As previously reported, Highland County received $1,002,332.83 in Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funds. Of that million dollars, half of the funds are for Highland County and its departments; 33 percent is available for distribution to the municipalities in the county; and 17 percent can be distributed to the townships, Fawley said. The approximately $501,000 allotted to Highland County can be shared with “local entities such as the health department, DD, the fair board” or whichever agencies the county sees fit. The county began authorizing requests at the Aug. 12 commission meeting, as Britton said they planned to review the forms submitted to their office at the end of each weekly meeting.
Among the proposals considered at the conclusion of the commission’s Aug. 19 meeting was a $59,325.64 request Fauber submitted to reimburse the engineer’s office for employees’ “unbudgeted administrative leave” during the state’s stay at home order.
“I did not include the dollar amounts for salaried employees who could have teleworked,” Fauber said. “This is just for the highway workers when they were sent home during the stay at home order that was unbudgeted administrative leave. We did actually come back to work full-time, I think, before the stay at home order was lifted.”
Collins responded that the engineer’s office already has a salary line item. “How do you not have enough money to pay that just because they’re at home?” she asked. “Are they getting paid more on administrative leave than if they’re at work?”
Fauber clarified that his office “does have the money” and that the employees have already been paid, but that the CARES Act allows for reimbursing “unbudgeted administrative leave to employees that were unable to telework.”
Collins said she “would question whether it’s truly unbudgeted,” since the salary line item covered the costs.
Duncan suggested reaching out to the Office of Budget and Management to ensure Fauber’s request was covered. As he and Abernathy pointed out, “if it’s denied, you’re not out anything,” and if it is approved, “it’s a win.”
“A win for who?” Collins asked.
Duncan and Fauber both said it would be a “win” for the engineer’s office. “That’s more money I can put on the roads,” Fauber said. “That’s more money I can do something else with. That was $60,000 that, in a way, I didn’t get anything for.”
Collins again argued that “calling it something different” doesn’t mean it’s “unbudgeted.”
“Administrative leave is not budgeted,” Fauber said. “I don’t have a line item specifically for administrative leave.”
“You do, Chris,” Collins said. “Whether you call it salary or administrative leave is no different.”
“I think it is different,” Fauber said.
Abernathy said the “salary” line item implies “people working and being paid a normal salary, as compared to being put on administrative leave.”
“I think administrative leave is ‘you’re not allowed to be here and I’m sorry you don’t have sick or vacation [time] and you’re not a salaried employee, go home,’” Collins said.
Fauber pointed out that discipline or the pandemic are also reasons for administrative leave. “It just seems that it checks the box for you guys to approve things,” he said.
Abernathy said he did not want to return any of the money at the end of the year “because it won’t go back to the people.”
“It won’t go back into people’s pockets,” he said. “It won’t go back to the taxpayers. It’ll just go somewhere else for some other government agency to use it. If we apply for it and get it, great. It saves more money.”
Collins responded that she “thought that if we don’t use it, it can go back to the taxpayers.”
“I’d like to see an example of the last time that ever happened,” Abernathy said. He later said he “hadn’t seen anything where they say ‘if you send money back that you didn’t spend, we’re going to send rebate checks to the taxpayers.’”
“No, I thought that business owners could apply to the county and get this money,” Collins said. “Business owners can apply to the county for money that we have not spent.”
Fawley and Abernathy agreed that is true.
“That’s what I thought,” Collins said. “We don’t have to give it back and count on the feds to do anything. We can make that decision.”
If the state authorizes this spending, Fawley said “a lot of our county offices could qualify for the same thing,” if their employees were quarantined or unable to work from home.
“I think it’s one of those things where I’m not sure how big this number would get, when we start including other offices,” Fawley said.
The auditor recommended giving “priority” to other projects before granting salary reimbursement requests. “In this case, I would like for us to wait and act on this in October,” Fawley said. “If we get money from the townships, if they don’t use their money and all that, it comes back to us in October. By then, we’ll have an idea from other offices and kind of put these all together.”
Fauber argued that in his case, he’s asking to reimburse “money that’s already been spent,” unlike some other proposals.
“Most of the requests are for things that they would like to happen,” he said. “They don’t need it. They’re going after money that would help further their office.”
“I’m not trying to be argumentative, but you don’t need this, either,” Collins said.
Fauber said it was “a loss of money that I didn’t get anything out of it,” but Collins said “It’s not a loss. It’s your budget.”
“I don’t know how you can claim that,” Fauber said. “I got no productivity out of it. The county didn’t. This money reimbursed would go back into the funds to help get some of this [back].”
Duncan interrupted by saying that he agreed with Fawley’s idea to “hold this [request] back” and revisit it in October. Fauber responded, “What are you out by asking [the state] if this qualifies?”
“Then we’re out $60,000 that we might need for something else,” Abernathy said.
“If it qualifies, you’re not out,” Fauber said.
Collins gave the engineer an example of putting Plexiglas in a county building at the same cost. “Now, we are out that money,” Collins said. “It wasn’t in a budget anywhere to spend that money. If we can’t get reimbursed for that, we literally are out that money. The county is literally out that money. Your money was already in your budget.”
