffers: That’s by statute. I think there’s around a $17 fee collected for a deed transfer, we get 5 for our perpetuation fund, the County Recorder gets 12 or something, I’m not sure exactly what –

Bill Jeffers: Right, it says what we can spend that perpetuation fund on, which is establishing and perpetuating section corners to which all those deed descriptions are tied.

Bill Jeffers: Well, I remember years when there was 40 to $44,000 a year coming into that, and now it’s down closer to 20, 28, I think, last year.

Marilee Fowler: I’m Marilee Fowler, with the Evansville Convention & Visitors Bureau. And as requested, this budget is submitted just like last years, no increases in any line items.

Marilee Fowler: Thank you. This year is going to probably be a challenge in the fact that we have exciting things happening, but in the transition between now and then will present challenges of the groups that we have coming to Evansville in 2010, making sure that we can provide the accommodations with the uncertainty of the Executive Inn as to what will or will not be open. What will or will not be demolished. So our priority at this point is to make sure those people are well taken care of so that they will continue to come back for years to come when we have all new product to offer them.

Councilmember Lloyd: I wondered, do the sales people have an opportunity to earn commissions like if they bring in a big show or –

Marilee Fowler: Well, we’ll be meeting with the Mayor probably next week to look at some opportunities for what can be done. We’ve been working with Mike Shoulders, the Mayor had commissioned Mike to put together a plan for a long-range strategic plan for Roberts Stadium. So looking at that, we’re hoping that we can encompass those sports fields that we wanted to do and to make that really a pristine part of Evansville.

Councilmember Kiefer: What are included in matching grants? I mean, who are some – what kind of recipients are you talking about?

Marilee Fowler: In January, any not-for-profit organization can come to the Convention & Visitors Bureau to ask for funds. They could be special grants to help put on an event, or they can be matching funds for marketing and advertising. Two of the biggest recipients of that is Burdette Park when they put together their spring and summer advertising campaign, and the other one is Mesker Park Zoo. Each of those gets annually about $10,000 a piece. So when you take that out of the equation, the rest of it can go to – this year, we’re helping the West Side Nut Club Fall Festival. We’ve been helping the YMCA with their half marathon, that brings in an incredible number of people into the community. So it’s different events, different projects that the not-for-profits can ask and we will help them.

Councilman Sutton: You’ve got a $7,000 request on Motor Vehicles, 4230, not much motor vehicle can be bought for $7,000.

Marilee Fowler: We have one company vehicle, it’s a van. It comes in very handy when we’re doing trade shows because many times we’re taking trade show booths and brochures. It also is very helpful in the fact if we’re doing site visits with people looking at Evansville for meetings, conventions, that type of thing, that we have plenty of room to chauffeur them around.

Councilman Sutton: Okay. And then on Office Machines, what are your plans there?

Marilee Fowler: That’s usually upgrade of computers over the years. We try to upgrade them as needed as they’ve reached capacity. I get teased because mine’s usually the fullest, the quickest, so it’s upgrading our office machinery.

President Shetler: Marilee, normally on most of the budgets we have a historical reference to go by, like ‘06's year to date, and ‘07's, and what’s been spent in ‘08, and we don’t have that on yours. Is it possible to provide that to us?

President Shetler: Yeah, I mean, at least ‘07 and ‘08, I think that would give us some historical reference to what you’ve been spending in those line items if at all possible.

Marilee Fowler: Most of those line items have been pretty similar each year. There may be some small increases based on what we have looking ahead in the next year but most of those had been very similar, so I will get you those for ‘07 and ‘08.

President Shetler: The next then is on the Capital, through the Tourism. Any questions on Capital?

Councilmember Lloyd: Some of this came before the Council so it’s, you know, they’ve shifted priorities towards the Transportation Center/Pagoda needed repairs and then the Sports Complex.

Eric Williams: Good morning. Just to make sure, using Surveyor Jeffers’ definition of token, I made a few marginal token adjustments to my budget, but after a healthy discussion with my liaison, he advised me that my tokens were the same as flat, so I think most of the adjustments in there end up being basically what they were last year with a few exceptions I’d like to point out, unless you have any specific questions that you need to address first.

Eric Williams: Okay. The FTO Incentive, 1050-1520 is basically the amount that we agreed to during the Council meetings this year to change how we handled our FTO payments. Clothing Allowance is just to adjust for the number of deputies that we have. Same with some of the others. I had put in a request for Tires & Tubes to go from $12,000 to $15,000, that was really just to handle the adjustment in the fleet and the number of tires we’re using. We’ve also got some other options that may address that. I’d asked for an increase in the Training from 15,000 to 20,000. Basically, that’s used to provide all kinds of training. That one, if you put it back in where it was, we’ll be alright. The one that I do want to point out, 1050-3370 Computers, you’ll see there is an increase in there. The actual amount for my computer line item would be the same as last year. The increase in there is to reflect an adjustment from the CIO’s budget. He is taking the maintenance on all of our network switch and router gear at the jail out of his budget and told us that we need to put it in our budget, so you should see a similar reduction in his request for those monies, and that is the maintenance cost on the Cisco equipment in the jail. I’d asked for $300,000 in the Vehicles line item. Traditionally we’ve put in for $250,00. I put it in both places, both the Commissioners’ CCD account and here to cover our bases knowing that one will make it and one won’t usually. We asked for the increase this year because we need to replace approximately five of our unmarked paper server cars. We’re currently looking at a Focus type vehicle, that kind of very entry level, high gas mileage type vehicle. One other thing that I wanted to point out, that there was an error or an omission in our budget request and that is 1050-3600, the rent, and that is the command post rent. It was inadvertently put in at zero. Last year the budget was $123,500. Because of our new negotiation with the Airport, that number should be $103,203, which is a $20,000 reduction from last year’s budget.

Eric Williams: Yeah, I mean, if we found a better option, I think we could get out from underneath that if we had an option that made sense to us.

Eric Williams: It should be $103,203, which is a $20,270 reduction from last year’s budget and that’s due to the renegotiation of that lease agreement.

Councilmember Lloyd: Yeah, I had circled that zero, I thought, wow, what a deal.

Eric Williams: Yeah, it wasn’t quite that good of a deal. I think the reason that it got put in at zero is we were still in the negotiation process when we budgeted or put in these numbers. So that was an error on my part.

Councilmember Lloyd: Page 24 in our book. I guess one quick question while they’re looking. The vehicles, the new vehicles, what are you replacing when you talked about the Ford Focus type –

Eric Williams: Right now, they’re driving probably seven to ten year old Tauruses. You know, we’re looking for an even smaller vehicle and even better gas mileage and the age vehicle is not getting that good of gas mileage. We had to take one out of service this last week, the cost to replace it or to repair it exceeds the value of the vehicle, so we’re just going to make do without for a while.

Councilmember Lloyd: The Taurus, that would be close to clunkers, wouldn’t it?

Eric Williams: And we’ve looked at that. We’re eyeballing the idea of being able to get in on the cash for clunkers program with these cars because they would qualify.

President Shetler: Are there any other incentive programs out there by the federal government right now that you can piggyback on?

Eric Williams: There are a variety of programs. I don’t know if there are any available for us to piggyback on, but we’re going to look for the best rates we can. We’re hoping to replace the full fleet of five of them and get some fleet purchasing incentives by doing it that way. You know, we looked at the hybrids, we’d love to do that, but the capital outlay on them right now with our fuel prices and the miles we put on them, it doesn’t break even yet for us.

Eric Williams: We have ten part-time paper servers, five of them work in the morning and five of them work in the afternoon. So there’s five cars and they share them, so two people share that car every day.

Eric Williams: It would be, roughly, five paper server cars and then ten fleet marked vehicles.

Eric Williams: Yes. One other thing that doesn’t appear on here, just so you know it will be forthcoming, is we’re in the process of changing out the dated phone system at the command post. The traditional system that we’ve got out there had dedicated lines going to all the phones. We are now with the increased fiber connection that the county has put in between our buildings, we’re now able to piggyback the phone system at the command post on the jail system, so we’ll be able to cancel all the phone lines that are out there, so that should be a significant monthly savings, we’re replacing equipment using commissary dollars.

President Shetler: I’m going to go to the – there’s a groundskeeper position, 1130-0212, it’s on page 20 of our book.

Eric Williams: If it’s the position I believe it is, and the gentleman that fills it is Mr. Magnus right now, he generally works at the training center and does a lot of our in-house mechanical and maintenance, he does a lot of things at the command post and kind of travels around, but he works out at the training center more often than not, does some of the small repairs on the facility, keeps the grass cut there, works on our cars periodically, things that we can do ourselves that we don’t need to go to our dealer or the service center for.

President Shetler: Okay, so he’s more than just a groundskeeper, he’s a general maintenance guy?

Eric Williams: Yeah, we’ve added to his job description on a pretty regular basis.

President Shetler: Non-union position, and the – is that possible to do that through Community Corrections at least the grounds keeping part of it, you know, the grass cutting?

Eric Williams: We have really tried to stay away from having community service people using mechanized equipment: lawn mowers, weed eaters, and things like that because of some liability issues and problems we continue to run into. The community service people are a great tool for our community, we use them thousands and thousands of hours, but they’re much more suited for painting guardrails, picking up trash on the side of the street, moving boxes, things that don’t require them to get on a lawn mower or use something that is mechanical. It’s very difficult to control who – we can’t. Who is coming into community service and what their skill levels are. It’s, you know, every week it can change who you’re going to get that’s going to be working in community service.

President Shetler: Is that different than someone that attains the level of trustee or something like that in the jail?

Eric Williams: Well, community service is somebody that’s not incarcerated, generally they’re on work release and doing community service hours. An inmate worker is somebody that’s actually confined to the confinement center, they’re in jail and the only place they do any work is inside the walls of the jail, and they don’t leave that facility for any reason under any condition. So they’re two different categories of people.

President Shetler: And the Custodian, that’s just a few spots down from there?

Eric Williams: The Custodian is assigned to the command post and does all the –

Eric Williams: Yes. Well, again, just like the maintenance, we use them where we need them. Generally, she works out at the command post doing janitorial services, cleaning, light bulb changes, and things like that.

President Shetler: How many custodians do you have at the – well, you don’t have any, I guess, because that’s all operated by the Building Authority at the Jail now.

President Shetler: I guess that’s kind of going back, Jail House, that’s a little bit of a 50's type thing.

Eric Williams: There’s a lot of names for it and I usually recognize all of them.

Councilmember Lloyd: One other question, Sheriff, I know on page 21, I guess 1130-0236 to 238, the Court Screeners, is that the only three new positions we’d need for the new security or is there –

Eric Williams: Based on the model that we have begun with, now obviously, if there are going to be changes to that model and if you’ll recall when I came and made that presentation, we made the absolute most conservative estimate we could make to try to make that work, with the knowledge that it may be more than those people can handle to do that and we may have to come back to the table. But I would much rather start it off on the low end and maybe work my way up as opposed to having too many and then never, you know, there’s the saying in government, once you have them, they never go away. You know, you hate to have extra employees and just trying to find things for them to do.

Councilmember Lloyd: In this budget, it’s just those three so far for the new plan?

Eric Williams: Right, since we’ve not implemented it yet, those positions are all still vacant. As I had said, I won’t fill those until we’re only about 30 to 45 days out from actually implementing it. There seems no reason to me to have those people on the payroll until I absolutely need them.

Councilmember Kiefer: Sheriff, on that, how did – I mean, we probably talked about this and I’ve just forgotten, how did the $31,011, how was that price tag come up with for that position?

Eric Williams: That was basically a Job Study position. We already had two existing Court Screeners so there are going to be three more of that like position. So that is the base salary established by the Job Study for that position.

Councilmember Kiefer: That’s the base salary. And then one other question, the Computer (Data Management) jumped up a pretty good jump, what’s –

Councilmember Kiefer: It’s 3370, it went from projected 2009 of $5,990 to 37,500, last line item on page 23.

Councilmember Kiefer: Okay, well, I didn’t know if that was the same thing or not.

Eric Williams: Yeah, it should have been about a $30,000 increase, roughly. I don’t remember the exact dollars, but that was, you should see a reduction in the CIO’s budget request for network maintenance by the exact same amount and we’re putting it in ours because he wants the maintenance to be under our budget.

President Shetler: That Manager Information Systems, will that reflect over there as well, then, or is that –

President Shetler: And is that 38,000 only, is that all they’re getting paid or is that – there’s nothing in another budget where they’re being supplemented –

Eric Williams: No, that is a county employee and that’s their salary. Our contractual IT services, there is a line item under contractual for that, we supplement that, the county picks up part of the tab, commissary picks up part of the tab and user fee picks up part of the tab to meet the contractual obligations for that position.

Eric Williams: Two. One county employee and one contracted vendor. I would tell you, with that line of questioning just so you know, that’s one of the areas that I’m the most proud of within the Sheriff’s office, of the way we’ve been able to manage our IT services with the resources we have because we are not under the MRC contract or anything within this building. And I think when you look device per device and server per server, and user per user, we’re probably substantially below the dollar per unit that is down here. And I’m not saying that they’re wrong or what they’re doing is inadequate or inaccurate, I just think that we’ve held the line pretty tight on that one.

Councilmember Kiefer: Sheriff, change back to those Court Screeners, when is that supposed to go into effect?

Eric Williams: You know, the time line right now, I know that the Building Authority has ordered the equipment, installation, those kinds of things. You know, one of the big issues is getting everybody credentialed. I’m getting the committee to issue the final statements on what we’re going to allow. There’s obviously been a substantial amount of feedback on how we’re going to conduct that, and like I said, I’ve said before, there is no firm decisions on the exact policy. There are a lot of recommendations at this point in time. But I would say that, you know, best case scenario, 60 days at best.

Eric Williams: I’ll just take questions because there shouldn’t be any changes in the Jail to speak of. I can tell you that today’s population is 505: 71 females, 434 males, so we’re just a hair below the capacity and we’ve held that number for a little while, so that’s a good thing. Community Corrections is full at 200. We have approximately 10 to 13 on the waiting list. The GPS bracelets are going extremely well.

Councilmember Raben: Just one general comment on this budget: as we go through the process, one line that we typically cut is the 2660, which has just always been a line that we’ve used to help get us below the freeze. If we manage to make the cuts necessary to kind of flat line this budget, that’s one that I would like to increase somewhat. I don’t know that we’d do it to the $675,000 that’s requested, but we know that one always comes back to bite us in the butt. So, you know, if we –

Councilmember Raben: No, that’s Food. So depending on how good a job we do on everything else, this is one line that, you know, that I would recommend that we make an attempt to increase over last year while we’ll probably never get it to the actual requested amount.

President Shetler: The Teamsters offer a health program, that premium may be somewhat less than what we’re currently paying. Would you see any conflict or problem if those employees were able to switch over to an alternative like that?

Eric Williams: I certainly can’t speak for the employees or the bargaining unit, but I know that the bargaining unit and their representation had made mention that there are other insurance options out there and possibilities that are out there. Not being that I have any direct control over the insurance, I have not given it much thought, but I think if, you know, personally, I think if the coverage is similar to all the other county employees and the cost is less, it doesn’t seem to me that there should be a lot of arguments about that.

President Shetler: I know I was asking for speculation on your part, but at the same time, I didn’t know if you had a feel for some of those and might just, within your department, if they could create some –

Eric Williams: I found the staff to be extremely reasonable. You know, again, I think that most of them feel very fortunate to have a job right now and a steady job working in county government. And I think they’d be willing to talk about any issue to come to the table, if it makes sense for the county and for themselves.

Councilmember Lloyd: Total, I guess, personal services are up only 1.25%, which is really low and then the total jail budget up 234,443, which is 5%, and part of that is in the Food account, so, I mean, I think this budget has really held the line versus the prior year although it’s a huge budget, 4.8 million.

Eric Williams: I think that we’ve done a lot with a little. I really shouldn’t say a little, 4.8 million is a lot of money, but when you look at the scope of services that are provided across the board by the Sheriff’s office, I believe it’s reasonable.

Councilmember Goebel: Just one other minor question, Sheriff. Training, you’ve increased that request, did you address that already?

Eric Williams: I just said that that was one that if it didn’t get through, that we could accommodate that not being increased, however, training is one of those things that is continually increased for us by the state for our deputies. Just this year, they’re going to roll out some new training requirements that we’re going to have to meet. Fortunately for us, we’ve got a fairly capable staff that we can do a lot of the train the trainer, train one person and then we can train the rest of them in-house for the most part. But that’s an area I always like to see enough resources in to provide the kind of training that we feel like the community wants us to have.

Councilmember Goebel: Okay, I thought that was the Sheriff’s office, not Jail.

Eric Williams: That’s the grant position that we discussed last year, and at this point in time we still don’t know what the award is officially going to be from the state to fund the Domestic Violence Coordinator for the office. I wish I could give you a better or more definite answer, but that’s kind of where we think it’s going to be.

Eric Williams: I do not know. They have a unit assigned that does domestic violence and sexual assault crimes, but whether or not they fund theirs through a grant or partially through a grant, I’m not aware.

Eric Williams: That’s a budget that’s established by the state. They dictate the dollars that we get and that’s how we divide them up.

President Shetler: Are there any revenue sources that are out there? You and I talked about this last week a little bit.

