County surveyor office to see staff changes

County approves hiring to replace retiring long-time employee

Taylor County is moving forward now to deal with a planned vacancy in the surveyor’s officer in September.

County surveyor Bob Meyer came to the county’s land information committee on July 7 to alert them that land information specialist John Easterly has announced plans to retire in September after being with the county for 29 years. While Easterly initially assisted the surveyor in the field work, in recent years his job has focused primarily on maintaining and updating the county’s geographic information system which provides a computerized map of land parcels and features in the county.

Meyer noted the GIS portion of the county website averages about 20,000 users a month. In addition Easterly works with individuals, businesses and groups on a daily basis for mapping information for the county.

Meyer was coming to the committee to get approval to fill the position and for updates to the job description. He noted that while in the past field work was a major part of the job, that now very few GIS specialists do any field work at all. In addition to working in the public sector, GIS specialists can also be found working for entities such as power companies or parcel delivery companies with mapping routes.

Meyer noted that while much of the work could be done remotely, which could theoretically open the county to a wider pool of applicants for the position, he said he felt it was important that the person be in the office. “There is no collaboration when people are working from their home,” Meyer said.

“I think it is a necessity at this point,” Meyer said of the worker being in the office.

Committee members approved moving ahead with filling the position and gave their approval to the job description. Later that day, members of the county’s finance and personnel committee also approved the updated job description.

In other business, committee members: Approved purchasing a 4 TB external hard drive to serve as an additional backup of register of deeds office data. Register of deeds Jaymi Kohn said that currently the main server storage for the office and the backup to that share the same space in the building. She said she felt this was flawed when trying to prevent loss of files in case of fire or flood, not to mention the potential for cyber attacks. The new drive will be kept in the records vault at the courthouse.

Received an update on the In Rem process to take property on back taxes. After going through the legal process for the county take them to cover back taxes, the properties are then sold at a public auction in the courthouse. Committee chairman Lester Lewis noted there was disagreement across the state about the need to pay other existing liens on the properties taken.