Board of Commissioners - Regular Meeting

Rowdy group today. [laughter] motion in support. All in favor may members. Any public comment? [snorts]

All in favor? I [clears throat]

have several appointments to look at today. We currently have three positions open. So on our board now in favor. Public number in favor. member Jeffrey. Yes, Madam Chair.

Chair Shotwell. Schneider. Commissioner Pleski. Commissioner Willis Commissioner Sneller. Chair Walls. Snider.

Schneider carries. current James support. All in favor? Commissioner [clears throat] Pleski

Elwell. Commissioner Willis Hemetry. Commissioner Snell. Elwell. Chair Walls. Elwell. Chair Shotwell. Lwell. Lwell passes. Forward item number.

Good morning. Thank you commissioners for allowing me the opportunity to provide this update. I will briefly go over workload staffing um in each division. If you have any questions at any time, feel free to ask. As you know, the county clerk and register of deeds overseas court services. So that includes civil claims over 25,000 criminal cases including felonies, domestic relations, divorce, paternity, custody support, personal protection orders, juvenile delinquency cases, neglect and abuse cases, business court cases, vital records, including birth certificates, death certificates, marriage licenses, DBAs, CPLs, notary applications, elections, and jury. So, our office does continue to experience increasing demand across our core services. Specifically noted in my report, uh, personal protection orders have already surpassed last year's numbers, as have death certificates and CPLs. Court filings are along the way, and our customer service uh, numbers are staggering as well. We have also surpassed the number of jury trials in 2024. Our current service levels are being maintained but we note that we are about a week behind in court services as we are short staffed that it continues to be a challenge with the court services group. Um we are managing uh but these ongoing vacancies do cause backlogs. Crossraining is a priority. We ensure that coverage across court divisions so our court services clerks get trained and court clerks so our court clerks may take their vacation times or cover when needed. Our record management systems are functioning uh but we need to modernize our efforts. We are currently working on back scanning our 2013 case load uh and we continue to do that every week. As far as elections, our 2025 elections

went well and our audits are set to start for next week for the November election. We are preparing for our upcoming election cycle. As you know, 2026 will be busy for our elections division. Uh our public communication in terms of our elections office, we have done voter education initiatives. We uh update our website and social media. Uh we do outreach events such as teaching eth graders to vote. Uh we have noted in our writings that LeBron James is a uh is a winning candidate for governor. Uh so we're excited to see that fictitional race. Uh other winners in other races are Taylor Swift and uh some other names that I am not familiar with uh as the young people are. Uh as far as customer service and public interaction, we continue to see particularly in the court services division emotionally escalated customers. The staff does an excellent [music] job deescalating them and I commend them for their service. We are very thankful for the deputies at the courthouse as they provide extra security for our staff. And we are also thankful for quick responses to the tower building by the Jackson City Police Department when necessary as well. I do get rare compliments, but when I do, I'd like to bring them to the board. Uh I had someone let me know how wonderful a job that both the court services division and the vital records division has done recently. So I wanted to let you know that we do receive compliments. They are rare but they are we are grateful that we do. Uh we're working with facilities department regarding additional storage and scanning capacity for the near future as our volume is increasing and we are purging records as allowed by state statute. Our ongoing challenges include staffing shortage. As I mentioned before we have about a 20% turnover rate. Um aging technology we have a scanner that just won't seem to function all the time. um and election

related workload spikes that we're anticipating next year, particularly with FOYAS. Um these challenges are manageable, but I thank you very much for your support. I would also like to thank the staff for providing excellent service to the public. Um they make me very proud to be a clerk register. Uh they often bring in items uh toys or crayons for children to fill out. Um coloring books while their parents are filling out personal protection orders to keep the children occupied. Um my staff very much cares about the public and the work they do. So I wanted to make sure you were all aware of that. Um thank you for your ongoing support and I'm happy to answer any questions. Any questions? Commissioner Pleski.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thanks for the report, Madame Clerk. I was uh taking a look at the jury report because that's an object of some entertainment at my township meetings. Sure. Uh [clears throat] am I reading it properly? We called almost 2,000 jurors and um 512 failed to appear. So that's a 25% failure rate. A little over 25% failure rate, but it was more than that before. Are you getting a better response maybe?

Absolutely. Thank you very much for bringing that up. We are always working uh with efficiencies and how we can do things better and different. We have since changed from a letter in an envelope to a postcard. Um and we have seen a little bit of a difference with that. Um, so maybe just people see the postcard, the front and back, and they notice that is from the court, the clerk's office, and that is their jury summons versus the envelope may not be as uh noticeable to to those people. And then I saw uh the fines collected, um, show cause fines, questionnaire fine. Those are from jurors who what failed to appear sort of thing.