Eric Williams: We submitted the sheet that was required with all of our incoming revenue streams that are out there. For example, the sex offender registry, you know, we enacted the fee structure on that, which is helping to pay for the cost of the person that’s running that. We quietus those dollars back into the General Fund to balance the increase that you saw fit to give us last year. I assume that there are probably other revenues that are out there, but in general, the group that we’re dealing with trying to collect those revenues from are probably the least capable of paying, more often that not, and create more overhead in trying to collect than they do. I can tell you that from the Community Corrections side of it, that’s a budget that we didn’t address yet, but that budget is as flat as flat can be. And, in fact, that is one of those programs that does a great deal in funding itself and we’ve seen our collections continue to stay consistent over there even with the increase in costs with the GPS monitoring and some of those things. So we are aggressively trying to make sure that we’re getting all the dollars that we can from all the legal and reasonable resources that are out there.

President Shetler: Someone that’s pulled over for a DUI, it’s mandatory for them to be taken down and processed I think, isn’t it now?

President Shetler: Do we get any revenue at all for that? You know, for the processing for that person?

Eric Williams: No, I think the way to phrase that is, that’s a cost of doing business, being that the county is responsible for the Jail and we take everybody that’s arrested on a state charge within the confines of this county. It’s a cost of doing business. There are some statutes out there that allow you to charge some booking fees, housing fees, some of those things, but right now, the Indiana Sheriff’s Association’s Council is advising everybody to stay away from that right now because they don’t think that’s going to work out. And those have been on the books –

Eric Williams: There may be some issues with those. We’ve never explored in great depth charging the inmates a fee to be there. You know, you can get into a lot of philosophical discussion about whether that’s right or wrong or not, whether we have the statutory authority to do it and then whether or not they can pay it or not, and where would you get those funds and would you then accrue numbers and go after them in small claims? I mean, there’s just so many issues, and it’s a big issue. I’m not saying it’s not worth tackling, or at least continuing to discuss, but it’s not one that we have ventured too far down with.

President Shetler: I recently saw a report on one of the networks that it talked about several communities across the country that were doing that and they were reporting an average of about 30% of people who are able to make some of those payments. And I’m really not speaking of those who are indigent or who are in a position not to pay them, nor am I trying to force someone to pay something when they’re not found guilty, but perhaps after they’ve pled guilty to a crime like DUI or whatever, for the processing that we’ve gone through and the inconvenience and the cost that it’s been to the community, another 40, 50, $60 fee that may help us out along those lines is where I’m coming from.

Eric Williams: And I certainly don’t disagree with you on – I happen to personally believe in user fees and if you use the system you should pay a greater weight than the average. You know, everybody pays a certain portion and know it exists, but if you’re a frequent user then probably your rate of pay should be a little bit higher. And as we talked about, I think it would be a very interesting conversation to have with the judges on how that would work, especially looking at the – and not so much maybe the drunk driving arrests, but more the failure to appear arrests because that is a group of people that are significant and those are people that aren’t being arrested because of the charge. They’re being arrested because they failed to show up in court as they had promised or said they would or were directed to do so. And that’s a pretty big pool of people and I think that would be an interesting one to look at in that respect. Today may or may not be the forum, but I would suggest that there’s probably also some room to talk about assessing other agencies booking fees. For example, the county picks up the tab to hold prisoners, you know, I think there’s room to talk about assessing the city a booking fee if their people are arresting until such time they go to court and become prisoners of the state. That’s treacherous territory to talk about, but it would at least be worth maybe exploring at some point in time.

President Shetler: Alright, thank you. Okay, anything else? Anybody else have questions? Community Corrections.

Eric Williams: Again, I think that budget is flat. Again, I’m proud of our collection efforts in that area to stay firm on and making sure the people are paying their freight when they’re in those programs. And it is a fairly self-funding program with the exception of some grant dollars that come in there and some personnel costs that the county has provided.

Councilmember Lloyd: Plus $40,000 on a 1.5 million budget, so that’s 2.6%, so it’s pretty flat. And that’s just mainly step increases, I believe.

Councilmember Kiefer: I have a question. It looks like a decent jump in Other Employees, and it looks like through June 30^th you had spent this year $188,000, well, if you multiplied that by two, it’s a lot less than $500,000. Is there a reason why, next year is something happening?

Steve Craig: Yes, the reason that I’m asking for this increase, one thing that doesn’t reflect a good picture on it is because the way the part-time people are used. It’s for the lifeguards and that, July and August, you know, that part of the time is usually our heaviest use. But the reason that I asked for this request is there is an old saying about timing, but the timing was wrong. But it was the minimum wage has went from $5.85 an hour last year to $7.25 now. And last year I went through the books and we had 70,000 part-time hours, and $1.40 a raise, that reflects almost $100,000 according to what we was running on that, we would have needed. This year I did not get any money at all, it was a 65 cent raise for everybody that was on the part-time account, not everybody, there was some people that was above that already, but we made several changes in hours. We made several changes in the way the people work, we split shifts up where we didn’t have large shifts and we’re trying to make it work. I didn’t know if we could get through this year with it because you take the 65 cents and take it times it, and we didn’t get a raise at all, but that’s because there’s going to be $1.40 more than we were per part-time hour paid at the park. And if you break it down, it’s probably 70 to $80,000. And I’m asking for 25, I think I can make it work. I’m not telling you I won’t come back next October or November

begging for some money, but at this time I think some of the policies that we’ve done, that I can make it work with that.

Councilmember Bassemier: On that Tires & Tubes, it jumped up a little bit from last year. (Inaudible – microphone not turned on) - we spent (inaudible) that’s on 2220. Double that, is there a –

Steve Craig: That’s actually only the bills that we got in and I save my money as much as I can. My explanation on that is we purchased one new vehicle in the last ten years. We get vehicles when they are surplussed from other departments and I don’t have the prettiest fleet, but it does work for us at Burdette. And I’ve done that so that I wouldn’t be buying new vehicles. I know some people get new vehicles all the time, but I guarantee you when I get those surplus vehicles, they need tires. And I’ve got school busses that we have to put tires on and I’ve got mowing equipment. We just replaced all their tires, they were six years old. I have farm equipment, tractors, backhoes and we have to put tires on them. And if you go out and buy four tires and divide it into 2,000, you don’t get very many tires. And I’ve got several vehicles right now that I’m not comfortable with. When my people, I send them to town and they said, what am I going to drive because I’m not driving that one or that one because the tires aren’t good enough, then that was one thing that I know we were supposed to flat line it, but it was just a safety issue to me.

Councilmember Lloyd: Question on park revenue, how do we look this year compared to prior years?

Steve Craig: Okay at the six month point I gave you when I appeared before you for my transfer, we were, I think, 60,000 above last year. At the end of last month we were still ahead of last year and after having a July where it rained all four weekends, that was my bread and butter month, and I lost all my weekends, we’re still ahead of last year. Even though the economy is where it’s at, we’ve had an extremely good year. We’re not behind. And the one thing that I want to bring out a point is that of this budget, I will return 70% of that money to the county coffers before the year is over through our revenues. So when you look at it, you may think that’s a lot of money to run a park, but when I get my revenue and that, you know, I return it to the county, so I think that’s something that we could look at, too.

Councilmember Lloyd: So in dollars, where are we at in ‘09, like as of July 31^st?

Steve Craig: I’ve got that here. We’ve taken in $665,549.09 as of the end of July.

Councilmember Lloyd: What do you attribute that to? I mean, that’s a fantastic record to have an increase in this kind of economy.

Steve Craig: First of all, I think we put on a good show and we give people a good value for their money and I think our advertising, we’ve changed the way that we went with our advertising the last couple of years. Two years ago we sold 320 season passes. Last year, we sold 430, and this year we sold 560, and we targeted that with our advertising. Those are dollars in the bank before we even open up, we’ve got those season passes. And then, according to statistics, people that’s got passes to get in spend 35 more percent at your concessions because they didn’t spend any money that day when they came there. So I think things that we’ve been doing has helped us out. I think maybe people stayed a little bit closer to home, that may have helped us also, but I predicted that we were going to be a lot worse off than we are and I’m proud that we are where we’re at.

Councilmember Lloyd: The other thing, overall, this budget is up 43,808, 3%, but it’s 100,000 lower than ‘08, so, I mean, this is a pretty tight budget, I would say.

Steve Craig: Well, I was looking, through my budget and I was trying to cut some money out and it was an interesting fact, in the last five years, I have 28 line items in the 200, the 300 and the 400 lines, and out of those 28 line items, 21 of them are the same or lower than they were five years ago. And when you get into repairs to equipment, get into sanitary supplies, chemicals, medical supplies, light bulbs and that, you know, if you’re the same or less than you were five years ago, you know, I’ve not just been watching my budget this year, I’ve been trying to do it for the last ten years actually, but the five years do reflect that.

Councilman Sutton: Steve, what was that revenue number one more time through the end of July? 665...

Councilman Sutton: And what was that through that same time period for last year?

Steve Craig: 665,306.48. There was a difference of about $247 we’re ahead of last year.

Councilman Sutton: Yeah, that is, given the climate, and some of the other factors that you had mentioned, I mean, that’s a pretty strong showing on the park’s part and you can be proud of what you guys have been able to do through these circumstances. So we definitely appreciate it.

Councilmember Bassemier: Are there any plans in the future about adding another attraction?

Steve Craig: We have several of them that I have submitted to the Commissioners for their review, which would come under CCD, Park & Recreation, part of the Commissioners. We have a plan, we have some drawings for a new water attraction, new playground. I’d like to build a new chalet, the timing seems to be right with materials and the building part right, they’re a definite asset to the county, not only from the income they bring in, but from the visitors they bring in, the leisure hours. We actually, I got together with some of the people from the Visitors Convention Bureau, got some numbers on when people stay in your park that are using your facilities such as the Discovery Lodge, there’s a lot of big weddings, people come from all over the United States. But when they use our chalets, according to the Visitors Convention Bureau, they spend $92.30 a day in your county when they have leisure, it’s called a leisure day, and that’s actually direct expenditures. That’s money that they spend, it’s not no trickle down thing that you can get these reports, but this is actually how much -- they have a company called Certec that does the study on it and that’s $92.30 a day. And if each one of our chalets was rented 168 days last year, they were worth $77,532 to Vanderburgh County.

Councilmember Bassemier: Has there been any talk about converting that regular pool into a wave pool? I don’t know, you probably know this, if you convert a regular pool into a wave pool, I know that’s a big attraction at Holiday World. I talked with Mark Tuley years ago and we were kind of working together on that, --

Steve Craig: Actually, we looked at that this year, went down and looked at a lot of the new things out. I would preferably probably put a wave pool in if it was the first thing, but there is a couple of things that – one of the things, they’re the most dangerous pools there are. Second of all, we would have to probably take out one of our pools to make it work. They’re very expensive, but there’s all kinds of thrill rides out there and I’ve had to take looks over the years, do we want to try to compete with the, you know, Holiday Worlds and the Six Flags and that, because every year they come out with a new three million, five million dollar attraction and I’m not going to try to stay up with them. But we’ve looked at the wave pools, we’ve looked at the Master Blaster, there’s all kinds of crazy stuff out there. Their life is not that long. Our slides are still very popular right now and one of them is 15 years old and one of them is ten, and the kids still use them every day. These other ones, after two or three years, the reason that they’re buying brand new ones is because they get old.

Councilmember Bassemier: I know when (inaudible) did that feasibility study out there on the wave pool (audible) 35 to 40,000 people, if I remember correctly, but I don’t ever remember it being a safety problem because there is no undertows or anything in all the information I received on (inaudible), it was the complete opposite. I don’t ever recall any drownings that I’ve seen over the years in a wave pool so –

Steve Craig: Well, I think if we got the facts out on it now, they’re finding out different. They actually even ask you to put cameras underneath the water and have people monitor them because as the waves come out, it’s called an undertow. They can be safe to a point but when they get into the deeper parts and that, they have become a problem. Personally, like I said, that would be the thrill ride I would like to put in first, but as I’ve looked at them, it’s just one of those things that, like I said, there’s safety things, but there’s a lot of them out there that are kind of dangerous, so you have to look at that point as well as the cost. And the cost to also staff them. We’ve looked at a new attraction a couple of years ago and we would have had to hire 24 new lifeguards to man the attraction.

Councilmember Goebel: Just looking over the salary increases, are those required by contract or –

Steve Craig: Those were the, I think, longevity pay was every three years, those are longevity pay for those employees that got them. As you can notice, the manager did not get a longevity pay increase even though he’s been there longer than everybody else. But all the union people did get a –

Steve Craig: But the union people did have a mandatory longevity pay that was included in these wages and that’s why it reflects a raise this year for them.

President Shetler: It’s a three year contract, I think, they’re involved in. Are you finished, Mike? Alright, Councilman Raben?

Councilmember Raben: Just a brief lecture. You know, one thing that’s always bothered me about, you know, we’re talking about new, bigger, sexier pools and things like that, you know, we don’t want to lose sight of what the mission is at Burdette Park, that it’s inexpensive, affordable fun for everybody, and when you get into bigger, better pools, things like that, costs go up. You’re talking more help, a tremendous amount of overhead, suddenly you’re not an affordable for everybody park. I mean, I think we’re already at the point that, I don’t know that it’s affordable for everybody. I mean, I would like to see us find ways of lowering our ticket price and maintaining the beautiful park we’ve got today. You know, I still believe that there’s a lot of people that can’t go out to Burdette on a weekend when they want to, so –

Councilmember Bassemier: (Inaudible – microphone not turned on) you get more people out there, (inaudible) and that’s the only thing I was saying. I know you’re going to (inaudible) because if it wasn’t for the water slides now, (inaudible) the water slides wouldn’t be doing the business it’s doing now, but to a degree, I agree with you.

Councilmember Raben: I mean, it is a county park. We’re not, Steve said it best, we’re not competing with the Holiday Worlds or Six Flags or anybody like that. Let’s keep it affordable, let’s keep it well maintained, and keep the beautiful park like it is.

Councilman Sutton: Well, you know, something maybe we can be mindful of too, is we had the really nice land acquisition a couple of years ago, you know, we’ve got a lot of acreage to work with to take advantage of healthful living, people are, you know, we’ve got the trail, we’ve got a lot of things that we can do that could be good, clean, inexpensive activities for families, and we’ve got a lot of options from a property standpoint to make that happen. You know, we probably do need to take a look to see what the other plans are now for that new space that will allow people to maybe hike in those areas and the trails and things, but things that are inexpensive and I think Jim brings up a good point, you know, just keeping it a park that is accessible to the whole community, and a good fun experience, and I think all the reviews have always been real positive about what people bring and the experience they have at Burdette. But just being mindful of just other things that we can do. You know, we talked about the recreational activities as far as expanding softball and that type of thing in the areas, those don’t necessarily cost a whole lot, but just some things that we can look at. We don’t necessarily, of course, we’re not competing against a theme park, we’re not in that league, but –

Steve Craig: Well, one interesting thing, we don’t compete against them, but in the Reader’s Choice Awards for the last four years, we have been number one on the favorite place to be on a hot day, and Holiday World was second. So it does show you what the tri – I mean, that is the truth. And it does show you what the people of the tri-state, you know, maybe they can’t afford that much money to go up there for the day and we do try to keep it cheaper, and that’s where the family passes come in. If you buy a family pass and you take your kids out there ten or twelve times, it ends up being just a couple of bucks a day to swim, for the kids. So that’s one of the things that, you know, I think we have going for us is the affordability of it.

President Shetler: Along those same lines, I don’t know how sophisticated your accounting system is there, but do you break it down by areas or departments, like the swimming, how much revenue and how many expenses and then also your cabin rentals, etcetera?

President Shetler: So maybe you could provide that information to us at a later point in time so that we could look at that.

Steve Craig: I’ll give you as many years as you need. We have it broke down and --

President Shetler: Maybe the history of the past couple of years of where the revenue is coming in, the expenses for that specific project going out.

Steve Craig: We break it down to the utilities and the maintenance and everything for every department.

President Shetler: Alright, great. Thank you. Anybody else have any questions or comments? Okay, thank you, Steve.

President Shetler: Now with regards to tomorrow, we have Personnel? No, that’s going to be on Thursday. Okay, so tomorrow we begin at 9:00?

President Shetler: Personnel & Finance at 8:30, okay. And then we’ll transition into this at 9:00 for budget hearings. So 8:30 tomorrow morning. Motion for adjournment would be in order.

President Shetler: Oh recess, I’m sorry, not adjournment. Alright, we’ll see you all tomorrow morning at 8:30 for Personnel & Finance.

The Vanderburgh County Council met in session this 19^th day of August, 2009 in room 301 of the Civic Center Complex. The meeting was called to order at 9:00 a.m. by County Council President Tom Shetler, Jr.

President Shetler: Good morning. You’re at day two of the County Council budget review and we will call the roll real quickly. Thank you.

COUNCILMEMBER	PRESENT	ABSENT
Councilmember Sutton	X
Councilmember Bassemier	X
Councilmember Lloyd	X
Councilmember Goebel	X
Councilmember Raben	X
Councilmember Kiefer	X
President Shetler	X

President Shetler: There being seven members present and none absent, we have a quorum, and we will resume our second part of the County Council review from day one, which was yesterday, that we recessed. First up is the Recorder’s office. Z Tuley? I’m not seeing the Recorder at this time, we’ll go on – I’m not seeing the Coroner, either. Oh, I’m sorry. There you are, I apologize. You’re small and behind a couple of other people there. We’re on page 35 of the budget book.

