Board of Supervisors - Regular Meeting

Supervisors.

First up, we have the invocation from Pastor Truna. If everybody could please stand.

Let us pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for all these people that have stepped forward to stand up for the work that has to be done in this county and that they give it good thought and reach good decisions in the plans and works that they have to do. We ask you to be with them during this meeting and encourage them to continue to make decisions that are good for the county and not personal. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

Amen. Thank you, Pastor.

Thank you, Pastor.

Okay, 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. Okay, roll call. Everybody up and running or is computers?

We still need Preston. Preston?

I can't get logged in.

Can you overwrite it and sign it for them if they're here?

You shouldn't have to do all that. I don't know if you can. You do want to get in and see if... Okay. Okay.

All are present and Jeff Ulrich is excused and Jordan Spacek is excused, unless you are online. Jordan, are you online? Okay. Thank you.

Very good. Thank you. Next up, communications and announcements from supervisors. Does anybody have any communications they would like to share? Your next public comment.

Thank you.

No supervisors have anything to share. Okay, we move on to public comment. We have one person sign up. Is that you, Samantha?

I believe so. I thought that we spoke and you were going to a lot of time for me today to discuss something.

You're not on the agenda. What's it about?

So this is about balance and equally stratified duties and privilege of knowledge and distribution.

Well, we'll give you two minutes if you want to step up to the microphone.

It's not sufficient, and we did talk about it, and I was under the impression that you had allowed time for this important data. Would you like me to come back on a reschedule for this information to be appropriately presented?

Yeah, let's do that.

Okay, so when is at your earliest convenience? What day would be good for everyone?

Well, the next board meeting. I would like to look at your materials.

So the challenge of that, Mr. Ernst, is that this material would then be delayed, and my concern is that the delay has brought and compounded things thus far, and I would be Kind of hesitant because of that. So, I'm, I'm sorry that I was under the intention that you made space for me on the agenda today, but it is relevant and. I want everyone to hear, but if there's no time in the agenda set aside today, as I said, I don't yet know how to adequately and appropriately distribute this information.

Okay, well, I would like you to contact me either via email or phone, and we will.

No, I have yet done that, and you have been elected to allow me at the time today, so I guess I would like you to do that. Okay.

Go ahead. So you could allow for the two minutes of public comment.

And that's not sufficient.

Let me finish, please. You could allow for the two minutes of public comment. Please let him speak. If the board feels it's relevant, they can waive, with a three-fourths vote, they could waive the two-minute rule to allow for additional time or choose to have it on a future agenda. rather than postponing it. So you do the two minutes, you would choose as a board whether or not to waive the rule, at which time it has to be a three-fourths vote. If you choose not to, we're done. If you choose to, it goes on, or you could choose to have it on a future agenda if it's relevant.

Are you interested in giving us at least a brief overview and then we can move on from there?

I feel at this time that my efforts have been not respectfully met with an open and welcoming And frankly, I am feeling very, what is the word that I'm looking for? Frustrated. I appreciate your process, but you've definitely neglected to be considerate of necessary information on many occasions. And so you further insult me and I feel definitely mocked at this point and I don't appreciate that. So if I call you and you said to me that you were going to make a space at this point and you haven't, I don't want to speak out of frustration. So perhaps I should exit. And I don't know if your books are so booked or you can't make the adequate time that I will be willing to come back in here. This is not okay.

Okay. We're going to move on. If you want to contact me, we can...

I had already tried that, sir, and I apologize that we have not yet met.

Okay. Moving on. Anybody online have any public comment? Star six to unmute.

Goodbye.

Nobody online has...

Password. Oh, Jesus.

Okay. Star six, if you're online. Okay, nobody.

Okay, nobody online. Next up, presentations. Number one, employee recognition, Laura Palskill.

Okay.

Good morning. Good morning. So we have a number of employees to recognize for Milestone Anniversaries this month. Kicking it off at one year of service. We have Charlie Melbauer, who is a highway operator, Melody Jorgensen, who is one of our ADRC specialists, and Katie Voss, who is a health and human services assistant. Then we have a couple at 10 Years, Joel Eider, who is our sheriff's deputy and recreation officer, and Jay Toombs, who is an on-call sheriff's deputy. And then at 25 years this month, Kim Polster, who is our accounting and legal assistant at Health and Human Services. So none of them are in attendance today, but let's give them all a big hand for their time of service here at Tristone. I'd also like to put in a little plug. We do have our employee appreciation night at the Price County Fair this Thursday. Although it is free admission for everyone because of having music in the park there, we are also providing our employees and board members all with a free ice cream treat at the 4-H Dairy Bar. So be sure to visit the Dairy Bar and get your treat. I'm partial to the chocolate malts myself. So have a great day.

Laura, just one question. Yeah, I'm sorry. It said on the calendar, that there's a meeting place for the county people, I think, well, there had been last year, but then we didn't really pursue it this year, because nobody took advantage of it.

So I saw it on the thing. And I was like, Oh, well, it's not. I mean, we, we had had a few tables together last year, and just sort of like, this is our special seating area, but nobody utilized it. So. Okay, thank you. You're welcome.

Okay, thank you, Laura. Next up, Phillips Area Chamber of Commerce, biannual report, Jonathan McArthur.

Not a problem, Jonathan. Thank you. There you go.

Good morning. My name is Jonathan McArthur. Those of you that don't know, I am the director for the Phillips Area Chamber of Commerce. The county every year awards the chamber $30,000 with the primary objective to increase tourism in the area. From the chamber side of things, I get to be the voice of 240 business members. On the tourism side, my job and the chamber kind of work together really nicely. Most of the businesses that I represent benefit from one unique factor, bringing people to the area. Whether that's a small mom and pop shop, whether that's an industry that needs families here, both tourism and the chamber benefit from bringing people to the area. I first wanted to say that I take that responsibility very, very importantly, not lightly, because when I first moved here, I find that this area is precious and I want to preserve some of the natural resources that we have. I realized that when you bring a ton of people to the area, Some of those things go away. Um, I look outside of my chamber window and I love seeing that water empty. I think it's beautiful, but we do need tourism. Some of these businesses, some of these, some of the bars, the restaurants, the lodging, even the gas stations need people driving through here. So I'm very fortunate that both of these goals align. Um, in front of you, I have a budget that breaks down where our spending is going. And over the last year, we have a large initiative. That initiative is Enjoy Price County. It's a website we're able to funnel all of our advertising to. So we have a lot of different means of doing so. I have two advertising agencies that I primarily work with. One is Skyfear. That's Heikki Heikkinen out of Prentice. The other one is Platypus Design. That's Dan Chesinski out of Butternut. So both of them have two different objectives, but they both unify at the end. uh platypus design what they're doing is they're utilizing youtube and google ads so these are targeting people outside of the county when somebody goes on google and they search biggest fish in wisconsin we're going to pop up price county is going to be there you're going to see some pictures of people fishing anytime somebody's on youtube outside of the county you might see a pre-roll ad or an ad that focuses on the woods the waters the trails some of the natural resources that price county has to offer on the Sky for your side of things, that's social media. That's going to be Facebook, Instagram, TikTok to hit an entirely different demographic. So the goal here is to spread out as wide as possible and to target and market to the people that are outside of the county. Meredith, I'm going to have you switch slides. So there's a lot of ways to read the information. One of my jobs is to break down and analyze the data that we have. There's a lot of terms I'm not going to go through, but these are kind of some of the ways that you can determine how effective our marketing is. And I'll have you go to the next slide. So year to date, we are from January to August. We're looking at almost 2 million advertising impressions. What that means is our ads have gotten in front of almost 2 million unique faces across Wisconsin. Meredith, I'll have you go to the next slide, please. This focuses on the Google search, the YouTube search. Again, that's going to be done by Platypus. Year to date for platypus, we have $12,000 spent. That's usually about $1,500 a month. We spread it out into specific months. So there's no reason to kind of hit the ads really hard during July when our county is already at its peak advertising. So we look at shoulder months. Meredith, I'll have a go to the next slide. These are going to be some of the Facebook analytics that we're going to see. I'll have a go to the next slide as well. um this is going to be like click-through rate so when you have an ad there's a lot of ways to look at it uh people will sometimes see an ad and they'll just skip through it right away we want to take some of the ads and we want to analyze how long they've been looking at it and where it goes so when they when they see an ad and they're engaged in the ad are they actually clicking on a link that brings them to enjoypricecounty.com and when they do we can track that information we can see where on that website they're going what links they're clicking on, how long they're spending on there, how long they're watching. And even if they're making a phone call to those places, we can track that stuff. We know these are working because we're seeing an increase in all across the board. We're seeing an increase in lodging. We're seeing an increase in overnight stay. Meredith, I would go to the next slide. And this is a breakdown of our reach. So each individual ad, I'm sorry, each individual platform we're able to track and analyze. All of these numbers are from people viewing outside of the county. So if somebody's inside of Price County and they're looking at this information, that's discarded because they're already here. They're likely already spending. So we don't track that information. I do track it, but I don't include it in this report here today. I'm ready to thought we go to the next slide. So how do we know that the advertising is working? It's always a hard thing to quantify. The Wisconsin Department of Tourism and Economic Development calculates that about 5% of all ads are going to work. And then how they take a look at that is they say one overnight stay is equivalent to about $184 per traveler. So what we do is we take the amount of impressions. We take about a 5% take on that. And then we calculate that figure and we multiply it by the $184 per traveler that we're getting. So this is just a rough estimate of the economic development that we've seen in Price County. Of the $30,000 that we receive at the Chamber side of things, we calculate that we've brought in almost half a million dollars from January to August. and just overnight travelers alone. And like I said, we're able to confirm that this is true because we can look at year-to-date numbers and we can see how much this has impacted areas like lodging specifically. During months that they may have had a 40% occupancy rate, we're now seeing a 60% and 70% occupancy rate. So we're seeing a large uptick to show that this is actually working. The Chamber's doing some amazing things with $30,000. Right now, I think I would consider us our tourism bureau for the area. We get nonstop calls. We're having nonstop requests for information and encouraging people to come to the area. When you guys are doing your budget, I would encourage you guys to review the amount that we're getting and make a motion to increase it. With what we're doing with $30,000 is amazing. What we could do with $60,000 would really move the needle here in Price County. Are there any questions?

