County committee calls for more accountability for funds

Taylor County is looking for more accountability from groups receiving power line impact fee grant funds.

From the Arrowhead to Weston Transmission Line Project, the county has received impact fee funds. Groups can apply for grant funds for recreational and community improvements. Projects have included everything from tuck pointing the courthouse building, to senior center upgrades and athletic field and playground improvements around the county.

At the May 9 county finance committee meeting, chairman Chuck Zenner proposed setting up some rules requiring groups that receive the funds to report back how the money was spent. His concern was with hearing about organizations that received additional money from other sources and perhaps the county did not need to give them as much money from the power line fund.

In these cases, it was noted that if a group were to come back and ask for more funds, they would probably be denied them in the future. Committee member Mike Bub agreed and said he would like to have accountability for how the money is being spent.

Committee member Scott Mildbrand noted that often the county board does not give the full funding for the requests. He suggested that rather than giving the money to the organization directly, that the county pay the vendor such as for the purchase of playground equipment. Another suggestion was that instead of giving the groups the money up front when the grant funds are approved, waiting until after the project is completed and reimbursing the groups for the actual money spent.

Currently after the county board votes to approve grant funds, the county’s finance department writes the organization a check, if it is a project outside the county government. There was concern raised about creating additional work for the finance department with delaying payment.

County treasurer Sarah Holtz, who is active with the Holway Sluggers baseball field said this isn’t always possible. The county board recently approved grant funds for field upgrades with the money to go toward purchase of bleachers.

“We need to get the money before we can order the bleachers,” she said, noting the vendor requires them to pay upfront.

The allocations of $100,000 for lights at the fairgrounds was also noted, with committee members wanting to be sure that if the lights could be done at a lower cost that the money could stay in the power line fund to go toward another worthy project.

County board chairman Jim Metz said a big thing would be for the groups to acknowledge the county’s role in making the projects possible. He praised the groups that do fundraising for themselves and who don’t just come asking for money.

“They are trying and not just asking for money like we are Santa Claus,” Metz said.

Zenner will work with county staff to develop guidelines to bring to the next finance committee meeting to be held in June.

Highway equipment

An updated equipment scheduled for the highway department was approved, but not without some questions and discussion by committee members.

When the highway department does work for outside entities such as painting road lines, the revenue generated goes into a fund which is used for the replacement of county highway equipment. As with other county departments, the highway vehicles are on a maintenance and replacement schedule which varies by the type of equipment it is. Unlike other departments which just include their capital replacement in their departmental budgets, the highway’s replacement schedule is reviewed and approved by the full county board.

The equipment expenditures approved last fall calls for about $795,000 in equipment replacement. Since then there has been the transfer for about $177,000 in carryover funds that was not spent in the department in 2023 and which highway commissioner Ben Stanfley wants permission to spend on equipment this year. He described coming to the committee for approval as being a procedural matter.

Mildbrand did not see it that way, describing it as being the county not following its budget and spending unbudgeted funds. He said that they needed to be careful that it did not come back to bite them when they put the budget together in September.

Mildbrand stated that he would like the money to be used elsewhere such as for property tax relief. “I think we buy too much equipment,” Mildbrand said, adding that he thinks the county replaces equipment too quickly.

Zenner said he could see Midlbrand’s point, but also noted there is a balance between having things that work when needed versus saving by not buying things only to have it nickel and diming the county going forward.

In the end Mildbrand opposed the changes to the equipment schedule with other members voting to approve it.

In other business committee members: Received an update on the issues with images not being properly scanned in the register of deeds office. Register of Deeds Jayme Kohn said the limited term employee hired to review the scanned files for errors is doing a phenomenal job. When the images were initially scanned to be in the online system, there were times when staff corrected items that were discovered, however, because of the way it was done at the time, these did not always stay with the correct files an issue that became evident with the transfer to a new provider. Kohn noted the department has almost 3 million pages of images dating back to 1970. It was noted that it takes about 30 seconds to review each image. They estimated the errors to be on about 1% of the overall documents due to the human error when the software was put in place. “It is unfortunate it is causing issues today,” Kohn said.