Annie Groves: Uh, not good. One is going to have to be towed away. It won’t run at all, the other van.

Annie Groves: Our van wouldn’t, the year of it. It wouldn’t qualify. It was too old to qualify for what they wanted.

President Shetler: I guess that’s what they’d tell me, that I’d be too old to qualify, too. Any questions? Yes, Ed?

Councilmember Bassemier: Annie, on the Chief Deputy, how did you figure that salary? Do you have longevity figured in that or...

Annie Groves: Well, that’s kind of a unique question because due to the fact that the way he retired from Sheriff’s department, he had to bump all the way back to base, but he is in a POLE position, so technically, I mean, I just went ahead and took the salary from last year and put it in there.

Councilmember Lloyd: Good morning. Assistant Coroner, is that more than one person?

President Shetler: Now aren’t they guaranteed a certain amount of time, those part-time?

President Shetler: By the hour, but aren’t they guaranteed so many hours per week?

President Shetler: Wasn’t there an issue on that last year that we talked about you having trouble attracting people –

Annie Groves: The pay is so low. We only pay 8 an hour. And what I figured in this budget right now is if we could take it to that number right there, we could pay them ten dollars an hour. They haven’t had a raise in nine years, but the law has changed twice in those nine years and they now have to go to school and get certified, and then they have to have continuing education. In order for them to do that, they have to take their own vacation time from their full-time job to do this. So I’m very fortunate to have the staff that I have, but it’s really hard now to keep people because of all the state requirements, and we have no choice but to follow the state laws.

President Shetler: With regards to autopsies, I know that was a question that came up last year and we got into a lengthy discussion about that, are you doing that locally today or is that still being done by outside contractor?

Annie Groves: Well, actually, our doctor has a couple of homes and he does live here, too, so he does live here and we do have a – the county has signed a contract this year with our doctor, so we now have the doctor under contract.

President Shetler: Okay. And is that contract per autopsy or is it a flat amount for the year?

President Shetler: For the seven, eight months, whatever we’ve, seven and a half months we’ve gone.

President Shetler: So we’re on track to do something in the neighborhood of 180 – $190 then for the year? I mean –

Annie Groves: However, you know, you have to realize that two days ago, we worked three suicides in one day. I’ve already had 25 suicides this year. We’ve had 23 accidental overdoses this year.

Annie Groves: In the state of Indiana, the only thing that’s mandatory, if it’s a child three years or under, that’s mandatory. And then there is no other requirements. However, in our office, what we do, all homicides, fire deaths, if we don’t know the cause, manner or mechanism of death, we will ask for an autopsy. Now if we have someone that’s in the hospital, that’s been in the hospital for like three weeks and we have all the medical records, then we don’t autopsy unless it’s a homicide, then we will.

President Shetler: But, like on a, and I guess I should be hesitant to say, an obvious suicide because to most criminal investigators, there’s probably not anything that’s really obvious, but something like that where there is no dispute about it with anything, we would still go ahead by practice to go ahead and do an autopsy?

Annie Groves: No, we would not. If we go out to an obvious suicide and we have a suicide note, etcetera, what we would do is, we would just do toxicology. You know, we’ll do some toxicology, we will do x-rays to make for sure that the projectile, if it didn’t exit out of the body that we locate the projectile, but we wouldn’t do an autopsy then.

President Shetler: And is that, to do something like that, that’s a separate cost that doesn’t fall underneath this, contractual?

Annie Groves: In Diagnostic is where the toxicology comes out of. The X-Rays, we do in-house.

Councilmember Lloyd: I’m just looking at some of these supply item accounts. Are you looking to do more autopsies next year?

Councilmember Lloyd: Well, you’ve got some increases here. You’ve got, you know, a $500 increase in Gas & Oil, $1,000 in Garage & Motor, these are off the prior year, 500 Office Supplies, 1,000 in Lab Supplies, 1,000 in Sanitary, 500 in Chemicals. So I just wondered if that meant you were looking to do more volume or –

Annie Groves: You know, I kind of prepare for that because every year our rate goes up. It’s really hard to answer that, however, the reason I did the gas is because we’ve only had one vehicle this year, now we have two so I’m thinking we might have an increase. There’s just, in the Garage & Motor, I don’t think we need to increase there because now we do have a new vehicle so we don’t have the wear and tear on the other ones. I am more than willing to live with the budget that you gave me last year, there’s just a couple of items that I need to raise, but other than that, I think that we can make it.

Councilmember Lloyd: Okay. Then what about, go down to 3160 Radio/Pagers, you have spent zero, I guess, the first six months, but you’re looking for $2,000?

Annie Groves: Well, I’m going to transfer into contractual because we now take that into, instead of the pagers, we now have cell phones so I need to transfer that into contractual to cover the cell phone cost where it used to take care of the pager cost.

Councilmember Lloyd: Okay, and then 4,500 in Buildings and Equipment, 4122? Was that repair on the building or did you have some other plans for that?

Annie Groves: That was for the carpet and the flooring that we put in last year. Or, I’m sorry, at the beginning of this year.

Councilmember Lloyd: Okay. So the completion of that, because you spent $9,000 so far?

Annie Groves: Well, what I did was, I encumbered money in that account from last year.

Councilmember Raben: Yeah, the building equipment, the 4,500. Do you still need that for next year or you don’t?

Annie Groves: I think they just carried those numbers over from last year is what they did because in my actual request, I didn’t put that down. And that’s because the Commissioners have given me permission to go ahead and bid the rest of the building repairs. But if you want to give it to me, I’ll take it.

Councilmember Goebel: On Maintenance Contract, what does that involve, do you know?

Annie Groves: It involves our X-Ray equipment, we have to have the processor, we have to have the chemicals changed all the time. We have our grass mowed and our refrigeration unit that goes out every other week.

Councilmember Goebel: Are any of these requests for copy machine lease or anything like that?

Annie Groves: No. Actually, we do lease our copier but that comes out of my Contractual account.

President Shetler: The Chief Deputy, is that a non-exempt, is that what it is, exempt employee or is that underneath our...

Councilmember Raben: Annie, back to Contractual, that 3530, so the 9,000, that’s going to have the copy machine, that’s –

Steve Owens: Good morning. The only thing I would have to say about our request is we’d flat lined this year’s budget as requested. The only thing that has really changed since we submitted it, we have been informed by the Building Authority that the rent request for next year should be at $56,875.57 as opposed to the $55,000 that I’ve got in the request.

Councilmember Goebel: Steve, you zeroed out one of your part-time and lumped those two together and made one full-time, is that correct?

Councilman Sutton: Steve, on the Travel/Mileage and on the Training areas, can you talk about those? Are those related to the annual training that you guys have to have to keep your license or is that something else?

Steve Owens: The training is – we have mandatory CLE, so all of the full-time lawyers in the office and all the part-time lawyers also have to have a minimum of six hours per year and it actually works out over the three year period, they have to have really twelve hours per year. So the training is what we’re paying to send attorneys to CLE seminars.

Councilman Sutton: Locally, are you looking at options to take that training here? I know we had a couple of discussions yesterday from a couple of offices that are looking, at least one office is trying to do that, to reduce some of the cost.

Steve Owens: Well, we’ve already done that. We’ve already given some local in-house CLE seminars within our office. You have to have those approved by the CLE committee up in Indianapolis. Unfortunately, many of the seminars, virtually all of them, are out of town, so we go to as few of those as possible. But we’re not really equipped to be able to give everybody the minimum number of hours per year locally. We’re doing that to the extent that we can.

Councilman Sutton: Well, just trying to see, you know, I’m not necessarily saying that you guys put on the training, I’m just saying that offerings that may ordinarily have been in Indianapolis or if there are opportunities here or a little bit closer that could cut down on maybe some of that travel and mileage there, reduce our expense there.

Steve Owens: Well, the travel and mileage isn’t really predominantly from training, the travel and mileage is predominantly from investigative expenses, mileage for the investigator to go out and do that. We have some travel and mileage that goes to people that are going out of town. We have a trial that’s going to be held over in New Albany, so we’ll have some travel and mileage for that. The training account is predominantly just for the CLE.

Councilmember Lloyd: Just to follow up on that, some of the part-timers, they do their CLE like in their offices or whatever, I mean, you just verify that they get it, but do they all use the county or do they – I mean, the ones that have private practices, don’t they do CLE on their own?

Steve Owens: The ones that have private practices will have to do CLE on their own as well. What we have been doing is, if it is a PD related sort of CLE for the part-timers, we’re paying half of the registration fee and nothing else. They’re picking up all of their travel, the other half of the registration fee. We have too many lawyers to be able to provide CLE for everybody at the full load.

Doug Brown: Good morning. Essentially, our budget is exactly the same and we plan to try and stay within it.

Councilmember Lloyd: On page 39, you’ve got a Deputy that has a pretty significant decrease. Was that a retirement or did someone leave? It’s 1380-1080, it went from $62,373 to $52,894.

Councilmember Lloyd: Okay, I figured that’s what it was. I mean, the overall budget is only up $7,000, which is less than 1% if you go to the – 1,731,420. Pretty small increase.

President Shetler: Okay, anybody have any questions or comments? Alright. Thank you.

President Shetler: I assume we were taking all of those. Does anybody have any questions about any of the other parts of the Prosecutor’s budgets while we’re...yell now. Alright. Good.

President Shetler: That gets us down to the County Commission. Mr. Tornatta? And he just stepped out. Let me just ask, is the Recorder back in yet? I haven’t seen her. Commissioner Tornatta?

Troy Tornatta: How are you? Commissioner Tornatta. Good morning. I got a call right before you called me...73, is that correct?

Troy Tornatta: Okay, looking down, first of all, any questions before I get into it? I would like to open up with a quick comment. It is refreshing to have the Commissioners office and the Council work so well together and I appreciate that from all the members of the Council. I also appreciate the fact that this is a County Council and a County Commissioners office are working together to live within the means of the county. And here again, I commend this Council on living within your means. The taxpayers might not know it now, but they will know it when it comes to looking at their tax rate from the county and it’s a way that we’re going to make sure that we have the money that we need over the next couple of years when others are not going to have those type of dollars and it’s all because we’re cracking down, asking our employees to do extraordinary things with some flat lined resources. So to do that, we all have to be in on it, not only employees, but the administration, I think, we are doing that, and so I applaud what you’re doing and what the employees are doing to make sure that we get through some of these financial rough times. So, that being said, if you’ll look at Southwestern Mental Health, 1300-3020, I believe that is a flat line because the CPI is flat. Sandie, I don’t know if they gave you a different number or, Bill, did they give you a different number, but from what I understand, the CPI is flat so we shouldn’t see an increase in that line. The same for Hillcrest –

Councilmember Lloyd: So you have three percent in here, of an increase, but you think that’s not going to come about then?

Troy Tornatta: Right, and Marissa put that in before she got the number. It looks like the CPI is going to be flat or negative and I don’t believe we’ll hit – we’ll adjust a negative number, but we’ll stay flat. I know for a fact that the Washington-Hillcrest Youth Home will be flat. And we’re signing a contract with Washington Youth Home that will essentially say that their increase will only be the increase of our employee’s salaries, or CPI, whichever is less. So it will be a new contract with them to adjust a little bit closer to how we run business here. Urban Transportation, I just wanted to maybe see if – I believe that’s the MPO and maybe we can change Urban Transportation to MPO on the books in the future.

Troy Tornatta: 3090. And other than that, I don’t really have anything from the Commissioner’s office as a whole.

Councilmember Bassemier: Troy, on the Rent, that went down, didn’t it? It’s not reflected here and I think that went down, didn’t it? 3600?

Troy Tornatta: Yeah, that was given to us from Dave Rector. It should be decreased to $4,756,206 for 2010.

Councilman Sutton: So what figure do you have with that rent? I mean, I know what we have here, but what do you – is that in agreement with what you’re anticipating? We’ve got $5,890,710.

Troy Tornatta: I believe we requested 5,800,000 – is that what you were saying?

Councilman Sutton: Troy, on line 3750 Purchasing Department, since a lot of those responsibilities are now shifted and there were a couple of positions that were eliminated but there’s no difference in what they’re looking for on the county side, is that figure in line with what the county is...

Troy Tornatta: This is a perfect segue to introduce the office, the people that help run the Commissioners office: Kristin Comer and Marissa Nichoalds are behind me. I will say, do we have, did they give us the number?

Marissa Nichoalds: I haven’t seen it, but it should be a third, a third and a third. City, county and –

Councilman Sutton: Well, if we’re dividing it a third with each entity, city, EVSC and the county, it may not end up being a half of this, but it shouldn’t – definitely this is not the correct number.

Troy Tornatta: Right, I guess I would look to – between now and the time that we have to finalize this number, we should be able to get a correct number.

Councilmember Lloyd: Let’s go backwards a little bit. Line 3000 Bond & Insurance, 46,000 increase? I mean, you just mentioned it’s to cover insurance premiums, so our carrier came back with that?

Marissa Nichoalds: That’s just a standard increase. I think I’d plugged in three percent as an increase there. Usually, we do see an increase and I had asked our insurance agent for some numbers, but I’m still waiting to get those.

Troy Tornatta: We should have the numbers back in the next couple of weeks. That’s our hope. And I think before, we’ve always been delayed on those numbers. We try to make it a point that they have those numbers ready by this time but they are trying to project 18 months early and so, I mean, that’s where we’re always going to get a (inaudible).

Councilmember Lloyd: But that’s the insurance on all the county buildings and –

Troy Tornatta: Correct. The only thing I will say is that I believe the new state statute actually says that we have to carry more liability on the buildings at a higher rate, so I would not be surprised to see this number go up per the state statute.

Troy Tornatta: No, it’s actually what we are mandated to carry as far as liability insurance. I believe there was a change.

Councilmember Bassemier: I got one more question. Troy, we heard this yesterday with Craig with Burdette Park, and I understand it did very well this year compared to last year, are there any future plans for Burdette Park, any changes, and could you give the reasons if you do have any changes?

Troy Tornatta: Yeah, and if we could, if it’s okay with you, let’s get the CCD or we can go to that whenever, and when we go to CCD, I want to talk to you about some thoughts that we were throwing around.

President Shetler: Let me just ask you a question, kind of general here, and that is with regard to the health insurance, because that’s contracted with you guys, is that a three year contract?

President Shetler: Are we – how locked in, for example, if a portion of our employees speaking in terms of our – the ones that are represented by bargaining groups out there, if they would do an alternative type of insurance policy or something, are we locked in to where that would not be allowed or... And I don’t mean to put you on the spot right now, you might want to talk to the attorney and stuff and ask him.

Troy Tornatta: Yeah, that would have to go back. I mean, it’s, to my knowledge that we picked up this particular carrier because of the incentive that we would get over the long haul and through the amount of employees that we have on the program or on the plan. And so I really, that would be a tough question to answer at this point.

President Shetler: If you could call Ted or someone and go back and check that out and find out if there is a little bit of room that we can look at, particularly, I’m thinking of the bargaining unit, you know, the ones that are represented by bargaining units out there, if there is an opportunity for them to do something else that might be of like kind, but save some money, that might be something we might be interested in.

Troy Tornatta: Yeah, the main reason why we went with this plan is because we believe that we’ll see a continued savings. Will it hit the four to five million dollars that we once anticipated? It’s going to be hard to say with the fluctuation in nationally what health care is doing and locally what health care is doing. I will tell you this, that our health care is running about 88% and that’s on an expenses to cost ratio. Essentially, we want to be about 75% of what we spend out. That’s the ratio we want to be, we’ll even get some money back, and that’s the deal that we cut. When we’re up at 88% , that’s not giving us any leeway and the next year, subsequent years, it’s going to boost our rate potentially to the max. At 88%, we’ll be at the maximum rate, which is 13%. Our goal is to be a healthier community and a healthier employer and try and get our employees to buy into the fact that we’re all in this together even though we’re not self-insured, so to speak, we’re still outlaying 8 to 11 million dollars on health insurance, and we need to make sure that we’re doing our part, everyone is doing their part, to keep that number as low as possible. We’re not saying don’t go to the doctor, but make sure you read and know what the most effective and efficient ways are to help out, everyone out, because if we can bring that down at the end of the year, that’s going to save us on health care costs. Right now we saved 400,000 over what we had in the past and that allows us to keep that 8% to our employees for health insurance and I think that’s what we all want. We don’t want to have a zero salary increase and then make them pay another 8 or 10% on their health insurance. So we want to make sure that we’re doing our due diligence as a group. And right now, 88% is higher than a lot of other places that we checked.

President Shetler: Along those lines of, if you could check into, also if the contract that we’re involved in would preclude us from looking at the option of having a clinic like the city is establishing and several other private businesses are engaging into today and saving a considerable amount of money by doing so. And if that contract would allow for some room to do that and cost savings as well.

Troy Tornatta: Well, I’ve been checking that avenue. I’m not sold, even though these clinics are out there, I don’t know what that cost is to keep that clinic running. Much like the offices that we have in Vanderburgh County, they do cost an amount of money. And we can’t discount the fact that we’re saving $25 per person at a time, yet we’re spending 800 to $900,000 for an office and we’re checking into those numbers now just to see if it’s something that would benefit the county. But right now, through several of our TPA’s, I’m not real sure that I’m getting a fair answer. I know people are doing it, but that doesn’t mean it’s always right.

