County Commissioners Meeting - 6.10.22

The meeting was called to order by Crystal Rodgers President Of the Commission. Commissioner Hofer, Attorney Shondi Lott and County Clerk Shelley Essl were all Present. Paris Dickerson the Business & Community Development Advisor with Idaho Power led the presentation for their process for Power Outages and time to restore. In the presentation the situations that may cause outages are Weather, Icy Road Conditions, Animal Interference, Planned Maintenance and Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) which was the majority of the presentation. This, according to the powerpoint is “Shutting off power for a short period to protect the system” “A public safety power shutoff, or PSPS, is a proactive outage to certain areas where wildfire risk is high due to extreme weather.” This includes high temperature, low humidity, high wind, dry vegetation and public safety. If your power goes out, use battery lights instead of candles, turn off machinery and equipment that were in use, keep one light on when your power has been restored and have a generator (According to Idaho Power). Idaho Power technicians will be stationed by Anderson Reservoir remotely relaying information back to the main control room. They stated that the PSPS will be in effect through October.

Also starting in October, Elmore County will receive financial assistance from the state for the Public Defender Program. They will be paying it out of state sales tax revenue. Shelley Essl, County Clerk, added that she will not be able to levy any bond revenue again. Essls updated that the courts administrative team is down from 6 people to 2 and there is one “Rockstar Employee” that canceled their vacation because of the work-load and limited staff.

Regarding the public defender issue, suspended cases will need to be closed by July 2023.

The IT Department budget report was presented by Steve Van Norman. He showed an overall increase of 22%. Last year they spent $43,000.00 and they are needing to buy a new AS400, which is an ERP program, in other words, database management, in October. Van Norman talked about the delays of equipment delivery and this is part of the supply chain problem which has been going on since Covid. Some deliveries have taken up to 4 months to receive. IT services equipment increased from $29,500.00 to $58,400.00, which was questioned by Crystal Rogers. “I’m spending a ton of money on supplies, the largest amount of supplies is a tie between the Assessors and the Courts” Van Norman stated. The IT department purchases toner and paper for those departments. Commissioner Hofer and Van Norman were talking about standardizing on xerox rather than the multiple brands of desktop printers. Van Norman stated “as they break we replace one,...it would be better to have them standardized,” Van Norman had a solution for this stating “If we can get a finalized decision on this(meaning ordering printers standardizing with Xerox) ‘we’re not going to buy supplies anymore. If you want printers you have to buy them from Xerox’, if we make that type of decision, we can reduce this line item quite a bit.” He is referring to the supplies cost on the multiple brands of printers that are not on contract vs. Xerox which is on contract through a reseller. He stated the Assessors office prints many things at the same time to justify a reason for the supplies cost. The department is looking to purchase 35 refurbished computers this next year and have them replaced on a 4 year rotation which is the total of refurbished life of product for the computers as an average as a reason for the supplies cost. There are other license purchases especially around security software and adobe licenses.