Me. You said Google search, right?

Yes.

Okay. I did the biggest fish in Wisconsin. Absolutely nothing about Price County showed up. And I just did the fall color drives because I seen that pop up there. And I see a lot about Vilas County.

You're in Price County. Just saying.

My phone's not though. Like my phone says I'm in Chicago.

When you're in Price County, you're not going to be targeted. As soon as you leave the Price County area, your phone is going to start display ads on all social media platforms, and when you do searches, it's going to pinpoint you back. I'm not sure where or what your phone is pinging off of, but I'd be willing to bet you're not running a VPN, and I'd be willing to bet that it is counting you as in Price County. I know I've done this myself outside of Price County, and I'll encourage you guys as well. When you leave the area, do a search, and Price County should definitely float to the top.

Do you have anything more to add as far as your report?

Um, I would say all things are going very well. Like I said, when it comes to advertising, it is always hard to quantify. You're spending a dollar. Are you getting that dollar back? It's the same thing I noticed with radio ads and other platforms. You put this out there. You put it on TV. People watch it. But they don't always tell you they've heard it. How many times have you guys heard a radio ad and thought, is this actually working? That's where this data is able to show it is. And like I said, we're seeing that huge increase in lodging year to date. We're seeing revenue increase in a lot of these areas, these bars, these restaurants. And at the end of the day, that money goes back into the families of Price County. So it's definitely working.

Do you want to highlight any of the Chamber's activities at all? Yeah.

Specifically maybe the one that just happened? Yeah. So there's a lot of good things happening. I primarily focus today on the tourism spending. If you look, we are trending to spend more than we get because we know it's working. So this – budget report in front of you is only reflecting the county side of things from the chamber side we're spending nearly the exact amount if not more focusing on the chamber related activities to help the businesses in the area um obviously i think you guys see some of the events that we had uh phillips on tap being the one this most recent one i project around 4 000 people were down at that event itself that's 4 000 people that may or may not have been in the county i suspect quite a bit of them might have been from already in the county but These events are driving traffic to the area. All lodging was completely booked this last weekend. You could not get anywhere and any of our hotels and any of our Airbnbs is completely booked across the board. That is just a small reflection of what we're trying to do. We're increasing advertising across all calibers, across all social media, across all avenues. And it is working. It's putting Price County on the map. It's creating more opportunities. It's creating more economic development for the area. And the families, the businesses, and even the residents are going to start to see this. You want to touch on the extra advertising dollars? The chamber received for Phillips on tap. Yeah. So the chamber this year, we've been working really hard. We applied for a travel Wisconsin grant and we received a grant for $38,000 to use specifically on Phillips on tap. I don't include that in this budget because again, that comes out of the chambers. payroll itself or the chamber's budget itself. Um, but we, we had a 75, 25% match. So of that $38,000, we needed to match $9,000. So over the last three months, we've really ramped up the chamber side of advertising. Um, and I would think it was working. I don't know if you guys have seen Phillips on tap in previous years. but we had some record-breaking numbers. I think that alone shows that the advertising is working. The money that we're spending, the dollars that we're using are going to a good cause. And I think the whole county is really starting to see benefit from that. I really do believe a rising tide lifts all boats. So when we advertise and we focus on areas like Ogema, Park Falls, Five Fields, it helps all of the county, not just Phillips, not just Park Falls, not just Ogema. Every area gets lifted.

How's the partnership with Park Falls?

It's been very good since I've been here. I think it's getting better.

Anybody else have any questions for Jonathan? Comments? Okay, hearing none, thank you for your presentation. For what it's worth, my two cents. I think you're doing a great job. Keep up the good work.

Thanks. It takes a team.

Next item on the agenda, approval of minutes from June 16th, 2026. Looking for a motion to approve.

I'll make that motion.

Motion by Hordak.

Yeah, it should be up now, is it? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm waiting to share. Nick, can I share?

Oh, uh-oh, something isn't right. Harry, can you help him? Please.

Here's my motion. Okay. Did it come up now?

Yeah.

Okay, good. Thank you.

Okay. Belay the last comment. Motion by Palachuk, second by Hodak. Any discussion regarding the minutes? Hearing none, we'll go ahead and vote for approval.

Is yours okay?

Yes? Okay. And approval of the minutes passes, 11 yes, zero no. Thank you.

Okay, onward. Resolutions, first one. Create an additional economic support specialist position. It's coming from Health and Human Services. Whereas the Price County Health and Human Services is part of the Northern Maintenance Consortium, which is compromised of 11 counties that combine together to administer mandated public assistance programs, including Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, SNAP, and so forth. Whereas the increased cost associated with the position will be fully covered by the additional revenue and will not require county tax levy and now therefore be it resolved that the Price County Board of Supervisors does hereby approve the creation of an additional economic support specialist in the economic support unit of the Health and Human Services Department and instructs the administration committee to develop a job description. Motion by Hodak, second by Kopisch. Any discussion?

So, are they going to be able to go to the schools and stuff, too, or is this just basically based out of here?

Different type of position. So, this is out of the economic support area. They are a consortium job where they cover all 11 counties. So, they rarely leave their desk. It's like a call center. It's just we house so many of them. Each county houses so many. State pays for them. It just gives a position to your community. We do have to have a person on site during work hours because there is the availability for walk-in. But this is not an educational, out-of-building position.

Any further discussion? Okay. Hearing none, we'll go ahead and vote.

Jen. Jen. It didn't connect. Do you want to just voice vote it? Yes. I said thank you. All this stuff, and I'd never seen that before.

and resolution resolution 14 dash 26 to create an additional economic support specialist position passes 11 yes zero no two absent thank you okay next resolution number two amend 7-20 request to apply for wisconsin dnr 2020 municipal dam grant program cranberry creek dam from the executive Whereas Price County Board of Supervisor Resolution 412 was adopted as now therefore it be resolved that Resolution 48-09 be amended to require Price County Board approval by resolution of any county funding required by the awarding of a grant to Price County under the Wisconsin DNR Municipal Dams Grant Program prior to submitting any such application for financial aid from the program. for any specific county dam project and whereas needed repairs have been identified at the Cranberry Creek Dam, Wisconsin DNRFF 50.32 KSN 435, so on. Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Price County Board of Supervisors, whereby authorizes the Price County Forest Administrator to be the aforementioned representative, and be it further resolved that Price County agrees to pay their share of the eligible costs, which are equal to the total project costs minus the state share authorizing funds to be transferred on an as-needed basis from the Capital Improvement Fund to the Forestry Department Revenue Account Number 100-79-49270. Financial impact. Total estimated cost for this project is $67,524. State share is estimated to be $33,762. And county share is estimated to be $33,762. Motion by Drobnik. Second by Palachuk. Before we get into discussions, Joe, you want to give us any overview here or not to put you on the spot? Just briefly.

This is the dam just south of town, across from the shooting range. It washed out in 18. Just with the different... engineering that had to be done on it. Took a while to get through, so now it finally got approved. Price originally was more like $30,000 or $35,000 maybe, and now it's $67,000, of course. The highway shop's going to do the work as far as the install goes.

That's $22,000 of the estimate. So basically, the board has already approved this project or this funding, but the cost has gone up, so we're amending it to approve the additional costs. Is that correct? Okay. We'll open it for discussion. Anybody have any questions?

Comments?

Does anybody want to see what the previous approved resolution looked like as far as numbers go or Nope. Okay. We'll move on then. And I don't hear any discussion. Go ahead and vote.

Preston. Yes. Okay. And motion passes 11 yes 0 note to absent for resolution. 7 dash 20 request to apply for WDN our 2020 municipal damn grant program thank you.

Okay resolution number 3 count of 5 for bridge and covert 8 from executive Whereas the town of Fifield is requesting aid for design and installation of one new culvert on Forest Road 136, North Gates Lake Road, and the unnamed tributary to Nichols Lake, I'm not going to try and say that, Creek Waterway, with directions from the nearest intersection from junction of Forest Road 508 and Forest Road 136. The crossing is approximately one mile west, and so on. Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Price County Board of Supervisors hereby approves the Town of Fifield Bridge and Culvert aid request. Fiscal impact, $12,000 municipal tax levy estimated. Motion by Drobnik, second by Erickson. Any discussion? Okay. Hearing none, you go ahead and vote.

Okay.

Resolution number 15-26. Town of Fayfield Bridge and Culvert 8 request passes. 11 yes, 0 no. Thank you.

Resolution number four, Town of Hill Bridge and Culvert Aid from Executive. Whereas the Town of Hill is requesting aid for design and installation of one new culvert on Holtman Lake Road and Esker Waterway with directions from the nearest intersection west of Highway C on Holtman Lake Road, half mile and so forth. Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Price County Board of Supervisors hereby approves the Town of Hill Bridge and Culvert Aid request. Fiscal impact, $12,500 municipal tax levy. Motion by Drobnik, second by Palachuk. Any discussion?

Hearing none, we will go ahead and vote. It'll tell you here.

Resolution 16-26, Town of Hill, bridge and culvert aid request, passes 11 yes, 0 no. Thank you.