President Shetler: We have one other advantage that might be able to be utilized, and again, I’ve spoken very, very briefly with the health department about this earlier, but there may be a way, and all the other entities that I know of that are doing it, are saving a considerable amount of money. What they’re having to do though, is to go outside and go to a third party privatization to actually do it, when we, in fact, have a lot of expertise right here pretty much, you know, in-house that we might be able to contract through the health department, a way for them to perhaps, I’m thinking that there may be a way here where they could actually have a division that would be “profitable” and help offset some of the other costs that we have and save the taxpayers in the long run here. So I don’t know if there’s a way of bridging this all together, with the resources that we currently have in play, that we might be able to do it. But the contract, I guess, is where we start to find out whether or not –

Troy Tornatta: Yeah, and we can do that. And all options are open. So I appreciate the comments and we’ll check on it.

Councilmember Goebel: Troy, I commend you and the Commissioners for trying to keep the rates down for the employees because, obviously, they’re not going to get a pay raise this year the way it looks, and the benefits probably outweigh a pay raise anyway, if we can maintain those. And I know you’re exploring ways to save on healthcare, as you mentioned already, and as Mr. Shetler mentioned. Do we have, just one simple question, a differential rate for tobacco users and non-tobacco users in our county, do you know?

Troy Tornatta: No, and here again, we’d have to check legally if that’s available. A lot of times there are reasons why we can’t do such an act and it comes down to equal and fairness and how that’s done, and there’s a lot of lobbyists out there that work the other side, too, to make sure that everyone gets treated fairly. So, I’d be happy to check that, but I think, at this time, it wouldn’t be an option.

Councilmember Goebel: Okay, well, you’ve taken some measures already to make Vanderburgh County employees more fit, more aware, and I think that seems to be the trend these days, too.

Troy Tornatta: I think that’s what we need to do and that’s where we all collectively need to have ideas and come up with things. Any idea is a great idea if it’s dealing with a better fit employee base, and making sure that everyone gets into it, like we did our walking contest. One small thing, but a lot of people got good and hopefully there are people that kept up with their fitness, so that’s only going to help us and bring that 88% down.

Councilmember Kiefer: Hey Troy? Commissioner? Does the health insurance company, when you talk about that 88%, do they provide you statistical information saying – I know they can’t disclose certain things because of HIPPA laws and things like that, but do we understand what segment of our employee population – is it the – I mean, I just don’t know what they’re allowed to provide, but –

Troy Tornatta: They will provide RX, which is any prescription, how much we spent on prescription drugs, they will provide how much in-patient, out-patient, --

Councilmember Kiefer: But it’s not a demographic that says the older population costs X, the –

Troy Tornatta: No. We do have some numbers and I can get that to anybody that wants it.

Councilmember Kiefer: Well, I was just curious because it might help us direct your planning when you’re doing health and fitness programming, if you saw, hey, we really need to target this age group or this type of population for health programs. You know, and then one other question is, you said the city, and I think I read about this in the paper anyway, the city has their health clinic they’re setting up. I mean, if they’re already spending the money and have the expense of having that set up, I wonder how much, what the differential cost would be for county employees to be able to utilize that?

Troy Tornatta: Right. But I’m going to say that right now, we just have a little bit of an issue with the difference of insurance and providers. And then how will we differentiate and will that put more cost into the running of that office? And how will that be based and –

Troy Tornatta: I think it’s a great opportunity to look and see if that’s a health savings situation, especially since we have more employees in this building, but at the same time we want that cooperation back and forth and I know they’re working hard to get this thing set up so, --

Councilmember Kiefer: Just curious, where are they setting up that office? What part of the building?

Councilmember Kiefer: Oh, I was going to say, because we’ve got 36,000 square feet, maybe we can rent to the city some of that.

Councilmember Lloyd: We had Mrs. Townsend in here yesterday with Weights & Measures.

Councilmember Lloyd: And she was talking about their move to 2901 East Morgan, which is the old National Guard storage building. Some of the questions she could not answer, but she mentioned your name.

Troy Tornatta: Okay. If you’ll look through that sheet, obviously, you’re going to see that there are several options and all the options would total $41,931. The building would be at the old armory facility, and I believe everyone knows, right by McDonald’s Golf Course, off Morgan Avenue. We were able to talk to the city and the Park’s Department and get them enthused about this and been working very diligently to make sure that, although Loretta might be displaced at the end of the year, we’re going to have her home and have it ready for when she’s ready to get in there when she’s displaced. As far as office renovations, it’s a block building and the structure is in great shape, the inside is not and so we have to bring it up ADA compliant and do some things that are up to code. And that’s really where we left it. We’re going to slap some paint on the wall, potentially, on the outside of the wall, that’s up to you guys. Inspect HVAC, make sure she has heating and air in the place, it’s got a chain length fence, something that she needs, she’ll have more security than she’s had in the past, they’ll be able to take all their equipment and put it inside and house it inside the building where I know they’ve been carrying it and had it inside another building where this will be a better structure. This will also be a block building, so it will be secure and we’ve taken precautions to put some type of plastic over the top of the windows so the golf balls don’t come through. So I think we’ve tried to think of everything, but do it in a cost saving manner. This would be a situation where I would ask the city to pick up 50%, even though we’re 55/45, I think this is something that we’re going to help the city out with. The city is also looking to make it a zero rent situation. So, and everything is subject to change, we know that. But as far as her budget, I believe we’ll be very close if we take her rent line and put it in to some type of utility line, I think it will wash.

Councilmember Kiefer: Troy, did I understand you correctly, the city would not charge rent, the rent would be at no charge?

Councilmember Kiefer: Okay, but she’s responsible then or the county is responsible for the utilities and the maintenance and –

Troy Tornatta: Well, we’re splitting that 55/45. So, at that point, if it’s $6,000 in utilities, we would only be responsible for $4,000.

Councilman Sutton: One of the questions that I had for Loretta yesterday regarding this structure and the rent agreement, if there are maintenance issues, repairs that need to be made in the future, who is responsible for those?

Troy Tornatta: It would go along the budget lines, so if it’s 55/45, and we have the lion share, then we would pay that amount. Obviously, there’s going to be something budget-wise, they’ve had a sweet deal. We’ve got two or three offices that have had sweetheart deals and we’ve kept them there. This gets it kind of back in-house, so to speak, and allows her to be in the center of the community, allows her to be out and have facilities that are worthy of her job and in this case, we just build a different budget in; instead of a rent line, we might put some type of services line.

Councilmember Bassemier: Troy, we’re going to pick up all the renovation costs?

Troy Tornatta: Split it. It’s going to be my request that we split it 50/50 and do what we need to do. If we don’t think we want to paint the outside, don’t paint the outside, save the money.

Councilman Sutton: Of course, you’d also talked about just the moving costs from their present location to the new one, she wasn’t really sure how that would occur. In her budget, that would cover that?

Troy Tornatta: Yeah, I’m going to say we’re probably going to have to throw another few thousand dollars at her moving costs. It was my responsibility to get a build-out cost on what this would look like and what it would take to make sure that it was inhabitable and ADA compliant and state compliant code and whatnot. As far as moving her, I really hadn’t thought about it besides the fact that when I talked to Loretta, she acted like it wouldn’t be that big of a move besides come cabinets, at that point, we’d probably just bid that out.

Councilmember Raben: The county has got enough trucks to make that – I know you’ve exhausted a lot of time with this, and I think it sounds like a great program and it should be beneficial for both city and county, I appreciate it. Thank you.

Troy Tornatta: We’ve looked and to try and find a segment and then to kind of block that down, I think is going to put us in a bind at the Highway Garage and it’s also – it’s not going to satisfy what I think our needs are for Loretta’s access. Loretta should probably be in the center of town, I think, by putting her at this facility it puts her in the center of town. She has a gasoline unit that measures gas and other things. I really want that away from as much stuff as possible. This is a stand alone building, it’s a block building. If there were a fire, you know, stranger things happen, it damages nothing at this property. It wouldn’t even hit a house. I mean, it’s far enough away from everything to cause a problem. So in this instance, for what her needs are, there’s never been a better building for what she needs.

President Shetler: At the County Garage, though, they do have fuel pumps there and there is a gas station across the street, so as far as –

Troy Tornatta: Yeah, but she’s constantly bringing gas into the property, out of the property. For liability purposes, I just think that that’s not a set up that we would need and that’s my personal opinion, and not of the other Commissioners, but talking to Loretta, knowing her office, being her liaison for as long as I was, I’ve been dealing with this for a while.

President Shetler: So like the Executive Inn, because that’s where it’s been before, pretty populous, I mean, as far as bringing all those kind of – that chemical and stuff in and out of there?

Troy Tornatta: I’ve not been a big fan of that location for the longest time. The monetary value and what Loretta, where she would have to go, her other alternatives, she would rather have stayed there and they had a bigger parking lot in the back that they could use. And that parking lot is a necessity. At the Highway Garage, there’s so many trucks back there, she’s not going to have the same situation.

Councilmember Goebel: Troy, there’s a security fence there already, is that correct?

Councilmember Goebel: And the rent seems to be very good and Loretta seems to be quite pleased?

Councilmember Kiefer: Commissioner, while my preference is to see all of the county offices in county owned buildings, I think this is a good step. I mean, at least it’s a government owned facility and we’re not paying it out to some third party, so I think at least that’s a good move. And if you can get the city to chip in 50/50, you know, that’s comforting to know, too, and plus, zero rent is, I don’t know how you can get much better than that.

Troy Tornatta: I would assume that that’s going to – that’s where we’re going to get a little attorney work in there, but we’re working on an agreement right now.

Councilmember Lloyd: It will be a lease, but the Park’s Department owns the ground, right?

Troy Tornatta: Right, and that’s who we’ve been going through right now. Obviously, the Mayor has a lot to say with the Parks Department and Dan Shaw has been great to work with on this.

Troy Tornatta: Yes. Security issues on vehicles and to start putting up gating around that place, I think we take away some of the aesthetic value. I didn’t even want to go there with the Preservation group on trying to hit that angle, and her getting in and out is going to be so much better out in this area.

Councilmember Lloyd: I mean, I think this looks like a good deal for both parties.

President Shetler: Okay, we’re ready to move on. Thank you. Go to the next one.

Troy Tornatta: Okay, any questions? Let me tell you, the Energy Savings Contract, although we see that’s a pretty big number, runs through 2015, just for your information. As far as the Sheriff, Motor Vehicles, I did neglect to talk to the Sheriff, I know Marissa has talked to the Sheriff about this.

Councilmember Raben: I can speak to those. Just like years in the past, he has requested them both in the General Fund and in CCD. The $250,000 will probably be ample to take care of his needs for cars but one of the – I would like to able to add about $25,000 to that because the equipment, the light bars and some of the stuff, Ford is going to discontinue manufacturing that Crown Vic, police car version, so whatever the new version is, he won’t be able to utilize his old equipment.

Councilmember Raben: And I’m advocating 250,000 plus 25,000 for new equipment.

Troy Tornatta: Okay. The one thing the Sheriff is doing that is something that I’m sure he has talked to you all about is, he’s been able to get some engines, use some of the older cars, I say older cars, they’re really new cars, new interior, everything is just spruced up, puts the engines in it, rebuilt engines, and he’s able to get three cars or four cars for the price of one. So he’s doing his best ability to keep these cars on the road and, I mean, we’ve never had that opportunity in the past, so I commend him for what he’s doing. As far as looking at Park & Playgrounds, Ed, that’s kind of where you were talking about. As far as Burdette Park, I think, obviously Steve Craig is doing a bang up job out there. He saves us a lot of money in how he’s able to fix parts without having to go outside and hire extra help because of his knowledge and his staff’s knowledge. And so that’s been a bonus and that’s saved thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. He submitted a budget request and there’s a couple of things that I would like to look at. We do have a neat situation out at Burdette Park where we have the chalets. He’s looked at building a turn-key chalet, at least one, I think that it might be something, because people are doing more “staycationing”, they’re staying in town. This might be an opportunity for us to continue the works that we’re doing out there at the chalets. The chalet turnkey is $198,000. Now with that, I think it’s very interesting, we did a little research to find out that $92.30 is spent in our community every night’s stay per person. And so you start doing some quick math, if 12 people, there’s 160 rentals with a maximum of 12 people, let’s say six people are in one of the chalets in a year, that brings over $88,000 to our community. When you start doing some bigger numbers, the total of all the chalets rented is over $482,000 to our community. Now we keep saying that we lose money out at Burdette Park, but do we really? And it’s kind of like at the Centre and some other locations, some other venues, do we really lose money because we actually get these people in our restaurants and in our community, they’re servicing, and with those types of numbers, I mean, I think that we do see some benefit.

Councilmember Raben: Just a quick question on the chalet side, would we be better spending that money to rehab the existing chalets? I mean, the condition of those, what are those like? I guess some of those are what today, fifteen years old? Older than that, possibly?

Steve Craig: Steve Craig, manager of Burdette. Yeah, they’re probably approaching that but as far as I’m concerned, they’re in tiptop shape and I really don’t have any major improvements to do. I do need to treat the cedar on the outside, it’s at the point where it’s drying out, that it needs some treatment, but as far as refurbishing them, I do not believe that it’s needed at this time. Some new furniture every year or two, we put in them whenever it needs it. The one that Troy was talking about, we actually, several years ago had the site, we flattened it, we brought the electric, the sewer, the water, everything sitting there so there’s no infrastructure needed for the chalets, and it’s due east of the present chalets, it’s not 100 yards away from the other ones. So it’s in a central locale. And the other thing that we have, these are all part of our ten year master plan. They had suggested building several more chalets because of the income that they do bring to Vanderburgh County. Yesterday Royce had asked me about the new 30 acres that we got and all the possibilities. That 30 acres does join up to our present chalets, and that’s where that woods and that starts. And right now we’re doing an infrastructure study on that to see where the road, where electric, where everything goes in that, and that will have the space for four more chalets at the northern part of the park in the next 20 or 30 years, of course. But there are places up there to expand for the chalets, where we can have up to ten chalets.

Councilman Sutton: So is what you’re presenting here, is this like an extended stay facility or something? This turnkey chalet that you’re referring to?

Steve Craig: The turnkey just meant that’s everything included from the furniture, everything. That’s just come in and somebody build it, and that’s the cost that it would, you know, to get into the building. Cost may seem high but we do pay the wages that we are mandated that we pay. It makes them go up a little bit higher than probably you could get a house built. But that’s what we’re mandated to pay so that’s what we do. That’s ready to walk in and you’d rent it for the first time.

Councilman Sutton: I just remember the cost maybe being a little bit lower when we built them before. Of course, times change, building costs go up.

Steve Craig: Well, you were standing on the deck the first day that we got them done, but that’s when my ground crew also existed of six or eight people. And if you remember, we had them framed out and my crew built the rest of the chalets. That made a difference. We no longer have that large a crew. Our crew is down probably to a maintenance crew now, and not a construction crew. And that’s one of the reasons I try to hold the money back. We don’t do a lot of construction anymore, we do a lot of maintenance. But yes, it was a lot cheaper back fifteen years ago and you was there the day we dedicated them. But they’re still, I think, in great shape. I mean, if you walked into them, I don’t think you could date them too much. But we try to keep them as clean and as functionable as possible.

Councilmember Goebel: Following Jim’s question, do people shy away from any of the chalets? The ones I have seen are well kept and clean. Do people, when they take a look say, well, I don’t, this doesn’t fit my needs or what I hoped to have? Are any of them rented more than others, I guess, is the question?

Troy Tornatta: We do have a, kind of a sheet on chalet rental. In fact, I’ll just pass this around.

Steve Craig: Yeah, it is kind of unique. Some years, one will rent more than others. The next year, the other one will rent, but they’re pretty well all within probably of an amount of twenty in a year. I don’t know why some of them change one year and some of them don’t the other year. But they pretty well rent equally. Location with number one used to be something. It’s set off a little bit by the side and people, if they had first choice, they would probably take it just because it was a little bit more secluded on the one side.

Troy Tornatta: We did find out in just, they do questionnaires and find out about complaints or whatever, so we are adding cable t.v. to the chalets. When you have people that do stay in town, they want their services. So we are doing that. One other thing we did at the level, is we got with Steve and talked about where the pricing points were as far as the Discovery Lodge. We gave discounts during the week, we were able to boost our sales and future sales. We also were told that we would be hit between what, 20 and 40 percent this year in our stays, and because we adjusted, we’re actually ahead of where we were last year on stays. The revenue is about the same, but we had to do that to make sure we kept turning those properties. So I think we made a calculated decision and its paid off and so we’ve had the volume through the park and it shows at the pool and whatnot.

Councilmember Goebel: I think there’s no doubt about that. You know, Burdette Park is no longer a well-kept secret and wedding parties and things like that, you’re doing a great job in that regard. Do we have out of town wedding parties stay on-site very often? I know you’ve talked about this in past meetings.

Steve Craig: Every weekend. Sometimes they rent all the chalets for three, four or five days and, I mean, they rent all six of them including the Hickory Lodge. The Hickory Lodge being twelve has become a popular venue with the weddings, with, like the girls from the wedding party might stay there for three days before and everything is on-site, and this just works great with the wedding. We bring people in from, I’ll tell you who is happy, is the hotels over by us because we don’t have enough chalets on the weekends to accommodate them and they end up staying in the local hotels.