Failed to appear and for jurors that have failed to fill out their juror, their questionnaire within the 10 days. and then also failed to show. And And what's the what's the damage on a failed questionnaire? $25. $25. Okay. Thank you. Uh thank you, Madam Chair. And I will note, we will always work with jurors. If there's an issue with the mail or if there are other issues, um our office does work with the public very well.

And if I may testify to that, Madam Clerk, my my son was called or, you know, got the the questionnaire, but he lives in Korea. he's away and your staff was very responsive and helpful. We had to we had to kind of provide some documentation that he was away but they excused him uh very curiously very helpful. Thank you. Thank you for the compliment.

Seeing none, I'll look for a motion to receive the report. Support. All in favor? I opposed. Motion carries. Thank you. That brings us to letter D, finance October 2025 finance report. Good morning, Cecilia. Good morning. So, I am here to go over um October 25's financial report. As you can see on the benchmarks for October 25, 101 12th of the budget is 83.3%. [snorts]

As you can see, our year-to- date expenditure is below that, which is a positive thing. And then our year-to- date revenue percent total is 94.9%, which is above our three-year revenue average, which average, which is also a positive thing. Are there any questions on the financial report? Any questions from the committee? Seeing none, I'll entertain a motion to receive the report. support. All in favor say I. I. Opposed. [clears throat] Motion carries.

That takes us to letter E, finance uh 2025 budget amendment.

Okay, thank you. Um so yes, this is our year-end budget amendment. Um it does um include various funds and the funds are in red and the first couple of pages are revenue budgeted adjustments and the last um four pages roughly are the expenditures. Um there's two funds that I just want to bring to your attention that is significant is um number one is the general fund. Um, as the board knows, our fund balance policy, um, you know, wants the fund balance between between be between 18 and 24%. Right now, our fund balance is right around 25%. So, we're proposing with this budget amendment to bring our fund balance down to 22%. Which is where on the first page under the general fund, the last line, it has plan use of fund balance. That's where the 2 million 2.5 million comes from. And then we are also anticipating um excess revenue for this year right around another 1.4 million roughly. And so our proposal is that those excesses per board policy is to transfer those into our equipment fund which is the 245 fund and um to help fund our capital account. If you turn to page seven, I just want to show you what that would look like in which um so it has um public improvement and building a 245 fund and it lists all the different buildings and we're in the contingency line items were. So the first um few um lines, so one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, like nine. The first nine lines right before you get to

the 300,000, those would be the 3.8 million transfer from the general fund. As you can see, we are ant, you know, putting a asking the board to allow us to put a million dollars into the gel because there's things that the sheriff would like to do with our gel since we weren't able to pass our gel millage last year. And then there's also projects that the medical examiner's office would like to do in with their space. So that is what we are asking and proposing and why. Um there is $300,000 that is um also being put into the um equipment fund and that's from our ARPA the interest we've earned on our ARPA ARPA dollars. And then there was a small amount for 42,000 that more had to do with fairgrounds with their bleachers. Um, I'll just stop there. Are there any questions? I've said a lot, so any questions?

Commissioner Pleski. Thank you, Madam Chair. So, that was the first thing that drew my mind was the use of fund balance, use of the general fund balance, and my initial thought was um alarm. I guess what we're using that we're using some of our fund balance, but if I could describe it as [clears throat] I understand it in a my simplistic way is that we find that we're going to use some of the fund balance because it's a little higher than our policy calls for. Yes. And we're setting we're basically putting money into savings accounts for building things we are pretty sure are going to happen in a future year.

Yes. uh that are not happening in the current year and we're taking our fund balance down to the 22% and we're setting that aside for things that will be done or we're pretty sure are going to be done as to buildings in some future period. Would that be a a simplistic way of saying that for Exactly. Yes. And then the excess for this year again is more of just a one-time thing. We can't anticipate that we're going to have this excess next year either, right? You know what I mean? So when we do, that's when we want to be able to put it aside because we know how old our buildings are. We know there's projects that we want to do. There's parking lots we want to do, things like that.

So remind me, I I think we budget fairly closely every year. Yes. So now we've had rather a better fund balance than we maybe thought we were going to have. Is that the result of revenues or expenses or what? Just kind of in a large sense, what were the things that went frankly better than we thought? Right. So on our first page, you'll see that our there's property taxes and interest or big ones. Okay.

