County Commission - Regular Meeting

Okay, we're going to go ahead and call the meeting to order. It is Tuesday, July 14, 2026. Please stand 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.

Any minutes or reports received and filed?

Yes, we have the Treasurer's June 2026 reconciliation report and the Sheriff's June 2026 piece.

Okay. Commissioner, committee, liaison reports, upcoming meetings and events.

Okay, I think my calendar just threw up on my paper here, but HBA board meeting today, planning, meeting tonight uh quarterly reports are due uh wednesday the 15th transportation meeting wednesday i guess are you going or not i'll go go ahead i won't go to all of them okay you go um Got an HBA social power out meeting Wednesday. Got an LABC meeting Thursday. Is that right? Okay. I don't think I'll be at that, but it is there. Solid waste management district board meeting Thursday. There's an MRPC hazard mitigation planning meeting. Are you going to that area then since you're the RBC guy or did you know about that? When is it? Thursday. I just had to email about it, trying to keep up with all those. Send that email to me. Okay. And then Sunday's the St. Stanislaus Picnic in Hortsville, and... Monday got to look like not a responsibility committee meeting for the board of Realtors And also I had an invitation for the UP big boy. It's going to be in town. I'm not gonna be able to make that either so Unfortunately, that'd be pretty cool. I Can't wear your train shirt I am going to wear the

B, H, and O Railroad. That's a good idea. Thank you, Gary.

Okay, today I have a mid-mo public housing agency meeting in Columbia. Tomorrow is an Apples meeting out on St. Mary's. And Thursday, Great River has invited us up, and I may go to Columbia to see Brian Boyce. And Thursday evening is the Samaritan's Center dinner. Monday, I have a safety net meeting. That's my schedule.

Yeah, you're going to go to transportation. Thursday, we have a traffic and safety meeting. We've got a Sons of the American Revolution meeting that evening. Samaritan's Center. Saturday, I'm with KWAS. Sunday, St. Stan Parrish Picnic. Jeff always directs traffic, Sue always saves me a good close parking.

They are late for volunteers for the dunk tank, and I think you should volunteer for that. This should be your last straw.

I think all of our incoming politicians running for office ought to all be involved in that, not me. Be outgoing. Yeah, no, no, no. Okay, that's all I've got. Appointments by commission, the reappointment of Harry Otto to the Mid-Mo Regional Planning Commission.

And I'll make a motion to reappoint Harry Otto to the Mid-Missouri Regional Planning Commission.

I will second that. Is there any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Aye.

I'm abstaining.

Okay. Look at this. This is... Okay, commission comments. Bids and contracts, approval and signing of the Homeland Security Grant subawards. The Arnold Palmer of EMS.

Good morning. Good morning. So these are some awards with State Emergency Management Agency to fund the Homeland Security Grant Program. There are, I believe, four different projects. The first being Oh, let's see, I just had it. The badge printer and ID marker that we use for emergency operations. The second being for the technology in the MEAC. The third is a portable radio cache for EM. And the last one is for the hazmat team itself. So... mac is here to answer any questions should you have but uh unfortunately sam this is your favorite day of the year as you get to sign and first page and then initial every page in this packet dollar and initial is that all he's gonna do one of those are those the duplicates oh no no these are he's got to do every one these are the original

Thank you, Chief. Thank you very much. You're welcome.

It's even funnier than that. Does anybody have any questions for Division Chief Kennedy? I brought his. I actually have a stamp. Matter of expert.

I'll happily second your motion on this.

Do we have any discussion? My God. I'll make a motion to approve and sign on the security grant subawards. Second.

discussion excuse me did you say sign sign an initial page nothing about using a stamp what I'm doing for a while Okay. New business. Accounts payable review. There's none. Okay. Election judge pay. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Hi. Yeah. Okay.