Number 5, Town of Prentiss, bridge and culvert aid, whereas the Town of Prentiss Prentiss is requesting aid for design and installation of one new culvert on Old 8 West Road and an unnamed waterway with directions from the nearest intersection one quarter mile west of Beaumont and Old 8 West. Legal description, southwest quarter, northeast quarter, section 8, township 35 north, range 1 east on the border of section 29 and 28 and so forth. Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Price County Board of Supervisors hereby approves the Town Apprentice Bridge and Culvert Aid Request, Fiscal Impact, $8,000 Municipal Tax Levy. Motion by Drobnik. Looking for a second. Second by Palachuk. Any discussion? Hearing none, we'll go ahead and vote.

Resolution 17-26, Town of Brenes, Bridge and Culvert Aid Request, passes 10 yes, 0 no, 1 abstain.

Okay, and last one, last resolution on today's agenda, Price County Public Safety Radio System Study Phase 1, Consulting Services, from the Executive. Whereas Price County issued a request for proposals for a public safety radio system facility and feasibility study and received proposals from qualified public safety communications engineering firms. And whereas the requested study will document and evaluate the existing radius radio system, analyze coverage and infrastructure, assess interoperability and modernization options, develop cost estimates and funding strategies, and provide phased five-year and ten-year capital and implementation plans, and so forth. Now, therefore, be it resolved that the TUSA Consulting Services is hereby selected to provide phase one consulting services for the Price County Public Safety Radio System project, and the County Board authorizes an allocation and contract amount not to exceed $55,000 for phase one and Be it further resolved that the Phase 1 costs shall be paid from Fund 105 Capital Improvement slash Bug Tussle Fund, and be it further resolved that the firm selected for Phase 1 will be recommended to provide professional consulting services for Phase 2 and 3 if the county deems the project necessary, and the consulting fees for those phases shall be included as project costs. However, the scope, fees, contracts, and funding for Phases 2 and 3 shall be presented in for separate approval by the county board before work on those phases begins. And be it finally resolved that the county administrator is authorized to execute the phase one professional services agreement subject to review by corporation council. Okay, the motion by Drobnik. Looking for a second. Second by Kopisch. Before we go into discussion, Nick or Larry, do you want to give an overview here?

Sure. I'll give a quick overview. And I think the biggest thing we should just discuss is phase one, two, and three, what that means. So when we had four of us in interviews, we had four bidders. We narrowed it down to three. Of those three bidders, the sheriff, the chief deputy, the board chair, and myself met with the three finalists out of the four. and discuss just what they were planning, what their idea was for the project. So phase one, what that'll be is the TUSA who was selected would come here, they'd interview the dispatch, they'd interview all the law, not all law enforcement, but law enforcement, so Park Falls, Phillips, they're looking at the fire departments, they're looking at EMS, they're looking at surrounding counties, they look at the equipment we have with IT and how that all works. So they build a three, three options, right? The, you can just get by this old, this old work prod product, a Goldilocks product, which is what they probably would recommend. And then the here's your Cadillac plan, which will be tracks your people and does all these fancy things, which Technology around here may not reach those peaks anytime soon. So phase one, they do all the research. They make sure they look at all the options for products. What do you really need? What do you have? Are you truly at end of life? They then come to you guys as a board saying, here's what we came up with. Here's what we saw in your system. Here's your weaknesses. Here's where you need to work on. Here's what you should. Here's your three options. If you choose to move to phase two, phase two is an RFP process. So then we would look at choosing a company which we would recommend the same company to do the RFP. And what the RFP is, is they all three said the same thing. It's between 100 and 200 pages of very precise equipment. very precise what we need for towers, all these things so that when you do get competitive bids, they're all apples to apples and not, hey, if I put together an RFP that was five pages that said we need a radio that works for our law enforcement, somebody's going to tell you, yeah, you need these and they're $10 a piece where this company is going to say you need these and they're $20,000 a So by doing a really in-depth RFP, you're going to get a very competitive bid and you're going to get like products that meet that Goldilocks or whichever one you choose, the Cadillac or the other option. So phase two would be the RFP process, would get you to doing the RFP, finding a competitive bid process and getting the contracts ready where it's They make sure there's a 10-year warrant, not warranty, but a 10-year maintenance, because that's the biggest thing. You want to lock in your maintenance for as long as possible. They look at how the future of it all works. Okay, so then that's phase two. If you choose to sign on the dotted line at a phase two year, you go into phase three, which is the implementation and getting the switch to turn on. So this whole process takes two years. This is not an overnight, here we need a product, go plug it in. Um, so we're recommending phase one through this resolution to at least get to know what we have going on here, where we're at. So it's not a salesperson coming in and telling the sheriff, you need a shiny new radio or you need X, Y, or Z. And they go, Oh yeah, of course. And then they come to the board and go end of life. We need shiny new. This is a third party that this is what they do every day for many, many different municipalities to tell you, this is what would work best in your situation. Um, whether it's rural because we only have three towers or if you need to add towers, whatever it might be. So that's where we're at. The TUSA was out of Missouri, so they would come on site. They would do the interviews with all the different groups. One area we're going to try to work with is we'll reach out to Park Falls, Phillips, there's five or six, the fire districts, the EMS districts, and say, you may want to consider looking with us at a system rather than wait for our system to go in and then in a couple years you have to figure out a system. So, we're not, we don't pay for the fire department system, we don't pay for the EMS system, but there's an opportunity where we could all work together. That'll be part of this phase one is what that looks like. Any questions on how we got to this point or timing?

I just got one. I want you to clarify. The ask is not to exceed $55,000, but they're How did it end up at $55,000 when their bid was less?

Yeah, so phase one bid was $49,600 or something. And there may be a situation where if we ask them to come back, that would be additional costs. Or if there was like outside of the current scope, if I came to you and said, hey, we want to... have them look at X, Y, or Z. That wasn't part of it. They have an hourly rate they charge. But it was one of those, if you put $49,640 and then there's the one-hour fee or something, it becomes a logistical nightmare. Yeah, it just takes time. With the money, so this one's $55,000 up to $55,000. The contract is for $49,000. We talked about like for this year's budget, which we'll talk more, but originally it was, okay, we're gonna have to borrow two to $4 million to do a radio project. We don't know what that scope is yet. This is not going to affect this year's budget discussion. we're nowhere near choosing a product, getting a number, doing all that. So this first phase takes about three months. We probably will be discussing phase two in that springtime next year, which then, You guys would come forward, or we would come to you as a board and say, hey, we've come up with this Goldilocks plan. The RFP is going to be approximately this. Do you want to go out for the RFP? Yep, go out for the RFP. It comes back at $2 million. You then would approve a $2 million project to be put in the 2028 budget. So we can still continue to move forward without a lot of pausing and waiting for like a budget process to happen. But the positive is we don't have to try to rush and guess on a number this year and affect your levy, your debt levy this year. It'll be for next fall. You'll be approving the bar. Well, you approve the project. You'll prove how we pay for it next fall, which would affect your 2028 levy. levy. So we're slowing everything down. We have confirmation that from Northway that our system's not going to just stop tomorrow and we're not going to have something and there's going to be an emergency. We do know that we're nearing the end of life. I hate using that end of life term because it seems like, oh, it's going to turn the switch off. We talked a lot about this at law enforcement where End of life means they don't make that product anymore. It doesn't mean they stop service. That's a different terminology. Even if service is stopped on it, there's always a third party that's willing to service it for an additional couple years. So we know the equipment's end of life, but service life is different. And so we have the time to do this right rather than try to rush and just put something on towers that won't work for us for the long term.

Mr. Kopisch.

How much is in the buck tussle fund?

$90,000. And technically this year there would be an additional $60,000. We get 40 basis points on the remaining principal, which ends up being about $60,000 a year.

So this is just an accumulation of that?

Yeah, over the last year and a half. Okay, all right, excellent. So right now that fund is being used for any legal services with Bug Tussle, and then we're recommending, or through executive, we recommended using the Bug Tussle funding to get this phase one done, because originally that was the intent, was to use their towers.

Anybody else have any questions, comments? Okay. Hearing none, we'll go ahead and vote.

Okay.

Hey, look at you.

Back on. And resolution 18-26, Price County Public Safety Radio System Study Phase 1 Consulting Services passes 11 yes, 0 no. Thank you.

Okay, next on the agenda is appointments. These are just for information only to be entered into the record. Unless anybody has any questions or comments they would like to put forward. If not, we'll go on to the next item of the agenda. Reports on file, 2025 annual report from Forestry and Parks. It's in your packet, should be anyway. Joel, we must have scared him off. Does anybody have any comments or questions we can direct to Doug? Because he's the head of the chairman of the forestry committee. Nick, you want to touch base a little bit? Do you know anything about that utility easement that's included in the packet? I assume that's part of this report.

Yeah, that was a request for somebody getting power through. I know we approved it and the stumpage is to come back to the county if there was any trees cut. It's just a long road. I would like to say, though, I was on at Solberg a couple weeks ago. If you guys have not been out to the new part, I think it's something to take a drive through. I think it's all complete now. The final blacktop is being put on. Very impressive. Very busy also.

Just a question about the jumping pillow.

I may or may not have been on it. But it's very fun for the grandkids. What about it?

My question is, I'd love to have seen that. How would it be maintained in our heavy snowy winters and ice?

I don't know. I'm sure it's got to be deflated if it just lays there. I don't know.

You don't know. Okay. Okay. I know it's deflated. I know we have some storage out there, so I don't know if it's one of those you deflate, roll it up and store it, but they will, it's not an all year round.

No, no, no. I didn't figure so.

This was a question too. Does it deflate at night?

No, no.

It stays going on.