Um I can tell you right now, this is where we're at right this second. I don't have final entries yet. So I don't have a property tax receivable number. I'll receive that from the treasur's office middle mid to late Jul J January 1 of February. Um but as of right now it looks like there is an increase in our property taxes. Um and then the other and the other one with our with our expenditures it's it's all about staffing um meaning that turnover um so people leaving it takes time to put um fill positions which you know saves on wages, saves on benefits. So if you kind of look through all of the anything in red on the expenditure side is a redu is a expenditure budget that wasn't used

because we always budget fulltees when we doing our budgets. So other than the couple things we've discussed I in looking through the budget adjustments uh the rest of them appear very minor in nature and are more or less table dressing to get to the end of the year here it seems to me. Okay. Thanks uh for the report, Cecilia, and thank you madam uh madame chair. Are there any further questions? Yes. Thank you. Got a new question. Cecilia. Okay, Johnny.

Thank you for answering all my questions last week. I appreciate that. comparing the uh your October statement bottom page two it says the general fund revenue totals for the year were 52.6 6 million. And now with this 2025 budget adjustments under revenue, it has under the current property tax uh 30 million. What's the difference between the or why is there a difference between the 30 million number and the 52 million number in these two reports?

Okay. Well, the 52 million is total revenue. So, it's including all of the revenues on that page on the on the financial report. It's including all of them. Okay. So that so as you look at grant so the 30 million on the budget is just current property tax that's one revenue line item of the 52 million. Okay. Thank you. That make sense? Yep. Okay. Okay. You're welcome.

Commissioner Pleski. Thank you and thank you for the consideration, Madam Chair, for a second question that comes to mind in an elderly brain. Um, with respect to the monies we're setting aside, especially for the jail. Okay.

Uh, we're putting a million dollars there. We know we're going to have to spend money. Would I be correct in saying that that is in the nature of addressing capital needs that may arise but it's not necessarily going to be adequate in size to build another jail or to to do some of the works we have talked about over the years. This is going to be in the nature of repairs and uh fixes that we think we can do with the monies we have available but it's not necessarily a savings account for a new jail. That is true. Okay. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. Did you

Thank you. Um, next month we're going to the sheriff's going to be here. We're going to have a a capital plan showing uh what he hopes to do in near and uh and even uh the we'll call it shortterm meaning a couple years down the road to a plan for capital uses of funding. and it's nowhere near adequate to do all of it, but you know, at least we're moving in the right direction. Thank you, [clears throat] Madam Chair. I'll move to recommend the budget adjustment to the full board. We have a motion and support. All in favor say I. I. Opposed? Motion carries.

Thank you. That brings us to letter F uh treasure quarterly report. Good morning. So I sent uh my quarterly report to all of you via email last week. Um it's quite a lengthy report but I felt that the topics um were relevant and I think you needed to know what was happening especially with regard to the claims process. So, um hopefully I laid this out as clearly as possible. Um it's kind of a convoluted mess on my end. Um to be truthful and frank, uh we've got a lot of different claims coming at us from different um court decisions. So, um I tried to lay the timeline out as clearly as possible, but um it doesn't always work out that way. And we're still in uh the process of dealing with this claims process. So, um, it continues. So, I wanted to take a minute to highlight that. Other than that, we've just got our our, um, status of the tax foreclosures from this cycle this year with the details on how everything uh, happened. And it looks like we sold all of or have gotten rid of all of our parcels from this tax foreclosure. Um, all sold but one at the auctions and the last parcel went to the city per their request. And then I also have some updates on the two properties that um the county owns, county treasurer owns, the Mechanic Street property, formerly known as Mitchner, and the Angling Avenue property, also formerly known as Mitchner Properties. Um ongoing sampling going on there. So we uh were meeting via email uh with Eagle and EPA on a pretty consistent basis for both of these properties and they are there monthly doing their sampling and reports out and all of that. So other than that,

I just information on our um upcoming very important dates in January and in February. And then of course to let everyone know of the upcoming um tax foreclosure deadline, March 31st, 2026. So at this point in time, I'll entertain questions if you have any for me. Any questions? Seeing none, I'll um looking for a motion to move this forward. I have a motion in support. All in favor say I. I. Opposed. Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you. Happy holidays to all of you. Thank you.

Next we have Parks. Welcome, Kyle.

