County needs facility plans

Members of the Taylor County Board made the right call last week when they approved using power line impact fee funds to pay for replacing lights at the grandstand at the Taylor County fairgrounds.

An inspection of the poles showed they were rotten and after nearly 70 years of service were due for replacement. Whether it is roofs, light poles or vehicles everything wears out over time and will need ongoing maintenance and eventually replacement.

The thing that has caused justifiable frustration among some county board members is that, especially in recent years, big-ticket items have come up seemingly out of nowhere. There is a scramble to figure how to cover the costs at the same time there is political pressure to cut overall county spending and year after year of the board setting zero increase operational budgets as the standard.

The county has been lucky to be able to play catch-up on some deferred maintenance and equipment replacement by tapping into federal American Rescue Plan (ARPA) grant money and, as with the grandstand lights, the power line impact fee funds. However, as has been correctly pointed out numerous times by county board members including Supervisor Lorie Floyd, grant funds may not be there in the future.

In order to get a handle on future budgets, Taylor County needs to know what it has to work with. At Monday’s Medford School Board meeting, board members reviewed the 10-year capital improvement plan which lays out a decade in advance the items that will need investments, from parking lots to HVAC units. There are similar plans in place for the school’s technology infrastructure including servers, work stations and student Chromebooks.

Such documents allow the school board to plan and prioritize how it should invest the maintenance dollars available each year. It also gives a heads up if borrowing will be needed for high cost items with a long lifespan, such as the replacement of a shop building.

Taylor County does not have an overall facilities and equipment plan. Individual departments may have them in place for their areas and others are kept in the heads of the longtime employees in those departments and disappear when staff members leave.

Taylor County needs to develop a comprehensive inventory of equipment and facilities and put on paper realistic plans for their useable life. Such a tool would give board members and those crafting the annual budget, a realistic assessment of the county’s current and future needs and reduce the number of budgetary surprises.

Regardless of whether it is roofs, trucks, roads or computers, everything wears out over time. Part of being good stewards of taxpayer money is for board members to be able to know what is coming tomorrow in order to prioritize how to spend maintenance dollars today.