By Dave Baumeister, County Correspondent
SIOUX FALLS – Since there were no public comments or controversial issues at the Tuesday, Sept. 6, Minnehaha County Commission meeting, commissioners were able to take care of a great deal of business in under an hour.
As with many meetings, money is a big issue, but this week, most of these monetary issues involved either signing off on grant applications or appropriating dollars already received from grants and federal programs.
Second Circuit Court Presiding Judge Robin Houman received unanimous commission approval to apply for the third round of grant money from the MacArthur Foundation after a briefing on what those monies had allowed them to do in the past.
As she explained, money received from that group has allowed the county to make changes to improve its criminal justice system and community outreach programs, among other things.
Houman explained how a pre-trial program is helping to keep non-violent offenders from being caught up in the revolving door of the judicial system.
She also told commissioners of how MacArthur funds are helping those with substance abuse and mental health disorders.
The commission approved the request to apply for funds by a 4-0 vote (Commissioner Dean Karsky was not in attendance).
County Highway Superintendent Steve Groen informed commissioners that a grant application they had authorized in the past had been approved.
He said the state had been awarded $4 million in federal highway bridge improvement grant money, and that Minnehaha County was to receive $890,000 of that for two bridges.
The county will still need to pay $113,119 of the matching funds toward those projects.
More radio coverage
While not with grant money, in the past, commissioners had earmarked money from the American Recovery Program Act to go for new emergency radios for the county’s first responders.
While Minnehaha County received approximately $35 million in those federal ARPA dollars, many local government and other outside agencies applied to get a piece of that money.
At that time, commissioners felt it would be in the best interest of county taxpayers to use that money for county government business, so one of the first things they did was set aside funds for new radios.
However, when Captain Joe Bosman of the Sheriff’s Department came before the county commission at this meeting, he was looking beyond just the radios and asked for more money to improve county-wide coverage for communications.
He said that the price for the radios from Motorola, the only vendor that would meet new state specifications, had been set at $3.2 million, but he was asking for $550,000 more to add and improve coverage for the new radios.
Commissioners seemed to agree that would be an excellent idea after such a large expenditure in radios.
Bosman explained that at present, the county relies on five towers for its communications, but he was proposing an additional seven antennae, mostly to be mounted in locations of existing communications antennae.
One new tower would be the reconstruction of a tower near Hartford that came down during storms earlier this year.
Another would be an antenna mounted on the Garretson water tower that would cover current “dead spots” in Palisades State Park.
Traditionally, Bosman added, there are many rescue calls to that area, and those can run into problems when there isn’t reliable radio communications.
Budget hearing
A public hearing was authorized to be advertised for Tuesday, Sept. 27, before the final vote on the 2023 county budget, which by state law must be in place by the end of September.
Figures now stand at a total budget of $114.3 million, with $2.6 million coming from a fund of unused property tax opt-out dollars approved a few years ago.
The next county commission meeting will be at 9 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 20, in the commission chambers on the third floor of the Minnehaha County Administration Building at 6th and Minnesota in Sioux Falls.
