Commission - Regular Meeting

830, we're going to call the meeting to order this Thursday, July 30th, 2028, of the Brookings County Commission. All please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Item number two is, oh, item number three is approval of the agenda. Do I have a motion to approve?

So moved. Second.

Motion is second. Any additions, corrections, comments? Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. Motion carries. Number four is an invitation for a citizen to schedule time on the commission agenda for an item not listed. There's a five minute time limit per person. anyone wanting to speak during this agenda item must sign in prior to the start of the meeting. No commission action will be taken during this agenda item. Any requested action item may be scheduled for a future meeting date and we don't have anybody signed in. Number five, we have regular business. Letter A, action to approve resolution 26-29, a resolution approving a construction and operating permit for a solid waste facility in Brookings County. Do I have a motion to approve?

So moved. Second.

Motion is second. Comments?

This is for Dakota Recycling in Volga, and they're applying for a solid waste facility permit. As the resolution says, to establish an automobile, white goods, and tire fragmentation size reduction shredding and processing facility. Jerome Kellner provided a letter that was included in your packet. Are you here today to speak to that? If you have questions, he is here. They're already an established business in Brookings. They're just making some changes. Essentially, the city of Volga is aware of this. They have already approved this as well. But there is a state statute that says the county must approve a solid waste facility permit. So even though it is within the city of Volga, the county still needs to approve that. That's why it's before you today. And we wanted to get moving on this and not wait another week to move this forward.

All right. Does the commission have any questions? Any comments? All right. Hearing none, call the roll, please.

VanderWaal. Aye. Post. Aye. Miller. Aye. Jensen. Aye. Hostler. Aye. Motion carries.

All right. Letter B. Conduct canvas of the July 28, 2026 gubernatorial runoff election. Ladies.

Good morning Commission. I think as Kim gets set up here. I'll just do a little bit of talking Kim is going to present to you guys some of the statistics of the election and how everything went along with the results and then I'll out of our hands, but Bethel had a little incident. There was no air conditioning in the gym and so we called up Joe over at the BCOAC and he had a fan and so we went and snagged it and took care of Bethel. So they were happy. The other person that I really wanted to thank is Cody Sunderland over in White. He was in the area when White was closing up at 7 PM, so he went and help those ladies pack up and get them on their way here. So they were super happy they were like one of the third ones in which they were very grateful for that. So thank you Cody for that. Yeah, and I think that's it.

OK. To canvas the unofficial results for the primary runoff election is. We're going to get started. Our agenda for today will be going over the statistics of the election, opening the returns from each vote center, which you should have in front of you as well, the certification of any provisional ballots, if we had any. However, we don't. We are going to declare the results and review the poll book. For statistics, on Tuesday, July 28th, we had 35 election workers, one resolution board, which consists of one Republican and one Democrat. Their job is to recreate any ballots that are kicked out by the tabulator for any reason. They are looking for voter intent. If the tabulator can't read something and it kicks it out, that's what their job is to do. They would also recreate any express vote ballots or UOCAVA ballots. The Resolution Board recreated all the ballots that, if you recall, were from Brown County initially that we started with. That way they were all the same because they were a different size and would have read different by the tabulator. There were 35 of those to recreate, so they started off their night nice and busy. We had eight vote centers that we used on Tuesday. There was a 32.62% voter turnout. We had 10,613 active Republican voters with one ballot style. 3,463 ballots were cast on election day. Sorry overall and 1187 of those were absentee ballots 2277 ballots were from the polls on Election Day Two ballots were left unstamped and both of those were from activity center and we'll talk about those when we go through that Center There were zero provisional ballots, which means that Either they agreed that they should not have been eligible for this election. So basically if they disagree that they should have been eligible and we can't find it at the time and they persist and want to vote on that ballot, they would be able to vote a provisional and it goes into an envelope that we review later to determine if it should have in fact been eligible and we just didn't determine that at the time that they were there at the polls. However, like an emergency voter refers to if they were at the polls and we were able to determine that they were eligible right then and there. And so then they vote like normal, but we had neither of those situations occur. The post election audit we if you recall, we did one for the primary election and this is a extension of the primary election, so we will not be conducting another audit. The state canvas is August 4th at 9 AM. Now we will go ahead and open up our results. And we'll go over those for each center.

