It was a dark and rainy morning, one in which you would expect to see Gene Kelly dancing off a lamppost or singing in a puddle, but mostly you just saw the usual group making their way to this week’s Tama County Supervisors meeting. Several subjects were touched upon during the meeting, but it all started with the roads report, which stated that they’ve been hauling rock and blading. They repaired a culvert, worked on patching L avenue, and regraded a curb.

The supervisors had a nearly hour-long meeting where the dispute with the secondary roads union was again the subject. The union made another counteroffer to resolve the contract issue as the negotiations between the supervisors and the union have stalled on a single item — arbitration. The union wishes to keep a part that is in the 2032 contract stating that certain disputes will be taken to outside arbitration rather than the board of supervisors.

In the latest counteroffer, the union says they will only go to outside arbitration if it is a group grievance or a grievance regarding termination of employment. When it comes to cost, the union stated they will pay 75% of the arbitrator’s fees and expenses. The Human Resources specialist, Paul Greufe, estimated a possible cost of $10,000 per arbitration. Whether the supervisors accepted the union’s counteroffer or moved forward with a declaratory judgment is unknown, as their motion out of closed session was simply for the attorney to proceed.

Local citizen Patrick Cornwell brought up during public comments the claim that the county was in the hole a million dollars when the five supervisors took office.

“Wages and salaries line went dry, but the well didn’t,” he said.

Supervisor chair Heather Knebel responded.

“So, when we got in, around that end of January, beginning of February, our treasurer came in and said we can not make payroll and the next payroll, right? So, that’s a huge deal because we learned that’s our general basic fund. Yes, we were seeing the negative $950,000 that was budgeted; you know, panic, why did we do that? We shouldn’t do that,” she said. “Agree, later we realized, yes, we do have all these monies, you know, we have like a full cash report of the whole county’s money. It was like $14 million total was the whole county. So, we did realize that later, but what we had to do is we had to do lots of transfers, like they had moved money into, the prior board had put into like the dispatch budget and so for a future building that wasn’t even planned yet. So, we had to pull that money back, and we had to pull, we had to borrow from our health fund because there’s a lot of funds you cannot borrow from even though we had $14 million you can’t just say, ‘Oh, I’m going to go take from the landfill or from, you know, secondary roads.’ You can’t just take it from other buckets.”

Former Supervisor and Chairman Bill Faircloth talked about this as well before changing the subject to Supervisor David Turner’s radio ad. According to Turner, the ad states that the cost per capita for all five supervisors is $11.23. Faircloth calculated that the cost per citizen was approximately between $24 and $30. Knebel said on the subject, “Whether it’s $11 a year or $33 a year, that sounds pretty dang good to have five for representation.”

Supervisor Turner also clarified statements he made in last week’s meeting regarding forgery. “All of that is true. I want to make sure everybody understands that I had authority to forge documents, to steal military vehicles, to impersonate other people- all of them in the means of testing the security of our most valuable weapons and weapons delivery systems,” he said. “So, I had papers on file every time I did that. I could do anything I wanted, but not present the ability to shoot me. In other words, I could not present all these people any force that they could use to kill me. Other than that, I could do anything. And so I did that for five years with… I wasn’t the only one. There’s others of us that did that. I just want to make that clarification.”

An ECI REC utility permit was approved. In the IT report, it was stated how the downspout was moved so it’s no longer blocking the security camera.

It was approved to participate in Albertsons Opioid Settlement. It was also mentioned how the City of Tama needs EMS volunteers.

Non-departmental claims totaling $99.45 and regular claims totaling $107,225.36 were approved.