President Shetler: Okay well, the only point I’d make is one I’d made yesterday, Steve, and that is I think it’s important for you to get to us some kind of breakdown on the accounting, the revenue and the expense side of it so that we could look at each one of these particular projects that are going out there and do some cost accounting on it because it all sounds good, but I don’t like to operate from the seat of my pants. I’d really like to know that we’ve got –

Steve Craig: I will have it to you probably tomorrow. We make them out every year and turn them in.

Troy Tornatta: One of the things that we try to do with a lot of our offices that we oversee is to make sure that they get us revenue projections and hopefully we can convey that to you whenever it’s needed. Real quickly, there was a sidewalk and curbing replacement. We are going to see if the Highway Garage, during their down time, if they have down time this year, can go out there and take care of that. It’s about a $35,000 project, hopefully we can take care of. There is a Burdette Park/USI pedestrian bicycle nature center handicap parking section to replace the one that’s there. I probably would like to see that in subsequent years when we have a better ability to pay for that or if we have extra monies that are left over from what we’re doing out there now. And then, the last one, there where the batting cages, Steve sees a need to have an interactive playground which is ADA compliant and it’s next to the concession stand, next to the Putt-Putt. If we do have something over there, we are going to attract people to that site. It does carry a $210,000 price tag. Obviously, we’re open for any suggestions on that, but it is a pretty substantial unit and that will go next to the Oasis Miniature Golf complex, and it is a vacant spot right now. And if people are over there, we do think we’ll see revenues go up at the concession stand.

Councilmember Raben: Mr. President, while we have Commissioner Tornatta here, do you want to go ahead and take the rest of his budgets then?

Steve Craig: I have one small comment. Of these projects and that, none of these will need any excess or new workers, or anything. That’s something, whatever we’re doing, if we added a chalet, I can accommodate that with my crew now and with this interactive playground, the batting cage used to have two employees there at all times, I will not need the employees stationed there paying them, so these projects are not going to add to our workforce.

Troy Tornatta: Riverboat I think is pretty self-explanatory. We have roughly 565,000 in our Economic Development line. We’ve been very cautious to spend that and any monies that we do accrue in there, obviously are toward that Economic Development side, and I’ve made it a point to let you know if we’re going to expend any of those dollars. Infrastructure and Drainage has $392,000 in that account and then Initiative Based and the Dental Clinic both have a zero balance.

Councilmember Bassemier: Mr. President? I’ve got a question on that Welfare to Work program or it’s called Initiative Based Assistance program, what’s the administrative cost? Do you know? The cost to run that program?

Councilmember Bassemier: Yeah, if you could get me a rundown. I was hoping some time in the future that we could get whoever is the manager of that program or supervisor, whatever, can come in here and give us a little presentation on that.

Councilmember Bassemier: I don’t know if we have time...got about five minutes or whatever? While I’ve got you here. I appreciate it.

Melissa Rynkiewich: Melissa Rynkiewich, with Lieberman Technologies, and we’ve managed the program since 1997. This is an Initiative Based Assistance program that you have to be working or enrolled in school full time to receive childcare assistance and/or car repair. It is not an on-going program. People who qualify come on and they have 52 weeks, if they remain eligible. Car repair is for those who are going to work, can’t, their car is, you know, I’m telling you, these cars are like, nine, ten, eight years old. There are no new cars getting fixed. And one of the barriers to keeping a job is having reliable transportation. A barrier to keeping a job is also affordable childcare. Childcare for an infant in a licensed or accredited center is $155 a week. That’s not a lot of money left over if you are making minimum wage. So what this does, it’s based on your income. As I stated earlier, you must be working and/or in school full time. And we can help you up to 52 weeks, and it’s non-renewable. So if you’ve used it in the past, like five years ago, you can’t use it again. It’s not per child, it’s per family.

Melissa Rynkiewich: I believe the administrative cost is ten percent. It’s ten percent. And we see those families at the minimum, three times a year. They have to be redetermined at least every six months. There are applications that they fill out. We enter the data. We track. We mail out initial interview letters to those individuals. We also mail out letters to get in and get re-certified so that they can keep their subsidy. So if a person comes on, we also do allow a 30 day job search. And that person has to show that they’re going out and looking for a job. We have forms for them to fill out, so we have to see them in 30 days, and once they get a job, you have to see them 30 days later, so they can present pay stubs, so we can determine what their copay may be at that childcare center.

Councilmember Bassemier: What’s the percentage of people after they finish the program and do they keep their jobs? How long do they keep their jobs afterwards?

Melissa Rynkiewich: I don’t know that I can answer that, because I track them while they’re on the program. I don’t track them once they’re off the program, but –

Councilmember Bassemier: How do you tell if the program is really working if they go out afterwards and they quit their job after, how do we know if the program is really working?

Melissa Rynkiewich: Well, I can’t answer that. I mean, I feel that it is working because we’ve also, with the funding, the Prosecutor’s office has been working, we fund a person to go out and actually have child support, where they can go in and file for the child support and then all those steps with that. And I found that those people that use that service and when they start getting child support, actually come off our program because if more of the families could receive their child support, you know, we could help more families. But the child support is a real issue when it comes to those families succeeding or not, being on welfare or being on a program like this. So what I have seen are those women who are getting, or men, who are getting their child support finally, they’ll come off the program because their income has come to a level where we can’t help them any longer.

Melissa Rynkiewich: I have that with me. Would you like to know from inception or...

Melissa Rynkiewich: Okay, right now, as of this year, we have 46 families and 61 children. To date, for this year, we have served 79 families and 119 children. With safety net, we just have one slot left for car repair. That’s helped 28 families this year alone remain employed by having a vehicle that they can get to work with. And Prosecutor’s office, they’ve done a total of 552 intensive assessments this year alone. They’ve done 246 established paternities this year alone and have established 189 support orders.

Councilmember Lloyd: Is that, for someone that wants to sign up, is that the Prosecutor’s office is the normal place where they get that information or they –

Melissa Rynkiewich: No, they would come to our office and fill out an application or take it with them. And we have requirements they have to prove, 30 days of income, they have to show us if they are or are not receiving child support, they have to prove that the child is actually theirs, I mean, all those things.

Melissa Rynkiewich: We are located at 223 NW Second Street. Everybody calls it the Girl Scout building, but I’m on the third floor, we’re on the bus route, and we’re downtown.

Councilmember Bassemier: Now the car repairs, what do you allow on that? Are these major repairs, transmission, rebuilds, or just –

Melissa Rynkiewich: It’s up to $750 per vehicle and mainly what we see is tires, brakes, rotors, you know, struts, sometimes there are engine troubles, I mean, I have to rely on my husband when it comes to the cars, so, but they have to get estimates and it’s not like, here’s the money. There is like 28 vendors in the county that participate and the families go and get at least two estimates. And if they don’t like those two estimates, they can go to all 28 vendors. If the car is not driveable, they only have to get one, but they have to get on the phone and talk and see who will come and tow the vehicle for them. And that is part of the $750.

Melissa Rynkiewich: No problem, you kind of caught me off guard, but that’s fine, that’s why I’m here. Thank you.

Councilman Sutton: Troy, you had indicated there is a zero balance on the Initiative Based, now our book, you know, we run a little bit behind with maybe what the current figures are, we’ve got $200,000, just a little over 200,000 showing left as a balance in that account.

Troy Tornatta: Yeah, they spend it down to zero, and that’s every year. So we’ve never had a balance in that at the end of the year.

Councilman Sutton: I guess a key to that program is that first word, it’s initiative based. If you don’t meet certain qualifications, you can’t participate in this program. The – when – the dollars – do you have an idea when those dollars actually were totally expended in this line?

Melissa Rynkiewich: Yes, they are encumbered funds. When I bring on a family in January, that goes, if they come on February, March, April, May, June, I, you know, I have to do that 52 weeks in anticipation. And that’s visited every two weeks when we process the claims, there is a projection done and we know where we are and if we need to bring families on or not.

Councilman Sutton: Okay, so you come on in March and you have that certain amount set aside for that family through –

Councilman Sutton: Though it may show zero, that family still has their allocation set aside?

Councilman Sutton: For them for that course of the program if they meet all the requirements?

President Shetler: Okay, anything else? Mr. Commissioner, since you said such kind words to us in the beginning, I think what we’ll do is, we’ll give you a little bit, we’ve got a couple of other ones that were in between you, but we’ll just continue on with The Centre and The Convention Centre and get all the operations underneath your belt out of the way first, and then we’ll go back to the Health Department. Does anybody want to take a break before we get to that point or just keep on going for a few minutes here and then we’ll –

President Shetler: I think The Centre might be the next place, and that would be page 102.

Troy Tornatta: Alright. We have our management from The Centre here with us if it gets more difficult we can throw it to them.

Councilmember Bassemier: I’m sorry. 3537, how did you all come up with that figure?

Darren Stearns: Darren Stearns, assistant general manager for SMG. That’s based on the CPI as well, so we did not have the number, so if the CPI is zero, then it will go back to zero. It’s increased by the CPI.

Councilmember Lloyd: Right now that’s three percent, is what it’s showing in the budget book.

Troy Tornatta: Okay, this is not the CPI, the CPI is like negative 9 or 97, something of that nature.

Councilman Sutton: Of course it depends on which, I mean, there’s two or three different measures on CPI, so just which one you –

Troy Tornatta: Right, the index that most people go by is a negative this year and I think in all the contracts it agrees not to go backwards, but it will not move forward.

Councilmember Kiefer: I was just getting an idea on projections for revenue for 2010, does it look like it’s going to be a good year or –

Darren Stearns: Right now we’re not seeing anything major. We do have a few concerns, of course, with the hotel next door and depending on if that’s going to be closed any time in the future, how that might affect some of the events that we’ll have there. It has kind of showed down this last quarter of this year. The first quarter was very good actually for The Centre, which was surprising to us, but it’s kind of slowed down and we’re hoping the last quarter is going to pick up. We have actually quite a bit more shows than we do normally in the last quarter for this next quarter. We’re holding out on our Christmas parties, of course, as well, corporate Christmas parties will have a lot to do with the December month.

Councilmember Kiefer: That’s why I asked the question because knowing the stadium project is going to be underway, how that was going to affect your 2010 revenue budget.

Darren Stearns: We’re not real sure yet. None of the groups that we have scheduled for next year have cancelled. We did have a convention that we had bid on that has decided to go somewhere else just because they were concerned about the hotel and when they would be closed and the number of hotel rooms. But we haven’t heard anything since then about any of the things that we have already on the books for 2010.

Troy Tornatta: I think one thing that we got ahead on was to talk to all the people at the Executive Inn that had contracts and we made those contracts work as much as possible at The Centre, and we tried to pick up that business. So we did see a bump there. I think we’re going to see a decrease in some of this because you can’t stay close to the convention center, you will see a decrease but then I think we’re going to see a big bump after the stadium is built. So, you know, it’s going to be, a be patient matter, but I think once we do, we’ll see a nice bump.

President Shetler: Okay, and are all of those six laborers on the same weekly schedule? Like Monday through Friday?

Darren Stearns: Yes, they’re staggered. We have two that are Monday through Friday, seven to three, we have two that are Wednesday through Sunday, three p.m. to eleven p.m., and then we have two others that are Tuesday through Saturday seven to three.

President Shetler: Are you able to, if you have a couple of big weekend things coming up and know it’s going to be real light Monday and Tuesday, for example, are you able to shift that schedule around pretty much?

Darren Stearns: My understanding is, I think there has to be a two week notice before you can move their schedule, --

Darren Stearns: Yeah, but then they have to stay on that schedule for a certain time frame, so the way I understand it is, you can’t move them and then move them back the next week.

President Shetler: I’m just trying to think from a management perspective if there were ways to keep that overtime cost down and, obviously, you’ve been looking at that anyway. Alright, thank you. Any other questions, comments? Next, the Superintendent of County Buildings.

Councilman Sutton: Before we get too far away, back on The Centre, from a maintenance and repair standpoint, is there, where do we stand on The Centre?

Troy Tornatta: Right now, we’ve been putting roughly a million dollars into The Centre for maintenance and repair and add-ons and things that bring it up to date. And we’ve been pretty diligent to keep that going, and that’s through the Building Authority. And so we’ll get a capital improvement budget on The Centre. We’d be happy to pass that along if you want to look at it at any time. But it talks about if they say they need new microphone boxes, if they need new curtains, you know, replace part of the stage, try and upgrade the orchestra pit or window valances, or whatever they need, they put that in that capital improvement fund. A lot of it’s electronic, getting the place constantly up to speed with what goes on.

Councilman Sutton: Well, I mean, I saw some pretty extensive projects here of recent on the exterior, don’t know exactly all of what was going on, some of it was more landscaping type of things, but there was a lot of tearing out so I’m just trying to get an idea if those are the types of, if we’re just beginning to level out, let’s put it that way on the maintenance, the larger repair items or if there is some things that are kind of planned, coming up here.

Darren Stearns: I think we are leveling off. I saw a lot of the CIP projects is, like he had mentioned, electrical, mics, pipe and drape, things that are revenue sources for The Centre now. Instead of having to go out and contract it out and bring it in, we actually have it in-house. But yeah, I think the majority, we just had the new cooling tower replaced last week, as some of you might know, but most of the major items that we’ve been coming up with are basically up to code that we know of. A lot of the things that we’re getting now are just some of the smaller things that we could use as revenue sources, the monitors for the LCD monitors, replaced all the white boards. Those of you that’s been in there before and it’s been written on boards, that’s what we have the LCD monitors for, for the meetings themselves. So I think we’re rounding it into shape.

Councilmember Kiefer: One final question, in regards to the utilities, I believe the, like the Civic Center, we buy gas on the – we’re able to use the NYMEX and fix our gas cost during, like right now, I think, natural gas is trading at a much lower cost than it will be come December, so we’re able to do some future trading and things like that, lock in through ProLiance and groups like that. Are you doing the same thing at The Centre or is that just, they’re paying whatever Vectren’s utility bill is?

Troy Tornatta: Yeah, he would take care of that. We’ve got about $8,000 left in that line item today.

Darren Stearns: Well, actually, utilities are paid out of a different fund than this budget, I think, the Convention Centre Fund budget, and actually, the numbers for gas are given to us from Dave Rector, because it is negotiated with the rest of the county.

Councilmember Kiefer: Okay, that’s all I was wanting to check on. I was looking ahead to the Operating Fund there, where it talks about utilities.

Troy Tornatta: Joe, I gave you a wrong number, I was on the Superintendent of County Buildings page. We have $8,000 left in that line item on the utilities, so, sorry about that.

President Shetler: What kind of occupancy do we have in the Old Courthouse right now?

Marissa Nichoalds: I think we’re probably still right around 40 or 50 percent. I know since the Commissioners signed the contract with Tucker back in June, we’ve gotten three new tenants since then.

President Shetler: You know, I’ve been by several times but right now, I don’t recall. The parking situation, has that ever been, because I know Dave Rector has had several different plans on that and we’ve discussed it for years.

Troy Tornatta: I’ve not seen a parking schematic, I know at one point they were going to look to do that. I think that our main focus right now is to see if we can develop the 35,000 square feet to the side of us and above us or below us on the second and third floor of the old jail. We want to make sure that whatever we do with that space, it’s up, ready to go.

President Shetler: Yeah, I mean, Mark keeps it that way. In fact, they, in-house, he’s actually doing a little bit more surveillance around the place and he’s taking care of that, so, I mean, we’ve got a dedicated employee over there.

Councilmember Lloyd: The burial allowance, it looks like we’re low on what we’ve expended in ‘09. That’s 3060, I mean, we budgeted 40,000, so that may be a little high, but obviously, you don’t want to have a big increase in use of that.

Troy Tornatta: I think we’re going, I think that’s a rate from the state, isn’t it?

Troy Tornatta: Cooperative Extension. Just real quick, I really put their board to work trying to make sure that they had a place that was going to be fitting for the Cooperative Extension. Councilman Raben has, and it’s in his district and he was working with them and with me to make sure that we had a good place for that group out there. We also wanted to work with Darmstadt, the town, and make sure that that was going to be a town that was going to keep rolling because they had people out in the area, (inaudible) as we’ve talked with them. What we’ve tentatively come up with is an agreement, the board president has signed an agreement, if conditions are met, they would like to stay in that area. The cost of staying in that area would stay the same from last year. It would not go up because the contract would have other (inaudible), so we feel like this is a win-win for both parties. If the conditions are met from the board of the Purdue Extension, we feel like we’re going to have a place for the next three years that’s going to be fitting for them. So hopefully everything works out with that and we’re able to come up with a contract, then we’d do that before the end of next month.

Councilman Sutton: So are you saying that it’s going to be in a different location than the –

Troy Tornatta: It will be the same location, but we’d keep the same rental rate as long as conditions are met from the board. They want to see some compliance and some code upgrades, and as long as they see that, they will recommend that we sign a contract.

President Shetler: So a continuation with the same lease for another three years with some improvements?

