Chairperson Jordahl called the Johnson County Board of Supervisors to order in the Johnson County Administration Building at 9:02 a.m. Members present were: Charles Duffy, Jonathan Jordahl, Mike Lehman, and Sally Stutsman; absent: Carol Thompson.

Jordahl: 9:00 in the morning on Tuesday, the 2nd of November, 1999. We’re here for the informal meeting of the Johnson County Board of Supervisors. First item on the agenda here is review of the formal minutes of October 28. We’ve had a chance to see those on the internet, if you’re curious. We’ll have those on for formal approval on Thursday, if there are no comments or changes.

COUNTY ENGINEER MIKE GARDNER, ASSISTANT COUNTY Engineer AL MILLER AND GRAHAM LAND ASSOCIATES REPRESENTATIVE JIM GRAHAM: RIGHT-OF-WAY ACQUISITION PROCESS FOR PROPOSED NEW CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS AND REQUIREMENTS TO ACCOMMODATE NEW LEGISLATION

Jordahl: 2nd item, or third actually, is business from the County Engineer after the call to order. Mike Gardener, Al Miller, and I have company here this morning in the person of Jim Graham, who is the head of Graham Land Acquisition Associates, a consulting firm.

County Engineer Mike Gardner: Good morning.

Jordahl: Good morning.

Gardner: We wanted to come before you today because there have been some changes in the law for right-of-way acquisition on our new construction projects, and Graham Land Acquisition is who has been handling this for us in the past few years. Al and I met with Jim last week. We asked if he would be willing to come in and explain some of the changes and some of the things that we’re going to be required to do now, the right-of-way we’re going to have to be acquiring for the projects that we’re going to be doing next summer. I’m just going to turn it over to Jim right now. We did pass out something that covers procedure to wave appraisal for acquisition on some of the minor takings that we’re going to be doing. What we will need to have is the Board adopts this as policy so we can approach the smaller takings in that manner. I’ll let Jim go ahead and explain it in more detail.

Stutsman: Before we get started, is this law, did you say, or is this recommended?

Graham Land Acquisition Associates Jim Graham: You have the authority as an acquiring authority to adopt a procedure or policy to acquire minor parcels. That’s basically the change in the law. 20 years ago the feds decided that it didn’t make a lot of sense to pay $3,000 to an appraiser in order to buy a $600 parcel for a minor acquisition on a County road improvement. They authorized the State of Iowa to set up a process to acquire those minor parcels. This is the process that I set up 20 years ago. As a practical matter, the DOT buys about half of the right-of-way that they buy, which believe it or not, are minor acquisitions. They fall into this category. Last session of the legislature changed what used to be, the DOT was what they called the lead agency for purposes of developing procedures for the acquisition of right-of-way. They changed that. They made it possible for all acquiring authorities, counties and cities to adopt their own process. One of the difficulties with that is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to adopt a process that doesn’t comply with the federal aid requirements to begin with. Why have 2 or 3 different approaches to buying right-of-way? This is the simplest thing that I’ve ever seen. It’s called a compensation estimate process. What it amounts to is that the right-of-way agent can prepare a compensation estimate. He takes a look at recent land sales in the area where the project’s being built, and comes up with an idea of what good crop land is worth, what pasture land is worth, that kind of thing, and make a uniform offer to everybody that you’re acquiring right-of-way from. There’s no delay in it. Everybody understands where that money is coming from. It takes a minimum of documentation in order to make this thing work. When the last session of the legislature made some major changes in the law, one of the first things I did was to develop an analysis on how to make that thing work. The very first recommendation I made was to adopt the compensation estimate process as the cleanest, most proven way of dealing with it. Mike and I have been talking about this, and I know it’ll work. There are a couple of things we can do to supplement this. One of the things that we were thinking about was, for example, to hire Casey Cook to do a market survey so we have access to the most current sales. The benefit of that would be that it would save our people some time. The appraiser would have some familiarity with the project, so in the event that we weren’t successful in acquiring all the property, we had to acquire some through the condemnation process, at least you’d have an informative and knowledgeable appraiser available. You could ask him to prepare an appraisal to do whatever you needed to do to fend the County in the Compensation Commission hearing or else appeal for that matter. I think the proposal that these guys have come up with is really workable. This is not a very complicated process. If you look in it, for example, there’s a reference in here that suggests that it may be possible for the property owner to make some kind of contribution to this compensation estimate. That’s not as dumb as it sounds, when you think about it. You’ve got some idea of what the acre and a half is worth, but you may not know where the well is, or where some of those other improvements are. Having him add that to the compensation estimate before you make a final offer does nothing more than help him, it gets him into the process in a helpful way. I know of no better way of doing this, and recommend that the County consider doing it and adopt it as a policy.

