At Tuesday evening’s March meeting of the Nevada County Quorum Court, the court passed an ordinance amending the 2024 budget to live up to the condition of an Arkansas Department of Transportation State Aid, which requires a ten percent match of $48,647.93 to cover the total cost of $489,000 for the levelling and resurfacing of county streets.
At the February meeting, the Justices of the Peace heard that the county’s cost would increase to $48,647.93 from $35,900 because the amount of the grant had increased to cover the costs of materials and work in the project. In Tuesday’s meeting, the JPs voted unanimously to pay the new cost.
JP Herbert Coleman asked how it was determined which streets would be attended to in the project. County Judge Mike Otwell confirmed the state would make the decision based on on-site visits.
The next agenda item after the passage of the ordinance was a discussion led by County Treasurer Ricky Reyenga on the possibility of combining the official roles of County Treasurer and County Collector. Reyenga explained that after he was elected to his office, the county judge and sheriff had asked him about this idea. Reyenga said he wanted to avoid the situation in Hempstead County after the office of Sheriff and Collector was separated by the Quorum Court there. “They came real close to a bunch of lawsuits,” Reyenga explained. “Because the people didn’t vote.”
Reyenga said the roles of Collector and Sheriff don’t naturally go together but those of Treasurer and Collector do. He said if the Nevada County Quorum Court expressed interest in transferring Collector responsibilities to the Treasurer, he would provide a feasibility study for it to consider before agreeing to put the consolidation of the Treasurer and Collector offices on the November ballot. Should the proposal be approved by voters, the candidates running in 2026 would be running for Treasurer Collector, Reyenga said.
JP Willie Wilson asked Reyenga if he could handle the additional work load, Reyenga affirmed that he could and that he had been collector before. Reyenga added that the $2,100 that state guidelines award to sheriffs for acting as collector would go to the Treasurer Collector if voters approved the proposal. So the proposal would not cost the county any more thanN before. A motion to see the feasibility study passed unanimously by individual voice vote, with JP Coleman saying before his yes vote that he approved as long as the decision was made according to what Nevada County needed not what any other county was doing.
Earlier in the meeting, Prescott-Nevada County Economic Development Office’s Executive Director Mary Godwin, in her regular report to the Quorum Court, said the latest state map of internet coverage had been released Tuesday. She explained that the red dots on the map represent unserved locations; the blue dots, locations with less than what is considered broadband speeds in the available services; the green dots, locations where grant money had been made available but projects to connect homes with broadband were not complete; the grey dots represent locations in the state that are connected to broadband internet at proper speeds.
The funding for the expansion is distributed by the state from an allocation it received as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Bill, approved by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden.
Godwin said that beginning March 20th, there will be a 30-day period when county officials need to verify whether the 2,300 grey dot locations on the map in Nevada County are indeed receiving broadband service that meets the state standard. Citizens will be urged to use online speed tests and answer questions about their service so that the state’s internet availability map can be made as accurate as possible.
Speed tests will have to be performed on three separate days to be considered valid for reporting to the state, Godwin said.
The word about the new map and about the need of households to test their internet service speeds will be put out in local media in news releases Thursday or Friday, Godwin said. Announcements will also appear on social media, in emails she sends and possibly text messages sent to cell phones.
JP Eric Jackson said if messages are to be sent to phones, he would prefer they not be sent at 2:00 in the morning.
Godwin said that compared to many counties, Nevada County was in relatively good shape, but there were unserved areas north of I-30 and in the southern part of the county.
The point of providing the state with this information, Godwin said, is because grants from will be made later this year to companies to help finance the expansion of broadband services. She said a priority would be put on connecting what the Arkansas Broadband Office calls anchor points, places in the community attached to institutions like schools, libraries, jails, fire departments and community centers.
The Arkansas Broadband Office, Godwin announced, would be coming to the county to brief attendees on new developments at the Nevada County Courthouse April 4 at 4:00 p.m. in an effort to visit all 75 Arkansas counties in what it is calling the Arkansas Broadband Road Show.
In other economic development news, Godwin said two prospects for locating businesses in the county had visited, one to the industrial park and one to the former Potlatch location.