My understanding is just, yeah. And then the pickleball court that they put out there that also can be taken apart and stored. So I don't know if we will, cause it's got, it's supposed to be able to stay out, but it is a, Mobile or removable.

I did see people using that also.

That's good. It's popular out there. And you? No. Not me, no. He's not heading to Florida yet to play pickleball. Thank you.

Any other comments regarding the report? Okay, hearing none, we'll go ahead and accept that report for the record. Next up, Committee of the Whole, Board Chair Report. Okay, since our last meeting, I attended the WCA district meeting in Hayward on June 17th, where there was discussion on county officials' roles and responsibilities. Forward analytics present population trends, taxation explanations, and various other topics. Legislative update was given, and one of the highlighted topics was the approval of funds for SNAP to make up the budget shortfall. Also attended the Northwest Regional Annual Commission meeting in Hayward, June 24. First thing we did was election of officers, and Mr. Kopisch was elected as secretary, despite his not being in attendance.

Well, there you go.

Not technically on that board anymore, because Brian is. You know when you don't show up for something.

That's right.

Well, congrats there, Bob.

Oh, moving on. At that same meeting, we adopted the 2027 membership levy, and basically there's no change for Price County. Talked about the fiscal impact of the Bladnick Bridge reconstruction for the Superior area. Traffic's going to be rerouted for, I believe, over a year, year and a half, maybe two years. So they're somewhat concerned, at least for the businesses, as far as that detour goes. Anyway, we also had a presentation from Bill Johnson regarding the planned building of a wood biomass facility for producing synthetic jet fuel over by Hayward, and that's going to be run by Johnson Timber. Also had a roundtable discussion discussing topics like buck tussle and their lack of action lately. Had a legislative update from Representative Chance Green. And then I also attended a WCA training session along with Ms. Hordak regarding board chair and vice chair roles and responsibilities, and had a lengthy question and answer time, including a mock board meeting that was held I also participated in presentations from the radio project RFP vendors, which Nick referred to earlier. As far as bug tussle update, nothing new. We're still navigating the possibility of getting out of our agreement with them, but I don't know. We don't really know the full process yet, so we're working on it. Do you have anything you want to add on that, Nick?

Yeah, so we're just, they're calling it unraveling the partnership. Right now we were kind of in a standstill because Bug Tussle's council through whoever their bond council was left, the person left and went to a different agency, so they have to find somebody else to do it. We're working with Andy Phillips and Ben Conard from Atolis on our end. But from all the discussions I've had, both parties are, interested in resolving this by unraveling the partnership. So we don't want to move forward with a product or a project that won't be successful for them or us compared to what we originally had discussed several years ago. So timeline, I'm hoping in the next three to five months, we'll have that all cleaned up.

Well, in a nutshell, it gets complicated because you have investors that invested in the bond. They expect to get interest on their investment, and we back out. The bond's still there.

Yeah. So the bond would be paid off early, which – so if you read the contract – From a 10,000 foot view, we had a $15 million project. If we finished, if Bug Tussle did the project and it only cost $13 million, you would be able to close the project, repay $2 million of it because it would be less than what was used for the project, which then would create a $13 million liability. So we're trying to utilize that opportunity. terminology saying we both agree that they completed a satisfactory project at $0, which would then pay back the loan of $15 million to $0, or the bond, which is not a loan, but the bond, and then we'd move on and be done. The question is, is that acceptable through the bond agency legality of, like, The chair brought up where I invested in a bond that was supposed to be 30 years, that was supposed to pay X dollars, be sold, be allowed to do whatever. And now that's being closed at $0 after two years. I didn't get my investment. Some ways you'd think investors would be, okay, I'll go do something else. Others would say, but that was my investment plan for the long term. So those are the legalities that we're all working through right now.

Okay, thank you. Just one other thing. I attended the various committees like usual and offered input when I deemed appropriate. Overall, it's been pretty much routine as county business. Any questions? Hearing none, we'll move on to county administrator's report. Number 2A, 2026 financial summary and update.

So I have two financial summaries today to just kind of share. The first one will be quick. We were just talking about the forestry and parks, the, the, the campgrounds report we do out of our office, just to kind of summarize. So this report shows us through six months of the year through June. So we didn't get July and August, which is some of our bigger months. But as far as revenues go, we're ahead of last year at this time by $15,000, $16,000. No one, I mean, we know it's Soberg for the most part, but there's not like a pinpoint of like, this is exactly why we had everything. But Soberg overall has been, is up year over year at this point. Part of that is the new system where we allow people to reserve. So you're paying ahead. So we don't have a lot of historical data of people paying ahead. So right now, we could have the exact same year we did three years ago. We just don't know it yet because people paid ahead. So the money's here. The people aren't. The only positive is we're getting paid ahead. But we're assuming with the additional sites, you're going to make money. more. Because if you normally filled up and you have additional, you should make more overall. We are seeing an increase of out-of-town campers. And then the other thing we're seeing is a lot more of the Park Falls campers coming down to Solberg from where Smith Lake used to be that hotspot for the Park Falls folks, we're not seeing an increase and we're not seeing, Smith Lake has kind of plateaued, which was interesting on the financial side. Now, again, paying early and all that might affect it. So, just kind of a nice report to see every once in a while where we're at. What our expenses are. And the only odd part is sometimes our expenses per park is a little off. It's not just your toilet paper, your general expenses. Like if we do a large project, like a roofing project on the – on a building out at Solberg that's going to increase the expenses meaning your net revenues for that year are going to be less so we just look at how much revenue did you have we budget every year for so many projects throughout all the parks it's up to Joe and his team to decide which park needs it each year so some years Solberg gets a whole bunch of work done sometimes Smith Lake sometimes it's Big Falls who we don't get a little a lot of revenue but it it year dependent on what projects go on. So Smith Lake, like I said, just year over year, we're within $100 going through June, which is surprising. Any questions about parks? Like at Toscobia, it just costs money.

Just a real quick one. Could you remind me how Forestry, what's the mechanism for repaying the ARPA funds? Because we originally gave them the carbon money. I mean, carbon credit.

Yeah, so we advanced the forestry $650,000 to finish the project. Or no, that was the ARPA funding. So we gave them the ARPA funding of $650,000. We said once the carbon credit came back, we would pay back that $650,000 to our general fund. So it's just a mechanism to pay that back. But right now it's paying off.

It certainly appears to be, yeah, very nicely.

Yeah.

Yep.

No, no, it was a, the ARPA was sitting there as it was technically it was in our general fund because we were allowed to write off a certain number of dollars, but that ARPA, we said we are allocating 650 to it. The committee at the time or the board at the time was like, yeah, we want to give the 60, but what if we had other projects? So it was, there was kind of a trade-off that you guys could unravel in a sense of if we, once we, if we were to get that carbon money, you could say, no, there's no need to pay the ARPA, the 650 to do other projects. You could just allocate it to other projects.

Yeah, you could use the ARPA for the carbon, the carbon offsets for some other stuff.

It was just at the time that was the verbiage everybody felt comfortable with. Big Falls, we track that. In general, we do more work usually out there than we bring in. Timms Hill, it's a free park. We do get donations. Once in a while, we'll get some real big ones. Somebody will just drop in a couple hundred bucks into the donation, but for the most part, expenses outweigh the revenues on those parks. Concrete Park, we don't do much out there. Or we do a lot. We do expenses out there, but not necessarily revenues. Any questions about the parks? And we keep that updated month to month.