Do you want to start with absentee?

Yeah. Okay, so absentee on Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. We had a great group come on up here and start opening all of those absentee ballots for anybody that had voted prior to election day and There were 1,185 envelopes that they opened. And then later on, as you see, we had two more ballots that were dropped off. So we had another board open those as the original board had left for the day already. but a total of 1187 ballots to be counted then and as you can see the tabulator agreed with that and counted 1187 ballots For our Brookings Activity Center, the ladies over there, or our poll workers there, said that they had 474 ballots to be counted. The tabulator counted 473. But down here, as you see referenced, there were two unstamped ballots. So they actually had 475 ballots counted. In chatting with them they had some sticking of ballots and they worked really hard to give people only one. However, there was one situation where they did not stamp the ballot initially and it must have had one sticking to it at the same time. because one of those unstamped ballots wasn't voted and one was, so it was basically that they had given one ballot to someone and forgotten to stamp it. So they would have been spot on if they had the stamper making sure that there was only one ballot there, basically.

And the discrepancy by statute is you have to be within five. So we're still within the margin, so they're fine.

OK, we have Bethel Baptist Church. They said that they had 595 ballots to be counted and the tabulator counted 595 ballots. So we're spot on. For Holy Life Tabernacle, those election workers said they would have had 308 votes or ballots, and the tabulator had 308 ballots counted as well. So spot on there. And last, we have Volguk First Reformed Church. They counted 416. They said that they would have 416 ballots to be counted, and the tabulator counted 416 ballots. So they were also spot on. All right, this was included in your packet, but this is just the overall results. We had 3,463 ballots cast.

It's interesting to see the over and the under votes. Do you see it on there? Any questions on that?

For both. Correct.

Alright, and so as we now kind of wrap up here, we're just going to declare the results and then we'll move into the poll book. We'll show you guys that poll book and then we'll look for action to to accept. So for the governor's race, the Republican total vote Toby Doden had 918 votes and Larry Roden had 2541 votes.

Great. And then like she said, we have the poll book here. It has everybody that was eligible to vote, everybody that voted in which location, and then some statistics to see how many voted at each location or from which precinct even that they voted or how many people, sorry, from Precinct voted so some interesting Statistics that you can take a peek at if you'd like But otherwise we just need you to Officialize and certify the runoff I would look for a motion certify the runoff gubernatorial election So moved second motion a second any other comments or questions concerns?

Hearing none All those in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Opposed say nay. Motion carries. Thank you very much ladies. Thank you to the election workers for all their hard work.

A second time in a month and a half.

All right, moving on to number six, commission director's report.

Just a couple things that we have going on over at the courthouse. We did receive a quote to do the removal of the insulation and the plastic from that dome. I think you remember when we toured over there, there was all that old insulation and plastic down over the glass dome right above the third floor. It's about just shy of $8,800. I guess I'm looking for direction if we want to move forward with doing that yet this year or if we want to wait until next year. I guess I'm just kind of looking for some direction. I think we did have the mold that was developing on the murals removed and I think doing this will also help with that not to hopefully not to continue to be an issue.

the plastic and the insulation stuff is holding the moisture in.

Correct. So what this would be is removal of that old insulation, the plastic, and then blow in insulation and don't put plastic down because plastic just holds that moisture.

And this is something that when we do replace and fix the cupola and all of that, it shouldn't need to be redone again. No.

What time frame would they be able to...

I think when we let them know I think within a month for sure if not just a few weeks we could be here to get it done. I'm just kind of looking for some direction if we move forward with it.

I agree. Let's get it done. I had a question. With the condition of those windows and sills and stuff, is there a possibility we're going to damage the new insulation Is it humidity or does it leak into that area or does it just run down the walls?