JP Willie Wilson noted that the Hostess plant near Arkadelphia was employing many Nevada County residents who were earning $18 to $20, which he said was a net positive. He had also heard from a Nevada County employee working there who said workers from the county were acquiring a good reputation as hard workers. Godwin said other employers in the area had had to raise salaries to keep workers who were considering employment at the Hostess plant.
County Extension Agent Stacy Stone reported that the annual fundraiser and contest had been a success, raising about $8,000 for agricultural education programs in the county. Two Beef Quiz Bowl teams had also met with success, placing seventh and third in a recent meet in Fayetteville among 21 other teams.
Stone said a wild hog trap has been in operation in the southern part of the county and had caught many. “The hogs around here’ll kill you,” commented Reyenga.
Judge Otwell here opened up the meeting to public comments on what had already been discussed. Shane Horn, who recently lost a race to replace Howard Johnson as JP in District 4 to James Roy Cornelius by a vote of 12 to 1, asked if he could speak on a subject not mentioned in the meeting up to that point. Otwell agreed to this.
Horn asked about the legality of the county purchasing road equipment without the County Judge seeking multiple bids beforehand. He cited information he said was from state audits that showed over a million dollars worth of equipment had been purchased without a bidding process. He asked how the county could justify the purchases when it might have saved money in a bidding process.
He also said the county should put up its own website so citizens could know when meetings are and what had happened in those meetings. This would likely help the county's rating for transparency, Horn said, citing a University of Central Arkansas study that rated the county 50th for web transparency.
Reyenga said for two years the county had had funding from the state for a website, but when the two years had passed, funding had been discontinued and the county had found that maintaining the site was prohibitively expensive and required hiring a person to do so.
JP Fore said that purchases of equipment with funds from the use of the American Rescue Plan Act did not have to be done after a bidding process. About equipment bought with the county’s road funds, he said, “You talked about the amount of money to spend on them and why. And then the next person speak is probably going to set up here and complain about the county roads not being worked on.”
Horn said he had no problem with work being done on county roads. “My question is why are they spending more than the budget?”
Fore said this could be because of the cost of diesel fuel. “My question is about equipment purchases,” Horn said. “If you’d done it properly, why did the state auditor say you didn’t?”
“All I can tell you is we went through Sourcewell,” Fore answered. “And that you didn’t have to do the bid process going through Source Well.” The Minnesota-based Sourcewell is described on its website as “a service cooperative created by the Minnesota legislature as a local unit of government.” On its Compliance & Legal page, Sourcewell is said to be “authorized to establish competitively awarded cooperative purchasing contracts on behalf of itself and its participating agencies.”
JP Patricia Grimes said that though she does not represent District 3, she still gets complaints about roads from that district as well as other districts in the county. She emphasized that the problem of keeping roads fixed is an ongoing issue and that money was always short for doing so. “I'm just saying the money is not there, it has to come from somewhere,” she said, adding that a three-day rain was often enough to cause roads to need fixing.
Judge Otwell asked Horn what solution he proposed for the problems he brought up. Horn said the county should hold back ten percent of what was budgeted for road repairs and use that ten percent for special projects which would include repair of the worst roads. Reyenga said that could not be done under state law and that because of rains in the county, roads were going out of repair so that it was impossible to say what the worst roads were.
Horn suggested then that paved roads should be repaired with asphalt instead of gravel. Judge Otwell responded that he had to wait for the production of asphalt and that he put it down as soon as he could.
JPs told Horn he could always find the minutes for the Quorum Court meetings on local news websites, naming SWARK.Today. The reporter from SWARK.Today corrected that he did not write his accounts from the minutes kept by the Quorum Court’s recorder. JP Wilson said Horn could request the minutes after a suitable amount of time to prepare them had passed.
Reyenga again said the county having its own website was a desirable thing, but was too expensive. “I'll agree with you. It was great when we had the website. But it was a two-year time that it was funded by the government. And when that went away, it was astronomical and you don't have any money and you're going to have to pay someone to maintain it and keep it up. Otherwise, you just have an unused website. It's still out there. But again nobody updates it.”
Before adjournment, the committee of the court that is working on a new ordinance or an amendment of an old ordinance on what the county’s policy will be in collecting fees from deer camps and churches for trash service attempted to agree on a meeting time, but it looked like that meeting will not take place until next month.
Adjournment occurred at about 7:00 p.m.