Jordahl: You’re saying this has been working before?

Graham: Well, it’s been working for 20 years. There are all kinds of ways of documenting this, for example, if you did have an appraisal on one of the parcels. You had a 20 parcel project and you had one appraisal, you could use the information from that one appraisal in order to come up with a standard offer for the same kind of property. It was intended to cure the craziness of spending $50,000 to appraise properties that you only needed to spend $3,000 on.

Stutsman: Mike, how were you doing it?

Gardner: This is similar to how it’s been done in the past. Some of the limits have changed. Before, it used to be $2,500 for the limit for the compensation estimate.

Graham: Yes, it started out that way. When you think about it, $2,500, you’d have to appraise something that was over an acre. Land values now, $2,500 an acre. If the taking was more than an acre, you couldn’t use this simple process. It took a long time for the… I left there in 1990 to set up our own operation. I took the best and the brightest with me, but anyway, it took a long time for them to realize that $2,500 was just wasting the opportunity, though they raised that to $10,000. Really, the formula is it’s a non-complicated acquisition, and the total compensation is $10,000 or less. It’s just about that simple.

Gardner: Basically, this is how we’ve been handling it in the past. All we’re asking is for some formal action to be taken.

Stutsman: To formalize it.

Graham: The offer will be approved by Mike. It’s not a one-man operation. We may be putting together the figure, but we’re going to have to explain to Mike this is what’s reasonable and this is why. It’s a team effort there too. I heartily recommend that that’s the way you approach it.

Jordahl: Are there any questions or comments from members of the Board?

Duffy: Yes, I have one, but I think it’s in here. It’s not only what the land is worth, and we’re talking how it affects the rest of the farm. That’s in here.

Graham: That’s a good observation. It really shouldn’t be used as an appraisal process if you’re doing some significant damages to the remaining property. That takes some judgement. You have to be in the business for a while to realize, well, this is really a minor acquisition, and there’s no damage being caused to the remaining property, except that you had a 180 acre field that’s now 179 acres. It’s just a smaller field. But if you’re talking about a situation where you’ve got potential damages to a major improvement or a house or something like that, that’s something that, in the theory of this, should be appraised. Again, we’ve got a lot of experience figuring out which ones really do some damage and which ones don’t. The property owner may not agree with that. We may make an initial call, but all we really need here is a compensation estimate. You have claim for damages that we think don’t exist, and as you go through the acquisition process and go through the condemnation process, you may want to appraise that. That’s one of the touchstones of it. There really aren’t any significant damages to the remainder. That $10,000 doesn’t include things like a fence. You have a separate statutory responsibility to replace the fence anyway. That’s $10,000 plus fence, those kinds of things. It’ll work.

Duffy: I used to be on that Committee before I was Supervisor. I can remember that we had a case or 2 that that was brought up. You’d have to look at the whole parcel, like maybe be on the other side of the road from another plot of ground that was part of the farm. That all has to be taken into consideration.

Graham: You raised a point. I wasn’t going to raise it because just compensation is the difference between the total value of the land before you took anything from it, the before value of the land less the after value of the land. In theory, that pays for any damages to remaining property, that kind of thing. When you use this kind of a process, it looks like that you’re doing is not following that formula, the difference between the before and after. What you’re doing is appraising what’s being acquired. Technically, that’s not the way to do it. Just appraising the half-acre that’s being acquired is really not the right way of doing it. What you’re doing is looking at that property and saying the value of this farm is 180 acres before. When this farm is reduced by an acre and a half or 2 acres, the basic value of that farm per acre does not change. You’re going through that mental process, and your conclusion is that there’s no damage to the remaining property. You’re not documenting, you’re not coming up with a documentation of the property before. It’s worth $350,000 or whatever it is, and you’re not coming up with a documentation of what it’s worth afterwards and subtracting the 2. You’re just going directly to the problem. I don’t think there’s any damage to the remaining property, and you’re applying this compensation estimate approach. Technically, you’re right. If you ended up with a condemnation hearing and the property owner was unhappy with that and he appealed, then you’re stuck with appraising it. At that point, you’re going to have to spend $3,000, or whatever it is, to appraise it. Then you have a formal appraisal saying the land in the before condition is worth X number of dollars. The land in the after condition is worth X number of dollars. You reach the same conclusion that you reach in the compensation estimate. You’re right.