Let's see what

So, the other one we go over normally is your executive summary and where we're at for the year. We are at 58% of the year. As you can see, we've collected 60% of our revenue, so we're slightly ahead of where we expect to be. on collections or amount of collected, and we've spent 61% of our year. Some of the reasons we're ahead of the 58% is we had a triple payroll several months ago, so you always have to get back down to that number. You have your prepayments on expenses, especially things like your insurances. So those are lump sums all at once. Here's your half a million dollars in all your insurances. So you don't spread those out throughout the year. So as far as general fund, um, Don't want to say we're looking, I mean, we're looking good, but don't want to jinx it in the fact that we haven't had any of those big emergencies under the general fund repairs, whether it's IT, the jail, sheriff's department. We've had a couple things in the sheriff's department, but in general, we're covering it okay. No major cases. A lot of cases, no big ones that would cost us a ton of overtime. Any questions about the general fund? Also no major projects where we're waiting to get the revenues back. You know, last couple of years we've had the Solberg project, the bathrooms at certain places. The next one is Health and Human Services. This one, it's tough to watch, but it's starting to creep up there. So 58% of the year, we've collected 72.14% of our revenues. We do collect as we spend from the state. They give you chunks of money as we tell them what our expenses are. But we're at 67% of our expenditures, and a lot of that comes out of those high-cost placements. We've had a rough year and a half of... it feels like we get one out of a high cost placement and the next one shows up or one and two show up. So that's one thing we're monitoring, but it's not a It's not controllable. It's not uncontrollable. We do our best to not get to that level, but when they do, it's between $12,000 and $20,000 a month per person for those high-cost placements. So we're monitoring it. We'll see a chart later where we're farther ahead. The other thing we see is the state is doing a little bit better on their or all, not state, but just in general, we're getting our billing quicker for Health and Human Services. So I don't know if they're updating systems or what, but usually we're about two and a half months behind. Now we're not as far behind. Our other funds, which is your airports, your highways, state forest, any special revenues, nothing's jumping out. Animal control, we pay a quarterly payment for that. If you're in law enforcement, you'll hear that is our busiest officer with the most amount of calls and cases. It adds up real quick for our humane officer. Highway, we had a decent spring, so we didn't have a lot of overage there, so we balanced out through the summer, so hopefully going into the fall, snow doesn't start until, what, two days before Christmas, so you can have your snowy Christmas, but other than that, no rain, no ice, and we'll be good. Yeah, every year. No one ever hears me. We'll do it for all the municipalities too. You're welcome. Price County cash, we're about $840,000 less than we were at this time last year in July. You'll see in the next couple charts where that comes from. The Biggest two items are your high-cost placements. We're ahead by quite a bit on what we've paid out on high-cost placements. And then your forestry. So your forestry last year at this time had collected about a half a million dollars more in stumpage. I have to look at the chart. I'm not sure if we're predicting we'll be close or just under our budgeted amount for forestry, but that's a three-year run. Sales tax, 5.2% more than last year at this time as a total, which we only have through May because that's a two-month behind process. In May this year, we had $126,953 in revenue for sales tax. Last year, we had $131,000. 694. So it was a slower May, but we're still ahead because the last couple months prior or the month prior was a bigger April than normal. And again, that comes down to when you collect it. We are as a statewide group, we are predicting a plateau on that because we're not seeing wage increases at the same level. And most of your sales tax is collected on discretionary spending. So the higher like a mortgage goes, the less discretionary you have. It's a non-taxable item. So you're not buying the same amount of taxable goods. Stumpage, as you can see, last year at this time we had $1 million. This year we have $551,000. So that's part of why we're a half a million dollars short on cash year over year when you look at our cash amount. High cost placements. This is where we're above again. So you add the two together, that's already $750,000 of cash. You're short. So last year at this time, we were at $344,000. This year through June, we're at $573,000 in high cost placements for children and youth. In past years, we've been lucky where high-cost placements in AODA, our behavioral help, usually offset each other. They kind of, one's high, one's low. This year, they're just both kind of creeping up to that higher level. So we're at $208,830 for AODA high-cost placements, where last year we were at $175,000. Health insurance, this is one we monitor because we're self-insured. So we pay as we go. And then if we hit certain high costs, we get reimbursed because we have insurance for that. This year we're doing, we started the year at negative 79,000. We're at a positive 66,000 after the first month. So really we started the year at negative 281. We're at positive 66,000, which is going to be, which is a, good thing because then next year when we look at health insurance we're not looking at the same increases you're seeing across the state so state health insurance i think was 17 or 14 i can't remember so if like for our budget we budget approximately two and a half to three million if you add 14 that adds up real quick um you're seeing a lot of other areas and that 20 for health insurance year over year so um In general, our health insurance fund balance is low. I mean, we would love to see a half a million to a million dollars in there, but we knew this was going to be a long process. So we went self-funded three years ago, two and a half years ago. And so it's just a slow and steady. Nobody make any rash changes or decisions based on where we're at. We've made a lot of changes through the health insurance, whether it's tailored family clinic, we have Health 360, which is helping employees help us by shopping around major knee surgeries, or we're seeing large savings when we're able to help each other or the employees can help us and we can help the employees shop around those procedures. Any questions on where we're at, what we're dealing with?

Okay. Next up, 2027 budget.

All right. Carrie just said she emailed me something for the budget, so. So, either way, we've talked about the budget. At the executive committee, we didn't hand out a budget yet. We're a month away from actually handing out a, here's the line by line. We're just finalizing getting everybody's requests in and where we're at. Each year we have our levy limit. So if you're new at this, we're capped at a levy. And then what we get to increase that by is a thing called net new construction. That net new construction is if... Quick trip builds, the state comes and goes, okay, that value of your equalized value went up and they do a thing. We average just under 1% new construction per year, which is we're not in the top area of the state. It's usually around two or three and we're not at the bottom either. But where we're handicapped with that is it's, Our health insurance, for example, if it were to go up 6%, which is kind of the industry standard, on $3 million, we don't even cover that with our net new construction. If we do a wage increase, a 1% doesn't get covered by that net new construction. Gas prices going up for your vehicles barely gets covered when it's highway trucks, right? Net new construction is the one where we can increase our levy. So then we have a spreadsheet, we increase it there. But we go through, right now, we're about a half a million to a million dollars over budget. So our operational budget is about half a million to a million of requests over. And that includes, based on discussions with admin and the board chair, a 2% wage increase across the board. And what that, it's not, we have a wage schedule, we have a market rate, we look at the market rate and say we should increase that by 2% and then people fall on that scale on how they get their wage increase. So right now in our budget, we have a 2% increase for wages across the board. We have a small increase for health insurance just to make some adjustments. And those are the big things for employee benefit type stuff. If we look at where our major issues are happening this year, it's I.T., So for example, our radio system, we had a 10-year agreement. That agreement might have been a five-year. We had a long-term agreement that our maintenance per year was $36,000 on our radio. That ran out. So the contract comes in and it's now almost $80,000 a year. We have servers that used to cost us $3,000 a year and now they're $8,000 a year. We have Licenses, so every computer we have, everybody has email. We pay a monthly fee for that. That used to be about $1.25 for an email address. It's about $5.25 a month now for those type of things. So that's where we're eating up our budget hand over fist. It goes real quick, and the state says, you're capped, so figure out where you're going to come up with that. So right now, one of the biggest things that we'll be discussing at executive is with this overage, we have an option to take all of our health or not health insurance, our liability property insurances and borrow for them. So a borrowing levy is outside your levy limit. So we can take our insurances for liability. It's $400,000. We put it on as a debt. We can borrow for that, and then it opens up $400,000 of operational levy. So that's one area we're going to be discussing. It's a mechanism we have to work with our operational. We can also look at... any highway construction that can always go on to debt levy. The biggest problem with debt levy is you as a board have to approve it every year with a three-fourths vote. So one year your board might go, sure, this is a great idea. Let's move it. And then two years later, I bring that back and they go, nope, we're not borrowing that half a million dollars for your insurances. Figure it out. Now we have to put it back in your operation and then figure out operations. That becomes very, very difficult because that's where you have to start cutting or adjusting programs. A lot of our programs were down to these are mandated. Now, the biggest change you can make is, yes, they're mandated, but at what level? So, when I say what level, we went through this with child support a couple years, well, it's been 10 years now, but we used to have a service level. The state says you can do a case in 90 days. We used to have a service level that was less than a week, right? So you came in, you got talked to, you were taken care of within 48 hours, if not sooner. So we rearranged that department and said, It's a state-funded area. It's state-mandated. We know we have to provide the service. How do we look at this at a funding level? And so we went from three caseworkers down to one caseworker. We have a director still. We have a financial individual. So we went three to one. We now match more of what the state rate is for case numbers. We're still a little... light on that, but it works very well. And so we then saw savings on how much we were paying because the state only pays so much and then you can get bonuses and things like that to cover your total costs. But we reduced the levy portion to come down closer to what the state pays you up to by saying instead of doing it in a week, we now do it in I don't know our general timeline, but 30 days or 50 days. I don't know what we're at. So those are the type of things. I pick on highway, right? We go out at X time of the day to go plow the snow. The highway committee can make a policy that says we don't go out until 10 a.m., right? So you're going to save hours of work. I say this as everybody laughs, but I'm saying it in an extreme way to show that those are how you can – change your procedures with still doing your mandated services to save the dollar right to make up that operational cost we're already pretty lean when it comes to most if not all of our our services so we have a half a million dollar issue that we have to figure out what that looks like at an executive committee meeting, and then it'll come to the full board for discussion. But we have till November to finalize that budget process. Those were the big things was the wages, the health insurance is looking good. Oh, I remember the last one. So Um, our debt levy so every year you guys have to 3 4th vote decide where what our debt levy and what projects we're going to be doing in it. Positive is this year. We don't have any TJ projects. We don't have any. Um, so it projects we don't have any buildings and grounds major projects where it's we need a 1M dollars to do something. Um. What we do have though is the insurances, but then we're also, Highway has put together a list of equipment. So we have three lists out at the Highway. One is your equipment fund, your five-year equipment fund. We have a equipment fund fund for that, where they use their depreciation, they use the sale of equipment, and they're guaranteed one salt truck or one dump truck. Of that, there's usually a little bit of money left over that they can buy their patching trailer, their other equipment, some pickup trucks if needed. So we don't leave that decision making. We leave the list of equipment that comes out of the equipment fund up to you guys as a budgetary decision, but it We put in place 10 years ago, 12 years ago, whatever it was, this equipment fund so that they could get a truck. Because if we stop buying trucks, then we get really far behind and then you're going to have a problem in five, seven years. So they got this fund that really covers a cell truck on $380,000 these days where they used to be a little cheaper. And then some of your general pickups. We've, in the last two years now, three years, we've also borrowed for one additional truck. So one more salt truck. So that's one thing you guys have to make a decision every year. That's not a guaranteed, but we have been now for the last couple of years doing two trucks. It gets us on a rotation of about 10 years for those large trucks, which get beat up. And there's a whole science, or science is the wrong word, but there's a whole process to it that we've determined that two really works well but we're guaranteeing one. They've now come forward when then they have a building fund, which same thing, they have a fund balance that helps them maintain their buildings up there, whether it's equipment like heating or flooring or roofing or things that we wouldn't have to borrow for. They've now come forward with this year a yellow equipment request or list, right? So we're talking front loaders, graders, I don't know, great alls, all kinds of the yellow equipment, the bulldozer type stuff. And so that's always historically been really difficult to purchase at the highway because you're you're focusing on your trucks, you're focusing on these other things that do the day to day. But we still need this other equipment to do our construction. And historically what we would do is we had a really good winter and we normally budget X dollars for winter maintenance and we had a positive $200,000. Their fund balance grew. Can we use the fund balance to buy a $300,000 loader? Yep, we go through this whole process. Well, they're requesting now is to here's a five-year plan on yellow equipment and we would request that or the highway committee is requesting that you look at debt for that. So instead of some type of fund, we would each year borrow up to X dollars. They're requesting half a million dollars to be rotating through yellow equipment, and they have a five-year plan for that. That's something that still needs to be vetted, needs to be determined if it's something that we want to either increase our debt for or stop doing other projects because we want to stay in a certain debt level. That's probably going to be the biggest debt question of the year is how that's going to work. Bridge and culvert aid, you guys keep approving bridges and culverts, then that will not slow down because there's a new state program with matching funds for these municipalities, which has been a very successful program. This year, though, our actual debt bridge and culvert aid levy will go down because we had an overcharge two years ago, I believe it was. So we have a whole bunch of projects, but we had a funds available to offset that from prior prior year collection The library services based on 80% is going down slightly But that'll be discussed at the next executive committee meeting out what percentage because the library plan allows for you as a full board during the budget process to determine what percentage up to a hundred percent no less than 70% what you want to reimburse the library circulation and Other than that, we're not getting a lot of new state aid or money.

