Montgomery County will be reimbursed for up to more than $124,000 in additional pandemic-related expenses through the CARES Act.
The county received a grant through the Coronavirus Relief Fund’s Supplemental Program, which provided extra money to local governments last year on top of the federal relief funding already received. The Board of Commissioners voted Monday to create a fund for the money.
“Just for the record, this is almost 100% [of the grant amount]. We’re only like $4,000 off of what we spent, correct?” county commissioner Jim Fulwider asked auditor Jennifer Andel during Monday’s Board of Commissioners meeting.
Andel said the county expects to be reimbursed for that amount sometime this month.
Commissioners joined county administrator Tom Klein in praising the health department for its work setting up the vaccination clinic, which opened Monday in the former Save A Lot Building on South Boulevard.
Health department administrator Amber Reed in turn thanked various local officials for their roles in the process.
Crawfordsville Mayor Todd Barton worked with building owner Niemann Foods to secure the site and the highway department provided barrels to manage traffic flow in the parking lot. Montgomery County 4-H donated fencing and helped clean the building.
“It’s really a community effort,” Reed said.
Reed said it will take 20 people to run the site at full-capacity, nearly three times the size of the health department’s staff. Both medical and non-medical volunteers are being sought to vaccinate, register, observe and check in people at the clinic.
In other business, commissioners:
• Introduced an ordinance establishing the Montgomery County Engineering Department, which will be directed by county engineer Jim Peck. The engineer’s duties include administering infrastructure projects such as road and bridge improvements. Peck currently works under the highway department.
• Approved a request from Peck to seek bids for road paving projects paid for by the state’s Community Crossings Matching Grant program. The county received $872,000 to pave seven miles of roads this year.
The projects include Camp Rotary Road from State Road 32 to C.R. 300S, eastward on C.R. 300S to State Road 47 and C.R. 400W from State Road 32 to U.S. 136.
• Approved the creation of a fund to pay for the construction expenses on the C.R. 100W bridge and to make debt payments. The county issued a $2 million bridge improvement note in December to fund the construction.
• Approved $2,704 in additional compensation for surveyor Tom Cummins for certified regulated drains and certified section corners. Under state law, the surveyor receives an additional $2 per mile of certified regulated drain and $2 per certified section corner. Cummins certified a combined 1,352 miles of legal drains and section corners in 2020.