Councilman Sutton: That’s probably an example of an office where I know we talked about bringing them back in, trying to use the Old Courthouse or somewhere within this complex here, where they were here at one point in time. And given the nature of what they do, it does make a lot more sense to be in a location where they are close to the 4-H Center since a lot of what they do are rural related programs. They do, of course, a lot of school programs, as well, but I know this has been an issue just trying to find a suitable location for them. So I think they are pleased with their present location. They would like a little bit more space, but sometimes you have to move one way to get what you want.

Troy Tornatta: Exactly. And Susan Plassmeier, the director, out there and I are going to make a trip to Purdue at some point and just find out what their future plans are. And if there’s any opportunities for us to partner with them, maybe they get on the 4-H Center grounds or another place that the county would own and make it more of a laboratory for what they do, general gardeners, trees, plants, home economics, that type of thing, that might even be a better situation. But we’re ecstatic to be able to do this right now in Darmstadt, and we’ll stay here as long as we’re welcome and helping out.

Troy Tornatta: Contractual Services, just real quick, I think it raised like $316, and that’s only in compliance with the 4-H Center. I did get a commitment from Susan that if the Office Supplies went up $500, if we could just make sure the Contractual Services are there, they can probably try and save their pencils and use them extra to save the $500 in the supplies line item. But that’s their olive branch.

Councilman Sutton: Is that a maintenance agreement on 3370, that Computer (Data Management) or is that equipment?

Councilman Sutton: That’s page 67, and the line is 3370, Computer (Data Management).

Troy Tornatta: I believe that’s their agreement with Purdue. They have a T-1 line and a computer agreement with Purdue.

President Shetler: Anything else? Troy, are you going to be handling County Highway garage or Chris or...?

Troy Tornatta: Yeah, Chris. Do you want to do 911 Emergency Service real quick? Oh, you did that? Okay. Where did they come up? Did we say anything about the Reverse 911? I know it was requested at 100,000, but much like last year, I think we have 100,000 in that account, I don’t really know if we’ll have a need for 200,000 in that account.

Troy Tornatta: You budgeted $100,000 last year in 911. We actually got a grant from the federal government so now we’re looking to implement this but at the same time, if there’s $100,000 in there, I don’t know why we’d throw another 100,000 at it.

President Shetler: Highway garage, we’re at 114. Have we gone back to the eight hour day?

President Shetler: I thought we were trying to work at getting that back a little sooner.

Troy Tornatta: Well, November, in my estimation makes more sense because we still have warm days in October. November starts where you get the cool days, it starts to really taper off on the sunlight as well.

Troy Tornatta: And this was something that, actually the November date was negotiated with Mike Duckworth at the time. He believed that that was a better date right before – I believe we were talking to do it before election day and then come after a major holiday. And that was trying to make it compensable with the other salaries.

President Shetler: How do we reconcile the holiday pay when it’s, you know, everybody else is getting eight hours and then that group is getting ten hours, I guess.

Troy Tornatta: Well, over the course of the year, what we did is, we figured out with the union representatives and with Mike Duckworth and with their liaison, to find out what the total number of days or hours that they would be shy of maybe a standard employee in the Civic Center. And what we found was we’d be looking at about sixteen hours shy and so what we’ve implemented is a training, sixteen hour long or eight two hour, depending on what the training cycle is, if it’s thirty minutes, whatever they train on, they get credit for that amount of training. They’re going to have that training, it’s going to be two-fold. The first fold is going to be, obviously, we’re going to make them better prepared to do their job; the second fold is they need to do the training to make up the hours for those days that we believe were deficient. And so far, it’s been good, they’ve set up training sessions, they put that in a folder. We’re looking to, right now, put that on a computer so that they’ll have their training on computer with LTAP or all the associated training, INDOT, if they have training on computer, we’ll send that down, they go through the form, they sign up for the training, they check it off, it’s in their file and they have to have sixteen hours.

Chris Walsh: It’s going to be a take home, and that’s just in with the other training that we’re doing. This particular training is just to address that sixteen hour issue.

President Shetler: I’m not necessarily speaking of just the guys that are within the bargaining groups, I’m also speaking of the, you know, management and others. And I know we’ve got Labor Day coming up, you’ve got Veterans Day, you have different ones that fall in the fall between now and, you know, election time and so, I didn’t know what –

Troy Tornatta: We looked at those hours and we were able to get it to the sixteen hours by implementing the timing that we were talking about. I think it’s the first full week after October 31^st and then the last week after April 10^th or something of that nature. We’ve got it written down. So we have to send something to the Teamsters thirty days ahead of time, so we’re reviewing what those days are, rechecking our numbers, making sure that we’re where we need to be. But as far as that goes, I think we’ve found a process that will work to get them the hours that we believe they need to make up.

President Shetler: Since most holidays, I guess, kind of fall on Mondays, would it make sense to negotiate that work week to go from Tuesday to Friday as opposed to Monday through Thursday and then that would have saved us on that?

Troy Tornatta: We actually threw out several ideas as far as how to tweak that. It came down to numbers and our numbers showed that at a time when we go from eight hours to ten hours, if we do it in the manner that we’re proposing, we think it all works out no matter what. How we’ve had it the entire year, it does skew the numbers, there’s no question about it. And that’s what we look at. Where are the holidays, how does it work, how can we best fit them into a diagram that would match what our other employees are doing. And I think this has been the best opportunity and it works with not only the Teamsters representation, but the employees. And we don’t want to jack with their schedules a whole lot. I mean, to find daycare, to find people to pick up their kids after school, and whatnot, we want to be able to work with those employees and not put them in a position where they’re constantly changing back.

President Shetler: I’m not talking about changing week after week, I’m talking about that you establish from the get go, that they’re going to be working Tuesday to Friday as opposed to working from Monday to Thursday. I mean, instead of Friday being the day off, Monday is the day off. And then you avoid the holiday pay altogether.

Troy Tornatta: We’ll revisit it. I think just how we looked at it originally, it was more balanced.

Chris Walsh: On the other side of that, though, I did run some numbers on what some of the potential savings might have been. And, you know, with the price of gasoline fluctuating, I think what you have to look at is the gallon usage of your diesel and your gas. And potentially, these are preliminary numbers, we think we’re saving in the neighborhood of around 48 to $49,000 so far as opposed to last year at this time. It was started late in the year and it’s kind of hard to come up with a good measuring stick for it, but we feel like in that – now on the therm usage and the electric usage on the building, it looks like it’s about a wash. It doesn’t look like it’s –

President Shetler: I mean, because when you get into having to call in people on Fridays and all that kind of stuff.

Chris Walsh: Our overtime is so weather related, it’s kind of hard to do depending on, you know –

Troy Tornatta: And getting back to your point, I do want to mention this, getting back to your point, any time that there is a county holiday, they get the next day, so if it is a Monday holiday and they’re not there, they’re going to get Monday and Tuesday off. So that’s kind of...

Councilmember Lloyd: Mr. President, I mean, on the overtime, I think it’s going to turn out to be quite a bit higher at least based on the budget figures. In ‘08 we had 61,324 for the whole year, and halfway through the year we’ve got 42,709, so the ten hour days, it may just generate more overtime because you’re having to call people in for things.

President Shetler: Do you stagger your employees at all so that some of them have to begin their work days on Wednesdays?

Chris Walsh: We do have some staggering. We have a second shift doing some maintenance work, which they can also go out and take care of some of the minor call-ins that we have, but if it’s a major call and a tree is down, something of that nature, then we do have to call people in.

President Shetler: Rather than just actual shift, do you have any that actually begin their work week on say Wednesday and then go through to Sunday, or anything like that?

President Shetler: Have you explored that as a possibility? Because I’m thinking, I mean, somehow these tornadoes don’t know what day of the week it is, you know. So I’m just wondering if we did that, you know, for snow and ice and everything else that does come up, we’d at least have some people there during the weekend that would help keep down the overtime.

Troy Tornatta: And we can talk with the Teamsters about that. I just don’t know what we’d be getting into at this point with their contract. But, I mean, we’re open to do that.

Troy Tornatta: The one thing, let me mention this, and this is from Duckworth and I’ve talked to Chris just the same, the one thing that we do see out of these extended days, our tickets that are accomplished are sometimes two-fold of what we do in an average day. We’re knocking a lot of stuff out and so that extra two hours, the one thing we can calculate because we can give you the claims, and when I talked to Mike before Chris took the job, he said the amount of tickets that we knocked out were far and away more than they have in their pre-eight hour days when they have longer days. So I don’t know what that measure is and what that means, but I know it means a lot less on the complaint side and we are taking care of our citizens and that’s why we have them out there.

Councilmember Raben: The crew is already out, the equipment is out, we’re saving that drive time, that’s the biggest difference.

President Shetler: Alright. Thank you. Any other questions? Comments? Yes, Mike?

Councilmember Goebel: This is on, I guess, preparation for the winter coming up. On 2530, am I jumping too far ahead here? Bituminous Materials, I think it’s obvious we must stockpile and carry that over, because ‘06 we spent $11,000, ‘07 we spent $420,000, ‘08 we spent 34,000, and what is the situation right now? We’ve got a request for 80,000?

Chris Walsh: Bituminous Materials is a commodity that is actually ordered 24 hours in advance and they actually make it for us. And it’s an oil driven commodity, so the cost does fluctuate. We’ve been pretty lucky this year, we haven’t had much fluctuation in the price. Last year, I know there was quite a bit of fluctuation with it. So it’s something that I have to order. To use on Wednesday, I have to order on Tuesday.

Chris Walsh: Not able to really. There is a portion of it for pothole patching that’s more of a temporary material. Now we will stockpile some of that in the winter months with the snow plows and when have potholes to address. But for the most part, we don’t --

Councilmember Goebel: So that huge year just reflected the increase in the oil price and the asphalt?

Councilmember Goebel: As far as Calcium & Chloride, 2580, similar, $495,000 last year compared to 100,000 in ‘07. Do we have ample supplies?

Troy Tornatta: The price back then was right around 25 to $35 per ton. Last year it got up to $141 per ton. We actually bought at 125 on a deal. What we lobbied is to have the state put out the QPA for the materials. We were able to get that passed through the legislature and now we’re looking at sixty to sixty-seven dollars per ton that we can buy it and have it delivered. So it’s more than what it used to be, but, I mean, those are going to be the rates that I think we’re going to see.

Troy Tornatta: We have a contract between 1,500, I think, and 2,500 ton. Anywhere in between there, we can get as much or as little as those numbers and they will add to what we have now, which 1,500 ton will be about 3,000 ton and it goes up from there.

Troy Tornatta: It will be a one year contract they’ll go through. My anticipation is, they will do it, they bid it out every year. They will go through and bid it out again. If that’s a successful bid and we want to get on their bid, we’ll tell them what we expect, a min and a max, and then we’ll get into the line for purchasing.

Troy Tornatta: We also have addressed the gas consumption with our Sheriff’s department and other entities and have been locked down, I think the number was a buck, seventy-one this year, Bill, if I’m somewhere in that. So we did a good thing for the county. We saved thousands of dollars and we hope that we can also look to do that again next year to keep that budget so we know where it is and it won’t be fluctuating like it has in the past.

Councilmember Bassemier: I’ve got one. I noticed you have Equipment Lease & Rental in there, a zero in, in the future, now, we’re talking about, of course, 2010, are you saying your equipment is all in good shape? You don’t need any new equipment or...

Chris Walsh: We definitely could use more new equipment. I’m starting a more aggressive preventive maintenance program to extend the life of what we do have, but I know a gradall has been brought up in years past and, you know, I don’t know what the answer is with the funding. But that’s definitely going to have to be addressed in the future at some point.

Councilmember Bassemier: From talking to some of your county employees, they’re telling me you need a gradall pretty bad.

Chris Walsh: Yeah, and we haven’t had a front line truck, a tandem axle in about three years. And if you have, say, eleven front line trucks, if you’re not rotating that in, say, one a year, to keep every ten years, you know, have the fleet turned over, you start getting into a situation where I’m forced to do a good thing, which is get a more aggressive preventive maintenance program going, but on the other hand, we do need some new equipment.

Councilmember Bassemier: So you was planning on coming back, probably, in 2010 and ask for upgrades, so you’re trying to keep it low now, but –

Chris Walsh: Most definitely. Just trying to work with the situation that we’re given for this year.

Troy Tornatta: Do you know what the anticipated number in this budget would be for revenues?

Bill Fluty: She’ll get that right now, but historically, this budget exceeds the revenue. So it has to be offset by some other funding. Last year it was by COIT dollars, so it doesn’t match.

Chris Walsh: One line item that may not be in there would be the job freeze, the line item is 1061, I don’t know if that’s addressed in this, but that’s the one that has affected us for next year. $41,067.

Chris Walsh: Most definitely. I mean, if we get by this year, not only will I be coming back for equipment next year, I’m going to be coming back for – because we’ll stretch to get through to get this done.

Councilmember Bassemier: Yeah, I was talking to one of your mechanics out there and he said definitely, he needs help. He can’t do it all.

Councilmember Bassemier: Mr. President, I am a little concerned about their equipment out there. I’m understanding some of it is getting where it’s almost unsafe on some of it. Is that –

Troy Tornatta: Why don’t we do an assessment, and I’m sure you do that, Chris, but maybe we’ll put it on paper and get an age of the equipment and get that to the Council.

Chris Walsh: We’re working on that right now and I’d like to put together a three to five year projection of what’s going to be needed in the –

Councilmember Bassemier: I know years ago we did that with the Sheriff’s department with their cars, it worked out very well. It was a cost savings by staying up with it instead of letting it completely wear out and then trying to get them fixed and whatever. It costs a lot more to go that route.

Chris Walsh: And I can just tell you from my own experience. I’ve been on the city side and the county side, the county has the most and the best equipment of any department I’ve ever been in, even though it is old, I mean, the abilities and the things we’re able to do is quite a bit. The city calls on us quite a bit for some help.

President Shetler: In addition to that inventory list, if we could maybe get an explanation of what that piece is used for, and about how often it is used, whether that’s by miles or hours, and then if there’s even the ability to go outside and rent that particular item, and what that cost might be to do that.

Councilmember Lloyd: On page 121, you’ve got a $10,000 increase in concrete and then on the next page, 3520 Equipment Repair, you’ve got a $15,000 increase.

Chris Walsh: The Equipment Repair was in lieu of not getting any new equipment, was to keep up with the equipment. The concrete repair was something that I, you know, if you have to zero out or take back to last year’s budget, we’ll certainly work with that, but what we had in our mind was that I may be able to save John some money doing some small concrete projects with our Bridge crew and I could probably quantify that the savings, once we do a few projects with him as opposed to what it would have been.

Councilmember Raben: This is one account that, when possible, you use this to offset the other side because this is its own levy, so unless we have to, we normally don’t –

Bill Fluty: You’ve had an unappropriated balance in previous years to tap back into.

Troy Tornatta: Right, so real close on this one. And then, is there anything that didn’t get done from last year that’s going to cross over?

John Stoll: Not really. Basically, the new projects that are shown in the budget were either recommended by the latest bridge inventory book or they’re just culverts that we found were in poor condition that were too large for the county crews to replace it so we’ll have to put a contract out on doing that work. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same projects, same way we’ve done things in the past.

Councilmember Kiefer: Question? John, when you guys do bridge inspections, who does that? Is that an employee or do you contract that out?

John Stoll: That’s contracted out. You have to be INDOT certified to do those inspections. We don’t have anybody to do that. In fact, INDOT keeps adding more and more regulations that inspectors have to comply with. The previous inspections have been done by, the last two inspections were done by Beam, Longest and Neff. We’ll have to do a new RFP to hire a new consultant next year when the inspection is due again in 2010.

Troy Tornatta: One of the things that we are trying to do and I’m not sure if it’s in this budget or one of the subsequent budgets, but Chris has been able to find where, instead of replacing the beds that hold the salt and the calcium that normally corrode and eat through those and we have to replace those beds for a pretty good rate, he’s been able to find out that he can sandblast those, have those repainted and some of the preventive maintenance he can do while they’re messing with the calcium chloride to be able to save these beds for two to three times the normal rate. And so, in that, we think that we’ll see hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings for a nominal fee. And I say a nominal fee might be 7 - $8,000 a year depending on how many beds you want to service. But we have it on a program and he’ll get that to you, how we’re going to implement and do one or two beds a year, go to the next one and try and make sure that we can get those, and they’ll look like brand new when we’re done.

Councilmember Lloyd: I see we have a $15,000 increase in Sand & Gravel and then the other question I would have, Traffic Lights brought to zero. Question on that.

John Stoll: Based on previous encumbrances from year to year plus the number of signals have been dropped out of the county’s budget because of annexation, it looks like the encumbrances would take care of the entire budget for next year, so that’s why I put that in at zero. It will go up again next year, but it will be less than what we’ve paid in years past just because we lose probably, I think it’s about ten traffic signals through the annexation that was done on the east side.

Councilmember Raben: You know, for the longest time, up until fifteen years ago, we only had one. Mill Road and St. Joe was it.

Troy Tornatta: And if we can help it, we’re going to try and utilize as much as possible, roundabouts, to try and keep the signals at a minimum as it is, to try to keep the traffic flow moving forward. So we’ve addressed that out at the airport area and if it’s possible and we have enough land to do it in other areas, we’re going to continue that pattern.

