White: Item 5. Reports and Inquiries from Elected Officials. We’ll start with Mike.

Lehman: I haven’t really had anything that anyone isn’t aware of. Things we’ve been doing and going on with. I guess I did have a subject matter I wanted to talk to you and maybe Bob about. Dingleberry Quarry, your reaction from the meeting the other day on that. It needn’t be hashed here.

White: OK. Tom?

Slockett: I have 2 points. It’s interesting you’d bring up Dingleberry Quarry, because I’ve been talking to Jean Prior at the University of Iowa about the Old State Quarry, which, Senator Harkin’s office called about. It’s being placed on a national historic preservation list by the federal government. His comment was the staff was essentially researching is there any reason why it shouldn’t be placed on a list of national historic sites. This is a quarry, it turns out, Jean Prior knew a lot about it; that the stone for the Old Capitol was taken out of and also the stone for the foundation of the new Capitol in Des Moines.

White: Where is it?

Slockett: It’s near the Mehaffey Bridge. It’s off of the Mehaffey Bridge Road and nobody knew about it. I checked all over in the building and had a lot of trouble finding information about it, but I discovered a lot of information. The point I wanted to make, is, this gave me insight into the wealth of information that we have that we can use to make our mapping system really the best mapping system anywhere in the State. Because we really have an incredible resource here with the University of Iowa. It’s just a point that we ought to keep in mind. This is an area in our mapping where we can take advantage of having the University of Iowa and those resources available, and having quarries on our map might be a good idea. We need to think about all the various types of information that we can put on and begin the project by incorporating as many of them as we can think of, rather than forging ahead and then having to try to retrofit the maps later. That was one point. The second point I wanted to make is I went to the Walk the Walk Rally today at the University of Iowa. You know there has been some discrimination through emails. Part of the new millennium that we aren’t looking forward too. The rally was headed up by a bunch of radicals, like the Mayor of Iowa City and the President of the University of Iowa, who read a message from our State Senators, State Representatives, Student Body President and the head of the Dentistry Department and other students. This was a very insightful and good experience. I was telling Mike, I’m terrible at estimating crowd sizes. I think there were at least 500 people there, would be my guess. It was a nice, large turnout. I also sent out an email, just reminding people of the time of it this morning. I just think it’s a good thing for us to think about the necessity for dealing with discrimination, that it is a reality. It’s something that we all need to personally recognize and do our best to deal with. So, I just wanted to point that out. That’s all I had.

White: Tom?

Kriz: The only thing I had is we are finished with this phase of the tax season. We were finished this year by April 6th. So, we’ve continued to move that up and everything’s done and we’re now working on the new statements for next year. It goes better and better each year as we streamline it. We’ve cut from a normal time of about 360 part-time hours during each tax season now, down to about 60. We’re getting it done about 2 and a half weeks quicker. So, we’ve got a pretty good system. It’s now starting to work pretty good and it’s starting to pick up.

Carpenter: I guess about the only thing I have is that, as far as the new Jail is concerned, where we’re at right now is that there was a committee set to interview or go through resumes for an architect to join Neumann Monson on drawing up the Jail. There’s 3 finalists selected. Thursday we’re going to interview 2 of those. Then, there was another one, I think the other day was the 17th we’re going to interview. All 3 of them couldn’t come the same day, so we’ll get 2 in Thursday and the other one’s coming in. There’s one local in the state, Durant Grand, out of Dubuque. They’ve put together quite a few facilities throughout the Midwest and they’re going to be one of them. I think there’s one out of Kansas City, I believe, and also one out of Wisconsin. So, kind of looking forward to interviewing those. They seem like a pretty good group. The thing was kind of neat when the committee went in and started looking at them. I think we had 8 proposals to start with. I was late getting to the meeting because of another commitment. But, by the time I got there, the 2 other candidates had gone through and they had selected the top 3 that they had out of all the list, we all agreed on the top 4. We could flip the 3rd one off back and forth. It didn’t make any difference. We were all close. We think we got some good candidates and we think we’re going to be pretty happy with what we end up with. So, hopefully after that, we’ll come back to the rest of the committee and then give our report to the Board. Actually, Neumann Monson will be the one coming to the Board then, because they’re hiring them as an additional architect on the schemes. Once we do that then, we’re hoping to get our list of locations put together, so we can get some ideas on the cost figure and get some drawings put together. Hopefully this will go faster than what we were hoping. I don’t know if you guys… Is there anybody here that wasn’t… I don’t think there is. You guys are doing some more work on a financial consultant on that, too. That’s something that’s coming up.

Kriz: By the end of the month we’ll be picking somebody there.

Carpenter: The thing we’re worried about is getting the thing on schedule enough to where we can actually put it on the ballot in November. That’s going to be the thing to get everything put together and get our people out. Selling the bond issue will be something else. I think we’ve got a pretty good group lined up to do that. I think hopefully it will end up trying to help sell itself. A couple of things have probably come up, I know, since the last meeting we had here. Washington County, as of July 1, is being shut down, their jail. They’re all ready and they know that they’re going to be spending at least $500,000 a year for their 22 or 15 or 22 that they send out. We know that probably next year we’re going to start… They won’t close us completely down like Washington County, but I’m sure they’re going to start shipping people out. The other bad thing about it is our State Jail Inspector that we had, that we had been working with so closely, he resigned a couple of weeks ago and we have no idea what this new one is going to tell us. So, it’s going to be interesting.