Thank you. Good morning. Uh so my first item, it's kind of a followup from last month. Um you'll resolve to accept a grant from the DNR to make improvements at Minard Mills County Park. So this is kind of the next step in that project. Um you know, the construction will come down the road. This is the design portion of of making the improvements at the park. So we put this out to bid and we got uh six proposals. We kind of narrowed it down to three um based on similar experience as well as uh DNR trust fund grant experience we thought was very important with this project. Uh and then once we narrowed it down to those three, we did select the lower bid of the three. So recommending uh row professional services uh mainly based on their uh price and their experience, but they're also um working adjacent to the park and doing the design work for Springport Road right outside the park. So um that's our recommendation. committee. Do we have any questions? Entertain a motion to move to the Oh, this one. I'm sorry. This is an action. We need to accept the proposal. So, I'll enterain a motion to accept the proposal.

Move. Support. I have a motion and support. All in favor? I

I opposed. Motion carries. And that takes us to letter H. And that's Kyle again. Okay. This is to replace a playground at Pleasant Lake County Park. Um, similar to a lot of our playgrounds, we bid out this way. We we give them the budget in advance and ask what they can do with within that budget. So, um we uh advertised at 225,000 for this project. Um received, uh a few bids. We we did have uh some community meetings out at Henry out of Township for this project. Uh mainly because we're replacing a a playground that was a community build project. Um so there's a lot of uh folks that are still around that were invested in that and and helped build it, help fund raise for it. So really wanted to make sure that we got their ideas and input as we uh replace something that's uh that means a lot to those folks. So, um I think we had three different meetings including with meeting with the township uh board out there. So, um we kind of agreed uh with that uh committee as far as uh or the public input as far as the Sinclair uh recreation proposal here. Um so, once we once we narrowed it down to Sinclair, um we did add some accessibility pieces to it. That's why it's a little higher than the 225. Um, so we, um, you know, the park board and part of our 5-year recreation plan has a goal to make our playgrounds more accessible. So, we wanted to make sure we were covering that with this, uh, playground as well. So, this is one of our more significant uh, playgrounds because it's one of our higher use parks with a campground out there at Pleasant Lake. So, um, the township is uh, uh, putting $8,400 towards this project. A lot of that is 6,000 of that is left over from the original community build project that they did back in back in 2000. So, um, so our recommendation is the Sinclair Recreation. It's it's based on, um, it's about twice the size as the other two designs, and it's got, uh, a

few different more play pieces, so there's more value with it. Thank you, Kyle. Do [clears throat] we have any questions? Move to adopt the staff recommendation. I have a motion in support. So, we will be um accepting, just so everyone is aware, the proposal for the playground equipment installation from Sinclair Recreation in the amount of $259,100. We'll be moving this to the full board. Um so, this is an action item to move to the full board, not to approve today.

All in favor? I. Any opposed? Motion carries. Thank you. Great. Thank you. That takes us to other business. Uh letter A, the claims. Need a motion to approve the claims. You made a motion. I'll support. Have a motion and support. Are there any other questions? All in favor? I

I opposed. Motion carries. That takes us to letter B. Other minutes. Seeing none, we'll move on to letter C. Reporting schedule. Uh it's currently not available. We'll look forward to that next month. Um, that takes us to public comments. This is our second opportunity for public comments. Each individual will state their name, have two minutes to address the board. You may only address the board once under this public comment, and you may not yield your time to others. Board members will not debate or answer questions at this time. Any public comment? No public comment. Seeing none, public comment is closed. Committee member comments. Commissioner Pleski. Thank you, Madam Chair. I got two things. Um, one I would uh draw the park's attention to the fact that discussions with respect to the Swain's Lake sewer are continuing and um the the park will be uh at least tangentially involved with that because of the county park that's out that way. Uh just um making sure I hope you're aware that uh that discussion is continuing. Of course, one of the questions would be how many units are attributed to the park versus how many units are attributed to the residents out there. So, if you're aware, that's good. Just want to make sure you you know that that's going on. The other thing u madam chair if uh an a motion is in order at this moment I would suggest that we ask our administration I'll move that we ask our

administration to provide a report at the Tuesday meeting uh with respect to what would be involved and the numbers uh necessary to provide our elected officials with an increase I'm going to suggest 3% and I hope to uh get support for that report. So, so the motion, Madam Chair, is to instruct administration to provide information at the Tuesday meeting uh about uh the numbers necessary to provide our elected officials a 3% increase. Thank you, Madam Chair.

We have a motion in support. All in favor? I I opposed. Motion carries. Are there any other committee member comments? Seeing none, meeting is adjourned.