Fauber responded that the over $150,000 request by the recorder’s office, discussed at the Aug. 12 and Aug. 19 meetings, isn’t money for which the county needs reimbursed.
“Chris, I’m agreeing with you that if we get this, I’m for getting it and for saving you, then you’ve got 60,000 more dollars you can put somewhere else,” Abernathy said. “I also agree with let’s see if there are other things that we haven’t already spent money for, that we probably wouldn’t spend money for if we didn’t have the CARES money.”
“Or that we had to spend money for to make a building workable,” Collins added.
Abernathy said he thought the county “will probably be able to” grant the request in October.
Later in the meeting, Fauber again brought up the request, asking: “Is the denial because you don’t think it qualifies or you think other options may be better?”
Duncan said the request wasn’t denied, and Abernathy said he thinks “it qualifies.”
“To me, it’s about seeing if there’s greater need,” Abernathy said. “Anneka’s right, you do have the money. If you can get an additional $60,000, great, if nothing else is being — if there’s no desperate need for it somewhere else.”
Britton said he wanted to clarify with the state to ensure “it does qualify” under the “unbudgeted administrative leave” definition. Fauber asked what they thought would meet the “unbudgeted” stipulation.
“Here’s an example,” Collins said. “If you have to send somebody home because your business is closed and you’re not making any money, now that’s unfunded, because you’re not making money to pay them and they’re at home not being able to work. You have the money.”
As Fawley pointed out earlier, Collins said there’s “going to be a lot of money” requested if other county agencies seek salary reimbursements. The auditor then recommended tabling any similar requests until October as well for later consideration.
“It’s a good discussion, good issues,” Abernathy said. “This is new. The feds will tell you, the state will tell you — we don’t know for sure on all these questions. That’s the territory we’re in. We’re kind of walking in the dark, doing the best we can to spend it appropriately.”
The county also heard a formal request from Highland County recorder Chad McConnaughey for a proposal to digitize county records, after hearing an informal presentation at commissioners’ Aug. 12 meeting. After consulting with his vendor, McConnaughey submitted an official proposal in the amount of $154,895.81, which was tentatively approved by the county.
“I realize this is a lot of money, but it would be a very good benefit to the county and to my office,” McConnaughey said.
At the previous meeting, the recorder said that he wanted the county to consider allowing a vendor to scan, digitize and index county records back to 1980 and have them available online and to fund the project through the CARES Act monies. He said that Richland County had authorized a similar project due to its allowance for increased social distancing, since more searches can be conducted online instead of in the recorder’s office.
McConnaughey said Wednesday that the county already has “all documents online, scanned and digitized back to 1988.”
“This proposal would take us back to 1980, which would get us 40 years, your typical title search that most companies are using these days,” McConnaughey said. “That would, in fact, reduce the traffic in the building and in my office.”
The proposal would include 97 books, spanning approximately 94,090 pages, to be “scanned and enhanced by the vendor,” according to McConnaughey. It also includes a 500-year microfilm and an index of names and dates for the online system. McConnaughey said that he and his staff would handle indexing the property information and redacting Social Security numbers on documents.
Britton asked “how many counties are doing this” under the CARES Act.
“I know a lot of counties are looking into it,” McConnaughey said. “No one has done it yet.”
Fawley asked if McConnaughey had any idea when the project could be completed.
“They probably could not get to it until later in the year,” McConnaughey said. “He said the most concern would be getting on the list quickly.”
Once the county is scheduled with the vendor, McConnaughey said it usually takes “two to three weeks” for the project to be completed.
McConnaughey said that if approved, the project will be a continuation of work his office has done on a “much smaller scale,” along with being faster and more efficient.
“We’ve done some of this back scanning,” he said. “It’s basically taken me and my staff about five years to do 30 books. They’re going to do 97 in about two weeks.”
Britton said he thought McConnaughey’s request “fits” the guidelines for funding, but the county is still awaiting official confirmation from the state.
“I will make a motion that we approve this contingent upon getting the approval from the Office of Budget and Management,” Fawley said. “I tried to go ahead and send the question to OBM [Tuesday afternoon], and their system was overloaded. I will try again to get that in this morning, and hopefully we’ll have that back within a day or two.
“I think with the motion we’ve got, as soon as we get the OK letter from them, we can give that to Mary [Remsing, commission clerk] and proceed.”
The motion to proceed “after getting clarification” from the state passed, 5-0.
Also approved, each by a 5-0 vote, were:
• A $654.75 request from the Highland County Emergency Management Agency covering the cost of repairs to their generator;
• An $880 request from the engineer’s office for an upgrade to the website to allow online permit submissions to cut down on in-office traffic; and
• A $604.14 request from Common Pleas Court for a reimbursement of various COVID-19-related purchases.
For more on Wednesday’s commission meeting, see the article at https://highlandcountypress.com/Content/In-The-News/In-The-News/Article/Commissioners-OK-proposals-from-JFS-deny-dog-warden-s-firearm-request/2/20/59432.