Duffy: Thank you.

Jordahl: Pat, do you have comments, some concerns? Well, I’d like to see policies written down. For me, this is a step in the right direction. The more that people know what we’re up to, and establish whether they think it’s a fair way to do things or not, we seem a little less arbitrary. Not that we’ve seemed arbitrary in the past, of course, but I just like having it buttoned down a little bit, if it’s not too different from what we’re doing currently. It doesn’t seem to be controversial.

Gardner: It’s really not.

Jordahl: I think you’re presence here indicates that you support adopting this.

Gardner: Right.

Jordahl: Sally?

Stutsman: This would have to be done by resolution, then?

Graham: I don’t think so. I don’t know how you adopt operating policy.

County Attorney J. Patrick White: A resolution would be preferred.

Graham: That’s your call.

Jordahl: It’s not something that we have to have a public hearing on. So we can put it on for approval on Thursday. Does the Board want to take longer than that?

Stutsman: I think I want to take… There’s no rush for this, is there? Mike, we’re not under a deadline or a time frame?

Gardner: We’re getting started with the process, but as I understand it, we’re scheduling some public hearings for a couple of the projects in December.

Graham: I forgot, Mike asked me to talk about… One of the elements of the new law is Chapter 6, B81 I believe it is. Basically, what that requires is that you send out an early communication to the property owner. You send the property owner a letter, and it says that we’re proposing a public improvement project, and this is basically what it consists of, and this is how it will impact your property, with a kind of a plat. It also requires you to send a list of property owner rights, and that’s something else that’s spun out of this law. What it does is create an opportunity for an informal meeting with the effective property owners. A lot of counties do that anyway. They always have done that. That’s just the way they operate. But now, in order to preserve your authority to condemn property, this is what you have to do. You have to send that notice out, give the property owner their list of rights, and give them an opportunity to make some input. The way you do that is up to you. For example, you could say that we’re going to meet with the County Engineer and he will answer all the engineering questions, and submit that to the Board. That’s one way of doing it. Another way of doing it would be to have the Board of Supervisors present at that meeting, and listen to the property owner’s observations and complaints, or why didn’t you move it on the other side of my neighbor’s land, why did you take my land, resolve all those issues. After that informal opportunity for their input is over with, then convene the Board and approve going ahead with the project. Get it all done in one shot. It’s your choice in how to handle it, but you have to send that information out and you have to give the property owner an opportunity to make some input.

Jordahl: This is all by way of answering the question of do we need this done sooner rather later?

Graham: Yes.

Jordahl: The answer to that seems to be sooner, so that we can send the policy out with the notices to the public.

Gardner: We have a couple weeks.

Graham: Yes, we have some time.

Stutsman: I need to do some more reading of this. I’ve just been exposed to it this morning, and it seems like I need to sit down. What’s the code reference, the law change?

Graham: It’s House File 476. The Code section that we’re talking about is 6B2A, Notice of Proposed Public Improvement. It really doesn’t make any major changes other than some consequences for not doing it. That’s a normal process anyway.

Assistant County Engineer Al Miller: One of the projects is the Sand Road project. We’ve already had an informational meeting, but it didn’t comply with new laws. We have to basically have another one.

Stutsman: Oh.

Jordahl: That’s nice.

Stutsman: Well, I don’t know.

Miller: It’s kind of a technicality.

Stutsman: It was a good meeting.

Miller: We sent notices out, but we’ve got to make sure that we include some things in with the notices, make sure all the right people have the notices and get to the meetings.

Jordahl: Is that addressed here?

Graham: No. Mike wanted me to mention that. It has nothing to do with the compensation estimate procedure.

Jordahl: Do you want to have another written policy about that one?

Gardner: It was just something else that is changing in the process, that we’re having to change our acquisition procedures.

Jordahl: I agree with Sally. It’d be nice to take a little more time to let this breathe. If at the same time, you wanted to propose something that would address the issue of how to structure a public meeting input process in conjunction with this, that would be something I’m sure you have time to do in between all your other projects. Guess not.

Gardner: I’m not sure one size is going to fit all. On different projects, we may want approach each of our projects different. The major projects we may want to have in here. A little bridge project or something, there may only be 2 property owners involved, and it can be handled differently.