As one of our election judges asked us about a pay raise, so we got to investigating it, and it looks like they hadn't had a raise since 2019, so it's been seven years. And then it was brought up to us about minimum wage, whether we had to pay a minimum wage or not. Well, I think that was decided that we didn't have to because they're temporary workers or seasonal workers. We have a couple different scenarios on the paper there. If given a minimum wage, it would increase the cost by about $13,600. It just depends on what election, because sometimes we have four judges per precinct, sometimes we have six. In the presidential election, sometimes we'll have eight at certain places. So the price kind of varies. But In 2019, when we redid it then, we gave them more money and then we cut back on some of the mileage. So they were getting, you know, if they travel, they just submitted their mileage and we paid them. So in 2019, we changed it to where you had to travel at least 10 miles to get mileage. So that kind of cut down on some of that. But if we do something with pay increases, we'd like to get rid of the mileage. that we're paying a month because i think it's a pain for like finance and stuff because it's two different checks so they'll get a check for 130 for being an election judge and they'll get a check for five dollars or six dollars for mileage whatever it is if they're driving around in town close so they're getting two checks and it's a lot of data entry and stuff so Unless Jessica just likes doing it. I don't know. But it is kind of a pain to keep track of and stuff. So if we do some kind of an increase, we want to try to get rid of the mileage part of it. The mileage part of it is probably, what, $400 an election, I think. Your range is from $260 to $430, yeah.

Depends on...

where they work and stuff. But if we have to send somebody from Jeff City to Eugene, it's 20 miles there, 20 miles back. So they have 40 miles invested in it. So I'm not sure. And as we do the minimum wage, I'm not sure the other proposal, they wouldn't benefit much. But it sure would help us as far as our accounting goes, I think, if we could get rid of the mileage. The April election, I think the judges, it was around 12,000, which all the political subdivisions pay for that so it really doesn't cost the county thing unless you put something on the ballot so you know what i mean so the election is paid for by the municipalities and then like the state now pays for half of the august and november so usually they used to the county haven't paid the whole bill well now the state pays for their half i think we already received a check from them for 30 some thousand dollars so And this August, the city's on with the sales tax. So it'll be divided two and a half ways because they only have 23,000 voters. The county has 50 some. So we break it down per voter is how we charge. So this election, it won't affect us as much, and neither will the November because the state pays half. And in this August election, the city's got to pay part of it. So I know we only have budgeted. 58,000 and we've already used 12 of that. So the second proposal on there we'd be real close to staying within our budget but I know that the city and all those pay us back but I know that doesn't calculate back up through that necessarily but it really doesn't cost the county that much because it's all divided out. So I don't know what your all thoughts are on that. um i did talk to sheila about it and i think she did talk to debbie and there was something about seasonal workers didn't have to get that but we don't want to lose our election judges either so i don't know if y'all can see the proposals uh what i have if we did minimum wage the projected cost for august would be thirty one thousand six hundred in november 31 600 because it's about the same turnout we'll have about 40 we don't expect to have you know the same amount of help for each election so but it does increase a lot i mean it does add a lot because we really don't pay them you know they don't do it for the penny i think the majority of them do it because they want to do it so so

August and November, are those going to be subsidized by the state? Yes. So when you say 31.6, that's... Half. Well, that's our half? No. No. It would be divided in two. At the end of the day, after the reimbursements from the state, the city, any other political subdivision, what will the August election cost us?

Well, we'll have to break that down, but the city's going to probably pay... you know some of that they'll pay a quarter of it maybe and then the rest of it divided between the state and the county okay so give me a guess out of 31 six how much does it end up costing us it's probably gonna cost us i mean we have a formula on our spreadsheet but i'm not sure how are you talking about for election workers august you know because yeah we'll have we'll have the city paying their part in the county and the state So if it's $31,000, I'd say it's probably going to cost $14,000. Well, that wouldn't be half, though. It would be more like $10,000 or $11,000. Because the city is going to pay a portion.

And in November, you said? The city on them? Yeah, they've got some. So in November, it'll just be split between the county and the states.

So it'll be 15 for each of you then. If we hire the same amount of help, which we probably will. I don't see anything surprising.

So why you've got your budget covered?

Our budget originally was 58, and we've already used 12 of that for April. But it didn't. I mean, it all came in through the entities.