Chris Walsh: Sand & Gravel, we anticipated, if you look at the 2007, it was 70,000, it’s been 25, 25. The bottom roads next year are going to have to have quite a bit more attention for these farmers. I think we can get by this season until we hit winter, but starting next year we’re going to have to – so we increased that with that in mind that we would have to be down there.

President Shetler: Just make it real quick, though. We’re going to take a quick five minute break.

President Shetler: We’ll go to the Health Department, and then after the Health Department and Dental Clinic we’ll go back to, we’ll go to the Recorder, because I noticed Z. Tuley is here now.

President Shetler: Page 128. Okay, anything that you want to point out in the budget that’s different from last year? Or areas of concern?

Gary Heck: I think the only increases that we have in any of the 2000, 3000 or 4000 line items was the consumer price index that folks have talked about on the rent. It has been down, but ours is based on whatever it is when they publish it in October for September. Our only caution was we don’t know what that figure might be yet. I think we plugged in, I want to say a half of a percent as an increase in the rent, plus to bring it up to what we’re actually, you know, would be paying this year. We’re certainly comfortable with whatever the Council wants to do on that. I just don’t know that there may not be an increase.

Gary Heck: I think last year it was flat and we actually did have an increase over what, but we had some encumbrances in the Rent line item which is what allowed us to do that. So, this would actually make up, if it is five percent, then it would be what the true picture would be at our square foot rent for this year, plus a, and I think I used a half a percent increase. So, that’s where the difference is. But, everybody, I think, when the Commissioners were reporting the consumer, ours is tied to the All Urban Consumer, which, and our landlord is the Southwestern Mental Health Foundation, or it’s Behavioral Health, I think they had a name change. It’s set by contract, so it’s nothing we can particularly change.

Gary Heck: Well, it’s ten years initially, and then two five year options is what I recall.

Gary Heck: We have the Dental Clinic, and then we have a lease with one of the Housing Authorities for a Fulton Clinic, and that’s all in a different budget. None of that comes out of this budget. The Dental Clinic will come out of, when we get to the Dental Clinic budget.

Councilmember Raben: Which raises the question, are we getting anything from the hospitals today?

Gary Heck: We haven’t received anything this year. The original grant agreement was for a two year period, and that time has come and gone. There was some discussions with the Commissioners about looking to re-negotiate something. I know the Health Department is working on a fund raising campaign with a lot of the faith based organizations, who initially came to local government with the issue about the need for the dental care. The one, the mailings that we’ve had so far have just been to a few small, and we have, we’ve received contributions back from those. But, we’re in essence looking at every church there is in Vanderburgh County and making an appeal. Since we do have clients that come from other counties, we’re looking to build that data base within the service area that we have clients that come from and sending an appeal to those churches, too.

Councilmember Kiefer: Question, regarding the rent, I noticed that each year there’s a bump in the rent. Is that the way the lease is written?

Gary Heck: It’s tied to the Consumer Price Index that is released in October from September. So, yes, it is, it’s whatever that increase in the Consumer Price Index is.

Councilmember Kiefer: Okay, so it may be less than the 386, then, because as we heard earlier the CPI is not really–

Councilmember Kiefer: –I’m sorry, I missed, I was, I apologize, I was delayed and looking at some other things.

Gary Heck: I think the difference is, we need to also have, last year we were able to keep it flat because we had money from the previous year encumbered to our landlord that carried forward, and that’s what saved us last year. This year we’re actually going to need about $3,900 to actually pay all the rent, but I’ll have that taken care of by December. So, we’re going to need some amount of money in there is the answer. Whether it includes a five, a half a percent increase will remain to be seen. But, I can tell you exactly what our, you know, rent for this year is, it’s $384,266.96. So, if it stays the same, that’s what I would need in that line item for next year.

President Shetler: We kind of jumped ahead just a little bit on that Dental Clinic, so I’m going to go ahead and continue there for just a, one second. What kind of participation do you, and I’m thinking in the beginning because I was involved a little bit three or four years ago on that, but we were getting some cooperation out of the dental community, the professionals, the dentists themselves, as far as contributing or helping out to some degree on that. Are we still tapping into that resource as a possibility?

Gary Heck: The original commitment from the Dental Society was to serve as a consultant to make sure that when the clinic was up and operational it would be a fully functional clinic. Then, last year they had an untimely death of a local dentist that they choose to honor by dedicating one of the operatories in his name, Dr. Raibley, and, so, they’ve made some contributions that way. The Dental Society from the get go never committed to financially be involved with it, just to, and they spent countless hours in coming to meetings, giving us advice, and then also soliciting equipment from other dental offices. We were able to actually have four operatories instead of three because of all of the extra dental equipment that was donated that was still, had many years of useful life.

President Shetler: Shortly Legal Aid is going to be coming up here, and, basically, they are funded because of, you know, largely, at least they got their feet off the ground initially, I think, from their fellow attorneys here in town that saw the need and kind of jumped in there and still to this day contribute fairly handsomely, I guess, for the most part, most attorneys do to the project. I didn’t know if that was a resource that we should tap into more financially rather than just, you know, the consulting that they’ve been doing.

Gary Heck: I couldn’t speak to what the Commissioners or some of the other elected officials have done. I know there’s been conversations back and forth. I know the Dental Society has always supported the project. I know last year there was some financial commitments to that, but the other Commissioners would probably have to tell you what their thoughts are on that.

Councilmember Sutton: Councilman Shetler, the, in the initial start up phase, that was one of the hopes that we could get the local dentists to support it on a regular basis financially. I mean, that’s not something they’ve ever really committed to, or that’s not really happened. They were, as Gary was saying, very generous with being able to help out with the equipment and some of the equipment we were able to receive, otherwise it would have, the cost would have been really exorbitant. But, the First District Dental Society who represents the local dentists here, they have agreed to at least be a conduit of grants, opportunities out there, because there probably hasn’t been a stone that hasn’t been unturned by Gary, his staff, and many others in trying to find some potential sources of revenue for the clinic. But, the kind of catch 22 has been the sources either they couldn’t give it directly to the clinic because it’s a government entity, so the First District Dental Society has been making themselves available to do that, but, the resources out there are pretty limited. We’ve looked on the Federal level, the State level, looked at local foundations in addition to continuing to try to generate some additional interest from the local hospitals. It’s an on-going concern, I guess, to that level so that that clinic can receive funding. I don’t think there’s probably any options that we would say that we aren’t open to looking at to try to keep the clinic open. I mean, I don’t know if Gary’s got the numbers with him, but the number of, the patient levels that we’ve got there, I mean, it continues to be as fully used as it was the day the doors opened. There are days when the line is out of the building, and it is a very strong program, but trying to get adequate funding has been a challenge for the Dental Clinic.

Gary Heck: There’s currently over 3,000 active patients, and about 86 percent of those are from Vanderburgh County. So, and they continue to see new patients every month.

Councilmember Goebel: I think when Councilman Sutton was originally instrumental in getting this thing established, we established it as a pay as able situation for the clients, is that correct?

Gary Heck: It’s still, there is, as I alluded to a little bit earlier in your Personnel and Finance Committee, that the County Attorney did the research for us and we do have a Vanderburgh County established minimum pay rate, and then every other place other than Vanderburgh County, if you reside any place else it’s a slightly higher fee based on that.

Councilmember Goebel: I think, also, it’s reduced emergency room visits by some of these very patients, is that not correct?

Gary Heck: Well, it’s correct, but how you determine the exact number is always up to debate, I guess, but when the hospitals look at certain codes and they present themselves at an emergency room they can tell if they’re there for an oral health related issue or something else. Those are the ones where we believe there has been some substantial number that don’t have to go to the emergency room anymore because they’re having their real root problem needs met by the Dental Clinic.

Gary Heck: If the client is Medicaid eligible and registered, yes, we can. Probably 78 to 79 percent of all the clients are in the lowest sliding fee scale, but if there are, and I would say of those little over 3,000 patients we’ve probably submitted almost 400 claims to Medicaid/Medicare. So, we knew going in that’s a little more than ten percent. Ten percent was, and we think we’re probably closer to 15 actually when you get into it, that we could actually do a little better than the ten percent revenues. But, the Dental Clinic, because of the uniqueness of it and that its primary purpose is to take care of adults who have, don’t have an option to go anywhere else to get their teeth looked at. If you’re a child under the Medicaid/Medicare program, or the Hoosier Healthwise as it’s called, they pay a lot for a child when they have a whole life in front of them. When you look at an adult, there’s a $650 cap, unless it’s for surgery. To extract teeth can be a surgical procedure, and there can be some charges for that. Otherwise, for the $650 you’re hard pressed to have an exam, x-rays, a cleaning, and then if you need any dental work after that, there’s no money to pay for that under that system. So, that’s part of the challenge is to, how do you find blended funding streams to make all of this work? We struggle with that, and we keep looking for that, grant opportunities. Councilman Sutton told you once before that when we look at revenue sources, funding and grant opportunities, you either have to be either a 501c3 not-for-profit, not associated with the government, or on the government side of things you have to be a federally qualified health center, like the Echo Community Health. If you’re anything other than that, there’s not a funding pot of money.

Councilmember Kiefer: Perhaps they can do like the School Corporation has done, they have set up organizations like the Education Foundation or something like that, the Public Education Foundation or something like that to be able to raise the money privately.

Gary Heck: Well, it can be a vehicle through which you have a collaboration and a partnership. Then, just finding the right grant opportunity, to apply and to get the money. Most of your funding sources don’t want to pay for operational costs. The one thing that we have been looking for is to have a digital x-ray system. The Dental Clinic will be almost paperless with the accounting system that we have if, but we still have to take x-rays, and if we can get the x-rays converted to where they would go directly into the patients file that would be a savings, and that would be a one time opportunity. That’s, we’ve been looking and spending most of the time, because that seems to be where there could be some money that could support that. But, we’ve exhausted ourselves looking for opportunities for additional operating costs. The faith based churches are the next, is our next step. They’re the group that originally raised the awareness of the issue and the conscience of the community. So, we’re going to ask them to help fill that gap so that we can fill teeth.

Councilmember Bassemier: On page 128 you have one, the Director, that kind of stands out a little bit. It went up $7,636 and some odd cents. Director of Laboratory.

Gary Heck: Well, I think this is a request we originally submitted that will have to do with part of a job study group that’s going to be meeting. I’m not exactly sure why it’s included in here other than to say it is a request that we’ve made for the job study.

Councilmember Lloyd: Job study is going to meet tomorrow and the Health Department is on the agenda to look at those.

Councilmember Lloyd: Based on the retirement of Mr. Elder and the reorganizing those other jobs.

Gary Heck: Any other questions? I know that you all asked for our revenue, we’ve provided you a ten year revenue trend study. Hopefully, that has helped. I know Dr. Nick would like to take just a moment to tell you a little bit about the wellness program we have and also address some of the concerns, there was a question about the smoking and your health insurance. I know the Health Department studied this with the county’s insurance consultant, and the answer we received, now this isn’t from an attorney at this point, but the answer from the insurance consultant was if the county were to change their policy, that basically said every employee would pay a higher rate than what we’re currently paying, and then if you met these conditions you would receive a benefit back. If you smoked you wouldn’t be eligible to receive them because that would be something that they can prove raises health costs. You can’t turn it around the other way and say if you smoke we’re going to charge you more, but you can charge everybody the same and then give discounts for behavior that saves the county money. One of those is to have a wellness program where if you, and Dr. Nick can tell you about what our program will do and how we’ve been gearing up to go county-wide with this whenever you all are ready for it.

Ray Nicholson: I’ll try just to sum up a few things. We’ve been doing a pilot study this past year in the Health Department. We wanted to see how it worked as far as wellness was concerned and whether we could make an impact on our own employees before bringing it over to the Civic Center. It basically is based on five parameters; smoking, hypertension, blood sugar, which is, of course, diabetes, cholesterol, which is hyperlipidemia, and then our body mass index, which is weight. So, we’ve been doing this with our own employees and we hope to have the study completed by the first of the year. If it looks like we’ve been successful in bringing some of these figures down with the Health Department group, we’ll see what we can do about the, transferring that to some sort of program for the Civic Center here. That’s basically it. I think it would affect insurance rates, and it would probably make a lot of difference. I would be glad to answer any questions.

Councilmember Sutton: So, Dr. Nicholson, are you talking about monitoring those, or are you talking about education programs that would be geared toward more healthful living to address those five different points? What would be done that would move employees toward improving in those areas?

Ray Nicholson: Well, basically, right now it’s been an educational process with our people. Our educational department has been working with them and trying to instruct in weight reduction and so forth. They’re, very briefly, you may not know this, but, at any age, it doesn’t matter you can pick out a one year old, a ten year old, a 50 year old, it doesn’t make a bit of difference, the five major reasons why people die at any age has nothing to do with disease or anything else, it has to do with lifestyle, how we live our life. How fast we drive our cars, whether you use seat belts or not, whether we have regular check ups, whether we keep our weight controlled, what we eat. The five causes of death at any age is our own lifestyle. If we want to reduce the health costs over the country, that’s what has to be emphasized. So, that’s what, the kind of thing that we’re doing. Councilman Sutton, I don’t know exactly all the things that Mary Jo Borowiecki has been doing, but she’s been working with this group trying to get weight reduction and so forth. We had some incentives for that. How much of that we would try to arrange with the Civic Center, we don’t know yet.

Councilmember Sutton: Well, we were talking about this, I guess, at our last regular Council meeting, and I was just making mention of just that importance as we talked about trying to bring down–

Councilmember Sutton: –health insurance costs upon the county. That’s really where it starts is finding a way to get us to quit eating as much, smoking as much, reducing stress, and exercising more. So, just–

Councilmember Sutton: –trying to find a way to, just trying to see what kind of things you’re looking at if you’re going to expand this from a pilot to a county-wide program, what things will be made available to employees that want to take advantage of this.

Ray Nicholson: I think that weight reduction is probably the most important thing. It’s the major cause of an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes. I mean, that’s the basis of almost everything. If you get the weight down...I heard of a program at St. Mary’s yesterday on bariatric surgery, and it is just absolutely amazing where people that weighed 350 to 400 pounds taking 8, 10, 12 medications and so forth, you know, took off 200 pounds and didn’t take a single medicine. Their diabetes was cured, their hypertension was cured. It’s just absolutely amazing. Those kinds of programs would have to be put into place.

Gary Heck: The program is called “Know Your Five to Stay Alive”. It goes back to staying within those accepted parameters. So, if an individual’s blood pressure should be between whatever it is, let’s say 110 and 70, then they get a baseline measurement, if it’s outside those parameters they would work with you to get it to that. It could be controlled by medication. As Doctor said, when you’re looking at the behavioral changes, what a lot of this is all about, and it’s balancing, it’s whether you do the right amount of exercise, you eat the right kinds of food, and Mary Jo’s program and our health education program is to give you that education and support and then the constant little encouragement to try to meet those goals. Then, once you achieve the goals is when you start seeing the incentives, and that could be in the county’s insurance program perhaps, when you get to that.

Ray Nicholson: The most successful programs have been where you’ve had incentives where you’ve had departments vying against another department as to who could lose the most weight, things like this. That usually works. We would have to be kind of innovative as to what kind of program to do, but it’s very important and it should bring down your insurance rates.

Ray Nicholson: I would like to say a little bit about the H1N1, if I could. The H1N1 flu is going to be a pretty big affair this coming fall. Whether we have an epidemic or not, no one really knows. There’s a lot of unknowns, but we do know that we’re going to be faced with giving maybe up to 400,000 injections, immunizations here. It’s going to take a lot of people to do that. We’re going to be very, very short of nurses. We’ve already informed our people that all vacations may have to be cancelled and held off because of the need for the shortage. But, what I wanted to tell you all is we’re having a town hall meeting a week from today. The town hall meeting is at Central Library, the Browning Room A and B, 9:30 to 11:30, and then a second one from 2:00 to 4:00, next Wednesday. Then, will be one in the evening on Thursday, August the 27^th at the Deaconess Johnson Hall from 6:30 to 8:30. I don’t know whether you all have received notices on this or not, but the press releases went out yesterday, and notices to the departments went out. We’re gearing up for that. Did all of you receive this communication that I gave Commissioner Tornatta, about what the Civic Center employees should do and so forth? Did you all receive that? Okay. Because if not, we were going to be sure you get those as well, we’ll e-mail those to you.

Ray Nicholson: We’re going to have to give the regular human, traditional influenza injections this fall. The H1N1 has actually been manufactured, there’s a lot of it that will be coming on to the market, but studies have not been done yet. It’s not been released. Everything points to the fact that you’re going to have to have two injections. So, we’re talking about three injections for our population.

Gary Heck: But, anybody over six months of age, and if they have to get two of the H1N1, then you can do the math, that’s going to be close to 350,000.

President Shetler: Well, when you said 400, that’s why I started adding up...we’re getting all of these outsiders coming in again? What’s going on?

Gary Heck: No, when you look at the seasonal flu, pneumonia, and some of the other traditional shots that other residents would normally take, now, that’s not assuming that every person gets every one possible, but you can see it still would be a major undertaking.

Ray Nicholson: Within 21 days. Every shot has to be accounted for. We have to put this into a computer, we have to account for every injection.

President Shetler: The, what’s, just, I don’t want to beat a dead horse here or anything, but let’s go back to that, the pricing structure and fee structure that we’re able to charge. When people come in from out of the county, is there, is that, do we differentiate between....I mean, I know we talked about that earlier that we don’t necessarily now, but we are able to?