I don't want to prolong your time, but the levy limit. And we had a discussion a little bit ago. Why is the state being so tight on that levy limit? We've been doing this for how many years? 1% a year. Inflation is way higher than that, just your operating costs. Why won't they move that levy limit and push us into borrowing? I think there's some new members.

Yeah, so if you're new to the board, we have been under a 0% levy cap since Doyle?

Before my time.

So for a long, long, long time, the state has taken away your ability locally to determine whether or not it is important to you to raise your levy to provide services to your citizens. And I say that in a... nicest way possible that they want local control, but they don't want to give you local control. And our argument to the state is if this board wants to raise taxes by 10%, the voters will determine whether or not that was the right move every two years. The state says, no, we're going to keep it at 0% because we need our This is how we feel is best for your local levy. And what that comes down to is the Republican and Democratic Party, neither of them can agree on how levy should be controlled. I don't want to pick on anyone because it comes down to votes, right? If either one of the parties says, I want to get rid of that local levy, they're saying to their constituents in their mind that I'm allowing taxes to go up and we're going to increase taxes. So If you talk to the outgoing speaker of the house right now, when we discuss this as, hey, can you give us our local control? It comes down to that vote, but it also comes down to you have options. So your options are one, debt. Two, go to your people and ask for a referendum, which if any of you have been on a school board or had a school referendum in your community, those work well. You know, in gist. So we've seen two counties go to referendum for health and human services. It was a big failure. So Ashland asked for a million dollars to go over their levy for health and human services, high cost placements or just health and human services. It failed miserably because it's raising of taxes and it's hard to educate why we have to do these these things. The second was that the most popular ones, there may have been more out there, but St. Croix County last year or two years ago went to referendum and they framed it as we are increasing our law enforcement presence. We need more officers. We need this. And they were successful on a... $1 or $2 million levy increase, which was one of the first that I'm aware of that they were successful. It came down to law enforcement. It's helpful, right? The safety of the community, it's a growing community, those type of things. But ultimately, the state legislators are not going to bring forward a legislative change on that because it's not a popular opinion. It's scary for local citizens to think that our taxes could be out of control. They can raise... whatever they want when really we're just trying to operate. And if you follow our levy over the last, well, I've been here 15 years. So if you follow it over that length of time, we've averaged probably a six to 7% levy increase. The mill rate changes it's actually gone down because our equalized value goes up. But we've raised our levy some years. I think one year it was 13% or 11%. And we get a handful of individuals that come forward and say, oh my gosh, this happened. We've had years where we've raised the levy $0 and we have more people come to us and say, my taxes went up because of re-assessments because of schools, because of all the other things. So taxes are a very, very, very, very complicated number and mechanism. There's a hundred levers to pull. So in the end, when you guys look at your budget, it's really what works best for your citizens, because I can't tell you how your taxes are truly going to be affected because you could do zero and it's going to go up. You could do increased by a million dollars and it could go down. Um, And it all gets determined by what the state does and what your local assessment happens and how the equalized value piece of pie gets distributed to your area. So Wooster went up a big chunk two years ago. Last year, they went down and we as a county raised taxes. So it's a lot of levers.

So what's happening is they force us into borrowings. And what they've done over time is they keep adding more things that we can borrow for. So it's basically the state people don't want to be looked at as letting taxes go up. They want to push that bonus back on the local government. And you end up the same place because whether you borrow it and you put it on the levy there or you put it on the levy right off the bat, it doesn't make much difference. You're still putting it on the levy because you've got to get the money back.

I do hear a lot of rumblings from my visits down south that after this November, so going into next year, with potential changes and long-term individuals not running, there is a I don't want to say like an appetite to look at it, but there's a willingness to discuss it with counties on what the future of the levy looks like. So that's a positive.

Anybody else have any comments or questions for the administrator? Okay, we will move on. Committee chair reports. Hey, administration historical.

Yes, we've been on August 11th and we got a. Update on the status of employees as we do every meeting. And then we discuss employee benefits for 2027. Health insurance was one of the topics that we talked about. Should be noted that Taylor health. provides for the county and they save us about a third of the cost of other facilities. So that saves us some money. We had a discussion about volunteer benefits, mainly dental and vision. We discussed the county's lifestyle perks program, which is a very successful program. We had a discussion about group life insurance benefits. And the committee agreed that the administration should investigate and see what that would cost. There is going to be employee benefits fair on October the 21st from 10 to 2. And employees will be able to come in and ask the various vendors questions. We had a discussion on the 2027 budget, the wage increase, and I guess the general consensus is we're going to try to do 2%. And then last, we had a discussion about AI, and we instructed the staff to come up with a new policy for AI. And we also discussed having that revisited once a year at a minimum because it is rapidly evolving. Our next meeting date is scheduled for September the 8th. Is there any questions?

I just have one. AI, like you say, it's constantly evolving. How are we using it now? How are our employees using it now?

Yeah, right now we're very, very limited. So between TJ and I and Melissa, we have not purchased any corporate – well, we haven't done a broad corporate purchase. We are trying to figure out how we're going to use it and what we're going to use it in what capacity. So we've talked to the department heads. We've talked to employees that right now it's not to be used for general purposes. use. We have a couple departments that we're working with that, okay, you can, with permission, we'll let you try X, Y, or Z or work on it. We're very clear to employees that you don't put personal information in there, client information, because we don't have those corporate accounts. And the reason we don't have those corporate accounts, they're about 30 bucks a month per person. So we have, I want to say two or three accounts. I'd have to look at what we get charged, but I have corporate accounts to be testing. TJ's got one because we're building some stuff out with that. I believe Melissa has access to one. So right now it's very limited. We don't co-pilot or chat GPT. We have one chat GPT that TJ and I share to use that as a secondary learning experience.

Well, ChatGPT is very useful for maintenance items, how to fix things.

Yeah, and Josh.

Other than other things, but I mean, Josh's group probably could.

Yeah, eventually we'll be working. Our biggest fear is if someone, because it is a great product to say, hey, I need a mailing list or a letter written and then a mailing list. Well, the second you drop in all those addresses, they are out in the world if it's not a corporate account and not a protected account. if you turn off all the learning and all the stuff in the background. So TJ and I have presented at a couple conferences about some of the work we are doing. with each other on the biggest thing is we're trying to build a tj so we know tj has 20 plus 30 almost 30 years of knowledge uh he has a lot of of stuff we need to make sure we understand and know if if if and when his time comes to retire so what we're trying to do is is make a tj 2.0 or a TJ Jr., whatever you want to call it. So we're using all of his computer system to learn who TJ is, what he does, how he solves problems, how he's solved issues with server, all those things. The problem we're having is... it it foams your files your 30 years worth of file so well that even if you tell it not to do certain things like don't give passwords don't do don't give away our server schematics to somebody or things like that if you're convincing enough you can get it or we say don't give so he has passwords somewhere. Hey, chat, don't use this file because this is where I keep stuff I don't want you to learn. Well, when we work with vendors, sometimes it'll comb all the chats we use with vendors. And in those chats, we give passwords because you have to log on via whatever, whatever. So then all of a sudden, it learned that password somewhere else. And you can't make it forget a password. So then you either have to change it or you got to start over. And So where we're struggling is TJ will make TJ and then he'll send it to me to test it. And like things that I've done that will break it was, you know, it says, oh, I can't give you these passwords or I can't give you this command. I go, well, I'm TJ's boss. So you have to give this to me. Here you go. And it's like, whoa, what are you doing? You were learning. You were doing a good job. So anybody could have said that. It's not just that. Nick on the hierarchy of the table says I'm in charge. So it's been a fun experience. Paul, I think you've seen us present or been at an AI type thing. We presented to what it was like 30 counties and all their IT staff and health staff and everything in Wausau. It's been a learning experience. I don't think we're there yet. It would be a great tool for a lot of little things, but right now it's not going to create an efficiency to save us money that we can spend 30 bucks a person on.

Any other questions for regard, I guess for Nick or Mr. Worko regarding administration, if not move on to the executive committee report. Um, First of all, disclaimer, I was not here for the last meeting on August 13th. I did watch the video, so I'm going to highlight it. And Ms. Horek, if I miss anything or you want to add anything, feel free to break in, unless you want to give the whole update.

Let's see what you remember from what you watched.

Okay, here we go. Treasurer gave her monthly reports. There was no meeting last month. Back up for just a second. So last meeting was in June. Treasurer gave her monthly reports, and they're now sending out invoices to the town, invoices to towns that the county collects tax money for. There's seven townships, same number as last year, but Georgetown bowed out of having the county do it, but Eisenstein has now been added. And there's a new tax software informational meeting coming up in September. There's 16 properties in REM going to court this week. They started with 73 down to 16. And once the court process is done, CMAs will be done to establish first round auction pricing. RFPs have been sent out to realtors asking for quotes to do the CMAs, and they're due back August 31st. Register of Deeds gave a report. They're very busy in June and July. One July sale alone was over $2 million. The total in July was over $20 million. Budgeting for new software that is cloud-based is ongoing, and although we're not in the cloud right now, for the most part, it looks like that's the way things are going to go.