And that's just on the expense side, so... if we need to if we need to increase the expense because we're getting more revenue in because of additional items being placed on the ballot from the city and things of that nature we can always do that i think we had our sales tax on the april election so the county did have to pay for some of that but we're just trying to get them some kind of an increase i'm just not sure

we want to go their own way and just eliminate mileage well um i think asking a poll worker to drive 40 miles on their own dime is is not reasonable it's not you know so we either have to give it in pay well or pay and expenses. I mean, nobody's going to not like to get that assignment. They'd like to be next door where they can actually maybe walk to the... And so it's pretty unfair to saddle somebody with 40 miles of

using their own vehicle. Sometimes that's an incentive to get them to go out there, tell them we'll pay them mileage. So it's, you know, we try to get people to work in their precinct. They live there, then they can just drive short distance.

Remind me again about maybe the 10-mile rule. If it's less than 10, it's zero. Yeah. And if it's more than 10, we reimburse them? Right. Something like that.

Yeah, that's what we did do. That's what we're doing now. We started that in 2019.

first 10 miles are free and then anything you drive above that then we have to but then that's a bunch of checks for well but i mean they're set up to do 500 checks a run uh with the juror pay you ought to see the six dollar twelve dollar eighteen dollars it's crazy so I think we have to be fair to our election. I mean, they're really contributing a lot of time to start with and at a very reasonable price. I'd like to treat them more than fair. I might even jump in on this, see where I'm going.

You could. So I don't know which proposal you think. The second proposal there was we were just going to add some $30 for judges and $50 for supervisors. Then if you want to do that, we could still leave the mileage in, or if you want to go minimum wage, it's still paying the mileage. I just don't know which way to go with it. Either way, the budget's going to have to be changed, I think, to compensate for it.

So do all of them work the full day then?

Yeah, they're required five to eight. Okay. And then the supervisors, the supervisors get paid more because they have to bring everything back here. Maybe they had, you know, split shifts or optional shifts or whatever. Well, they would like that, but we don't have enough people. We wouldn't have enough people to do that.

Do we feed them? So they bring their lunches. I'm just curious. I want to, yeah.

Some places used to provide food for them. Okay. Yeah, they have to bring their own lunches.

So I think we do need to do something.

Yeah, I don't know any of them that do it for the money.

A lot of them don't.

Some of them do want the money. I'm sure that helps, but it just... I know a lot of them are out there just doing it to help out as a service. I don't know if we want to dig into the numbers anymore or anything or if you're comfortable going with the... I mean, I'm leaning towards if we're going to do this, do the minimum wage. As far as the mileage, I don't know if we want to have a limit on that. I mean, I think it's fair if they have to drive out to Eugene or St. Thomas to, you know, from Jeff City especially. Yeah.

So basically, we would have to figure out what it would be and then give them a round figure instead of doing it because you can't have people. I think it would be hard to keep track of people that, okay, well, I clocked in at 5, then I clocked in at 530, I clocked in at 515. You know what I mean? Then we've got a bunch more. Your planned one, I guess, is one of the 250. Yeah, and just give them that amount to work the election.

Flat amount.

Flat amount. Instead of trying to keep track of all the hours. This is minimum wage for 14 hours and this is what you get paid. Which is a pretty good increase from what they are, so they should be really happy with that. And then if you want to do that and still give them mileage. I went 10 miles, first 10 miles free because a lot of people work in Dove City. Just the ones that we have to send way out.

Here's what I would propose is we meet the minimum wage requirement for workers. By the way, the time when minimum wage goes up, this goes up. To meet the minimum wage. Okay. That sounds good. Number one. Number two, pay mileage to the extent it exceeds 10 miles. Okay. And the mileage rate is the same rate that we use for the other county employees, which currently is 70 cents a month. Yes, that's correct. That's my motion.

I'm going to second it for more discussion on the minimum wage thing that when minimum wage goes up, are we going to, because I'm looking at doing just the flat number, the 250 and 220, but you're proposing minimum wage times the hours, the 15 hours.

Standard hours, whether they're clocked in and clocked out. That's what we're going to have. Standard and standard. For that day, is it 14?

14, about 14 and a half, it depends. Yeah, one's like 14.

And then the supervisors are an hour longer.

14 hour days.

That's why they get paid a little more.

Because they got the extra hour at the end. They got to come here and drop everything off. Make it simple, but make it as fair as possible and reasonable is my goal. They'll appreciate that. We change budgets all the time, so that's not an issue to me. Okay.