Graham: That’s a good point, trying to keep these things as simple as you can. Yet, if you’ve got a 3 or 4 parcel bridge improvement project, for example, there really isn’t any reason why you couldn’t have 2 bridge improvement project meetings at one time. Since you’re only dealing with a few parcels, there isn’t any reason why you couldn’t have the easement documents prepared, so that if there’s no problem, maybe you could sign off on it right that night and save some further contact time. The problem with doing that is that there’s another statute that says the property owner is entitled to 10 days to think about it. You can’t just… If he’s willing and in support of the project and he wants to sign that night, by God, all you have to do is have him sign a little waver. You don’t have to send it to me. I understand it and approved it, and it’s done. That simple approach to it won’t work for a major project, where you’re talking about 20 or 30 parcels, are you’re going to have all kinds of issues that you don’t even know about. You’ll have to follow that up with some negotiations. I don’t think all things do fit. It’s not one size fits all.

Jordahl: Well, we’ll of course defer to the expertise of our engineering staff and their understanding of the law. But if you have a problem with the consistent application or interpretation of the new law, I’m just saying, gosh, sounds like we need to redo this. Maybe we need to have a policy that tells us how to do it in the future. I’ll wait to hear from you about that. As for putting this particular item on the agenda, as you say, 2 weeks is soon enough? Do you want to wait until Carol gets back? How do we want this one?

Stutsman: Well, we have informal and formal next Tuesday.

Jordahl: That soon enough.

Stutsman: Or on the…

Duffy: That’ll be out, because Mike and I aren’t going to be here next week.

Stutsman: Carol isn’t going to be here either.

Jordahl: That’s the 9th, the Economic Development thing.

Duffy: Economic Development Committee Meeting.

Lehman: Maybe you and I need to talk, maybe I need to stay so we have quorum. That means only a 3 member Board is making some decisions, though.

Duffy: Something like this, why don’t you. Usually in the past, when someone had an important meeting like a State meeting, I don’t mean other meetings of groups that you belong to, but we try to keep things off of the agenda so we can all vote on it.

Jordahl: Why don’t we put it on for the 16th? Will that be soon enough for you guys, or not?

Stutsman: Carol will be back then, too.

Jordahl: All right. Carol, how about the 16th, then, for formal and informal, the formal portion of that meeting for approval and have discussion so we can inform Carol adequately.

Stutsman: I think in the past, when there’s been something like this, we’ve always tried to have all the Board members present to vote, if it’s a major policy. Maybe it’s not that big of a deal, but I think it would be good if we’re all here to vote on it.

Graham: That’s why we wanted to bring it to you as soon as we could.

Stutsman: I appreciate that. I need to do some more homework on it.

Jordahl: OK, well we have a full agenda this morning. I appreciate your making what I assume was a trip.

Graham: It was a beautiful drive. No problem.

Jordahl: Thank you, gentlemen. You have some good weather out there, I imagine you’re going to use it for something.

Jordahl: Pat, maybe we should leapfrog your item here and jump ahead rather than asking the public to leave while we do an executive session here. The agenda tells me it’s an executive session. Is that all right with you?

White: The executive session is an option, if you want it. From my standpoint, I don’t know that we need it, but if the Board members have remaining questions, it’s there in case you want it. We do need Janet in any event, because she has the paper.

Jordahl: Janet is going to be here at some later time?

Stutsman: Yes.

Jordahl: All right then, let’s leap frog.

Stutsman: Approximately 10 minutes.

Jordahl: OK. Let us move ahead to business from the Board of Supervisors, then. We have discussion/action needed regarding voluntary annexations from the City of Tiffin. This we keep seeing do to the variations in the description of the annexation. Because I’ve been out either with sick children or sick myself for a couple of days, I haven’t seen the most recent draft of this. Have other members of the Board had a chance to review this or discuss with the Auditor's Office? Have we heard from the Auditor about this?

Peters: No, everybody has a copy though. We need to touch base with the Auditor’s Office. I haven’t contacted them due to the election.

Jordahl: I see, yes. Right. They’re busy. It was considerate of you. I think maybe we should defer this until next week or maybe the week after, and give ourselves a chance to study that a little, I assume, but of course…

Peters: It’s my understanding that the legal description has been corrected and is accurate, but I have not checked with Gale yet.

Stutsman: Basically, if the legal description is corrected, and we have discussed this particular annexation before.

Jordahl: Twice.