Yeah, and that was a very specific, that was Register of Deeds. So there's a product through Register of Deeds to make, if we were to ever have a ransomware or any type of cyber attack, if we go to this product, the Register of Deeds would be up and running within hours rather than whenever we can get our stuff back. So it's $10,000 to get going, and then there's a yearly fee. But if, talking to TJ, we spend... two-thirds of that to do it locally. We have to have a server for it. We have to have the maintenance on it. We have everything. So we'd be able to eliminate one server. We'd eliminate that service contract. So it costs more, but in the end, it's a better product for if, or I should say when, not if, we have a cyber attack.

And one thing that was stressed was if we do get infected, so to speak, the Register of Deeds can get it. a laptop from the vendors, and she can be back up and running in a couple hours rather than a couple days or weeks.

So then it lets realtors continue to sell, lawyers continue to do their stuff, all the deeds, all the deaths. It keeps everything moving. It's worth the switch, and it's less for us to maintain in the long run with servers. We will still have backups. We'll still have all that.

Okay, next on the agenda was the administration report, which Mr. Nick already basically highlighted that today. Clerk gave an update. He's been very busy with the primary election duties. And in my opinion, there was a good turnout for election. I believe it was over 49%, which to me is a lot for a primary. There was discussion regarding the resolutions that were brought forward here today. There was an update on bug tussle, which we discussed already. And I guess, Ms. Hordak, do you have anything you want to add?

Just the one thing. Nice job, Brian. Good job. I was following you. But I thought it was interesting that we should note that the Fair Commission came and gave a presentation. And that was Darren Bratka and Alexis Scheinebeck. presenting the updates on the fairground. And they talked about over recent years having invested roughly $265,000 into the property upgrades, the historic barn restorations, and the grandstand improvements. There has been increase in their new attendance. Sponsorships are growing every year and Price County Productions has received compliments on their updates as they make improvements to provide an increasingly better event for the county. And this is something I think we all should know because with budget coming, they are requesting additional funding for the county from the county, which currently we provide, we allocate 20,000 towards the group. So that to me is just, you know, after we hear the chamber asking for, and now the fair, so things that we need to think about. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for hiring me.

No problem.

Any questions regarding executive committee report?

Hey, Brian. Amber Reberg was here, too, on behalf of that.

Oh, Amber.

Gosh, thank you.

Thank you. Okay, moving on. Forestry and Parks, Buildings, Grounds. Mr. Erickson.

We did not have a meeting this month, but I would like to note our stumpage. A lot of times in the summer, you have wet conditions or whatever, that stumpage is low. Well, that is not the case this year. I I think in our forestry is kind of on a different movement. And so it'll be interesting for stuff which comes back. Yeah.

We haven't had a meeting, so I don't know if we have a lot of active cuts.

I think we have four active sales going right now.

So that adds up quick once you actually start getting the bills in or the money.

Yeah. Yeah, just something to watch, I think.

Anything else regarding forestry from anybody? Okay, hearing none. Health and Human Services, Ms. Hordak.

Okay, so we met on August 12th and it was an afternoon meeting. We don't normally have those, but once a year we have to because we have public participation afterwards. So at four o'clock we had a meeting and then five o'clock was public participation. At the meeting, Committee appointments, we now have a new board member, Stacy Pomeroy. She will be from 6-2026 through 5-2029. Stacy Pomeroy is a new nurse as well as a new member of the HHSB. We're glad to have her on board. We had an opioid committee update. I'm just going to give you that as well. We have met four out of the five allotted meetings right at this point, discussion and review of a list of preliminary recommendations for utilizing opioid funding. and the resolution process. The list was presented later that day because we had our meeting at noon and then at 4 o'clock we had Health and Human Services. It was recommended from the Opioid Committee that we provide the Health and Human Services Board with this list of recommendations and they should take it back and study it and then come back to our meeting in September which will be prior to, we'll flip it this time, it'll be prior to the opioid committee that day as well, and see what kind of suggestions they have. On this list we have different areas, either through the schools or the, help me Nick, I don't have my list with me, the schools, the Health and Human Services Board, I'm talking about the opioid committee,

Oh, yeah. The list will come through them. There's like His House of Hope. There's Money Set Aside if it was a female version of that. Schools. Health Department is probably the largest one. Law enforcement's looking at a product that tests the drugs so we can get people into rehab quicker or deal with that issue quicker. It's also safer for our officers.

So we set up the... A thousand dollars worth. Right. And so Mark Diston, who is on the board of His House and Hope, and that's the only group or business of any sort in Price County who has come to us with any requests. And he came to answer questions about this Genesis program, which is a curriculum that they're rolling out in His House of Hope. It's pretty new. And I know at this time, Caleb Organ from... behavioral health. She had concerns, not concerns as much as just questions. Was this a curriculum that we as the county could partner with them so it would help with the cost of that and if it's going to help. So those are all real new questions that we have. So nobody really has a big answer for it, but it's something that we're looking at. Just showing you these are the things that we're looking at. They also came with a request or a quote for a surveillance system within his House of Hope and all of this is on file. So now the Health and Human Services Board is charged with looking at this list that was provided to them and then that will be a discussion unit for the Opioid Committee then at that time. So going back to the Health and Human Services meeting, I just thought you should know what was going on with the ad hoc committee at that time. Public health, oh, the annual report for... for public health was on file there's a recap of 140 review the final findings and recommendations should be delivered to the county soon from there children and youth recognition of foster parents we had a jasmine marlenga the foster parent coordinator recognized a local couple their names were christina and dennis connor and they were finally retiring after 38 years of being foster parents. I know, that's pretty impressive. And so they were presented with a plaque and a cake for all, which was fun. It was interesting talking to the couple after the meeting and the stories that they had and the connections they still had with those 38 years of foster parents. It's pretty impressive. So we thank them very much for that. And then... I guess that was really all that was. The next meeting will be September 9th. Thank you.

Any questions for Ms. Odick? Okay. Thank you. Next up, Highway and Transportation, Mr. Palachuk.

Thank you. The highway crew assisted Lincoln County with paving on County Trunk Highway YY with 8 to 11 haul trucks per day for 18 days. They replaced large culverts on Springs Drive for Town of Wooster Bridge and Culvert Aid and one on Forest Road 149 for Eisenstein Bridge and Culvert Aid. Completed mowing on all state and county trunk highways. changed 13 culverts on County Trunk D in Brantwood, and paved the cuts. They did bridge repairs to State Highway 13 bridge at Old 8 in Prentice, routed and filled cracks at Smith Lake Park, courthouse, and the normal building parking lots. The crew hauled 14,000 tons of crushed gravel for lifts on County Trunk H and 10,000 tons for lifts on County Trunk D. They also staked H and D for construction, graded and compacted behind the polarizer. The shop report. Shop is catching up on routine maintenance and repairs. Buildings and grounds installed a new roof on our sign shed. The shop is starting to go through V-boxes for this winter. We have two new plow trucks at Scott's Repair in Wausau waiting for body builds. The plow equipment is scheduled to be delivered in September. We still have a shop mechanic position open.

In June,

In June, the BOA inspection that they do every three years was done. Hal Davis let us know that they have some runway approach and tree obstructions that we need to take care of. We're starting the process with the help from Carl at Becker Hoppe. On July 14th, Colin Davidson, our BOA project manager, informed us that the crack filling and top coat project is happening next summer instead of this year as originally planned. Air traffic was crazy while gas prices were low, but we have since sold out and returned to normal traffic flow with normal fuel prices. Daniel Hamburger Fly-In Social took place on August 13th. Dams. The status of dams are overall good. Summer maintenance of mowing, tree brushing is done as needed. With low water levels, minimum flow checks are being done due to lack of normal summer rainfall. Job's dam water level is now 3 1⁄2 inches lower than normal, with Weemers Dam being 3 inches lower, Prentice being 5 inches lower, Sailor Creek 3 1⁄2, Solberg 4 1⁄2, and Musser being 3 inches low. Now pay attention, there's going to be a test next meeting. Weemers Dam safety inspection was completed by Becker Hoppe. The report reported that the dam is in sufficient order with the directive to monitor rodents brewing in the embankment. We are monitoring concrete deterioration on Solberg Dam, some minor patching of concrete cracking and spalling to be repaired this summer. Our next meeting is September 2nd. Are there any questions?

I have just one. How did they measure the... water level in these various lakes slash reservoirs because our lake is more than three inches low. Tape measure. Go ahead, Mr. Braca.

I can speak to that maybe a little bit. Thanks, Joel. So on every... dam, there is a gauge on the wall that shows them what the level is of that impoundment. They also have electronic monitoring through their phones so that the dam's keeper can see what it's doing at any given time. However, the level at the dam is not going to correlate with the level at a specific location because of the topography of the lake itself. So if you live on a flat, a good example is Wilson on the backside of Wilson all the way to the back. that's a flat area. If it goes down, which Wilson is controlled by Job's, if Job's goes down four inches, that four inches may be you may lose six. So it doesn't correlate because of the topography of the lake.

The other thing you have to look at is on your shoreline, if it travels 18 inches, it depends on how steep your shoreline is. So if you have a really steep shoreline, yep, three inches is only going to move five. If you have a really long, shallow shoreline and it goes down three inches, this 3 inches or 6 inches is going to look like 24 inches of shoreline seeing. So people go, oh, my water line or my water is down 2 feet. It's actually only down 3 to 4 inches. It's a real, like you said, the spot we use is at the dam, but wind, water flow, all those things. So wind can, on a straight line wind for a lake can push 3, 4 inches higher on one end than the other because it's just the pressure of the the wind happening. You'll see it. Lake Superior has the biggest, big, big changes with wind.

