By Morgan Cardenas
editor@wayneherald.com
At Tuesday's meeting, the Wayne County Commissioners heard more from Summit Carbon and discussed employee benefits.
First during the Board of Equalization meeting, Dawn Duffy discussed the Carroll Methodist Church property.
The Wayne County Board of Commissioners meeting started off with an update on the Summit Carbon Project. Debbie Borg had Grant Terry speak for her. Terry is the Senior Project Manager at Summit Carbon Solutions. Their goal is to reduce the carbon score with the pipeline covering around 2,000 miles across five states that would tie into several ethanol plants. Many of the questions centered around what would happen if something went wrong with the pipeline, what they plan to use it for, clarification of wording in the contract for landowners and what would happen if a landowner did not sign the contract. Terry said that if a landowner does not want to sign the agreement, they would reroute the pipeline so they are not on the landowner's property.
Then, Highway Superintendent Mark Casey opened the bid for new truck tractors and had received two bids for it. Custom Body Company put in a bid for one 2022 Kenworth and up to three 2022 Internationals were being offered by Cornhusker International. This was tabled and will be discussed again at the next meeting. Casey also talked about the County Bridge Match Projects. The CBMP #6 project had its agreement signed being box culverts in conjunction with Cedar County while CBMP #5 was being awarded and approved.
After, a resolution was adopted and approved for the execution of the agreement to tie-out and reset land monuments for Project No.STP-98-5 (106). The county surveyor will set the monuments and re-set them from the Hwy 81/98 junction to N-35 as the county will be reimbursed for their work.
Finally, the Commissioners brought up the topic of possibly modifying part-time employee benefits. The courthouse currently has two employees that are working about 32 hours and are taking the cash-in-lieu package while full-time courthouse employees are working 37.5 hours a week. The main point of discussion was about how the part-time employees shouldn’t be getting full-time benefits. The Commissioners believe a problem they might see is more employees will want to become part-time over full-time if they received the same benefits. This conversation did not result in a decision and would be brought up again after the election.
The Wayne County Board of Commissioners will next meet in regular session on Tuesday, Apr 19 at 9 a.m. in the Wayne County Courthouse.
