Last but long

The Commissioners held their end of the year meeting on Wednesday, December 26. What I thought would be a fairly short meeting lasted three and a half hours.

They approved a buried cable permit for NITCO. Whatever NITCO was doing seemed to be related in some way to an outage of phone service somewhere in northern Jasper County. They signed some documents for changes needed in the County's life insurance policies and approved the salary contract for the Sheriff. They approved filling three vacancies in the Sheriff's Department and approved adding a person in the Prosecutor's Office who will mostly deal with child support cases. The position in the Prosecutor's Office has been vacant for several months.

The meeting schedule for the Commissioners meetings will be the first Monday of the month except for September, when it will be the first Tuesday. (Labor Day is on the first Monday.) They signed a variety of contracts and documents. The Coroner currently does not charge for documents, which is not the practice in surrounding counties, and said that he would like to start charging to defray costs. He also wanted the County to charge for cremation permits so the Coroner will be aware of some deaths that he maybe should see. There was a long discussion of per diem expenses for assistants for the department. The Veteran's Office will be limiting hours so they can better do interviews and paper work. The new hours were approved on a 90-day trial basis. The Commissioners approved a lengthy list of appointments to positions and boards, almost all of which were reappointments.

The remainder of the meeting was taken up with a discussion of the wind turbine ordinance that had been passed by the Planning Commission in November. They added a few things that made the ordinance more restrictive such as setbacks for private airstrips that are FFA recognized and took a few things out that seemed to be issues that landowners should negotiate with wind farm operators. They discussed and I think they approved a height limit. The new wind turbines in Benton County have a tip height of 567 feet and the limit that they seemed to be considering was about that height. (They were working from a document that I did not have and often a variety of options were bounced around and sometimes it was hard to follow which one they settled on.) They reduced some of the setbacks. They consulted at least one study and several other documents that they had found or solicited. They were very concerned about protecting the County from any adverse effects of constructing and operating the turbines.

Although they agreed on many changes, there were areas on which they wanted more information and presumably those items will be discussed and resolved in the January meeting. I suspect that the document that they pass will be considerably different from what the Plan Commission passed. It will then go back to the Plan Commission for their consideration. The Plan Commission can either make some minor changes and send the document back to the Commissioners hoping that the minor changes will be approved, or they can take a harder line and stand with something close to their original proposal, which will probably be rejected by the Commissioners and resulting in the whole process starting again. There should be some interesting meetings in early 2019.

As I was leaving, i was invited to tour the basement of the Court House. I had never been down there. It is full of stuff in storage. In many places there are pipes about five feet above the floor, so walking required keeping one's head down.

 There are a lot of old law books down there.

This hole was for steam pipes that used to run to the old jail. The passage was never used to bring prisoners from the old jail to the Court House. It is now blocked off.

This area looks like it could have once been a holding area for prisoners. It was not. It was once the mircofilm department and two ladies worked down here. The department was moved across Washington Street into what is now Gutwein Seeds and then back to the Court House when the Surveyor's Office was moved to the building that was formerly the office building of Jasper County Farm Bureau (before they merged with Ceres Solutions).

 The Court House has two new boilers. They are quite small for the size of the building. They replaced much larger boilers.

I also got up to the attic but did not climb the spiral stairs to the tower. (For pictures higher in the building, see here.) The light is from a window in the attic.

 A look at the rafters with looks like fairly recent duct work.

Thee Dragonfly is moving from its present location at the corner of Front and Kellner to Washington Street next to the Bakery. It will reopen as Country Bumpkin in February.