Okay. I haven't personally had any phone calls on the lake levels. Have you?

No.

Have you, Nick?

We saw a little bit of rumblings about why are we letting any water out, but there is regulations on CFP, CFM. You have to allow so much water through because otherwise if you dry up a whole area, that would be bad for the wildlife. So there's a minimum water pass through that you have.

Okay, that answers my question probably way more than we needed to know, but... We're all educated now. Any other questions regarding law enforcement?

Mr. Palachuk? Mr. Palachuk? Do you want some phone calls?

On that note, we'll move on to land use and UW Extension. Mr. Kopisch.

We've had a fairly busy committee here the last few months, starting off with that first meeting after the election with the gravel pit out here on East Silbert Lake Road, and it's been pretty active. We had two meetings since the last board meeting, one we had on June 18th. We had five public hearings. One had to do with building a home three feet to the property line on East Wilson Flourish Road in the town of Elk. We approved that. Normally it's a 10 foot distance, but sometimes doing this corrects a bigger problem than what we have by putting it at three feet. We've had a couple of homes that have been over the property line and moving them to three feet is definitely an improvement. So we had the same kind of situation going here. We also had a building a home five feet to the property line and 30 feet for the town setback. And those are normally 10 feet and 33 feet. We got the owner to agree to the 10 feet and the town was happy with 33 feet. So we went ahead and approved that one. That one had a bit of public comment. We had several people that weren't too happy about that because of the speed on the road or whatever, but we did approve that. We had a reclamation plan by Granberg Brothers for a gravel pit on Highway 8 in Prentiss. We approved that. We had building a shed 54 feet to the center line of Bromstead Road. In Fifield, we approved that. Normally, I think that's 60 feet. That's where the county gets involved in.

You know, it's between the county and the town there.

And then we had one for operating a small-scale dog boarding facility on Schneur Lake Road, and we postponed that. There was quite a bit of public comment on that. We had a decision that we made on the Janik and Sons for the gravel pit on Soberg Lake Road. We amended two conditions, and this was a lot of controversy. You're probably not aware of this, but we had a lot of controversy on this. And we amended two conditions, and we added another one regarding a solid waste disposal site, which came up, which is the old Grandview Hotel that's buried out there. And we were able to resolve that by... you know, going, making sure they didn't invade that property. And so we approved that, which was not a popular decision. Then we had a decision on a reclamation plan by Johnick and sends for the same pit, and we approved that we had two land divisions. And because of the length of the meeting, the zoning meeting, we did not have much on land conservation or UW extension to report on. Then in our July meeting, We had one public hearing and that was operating a small-scale restaurant and tavern on County Road F in the town of Fifield, which we approved. And then we had the decision on the Schnurr Lake dog boarding facility and we had some more public comment on that. And after all the discussion we had on it and the size of the lot and all the stuff having to do with animals, we did deny that permit. And then we had a follow-up on a gravel pit on east of Silver Lake Road just to see what was going on. And we had more public comment on that. And we did allow public comment when we were talking about these issues, which was a little bit out of the ordinary, but we wanted to make sure we were hearing people. But we did get a verbal and most of it had to do with noise and the start time in the morning. And Janix agreed to starting at seven instead of six, which was the condition we put in there. And that was probably for a two week period. I went out there last week. It's a nice, serene environment. The new road is in. It's all crushed stone, and there's a big pile of filtered or screen topsoil sitting there. That's all that's there. No noise. There's nothing going on. So right now, it's quiet. And they're planning on starting in the back part of the lot with the gravel pits. So they're probably not even going to be able to see it because it's back in the trees. So we'll see how it goes. We had one land division. And then on land conservation, they were working on grants, getting the grants and funding set for this year's season as far as projects. And they were working on some imported invasive species that we got here from somewhere out west. I'm not sure what all that was, but it's something. So that's the main thing on land conservation. And then we did have a pretty good extension committee meeting. We have changed the venue on that. We're going to a larger meeting every quarter instead of having them come every month. And then people have to leave their works. They got to travel for maybe not a lot. So we're doing it more on a quarterly basis. And I think this is going to work out. We'll get periodic updates in between, but it's not going to be the extent of the meeting we had this last time. So we had the Assistant Dean from Extension, Jason Housler, and he gave us an update. He talked about the loss of the FoodWise and SNAP programs. And they've had, I guess, reduced by 100 positions in 2025 because of that. We also had a preliminary discussion on a possible addition of an educator position in Price County. Possible. Don't get excited. It's possible. We have to talk through this yet. Then we had an update from the 4-H educator, Julie Drippenbrock, on the 4-H AmeriCorps and summer internship. programs and we heard from the actual people doing it. The young ladies were here and they all gave us a report. There were about two minute reports. They were pretty nervous. And then we had state horticultural specialist Bruce Springer, who also gave us an update. And that's it. Unless you have some questions.

I have just one. Yeah. Regarding that pit out on Silver Lake Road, has there been any complaints as far as traffic? Because I have heard that they are starting to haul out of there.

I'm just curious how it's going. Probably the topsoil.

I don't know what they're hauling. Because there's no gravel that's been mined yet. But not...

I haven't heard any complaints about that, no. Well, that's good. One condition we've had is the road going in has to be at least 100 feet from any driveway, and where that road is, it's not across from anywhere. I haven't heard anything. Maybe they're just giving up on us because we approved it, but I don't know. Okay.

Yeah.

It was really nice and quiet and serene when I drove by there the other day.

Well, that's a good sign. Yeah.

Yeah.

Anything else? Anybody else?

So when we deny something, like what's the next step? If there's still ads out there and they're still taking things, is that something Evan's going to bring back to us? Do you know what I'm trying to say without saying it?

If it was reported that a business was doing business without the proper permits, then we would look into it, but we don't seek that out. We're aware of it, obviously, that there are looking for that permit to have that boarding there we are aware that there's advertisements out there there has been for a while um but we we can't just bust on a door and say hey you got a dog in here it would have to be a little bit more reported but that would be an evan i would review it yep i would anticipate a neighbor making a phone call yeah usually that's what

Because they were very much against that. And so if they're doing it and there's some issue, we're going to get a phone call.

And then we can do something.

What is it? On Schnur Lane. You know where Schnur Lane is?

That side of Schnur's Lake.

It's on Schnur Lake. And it's just a little gravel road. It would be the southeast corner of the lake. The Helberg Farm is right next to it. Just a gravel road, there's maybe seven properties in there. They're all 100-foot lots. We've got a thing on animals where they've got to be at least 100 feet from a property line. It doesn't say dogs, but it's a cow or a horse or whatever. And it really isn't suitable for what they want to do. And, of course, with dogs, you worry about barking and all that kind of stuff. And on a lake, it's going to echo all over the lake. So we just didn't think it was the right thing to do. And all the residents there were not in favor of it. We'll see how it goes.

Anything else for Mr. Kopisch? Great. Thank you, Mr. Kopisch. Mr. Palachuk, next up, law enforcement.

We met on August 13th. We had public comment from Brittany Volkman of Medford, Taylor County, spoke on a non-agenda item. Coroner report, Coroner Casey took office, six reported deaths, six cremations. In May, 18 reported deaths, 17 cremations, one burial, one autopsy. June, 16 reported deaths, 15 cremations, one burial, three autopsies. In July, 16 reported deaths, 12 cremations, four burials, one autopsy. Business is picking up since she got in. And she said there was no survivors. The District Attorney Department report, the office is at high volume of cases with 250 cases pending review and 50 were just filed. New District Attorney Alexis Nash and her office are diligently working towards getting that number down. She's a real aggressive gal that we've got on board now. She's got some spunk. Almost like my sidekick here. Clerk of Circuit Court Department report, no new updates. There will be a new Clerk of Circuit Courts elected in January. The sheriff's office, the department report, we went on the radio project and request for proposal that we've already discussed today. Staffing update. Dawson Housechild is in his third phase of field training officer. and is estimated to complete his FTO in the beginning of September. New hire Brandon Boggs is currently in the Recruit Academy in Rhinelander and doing very well. He is anticipated to graduate from the Academy early September and return to Price County for the FTO program, interviewing for the third vacancy. Humane Officer Mindy Dabbler has been busy with animal calls. Canine units, Deputy Calsevera has been organizing the K-9 fundraising schedule for the end of August, which is going to be a trap shootout by the airport trap range. Rec officer has kept up with the required hours for the Department of Natural Resources and has been on a lot of boat patrol trips. The jail recently passed its kitchen and jail inspections with positive feedback from the inspectors. The sheriff's office is dealing with an influx of open records requests, which are taking a significant amount of time and resources. The county is exploring ways to manage the requests more efficiently. In 2024, there were 195 total requests. 2025, there were 322 total requests. Year to date in 2026, we've had 220. It's getting to be a real problem for our people over in the Sheriff's Department. Discussion on amending ordinance section 398-19. The committee discussed an ordinance update regarding pet waste in campgrounds. We've been getting a lot of complaints about people leaving pet waste in the campground, which would require pet owners to clean up after their animals, including at campsites. The committee agreed to move forward with the ordinance update and schedule a public hearing in the future. Are there any questions? Not yet.

Thank you, Mr. Palachuk.

Okay, thank you.

That concludes that section of the agenda. We'll convene our Committee of the Whole. Date of next meeting is September 15, 2026. Does anybody have anything else they want to add for comments, even though there's nothing else on the agenda? Nothing else? We'll go ahead and call this meeting adjourned.