White: Where is he going?

Carpenter: Actually, he’s going to go work for a company that does nothing but help build jails. He’s going to be a Bill Garnos.

White: Somebody out-of-state?

Carpenter: I don’t know, to be truthful with you Pat, where this company is operated out of. But, it will be interesting. I don’t know whether our time is going to be increased or less as far as when we have to start doing things. But, I imagine we’re still probably in pretty good shape till the first of the year.

White: Have they replaced him?

Carpenter: No. They started training a new guy last fall. Actually, he came down upon my request because I really didn’t want to start out new with somebody that hadn’t been down there before and not knowing how they would do it. So he came down and I knew we’d get a favorable review from him because of the fact that he knows what’s going on. So, I don’t know what the new guy is going to do. But, we’ll see. Other than that, that’s kind of where we’re at now. It’s going to be kind of an exciting time and we’ll see what happens.

White: Carol?

Thompson: I’ll skip, it’s getting late.

Painter: Oh, the pressure is on. I’ve got a few things, however late it is. But, anyway, Document Management issues in the County, within the Recorder’s Office, we’ve got all of our hardware, except 1 or 2 pieces of equipment to begin to roll over the real estate processing out there, optical disk and that sort of thing. We have to give all of our constituents who want to have them, the disks of the days activities. That will officially start no later than July 1, if we’re going to be able to provide some sample data sets by the middle of this month, by the 15th, by say next Monday. I hope we’ll get to start doing that. By May 1st, again pending the arrival of just a couple of pieces of equipment that we do need, we should be able to start intensive processing of all the day’s activity in that manner. Hopefully allowing for, as I said, no later than July 1, a complete switchover and possibly June 3rd. The staff seems to be doing fine with this. People are happy to see it coming. I met with Pat and we spoke briefly about a brief form to give abstracting firms and others who would want to subscribe to this service. We’re working on that. I gave Pat a draft of that and I will send you an email or hand you a hard copy. So, that’s going well. In addition to that, the Document Management Committee, the larger countywide committee, has met in recent weeks several times. We had, I think maybe Tom would agree, a fairly good productive initial meeting with the Auditor, Treasurer, Planning and Zoning, Assessor and Ted Kruzan, who’s the head of the company that’s doing our imaging. I think that he was able to answer a lot of our general questions that these other offices had about how these applications would or not work for them. People seemed very satisfied. He’s coming back on the 25th of this month. I think that date is going to work with him. I got word yesterday, from Phil Sickles, that Ted’s mom very suddenly passed away. He’s out-of-town before now, but I am hopeful that that date will still hold in spite of that unfortunate occurrence. We’re moving ahead with those offices also on their plans. This is in relation to the $65,000 the Board allocated for Document Management within those 3 departments for Fiscal Year 2001. I guess that’s really about it. I did get an appointment, some of you may have seen that, a gubernatorial appointment to the Commission on the Status of Women. That’s a group that meets every other month in Des Moines. I will attend those meetings and look forward to the learning a lot. There are some really excellent people on that Committee from all over the state. It should be a really good learning experience. Other than that, things are fine. In this Fiscal Year, we’ve managed to eliminate the use of overtime or accumulated comp time. We have not been using temporary part-time clerical help, in spite of the very healthy increase in population from the Recorder’s Office. We’ve had 3 new infants this year from office staff and a couple of other kinds of leaves of substantial nature. I think the incremental increases in efficiencies and I think probably staff morale have helped all that. So, things are going well.

White: Any explanation for the sudden birth rate?

Painter: I really don’t know what to think. What’s going on with that water in the break room? Is there something in it? It was covered up for awhile. I don’t know.

Carpenter: It’s comp time, didn’t she say.

Painter: Less work.

White: Thanks for your patience with my trying to coordinate this for the last couple of years. I actually have enjoyed it. I’ll probably be more contentious sitting here not chairing your meetings. Speaking of appointments, last December, the County Attorneys Association Board of Directors Meeting, at which I was not in attendance, voted to appoint me to the ISAC Board of Directors. The County Attorney’s representative has been Mike Riepe, for about 10 years. Now that he’s the past president, County Attorney’s have a seat that is open on that again and I have been, actually, resisting accepting that appointment for 4 months, trying to recruit somebody else to do it. Last week I succumbed and agreed to start serving on the ISAC Board. Sort of taking a step backwards in light of time constraints. But, I’m going to do it anyway.

Slockett: Well, good for you, Pat.

White: Is there anything else under Item 6 anybody wants to talk about?

Slockett: Congratulations on that.

White: Thanks.

White: Item 7 is set next meeting date and time. I think we’ll defer to our new chair. We would normally go about 2 months from today, which would take us to a Tuesday afternoon in June. Do you have a preference?

Painter: That would be fine.

Slockett: Remember, June 6th is Election Day.

White: Tuesday the 20th, did somebody say?

Kriz: Or the 13th would be the 2nd one. Carol says there’s only one (inaudible) the 13th.

White: 20th looks good to me.

Slockett: 20th looks good.

Peters: 20th.

Slockett: Isn’t that the longest day of the year?

Peters: 21st is.

Slockett: 21st.

White: I’d say, I think it’s the next day.

Kriz: It may be.

White: I think this year it’s Wednesday the 21st. Tuesday, June 20, 1:30 p.m. We’re adjourned.

Adjourned at 3:42 p.m.

Attest: Tom Slockett, Auditor

By: Casie Parkins, Recording Secretary