Peters: I just wanted to make sure that you knew that the new one with the correct description is here. It does give the time and date of the…

Lehman: It’s more informational. It’s not that we’re taking any action on it. We’ve already discussed it.

Stutsman: This is according to the policy that we’ve adopted, to review these annexations.

Jordahl: There were some interesting questions on the last one, including what appeared to be an ancient right-of-way cutting across one corner of a property that wasn’t part of the annexation. I’m interested in how that has been resolved. I haven’t seen the details of that. I think we should have it on the agenda again next week, and have a look at what the details are.

Duffy: If there’s any problem here, Jonathan, I’d rather see it on 2 weeks. I went out there and looked at that parcel around, and there are some things that might come up.

Jordahl: (Inaudible) you and Mike maybe. If you and Mike are gone we don’t have a quorum. Are we going to have a meeting next Tuesday?

Stutsman: Quite frankly, that’s what I was wondering. Do we have a meeting if there are only 2 of us here?

Jordahl: No. We could deputize Pat to serve as a Supervisor for one day. No?

Stutsman: I think what that means is that one of you 2 is not going to be going to the economic… Or we just cancel the meeting next.

Duffy: I’d like to have Mike go. I won’t be around forever and this is very important, Sally.

Stutsman: Then we have to decide if we won’t have a meeting next week.

Duffy: A lot of things that we talk about up there go through the Board of Supervisors. You’d be surprised.

Jordahl: Well, we need to have a representative there, but we have a duty to the public who elected us to serve as the Board of Supervisors.

Duffy: Right, but I said I was going to go.

Lehman: Maybe you need to go and report back.

Duffy: You didn’t tell Carol not to take her vacation, did you?

Stutsman: I thought that meeting was cancelled. I guess I was just confused. I thought we had clarified that that meeting was cancelled.

Jordahl: I called about it and thought it was on the 19th. Are you sure you got a thing in the mail that was on the 9th? We have cancelled meetings in the past, but we have generally done it with more planning and forethought than this. I think the easiest way to resolve this would be not to… We are equals here on this Board. I’m serving in an administrative capacity here by suggesting as Chair that we ought to have a meeting since we’ve planned to have a meeting and rescheduling it one week in advance isn’t much public notice to shuffle agendas and so forth. It would be best, Mike, if you stayed here.

Lehman: I think Charlie and I will work it out. One of us will stay, one of us go.

Duffy: I going to have to be there, Mike.

Lehman: OK. That’s fine.

Duffy: But I brought this up at least a month and a half ago and I don’t appreciate what’s happening here, to tell you the truth.

Stutsman: I think there was just general confusion as to whether there was a meeting scheduled. I think we do try to accommodate individual Supervisors’ schedules.

Duffy: I think we better talk about this property. It says discussion/action.

Stutsman: Carol, when is that hearing for the annexation to the City Development Board? Is there a date on that?

Peters: November 10th at 6:00. Oh, I’m sorry. It has to go before the City of Tiffin first.

Stutsman: OK, so we have plenty of time.

Jordahl: Put it on the 16th.

Stutsman: Why don’t we put it on the 16th. Then you can get those questions answered concerning the easement and stuff.

Jordahl: All right now. 5B. Discussion/action needed regarding letter from Randall Handley, Senior Manager from DMG-Maximus regarding contract with Johnson County for professional services. Carol, do you want to represent this issue?

Peters: Yes. Johnson County has been contracting with this organization under one main business or another since the early 80s. Their fee has been $8,000 or half of the reimbursement, whichever is less. This year, you received a new contract, among which they are increasing their fees to $9,900. Also, they will be including some additional services, such as…

Jordahl: Should we skip over this item for a moment, Carol, and go to the trails thing?

Peters: That’d be fine. But anyway, the basic thing is $9,900 would be their compensation and it would include the reimbursement of expenses incurred for each annual cost and obligation.

Jordahl: Where does this reimbursement come from?

Peters: We pay for that out of Department of Human Services.

Stutsman: This is really…

Peters: You received a letter from ISAC months ago. This has been a good program for the County.

Stutsman: It certainly returns what we pay into it.

Peters: Oh, my goodness. Time and again, over.

Jordahl: You also indicated that this cost had not been increased in quite some time.

Peters: This is the first time it’s been increased.