Okay. So then the minimum wage right now, then you were using... Is it $13.50?

No, it's $16.50.

So then these numbers will be higher than...

We had it out here $220 per election for workers and then elections just get $250 the supervisor. 15 times 14 hours is $210.

Yeah so if you do your 15 times 14 it's actually $210 but we just did $220. I mean we could go to $210 if you wanted for the election judge.

That's why I'm just surprised that Commissioner Otto's doing some kind of something and some change. round number yeah and then like no change no change your supervisor if you have to pay them more so they would get more than minimum wage so i'll just deal with him uh yeah i think that's where i was leaning to towards that if we spend a round number or just base it simply upon the minimum wage so that was the only questions for clarification i guess that i had are you good with mileage uh if we do the

if we do them at minimum wage we're kind of forecasting that going forward we're not going to get behind again because as minimum wage goes up this would go up true yeah that'd be a good way to keep pace and it it's good that we get to put this mandate on the state because they're always putting mandates on us, state mandates. So let them share in this expense.

Yeah. And then the 10 miles was what you had before?

That's what we started in 2019 to try to alleviate some of the little checks, you know.

If they don't turn in their mileage, they don't get paid. If they do, the first tens on them in excess of ten, it is reimbursed. That's 70 cents. And we should also make it Instead of saying 70 cents, at the rate the county employees are compensated for, which we tie now to the state, right? For the most part. Correct. We try to. Okay.

So they'll be happy with that. That's my motion. Yeah, and I'd second it. So if you want to add that part into it. So, got that. Okay. Any other discussion?

Just all for the future, it's the same way with our polling places. You know, we haven't increased them. since I've been here. And I don't know how long it was. We pay them $100 is all we pay them for a whole day. So one of these days, we're going to have to research that a little bit, see if we can't do something better.

Let us know if that gets to where they're grumbling. Because they're doing it to be good people. They are. And of those, how many places are churches? Quite a few.

There's only a handful. And some of them we don't have to pay if it's tax dollars. You know, like McClung Park, we don't have to pay because it's through tax dollars. You don't have to pay any places, just the churches. American Legion and them, they didn't really want it, but we paid them anyway because we pay everybody else. So BFW, they didn't want any either, but we still pay them because we paid everybody else $100, so we didn't want it. The only place people we don't pay is the ones with tax dollars. But yeah, the schools, like Eugene, we don't have to pay them because it's tax dollars. The school?

The only one. We're out of every other school. I mean, the safety issues, I thought it would push you almost out of the school. Yeah, they don't keep the doors locked, I guess.

Way back on the end by the gymnasium, they were on the entrance and everything. We were actually just in a hallway, but there's nowhere else there. I don't know what else to do. Shut it down. Move it to the union. And we can't find people to work there either.

When you start changing polling, people get upset. Yeah, we'll get a few folks.

They go to vote and they keep... Did y'all vote on that? No.

No, I will call for the question then. All in favor?

Aye. Okay. Thank you all very much. Appreciate it.

Okay, HMB grant adjustment.

This is a grant that we currently have. And what they're doing is they're giving us some more money. It's a budget adjustment for the hazardous minimum violation of $500. There's nothing for you to sign. I just need you to vote on to doing it. And then Sam and I have to docu-sign the grant before close of business today. betsy's not here this morning when she comes in this afternoon she'll send us the information for us both of us to be able to document i'm going to be done with signing after i do all of your examples well this is just a click so you don't have to actually sign it okay so but uh i'd ask that you approve the 5500 adjustment for the head of his moving violation

all right i'll make a motion to approve sam docu signing the hmv grant adjustment second all in favor aye aye thank you good job okay uh unfinished business last week we appointed three individuals to serve on

We did not adopt a resolution to do the same thing. So I'm just trying to cover the bases because we should have adopted a resolution. So I think my motion is to execute a resolution showing what we did last week on our typical standard resolution paperwork.

second okay any discussion all in favor aye aye okay i have some additional um so following up from the july 4 storms uh the missouri baptist that disaster relief has been working in osage city helping private residents clean up their properties apparently they've decided to pile some of that storm debris on the right ways and have requested that we come clean it up I've talked to eric this morning eric landwehr and he says that they are willing and able to do that however it will cost them man hours and equipment use to do that so there will be an expense so he wanted me to bring that in front of you obviously he's out of the office today and get some direction on that it'll be an expense to go pick it up it'll be an expense to haul it to the cart facility and eventually Those piles, along with whatever other items that they have, will have to be an expense to get it either chipped up or hauled off. So that's kind of where we're at.