I don't know that it's really been leaking terribly into that area. We should really go up this afternoon when we're getting an inch of rain.

There will probably be a little bit, but we won't have to replace the entire mound.

I didn't know if there's a leak potential onto the top side of those murals. if we don't have a plastic layer in there?

It's more of a humidity issue. Then the plastic is keeping that... Before we replaced the roof a couple of years ago we did have some serious leaking issues and since then we really haven't but there still remains some humidity.

They shouldn't get onto that mural portion. In the meantime I wouldn't think.

The other thing that we have going on is the courthouse has become home to some bats. Again, probably a lot of it due to some of the holes that we have up there that we're going to address with the cupola. We had a couple different companies come that do bat mitigation. It's a lot more expensive than I thought to get rid of bats. Apparently, we have quite the colony living in there up in the cupola. So the one quote that's, we had a quote for about 14,300. That was the lower quote. And then we had one for about $33,000. So I guess I'm looking for some direction. We have been having the bats showing up in offices and courtrooms, so I think it's something we need to address sooner rather than later, is to get them out of there. And I think we want to get them out of there and have that addressed before we do this project as well. There is a 10-year warranty on this work as well, so if they return... They guaranteed no bats for a 10-year warranty.

After the work's done with the cupola, they'd come back and make sure everything's still going.

Thoughts?

Well, bats get in everywhere. There's a lot of homes that deal with that. My opinion is that we might be a little bit premature on that with looking at the condition of the sills of the window up there. Until that's repaired, that may well be where they're coming in. I guess I'd like to know more information about, I think there needs to be more research. How are we, what are they going to do? You know, those windowsills on the north side there are just completely rotted away that they can go in there. We could spend $14,000 for this bad mitigation. Are they going to address the windowsill part of that?

Yeah, and I guess that was kind of my question, too. We have had an incident where we weren't sure of a bat scratching someone, and that becomes a work comp issue.

They've been seen in the actual courtrooms, correct?

Yes, courtrooms and whatnot.

We need to address that issue. The safety issue.

The nice thing about that is that if we do take it out and we do, you know, we have, like Stacy said, we have 10 years that if we have another bat, we have 10 years for them to come and get them until we get those fixed. So it's kind of a service that we've got.

It has to be done before or after we fix it.

It's got to be, yeah. And then, you know, if it was another... I'd have questions if it was $14,000 and then a month later because of the windows, we have bats in there, it was another $5,000 or something like that. If they will guarantee that for that 10 years that we call them, hey, we had a report or whatever, they come back and do that, I think it's good money to spend now versus later, in my opinion. Any other thoughts? Sounds like we have a consensus to do.

Marty did you want to talk about your National Night Out handout?

I handed out a sheet for the, it's Tuesday night, August 4th, and I got to give most of the credit, in fact, all the credit goes to Dane Larson, who's the full-time deputy over at Volga, and also Jeremy Creasy, who's in the school system with the school resource officer they go around to the businesses and get donations and stuff and vaga really steps up and and donates money and so we can get praises and things like that so him and this year they're gonna uh... i do fundraising for sarah olson and joel shown well and uh... come out hopefully the helicopter be able to land this year Last year it was windy, and so the helicopter couldn't land. So hopefully this year they'll be able to land. Fire department's going to use the jaws of life to do a demonstration and so forth. So, yeah, there will be a lot of interesting things. Petting Zoo, Salvation Army will bring a petting zoo over.

Yeah, there looks like there's a lot of events listed.

Yep.

that I think everybody... And that's right on Cassin? Or where are they doing that? Right on Main. Right on Main on Cassin Avenue.

5 to 8 o'clock. Hopefully it won't be so hot. The fire department's there so they probably hose this down if we get too hot.

Other than that the only other thing that we really have going on before we meet again on Tuesday is 4-H Achievement Days starts on Monday and runs next week.

Alright. Number 7 on the agenda is adjournment.

Do I have a motion to adjourn?

So moved.

Second.

Motion is second. All those in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Opposed say nay. Thank you very much everybody.