County Hears Staff, RHID Updates

news1@ulyssesnews.com

Grant County Commission is whole again with the swearing in of commissioner Darrin Figgins October 1. Figgins was appointed by Kansas governor Laura Kelley following the resignation of Marty Long in July, following his election to the Kansas House of Representatives in June. Figgins will serve District 1.

“I’m excited about the opportunity to be a commissioner and I’ll kind of soak in some of this and get more involved as time goes on,” Figgins said.

During staff reports, County clerk Sheila Brown said in-person advanced voting for the November 5, General Election begins October 21 and October 15 is the deadline to register to vote.

Fire chief John Crosby gave a positive report about fire weather over the summer.

“The fires have been really down,” Crosby said, adding the fire department will help with the Homecoming parade and Safety Fest this weekend.

Sam Minks said the road department has been busy mowing while battling tractor breakdowns and a shortage of staff for various reasons. He added that part-timers will be let go for the season October 26, and the road department has been fielding calls about abandoned tires, saying crews removed 26 truck tires around the county.

“They’re mainly down in the southeast side where they’re dumping them,” Minks said, adding if he gets a case number he can get some of the expense for removing illegally dumped items back. “I think we’re up to 63 or 83 tires this year.”

The perpetrators can be fined by the sheriff’s department if they can find who is doing the dumping.

“That’s the hard thing is trying to catch who they are, because tires - there is no serial number so you can’t backtrack,” Minks said, adding when cameras are put up, the perpetrators find a new place to dump.

“What’s bad is most of the dumping is at the bridges, so we gotta carry them all the way out of the river bottoms, back up, and put them on a trailer and get rid of them,” Minks said. “They don’t dump them in an easy spot, they dump them in a hard spot.”

Minks said several bus drivers have asked for part-time work to help out, including sanding roads in the winter. He said they already have a commercial driver’s license and just need to be able to pick up kids in the morning and afternoon. The commissioners later approved his request to hire part-time drivers.

EMS director Jeff Baier also reported a slow month with 35-40 calls, and mentioned an EMT class begins in January. Baier said he has one more class to take and will be certified in the State of Kansas as an Emergency Manager.

Civic Center Director Mar Honstead reported she has had trouble with kids during junior high and high school dances at the civic center.

“They’re coming out back doors and then they go meet somebody and then they sneak back in that door with things they shouldn’t have,” Honstead said. “So we’re working (with Sheriff James Biddle) trying to figure out the best way to do it. Right now we’re all just kind of patrolling around the building all night.”

Honstead added a bathroom door at the park adjacent to the civic center was broken down.

“I don’t know what to do with them,” she added. “They get bored and then they start mischief. They get really angry and in your face, I don’t know what the best option is to control that because they run in groups. It’s getting to be a huge problem.”

Commissioner John Martin asked if additional lighting would deter those issues and Honstead said she thinks it would help.

“It’s getting to the point where I’m almost wanting to talk to you guys about limiting how many we have a year or just take a year off and just not have any so people will understand they’ve got to control these kids,” Honstead said. “A lot of them I think maybe aren’t even ones that were invited; it’s a friend of a friend of a friend that’s coming along as an extra person. So it has just gotten way worse than it used to be.”

Community Development Director Bob Dale updated commissioner’s on the Reinvestment Housing Incentive District and areas designated by the housing committee for housing needs.

“We designated several areas around town - in and outside the city - to create these incentive districts,” Dale said. “The city, as you may have heard, at their last city council meeting, Luke (Grimes) presented an outlay for it, the council approved it to be sent off. It still has to be approved by the Department of commerce and there’s still some back and forth to go.”

The committee discovered the city cannot administer an RHID outside the city limits. The county could do an RHID, but it’s only used to pay for infrastructure, which is generally the domain of the city, Dale said.

“You would actually recapture less tax in the county than you would in the city because there’s a city tax on top of it,” Dale said. “So, we put those aside for now and the advice we were given is if it’s in the county and you want to create an RHID, the city needs to annex it first and then create it. And we’re not at that point where we’re ready to do that yet.”

The RHID doesn’t cost anything, it’s just areas that could possibly be expanded at a later time.

“If a developer comes in and wants to build some housing and there’s some publicly-owned infrastructure that doesn’t exist, the developer can foot the bill for it and put it in himself and then over the next 25 years the incremental tax - which would be anything over what the current tax is - the incremental tax on the property going forward for 25 years can be recaptured by the developer to pay himself back,” Dale said. “The other way it can be done is the city can bond to pay for the infrastructure and then they can pay that bond back with that tax over the next 25 years.

“The most attractive way for developers obviously is to have the city bond it, do the work and take care of it.”