Stutsman: I guess I’m ready to put it on for Thursday to vote on this. I think this is something we’ve done any number of years. The return is certainly there. It’s unfortunate that it’s going up, but maybe it’s time to…

Lehman: Do the cost recoveries go back into the Human Services budget, or general funds or what? Where are the recovered moneys?

Peters: Go back?

Lehman: Do they go back to where they were claimed from or do they go back to the general budget.

Peters: General budget. Most of the cost obligation, the return that we get is from our Human Services area. The other thing that they will do and they have done, is they will bill a department of the costs, and then take it back down again, allocating out how much is spent on insurance, how much is spent for building repair, rent, whatever. If you ask them to look at a specific department, and allocate those costs out more definitively, they certainly do.

Jordahl: We’ve talked about a possible way of allocating computer costs, for example. You look at how much the Department of Information Services time is devoted everyday with this department, but it seems like it may be a little bit punitive to work with them that way. But if we’re getting money from outside of the County, then it’s a really good deal, to be able to say…

Peters: Their figures are helpful, like when you’re in negotiations with another entity or somebody else. They did look at, I don’t know to what depth, because I didn’t work with them, but I know at one time they looked more closely at that SEATS Department, hoping to allocate out a cost (inaudible) personnel. Might ask Pat.

Jordahl: I think that was a question, Pat.

White: What was the question? That was actually one that you’re best not asking. There’s no legal problem at all. Everything they say is true, I’ve just always been rankled by the notion that we have to pay a private company to get money from State government.

Stutsman: It’s a business. I agree with your assessment, but that’s how it’s done.

White: It certainly is. They’ve performed what they’ve said they would do, and we’ve gotten more than what we’ve paid them. But it’s the notion of County government paying private business to get our money back from State government. It’s just annoying. But that’s the way it works.

Jordahl: Could it work another way?

Stutsman: Well, we could do it.

White: The State government could give us what we have coming without having to have the private sector get a cut. Talk about taxes and maximizing return to the taxpayers. This is a hoop they make us jump through to get our money.

Jordahl: So this is the State’s doing.

White: They would argue with that, but I think it is. Yes. They could write into our contracts that they’re going to give us X percentage. They don’t.

Stutsman: They must feel that there’s maybe some benefit to them if we don’t.

Peters: There’s probably some entities that don’t contract (inaudible).

Stutsman: Exactly. So, put this on for Thursday?

Jordahl: It’s interesting the way they structure this in the letters, that over the past 4 years the cost allocation plans we’ve prepared for you resulted in $245,931 of indirect cost recoveries, and they’re only asking us for $9,900. That sounds like a bargain. But if we’re getting the money anyway…

White: They compared apples and oranges. There are costs over those 4 years would be 30,000 something rather than 8 or 9. I don’t understand that particular part of the way they did this, but we’re still coming out ahead.

Jordahl: I see, yes. Uh-huh. 4 years.

Duffy: Well, it used to be in the past on some of these things that we would pay our half, say the State would pay half… Well, it had to be important that they’d even pay half. But say they pay half, we pay half. That’s what they come up with. For years, we used to do that, and then they changed that. We pay the whole bill, and then we have to get the half back from the State. Is that what we’re talking about, Pat? This is a little different, but there are some things like that now.

White: There certainly are a variety of programs where we pay and get the money back, but in the context of our contract for child support recovery, which is just now being rolled into this indirect cost allocation, they reimburse us directly for attorney time and staff time. Our indirect cost allocation will be estimates as to how much time the Auditor’s Office spends processing payroll for the child support recovery people, how much time our managing secretary spends processing the budget and handling claims. What fair share of our insurance policies could be allocated to child support recovery. The other part of this is that there’s a lot of estimation, a charitable phrase, that goes into these plans. But again, the State government accepts them and sends us the money.

Jordahl: All right. Well, it seems like we ought to get off this topic.

White: I certainly recommend that you approve the new contract.

Jordahl: There we go. That’s what I was looking for. Thank you. Yes?

?: I just have a question. What was the original contract for? How much was that?

Jordahl: Carol was quoting it.

Peters: $8,000. It had never increased…

Jordahl: Never over, do you recall how many years we’re talking about?

Peters: I’m talking about mid 80s, or early 80s. I don’t remember exactly.

Jordahl: 20 years without a cost increase. What kind of percentage is that, Pat, over 20 years, zero, right? Given inflation, that’s quite a drop, actually. I feel like taking a break but it’s only 40 minutes into the meeting. Maybe it’s the air. Tom, can you pump some life into this?

(Continued in Part 2)