Ray Nicholson: No, the, by law, the H1N1 will be provided by the Federal government. We cannot charge anyone–

Ray Nicholson: Yeah, and they’re even supplying the syringes and needles and so forth. We cannot charge any administration fee at all. So, there will be no administration fee for any of it. It will all be free. We’re glad to provide that service.

Gary Heck: I know, at this point, they’ve talked about the vaccine, and we’re getting the rest of the guidance, and, until...and it’s a constantly moving guidance as you may suspect, because they’re, they’ll be smarter tomorrow than they are today. So, everything they give you is interim, and when they know a little more they give you additional information that can change some of what you’re preparing to do. But, the bottom line is, if everybody over six months has to be offered that opportunity, it’s going to be a major undertaking. It was a discussion point at the Board of Health meeting last week where the Board of Health was concerned about the one vacancy in the Public Health Nurses that we have that was funding the accrued payment buyout, and they wanted Dr. Nick to just explain to you today that we may be looking at a way to get some additional help. The money that we, the Federal government is channeling some money to the county to help pay for this, and there’s a two phase payment that we’re aware of right now. We’re not sure that that would come anywhere near to covering the actual cost of what that would be. We’ve shared that with the county officials, the money that we are anticipating receiving but we’re going to know more tomorrow than we do today. We’ll keep you informed of that. But, they were really concerned about the Public Health Nurse and that we may want to ask to see what we can do to potentially get that person hired sooner than later.

Ray Nicholson: We cannot do the job with the nurses that we have. We will have to hire outside nurses. When you hire outside nurses, it’s much more expensive than when you’re paying your own people for this. So, it’s kind of essential that we have all of the nurses that we need. It’s, we’ve calculated out how much it would take. For example, if you send five teams out the same day, and had two nurses with each team, and it would take that, in order for us to immunize all...we’re going to have to go to 60 schools, businesses, it’s going to be a very large undertaking.

President Shetler: Could we, have you had discussions like with the School Corporation and working with their school nurses? I don’t know, do they still have them?

Gary Heck: They don’t have full time, but they do have some, and we are in discussions with all of that. Part of the reason, part of this was the initial guidance that they had to be an RN or a physician were the only ones who could vaccinate.

Councilmember Raben: You know, I might interject something. We’ve actually got this room until 12:00 today. I don’t whether or not anybody is scheduled to come in here after us or not, but we probably need to continue this discussion, because it’s very important, but we’ve got about a third of our agenda to do yet today. If you want to stick around, anybody that can stick around afterwards that wants to hear more, you know, that would be great, but, for right now, I think we have to get back on track here with our budget.

President Shetler: Let’s go up to the Recorder. Anybody have any questions? That would be on page 12. Anything new, Z, to add?

Z Tuley: Z Tuley, Vanderburgh County Recorder. I apologize for being late this morning. I ran into the Convention and Visitors Bureau and got all fired up about trying to influence the Recorder’s Association on an upcoming conference to be held here in Evansville. If we can, if I have that influence over the association, they’re really pushing for it, and I’m sorry, I got all wrapped up. I know you can’t believe I was out talking, but, that’s what it was.

President Shetler: Alright, thank you. Anybody have any questions? Yes, Councilman Lloyd?

Councilmember Lloyd: I did receive your e-mail about the emergency replacement employee, and if this was a situation in the private sector they would be looking at ways to reduce head counts in your office due to your volumes being down by a tremendous amount. So, I mean, in my opinion, I’m not sure, I mean, I don’t feel you need to replace that employee. I mean, that’s something that the county needs to look at. We’re always looking at our headcount, and this body has really questioned the Vanderburgh County Assessor about when he had employees come in from the townships, looking at ways to make things efficient. So, when your recording numbers are down 70-75 percent, I guess, I would question why you would need that employee, and if you would be able to re-organize your office without that one employee being replaced?

Z Tuley: I can pull the previous year’s numbers, but we are up from January. Having started a project, which we are in a current contractual agreement with Phoenix, and for phase two we are looking at a second contractual agreement. The staff cannot keep up with the amount of workload that they are producing. This is a very vital project in the preservation and retention of records to get them online so that we have more people who are able to retrieve public records through the Internet, and to make it more accessible. Not just that, but the best way to preserve and retain records is to get people’s hands off of them, in a physical sense, not a literal sense. Well, that is literal, but when they are coming in with the Purell on their hands for sanitation and they’ve got lotion on their hands because it’s wintertime and they’re going through our records, the paper is deteriorating. I’ve been gathering some estimates on the repair and restoration of some books that have crumbling pages and the pages are falling apart and they’re wrinkled, and they continue to get wrinkled with usage. So, I need these records to be online so that the abstractors and the general public quits touching them. The only way to do that is to get it online, and going through the process that I’m doing. We also have about 16 books I believe it is that have termite damage. Once these records are lost, they are lost. It’s not just the record itself, but it’s history that is gone. There are pages that are ate up, and there are lines missing, or part of a line missing, and that is the battle. We are trying to not move too quickly, but at a responsible speed, so that what we are paying the Phoenix team to produce, the staff in return can do the verification process, which should be held accountable by Vanderburgh County employees and not necessarily a company. We could hire them to do both, but then that would be a lot of money. I don’t want to spend so much money that I have so much money going out that’s not being brought in on a monthly basis through the fees that I collect. I’m trying to find a decent balance.

President Shetler: Councilman, you alluded to the fact that it’s about 70 percent less, do you have the numbers from the last couple of years? And what we’re basically averaging today?

President Shetler: That’s just for this year. I think we’ve got some numbers from the past couple of years that might–

Councilmember Lloyd: Well, the first six months, or, no, the first seven months, I guess, this year approximately, new recordings, approximately 20,556, does that sound right?

Councilmember Lloyd: Okay, then in 2008 approximately 84,040, that would be 75 percent lower in 2009.

Z Tuley: Where were these numbers obtained from, might I ask? I mean, I’m happy to verify the numbers.

Councilmember Lloyd: Either the Vanderburgh County Treasurer or the Vanderburgh County Auditor, one or the other. The Phoenix Imaging, is that something that has been contracted since you’ve been the Recorder?

Z Tuley: Yes, because the previous Recorder had contracted to have the images scanned, now you have to go through the second part of the process. Once they are scanned, then they have to be put into a search engine. So, Phoenix is providing the first step in that search engine, and the staff is supposed to be providing the second step in quality control on the search engine part.

Councilmember Lloyd: Well, and anybody associated with real estate can tell you how difficult an environment it is, and how these recorded deeds would be lower. The, and I think most people would say 2010 is not going to be any better. That’s why I would petition that this Council needs to look at not replacing that position.

Z Tuley: Well, previously, in those years, might I add, that there was no project going on. The scanning project was going on, yes, but that’s by an outside firm and not internal. Now they have this additional workload.

President Shetler: Okay, we can, I guess we’ll take that matter up at a different point in time when we, if you, it’s an emergency we have a process to go through on that and talk to Council about that. Is there anything new in this particular budget, and I don’t mean to be rushing you along–

President Shetler: –but it is ten till twelve and I understand that the Parks Department is coming in at twelve.

Z Tuley: The only increase is from the FICA, PERF and step raises. That’s it. Everything else is flat lined.

Councilmember Bassemier: Isn’t this department pretty well self-supporting? You bring money back to us? I mean–

Z Tuley: Yes, there is a portion of the fees that is kept and retained by the Recorder for the restoration and the retention of the records, and then there is a portion that goes to the Surveyor, and then there is a portion that goes to the General Fund, I believe, there’s something called the State Mortgage Fund and the Security I.D. There are four entities that every fee that I collect it’s split among.

Councilmember Lloyd: Well, I guess, my question would be, do you know roughly what the fees are in ‘08 versus ‘09, like through July?

Z Tuley: Yes, I did gather that information. ‘08 to date, well, I didn’t total them because we have them split among the four. How do you want that, the General Fund?

Z Tuley: Okay, the portion that I keep, in ‘09 we had $159,000 collected, and last year in ‘08, $152,000 collected. I credit the increase of that $7,000 based upon what we believe has been the stimulus package that came out from the finance where the $8,000 home credit, which will expire December 1^st, I believe, is what I have noted. It expires December 1^st.

President Shetler: Alright, any other questions, comments? Again, I don’t mean to be rushing you along–

President Shetler: –these Park guys are starting to come in here, so we need to...alright, thank you.

Sue Hartig: Good morning, Sue Hartig, Director of Legal Aid. With me today are three of the attorney board members, Kathy Nestrick, Ted Barron, and Karen Heard. We have tried to keep this a flat line budget. We do have one employee with a step increase, and there are two additional decreases I can give you today that we didn’t have any information before. 3140, Telephone, we can cut that back to $1,200. That’s increased a little bit, because for some reason many of our clients have Kentucky cell phones and we have to make long distance calls to call a client back. We can handle that with $1,200. Malpractice Insurance, we just this week got the malpractice bid for this year. So, I’m always guesstimating a year ahead. So, today’s bill was $4,269. So, presuming there might be an increase next year, we can safely cut that back to $4,500.

Sue Hartig: No, they are Evansville clients. For some reason they have 270 cell phone numbers. I don’t know why.

President Shetler: But we’re certain that they are Vanderburgh County residents.

Councilmember Sutton: You said, back up to the malpractice insurance, so, it came in at 42 this year, so–

Councilmember Sutton: So, you’re wanting to estimate it at 45? So, basically, flat line from what you had last year?

Sue Hartig: I think the only increase we had was on Yellow Pages, and that’s minimal, it’s a half inch advertisement so that people know where to find us.

Sue Hartig: Well, not a lot. A lot of the people that need our help are just over the guidelines. It’s that next tier of people.

Councilmember Goebel: Susan, you’ve adjusted United, are we moving to that one?

Councilmember Goebel: You gave us a hand out this morning with those adjustments, is that correct?

Councilmember Goebel: Where you zeroed out, so, we don’t need to discuss that, I don’t think.

Sue Hartig: Right, we’ve taken a big hit, United Way has taken fairly big hits on their campaign the last two years.

President Shetler: Next, County Assessor. You guys are all lucky that you don’t get grilled like you, everybody could have been, right?

President Shetler: That would be on page 47. Okay, Mr. Weaver, anything that you’ve added?

Jonathan Weaver: Well, I guess, one glaring thing you’ll notice is that our salaries have quadrupled, but that’s because of what’s happened with all of the assessor offices, you know, with the legislative changes last July and the referendum changes this past November.

President Shetler: So, it just wasn’t that you were running around giving big, huge raises to everyone?

Jonathan Weaver: I would love to give raises to everybody. They work so hard. They make me look great, but, you know, they understand. They’re not happy about it, but these are the times, I guess.

President Shetler: President Shetler: Let’s see, Property Tax Assessment Board of Appeals. Anybody have any questions on that one, on 144? The Reassessment was part of the – on page 142, wasn’t it? Or, wait a minute.

Councilmember Lloyd: Page 142, Reassessment, I know we’ve got an increase, Level II Certifications and Extra Help are pretty substantial, then also Contractual Services.

Councilmember Raben: Those are – you’ve never looked at it until this year as one sum, so that’s all the other, that’s outlying’s combined. So, this whole budget is going to look different.

Councilmember Lloyd: Right. Oh, because we’ve got certifications from all of these township people.

Councilmember Sutton: Does that include travel and mileage as well, bringing all of those together?

Jonathan Weaver: Yeah, I believe, if you added the three townships that were left last year, before the referendum, and the county office, we’re down from $12,500 as a whole to $8,000. So, that’s a $4,500 savings in travel there.

Jonathan Weaver: –yeah, we have a vendor where we have our personal property software, we have our appeals software and we have our sales disclosure software. So, that’s maintenance for that. That includes the Pictometry second year fee there, ESRI mapping software, that’s what that includes. I believe that’s it.

Jonathan Weaver: Oh, and our PTABOA attorney, oh, and our assessing software, ProVal.

Councilmember Lloyd: It looks like you had, the Property Tax Board of Appeal, you moved money from there to the Reassessment Fund, is that correct? Well, because you had Contractual Services, $42,800 for the Board of Appeals, I assume that’s mainly the attorney, you moved that to the Reassessment Fund?

Jonathan Weaver: Yeah, we have, let’s see, 2490-1091-1180, you’ll see a $7,000 decrease there. Yeah, we’re putting the attorney fees up in the Contractual Service line.

Councilmember Goebel: Real quick, Jonathan, Pictometry, I know you put up, or you’re having workshops on that, have you discussed with other groups that might be utilizing Pictometry as far as sharing the cost of that?

Councilmember Goebel: –I’m talking about in the future, is that still a possibility?

Jonathan Weaver: I think it’s, well, I’m not, I’ll have to look back at the minutes of the last meetings, but it’s fairly, I believe, minuscule as compared to this sum.

Jonathan Weaver: We have 65, roughly 65 county employees right now using Pictometry, all throughout the enterprise. So, we’re really excited about that. We had someone in my office visit 11 homes in 15 minutes, which would have took her four hours if she was out in the field. So, we’re realizing the changes already.

President Shetler: Alright, anybody else have any questions? Anything else for Mr. Weaver on any....okay.

Bill Fluty: My budget, basically, the only changes would be step increases on the Auditor’s, everything else is the same.

Bill Fluty: The jail bond is just exactly what it is: payment for the bond payments.

Bill Fluty: Bond debt service for the USI, actually that loan is paid now and I will not need that $480,000.

Bill Fluty: Honestly, it is, there is one payment to be paid in January, but we have, they’re holding the money for that as they hold debt service. So, they have the exact amount to pay themselves on January 1^st.

President Shetler: Any other questions or comments of the Auditor? You’ve done Jail Bond and Bond Debt.

Councilmember Lloyd: Page 110, no increases in salaries, other than step. We reduced travel, $1,000, which is on page 111, and we reduced Office Supplies and Other Supplies, $100. Then Court Technology is 3315, that money was not needed. Or wait, $12,000. Oh, part of that is from last year, we had those encumbered. That’s it.

Councilmember Kiefer: Did you ask about the Computer Contractual? Just curious, that’s up $100,000. Or am I looking at the wrong thing? Hang on, on page 112, $100,000.

Councilmember Lloyd: That, the computer budget, I’m the liaison to ITAC, and there was quite a bit more of an increase. $69,000 of that is for the Treasurer and the Auditor’s new software.

Councilmember Lloyd: The rest of it is new equipment. So, I think the original budget was over two million dollars and we just cut it back to a $100,000 increase.

President Shetler: Any other questions or comments? Do we adjourn today then? Oh, yeah, Mike, go ahead.

Councilmember Goebel: I just wanted to ask one question on the Copy Machines. Every department seems to have a request for it, have we gone any farther with getting a county-wide plan? Does anyone know, that would reduce? Matt Arvay was here a few weeks ago. We’ll ask that later.

Councilmember Lloyd: Yeah, I know they’re looking at it, and I’m not sure where they are on that. I think the city may be a little farther along than we are.

Councilmember Goebel: If we do incorporate that kind of plan, will each budget then be reduced by that amount? Like the leases and things that we have.

Councilmember Lloyd: Everyone that (inaudible) a copy machine, it should be reduced. I’m not sure where we are.

President Shetler: It may be a lateral transfer, I would think, you know, in the beginning anyway.

President Shetler: Alright, it’s been moved and seconded for adjournment. Yes?

President Shetler: It’s probably adjourn. We can reset it up, couldn’t we? I mean, legally, does it matter?

Councilmember Sutton: Well, I’m just waiting for everybody to come back to the meeting. I know every year the budget is a little bit different in terms of what we have to approach, but, and I know that they’ve got a meeting coming up with the Parks Board so we really need to get out of here, but, probably two days, giving this structured format was probably not enough. You know, we’ve done it a couple of different ways, but I hate that the latter part of this meeting that we really rushed through some budgets and probably didn’t get the chance to ask some questions that we really wanted to just for the sake of time. But, you know, the next time we get together isn’t until September, and at that time we are making adjustments and starting to look to the point of finalizing budgets. So, you know, that’s really the only time our department heads get a chance to talk about their budget, and for us to get the active feedback on their budget is during this period here during this week. So, it just, I don’t know if we might want to give some thought of how we want to address that, but I just hate that we, I want to say just really zipped through several of those budgets there. We probably should have spent more time.

Councilmember Goebel: Could we allot from 8:00 and make it a little bit longer day?

President Shetler: Yeah, that’s possible. I think this all came about through a committee of seven trying to gel their calendars together here somewhat more than anything else, because I think we had set it for a week earlier, then some conflicts arose on that. Then, you know, a week later and some things, and it all just kind of got parceled into the two day thing. Anyway, I agree we’ve gotten pretty rushed. Yesterday, of course, we got out a little bit early, and we could certainly start a little earlier, but it is the one time that we have an opportunity to go through that exercise and find out exactly what is going on and what we can expect in the future, and it’s a good opportunity for the taxpayers to see what they’re spending their money on.

Councilmember Lloyd: Mr. President, the proper term is, we would recess the budget hearings.

President Shetler: Yes, right. So, we will recess until September the 2^nd. I’ll give you an update real quickly, and that is we have a Personnel meeting tomorrow at 9:00 in room 307. Job study, I’m sorry, Job Study.