The Lincoln County Commission met Tuesday, March 4 in the Lincoln County Boardroom. Commissioners heard agenda items including awarding bids and department head presentations.
Highway Superintendent, Terry Fluit requested board action to award bids for concrete products to Cemcast Pipe and Precast and to Oldcastle Infrastructure.
“We’re going to be awarding both bids in part and rejecting both bids in part. We are going to be accepting the low bids for each of the items on both of the bids and rejecting the high bid items,” Fluit said.
Motion to approve made by Doug Putnam, seconded by Betty Otten, motion approved. Fluit next requested board action to authorize the chair to execute a contract with Cramer and Associates Inc. for the 2025 bridge preservation project.
“We were awarded the bid for this on February 25, this will be for the preservation project for three structures that we are doing, I believe the bid was around $3.2 million total for all three of them, and this is the contract to get this project moving,” Fluit said.
Motion by Putnam, seconded by Otten, motion approved.
Fluit requested board action to award a bid and authorize the chair to execute an agreement with Sir Lines A Lot for the 2025 Lincoln County Striping project in the amount of $146,502.25.
“This is the project that we collab with 13-16 other counties in the southern part of the state for doing striping. It’s a retrace on any of the roads we do for the stripes. There were two bidders on this and Sir Lines A Lot was the low bid,” he said.
Motion by Otten, seconded by Putnam, motion approved.
Fluit requested board action to authorize the highway superintendent to sign agreements with IMEG for construction administration costs for the 2025 Bridge Preservation Projects.
“For PCN 09M0 (42-020-201) in the amount of $99,723.75, for PCN 09M1 (42-244-255) in the amount of $131,876.42, and for PCN 09RC (42-175-153) in the amount of $79,014.29. These agreements are basically for them to do construction administration oversight when these projects are happening,” he said.
Motion to approve by Putnam, seconded by Otten, motion approved.
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Administrator, Jon Peters was present to give a department presentation to the commission.
“We at GIS maintain and develop the county digital mapping data for towns, parcels, addresses, annexations, roads, voting districts, soils, and we have over 300 data sets in the GIS office,” he said.
The office was created in 2002 and started on paper maps. Now, GIS is available online and helps assist administration and the public and GIS is reporting around 350 uses of the website per day.
“For 2025 we are focusing on regular maintenance updates and improvements, rebuild the parcel browser, we’re going to go to an experience builder, so the parcel browser will have to be rebuilt again,” he said.
Updating apps to be stored into cloud software is also a 2025 plan of GIS.
Human Resources (HR) Director, Traci Humphrey, was present to give a department presentation.
“We are a resource for the County and you Commissioners. We have 180 employees so there’s a lot of recruiting that we are doing identifying the right people for public service. We are also always identifying areas for improvement, we are one of the sole departments that doesn’t have a specific role that we have to fulfill for the public so our focus is entirely internal making sure that if there’s anything we can do to improve our processes and procedures that we’re working with departments to do so,” she said.
Human Resources helps each of the department heads with training, hiring process, job posting, employee issues, policy writing for the commission, and data tracking on employees including benefit usage and length of employment. In 2025, the HR will continue to help departments identify staffing needs for the new courthouse and more.
Director of IT, Jake Oakland, gave the Information Technology Department presentation.
“The IT department is anything dealing with technologies from the computers, to the cameras, phones, to processing property taxes, processing assessment notices, all of those tools and abilities we manage and oversee and try to help create efficiencies throughout the whole infrastructure that Lincoln County has,” he said.
Oakland has been in his position for 13 years and has watched the country grow through all of those years. Key responsibilities of the department are hardware, software, technical support, cyber and physical security, and server, network, and data management.
“In 2025, we have started the migration to .gov website layout, which went pretty well, it’s been difficult for employees, it’s hard to get used to, but everyone’s doing well, we plan on upgrading the phone system, probably in the next month or two, and in the summer time we’re going to have our storage and data systems upgraded,” he said.