We don't really know what the cost would be.

No. And talking to Eric, the labor costs, it's his guys working. So they just have to defer whatever they were working on that day to go do it. So there's not really any labor cost. It's more of an equipment usage and then also fuel and then disposing of it when that time comes. Is there any chance we get reimbursed for it? We are working on that.

right now the the threshold hasn't been met from the state level so get out there pretty quick though moving that stuff around and disposing of it

uh we are trying to work on that obviously uh with the events uh sivas kind of have had their direction uh you know their their focus redirected here in the last couple days so we don't know utility wise what assistance may be available or if we can get a disaster declaration it's really going to depend on what the overall impact was to the utility companies And, you know, seeing what that number is, I would not put your faith in getting reimbursement for this. No, that would be nice, though. Yes, it would be. Well, and it'd be more likely that if we do a good job documenting the hours, the out-of-pocket costs, if we are to ask for reimbursement, here's our... Yeah, or if reimbursement were to become available, but that's one of the things that Public Works does in their cartograph, you know, their software. I think it's a few clicks of a button to get that information back out in case we do get that reimbursement.

I guess I've got some questions. If we don't get reimbursed, is Public Works wanting to charge emergency management? Is that who they're wanting to charge versus the public or anything?

I think this would be an expenditure out of GR or whatever piece because EM doesn't, you know, we don't budget for operations and that piece of it. So...

You're funded out of general, but it's from the road fund or the public works paying initially for it and then charging emergency management the general fund for reimbursement.

I think it's a general entry that they'll be massaged until everybody's happy with it.

I think we need to do it. Okay. I don't think we need any formal motion. I think Eric just wanted direction that yes, we are interested in doing that. One of the things that we talked about this morning is really trying to get some lines of communication with these disaster relief organizations and these community partners to make sure that we don't have this disjointed kind of clean up in response. You know, it would have been nice if we would have had a plan and could have had some more insight on maybe where it would have been more functional to store this sort of stuff or compile it and make it easier to haul off.

So in the future, yeah, maybe we will look for a site for the debris to be taken to.

Well, I think a lot of it's where they're at. I mean, they wouldn't have done this in the middle of Jeff City. Right. If you're down in Osage City, we're just going to dump it in a ditch and let somebody else take care of it or not take care of it. So I think that's part of the issue here. I don't know. You can correct me if I'm wrong or if you know any better.

I think the... the the folks doing the cleanup were working on behalf of the homeowners or the property owners and if the property owners didn't have their own means to get rid of it it was maybe more of an answer of hey uh just pile it up and and where do we go from here there's enough problems with trash down there just i think when you got to get it out of there it's just

It's going to roll over and everything else and everything that they've tried to do to fix that area up is going to go for naught. Hopefully we do get some reimbursement for it. It'd be nice.

That was a hell of a storm, so... I would be for having public works do that.

We'll work with Eric to get that accomplished. And then the one other update that Brian wanted me to mention is that the cybersecurity grant for 2024 was approved and our reimbursement is on its way. And I believe that was about $250,000-ish.

The total reimbursement was $140,000. The total project was

Thank you.

One other thing. We had our Cole County United Way Golf Tournament yesterday. I think it was very successful. I just want to thank Teresa and Carrie and Matt and Brian and all of our county employees who worked Judy and her office. We had... Our workers did a great job and hopefully we will set a new record for our fall tournament. But I do want to thank everybody who participated. Everybody who worked and then everybody who participated. We had Arnold Hoy there. Thank you very much. And that is all I have. Anything else? Then I would entertain a motion to go into closed session.

Pursuant to section 610.021 of the revised statutes of Missouri, the commission will go into closed session to discuss the following. Real estate under section 610.021 subsection two, Personnel issues under section six ten point zero two one subsection thirteen second roll call, please Sam yes Harry yes Jeff yes